No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Abstract ‘HE was not of an age, but for all time!’, declared Ben Jonson in his poem ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us’, that stands at the head of Shakespeare’s r623 First Folio. These were brave words in r623: no one until then had so positively asserted the perennial and enduring nature of Shakespeare’s genius, hailing him so boldly as a writer for all time. By the late eighteenth century Jonson’s phrase had changed from a lively prediction to an uncontested truism. Shakespeare had by now self-evidently stood the test of time, and appeared to belong to more ages than one. In the late twentieth century the tribute has become once more debatable: Shakespeare is no longer viewed as a timeless and transhistorical genius, but as a textual phenomenon that is constantly reconstructed, constantly reinvented, constantly reinterpreted by every age according to its needs, priorities, and pre conceptions. At the end of his memorial poem, Jonson figures Shakespeare as a fixed star, shining chidingly and cheeringly from the heavens throughout all time. For Gary Taylor, Shakespeare is no longer a star but a black hole, an insatiable vortex, ‘spinning, suck ing, growing’, a source and centre of massive critical turbulence. In this new and sharply relativist vision, Shakespeare has become, as Derek Longhurst puts it in the title of a recent revisionist essay, ‘ “Not for all time, but for an Age” ‘.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.