This ground-breaking book reveals the prophetic, revolutionary vision that drives Shakespeare's tragedies, tracing its unbroken development from its beginnings in the Henry VI plays and Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, right through to his last, Coriolanus. The four full-length studies at the heart of the book focus in depth on Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearean Tragedy engages with each of these titanic masterpieces as a singular, complete work of dramatic art with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, but with the same unmistakably Shakespearean tragic vision at its core. Through compelling new readings of the plays, grounded in close analysis of their language and form, Kiernan Ryan shows how Shakespeare dramatizes the tragic realities of his world from the standpoint of the transfigured future that our world still awaits. This brilliantly written and consistently illuminating book presents a wholly original perspective on every one of Shakespeare's tragedies, and makes a compelling case for their importance now. With a refreshing range of reference across the breadth of the critical tradition, not to mention the whole scope of theory and philosophy, it thrillingly opens our ears to Shakespeare as 'the prophetic soul of the wide world'. Thanks to Ryan, the most famous characters in literature come close and confess that they are haunted by their own fulfilled selves in the transfigured future to which Shakespeare is ushering us, even as they fall prey to their times.