Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character (review)

Lina Perkins Wilder takes on a central question in Shakespeare studies: how memory and recollection are constituted in performance. Her methodology is materialist, historicist, and cognitive. It is materialist because Wilder attends to stage properties both present (like Othello’s handkerchief) and absent (like Prospero’s books). It is historicist because she contextualizes Shakespeare’s memory theater in terms of contemporary mnemonic treatises of the sort discussed by Frances A. Yates in The Art of Memory (1966). It is cognitive in two senses. On the one hand, Wilder understands memory physiologically as a faculty with varying degrees of agency involving ventricles and animal spirits. On the other hand, she views the stage and its appurtenances, including actors who are “mnemonic objects” (91), as evidence of distributed cognition or an extended mind, and hence of an extended memory. Thinking and remembering come to be almost interchangeable. This approach yields useful insights and is especially fruitful when considering gender.

Wilder’s analysis of the differences and overlap between male and female modes of remembering advances the study of memory and gender in Shakespeare. For example, Wilder observes that the Nurse’s flashback about weaning Juliet in Romeo and Juliet is characterized by digression, disorderly wandering, and rhetorical excess—traits that she contrasts with the spatial order and “masculine bodily discipline associated with the memory arts” (61). This opposition between dilatio and divisio allows her to interpret Hamlet’s “excess of remembrance” as feminine (112). Because Hamlet perceives “mnemonic fecundity” as a menace, he struggles to limit and control the contents of his own and his mother’s “overfull memory” (122, 125). The point is that “anxieties about women’s bodies coincide with anxieties about fertile, wandering, and less than perfectly faithful memories” (108). The threat of a teeming, inventive, and unreliable memory finds its metaphorical locus in the female body.

Wilder charts the tension between nonpurposive recollection, coded as feminine, and the masculine need for control, together with the consequent “gendering [of ] the mnemonic space” (108) in the Henry plays, Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest. This casts familiar passages in a new light. Consider the insight that the apparitions conjured by the witches in Act 4 of Macbeth conform not to emblems, but to the grotesque imagines agentes prescribed in mnemonic treatises. As she puts it, “The ‘armed head,’ the ‘bloody child,’ the ‘child crowned, with a tree in his hand,’ and their prophetic words function as future mnemonics,” engaging with the memories of both Macbeth and the audience (165). Wilder’s riff on Prospero’s use of the verb—“‘I will discase me, and myself present / As I was sometimes Milan’” (182)—captures her materialist approach. Drawing on her knowledge of bookbinding, where the sewn pages of unbound books were glued or cased into leather or parchment covers, she suggests that “by ‘discasing’ and re-casing himself, he [Prospero] joins the well-worn books that are the material repositories of his past” (184). Similarly, Wilder’s analysis of the Hostess’s sexuality and its association with table-books illuminates Henry V. “As the embodiment of the erasable memorandum-books,” Wilder argues, “the Hostess is Falstaff ’s memory” (102). Making oneself an open book like recording one’s thoughts betrays a bodily openness and a facility for reproduction. Therefore, she writes, “The figure of the table-book links male writing to leaky female bodies and to a past marked by sexual promiscuity. This association suggests a deep gender ambivalence in the seemingly masculine act of memorization” (103). These examples should give a taste of the rewards of reading this book.

Yet I felt frustrated at times, worried that Wilder’s methodology was preventing her from asking larger questions about memory in Shakespeare. When she probes the experiential effects of absent stage properties, Wilder tends to stop short, as if pursuing the implications of her conclusions would take her outside her project. For example, she rightly notes that “the visual...