ABSTRACT

Jonson’s Tribute “To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And What He Hath Left Us” (U.V. 26), written on the occasion of the posthumous publication of the First Folio (1623), has long posed problems of tone and interpretation.1 The debate over the sincerity of Jonson’s praise of his great friend and rival began among his own contemporaries and flourished in the time of Dryden and Pope, who respectively characterized Jonson’s tribute as “an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric” and as the unqualified admiration of a close friend.2