Publisher's Synopsis
Dr David Whitmarsh-Knight offers a fresh canon of information on Blake's dramatic narrative and grammar that locates Blake firmly in Shakespearean tradition. To show this he reconstructs the Second Blackfriars theatre as an architectural analogy to Golgonooza both as shaping crucibles of consciousness. He reliably reconstructs the staging that took place and shows how these indigenous structures of space/time are used by Blake to govern the entries and exits of his epics. The dramatic narrative revealed through different levels of space/time, opens our eyes to Blake's doors of perception, to understand how his characters move between 4 dimensions of space/time vision: namely, the one-fold, two-fold, three-fold and four-fold. Blake's doors of perception are prophetically relevant to our post-modern expressions of the sublime, of catastrophic trauma, economic collapse, experience of war and the need for healing and psychic survival. The link to Shakespeare's language and staging proves Blake is not an isolate to be dismissed behind an incomprehensible wall of words, but is deeply embedded in tradition. He also prefigures the hyper/text/novel form of our avante garde writing structures in Blake's The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.
