Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

11. The Ars Longa Trope in a Sublunary World

The Ars Longa Trope in a Sublunary World Kate Narveson “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme.”1 Immortality through immortal art is surely a trope that defines the Renaissance in the popular imagination. Ben Jonson takes it up in his tribute to Shakespeare, declaring, “[thou] art alive still, while thy book doth live.”2 It seems reasonable, then, that the image of the poem as enduring monument should make the list as one of the main tropes whereby early modern writers conceived the nature and stature of their work.3 What we now take to be the sense of the trope, though, depends on a notion of poetry that unmoors poems from a specific occasion and mode of circulation , and conceives of them as having a self-sufficient existence , whether recited, written by hand, or printed.4 We thus naturally assume that the ars longa trope captures two related “facts,” first that poems are not material—that their essential meaning is independent of medium and occasion—and therefore are not subject to time, and second that something of the author is present in them (as voice, spirit, or thought) 11v 255 256 The Ars Longa Trope in a Sublunary World and thus is likewise eternized. Yet recent scholarship questions whether that sense of the literary work was in fact common before the end of the seventeenth century.5 If texts were not immune to occasion and audience, and if the poet were not an ongoing presence in the text, then what, exactly, was understood by the trope of immortality through literature in early modern England? To ask this means asking how the life of the text in the world was understood—what had a writer created and presented to the world, if it was not primarily conceived as an expressive,autonomousutterancetranscendingtimeandmatter ? What did Shakespeare or Jonson mean when they wrote of a person living on in poem or book? Joseph Loewenstein identifies three competing senses of the book: as “material object or commodity,” as “tributary gift, the sign and site of a complex socio-cultural relationship,” and as “material signifier of ‘ideas’ proper to their author.” Such conceptions are not clearly distinguished; they jostle indiscriminately in prefatory epistles as well as in self-referential moments in lyric poems. Senses of the “immortality” ensured by poetry similarly jostle: does the poem perpetuate its subject’s fame or its author’s? Or will authors themselves somehow live on in their work? The indeterminacy and conceptual flux in the trope of immortality that this article addresses is one component of the developing concept of an author in early modern England.6 In this essay, I will begin by briefly surveying the main habits of thought that informed conceptions of immortality . Remembering the admonition by Gale Carrithers and James Hardy that religion was the “matrix” within which early modern writers “understood subjects now seen as essentially secular,” I will argue that the distinction between temporal and eternal existence operated strongly, especially when combined with a sense of the material nature of texts.7 I will demonstrate the influence of these habits first on religious verse, where one would expect them to bear weight, and Kate Narveson 257 then on the less obvious case of secular verse that deals with the immortalizing power of poetry. It is not surprising that poetry of compliment would primarily address the continuance of the subject’s fame as long as the poem lives on in the world. More surprisingly, the evidence indicates that ideas of time and the materiality of the text can circumscribe even the sort of immortality envisioned in works by Shakespeare and Jonson, poets with higher claims for the power of their verse. 1. HABITS OF THOUGHT: THE INGREDIENTS OF THE TROPE The dominant conception of literary immortality today, that not merely an author’s fame but something of the author lives on in his or her work, took shape during the eighteenth century. Andrew Bennett notes that as originality began to be a central aesthetic criterion, the appreciation of a literary work became “indefinitely future-oriented” because it was based on an assumption that readers would need to catch up with its aesthetic, and because originality came to be seen as a “quality of the work which will inhere beyond the time of its production.” Therefore, it...