Late Shakespeare: Style and the Sexes

Summary

Shakespeare’s turn from tragedy to romance coincides with a similarly radical change in the style of his verse. This complicated and self-conscious poetry has attracted a wide variety of labels, from Baroque to incompetent to post modern, but it has not been carefully described nor have its implications been adequately assessed. These metamorphoses of dramatic mode and verse style are partly attributable to Shakespeare’s evolving and contradictory opinions about language itself, and the late tragedies, especially Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, are a good place to start in studying these changes because together they constitute a kind of hinge or pivot on which Shakespeare turns from one kind of drama to another. For my purposes, their particular utility derives from their dependence upon similar conflicts of gender that not only help to forecast Shakespeare’s narrative and thematic interests but also influence the kind of poetry he will devise for the final phase of his career. Recent criticism has begun to establish that, historically speaking, certain expressive styles could be sexually coded, and I shall draw upon some of that work to assert that what we witness in the final phase of his career is the feminization of Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic style.

The argument that follows, simply stated, is that the complex verse patterns of the late plays are intimately related to Shakespeare's imaginative recovery of the feminine, that the origins of these thematic and stylistic conflicts emerge clearly in the last classical tragedies, and that the romances constitute a conditional resolution of these concerns.