SHAKESPEARE CRITIC G WILSON KNIGHT’S ANNOTATED COPY: The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination

Wilson Knight has subsequently added numerous pencil annotations to the text, often quizzical or critical in nature, comprising underlinings, marginal lines, question marks, and occasional verbal notations. Like Wilson, Knight was fascinated by the mystical and spiritual, as clearly indicated by his close reading of the present work, where his annotations frequently focus on discussions of the supernatural, marking sections regarding ghosts, spirits, fairies, and telepathy, as well as related considerations of sex and sexuality (as he notes, for example: “Yes – Gothic & homosexual go together sometimes”). Knight certainly comes across as a firmer believer in such spiritualistic ideas than Wilson, pointedly marking the latter’s sceptical asides with question marks or the word “why?”. To the rear pastedown Knight also provides a list of page numbers pertaining to these sections in which he evidently had greatest interest.

First edition. Signed and inscribed by the author. Publisher’s original blue cloth with titles in gilt to the spine. A very good copy, the binding square and firm with dulling to the gilt titles and a little fading to the spine and to top edge of the upper board. The contents with foxing to the edges of the textblock are otherwise in very good order.

The book is an analysis of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature by the writer and philosopher Colin Wilson (1931-2013) as viewed through the lens of his philosophy of ‘new existentialism’.