ABSTRACT
I will begin with a “what if?”—with a question of what might have been. It is this: what if it had been a German, not an Irish, critic whose version of “late Shakespeare” had been the one that, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, became the orthodoxy? This question might easily, of course, be followed by a “so what?” but supplementary questions ramify from the first and, I hope, provide an explanation. They are these. What difference might a different orthodoxy about the end of his creative life have made to our understanding of Shakespeare? By extension, what difference might it have made to our understanding of the nineteenth century’s attitude to creative old age? And what difference, if any, might it have made to our own engagement with late-life creativity? Underpinning these questions is my working premise that attitudes to Shakespeare and/in old age are symptomatic of attitudes in general to old age and to the possibility of late-life creativity, and that they have been so across the period of Shakespeare’s canonicity. Very simply, then, responses to late Shakespeare, especially to The Tempest, and also to the best-known Shakespearean play about old age—King Lear—although it is not itself generally understood as a “late play,” tend to map the development of attitudes to aging over the period from the very late eighteenth century to the present, and therefore any analysis of the kinds of response, especially creative response, made to aging in the nineteenth century ought to acknowledge this mapping and its persistence, not least because of the limitations and discontents of the idea of late work as it has been extended into the early twenty-first century by way of Edward Said’s posthumously published On Late Style (2006).
