Shakespeare, Memory and Performance

"Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe." Hamlet’s lines pun on the globe as both his skull and the Globe Theatre. But what does memory have to do with Shakespeare and performances past and present? This is the first collection of essays to provide a meeting between the flourishing fields of memory studies and Shakespeare performance studies. The chapters explore a wide range of topics, from the means by which editors of Shakespeare plays try to help their readers remember performance to the ways actors sometimes forget Shakespeare’s lines, from the evocative memories instilled in the archives of costumes to the photographing of props that act as memories of performances past. The fifteen contributors are leaders in the field of Shakespeare performance studies and their considerations of the possibilities of the subject open up a rich new vein in Shakespeare studies.

• The first study to connect memory studies with Shakespeare performance studies • Contributors are all leading Shakespeare scholars • Includes over fifty production photographs

Foreword Stanley Wells; Introduction Peter Holland; Part I. Shakespeare’s Performances of Memory: 1. Speaking what we feel about King Lear Bruce R. Smith; 2. Shakespeare’s memorial aesthetics John J. Joughin; 3. Priamus is dead: memorial repetition in Marlowe and Shakespeare Anthony B. Dawson; Part II. Editing Shakespeare and the Performance of Memory: 4. ‘Wrought With Things Forgotten’: memory and performance in editing Macbeth Michael Cordner; 5. Citing Shakespeare Margaret Jane Kidnie; Part III. Performance Memory: Costumes and Bodies: 6. Shopping in the archives: material memories Barbara Hodgdon; 7. ‘Her first remembrance from the Moor’: actors and the materials of memory Carol Chillington Rutter; 8. On the gravy train: Shakespeare, memory and forgetting Peter Holland; Part IV. Reconstructing Shakespearean Performance: 9. Remembering Beigner’s Rosalind: As You Like It on the file in 1936 Russell Jackson; 10. Shakespeare exposed: outdoor performance and ideology, 1880-1940 Michael Dobson; Part V. Performance Memory: Technologies and the Museum: 11. Fond record: remembering theatre in the digital age W. B. Worthen; 12. The Shakespeare revolution will not be televised: staging the media apparatus Robert Shaughnessy; 13. Memory, performance, and the idea of the museum Dennis Kennedy; Afterword Stephen Orgel.

\'Shakespeare, Memory and Performance offers a timely contribution to Shakespeare studies which could inspire a deeper engagement with performance studies in the field at large. … The results are both fruitful and suggestive. … these essays open a subject whose introduction is long overdue.\' Review of English Studies