Needless to say, the discourse of Shakespearean lateness did not emerge fully formed with one critic in the 1870s. I have so far described the general debt of late-style critics to Dowden and I have outlined the twentieth-century debates over the delimiting features of late Shakespeare. I want now, in the course of the next two chapters, going backward like Hamlet's crab, to trace the history of the possibility of late Shakespeare in the context of the larger history of the emergence of the general idea of late writing. By ‘a history of the possibility’, I mean, in part, a narrative of the development of the conditions for that emergence, one that will involve assessing the understanding available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries of the significance of last words and of last moments and the extent to which this understanding might inform the idea of late Shakespeare as it would in due course emerge.