Lines 11-18 Summary

Lines 11-16

Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron ; what could hurt her more ?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above the ill fortune of them, or the need.

• Line 11 reminds us of the idea briefly touched on in line 1, namely that Jonson has some ulterior, mean-spirited motive for heaping praise on Ol' Shakey. The idea raised here is that the poem might seem to be praising the author when, in fact, it's doing damage.
• Even for an author as skilled at slight as Jonson was, making a poem sound praiseworthy enough to land in the preface of Shakespeare's volume while secretly being mean would be a pretty difficult challenge.
• Lines 13-14 , however, explain how a guy might pull it off.
• Jonson uses a simile to explain how "crafty malice" could be hidden in the poem. The simile is found in lines 13 and 14, and it compares Jonson to a bawd (or prostitute) and Shakespeare to a noblewoman or matron. The gist of it is that a bawd can praise the matron and even if the words are nice, coming from such a low and degrading source, they're actually offensive. 
• In modern terms, it's kind of like when some upstart college athlete who never gets off the bench starts looping himself with the professional hall-of-famers in his or her sport. He or she is probably saying nice things about them, but the skills and accomplishments of the professional athletes so far outweigh whatever the benchwarmer has done that it almost cheapens their career that someone thinks the comparison of the two was worth discussing in the first place. 
• Shakespeare, however, is apparently so undeniably awesome that he would prove anyone wrong who tried to say otherwise and his reputation is so impeccable that even the craftiest of malice could not tarnish it. So there.
• We are thus left to conclude that Jonson, recognizing the futility in trying to bash Shakespeare and the irrelevance of blindly praising him, is writing this poem for one reason: he's thought about it a lot, analyzed it carefully, and arrived at the conclusion that Shakespeare's awesomeness is such that it simply cannot be ignored. 
• Note how this is different than the argument in line 5. Jonson isn't arguing that Shakespeare is awesome, he is simply accepting it as a proven fact and writing a poem about it.

Lines 17-18

I therefore will begin: Soul of the age!
The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage!

• Having spelled out his reasons for writing the poem, Jonson is about to get down to business.
• Jonson first calls Shakespeare the "soul of the age," which is a metaphor. 
• In the metaphor, Jonson compares their era or time to a person, and casts Shakespeare as the "soul" of that person; it's a pretty profound statement about Shakespeare's ability to capture the emotional tenor of the time period in his writing.
• Jonson doesn't stop there; Shakespeare is also called the applause, delight, and "wonder" of the early modern stage.
• Before you brush off those comments as nice but fairly straightforward, let's talk for a minute about applause. 
• Today, people clap for everything, and it's often considered rude if you don't. Can you imagine going to a concert and not clapping for the person who sang, even if they were terrible? It would just never happen. 
• This wasn't the case back in Shakespeare's day. Applause was the scale by which theater owners decided which plays to continue showing and which ones to can. Do you remember how, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the play concludes with a speech by Puck where he talks about escaping the serpent's tongue (hisses) and, instead, asks the audience to "lend their hands" (a.k.a. applaud the production)? This isn't just to make the actors feel better—if the audience hisses and doesn't clap, the actors are out of a job.
• Calling Shakespeare the "applause" of the stage, then, speaks to more than the fact that Shakespeare was popular; it implies that Shakespeare was the sole force that kept theater going and growing. Now that's high praise.
• It's interesting to note, too, that Jonson describes the stage as "our" stage. Is this him allying himself with Shakespeare even though their dramatic styles are markedly different? Is it a reference to the stage of Britain? You tell us.