It is his contemporary Ben Jonson who caught him best. Writing a few years after Shakespeare’s death, he used terms which might have been thought hyperbolic and now seem prophetically accurate. It was 1623, the year in which Shakespeare’s First Folio was published. Thou art a monument without a tomb And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give. Jonson ranks his contemporaries well below him; even the Greeks, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, are called on to honour him. Jonson takes great pride in Shakespeare’s nationality. Since the joining of
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