Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann, eds. Memory and Affect in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. xiv + 315 pp. ISBN 9781316517697. $110.00 hardback.

To begin at the end; Peter Holland’s “Coda: Remembering Shakespeare” opens with the vertiginous sentence: “I cannot remember not remembering Shakespeare” (271). Holland’s touchingly autobiographical account of his apparently lifelong acquaintance with the playwright includes discussion of his childhood memories, his parents’ record collection, trips to “the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street,” the intonation of his “Uncle Alec’s recitation from Caesar,” and memories of “The Shakespeare scholar Anne Barton, [his] dissertation supervisor and mentor” (276; 272). For the author of an article with the intransigent title, “It’s all about me. Deal with it”, this coda might just be further evidence of Holland’s own stubborn solipsism, but more significantly, it offers a powerful instance of the degree to which memory and emotions are superimposed: an illustration of the imbrication of (citing the titular terms of this collection) memory and affect.¹

As the volume’s editors argue in their introduction, events stick in the memory more effectively if they occur at a point of emotional intensity and, moreover, that “the intimate relation between memory and affect has been widely appreciated since at least the ancient world” (1). Contrariwise, remembering an event from the past can evoke a particular emotion, and as William Kerwin puts it in his chapter for the collection on complaint, “memory can carry and spread painful affects” (106-7). As this suggests, the return of a memory can be both voluntary and involuntary and, in the case of the latter, intrusive and even traumatic. For several of the volume’s fourteen contributors, memory can function as a collective phenomenon serving to define identifiable religious or political groups. Indeed, Baldo and Karremann suggest that Elizabethan culture was particularly prone to such remembering: “the twinned energies of memory and emotion were charged with political meaning in an England that ceaselessly reread, and remade, its past” (12). The predominance of the history play is the evidence of this and expresses the period’s sustained interest in its own emergent Protestant identity.

Essays by Rory Loughnane and Evelyn Tribble explore the history plays in this light. For the former, “All early modern English history plays memorialize a selectively represented and imagined version of the past” (220). Loughnane examines the versions of William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI and the ways in which the variant texts deal with the death of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The quarto, also known as The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, has the murder take place on stage. In the folio, the murder is unseen and described by Warwick, whose “blazon-like cataloguing of the unseen horrors […] produces an emotionally arresting and visceral remembering of an unwitnessed past” (231). Loughnane demonstrates how the report of the murder relies upon, and thus catalyzes, the audience’s imagination so that the effect may be even more emotionally intense than actually witnessing the murder. In this case less is more, with the implication that the folio version represents an increasing confidence in the playwright’s reliance on the audience’s own inventiveness: “Shakespeare recognized that playing on the forces of an audience’s imagination about what might have happened was potentially more effective in heightening the emotional distress of Gloucester’s death than the blunt force of showing the murder on stage” (234). (Extrapolating, we might wish to compare the same technique being used in Tyrrell’s perversely lyrical report of the Princes’ murder in the Tower, Richard III, 4.3). Tribble’s chapter deals with characters shared by the Henry IV plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor: Falstaff, Pistol, Quickly. As she observes, “the characters in Shakespeare’s English chronicle histories are obsessed with and oppressed by memory” (238). She goes on to demonstrate how the Falstaff of Henry IV both is and is not the Falstaff of Merry Wives; that is, the former Falstaff is immediately recognisable from the point of view of the audience, but his transposition into the comic world of Merry Wives allows him “to forget the past grievances and searing memories, including the devastating renouncing […] at the end of 2 Henry IV” (248). In this way, the characters of Merry Wives are different in terms of how they construct memory from those of the history plays because they “confine their memories to the immediate fiction of the play itself” (239). Tribble confines her chapter to memory as it is figured “within the parameters of this fiction”, but it might have been worth exploring the generic distinctions between history (Henry IV) and farce (Merry Wives) that motivate such memorial dissimilarities for the spectator (248).

In her account of Macbeth, Lina Perkins Wilder intriguingly demonstrates how a character within the play can disrupt or challenge the genre of the play itself. She shows how Macduff’s ponderous response to the news of the deaths of his family switches the play into slow-motion, as it were, and how this pensive delay is at odds with the headlong rush of the revenge drama: “Macduff’s refusal to shift immediately from grief to violence is a rejection of a specific type of plot, revenge tragedy” (253). Of course, critics have pointed to this delay in the case of Hamlet’s protagonist for a long time but, in the pell-mell of Macbeth, this uncharacteristic suspension, during which Macduff recalls and dilates upon his love for his wife and children, is worth noting.

In his examination of Cymbeline, Daniel Normandin explores the “play’s general quest for origins – personal, familial, and national alike – in an ancient British setting far murkier than that of the medieval histories” (181). In spite of its historical fogginess, Normandin suggests that the play addresses two topical aspects of the first decade of the seventeenth century and these explain why the play’s first audiences may have “imagined [their] ancient forebears as memoryless ‘primitives’”. He identifies “the antiquarian recollection of the nation’s distant past and the colonial expansion of its territory” as being essential to the political reading of the play which he proposes. Noting the princes’ discontent with their sequestered Welsh pastoral, Normandin argues that “consciousness itself is rendered impotently primitive” (183). Without experience (and therefore without memories) of political engagement, Guiderius and Arviragus consider themselves beyond memory and so beyond history. As Normandin explains, the funeral rights over the corpse of Fidele “convey their desire to enter into history, to locate themselves within some coherent historical scheme” (184).

William E. Engel’s evocative phrase for the way in which an event or feeling from the past contributes to identity is “the tug of memory” (203) and he elaborates on this by showing how the drama may ask us to share someone else’s memory – even, dizzyingly, the memory of a fictional character. Audiences “are made to remember something from a character’s past, something that conveys telltale cues enabling a glimpse into that character’s inner life” (203). He instances in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice the case of Leah’s ring, the disappearance of which Shylock laments, evoking an earlier courting Shylock who received the ring from his future (but presumably now dead) wife. That insight, provided by an emotionally fragile Shylock, allows the audience to glimpse “the notion of a Shylock who has perhaps not always been so stern and unbending” (204).

A number of chapters deal not with Shakespeare but with his near contemporaries. Devori Kimbro’s consideration of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments focuses, unsurprisingly, on trauma, both individual and collective and, especially in the latter case, on how Protestant identity is consolidated. Traumatropism, she proposes, is “a convergence of cultural trauma and historiography wherein memory and affect conjoin” (91). Such collective trauma has a politicizing effect, while “a narrative of torment” serves to galvanise Protestant enthusiasms and solidarity (93). Acts and Monuments thus “became a defining presence in the English Protestant imagination during the Elizabethan era and beyond.” Kimbro is acute in noting the irony of the longevity of martyrology, on the one hand, and the comparative innovation of the Reformation, on the other, pointing out that “Foxe understood the importance of rooting the relative newness of Protestant reforms in the long-distant past, forging a deep connection between those who perished during the Marian Reaction and the martyrs of early Christianity” (102).

In her account of domestic tragedy, Katharine A. Craik discusses the conflation of memory and emotion and the importance of both, “not least because [the genre] tends to deal with local events which mattered to its first audiences” (163). Craik underlines the connections between events depicted onstage and the audience’s recognition of “a familiar urban habitus” (171). It is this element of recognition that made such domestic tragedies so potent in the period: “history’s place in the public imagination, including and especially recent local history, was at this time a source of intense debate” (170).

Both Indira Ghose and Brian Cummings focus on comedy. In her exploration of early modern jest books, Ghose fascinatingly charts the gradual emergence of a popular culture. In the period, as she rightly points out, such humour was often a pastime for the educated, demonstrated by the evident enthusiasm for satire and jest as typified by Erasmus and Thomas More. In fact, she argues, “the Renaissance saw a remarkable upsurge in the prestige of jesting” (126). Since the joke drew on “the collective memory of flyting and the classical and medieval tradition of combative wit,” it was the domain of an elite: “Joking well is a sign of refinement and good breeding” (137; 132).

Cummings turns to Twelfth Night and its relation to memory, particularly to the events which have brought the play’s characters to the here-and-now of its action: “Throughout the play the Captain is assaulted by flashbacks, by a menace of unfinished business and unfulfilled punishment. The split selves of Viola and Sebastian are thrown about by this mental turbulence of past and present” (51). And while I enjoyed the following formulation, I am not entirely sure what this means: Sir Toby “is also an ass like Sir Andrew. He is just one fart away from becoming a permanent Aguecheek” (58).

Surprisingly, given the collection’s titular terms, there is only one essay on the Sonnets. Rebeca Helfer points out how memory “represents first and foremost a poetics whose principles derive from epic poetry and performance, and whose affective power […] is drawn from memories of love, paradigmatically, and stories about it” (27). A radical departure from this method is, she suggests, modelled in the ways in which Shakespeare’s poems so often anticipate futurity: “instead of a backward-looking Petrarchan gaze, the speaker looks to preserve the present for the future” (35).

Memory and Affect in Shakespeare’s England offers its reader a striking variety of topics, approaches, and critical methods. It combines the two emergent disciplines of the history of emotions and memory studies to texts both very and less familiar, in ways which illuminate both the texts themselves and the concerns of both disciplines. Baldo and Karremann conclude their introduction with the hope that the collection may “open new pathways and help foster further dialogue between the study of memory and affect in the literature and culture of the early modern period” (17). These rigorous and often engaging essays will guarantee the future potentiality of such further dialogue.

Peter J. Smith

Nottingham Trent University