Dr%20Robert%20Stagg: List of publications

In the prefatory material to the First Folio (1623), Ben Jonson praised Shakespeare with a phrase too fitting to be fitting. Shakespeare’s lines, he wrote, were ‘richly spun, and woven so fit’ (49). This makes Shakespeare into, or out to be, a labourer warping and wefting in a tapestry workshop – a description perhaps too artisanal and banal for an encomium (of sorts). Jonson moves over his own verse line to arrive at a more evocative criticism: that Shakespeare writes a ‘living line’ (59), transforming ‘spun’ from the tedious routines of a weaver into the alacritous activity of a spider or bug. The textile Shakespeare, weaving ‘so fit’, becomes a textual Shakespeare. Jonson’s line even picks up a thread from Shakespeare’s, since in Henry VIII, or All is True (1613) the Cardinal Wolsey thrives in ‘his self-drawing web’ (1.1.63), forever creating the contours of his own power and abundance, at once an act of imaginative range and limitation.