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Shakespeare's Late Style
When Shakespeare gave up tragedy around 1607 and turned to the new form we call romance or tragicomedy, he created a distinctive poetic idiom that often bewildered audiences and readers. The plays of this period, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, as well as Shakespeare's part in the collaborations with John Fletcher (Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen), exhibit a challenging verse style - verbally condensed, metrically and syntactically sophisticated, both conversational and highly wrought. In Shakespeare's Late Style, McDonald anatomizes the components of this late style, illustrating in a series of topically organized chapters the contribution of such features as ellipsis, grammatical suspension, and various forms of repetition. Resisting the sentimentality that frequently attends discussion of an artist's 'late' period, Shakespeare's Late Style shows how the poetry of the last plays reveals their creator's ambivalent attitude towards art, language, men and women, the theatre, and his own professional career.
- GenresShakespeare
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 2, 2010
McDonald (whose Bedford Companion to Shakespeare was one of the most useful textbooks I had in college) is an incredibly sensitive critic. In this work, he surveys just about any element of stylistics (prosody, ellipsis, alliteration, rhyme, assonance, metrics, etc. etc.) he can think of, as they appear in Shakespeare's "late" plays (Pericles through Two Noble Kinsmen), and then manages to tie all of this stylistic analysis into a coherent argument about the larger structures and themes of the plays, all in a way which never stoops to such facile arguments as "Prospero=Shakespeare" or that convoluted prosody always suggests a character's disordered mind.
This book is definitely not for the casual Shakespeare reader (it helps, for instance, to have read all of Shakespeare's plays, not just the late ones). But for anyone with a bit of scholarly awareness (a college course or two) it is eminently readable and rewarding.
This book is definitely not for the casual Shakespeare reader (it helps, for instance, to have read all of Shakespeare's plays, not just the late ones). But for anyone with a bit of scholarly awareness (a college course or two) it is eminently readable and rewarding.
February 27, 2016
One of the current and dumber controversies in Shakespeare studies is if Shakespeare's late plays are notably different than his earlier plays. At the moment, the differences are being doubted.
Russ McDonald lobs this book into the discussion, and it ought to have the impact of a hand granade. This book was not written to that end, only to identify the ways that Shakespeare's late poetic style differs from his earlier, but in so clearly identifying these differences McDonald has delivered a powerful argument for the distinctiveness of Shakespeare's late plays.
Russ McDonald lobs this book into the discussion, and it ought to have the impact of a hand granade. This book was not written to that end, only to identify the ways that Shakespeare's late poetic style differs from his earlier, but in so clearly identifying these differences McDonald has delivered a powerful argument for the distinctiveness of Shakespeare's late plays.
December 15, 2023
McDonald's Shakespeare And The Arts Of Language (Oxford University Press, 2001) ended with a look at the Romances, or Late Plays, or Tragicomedies (Pericles [1608], Cymbeline [1610], The Winter's Tale [1611] and The Tempest [1611]), as he moved to a 'late style'. Given the beauty of the late plays, and that they have a persistent habit of staying with you long after you have first read or seen them, it is not surprising that McDonald should follow up that book with one dedicated to the late style of these wonderful - 'deeply resonant' (Mowat, " 'What's In A Name?': Tragicomedy, Romance or Late Comedy?", A Companion to Shakespeare, Blackwell, 2003, p.143) - works. His purview here extends also to Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen of 1613, since these last co-authored plays share much of the late style in their Shakespearean parts.
His Introduction is probably one of the longest you will read in any book on a technical subject, or on Shakespeare. At over 40 pages, he discusses historically the critical approaches to the late plays in terms of genre, style and poetics which references a wealth of critical heritage, from 19th century categorisation and criticism to the latest (at 2005/6) forthcoming works. If I were 'merely' able to write anything approaching such an introduction, I would consider it a life task I had never dared to aspire to, so moving into the analysis of the prosody of these Romances seems to be very much a bonus beyond a rich beginning. His discussion is very widely read and well referenced.
He prepares us for his main discussion by looking at the transitional last tragedies, Macbeth [1605-6], Antony And Cleopatra [1606-7], and Coriolanus [1608], though his Riverside dates differ in that he looks at Antony And Cleopatra as the later play and key transitional style. It must be said at the outset that it is crucial to be familiar with all 9 of these plays in order get the maximum out of his detailed discussion, and to have accommodated yourself particularly to the dense language of Macbeth to begin with. Without such familiarity, much of the discussion will seem superficial, for knowledge of their narrative arcs is as important as experience of their particular language.
Thus we move to the itemised syntactical discussions of elision, divagation (or digression), suspension and repetition deployed in syntactical, grammatical and rhetorical segments, clauses, phrases and speeches, all well illustrated from the last six plays. Needless to say, you'll need a dictionary or list of grammatical and rhetorical terms in order to understand the illustrations of many of these, if you've not studied grammar as Shakespeare probably did. Peter Mack's listing of such at the end of The Cambridge Companion To Shakespeare's Language (2019) is useful for this purpose, then either the OED or a free dictionary. Without this, you will be lost, and I had to refer to the original definition I assigned to each term's first instance often to remind myself of the specific technical meaning.
But specific meaning is often hard to wrench out of Shakespeare's late style - which is why you will be reading this particular book - and McDonald's repeated theme, of marrying the syntactical, grammatical and rhetorical devices to the romance narrative as parallel methods of delivering the new genre of his late career, becomes more apparent with more specific references to their deployment in speech - and largely verse. The percentage of verse to prose in these late plays is about 85 to 15 (80-20 Per; 85-15 Cym; 75-25 WT; 80-20 Tem; 98-2 H8; 95-5 TNK - these last two weighted by the typical highly regular verse style of Fletcher), so much of the examination is of verse, while some prose is looked at. And following such a detailed examination is by no means a drudge at any point - but this, again, is largely dependent upon being familiar with all 9 of the plays discussed, or at least the last 6.
I had started this book towards my dissertation on Time in Shakespeare's Romances two years before, but found I had to re-read the first three sections to come back up to speed. However, I found myself this time more involved in the discussion because I was not searching it for quotable instances but reading it at leisure. Not the sort of book to read for leisure, you might think; but no, it is, if you've got the bug, and by that I mean the larger one of Shakespeare anyway, but specifically a love of the last four later plays which end in his finest (if not his greatest) play, The Tempest. The magic in that play is elevated by the journey through the preceding three. Shakespeare, in his late phase, brings an often convoluted but yet magical style to the plays which, once seen or read, never goes away.
Consequently, journeying with Russ McDonald on his highly technical yet ultimately satisfying presentation of Shakespeare's late style becomes a journey you find you obviously must make, after reading those plays. Far from being bogged down in the minutiae of technical grammatical terms, it beomes part of the journey of experience of Shakespeare's Romance. I enjoyed it, and while I have little prior example but for his preceding work, Shakespeare And The Arts Of Language (2001) and that Cambridge compilation, I found I had read them in exactly the right order, moving from the general to the specific, and arrived at a sense of inevitability which is the kin experience of resolution at the end of each of these Romances, even while the journey was choppy, initially obfuscated, but ultimately very rewarding. So, yes, they both arrived at their conclusions satisfactorily.
McDonald's conclusion, though, 'Style and the making of meaning', is largely dedicated to a survey of Renaissance romance fiction, its popularisers and critics. It is strange to have this both as a concluding chapter (instead of part of the introduction) and off-subject. The chapter title implies a greater amplification - at the macro scale - of what had preceded it, the way in which Shakespeare's use of language in the romance, his late style, promotes the generic teleology (design), the (largely episodic) structure of the adventure or quest narrative in exotic locations with the fabula of wicked stepmothers, theophanic interventions, familial separation, loss, reunion, reconciliation and redemption, romance fiction's happy endings. While the context is the accommodation of the feminine, little of the chapter, devoted as it is to a contemporary survey of romance fiction, is actually about 'style and the making of meaning' - all of that work has been done.
Technically, also, a criticism of a book which demonstrates an author on his subject so widely read, is the lack of a bibliography. Considering also that modern criticism always includes such, as well as some standard citation style (MPA, Chicago, APA) - typically, as McDonald uses here, the Chicago footnotes style - this should also be matched by a bibliography. The lack of it is obscure, since one of the adjunct activities in reading any such critical literary work is to pick up pointers to other such works you would be interested in reading, such as Alison Thorne's Shakespeare's Romances (2003), Anne Barton's 'Leontes and the Spider' (available in Kiernan Ryan (ed.), Shakespeare: The Last Plays, 1998), and Ruth Nevo's (prohibitively priced) Shakespeare's Other Language (1987) - as the key works I would like to look at next. While I marked these in situ as I read, I had to scan 260 pages at the end of reading in order to rediscover this list, which normally would be accessible within a few pages in a bibliography.
If there is a criticism of McDonald's detailed inspection of the style of the late plays, it is probably one of overstatement, and, probably literally reinforcing one of his key analytical perspectives, of repetition. But so abundant are his examples of his stylistic vocabulary, that this is a somewhat pedantic view. The more illustrations of his examination, the more the ideas become a given - and so, the more the mind will examine Shakespeare's text the next time. But such a criticism is perverse in the light of the fact that someone can sit down and write logically, engagingly, illustratively and as well informed of his subject, which most of us steer away from generally, as well as in Shakespeare criticism. That, in itself, is quite remarkable, and elevates the feat of his achievement here. Because, at the heart of it all, he loves these plays as much, or more, than I do.
But in the end, I found that this is a book I should have read next (in my reading of Shakespeare). And satisfied that I did. And not a word went by that I did not understand. You have to work at this book, and alongside a dictionary or glossary of grammar and rhetorical figures. Like Shakespeare, it's not an easy read. But the satisfaction that accrues, in both cases, is, as with the Romances, one that will keep. While the academic and stylistic content of this work measured a steady 9/10, those technical omissions noted above, and the strangely inconsistent survey of romance in the conclusion instead of the introduction, meant a reduction in its overall impact, which irked, but is only fair. Call it a nod to the renewal of doubt at the very end of Shakespeare's portfolio, after those wonderful positive Romances, if you like.
His Introduction is probably one of the longest you will read in any book on a technical subject, or on Shakespeare. At over 40 pages, he discusses historically the critical approaches to the late plays in terms of genre, style and poetics which references a wealth of critical heritage, from 19th century categorisation and criticism to the latest (at 2005/6) forthcoming works. If I were 'merely' able to write anything approaching such an introduction, I would consider it a life task I had never dared to aspire to, so moving into the analysis of the prosody of these Romances seems to be very much a bonus beyond a rich beginning. His discussion is very widely read and well referenced.
He prepares us for his main discussion by looking at the transitional last tragedies, Macbeth [1605-6], Antony And Cleopatra [1606-7], and Coriolanus [1608], though his Riverside dates differ in that he looks at Antony And Cleopatra as the later play and key transitional style. It must be said at the outset that it is crucial to be familiar with all 9 of these plays in order get the maximum out of his detailed discussion, and to have accommodated yourself particularly to the dense language of Macbeth to begin with. Without such familiarity, much of the discussion will seem superficial, for knowledge of their narrative arcs is as important as experience of their particular language.
Thus we move to the itemised syntactical discussions of elision, divagation (or digression), suspension and repetition deployed in syntactical, grammatical and rhetorical segments, clauses, phrases and speeches, all well illustrated from the last six plays. Needless to say, you'll need a dictionary or list of grammatical and rhetorical terms in order to understand the illustrations of many of these, if you've not studied grammar as Shakespeare probably did. Peter Mack's listing of such at the end of The Cambridge Companion To Shakespeare's Language (2019) is useful for this purpose, then either the OED or a free dictionary. Without this, you will be lost, and I had to refer to the original definition I assigned to each term's first instance often to remind myself of the specific technical meaning.
But specific meaning is often hard to wrench out of Shakespeare's late style - which is why you will be reading this particular book - and McDonald's repeated theme, of marrying the syntactical, grammatical and rhetorical devices to the romance narrative as parallel methods of delivering the new genre of his late career, becomes more apparent with more specific references to their deployment in speech - and largely verse. The percentage of verse to prose in these late plays is about 85 to 15 (80-20 Per; 85-15 Cym; 75-25 WT; 80-20 Tem; 98-2 H8; 95-5 TNK - these last two weighted by the typical highly regular verse style of Fletcher), so much of the examination is of verse, while some prose is looked at. And following such a detailed examination is by no means a drudge at any point - but this, again, is largely dependent upon being familiar with all 9 of the plays discussed, or at least the last 6.
I had started this book towards my dissertation on Time in Shakespeare's Romances two years before, but found I had to re-read the first three sections to come back up to speed. However, I found myself this time more involved in the discussion because I was not searching it for quotable instances but reading it at leisure. Not the sort of book to read for leisure, you might think; but no, it is, if you've got the bug, and by that I mean the larger one of Shakespeare anyway, but specifically a love of the last four later plays which end in his finest (if not his greatest) play, The Tempest. The magic in that play is elevated by the journey through the preceding three. Shakespeare, in his late phase, brings an often convoluted but yet magical style to the plays which, once seen or read, never goes away.
Consequently, journeying with Russ McDonald on his highly technical yet ultimately satisfying presentation of Shakespeare's late style becomes a journey you find you obviously must make, after reading those plays. Far from being bogged down in the minutiae of technical grammatical terms, it beomes part of the journey of experience of Shakespeare's Romance. I enjoyed it, and while I have little prior example but for his preceding work, Shakespeare And The Arts Of Language (2001) and that Cambridge compilation, I found I had read them in exactly the right order, moving from the general to the specific, and arrived at a sense of inevitability which is the kin experience of resolution at the end of each of these Romances, even while the journey was choppy, initially obfuscated, but ultimately very rewarding. So, yes, they both arrived at their conclusions satisfactorily.
McDonald's conclusion, though, 'Style and the making of meaning', is largely dedicated to a survey of Renaissance romance fiction, its popularisers and critics. It is strange to have this both as a concluding chapter (instead of part of the introduction) and off-subject. The chapter title implies a greater amplification - at the macro scale - of what had preceded it, the way in which Shakespeare's use of language in the romance, his late style, promotes the generic teleology (design), the (largely episodic) structure of the adventure or quest narrative in exotic locations with the fabula of wicked stepmothers, theophanic interventions, familial separation, loss, reunion, reconciliation and redemption, romance fiction's happy endings. While the context is the accommodation of the feminine, little of the chapter, devoted as it is to a contemporary survey of romance fiction, is actually about 'style and the making of meaning' - all of that work has been done.
Technically, also, a criticism of a book which demonstrates an author on his subject so widely read, is the lack of a bibliography. Considering also that modern criticism always includes such, as well as some standard citation style (MPA, Chicago, APA) - typically, as McDonald uses here, the Chicago footnotes style - this should also be matched by a bibliography. The lack of it is obscure, since one of the adjunct activities in reading any such critical literary work is to pick up pointers to other such works you would be interested in reading, such as Alison Thorne's Shakespeare's Romances (2003), Anne Barton's 'Leontes and the Spider' (available in Kiernan Ryan (ed.), Shakespeare: The Last Plays, 1998), and Ruth Nevo's (prohibitively priced) Shakespeare's Other Language (1987) - as the key works I would like to look at next. While I marked these in situ as I read, I had to scan 260 pages at the end of reading in order to rediscover this list, which normally would be accessible within a few pages in a bibliography.
If there is a criticism of McDonald's detailed inspection of the style of the late plays, it is probably one of overstatement, and, probably literally reinforcing one of his key analytical perspectives, of repetition. But so abundant are his examples of his stylistic vocabulary, that this is a somewhat pedantic view. The more illustrations of his examination, the more the ideas become a given - and so, the more the mind will examine Shakespeare's text the next time. But such a criticism is perverse in the light of the fact that someone can sit down and write logically, engagingly, illustratively and as well informed of his subject, which most of us steer away from generally, as well as in Shakespeare criticism. That, in itself, is quite remarkable, and elevates the feat of his achievement here. Because, at the heart of it all, he loves these plays as much, or more, than I do.
But in the end, I found that this is a book I should have read next (in my reading of Shakespeare). And satisfied that I did. And not a word went by that I did not understand. You have to work at this book, and alongside a dictionary or glossary of grammar and rhetorical figures. Like Shakespeare, it's not an easy read. But the satisfaction that accrues, in both cases, is, as with the Romances, one that will keep. While the academic and stylistic content of this work measured a steady 9/10, those technical omissions noted above, and the strangely inconsistent survey of romance in the conclusion instead of the introduction, meant a reduction in its overall impact, which irked, but is only fair. Call it a nod to the renewal of doubt at the very end of Shakespeare's portfolio, after those wonderful positive Romances, if you like.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews