Why the Canon Is Worth Conserving

In his commendatory poem in the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623), Ben Jonson addresses the Bard as “Soul of the age!”; however, a couple dozen lines later, Jonson proclaims, “He was not of an age, but for all time.”¹ I must confess to having taken a perverse delight over the years in watching students squirm when asked to resolve the apparent contradiction. We may then surmise that a certain poetic justice, a certain perversity of the Fates, has come into play as I find myself squirming at the spectacle of learned and distinguished colleagues, scholars of literature and the other humane disciplines, quite as nonplussed by the Jonsonian paradox as the most callow sophomore. According to the reigning heterodoxy, absolutely nothing is “for all time”; and works of literature do not bespeak the “soul of the age” so much as they conceal, even while embodying, its ideological agenda and economic imperatives.