Shakespeare, Memory and Performance

This collection by leading Shakespeare scholars, first published in 2006, brings together memory and performance.

Peter Holland (Edited by)

9780521863803, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 November 2006

378 pages, 51 b/w illus.
22.8 x 16.1 x 3.1 cm, 0.67 kg

'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

'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 collection of essays, first published in 2006, provides 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Theatre studies [AN]