...Somewhere or other Aldous Huxley makes the interesting suggestion of an anthology of last works, or better, late works: Samson Agonistes of Milton, for example, Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, the last quartets of Beethoven, Verdi's Falstaff, the late paintings and etchings of Goya. Age doesn't enter in. Shakespeare was only 45 when he wrote Pericles and Cymbeline, Beethoven died at the age of 57. On the other hand, Verdi was 80. The works must be definitely different. The last works of Pope or Ben Jonson don't qualify-they are not a definitely different kind of thing. The difference mustn't be because of the failure of artistic power-Wordsworth, for example, wrote little of value after 1816. Other people, like Rossini and Rimbaud, just decided to stop writing-they have no late works. The difference must be a chosen difference, a choice made by the artist in light of approaching death and the end of his career.
The characteristics of such late works include, first, a certain indifference to their effect either on the general reading public or on critics. There must be no sign of a wish either for popularity or for an artistic perfection that is designed to reap critical acclaim. Late works also have a kind of obscurity that is different from that of a young artist. A young artist has an original vision that is strange and will seem strange to his audience. Secondly, he lacks the technical practice to put the vision across. He also has a wish to shock, which is a way of becoming related to his audience. There is a desire to be (a) popular and (b) épatant [provocative]. In late works, the strangeness comes not from a given vision, but from an acquired vision...The writer of late works is sometimes shocking out of his indifference as to whether he shocks or not. It must not be a lessening of artistic power. Our difficulty must not be due to that, nor should the strangeness be due to that either. The work's strangeness must be intentional or because the author doesn't care. Nor is there a wish in late works for big, spectacular, purple effects. There is an enormous interest in particular kinds of artistic problems lovingly worked out for themselves, regardless of the interest of the whole work.
...In the late work of Shakespeare, there is no real resemblance to the real world of time and place. The recognition scenes are fantastic. There are repeated shipwrecks in Pericles and repeated disguises in Cymbeline. Shakespeare is taking up an entirely primitive form-with choruses, dumb shows, and masques. One might think of a modern writer who, after mastering complex forms, takes up the Wild West. The plays show a conscious exploitation of tricks: asides, etc. Late works appeal to lowbrows and very sophisticated highbrows, but not to middlebrows, even to the aristocrat of middlebrows, Dr. Johnson. Critics do not appreciate the pleasure a writer has in consciously writing a simple form-like the masque in Cymbeline.
...Everything in the plays is directed toward the final scene in which reconciliation takes place. What is past gives the reconciliation scene its power. Either a relation is changed from bad to good or, through suffering, it is valued and treasured more than it was before...
In Cymbeline, Posthumus says to his enemy, Iachimo:
Kneel not to me.
The pow'r that I have on you is to spare you;
The malice towards you to forgive you. Live,
And deal with others better.
And Cymbeline follows with:
Nobly doom'd!
We'll learn our freeness of a son-in-law.
Pardon's the word to all.
(V.v. 417-22)
"Pardon's the word to all" is the note of all the late plays, the note to which everything is made to lead up. The characters are not separate individuals in their own right, you are not fond of them as you are of Beatrice and Rosalind, and they are not terrifying as they are in the tragedies, where they are isolated in their own self-love. But like a fairy-tale story, this is the world as you want it to be, and nothing makes one more inclined to cry.
The excerpt from Pericles and Cymbeline, from W. H. Audens Lectures on Shakespeare, is reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. © 2000 by the Estate of W. H. Auden.
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