The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory

Andrew Hiscock, Lina Perkins Wilder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317596844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory introduces this vibrant field of study to students and scholars, whilst defining and extending critical debates in the area. The book begins with a series of "Critical Introductions" offering an overview of memory in particular areas of Shakespeare such as theatre, print culture, visual arts, post-colonial adaptation and new media. These essays both introduce the topic but also explore specific areas such as the way in which Shakespeare's representation in the visual arts created a national and then a global poet.

The entries then develop into more specific studies of the genre of Shakespeare, with sections on Tragedy, History, Comedy and Poetry, which include insightful readings of specific key plays. The book ends with a state of the art review of the area, charting major contributions to the debate, and illuminating areas for further study. The international range of contributors explore the nature of memory in religious, political, emotional and economic terms which are not only relevant to Shakespearean times, but to the way we think and read now.

PART I

Critical introductions

1
SHAKESPEARE, MEMORY, AND THE EARLY MODERN THEATRE

Zackariah Long

In 1988, Bernard Richards published a brief piece in Notes and Queries entitled ‘Hamlet and the Theatre of Memory.’¹ In it he observes with some surprise that in The Art of Memory (1966) and Theatre of the World (1969) Frances Yates does not remark upon a possible allusion to Renaissance memory theatre in Hamlet’s second soliloquy: ‘Remember thee? | Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat | In this distracted globe.’² Noting that theatres were among the structures recommended by memory theorists as models for mnemonic systems, Richards speculates that the great unacknowledged referent of Hamlet’s soliloquy may be the Renaissance theatre of memory. Yates’s failure to remark on this possibility is particularly striking because in her books Yates advances the argument that Robert Fludd’s illustration of a memory theatre in History of the Two Worlds (1619) was modelled on Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. If it is possible that one of the most important memory theatres of the Renaissance was patterned on the Globe, then it seems equally possible that the Globe may have been imagined as a kind of memory theatre.

Since Yates’s books and Bernard’s provocative note, Shakespeare scholars, theatre historians, and students of memorial culture have expressed regular, if cautious, interest in the possibility of a connection between Renaissance memory theatres and Shakespeare’s ‘wooden O.’³ However, there has been surprisingly little sustained critical attention to this relationship, perhaps because of the scepticism that originally greeted Yates’s thesis.⁴ At the same time, there has been a growing recognition of the manifold connections between the broader memorial culture that produced the memory theatres and early modern theatrical aesthetics, stagecraft, and performance. In textured and wide-ranging examinations of characters, stage properties, and performance conditions, histories, and practices, scholars have documented how the ‘memory work’ of Shakespeare’s theatre is in constant dialogue with the theories and practices of a variety of mnemonic forms.⁵ This expanded critical context suggests that the time may be ripe for a fresh look at the relationship between the Renaissance memory theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe.

In this chapter, I would like to sketch a set of conceptual links between Shakespeare’s Globe and the memory theatre, especially as manifested in that most famous memory theatre of the European Renaissance, Giulio Camillo’s. The context for this argument will be a close reading of Hamlet’s invocation of the ‘distracted globe’ in his second soliloquy. This soliloquy has long been recognized as an epicentre for the play’s exploration of memory, and a speech that constellates and condenses a number of important early modern mnemonic terms and concepts. I will have occasion to touch on a number of these concepts; however, my main objective is to offer a fresh reading of the lines themselves, which I believe crystallize the relationship between Shakespeare’s theatre and the Renaissance theatre of memory. In identifying the Globe theatre as a seat of memory, and by punning on ‘globe’ as head, theatre, and world, Hamlet links the project of Shakespearean soliloquy to the project of visionaries like Camillo, who sought to use mnemonic technologies to recreate the order of the universe within the mind of man.⁶ At the same time, by admitting that this theatre is ‘distracted,’ Hamlet measures the distance between this grand vision and Shakespeare’s ‘wooden O.’ It is in the gap between these two theatres that we can find Hamlet.

Camillo’s theatre

The cultural fantasy that animated Renaissance memory theatres has been aptly termed by Julie Stone Peters ‘the fantasy of mnemonic totality’: the attempt to distil the entirety of human knowledge into an epitomized form that can be taken in at a single glance.⁷ This fantasy was supported by a particular view of human knowledge—‘knowledge as the ordered representation of everything … spatialized and visual, objective in the sense that it existed independently of its knowers’—and was made possible by an ‘at least physical and perhaps psychological or ontological’ separation of the knower from the known, observer from observed. Given these specular and epistemological needs, it is not surprising that the theatre was tapped as a conceptual and aesthetic model. By physically or imaginatively placing himself within a theatre (a ‘place for seeing’), a memory artist could view the objects of his contemplation as a totality. Moreover, the figure of the theatre sorted nicely with the desire to ‘map the world’s order and to construct a universal theory of everything.’⁸ Thanks to the ancient metaphor of the theatrum mundi, early moderns were already used to thinking of the theatre as a model for the world; it was only a short step to making this metaphor literal. And the physical and spatial characteristics of theatres themselves—both the semi-circular ancient amphitheatre, with its orderly division of seating bays into horizontal and vertical tiers, and the circular Elizabethan playhouse, with its symmetrical stage doors and upper and lower galleries—provided the regularity, stability, and orderliness necessary for a mnemonic system.⁹ This is why several memory theorists, including those potentially linked to Shakespeare’s Globe, Giulio Camillo, Robert Fludd, and John Willis, adopted the theatre as their mnemonic schema.

Given the spatial, temporal, and aesthetic proximity of Fludd’s and Willis’ memory theatres to the Globe, it is not surprising that their treatises have received the most critical attention in recent Shakespeare scholarship.¹⁰ However, for the purposes of this analysis, I believe Camillo’s memory theatre offers the most profound point of comparison. First, Camillo’s theatre, unlike Fludd’s or Willis’s, adopts the point of view of Hamlet’s soliloquy. When Hamlet invokes the ‘distracted globe,’ he is looking outward at the audience. In both Fludd’s and Willis’ theatres, in contrast, the mnemonist adopts the vantage point of an audience member viewing the stage. Second, the relationship between the theatre and the cosmos that informs Camillo’s theatre is closest to that of the Globe. Like Shakespeare’s theatre, Camillo’s is a theatre of the world: it inscribes the proportions of the universe within its dimensions. Fludd’s memory theatre is just the opposite: it is only one of a series of theatres in the world, literally positioned alongside other theatres within the circular circumference of the zodiac. (Willis, meanwhile, makes no claim to his theatres having microcosmic significance at all.) Of course, there is less likelihood of a direct relationship of influence between Camillo and Shakespeare’s Globe as there is with Fludd or Willis; but, as I hope to show, this is not as important as Shakespeare’s clearly demonstrable knowledge of the vision that informs it.

To understand Shakespeare’s engagement with this vision, though, we need to examine Camillo’s theatre more closely. We have already noted that Camillo’s is a theatre of the world, so we should expect its symbolic topography to mirror the Neoplatonic universe on which it is modelled. First, it contains three worlds: supercelestial, celestial, and subcelestial. The supercelestial world is represented by the orchestra: this is the world of ‘divine emanations,’ and is where Camillo’s mnemonist stands, looking outward at the amphitheatre’s seating area. The seating area, in turn, is divided into the celestial world of ‘first causes,’ represented by the first row of seats, and the subcelestial world of the elements, which extends upward over the next six rows. As we shall see, this tripartite grouping is a major structural principle of the theatre, and a key to understanding its design. However, it is balanced by another structural principle centred on groupings of seven. We have already noted that the theatre’s seating area is divided into seven tiers or grades, running from the orchestra to the back wall. Camillo endows these seven tiers with special significance: they represent phases in the creation of the universe, echoing the seven days of creation in Genesis. Camillo then divides these seven tiers into seven sections, running from left to right, that represent the seven planetary influences.¹¹ The result is a gently sloping grid of forty-nine loci, and in each locus Camillo places a gate emblazoned with memory images that epitomize qualities of the region associated with it.

As for the images positioned within this mnemonic grid, they too are structured by a complex symbolic system. Each phase of creation is given its own master image, which serves to connect it to its neighbours on the same tier. Then, under these master images are subsidiary images that focus upon the planetary series to which they are assigned. By standing in the centre of the orchestra and inspecting these images, Camillo’s mnemonist could not only contemplate the universe’s macrocosmic structure, but inspect that design on the microcosmic level. As an example, consider Tier Four of the Saturn Series. On this tier, which in Camillo’s Neoplatonic history corresponds to the creation of man’s soul, the master image is the three Gorgon Sisters, which symbolize the tripartite soul, and the subsidiary image is Hercules battling Antaeus, which symbolizes man’s ‘struggle with earth to rise to heights of contemplation.’¹² In scrutinizing these images the mnemonist becomes aware of their microcosmic significance—of how the tripartite soul recapitulates the tripartite structure of the universe—as well as how these three worlds inform the Hercules image, since the hero is imagined as occupying an intermediate region between earth (below) and heaven (above). The mnemonist then applies this macrocosmic perspective to the lesson of the image itself—that man cannot defeat his ‘earthy’ (Saturnine) character through aggressive action; instead, he must consecrate his flesh (Antaeus) to the heavens. By meditating on the other memory images on this gate, the mnemonist internalizes the fruits of such a victory: the ‘memory of things above: learning, imagination, and contemplation’ (another tripartite division); meanwhile, if he progresses (or, rather, regresses) along the Saturn series to Tier Five, he discovers what happens when one loses this battle, since on this level the master image is Pasiphae and the Bull, which symbolizes the fate of the soul when it ‘falls into a state of desiring the body.’¹³ By inspecting all of the memory images within the theatre’s loci, and by toggli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Critical introductions
• Part II Tragedy
• Part III History
• Part IV Comedy
• Part V Poetry
• Part VI Review
• Bibliography
• Index