“Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,/ Our bending author hath pursu’d the story,” writes Shakespeare—the least sincere line of his most insincere drama, Henry V. But how far is “thus far”? Is it a time or a place, a duration or a location? Shakespeare is definitely thinking about space since the Chorus complains about close quarters—“In little room confining mighty men” (epil.3). “[L]ittle room” is clear enough, then—the place, elsewhere, of “great reckoning[s]” (AsYou Like It, 3.3.15). It's the cramped quarters of the “cockpit” (Henry V, prol.11) into which the writer has confined his work. Maybe that's why he's bending.

“Thus far” is a place, then. The line's a workplace gripe about a tiny office. But an instant later the epilogue mentions the “[s]mall time” in which this “star of England” lived (epil.5, 6). “Small time”? Like you could slap a handle on time and stow it in the overhead. “Brief” would have scanned, but here the temporal duration of this history play is deliberately spatialized, and vice versa. The notion, at the end, is that you’ve come along way without getting anywhere. Little room, small time: “thus far” is both a geographical and chronological span, the one the other in a form of theatrical synesthesia.

In a marginally less well-known history play, James IV, Robert Greene has King Arius announce that “thus far the English peeres have we displayed/ Our warring ensigns with a happy warre.”

In the ‘two bucket’ version of literary history whatever praise lightens Shakespeare’s load must fill Jonson’s with invective. This history is abetted by anecdotal accounts that bring the writers together in ‘wit contests’, which ransom Shakespeare’s reputation at the expense of Jonson. The prevailing morphology of the Jonson anecdote is that he often ends up as the butt of the joke. Such stories seem to respond to his attempts to manage his own legacy, especially his effrontery in supervising his own ‘works’ in 1616. This essay studies the tradition of Jonsonian anecdotes – including three previously unknown eighteenth-century examples – all of which show Jonson trying and failing to play executor to his own literary legacy. Tellingly, these rebuttals to Jonson often address him in his own terms, specifically poetic ones. For be it epigram, epitaph, or epilogue, these anecdotes offer light verse rejoinders to Jonson’s attempts to have the last word. Attention to Jonson’s reputation in his own time and in the century following his death complicates and enriches a narrative about the dilation of that reputation across the centuries, presenting him as not just the foil to Shakespeare but the casualty of his efforts to author his own legacy.