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.