ABSTRACT
Ben Jonson’s poem ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, And What He Hath Left Us’ was originally published as a preface to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays in 1623, just seven years after the Bard’s death. In these lines Jonson addresses the topic of this chapter: the nature of the literary monument and the way in which the writings of living authors are posthumously transformed into monuments to those authors’ lives and work. The poet is, in Jonson’s seemingly paradoxical formulation, a ‘monument without a tomb’, and is ‘alive still’ despite his death. The paradox that Jonson explores involves the idea that the poet is both alive and dead: after his death the poet still ‘lives’ through the ‘life’ of his ‘book’, which itself lives just as long as we read it and praise it. Exploring this paradox of the literary afterlife, the poem is performative. It performs an act of monumentalization, since it is designed not only to remind the reader of the value of Shakespeare’s work (the word ‘monument’, we may remind ourselves, originates in the Latin monere, to remind) but also, in so doing, to establish that value. In fact, the publishing venture to which Jonson contributes his poem plays a crucial part in the monumentalization of the poet: the publication of a posthumous ‘Collected Works’ is itself a sign of the importance of the dead poet’s work, an index of his genius. Contrary to Dryden’s sense that the poem was ‘an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric’ (quoted in Donaldson 1988, 718), Jonson’s intention seems to have been to ‘honour’ Shakespeare. This is the first stage in the poet’s
transcendence of his time and in his establishment as a ‘classic’. Shakespeare ‘was not of an age’, Jonson asserts, ‘but for all time!’ (l.43).
