Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 What is a ‘late play’?
- 2 Blackfriars, music and masque: theatrical contexts of the last plays
- 3 The literary and dramatic contexts of the last plays
- 4 Politics, religion, geography and travel: historical contexts of the last plays
- 5 ‘You speak a language that I understand not’: listening to the last plays
- 6 The Winter’s Tale: shifts in staging and status
- 7 Cymbeline: the afterlife
- 8 Literary invocations of The Tempest
- 9 Pericles: the afterlife
- 10 The Two Noble Kinsmen and King Henry VIII: the last last plays
- Further reading: Clare Smout
- Index
1 - What is a ‘late play’?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 What is a ‘late play’?
- 2 Blackfriars, music and masque: theatrical contexts of the last plays
- 3 The literary and dramatic contexts of the last plays
- 4 Politics, religion, geography and travel: historical contexts of the last plays
- 5 ‘You speak a language that I understand not’: listening to the last plays
- 6 The Winter’s Tale: shifts in staging and status
- 7 Cymbeline: the afterlife
- 8 Literary invocations of The Tempest
- 9 Pericles: the afterlife
- 10 The Two Noble Kinsmen and King Henry VIII: the last last plays
- Further reading: Clare Smout
- Index
Summary
At the end of his life, Edward Said, one of the most influential cultural critics of the later twentieth century, wrote, appropriately enough, about last works. On Late Style, which was published posthumously, rejects the presumption that old age equals creative decline, endorsing instead the critical counterargument that, for certain major writers, artists and composers, the last few years of life, far from tracing a gradual and irreversible process of decay, in fact mark a period of renascent creativity, a coherent, if brief, burst of artistic energy embodying a return to the engagements of the artist's youth which functions at the same time as a prophecy of subsequent developments in his chosen form. In the late stylists Said admired - Strauss, Lampedusa, Beethoven - lateness manifests itself as a raging against the dying of the light, a resistance or obtuseness quite different from the resigned, serene abstraction more usually associated with the art of old age. For Said, the 'prerogative of late style' is to 'render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them', and he argues that “[w]hat holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist's mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile'.”
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Last Plays , pp. 5 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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