Shakespeare's Lyric Stage

Within the much-explored territory of Shakespeare's late plays, Lerer's book will hold a place of its own for the richness of its scholarship and for the delicacy and originality of its readings. Looking closely at how these plays dramatize the power and limits of lyric voice, he manages beautifully to evoke their strange danger, charm, capaciousness, and doubt. --Kenneth Gross, author of Shylock Is Shakespeare Seth Lerer ranges widely and brilliantly on Shakespeare's last plays, bringing them into sharper focus at a moment--like Shakespeare's own--when the tensions between the aesthetic and the political are palpable. Learned, informed, elegantly argued, and packed with insights, this is truly an 'elegy of the imagination, ' a deeply absorbing study that will prove invaluable to all who are drawn to these vexing, haunting plays. --James Shapiro, author of A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 In this evocative study of the late plays as experiments in lyric utterance, Lerer traces the representation of lyric as mediated and embodied performance, a repeatable impersonation, in order to suggest that art's capacities become for Shakespeare most urgent where poetry fails in its Orphic aspiration to turn, to fix, to transcend, to console. The elusive object of Shakespeare's Lyric Stage is less Shakespeare's late style than a whole sensibility caught, movingly, in the time for which elegy stands, gazing back at the remembered changes and forward at the fragility of its own ongoingness. --Bradin Cormack, Princeton University