Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room;
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.

These lines come from Ben Jonson’s elegiac poem prefixed to the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (“To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us”). Written after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 and published seven years later, Jonson’s tribute helped frame Shakespeare’s posthumous reputation at a moment when the Folio sought to secure his works in authoritative print. Jonson—himself a leading dramatist and sometimes rival—presents Shakespeare as the defining spirit of the theatrical age, surpassing earlier English poets (Chaucer, Spenser) and contemporary playwrights (Francis Beaumont), and argues that Shakespeare’s true monument is his living text rather than a physical tomb.

Jonson proclaims Shakespeare the “soul of the age,” making him not merely a successful playwright but the animating genius of an era. The refusal to “lodge” him beside other great writers is not a slight to them so much as a claim that Shakespeare exceeds ordinary categories of literary commemoration. The paradox “a monument, without a tomb” shifts memorialization from stone to language: Shakespeare remains “alive” through his book, as long as readers possess “wits to read” and the cultural capacity to “praise.” The passage thus articulates an early, influential theory of literary immortality—canon formation through print, readership, and ongoing critical admiration.