Magnificent, powerful, haunting, The Changeling - a 1622 collaboration by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley - is a play that both works superbly in performance and is a goldmine for critics. It represents a paradigmatic Jacobean revenge play - with all that blood at the end, how could it be anything else? - yet it appears late enough in the development of English Renaissance tragedy both to parody the idea of revenge and to foreground the increasingly hybrid nature of the genre. It records the obtuse operations of desire in a stratified culture, mapping the spread of social pollution manifest as ugliness, the ramifications of which are apparent not only within the play but also in its critical and theatrical afterlife. Is The Changeling an ugly play, then? On one level, far from it: the elegance of its inexorability is unquestioned, whether one reads or sees it. But the physical ugliness that the play's upper-class female protagonist finds in its lower-class male protagonist, exposing and matching the spiritual ugliness she is appalled to find within herself, not only drives the narrative grimly towards hell but ramifies also in the fields of genre and of authorship. The Changeling denies its admirers the aesthetic comfort of authorial unity-of-purpose - the beauty of tragedy, as understood by generations of critics - and refuses the self-coherence, the clarity of trajectory, of the revenge genre to which it belongs. In this double rejection of singularity, the play is not perverse.

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'.”

Late style is, I wish to argue, a concept creative artists and critics have together established in order to negotiate the proximity of death and, for this negotiation to begin in individual instances, certain conditions must be fulfilled and work done in order to establish the place of a given late style within the overarching concept. Part of that work, for the critic, involves easing readers past issues that might complicate the understanding of late style they have been encouraged to adopt as the embodiment of a certain transcendence – issues that include, as I have suggested, tone, contingency, complicity and gender. And part is the establishment in the individual case of the key criteria for the attribution of a late style. There are several such – a defensible argument that the work in question displays overwhelming evidence of genius is an obvious primary instance – but the single most basic criterion, the one from which the rest in a sense develop, is what I have called the caesura, that is, the point at which the mid- or mature-period style stops and the late style begins. Epochs, personal and social, must begin and end somewhere if they are to be distinguished and categorised, and one of the key issues in analyses of late work is the problematic idea of the divide between the late period and whatever came before it.

In his mischievous essay, ‘Tempest in a Teapot’, Tony Dawson draws attention to the stories that are told about the end of Shakespeare's career and to the reductive effect these stories invariably have. He announces without preamble that he thinks The Tempest ‘Shakespeare's most consistently overrated play’ (‘Tempest in a Teapot’, 61) and points out that this is a direct result of the play's privileged position as the last Shakespeare wrote, that in view of ‘the importance of chronology in the assessment of Shakespeare's plays’ the fact that The Tempest ‘comes at the end of Shakespeare's career means that it will be read retrospectively, as climactic’ (ibid., 61). Resisting this tendency, he points both to the actual absence of evidence for determining which of the three plays Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, all apparently written in 1610 or 1611, was truly the last of Shakespeare's solo-written plays and to the tactics critics deploy in order to ensure that, of the three, it is The Tempest which retains that status by default, thereby sustaining the standard assumption that the play is intrinsically autobiographical. He notes that Cymbeline, for one, is often treated – on a purely impressionistic basis – ‘as an apprentice work in comparison with The Winter's Tale and The Tempest’ and is therefore ‘seen usually as written earlier than they’, an entirely imaginary priority constructed simply because, as Dawson puts it, ‘we do not like to imagine Cymbeline as Shakespeare's last complete play’ (ibid., 62).

I have argued that, almost as soon as the discourse of lateness was established as a concept within the general culture of creativity, it became subject to certain complicities; that ‘genuine’ lateness became impossible to distinguish from ‘knowing’ lateness, from lateness striven for and assumed by a given artist. Henry James's ‘Middle Years’, as I have shown, makes this clear, and the late James's engagement – indeed, obsession – with the Shakespearean late phase and in particular with The Tempest as the supreme embodiment of late Shakespeare demonstrates Shakespeare's centrality to the idea of late style as it developed in twentieth-century literary culture as the poetic counterpart to late Beethoven in musicology and late Rembrandt in art history. I have noted, too, that Edward Said's turn to the analysis of late style coincided with his own later years and terminal illness. Late Shakespeare has also, unsurprisingly, been an object of particular interest for critics late in life, who demonstrate a susceptibility to the extension of subjectivism offered by the idea of late writing, from the association of the late author with the late work to that of the late critic with the late author.

Needless to say, the discourse of Shakespearean lateness did not emerge fully formed with one critic in the 1870s. I have so far described the general debt of late-style critics to Dowden and I have outlined the twentieth-century debates over the delimiting features of late Shakespeare. I want now, in the course of the next two chapters, going backward like Hamlet's crab, to trace the history of the possibility of late Shakespeare in the context of the larger history of the emergence of the general idea of late writing. By ‘a history of the possibility’, I mean, in part, a narrative of the development of the conditions for that emergence, one that will involve assessing the understanding available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries of the significance of last words and of last moments and the extent to which this understanding might inform the idea of late Shakespeare as it would in due course emerge.

I have stated that the idea of late Shakespeare could not, to all intents and purposes, predate Malone's chronology and the subsequent construction of the figure of Shakespeare the author. I have therefore implied that Shakespeare himself could have had no concept of late style and I wish now to explain and qualify this implication in two ways, first of all by considering the significance accorded to the endings of lives – and specifically to last words – in early modern England and then by examining the asymmetrical relationship between the conditions of production in the early modern theatre and those required for the attribution of a late style. I have also begun to argue for another asymmetry, that of, on the one hand, the general idea of late style and, on the other, the specific idea of late Shakespeare, even while claiming that the latter forms a significant constituent part of the former. Late style is a redemptive fantasy of rejuvenation, a manifestation of critical and artistic wish-fulfilment that may at times approximate a biographical truth but which is far more often the product either of the imposition of an understanding of the creative process inimical to the actual conditions in which the art-works in question were produced or of complicity on the part of the artist, consciously producing work that fulfils the criteria for the attribution of a late style.

LA DERNIÈRE PÉRIODE

The Musée Picasso in Paris, housed within the elegant Hôtel Salé in the Marais, offers visitors a representative, chronologically ordered selection of the artist's works – his personal collection, as it happens, subsequently augmented to fill gaps in the narrative – which charts the linear development of an exemplary creative genius, each room representing the successive ‘periods’ of Picasso's artistic life. These visitors learn, if they did not already know, that Picasso lived a very long time. And if they anticipate a certain decline, weariness or loss of control in his work by the time he reached his ninetieth year, then they find that they have to think again. The wall label in Room 20 – which covers the last eleven years of the artist's life, from 1962 to 1973, a phase described simply as ‘La dernière période’ (‘The last period’) – reads as follows:

The account by the Japanese artist Hokusai of the relationship of age to creative achievement, which was written in 1834, may belong to a culture quite other than the Western tradition I have been examining in this book, a culture with very different attitudes both to old age and to creativity, but it chimes productively, if somewhat uncomfortably, nonetheless, both in its seriousness and in its apparent irony, with the discourse of lateness that I have mapped by way of Shakespearean reception history.