Shakespeare's "Books of Memory": 1 and 2 Henry VI

Abstract

In Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI (1589-90), Plantagenet tells Somerset and Suffolk that he will note them [his] of and scourge them later for their gibes about his father (2.4.95, 101-02), and in 2 Henry VI (1590-91), Gloucester repeats phrase in assessing effects of Henry's marriage. It has canceled peers' fame, [b]lotting [their] names from of memory,/Rasing characters of [their] renown,/Defacing monuments of conquer'd France;/[And] Undoing all, as all had never been (1.1.99-103). Both expressions are part of what, in European Literature and Latin Middle Ages (1948), Ernst Curtius sees as Shakespeare's preoccupation with book. Besides of memory, Shakespeare mentions love books, jest books, inventories, chronicles, account books, conjuring books, and, in Coriolanus (3.1.291), Jove's own (i.e., of heavens). Shakespeare continues, moreover, medieval metaphorical conventions of both the face as a (Love's Labor's Lost, 4.3.349; King John, 2.1.485; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2.2.122; Romeo and Juliet, 1.3.87; Macbeth, 1.5.62; etc.) and the of nature (As You Like It, 2.1.16 and 3.2.5). Curtius notes that especially in his treatment of love Shakespeare appears to prize bindings, and he concludes that Shakespeare's real `life-relation' to is that of aesthetic enjoyment. Richly bound are a feast for his eyes. (1) Such an appreciation is not uncommon in sixteenth century. In art, an iconographic tradition of ceremoniously dressed readers continues, built upon medieval illuminations of Jerome, and in a letter to Francesco Vettori (10 December 1513) Machiavelli describes himself slipping off his day's clothes with their mud and dirt. At threshold of his study, he dons royal and curial robes before entering the ancient courts of men of old. (2) This preoccupation with is not a denial of Augustine's sense of discovering God within memory. One recalls that in Confessions (c.400), Augustine uses Aeneid, Cicero's Hortensius, Platonic texts, and New Testament as guides and undertakes in last three a reconciliation of Scripture and understanding. Curtius, noting Greek links of memory and writing, points to emergence in medieval thought of three distinct models: God's book, of memory, and of nature. Being concordant, these books eventually become analogous and, with grace, alternatives. (3) In literature, Dante cites a personal internal book of whose incidents in Vita Nuova (1294) assist him in remembering himself (1). Although he makes no claim of a congruence of this and other books, including that book of life on which men are judged (Rev. 20:12), Dante clearly implies a coincidence at points of truth, including knowledge of God. By final sonnet (Oltre la spera che piu larga gira), he indicates beginnings of such truth within work. For readers accustomed to Cartesian separations of subjective and objective and empirical differences between them, these accords and coincidences may seem mistaken, but to emphasize their unifying force and set faith as means of their apprehension, both God and truth are often defined as joined opposites. In an age of changing classes and self-made men whose success depended on their bringing their inner feelings in line with what manuals indicated was proper and convention determined was assimilable, this coincidence of outer and inner books takes on added social and political importance, achieving less salvation than dependable conformity. In going to of memory, Shakespeare thus not only gives objective shape to Augustine's interior many and indescribable departments but avails himself of associations attending actual texts. In Henry VI plays, Shakespeare surrounds his of memory with allusions to law books, God's book, and prayer books. The Lawyer in 1 Henry VI presents claims of York in Temple Garden on basis of legal study and . …