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3 Shakespeare’s Late Style
Get accessA.R. Braunmuller teaches English and European drama, 1500 to the present at UCLA. He has written about Brecht and Pinter, Chapman and Peele, Ibsen and Shakespeare, about early modern private letters and manuscript collections, and about the practice and theory of editing among other topics. He serves as Associate General Editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare and is co-General Editor of the Pelican Shakespeare with Stephen Orgel. He anticipates completing the Arden3 edition of Measure for Measure soon.
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Published:01 October 2013
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Abstract
‘Shakespeare’s Late Style’ explores stylistic aspects of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse (and a little of the prose) in plays composed after Hamlet. It suggests that Dryden was among the first to recognize that Shakespeare’s style changed over time and seems to have thought that the style became less ‘pestered’ with ‘figurative expressions’ as the career advanced. Like most early commentators, however, Dryden left little detailed analysis to support his larger, often metaphorical, claims. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the features of Shakespeare’s style in the second half of his professional career, to explore the imaginative effect of those features, and to speculate on why these changes from his earlier plays might have occurred. One principal claim made in this chapter concerns the degree to which the dramatic verse is rooted in dramatic events and characters’ motivations and designs. Increasing abstraction in both thought and expression combine to create the distinctive quasi-allegorical qualities especially visible in the four or five plays last written by Shakespeare alone or in collaboration.
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