The most distinctive feature of Shakespeare's late style, the property that contributes more than any other to the acoustic imprint of the dramas, is its radical compression. Complex ideas are packed into few words, often at the expense of the dominant metrical pattern and the expected syntactical forms, sometimes in defiance of ready intelligibility. It is a characteristic that readers have recognized and puzzled over since the earliest days of academic Shakespeare criticism. The terms of the Bradleyan description, quoted in the Introduction –“more concentrated … not seldom twisted or elliptical … sometimes involved and obscure”– have been endorsed by later critics, although few proceed beyond these abstractions to specific illustration. Gladys Willcock, for example, suggested in 1934 that the late style exhibits a “compressed, often cloudy, pregnancy.” J. H. P. Pafford, reviewing critical responses to the late style for his 1963 Arden edition of The Winter's Tale, records general “agreement that the plays have a certain elusive quality which is peculiar to them.” These accounts capture the widely shared sense that the language of the last plays is veiled and ineffable, that it points to something beyond itself but frustrates any effort to apprehend that something directly.