6 - His daughter Susanna Hall

Summary

William Shakespeare's monument in Holy Trinity Church will have caused quite a stir in Stratford when installed, sometime between 1616 and 1623. Such ‘aedificated’ (partly resembling a house), wall-mounted memorials became increasingly fashionable during the seventeenth century; Shakespeare's was thus reasonably early, and has been described as one of the best (Curl 2002, p. 118). Its novelty points to its having been wholly designed in London or by Londoners, though its placement clearly required an influential Stratford voice. Whose idea it was, we cannot know. Its uniqueness lies in its claims for its subject.

Ivdicio Pylium, Genio Socratem, Arte Maronem,

Terra Tegit, Populus MÆRet, Olympus Habet

Stay Passenger, Why Goest Thov By So Fast?

Read If Thov Canst, Whom Enviovs Death Hath Plast

With In This Monvment Shakspeare: With Whome,

Qvick Natvre Dide: Whose Name, Doth Deck Ys Tombe,

Far More, Then Cost: Sieh All, Yt He Hath Writt,

Leaves Living Art, Bvt Page, To Serve His Witt.

The Latin lines tell us that Olympus now owns one whom earth buries and the people mourn, who was as wise as Nestor, as intelligent as Socrates, and whose art was level with Virgil's.

‘Stay passenger’; we are passers-by, in space but also, in context, in time. ‘Read if thou canst’: what if we can't? Jokes about notices announcing classes for illiterates spring to mind. Maybe by ‘read’ we should understand ‘understand’. Presumably someone will read the words to us. ‘Whom’ may seem at first to refer to ‘thou’, opening a disconcerting abyss at the line's end. We ourselves die for a moment. The poem's iambic pentameters run smoothly until we hit ‘Shakespeare’, a meaningfully disruptive inversion of stress, a trochee where an iamb is due. ‘Quick’ means ‘pregnant’; ‘dide’ irreverently proposes an erotic sense of ‘did’ as well as dying, itself a frequent metaphor for orgasm. ‘A pun was his fatal Cleopatra’, wrote Dr Johnson; here, it is somebody else's.

That somebody else, a competent versifier, rhymes efficiently and unobtrusively. The lurch after the second line may be deliberate, but it unfortunately deflects us from the verse's main purpose; if intended, it pursues a local effect distracting from the whole, the kind of ambitious mistake a young poet might well make. The stressing of ‘Shakspeare’, though, is accomplished.