Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (review)

Gordon McMullan’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing will affect nearly everything we write, teach, and (perhaps) perform. The reason is that we have been supporting a myth—a historical inaccuracy: in his late plays, Shakespeare entered into “the proximity of death” armed with a profoundly childlike “authorship” at once “serene, redemptive, spiritual” (10, 12, 13). According to McMullan, this idea of late writing is a modern construct, articulated most influentially by Edward Dowden. Consequently, McMullan’s largest aim is to critique the idea of late style: “Late style is perhaps the last of the great overarching critical ideas to be brought before the jury of theoretical or posttheoretical skepticism, as a sub-category of, but nonetheless distinct from, the Romantic concept of Genius” (16).

The historical origins of late style may be formally traced to Vasari, in his commentary on the changes in Titian’s painting toward the end of his life. Art historians, musicologists, philosophers, and literary critics have been carrying on a major conversation about late style for over a hundred years, about artists from Beethoven to Picasso, with major contributors ranging from Coleridge and Dowden to psychologist Erich Neumann, novelist Hermann Broch, cultural theorist Theodor W. Adorno, and critics Frank Kermode and Edward Said. Since the end of an artist’s career is the telos of his enterprise (we have to take “his” literally, because, historically speaking, “women have no place in the ranks of late stylists” [17]), we are talking about the promised end itself. The close of Shakespeare’s career requires something that can account for the end of genius—the patriarchal idea of late style, the invented crown of Western greatness.

McMullan divides his study into an introduction and six detailed chapters. All in all, it’s a pretty good read, as we realize the topic’s cultural centrality and artistic vastness. In his introduction, McMullan engages at first in too much throat-clearing, repetition, and personal biography: “Even as I began to recognise the motivations for the writing of this book, I became increasingly aware that the self-consciousness of an autobiographical explanation of the kind I have so far been making is itself symptomatic of the problems I am addressing” (16). But he does a good job of outlining a complex project, in which the broadest theoretical claim is this: “the idea of late style is in fact synecdochic of the biographical urge in general, and any critique of late style must therefore also involve a critique of the central place biography still occupies in the critical process” (3). McMullan aims “both to chart the construction of the idea of a Shakespearean late phase and its impact on subsequent models of lateness and to demonstrate the inadequacy of the idea of late style as a means of understanding a group of plays created in the conditions of early modern English professional theatre” (5). Through such an interdisciplinary reception history, we may come to question “the way we treat the relationship between creator and creation in all fields of artistic endeavour” and more accurately to “assess the extent to which the artist in question is able to determine his or her future reputation and thus dictate to posterity” (6).

McMullan acknowledges critical alliances: “Margreta de Grazia on canonconstruction, Jeffrey Masten on collaboration, Jonathan Bate on genius,” with “immediate influences” running from Barbara Hodgdon to “the considerable impact on our understanding of specifically theatrical authorship of work on the early modern repertory by Roslyn Knutson, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, Mary Bly and, most recently, Lucy Munro” (11–12). McMullan aims to “touch on the debate over Shakespeare’s ‘literariness’ recently reignited” by Lukas Erne and other scholars (12), arguing that “the assumption that the development of the work derives from and maps the development of the personality . . . fundamentally misrepresents the processes of production of early modern theatre” (22). McMullan may claim...