First Shakespeare, Then Milton

John Milton will forever hold the second place in the ranking of English poets. His masterpiece Paradise Lost might be unknown today even among your college English majors, but its power and brilliance will always a “fit audience find, though few.” (PL 7, 31) Milton himself was a voracious reader, and it could be argued that his English favorite author was the one who surpassed him in greatness, Shakespeare. Shakespeare (1564-1616) was still active the year Milton (1608-1671) was born. When he was 22 years old, Milton wrote a tribute to Shakespeare, which was also the first poem he published. It appeared in the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works in 1632:

     On Shakespeare. 1630

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in piled stones?
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,                                                5
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Has built thyself a livelong monument.
For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart                                          10
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book 
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepulchered in such pomp dost lie                                             15
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

In the first four lines, Milton praises Shakespeare with two rhetorical questions that effectively dismiss any reason to construct physical monuments honoring Shakespeare’s memory. Great kings and pharaohs might require “stone” monuments, so people do not forget their names, but Shakespeare himself has built something equally enduring. His “fame” endures through the plays and poems he wrote. But how was Shakespeare capable of producing what he did? Well, no one can really say where such talent or genius comes from; so instead, Milton symbolically suggests that Shakespeare is the “Dear son of memory.” Here, Milton is alluding to Mnemosyne the Titaness goddess of memory, who is the mother of the nine muses of inspiration in Greek mythology and by doing so, suggests Shakespeare has created works that exist beyond the process of time.

If the poem were to end at line 8, Milton’s effusive praise would have told us only half the story. After line 8, Milton continues to laud Shakespeare’s work, but in his adulation a current of anxiety slips to the surface. Milton, whose early ambition was to become a great poet himself, could not help but admire Shakespeare, but he also must have felt anxious writing so soon after the publication of the Second Folio, which might make any aspiring young poet doubt the quality of his own work. That doubt ripples through the second half of the poem. Unlike the first eight lines that assert in deliberate, separate sentences, each forming a unit of exuberant praise, the second half of the poem is a single sentence that accelerates the poem’s tempo by refusing to stop after each couplet and incudes self-deprecating remarks about his own abilities. It is as if after acknowledging Shakespeare’s eminence, young Milton is in a hurry to finish a poem that not only recognizes the talent of this playwright but acknowledges also his own lesser talents as a poet.

In line 9, Milton specifically compares his own efforts as a poet with Shakespeare’s. Given Shakespeare’s brilliance, writing great works came naturally to him, or so Milton presumed, but for Milton writing poetry is a grueling labor. “For whilst, to [Milton’s] shame of slow-endeavouring art,/Thy [Shakespeare’s] easy numbers flow.” Contrasting his own exertions with Shakespeare’s “easy numbers” seems to have stung Milton’s ego, but perhaps even more discouraging to the young aspiring poet Milton are all those “Delphic lines” (prophetic) that display Shakespeare’s oracular power to plumb the variety and depth of human experience. From lines 13-14, it clear that the act of reading Shakespeare’s plays astonishes Milton, but it also bereaves his imagination (fancy) by making him another “marble” monument to Shakespeare.

As the poem concludes, Milton tells us that Shakespeare is “so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie/That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.” Just shy of twenty-two and determined to be a great poet, Milton must have felt that awkward, competitive ambivalence poets can feel about a great poet they revere. Fortunately for Milton, it did not impede him, and he lived long enough to acquire the knowledge he needed to combine with his extraordinary talent to finally write the great epic, Paradise Lost, which elevated him alongside Shakespeare in the pantheon of greatest English poets.