1 - What is a ‘late play’?

Summary

At the end of his life, Edward Said, one of the most influential cultural critics of the later twentieth century, wrote, appropriately enough, about last works. On Late Style, which was published posthumously, rejects the presumption that old age equals creative decline, endorsing instead the critical counterargument that, for certain major writers, artists and composers, the last few years of life, far from tracing a gradual and irreversible process of decay, in fact mark a period of renascent creativity, a coherent, if brief, burst of artistic energy embodying a return to the engagements of the artist's youth which functions at the same time as a prophecy of subsequent developments in his chosen form. In the late stylists Said admired - Strauss, Lampedusa, Beethoven - lateness manifests itself as a raging against the dying of the light, a resistance or obtuseness quite different from the resigned, serene abstraction more usually associated with the art of old age. For Said, the 'prerogative of late style' is to 'render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them', and he argues that “[w]hat holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist's mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile'.”