Late Shakespeare: 1610-1613 (050626-WiSe 2023/24)

Romanticism has given us the idea of late style: the notion that artists go out with a bang and that their last work of art represents the sum of their talents and experience. For romantically inclined Shakespeare critics, the relevant ‘last work of art’ used to be The Tempest (1610-1611), a romance in which Shakespeare supposedly encoded his farewell to the stage: “I’ll drown my book”, the protagonist says, renouncing his magical powers. In historical reality, Shakespeare continued to write plays for a few more years before his death in 1616, collaborating with fellow playwright John Fletcher to produce the history play Henry VIII (1613), the tragicomedy The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) as well as Cardenio (1613; now unfortunately lost). It is in this context that Shakespeare scholars have cautiously returned to the paradigm of late writing: as Gordon McMullan argues, we need it as “a construct, ideological, rhetorical and heuristic”, in other words: as a (consciously artificial) framework that helps us to look past the differences in genre and to focus on what the plays of the 1610s reveal about the (obviously similar) political, cultural and personal circumstances in which they were written. On this basis, this course will be dedicated to a comparative analysis and interpretation of The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, supported by a critical discussion of McMullan’s and other concepts of Shakespearean lateness.