Shakespeare and print

A belief in the longevity of literature is deeply embedded in Western culture. It is enshrined in familiar tags like ars longa, aita brevis and littera scripta manent. In the fifth century BC Thucydides declares that his history of the Peloponnesian War is not meant just for current readers, but 'as a possession for all time'. Florace rejoices that his Odes are 'a monument more lasting than brass'. At the end of the Metamorphoses, Ovid says: 'And now my work is done, which neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be able to undo.' Shakespeare makes an interesting case study within the history of this idea. In his time, as recent commentators have argued, there was a crisis in attitudes to mortality: a new importance was accorded to the individual, while at the same time the unquestioning belief in a Christian life after death was in decline. This brought a particular urgency to the notion of the secular immortality of poetry. Then there is the special problem that Shakespeare articulates the ideal of literary survival with supreme eloquence in the Sonnets, yet seems in his practice of publication largely to have ignored publication in print, the obvious means to achieve it.