John Milton
In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.
London: by Thomas Cotes, for John Smethwick, William Aspley, Richard Hawkins, Richard Meighen, and Robert Allot, 1632
This poem of sixteen lines is written in heroic couplets. It resembles a Shakespearean sonnet, but exceeds it by an additional couplet. Milton addresses Shakespeare as “Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,” and asks, “What needs my Shakespeare” any eulogy? You have built yourself a “live-long monument,” he tells Shakespeare, akin to a “pyramid” or a monarch’s “tomb.” The poem therefore becomes an exercise in paralepsis: Milton memorializes Shakespeare by explaining to the dead poet that such commemoration is superfluous, and demonstrates his own rival poetic skill by protesting how Shakespeare’s “fancy” forestalls and overawes his own, as well as his contemporaries: “thou, our fancy of itself bereaving, / Dost make us marble with too much conceiving.” —PG