This book does exactly what it says on the tin, but since its project is a rather unusual one for a book with Shakespeare in the title, it is worth spelling out precisely what it is. It is not a book about William Shakespeare's works in the conventional sense, in that it contains no close analysis of his texts and indeed offers little discussion of any of his plays or poems, although mention is repeatedly made of The Tempest, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and, to a lesser extent, King Lear. Rather, what Gordon McMullan is interested in is, as he says, the idea of late writing, and the application of that idea to Shakespeare functions essentially as a case study. It is, in fact, a book that sets out to challenge the entire premise of the idea of late writing and indeed late style in general (broadly defined as moving away from the representational, as bearing a transhistorical and indeed transgeneric resemblance to all other instances of late style, and as simultaneously retrospective and proleptic) and to expose the problematic assumptions that underlie it, particularly but not exclusively in cases in which it is applied to authors who might not have known that they were writing in the proximity of death. As such, the book is in many ways as interested in Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Pablo Picasso, and Rembrandt van Rijn as it is in Shakespeare, and it is certainly acutely aware of how ideas derived from the study of music and art have inflected the development of the concept of “Shakespeare's last plays.”

In the introduction, McMullan traces the origins of the idea of late style back to musicology and explores the inherent challenge to the idea of Shakespeare's late style presented by Henry VIII, which he has edited. In subsequent chapters, he first discusses the question of the “caesura” in the career that the idea of late style is usually felt to require and considers where if anywhere in his career Shakespeare's caesura might be said to fall. He then moves on to trace the development of the idea of late Shakespeare, the possibilities for an idea of lateness in Shakespeare's own culture, King Lear and its bearing on the vexed question of the relationship between late style and old-age style, and finally the ways in which The Tempest has come to signify a “retirement” play in the theater.

Throughout, McMullan writes beautifully and with a magnificent economy. He is especially interesting when writing on how Beethoven's life was read as following sonata form and Shakespeare's was read as structured by the rhythms of a five-act play, and he also writes brilliantly about the implications of John Gielgud’s, Derek Jacobi’s, and Mark Rylance's anti-Stratfordianism for their performances of Prospero. I found only one error of any kind—“because this is because” (322)—which is extraordinary in so long and densely written a book. He ranges over a number of critical debates with a very light touch, although if I have a cavil about this fine book, it is that that touch is at times so light that it may disorient readers with a less sure sense of the critical landscape than he himself has; this is, in one sense, itself a kind of late criticism, acutely aware of what has gone before, and if I asked a postgraduate student to engage with it I would expect to have to supply some additional context, as for example in the case of the list of critics on page 12. (Indeed in some ways that list, and other parts of the introduction too, feel almost like a continuation by other means of the already voluminous acknowledgments.) This is, however, abundantly compensated for by the range and ease with which McMullan covers his topic, responding delicately and flexibly to questions of late style in the range of an extraordinary variety of artistic, literary, and musical figures and picking his way nimbly through the debates in these areas.

The book does ask more questions than it answers. In my introductory paragraph, I referred to it as covering Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, and The Tempest. I might just have said “the last plays,” but, mindful of McMullan's observation that “if there is one inevitable outcome of work on late style, it would seem, that outcome is complicity” (16), I feel a duty to be careful about how I use that term since McMullan declares that he is “seeking to make it as difficult as I can for Shakespeareans ever again to treat ‘late play’ as the ‘neutral term’” (126). Unfortunately it is not easy to replace that term with any other, such as “romance” or “tragicomedy,” since McMullan shows that they too have drawbacks, nor, by the same token, does he offer any explanatory model for the difference so many critics have felt in these plays to replace the “subjectivist” one he assails, although he does seem tentatively to endorse Leeds Barroll's suggestion that they might profitably be considered as postplague plays (100–101). I do not quite feel able to move to calling them “the plays formerly known as last,” but if I do keep saying “last plays,” I shall take to heart McMullan's injunction that it cannot be regarded as in any way a neutral term.