This is a selection of essays by one of the most distinguished of modern literary critics, L. C. Knights, published as a companion volume to the selection of Professor Knights' Shakespearean essays, which appeared in 1979. The essays span almost four decades of critical work on authors as diverse as Marlowe, George Herbert, Clarendon and Henry James. At the centre of each essay is an attempt to elicit some essential quality in the author, or authors, discussed. Although each can be read as an isolated critical essay, the different pieces are linked by a pervasive interest in the conditions, social or personal, out of which particular works emerged, and in the way in which major works of the imagination are renewed as they are re-interpreted in successive generations. Throughout, the underlying assumption is that literary criticism needs to be 'pure' - the result of direct exposure to particular works - but that it cannot remain purely literary, if only because the meaning of literature includes its effects on the lives and conduct of individual human beings.

In these Shakespearean essays originally published together in 1979, the distinguished literary critic L. C. Knights offers the fruits of his long-term thinking about individual plays (notably, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Lear) and explores the ways in which a deep and imaginative understanding of Shakespeare's work can relate to and enrich other areas of knowledge - politics, history, social and emotional relationships, the nature of theatrical experience ... Certain critical assumptions are of course implicit here: that great works of art have a continuing life which is renewed through perception; that the vitality generated by such works is for all men and that the critic's function is to encourage all readers to see as much as they can for themselves, not to dogmatize or try to impose a particular reading. L. C. Knights admirably fulfils this function in these essays most of which have been gathered from the three volumes entitled Explorations, Further Explorations and Explorations 3.

EXPLORATIONS ESSAYS IN CRITICISM MAINLY ON THE LITERATURE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY by L. C. KNIGHTS GEORGE W. STEWART, PUBLISHER, INC. New York To MY WIFE CONTENTS Preface 9 1. How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth 15 An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism 1933 2. Shakespeares Sonnets 1934 55 3. Prince Hamlet 1940 82 4. Shakespeare and Shakespeareans i 1934 ii 1935 94 5. Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Dissociation of Sensibility 1943 108 6. George Herbert 1944 129 7. Restoration Comedy The Reality and the Myth 1937 149 8. Notes on a Marxian View of the Seventeenth Cen tury 1940 169 9. Henry James and the Trapped Spectator 1938 174 10. Poetry and Social Criticism The Work of W. B. Yeats 1941 190 11. The University Teaching of English and History A Plea for Correlation 1939 206 PREFACE THE ONLY UNITY that can be claimed for this small collection of essays all of which have already appeared in print during the last ten years or so is the unity of a point of view. The idea that informs them is that good reading is the beginning even if it is not, as one critic has said, the whole secret of good judg ment that literary criticism is a form of disciplined exploration exploration, in the first place, of words in a certain arrangement and that the main function of criticism is to prompt other readers to fresh insights, based on fresh disciplined explorations of their own. This idea is so simple that one would hesitate to pronounce it so pontifically were it not for the fact that it is one of those ideas that need constantly to be retrieved from the status of platitude and realized afresh, in all their implications, as living truths. At the present time especially it seemsnecessary to re mind ourselves that works of literature, once they have left their authors hands, are only kept alive by being possessed by indivi duals as intimate parts of their own living experience and that they are only so possessed when they are re-created by each reader from the action and interaction of the minute particulars of which they are composed. 1 The only merit I should care to claim for these essays is that they do attempt to keep in the forefront of attention the primary impact of the works they discuss, so that if the reader disagrees with any particular judgment he is at least invited to formulate his disagreement in terms of the primary im pact on him not in terms of general notions and abstract ideas. Which is far from denying that I hope some of my conclusions i In a recent essay by I. A. Richards I find an admirable definition of the creative activity that reading a good poem or play or novel is. Commenting on some lines from Donnes An Anatomy of the World, he writes In the Donne, I suggest, there is a prodigious activity between the words as we read them. Following, exploring, realizing, becoming that activity is, I suggest, the essential thing in read ing the poem. Understanding it is not a preparation for reading the poem. It is itself the poem. And it is a constructive, hazardous, free creative process, a process of conception through which a new being is growing in the mind. The Inter action of Words, in The Language of Poetry, edited by Allen Tate. Dr. Richards is also the critic referred to in the second sentence above Practical Criticism, p. 805. PREFACE will be found apt by others. Butand this applies to all forms of criticism it is the redirection ofattention to the works them selves that matters. There is another aspect of the present book on which I should like to comment briefly here. In a book published some years ago called Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson I suggested that the relations of literature and society a topic then, as now, much in the air could only be profitably discussed in relation to particular works written in a particular place and period...

D.W. Harding was a rarity amongst literary critics since his academic career was passed as Professor of Psychology. Yet this professional occupation never obtruded. As Professor Knights writes in his Foreword, as a critic 'he was one of the most sanely subtle or subtly sane) of his generation'. His title essay, 'Regulated Hatred', altered the course of Austen criticism, and this selection from the best of his writing about his favourite author (some of it previously unpublished) will be an important landmark in Austen criticism.