“To hear the rest untold“: Shakespeare's Postponed Endings

According to Edmund Spenser, trivial art was merely “painted forgery,” no more than “th'aboundance of an idle braine.” Its antithesis, exemplified by The Faerie Queene, was “matter of just memory” (FQ II.Proem, i). In this distinction, the double sense of “just,” i.e. both “righteous” and “exact,” tellingly suggests the response he desired—demanded even—from readers of his epic. Other works aspiring to the status of high art similarly make demands upon their audience which implicitly continue into the memory of the reader or viewer. It was thus, Ben Jonson argued, that the text of a masque could be elevated above the mere physical spectacle of its performance: it was in the imagination of the audience that the “more removed mysteries,” only shadowed forth in the action of the show, could be fully subjected to the understanding (rather than simply experienced externally by the sense) of the beholders.