Shakespeare's Late Style (review)

Since the days of Arnold Houbraken, who noted of Rembrandt that "particularly in his last period, his work, seen from nearby, would look as if it was smeared on with a trowel,"¹ art historians writing about late style have gradually developed a more or less informative terminology-—looseness of facture, gravelly surfaces—for the visual and textural qualities of the work they are examining. Descriptions of late style in literature tend to be rather vague by comparison, implying a certain transcendence, on the one hand, or resistance (the kind of lateness preferred by Edward Said), on the other, without offering a thorough account of how the words actually do the work required for this outcome. Often parody, as (for instance) of Henry James's late prose, does the job better. Certainly in Shakespeare studies, there has been a notable lack of precise technical accounts of Shakespeare's late style, presumably because few critics have the skills or the sheer persistence required to do the work well. Russ McDonald sets out in Shakespeare's Late Style to rectify this situation, and he does so superbly.

There have been prior attempts to address this lacuna. McDonald quotes from S. L. Bethell, who argued, in his 1956 Oxford edition of The Winter's Tale, that the characteristics of late Shakespeare were clear. In the late plays, Bethell notes:

Rhythms for the most part are not smooth and regular as in the early plays, nor do they directly suggest the rhythms of ordinary speech as do those of Shakespeare's middle period. We are aware of the blank verse pattern and we can hear at the same time the tones of speech, but the total effect is new, a blank verse which is tense, springy, contorted. Among the means employed to achieve this are a daring use of harsh sound to express harsh feelings, the frequent omission of words properly required by the syntax . . . and a sometimes violent distortion of word order.

(31)

Bethell describes here a series of disruptions, disturbances, and distortions—what T. W. Adorno, addressing late Beethoven, had called "fissures and rifts"²—in the smooth progress of the plays' language. Bethell eschews the customary impressionism critics resort to when describing the late style for a harder, more precise analysis of syntactical and rhetorical features. His description seems designed to provoke a fuller analysis of the late style and, exactly a half-century later, McDonald offers that analysis, one that reinstates an appropriate technical language for profound verbal effects.

In the late plays, McDonald observes, "Ellipsis exerts a constant pressure on the sound and sense as the poet concentrates expression, omitting phonemic and verbal units that in an earlier phase of composition he would have retained" (33). Asyndeton is a related feature, giving the language a " 'distilled' " feeling (33). "Syntax becomes convoluted, often confusingly so, and even though word order in early modern English is much less standardized than it has since become, the number of deformed phrases, directional shifts, and intricately constructed sentences is exceptional for the period and exceptional for Shakespeare" (33). The plays show a dependence on parenthesis and on repetition of letters, words, phrases, and rhythms, something that "becomes more prominent and sometimes almost obsessive, patterning heard clearly in the incantatory doublings in Macbeth and resounding most audibly in the extraordinary echoing effects of The Tempest" (33). "Blank verse . . . is now aggressively irregular, encompassing enjambments, light or weak endings, frequent stops or shifts of direction, and other threats to the integrity of the line," and there is a rapid succession of metaphors, only partially articulated (33).

These features are the bases for McDonald's chapters on elision, divagation, suspension, and repetition. A key marker of late style, he argues, is ellipsis: "In seeking intensity, the mature Shakespeare experiments with a poetic method based on distillation and reduction" (79). Another is pleonasm. "For all its fierce abridgements, the late line is also heavy with surplus" (96), McDonald argues, especially at the level of verse...