Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
Shakespeare's Late Style offers a detailed study of the difficult poetry spoken in such plays as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaborative plays written with John Fletcher. In chapters devoted to major poetic features, Russ McDonald shows how the complex verse promotes the extraordinary impact of the late plays in the theatre and suggests new ways of thinking about some of Shakespeare's favourite topics in his last phase: art, language, men and women, the theatre, and his own career.
About the Author
Russ McDonald is Bank of America Excellence Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Table of Contents
Introduction; 1. The idioms of the late tragedies; 2. Elision; 3. Syntax (I): divagation; 4. Syntax (II): suspension; 5. Repetition; 6. Style and the making of meaning.