Shakespeare's Mortal Knowledge: A Reading of the Tragedies

by Zulfikar Ghose

Novelist and poet Ghose presents radical interpretations of The Bard's four most popular tragedies, for both the scholar and the theatergoer. He delves into such questions as whether Cordelia deliberately provoked her father into disinheriting her, whether jealousy was really the reason Othello murdered his wife, and why there is so much sex everywhere. No index or bibliography. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

171 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1993

About the author

Zulfikar Ghose (born in Sialkot, India (now Pakistan) on March 13, 1935) is a novelist, poet and essayist. A native of Pakistan who has long lived in Texas, he writes in the surrealist mode of much Latin American fiction, blending fantasy and harsh realism.

He became a close friend of British experimental writer B. S. Johnson, with whom he collaborated on several projects, and of Anthony Smith. The three writers met when they served as joint editors of an annual anthology of student poets called Universities' Poetry. Ghose also met English poet Ted Hughes and his wife, the American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, and American author Janet Burroway, with whom he occasionally collaborated.
While teaching and writing in London from 1963–1969, Ghose also free-lanced as a sports journalist, reporting on cricket for The Observer newspaper. Two collections of his poetry were published, The Loss of India (1964) and Jets From Orange (1967), along with an autobiography called Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) and his first two novels, The Contradictions (1966) and The Murder of Aziz Khan (1969). The Contradictions explores differences between Western and Eastern attitudes and ways of life.