ASKED TO COMMENT on how literary critics might best "use history" or "think historically" today, I will here attempt to illustrate a response to these questions by way of an engagement with a much-discussed and familiar text that is widely perceived to be ahistorical in its claims. Ben Jonson's commendatory verse for the First Folio, "To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr William Shakespeare, And What he Hath Left Us," has been rebuked frequently in recent years for its ostensibly "humanist assumptions" about the (geographical and historical) transcendence of great literary themes and values. Many critics have pointed out the investment in "afterlife" of Jonson's poem in lines such as "[Thou] art alive still while thy book doth live," or "He [Shakespeare] was not of an age, but for all time!" and argued that such claims are inherently ahistoricizing and otherwise suspect. As one recent essay muses, surveying the criticism: "it is difficult to think of any famous critical pronouncement which is less fashionable." One critic has even wittily reversed the emphasis of Jonson's famous line so that it reads: "Not for all time, but for an age," a quip much-repeated in subsequent commentary on the poem. While these recent discussions have provided a needed corrective to ahistorical textualist readings, I want to insist nevertheless that much of the critique is misplaced, and that Jonson's gesture is not only understandable in its originary context, but actually commendable. Through this argument, I hope to show the importance of carefully situating poetry simultaneously in its moments of writing and reading, including--irreducibly--the living critic's moment; a historical approach as I enact it here, then, recognizes that not only literature but also the critic inhabits time.

While this is not an especially surprising position for a critic to take today, it is going rather against the grain to claim that Jonson's poem seems to suggest such a position as well. However, "To the Memory of My Beloved" exhibits the keenest possible awareness of changing valuations of poetry over time and, thus, the importance of ongoing critical commentary (such as Jonson's own) to the endurance of literature. This is not, I would suggest, the strategy of a critic who believes in timeless and transcendent poetry but one who, to the contrary, understands that poets are "made, as well as born"--and made, in part, by how they are read. While the poem is adamant, to be sure, that Shakespeare's work is "not of an age" as the current criticism emphasizes, it is equally insistent that this continuous timeliness (not timelessness) won't happen all on its own, since the past is dependent on successive readings to keep it alive:

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.

The afterlife of poetry, then, is not a function of the "book" alone but of its readers as well.

This insistence on a collective responsibility for Shakespeare's preservation at first seems to contradict the opening sixteen lines of the poem where--in typical Jonsonian fashion--the persona utterly rejects most people as proper readers of the Shakespearean text, and actually appears to insist that Shakespeare does not "need" collective approbation at all. The difficulty is resolved only when we realize Jonson is not referencing a synchronic readership in his "we "who "have wits to read," but a diachronic one. The opening lines of the poem establish (as does Jonson's criticism more generally) that there are very few proper readers, but that proper reading is nonetheless crucially important to the preservation of a text. While this is an elitist view, it is certainly not necessarily an ahistorical one. Jonson's own "judgement," he emphasizes, is not merely "of years" to be sure, but this does not mean that it is timeless. Rather, his text refuses to restrict itself to his present (and situating Shakespeare only among his coevals) because it aspires to continue to accompany the Shakespearean text--collected as it is with it--to promote it to potentially doubting future readers. As the aggression of images such as the Shakespearean "issue" (the plays) rising up to "shake... a lance... at ignorance" suggests, Jonson foresees an ongoing struggle against "ignorance," a quite historicized perspective. There is no reason to assume from the poem that it is even always the same ignorance and insufficiency that the text will meet as it wends its way through time.

Jonson is surely aware after all that to make grandiose claims for Shakespeare's stature--against prevailing global politics of literary value that took no account of Shakespeare whatsoever--he actively asserts the changing fortunes of literary figures in time rather than claiming immortality as an absolute. He knows full well that without a change in prevailing norms, there can be no place for Shakespeare to endure. The most emphatic critical claim in Jonson's poem, thus, is his announcement that Shakespeare has put the ancients in their place, which is to say the land of the dead, and thus that English subordination to the ancients--as well as to the continental writers who claimed closer ties and affinity to their legacy--comes to an end in him. Jonson's persona first commands Shakespeare to "rise" then "call[s] forth ... to life again" his ("dead") classical rivals from "insolent Greece or Haughty Rome," who are shown to be no competitors after all:

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.

Elsewhere these lines might easily be read as Jonsonian assessment of the general bad taste of the "age" into which he (and Shakespeare) had the misfortune of being born. In this poem, however, they have a specific role to play in the assertion of England's international prominence through Shakespeare's accomplishments: "Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show / To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe." The subtext of these lines is not only an attempt at reversal of the lack of cultural prestige England suffered in relation to the continent--manifestly the case--but also an attempt to assert that it is the critic who "call[s] forth.., to life again" and who can, conversely, pronounce a poet dead. To insert Shakespeare into the "scenes of Europe," Jonson imagines killing off the tradition, which has denied or derided English contributions to it. Jonson's much-critiqued "universalism" must be read in this context to be fully understood.

Although Jonson's poem now reads like a textbook case of Anglocentrism at its worst, it is important to remember how truly preposterous his words would have appeared in the international context of 1623. That claims such as Jonson's were not immediately successful in raising Shakespeare's stature on the continent (much less beyond it) is evident from the ignorance of, or deeply ambivalent attitude toward, Shakespeare outside of England well into the latter half of the eighteenth century. Voltaire famously wonders, for example, how Samuel Johnson could have the audacity to defend Shakespeare's considerable weaknesses--from his point of view--against the critique of foreign detractors. He goes on, reluctantly, to proclaim Shakespeare a "genius," but he also makes it clear that he understands why "Italians, Frenchmen, men of letters from all countries who have not lived for a time in England [as Voltaire himself had], take him only as a kind of marketplace dramatist.., as a farceur many notches below Harlequin, as the most miserable clown who ever amused the populace." Voltaire's observation is interesting because it indicates he is willing to entertain the possibility that English culture in its particularity--however odd it may appear to outsiders--might rise to universality ("truth, nature herself speak their own language here") if understood--at least partly--on its own terms (hence his reference to the need to live in England "for at time"). Before Voltaire's moment, such a position does not appear to have been thinkable in any sustained or influential way on the continent. Indeed, earlier, the contempt was even greater, because it extended to the whole language of English, and thus there was no continental opinion of Shakespeare to speak of at all. Hence a great deal of ink is spilt through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England--Jonson's poem prominently included--attempting to assert "The Excellency of English," in Richard Carew's words--in its particularity--against tidal waves of European indifference and disdain, and substantial local insecurity and doubt as well.

Although Voltaire does not appear to have read Jonson's poem, it is very much to future critics like him that the poem seems to make an appeal. Jonson Anglicizes "Nature," the great arbiter of the "universal"--rendering England not just an exemplar but the exemplar of it. She is described as being delighted "to wear the dressing of Shakespeare's lines" at a time in which costume (or lack thereof)--as the decorative borders of countless period maps illustrate--was widely viewed as one of the principle markers of cultural difference. He even claims exclusivity: "Since [Shakespeare] she [Nature] will vouchsafe no other wit." With such lines Jonson attempts to keep at bay future potential competitors to Shakespeare (as Jonson's use of future tense "will" here implies) not only in hopes of rendering the monopoly of the continent on cultural authority defunct but of setting English claims to prestige on less easily overturned foundations than the classical poets, who have just been cast out of "nature's family" by Jonson. This is not, however, we must recall, the haughty gesture of a confident, self-assured world power, but the defiant assertion of a subaltern nation.

Indeed, given the context in which Jonson wrote, it seems to me that good radical critics should be applauding him for defending local cultural value against the oppressive weight of tradition and the global balance of power, at a time in which English was not yet what it would become. Perhaps the greatest anachronism of much criticism of Jonson's poem today is treating a statement of the 1600s as if it already carried the force of a similar statement made in the 1800s. By charging Jonson's poem with "universalist" offenses, current critics are at fault in two respects it seems to me: firstly, in assuming a continuity in the force of Jonson's words, and, secondly, in assuming that "universalism" must--however theorized--be a bad thing. At a moment in which even critics as fiercely patriotic as Francis Meres cannot bring himself to make so preposterous a claim as that English can be listed among the "famous and chief languages of the world," Jonson defiantly says what Meres cannot. By inserting Shakespeare, with his "small Latin and less Greek," in Nature's place, Jonson renders particular English universal. As Slavoj Zizek has recently argued, the despised, excluded, and marginalized must always make precisely such a gesture against the pretension of the guardians of a (false) universal that would exclude them. From this perspective it is not a crime in 1623 to propose English language and culture--even via Shakespeare--against overwhelming global counterforce as universal. The crime, rather, is that once Britain's "triumph" was material rather than rhetorical, its elites came to believe that the universal ended in them rather than being an ongoing project. If we remember the global struggle for cultural recognition out of which Jonson's poem emerges rather than just the words, we can, however, reclaim the possibility that the universal remains an incompleted project. As English once more becomes a site in which global cultural prestige is worked out, it is crucial for us to hear this part of the poem, as well as critique of universalism that comes so easily to current critics.

Around the globe, after all, those who have inhabited subalternized nations are not so willing to give up the concept of the universal--albeit recognizing at the same time that it must be a differently conceived "universal" than the Eurocentric tool that has predominated in the history of modern imperialism. Samir Amin, for example, has advocated for some time a "true universalism," and Gayatri Spivak has emphasized the importance of a project to "bring humanism [attention to the "ways human beings are similar"] and difference together" in the current quest for global social justice. Whatever such a quest is called, however, the point is that much attention has been returned recently to the once thoroughly disparaged concept of "universalism," though this shift has not been reflected in the criticism of Jonson's poem. The absence of any recognition of the unrealized utopian possibilities of "To the Memory of My Beloved" is no mere problem of "keeping up" with theory, however, but rather of failing to situate the poem in a current situation that it still speaks to as a living poem: English as a contested site.

Since the end of World War II, with the onset of decolonization and the speed up of globalization, "English" has been proliferating rapidly as a "world language"--and as a site of struggle. In this context, questions and concerns multiply: to what extent (and how) could English ever be a "common language"? How are hierarchies of linguistic prestige and dispersion related to political, economic, and military power? I do not raise these questions to answer them here, but in order to insert Jonson's poem into a living problematic--the work of a properly historical criticism in the materialist sense of the term. Jonson's poem, when situated in "its" originary moment, a time in which English was, as John Florio put it, "worth nothing past Dover," can be seen as performing a crucial gesture of cultural assertion--a refusal to be excluded from the universal. Understood thus, its most compelling afterlife would be to direct us to listen for the voices that make such claims now--within or even against the English language that Jonson worked so hard to promote. Both "English" and the universal, his poem emphasizes, are in process. Lest we contribute to the reification of either, a "historical" criticism must be equally willing to understand both the irreducibility of process, and that metropolitan voices are certainly not the only--or even the primary--ones that need be heard on the subject of the politics of language and culture, any more than in Jonson's day the continental arbiters of taste were. Hence, I close (or rather open out) with a voice other than my own, Gayatri Spivak's, as she complains: "There are countless languages in which women all over the world have grown up and been female or feminist, and yet the languages we keep on learning are the powerful European ones, sometimes the powerful Asian ones, least often the African ones." Jonson's poem asserted that the particularity of the "least" of his day be recognized in the "universal"; I have tried to make this part of the poem once again audible, since we need to do the same if, as Spivak continues, we are not to misunderstand "solidarity" by discovering it always--and only--in English.

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By Crystal Bartolovich