Renaissance self-unfashioning

Shakespeare's late plays as exercises in unravelling the human

Rainer Emig

pp. 133-159

in: Stefan Herbrechter, Ivan Callus (eds), Posthumanist Shakespeares, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Shakespearean scholarship is generally rather embarrassed when it comes to the late plays Timon of Athens (c.1605–8) and Pericles (c.1607–8). Critics generally emphasize that their authorship is mixed, that they are either unfinished (as in Timon of Athens) or rather reported snippets from rehearsals (as in Pericles) than properly authored and authorized texts.¹ As such, however, they merely expose the workings of early modern authorship. They also show us very clearly that Shakespearean character and plot creation are a far cry from the romantic nineteenth-century myth of a single genius plucking original material out of nowhere. Their intertextual nature and complex assembly of fragments (which in Pericles requires the author of one of its sources, the late medieval chronicler John Gower, to appear as a clumsy narrator) hardly lead to satisfactory plots with meaningful resolutions — at least not for a modern reader and viewer.

Cited authors

Shakespeare William