Abstract
Both Shakespeare and Donne wrote epitaphs for themselves and on commission—material evidence of attitudes toward memorialization that bear comparison with the representation of epitaphs in their literary work. But the business of writing epitaphs did not engage Shakespeare’s heart as it did Donne’s. While economics may partly account for this difference—Shakespeare being more independent financially and hence more free to distance himself from the customs and obligations of aristocratic patronage—the epitaphs they wrote for themselves suggest that their skepticism about future memory may have mattered as much as their sensitivity to their social positions. Donne is skeptical about memory in a way that causes him to appropriate and revise the fashion for monumentalization. But while he may seem skeptical of epitaphs in his lyric poetry, he is committed to them in practice. Indeed, Donne’s exceptional intensity regarding these valedictory markers manifests his skeptical anxiety regarding the value and veracity of both retrospective and prospective memory. By contrast, Shakespeare has equanimity. In both life and work, he laughs skeptically at the memorial aspirations of epitaphs, although even he acknowledges their disturbing power.
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Notes
John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, ed. Charles Edmund Merrill, Jr. ( New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910 ), 268.
John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 3.43.
John Donne, Biathanatos, ed. Michael Rudick and M. Pabst Battin ( New York: Garland, 1982 ), 1091–94.
See Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ).
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See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992 );
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Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986 ), 298.
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See Katharine A. Esdaile, English Church Monuments 1510 to 1840 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1946), 132. Esdaile ascribes the monument to Gerard Christmas.
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See Millicent Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 ).
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Virginia Woolf, The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, ed. Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett (London: Hogarth Press, 1982), vol. 4, 5/9/34.
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© 2007 Anita Gilman Sherman
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Sherman, A.G. (2007). Skeptical Epitaphs and Prospective Memory in Donne and Shakespeare. In: Skepticism and Memory in Shakespeare and Donne. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08610-5_6
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