ABSTRACT
In the monumental poetic act, the William speaker praises the beloved's beauty in order to receive, in turn, two temporally separate recognitions. In Elizabethan monumental culture, the praise communicated through arms and tombs quickly lost its lustre, when the commodification of antiquarian services was seen to cheapen aristocratic value. Shakespeare's sonnets allow him at times to indulge in the fantasy of possessing a monumental body, albeit an alternative one to patrician memory. The Elizabethan sonnet's fantasy of monumentalization involves, at its core, a posterity in the form of heraldic recognition, whether from royalty, nobles, gentlemen, or heralds themselves. When vaunting Horatian claims, Shakespeare strives to surpass heraldic praise, appealing to an imagined posterity of sympathetic lovers. Shakespeare's rumination on ruins dissolves the fantasy of monumentalization because it ultimately foregrounds the contingency of posterity's recognition. Contemporary memory studies encourage such pathos over loss by virtue of cultural materialist assumptions about remembrance.
