Drama and the History of Memory

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. An exceptional interdisciplinary approach is Nalbantian (2003). CHAPTER 1: DRAMA AND THE HISTORY OF MEMORY 1. Useful for the history of memory are the already cited works of Edward S. Casey, Graham Richards, Gardner Murphy and Joseph K. Kovach, Douwe Draaisma, and Tulving and Craik. See also Yates (1966) and Coleman (1992). 2. For the original reference, see F. M. Cornford’s translation of The Republic (1945, 359). 3. See also Weinrich (2004, 15). 4. See DeConcini (1990, 4–10) and Coleman (5–14), for useful accounts of Plato on memory. 5. For Aristotle on memory, see Sorabji (1972), who translates the De Memoria et Reminiscentia; also Yates (1966), Chapter 2; Scott (126–127); Casey (14–15); and Burnyeat (107). 6. I have used the “literal” translation of Kenneth Telford (1961, 20). Subsequent quotations are from this edition. 7. See Simon (1994) and Garvey (2002) on Greek identity as relational. 8. In Segal’s Introduction to the Bakkhai, translated by Reginald Gibbons (2001). Line citations are from this edition. 9. My discussion of Augustine is reliant upon DeConcini (177–194) and Coleman (80–111). 10. References to Augustine’s work are from The Confessions of St. Augustine, translated by Edward B. Pusey. 11. See Nagler (1976) for a good collection of visual evidence on marketplace arrangements. Modern hypermnemonists frequently favor an array of houses along a street as a mnemonic device (Luria 1968). 12. Yates (1964, 210–211n.). Quotations from Friar Bacon are from the Brooke and Paradise (1933) edition, which retains the original textual convention of division into scenes without act divisions. 13. Sullivan (26–27). Sullivan’s well-researched book makes the point throughout that loss and gain of self-identity are often couched in English Renaissance drama in terms of forgetting and remembering. While he considers Hamlet in passing, he mentions Pericles not at all, concentrating more on forgetfulness in All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Dr. Faustus, and Duchess of Malfi. 14. Low (1999) notes that Hamlet forgets his duty to remember his father by offering masses to release his soul from Purgatory, and links that forgetting to the Elizabethan forgetting of Catholicism as a sort of killing of the father. 15. Shakespeare refers to a mole only three other times, one of them in the first act of Pericles (1.1.143). 276 Notes 16. See the chapter “Wriggle-Work” in Sutton (1998b), 25–49, who does not mention Hamlet in this context. 17. Greenblatt (2001) calls attention to the importance of remembering in Hamlet, briefly drawing on Plato and Aristotle on memory, and noticing that Aristotle comments on memory in melancholics—though missing the passage I just quoted from De Anima. Indeed, Greenblatt dubiously contends that Renaissance theorists of memory could not explain naturalistically the sort of compulsive remembering Hamlet engages in (214). 18. Death remembered as a mirror for mortality was a common illustration in the emblem book tradition, itself a mnemonic system (Engel 2002). 19. Here and elsewhere in my reading of Pericles I have benefited from a seminar paper by Kellee Van Aken. 20. Pericles enters a kind of limbo, perhaps literally. While it is possible to do something about a soul in Purgatory—that is, to perform the remembrances that will earn a soul’s liberation—the same cannot be done for souls in Limbo, who can only wait in the Limbo Paternorum. It might be fruitful to pursue Pericles/Limbo, Hamlet/Purgatory parallels. 21. Greenblatt rather sees Shakespeare the son remembering his father John: “In 1601 the Protestant playwright was haunted by the spirit of his Catholic father pleading for suf- frages to relieve his soul from the pains of Purgatory” (249). His contention and mine are by no means incompatible. 22. The Scottish school is most influential on American psychological thinking and leads to William James (Murphy and Kovach 1972, 21–23), and through James and Gertrude Stein, who studied with him, to American playwrights (e.g., Thornton Wilder) inter- ested in memory. 23. Details of performance and publication of The Rival Queens are from the Vernon edition, xiii–xxvi. Citations are from this edition. 24. Quotations from All for Love are from the Vieth edition (1972). 25. Quotations from The Fatal Curiosity are from the McBurney edition. 26. Camus evidently did not know Lillo’s play or any of the several other dramatizations of the story. His notebooks, wherein the play is referred to by its intended locale, Budejovice, make reference to no literary precedents, and in a 1957 letter to critic R. Thieberger Camus said the idea for the play came from a newspaper story. See Camus (1965, 46ff.) and Gay-Crosier (1967, 101, n. 11). Citations for The Misunderstanding are from Caligula and Three Other Plays, translated by Stuart Gilbert (1958). 27. The Dedication is quoted in Kaufmann’s edition (1963, 11). Textual citations are from this edition, which also has the German text. 28. But Faust has scarcely more than a single line in the entire scene, whose chief purpose seems to be to demonstrate Mephistopheles’ power. Nor does Faust “forget himself” by joining in the revels. 29. But the name of the river is not mentioned in the text, and it is not certain that the heal- ing referred to by the Chorus is forgetting. 30. Jefferson’s acting version of Rip Van Winkle is available in the Myron Matlaw edition. Citations are from this edition. CHAPTER 2: DRAMA AND THE MEMORY OF HISTORY 1. See Rehm (1992, 22–23) and Hall (1989, 62–69) for the political context of these historical dramas. Hall adds to and somewhat amends her hypotheses about The Persians in her edition of the play (1996). Notes 277 2. On Aeschylus’ departure from the facts, see Pelling (1997). Aeschylus, for example, manipulates the time and duration of the battle to link Greece to daylight and Persia to night, and arranges battle strategy to portray the Greeks as natural seamen and the Persians as “lumbering landsmen” (7). See also note 6, below. 3. On Aeschylus’ use of allusion, see Garner (1990, 22ff.). 4. See Harrison’s first chapter, “Aeschylus the Historian?” for a recapitulation of the argu- ments about Aeschylus’ accuracy. 5. Hall, though she does not use the term “collective memory” and is apparently unaware of Halbwachs, writes of The Persians as “a document of Athenian collective imagination” (1996, 5). 6. On the critical history of the play, see Hall (1996, 16–18). 7. Harrison is peerless in discriminating minute differences among the play’s critics over whether Aeschylus is a Persian sympathizer or Greek chauvinist, though both Kuhns and Snyder are absent from his bibliography. 8. For an explanation of this neglected distinction of the forms of tragedy, see the incom- parable and invaluable translation of The Poetics by Telford (118–121). 9. In the translation of Lembke and Herington (1981, 52). Quotations are from this edition. 10. On ring compositions, see Lord (1991). 11. Segal tends to overemphasize the tension between oral and written culture in theatre, however. Greek practice normally put the playwright in charge of the original produc- tion, thus minimizing the distinction between composition and performance. 12. Garner (21), notes, however, that The Persians is relatively bare of reference to Homer, compared with others of Aeschylus’ plays, thereby lessening the warlike tone of the play. 13. On the prevalence of metonymy in oral forms, see Foley (1991, 7–8). 14. See, for example, “The Arts: Assault on Aeschylus,” The Daily Telegraph (London); Nightingale, The Times (London); Wright, The Scotsman (Edinburgh); Drake, Los Angeles Times; all 1993. 15. As suggested to me in a seminar paper by Jay Ball. 16. I am indebted to Gary Williams for this suggestion. 17. Hartigan makes this point. 18. Said, Orientalism (1978, 56–57), considers The Persians in this context. 19. Castellani, (1986, 1–2), offers five reasons for the paucity of Greek historical drama, none of which I find compelling. 20. I am here indebted to Slater (1990), who somewhat less precisely refers to the formation of a “reperformance” culture. The early proscription against a repeat performance of The Capture of Miletus is generally taken as evidence for a tradition of repeat performances in outlying demes, rather than in Athens. 21. Ong is not discussing theatre in this context, but his words apply. 22. See Auerbach (1953), esp. his Chapters 7 and 8 on the twelfth-century Mystère d’Adam and on Dante. 23. See Vance (1978) for an explication of this notion. Enders (1992, 53) evokes it in reference to medieval French drama. 24. See Nagler (1976, 22–25), on medieval staging in the Roman amphitheatre at Bourges in 1536. 25. On the association of medieval drama with the Feast of Corpus Christi, see Kolve (1966). The recorded instances (see Enders 1992, 103) of a criminal being cast in a mystery play, so as to exploit his actual torture and death as part of the spectacle, form a sort of harrowing doppelgänger to the doctrine of the Real Presence. Such a contriv- ance was no doubt designed, devotionally speaking, to make the lessons of the drama “memorable.” 278 Notes 26. See Knight (1983, 19). Perhaps less obviously, plays addressing themselves directly to everyday life were classified as “fictions” (23). 27. Alessandro Portelli (1994) uses “history-telling” in the more restricted sense of an oral interview recorded from an informant by an ethnographer or sociologist; Paul Hernadi (1985) uses the term without a hyphen and without defining it. Neither uses it in the sense I am constructing here.

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