Late Shakespeare and the English Baroque

Late Shakespeare and the English Baroque focuses mainly on Shakespeare’s late (or later) works, those written from around 1607. It sets both poetry and plays within the emerging culture of the baroque, the term defined not merely by stylistic features but by the underlying ideological ’structure of feeling’ of baroque culture in early modern England. The book extends the mode of analysis of The Female Baroque (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and draws on theoretical work by José Antonio Maravall, Raymond Williams, and Julia Kristeva. It analyzes recurring Baroque characteristics - hyperbole and melancholy, theatricality, gender, and ’plateauing’. Attention is given to the sonnets and other poems, as well as the tragedies from Hamlet on, and argues that increasingly, tragi-comedy emerges as a distinctively baroque Shakespearean characteristic. In the final chapter, primarily on The Tempest, the late Shakespeare is shown to have philosophical insights parallel to Montaigne or Bruno, and to provide anticipatory connections with later baroque artists like Vermeer.

Gary Waller is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies Emeritus, Purchase College, SUNY. His books include English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century, The Sidney Family Romance, Walsingham and the English Imagination, The Annunciation: A Cultural History, The Virgin Mary in Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Popular Culture, and The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture.