Lateness

I can't recommend highly enough Professor Emma Smith's podcast lecture series on Shakespeare (here). Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. She is an active and generous academic whose insights can be enjoyed further on YouTube and on radio programmes like In Our Time.

Throughout her lectures Professor Smith poses questions about critical response, genre, style, and intertextuality, all topics of wider relevance.

She encourages her students to use their enthusiasms in their work, licensing them to seek comparisons and contrasts between early-modern drama and apparently unrelated cultural phenomena.

In her lecture on The Tempest, she says:

One association of cultural or aesthetic lateness is as a decline from earlier achievement or prowess. We might think: Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Alfred Hitchcock, Lady Gaga, Kenneth Branagh, artists who go off rather than on.

It sets me thinking. What of Brookner? The first thing to note is that Brookner was a late starter anyway. By the standards of many novelists, all her fiction is 'late'. Does she come, then, on the scene in 1981 at the age of fifty-three a fully fledged practitioner, with a developed style? I'd suggest not. Her early work displays hesitancies as to tone and point of view. A settled manner emerges in the 1990s, in assured performances such as A Family Romance (1993) and A Private View (1994). Something seems to happen towards the end of the decade. Undue Influence (1999) is a notably different novel from its immediate predecessors, harking back to the plot structures of Brookner's earliest novels. Then there comes a break in the annual routine: no novel in 2000, instead a book of art criticism. The pattern seems back in place in the following year (The Bay of Angels) and the year after (The Next Big Thing), but the last three novels (The Rules of Engagement, Leaving Home and Strangers) are spaced disparately across the remaining years of the decade, and a novella ('At the Hairdresser's') follows in 2011. The tone and manner of these twenty-first century works are new and unpredictable. A 'late style' is evident, a wilful opacity in places, in others a tendency towards the lighter and more demotic. The subject matter repeats and reworks the original material, just as Brookner always did, but the stakes are often higher for the characters, the abyss wider and nearer. One always reads Brookner with a sense of unease, dread and anxiety only partially tempered by the soothing voluptuousness of her prose, but never more so than in her late fiction.

Professor Smith further wonders of Shakespeare: Does knowledge that The Tempest is 'late' and, for example, Two Gentlemen of Verona 'early' govern and determine our appreciation? If in five hundred years' time we didn't know the dating of Brookner's novels, would we be able to tell what was late and what early?

The Shakespeare monument in
Westminster Abbey