Shakespeare's Labored Art: Stir, Work, and the Late Plays.

This study, focused on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, King Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, offers a number of useful insights into these late plays, and it is also concerned with some aspects of their historical and personal contexts. It turns upon the idea of work, variously interpreted, and how this may reveal the particular preoccupations and techniques of these plays. It is assumed, but not clearly shown, that there is a concentration upon 'work' and 'labour', together with a notion of creative and productive 'stirring' of feelings and mental processes, peculiar to the late plays, and not so apparent before Hamlet.

Perhaps the best way to …