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Shakespeare's Late Style.

Article Excerpt
Shakespeare's Late Style

By Russ McDonald

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006

One of the casualties of the turn to historicism and cultural studies over the last two or three decades has been the sophisticated mechanisms for the close reading of texts developed through the widespread practice in the preceding decades of the New Criticism and other formalist methods. As innumerable recent articles and books have been suggesting, the disciplinary impact of this loss is now being recognized. Returning detailed attention to the "syntax, meter, diction, repetition, figurative language, and other such verbal and poetic properties" (1) of Shakespeare's writing, Russ McDonald's new book on Shakespeare's Late Style participates in a revival of formalist analysis. This reemergence of formalist close analysis of texts raises many questions. Foremost among them is the question of what might be productively recovered from past practices and what needs serious rethinking to take on board the advances and the broadening of our knowledge that cultural criticism has afforded. While McDonald is quite brilliant on the former, he seems much less interested in the latter. Let me suggest how good McDonald's recovery work is.

A key strength of this book is its well-researched engagement with the critical history of its subject. A fascination with the altered texture of the dramatic verse in Shakespeare's final plays long predates mid-twentieth-century formalism. Whereas the Victorian scholars engaged in metrical tests to establish the canon and chronology (including F. J. Furnivall and James Spedding) provided some initial descriptions of the stylistic minutiae, critics like Edward Dowden initiated the efforts to interpret the manner of Shakespeare's late plays in relation to larger...

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