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Reviewed by:
  • Late Shakespeare, 1608–1613 ed. by Andrew J. Power, Rory Loughnane
  • Judith Haber (bio)
Late Shakespeare, 1608–1613. Edited by Andrew J. Power and Rory Loughnane. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Illus. Pp. xii + 344. $120.00 cloth, $39.99 paper.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Late Shakespeare, a reassessment of the last six years of Shakespeare’s career, is its avoidance of what it terms “an exclusionist agenda” (5). Arguing that the years 1607–8 marked a “watershed” (8) “both personally and financially for Shakespeare, and socially and economically for the people of London and England” (1), the volume considers all seven plays written during and after this period in their most likely chronological order (Pericles, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, King Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen), rather than separating them out into conventional groupings. This approach creates a collection of texts “often markedly disjointed in terms of genre and authorship” (5), but it also results in a number of extremely interesting juxtapositions and insights, some of which could be taken much further. The editors also argue that one unfortunate consequence of “the traditional romantic view of the late plays” has been a neglect of their material conditions (11), and they seek to redress this omission by examining the texts in their cultural and historical contexts.

Each of the essays in the first section of the book presents a reading of an individual play, though many of them bring other plays into conversation. In keeping with the editors’ inclusive approach, not only the plays themselves but also the critical perspectives here often differ widely from each other; this can sometimes make the volume difficult to read straight through, but it also makes it a very useful reference [End Page 273] work. One of the most potentially fruitful results of the book’s methodology, in my view, is the inclusion of Coriolanus among the romances. In the second essay, “Coriolanus and the Late Romances,” David George finds many connections among the plays, arguing that the Roman play is itself indebted to Pericles and that it helps to create the conclusions of the last three romances. His evidence is quite persuasive, although I found myself wishing that he had taken his argument further to provide a fuller, more interpretive reconsideration of these plays. In one of the best essays in the volume, Michael Neill, “silent[ly] absorb[s]” Coriolanus into his fascinating “account” of silences and part-lines in the late plays, as Gordon McMullan’s afterword notes (266–67), and Neill’s study—focusing primarily on The Tempest—is richer for it. In other essays, Andrew Hiscock argues persuasively, if not entirely surprisingly, that an obsessive concern with narrative is the subject of Pericles, and he forces us to reconsider traditional evaluations of the play. Raphael Lyne uses cognitive theory to shed more light on recognition scenes in Cymbeline, and William Engel examines memory images and “kinetic emblems” in The Winter’s Tale, arguing that Shakespeare uses myths in the shared memory of his audience to “take[] us to a place before and beyond words” (87). In an essay focusing on Henry VIII, Rory Loughnane examines Gentlemen characters in Shakespeare’s various works and asserts that the playwright’s use of them changes in the later plays: together with other “semi-choric” characters, they “offer counter-commentary that directs ambiguous readings of grey areas in the historic narrative” (122). Finally, Sandra Clark compares The Two Noble Kinsmen to earlier plays with similar themes (for example, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to emphasize “how dark and unresolved” this last play “appears as Shakespeare’s final word on the relationship of friendship and love” (137). Both Loughnane and Clark make strong cases for giving their often-neglected texts more serious consideration.

The second section of the book, offering broader historical and theatrical contexts for the plays, is similarly eclectic. It begins with Grace Ioppolo’s careful examination of the transmission process from author to print, which suggests that the author and his audience had more power in this process than they have previously been accorded. In...

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