Shakespeare and the idea of late writing

"What do we mean when we speak of the 'late style' of a given writer, artist or composer? And what exactly, then, do we mean when we speak of 'Shakespeare's late style' or Shakespeare's late work? In Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing, Gordon McMullan argues that - far from being a natural phenomenon common to a handful of geniuses who, in their last few years, enter a rejuvenated period of serene, abstract or (sometimes) difficult, resistant creativity, a transition typically attributed to old age or to the proximity of death - late style is in fact a critical construct. Taking Shakespeare as his exemplar, he maps the development of the idea of the 'late plays' from the later eighteenth century to the present, noting not only the mismatch between what he call the 'discourse of lateness' and the actual conditions of production and of authorship in early modern theatre but also the generativity of this discourse for subsequent projections of creative selfhood. This book offers the first full critique of the idea of late style and will therefore be of interest not only to literature specialists but also to art historians and musicologists and to anyone curious about the relationship of creativity to old age and to death."--Jacket.