Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them talk. Yet, at least for this aging reader, works written late in a writer’s life retain a fascination. They exist, as do last words, where life edges into death, and perhaps have something uncanny to tell us. In 1995, the critic, teacher, and journalist Edward W. Said, best known for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, taught at Columbia a popular course called “Last Works/Late Style.” Until his untimely death, of leukemia, in 2003, he was working on a collection of essays and lectures relevant to the topic; this assemblage, edited and introduced by Michael Wood with the coöperation of Said’s widow, has now been published by Pantheon under the title “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain” ($25). Said’s central idea, set forth in the first chapter, comes from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), who wrote extensively, with an agitated profundity, on Beethoven’s late works. Adorno found in the disharmonies and disjunctions of these works a refusal of bourgeois order, an “idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.” In his own not easily understandable words, possibly clearer in the original German:

Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which—alone—it glows into life. He [Beethoven] does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.

In Beethoven’s case, the catastrophe was fruitful; Adorno credited his late style with presaging the innovations of Schoenberg, whose “advanced music has no recourse but to insist on its own ossification without concession to that would-be humanitarianism which it sees through.” Adorno writes from within a sardonically modern, anti-bourgeois mind-set that welcomes dissociation, catastrophe, and affronts to harmony and humanitarianism. Thus art, at least modern art, makes itself new. Adorno decreed, “The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves.” The artists Said cites in “On Late Style” are predominantly composers and, in a chapter centered on Glenn Gould, performers. Said, an accomplished pianist and, among his other activities, music critic for The Nation, had an insatiable appetite for musical performances and, though he disclaims a musicologist’s competence, an extensive and technical grasp of music. Beethoven, Mozart, Richard Strauss, Bach: among learned discussions of all these only a few writers are considered at any length, and they—the Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the French criminal Jean Genet, the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy—are valued for their “against the grain” qualities of eccentricity and intransigence. A different list of literary performers would be needed for an inventory of late works that answer, perhaps, to what another literature professor, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, has termed the “senile sublime.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her book “Touching Feeling” (2003), uses the phrase to describe

various more or less intelligible performances by old brilliant people, whether artists, scientists, or intellectuals, where the bare outlines of a creative idiom seem finally to emerge from what had been the obscuring puppy fat of personableness, timeliness, or sometimes even of coherent sense.

A sacrifice of, or impatience with, “coherent sense,” as well as the requisite irascibility and what Said calls “highlighting and dramatizing . . . irreconcilabilities,” can certainly be ascribed to the shimmering late works of Shakespeare, an artistic titan on Beethoven’s scale. Lateness came early to both, both dead in their fifties.

After the composition of Shakespeare’s last tragedies—the opulent, spacious “Antony and Cleopatra” (1606-1607), the cold, rhetorically contorted “Coriolanus” (1607-08), and the rough-hewn, one-note “Timon of Athens” (1607-08)—there is a slackening, as if something had snapped. “Timon of Athens,” apparently unfinished and unproduced, has been thought by some speculative scholars to mark a personal crisis for the writer; no less measured a source than the Encyclopædia Britannica perceived “a clear gulf” between it and the four plays that follow. These plays—“Pericles” (1607-08), “Cymbeline” (1609-1610), “The Winter’s Tale” (1610-11), and “The Tempest” (1611)—are commonly grouped together and called romances. Their form is a crowd-pleasing one, still in wide use: the audience, after witnessing many travails and perils, arrives at a happy, if implausible, ending—storms, terrors, and confusions give way to recognitions, reunions, forgiveness, and reconciliation. But a silvery chill blows through these romances, a deliberate and, at times, brazen use of stage artifice.

Changes had overtaken Shakespeare’s physical theatre. After a decade of performing at the Globe—a London amphitheatre patterned on the inn courtyards where plays used to be staged, with little more scenery than what language could paint on air—Shakespeare’s company succeeded in taking over the Blackfriars theatre and, in 1609, began winter performances there, out of the weather, with more elaborate effects. Spectacle—which Aristotle’s “Poetics” ranked, with Song, as the least of tragedy’s necessary parts, behind Plot, Character, Diction, and Thought—grew in importance under James I. The Stuart court was more open to Continental divertissements than Elizabeth’s had been; masques, performed by masked dancers who invited the audience to join in, enlisted such high talents as Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones.

Shakespeare’s dramas became parades of wonders. “Pericles” brings the medieval poet John Gower onto the stage to shepherd, in quaint tetrameters, its mythological hero back and forth across the Mediterranean. “Cymbeline,” whose plot was memorably characterized by Dr. Johnson as “unresisting imbecility” marked by “the impossibility of the events in any system of life,” caps its absurdities with the rhyming apparition of the hero’s dead parents and brothers, and the descent of Jupiter “in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle.” “The Winter’s Tale” subjects its protagonist, King Leontes of Sicilia, to an insane fit of jealousy at the beginning, and at the end has a statue of his wife, for sixteen years thought dead, dramatically come to life. Shakespeare, who was, after the early death of his son, Hamnet, the father of two daughters, inflicts upon his young romantic heroines, with their pretty names Marina, Perdita, and Innogen, no ordeal that they do not come shining through. As Stephen Orgel observes in his introduction to the Pelican “Pericles,” “Death is acknowledged to be real” in a late tragedy like “Antony and Cleopatra” but is “denied in Pericles, as it is, though to a lesser extent, in Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.”Yet the last of these, “The Tempest,” is one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces: the strained contrivances and righted wrongs of the previous romances—“Plot has always been the curse of serious drama,” George Bernard Shaw said, discussing “Cymbeline”—fall simply into place, with the contriver in plain view, his motives and magical means established at the start. Prospero, the unjustly deposed Duke of Milan and self-taught sorcerer, spins the plot before our eyes, beginning with the tempest that lands the cast of characters on his private island. The hero and the contriver merge into an omnipotent artificer. In the fourth act, having provided a suitor for his cloistered daughter, Miranda, he stages a masque, starring Iris, Juno, and Ceres, for Miranda and her swain, Prince Ferdinand. When an unpleasantness left over from earthy reality, the rebellion of his slave Caliban, disturbs the performers, so that “to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish,” Prospero reassures his audience of two: