Whole Journey

The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development by C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s career as a continuous process of artistic and human growth. Conceived as Barber’s capstone study and completed posthumously by Wheeler from extensive drafts and notes, the book situates Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances within an arc of development shaped by temperament, historical pressures, and recurring crises of meaning. At its center lies a provocative claim: Shakespeare’s oeuvre has a discernible “human shape.” His plays are not just literary artifacts but responses to psychic needs, dramatizing both the risks of identification with “other identities” and the forms of mastery that drama makes possible. By placing tragedy at the pivot of this trajectory—where post-Reformation audiences confronted sacred longings in a secular theater—the book redefines the stakes of Shakespeare’s achievement, showing how his art disciplines magical expectation while offering communal rituals of recognition.

This landmark study makes a dual contribution: it recovers Shakespeare’s works as developmental rather than static, and it models a critical method attuned to history, form, and psyche. Close readings across the canon, from Richard III and Titus Andronicus through Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, to the late romances, reveal how Shakespeare continually reworked the tensions between “nothingness” and omnipotence, surrender and control, comedy and tragedy. The Sonnets serve as a diagnostic of Shakespeare’s temperament, illuminating the vulnerabilities and powers that his drama then transforms. Drawing on Reformation history and psychoanalytic awareness as resources for “paying attention” rather than totalizing theories, Barber and Wheeler create a framework for understanding Shakespeare’s genius as both historically situated and profoundly human. The Whole Journey will engage scholars, students, and general readers seeking to see Shakespeare’s art not as isolated masterpieces but as a lifelong endeavor to make and mend meaning in a changing world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.