Finis coronat opus

The best-known treatment of the trope is in the remarkable series of Time sonnets in which William Shakespeare pitches the fragile artifice of poetry against the encroachments of ‘sad mortality’, and the ‘fell arrest’ of Death celebrating The Duchess of Malfi. Nowhere, in fact, was the trope of poem-as-monument more ingeniously developed than in the theatre, where dramatists regularly exploited the iconic potential of tombs and monuments in a reflexive celebration of their own art that went far beyond John Weever's rather wooden manipulation of commonplaces. In tragic drama, this chapter suggests, the monument, with its artifice of eternity, stands in the same relation to play-as-finished-artefact as the funeral to the play-as-unfolding-plot; and typically, it has much the same emblematic relation to the whole action as the tomb in Sir Henry Unton's portrait to the narrative it completes and the monumental ending of Anthony and Cleopatra.

Art · Cleopatra · Literature · Opus · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History