‘This Rough Magic’: Late Derek Mahon and Late Shakespeare

Abstract

The transformation in voice and style that might suggest the move to ‘late’ happens prematurely in Derek Mahon’s work. When The Hudson Letter (1995) broke a long publishing silence, its author in his early fifties, the return was marked by a preoccupation with the symptoms of belatedness: physical and imaginative decline, destitution, and the desperate hope for regeneration. Throughout this breezily intertextual volume, a particular version of Shakespeare is emphatically summoned. The late romance The Winter’s Tale provides a structuring principle, and late-Shakespearean motifs of magic, dream vision, dubious paternal wisdom, social upheaval and reconciliation combine with a new, rough demotic to announce a late style that Mahon’s critics have found discomfiting at the least. This essay suggests that the resistance and improprieties that have perplexed theorists of Shakespeare’s late style feed Mahon’s conception of his own lateness. Tracing Mahon’s engagement with Shakespeare from an early poem commissioned by the Globe, through the 1990s poetry, to Harbour Lights (2005), this essay argues that Mahon’s Shakespeare has always been late, and a self-conscious emulation of Shakespeare’s late style has endured and enabled various transformations across a long career.