Description
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Shakespeare'S Late Style by Russ McDonald
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 Winters Tale, The Tempest, as well as Shakespeares 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 Shakespeares 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 artists late period, Shakespeares Late Style shows how the poetry of the last plays reveals their creators ambivalent attitude towards art, language, men and women, the theatre, and his own professional career.show more