Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (review)

This is the first book-length study devoted to memory and Shakespeare performance studies, to “creatively inaccurate” memories (3), written and mechanical records (xix), and the cultural memory enacted in theatrical, cinematic, textual, and museum spaces. The case studies show that “the memories of Shakespeare and performance and their intersections are less reliable, most vulnerable, at exactly the points at which they appear most secure” (19). The volume aims to examine “the concerns of memory” as they “move from the acts of remembering within the plays to the acts of remembering the plays themselves in performance,” among other issues (2). The goal is achieved with grace in the thirteen essays, complemented by fifty-one illustrations. As Peter Holland recognizes in the introduction, “memory has . . . become a distinctly fashionable topic in the humanities these days, moving far beyond . . . departments of psychology” (3). However, none of the books so far, important in their own rights (Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory [1966Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory [2001], Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage [2001], Garrett Sullivan’s Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama [2005]), addresses explicitly the issues of performativity and memory unique to Shakespeare studies. Shakespeare, Memory and Performance opens with a foreword by Stanley Wells that acknowledges the necessity of the acts of memorializing performances and complicates the common urge to seek objectivity in records of performance. In the afterword, Stephen Orgel shares his memories of a series of Shakespeare plays he attended from the 1940s to 1969 and suggests that the history of theater is also a history of desire “essential to the creation of our selves” (349).

The first part, “Shakespeare’s performances of memory,” contains three essays on the function of memory in early modern playtexts’ “performances of their arguments” (5). Bruce R. Smith traces the movement of memory in different moments of King Lear’s history from Shakespeare’s writing of the script through its original stage presentation and textual presence to the truth claims of film and video. He argues that “the King Lear that hit the boards in 1605 or 1606 was not the first link in a chain of memory but a new link in an already established chain” (29). He maintains that memory consists in perpetual movement between “two very different ways of knowing” (42): speaking what one feels and what one ought to say. John J. Joughin’s chapter examines the performance of grief and Shakespeare’s “memorial aesthetics” in Hamlet and Richard II . Anthony B. Dawson delineates a different aspect of memorial acts, specifically, how Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage and Shakespeare’s Tempest recall and represent Virgil’s Aeneid.

Michael Cordner’s and Margaret Jane Kidnie’s essays in the next section turn to the intersections between the performance and editorial practices as acts of cultural memory, warning against the editorial tendency to dictate what actors should or should not do. Cordner believes that Nicholas Brooke’s Oxford and A. R. Braunmuller’s Cambridge editions of Macbeth, respectable as they are, “fail to use . . . relevant testimony from the play’s rich theatre history” (90), while Kidnie attends to why actors and editors choose to memorize specific aspects of the plays or performances, which contributes to the “disruptive intertextual effect of citation” (132).

The third section, “Performance memory: costumes and bodies,” extends Kidnie’s point about the problem of representation in live performance archives to nostalgia. Barbara Hodgdon’s essay, aptly titled “Shopping in the Archives: Material Memories,” looks at archival politics in the archive of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and what she calls “communal epistemology in which looking functions as a form of discourse” (138). Carol Chillington Rutter’s essay provides a fascinating account of lost props in the same archives, in particular, one of the handkerchiefs in the RSC’s productions of Othello— present only in the form of photographic images. Complementing these two essays on the archives and the lost presence...