Or blind affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
These are as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron: what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed
Above th‘ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise. I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room.
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses:
I mean with great but disproportioned muses.
For if I thought my judgement were of years
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee I would not seek
For names, but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time,
And all the muses still were in their prime
When like Apollo he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As since she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie
As they were not of nature’s family.
Yet must I not give nature all; thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet’s matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat—
Such as thine are—and strike the second heat
Upon the muses’ anvil, turn the same,
And himself with it that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet’s made as well as born.
And such wert thou. Look how the father’s face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filèd lines,
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like
night 80
And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.
Ben Jonson, in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623)
Upon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenic Poet, Master William Shakespeare
Those hands which you so clapped go now and wring,
You Britons brave, for done are Shakespeare’s days.
His days are done that made the dainty plays
Which made the globe of heav’n and earth to ring.
Dried is that vein, dried is the Thespian spring,
Turned all to tears, and Phoebus clouds his rays.
That corpse, that coffin now bestick those bays
Which crowned him poet first, then poets’ king.
If tragedies might any prologue have,
All those he made would scarce make one to this,
Where fame, now that he gone is to the grave—
Death’s public tiring-house—the nuntius is;
For though his line of life went soon about,
The life yet of his lines shall never out.
Hugh Holland, in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623)
TO THE MEMORY of the deceased author Master William Shakespeare
Shakespeare, at length thy pious fellows give
The world thy works, thy works by which outlive
Thy tomb thy name must; when that stone is rent,
And time dissolves thy Stratford monument,
Here we alive shall view thee still. This book,
When brass and marble fade, shall make thee look
Fresh to all ages. When posterity
Shall loathe what’s new, think all is prodigy
That is not Shakespeare’s ev‘ry line, each verse
Here shall revive, redeem thee from thy hearse.
Nor fire nor cank’ring age, as Naso said
Of his, thy wit-fraught book shall once invade;
Nor shall I e‘er believe or think thee dead—
Though missed—until our bankrupt stage be sped—
Impossible—with some new strain t’outdo
Passions of Juliet and her Romeo,