JONATHAN BALDO. Memory in Shakespeare's Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England.

Abstract

In this insightful study, Jonathan Baldo proposes that Shakespeare’s ‘second tetralogy’ is defined by its concern with memory and, more importantly, forgetting. In contrast to the ‘first tetralogy’, where the capacity to erase memories threatens national aspirations, Shakespeare’s later history plays show that forgetting plays a key role in creating national identity. Baldo sees the struggle to produce a stable understanding of English nationhood as a concern of Shakespeare’s that intensifies in the plays written after Richard II; this supplants the older dynastic understanding of the realm which informed his earlier historical drama. However, in a post-Reformation context, the national past was deeply contested. The counter-memories of various communities (Catholics, ‘church-papists’, Puritans) ensured that the values that constituted the nation were kept under constant scrutiny and debate. Shakespeare’s plays address this area of conflict in Elizabethan culture and they are each characterized by ‘internal memory wars’ in which ‘various forces strive to produce a more uniform perception of the past’ (p. 4).