Monumental memory and little reminders

When scrutinizing Shakespeare’s boast about his ‘powerful rhyme’ outliving ‘marble’, gold, and ‘unswept stone’, recent critics seek guidance from Horace, one of the classical sources of his boast. ¹ Horace’s trope of verse metalwork, aere perennius—‘more lasting than bronze’—promotes a fantasy of perduration contingent upon a triumphant poetic materiality. ² According to the unstated implications of this trope, a monument, whether a poem, artefact, or building, derives its wished-for immortality from an indelibly memorable mark inscribed into imperishable fabric. However, the question of what lasts in a memorial is more complicated than a narcissistic boast would have us believe, and so I want to unseat the Horatian commonplace with another Roman genealogy proper to rhetoric. During the early modern period, the idea that intellectual products could compete with physical memorials circulated widely in the expression ‘monuments of wit’, which, as Bacon observed, ‘are more durable than the monuments of power or of the hands’. ³ The expression—a translation of ingeniorum monumenta—appears in Quintilian’s encyclopaedic treatise on rhetoric, where he examines the challenges inherent in the topic of praising men. Because the state rarely devotes the occasion or the expense to celebrate divine honors, posthumous gratitude, and statues, Quintilian seems to distrust the staging of public memorials. Instead, ‘monuments of genius’, such as, plays, cities, laws, and institutions, provide a suitable topic of eulogizing, for they will have withstood the test of time: ‘some, like Menander, have had a fairer deal from posterity than from their own age’. ⁴ This passage on the rhetoric of memorial praise introduces two key ideas in my argument. First, monumental memory’s staying power depends less on the durability of materials than on securing the approval of future generations, and thus Quintilian’s important insight can be extended to the rhetoric of all monuments, not just ingeniorum monumenta. Second, his expression ‘monument of wit’—with my extra emphasis on wit, the mental faculty—designates my argument’s destination. Despite periodically envisioning a grandiose mausoleum for himself and his beloved, Shakespeare settles for little reminders, which strive to captivate the beloved’s cognition.