Shakespeare's Late Style

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Cambridge University Press, Aug 10, 2006 - Literary Criticism - 260 pages
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 often bewildered audiences and readers. The plays of this period, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, as well as Shakespeare's part in the collaborations with John Fletcher (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, grammatical suspension, and various forms of repetition. Resisting the sentimentality that frequently attends discussion of an artist's 'late' period, Shakespeare's Late Style shows how the poetry of the last plays reveals their creator's ambivalent attitude towards art, language, men and women, the theatre, and his own professional career.

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Contents

Section 1
66
Section 2
76
Section 3
77
Section 4
81
Section 5
96
Section 6
99
Section 7
106
Section 8
156
Section 10
195
Section 11
199
Section 12
206
Section 13
219
Section 14
226
Section 15
229
Section 16
233
Section 17
244

Section 9
181

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Page 253 - SYSTEMATIC defence of the theory here maintained, it would have been my duty to develope the various causes upon which the pleasure received from metrical language depends. Among the chief of these causes is to be reckoned a principle which must be well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of accurate reflection ; namely, the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude.
Page 49 - Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave* of care, The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast,— Lady M, What do you mean ? Macb. Still it cried' Sleep no more !' to all the house ' Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.
Page 180 - Tis her breathing that Perfumes the chamber thus. The flame o' th' taper Bows toward her and would under-peep her lids To see th' enclosed lights, now canopied Under these windows white and azure, lac'd With blue of heaven's own tinct.
Page 200 - t in a woman's key, like such a woman As any of us three ; weep ere you fail; Lend us a knee ; But touch the ground for us no longer time Than a dove's motion, when the head 's pluck'd off; Tell him, if he i' the blood-siz'd field lay swoln, Showing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon, What you would do ! Hip.

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