Toward a Shakespearean "Memory Theater": Romeo, the Apothecary, and the Performance of Memory

Romeo's first reaction to the news of juliet's death is not mourning but a lengthy and, according to some, unnecessary recollection of an apothecary and the contents of his shop:

Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee tonight.
Let's see for means. O mischief thou art swift
To enter in the thoughts of desperate men.
I do remember an apothecary—
And hereabouts a dwells—which late I noted
In tatter'd weeds, with overwhelming brows,
Culling of simples. Meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones,
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuff'd, and other skins
Of ill-shap'd fishes; and about his shelves
A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses
Were thinly scatter'd to make up a show.

(5.1.34–48)¹

Critics have long complained that this speech is inappropriate to Romeo's situation both practically and in its affect, that the speech has little to do with the acquisition of poison (the scene's ostensible purpose) and nothing to do with the grief that one might expect Romeo to be feeling.² I argue here that the apothecary scene is appropriate, that it does express grief, and that it does so by means of what I will call a "performance of memory."

The apothecary scene in Romeo and Juliet is one of many performances of memory in Shakespeare's plays, moments in which one character's seemingly digressive recollection momentarily displaces dramatic action. Other examples include the first of Justice Shallow's scenes in 2 Henry IV (3.2); reminiscences of Falstaff in Henry V (2.3); Hamlet's scenes with the Ghost (1.5), the First Player (2.2), and the skull of Yorick (5.1); Enobarbus's recollection of Cleopatra on the barge at Cydnus (2.2) and her "return" to Cydnus as she prepares for death (5.2); and Prospero's exposition (1.2), Miranda's half-memory of women (1.2), and Caliban's dream in The Tempest (3.2). The function of memory scenes in Shakespeare's plays seems to be similar to that of flashbacks in film: they give background and expand the work's narrative frame beyond its immediate physical and temporal borders. But the difference between what the audience sees onstage and the past events the character is recalling creates a dissonance not present in cinematic flashbacks: stage memory belongs to a register of experience separate from that of represented action. In addition to tying events from the play's or the character's past to those in the acted present, and to momentarily relaxing the pace of a play such as Romeo and Juliet, in which narrative drive is otherwise relentless,³ the performance of memory interrogates early modern ideas about memory and about theater.

Looking backward over the action of the play and even toward events outside the play's scope, Shakespeare's memory theater may invite both audience and actors to see the play as a dramatic whole, an effect that Tiffany Stern claims was unusual in the early modern English theater. "Plays seem to have been watched," she writes,

as they were performed, with the emphasis at least as much on parts as on the whole. . . . Part-oriented response is reflected in the way the audience might, for instance, take objection to single characters in plays as well as to plays themselves, and in the preponderance of actor-focused criticism over much of the period.⁴

She also notes:

Plays often indicate that an actor has privately learnt his role, but does not know what parts his fellow actors are playing . . . , or whom he is supposed to be addressing. . . . [M]any actors, having learnt to deal primarily with their own parts in private...