...were immeasurably superior. Did he ever read the so-called Shakspere plays before he wrote the "Ode to the Memory "of my Beloved The Author, Mr. Wil"liam Shakespeare, and What He Hath "Left Us" for the syndicate of printers? For the affirmative of the proposition there is not the faintest presumption...

...Drummond, argues in ignorance. We now come to Ben's panegyrics in the Folio of 1623. Ben heads the lines, " TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED THE AUTHOR MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US." Words cannot be more explicit. Bacon was alive (I do not know when Mr. Greenwood's hidden genius died),...

...Jonson wrote, but he was not a celebrity as Johnson was. In the poem from which I have just quoted, 'To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr William Shakespeare, And What He Hath Left Us', Jonson places his friend clearly apart from his contemporaries, For if I thought my judgement were...

...Folio's antechamber deserves individual attention. The most well-known (and longest) piece is Jonson's "To the memory of my beloved, the AUTHOR Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us." It is mostly the "what he has left us" part that Jonson addresses, and his approach constitutes frank...

...againe, and againe'. The Folio is also graced by a ten-line poem by Jonson as well as by his elegy 'To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us'. The latter is generous, discerning, and prophetic: 'Soul of the age! I The applause! delight! the wonder...

...the educated of his day, he had 'small Latin and less Greek'. Jonson, who characterized him thus in 'To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us', is also by implication contrasting his own more consistent imitative practice (illustrated in this...

...form which Jonson himself, paradoxically in elegizing Shakespeare, had sought to make his own. His 'To the memory of my beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us'5 - the very title has the characteristic, detailed precision of a Jonsonian inventory - is a poem...

...7 Jonson's swipe at Shakespeare for having "small Latin and less Greek" appears in his commendatory poem, "To the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare," in Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (London, 1623), the so-called First...

...legacy ('look | Not on his picture, but his book'); and the other his honest and affectionate lines 'To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us'. Something of the same sense of bequest playfully haunts Heminge and Condell's preface, 'To the Great...

...the open shelves of all major research libraries. PREFACE 'While thy Booke doth live' (Ben Jonson, in 'To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us', on a preliminary page of the First Folio) The Shakespeare First Folio is a special book. The Foreword...