SHAKESPEARE'S LATE STYLE

"When Shakespeare gave up tragedy around 1607 and turned to the new form we call romance or tragicomedy, he created a distinctive poetic idiom that has often bewildered audiences and readers. The plays of this period - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Shakespeare's contributions to the collaborative Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen - exhibit a challenging verse style: verbally condensed, metrically and syntactically sophisticated, both conversational and highly wrought. In Shakespeare's Late Style, McDonald anatomizes the components of this late style, illustrating in a series of topically organized chapters the contribution of such features as ellipsis, syntax, grammatical suspension, and multiple forms of repetition. Resisting the sentimentality that frequently attends discussion of an artist's "late" period, Shakespeare's Late Style shows how poetry of the last plays reveals the creator's ambivalent attitude toward art, language, men and women, the theatre, and his own professional career."--Jacket.