‘Must I Remember?’ Artificial Memory Systems and Early Modern England Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Jonathan Joseph Michael Day. June 2014 Abstract My thesis traces the evolution of artificial memory systems from classical Greece to early modern England to explore memorial traumas and the complex nature of a very particular way of remembering. An artificial memory system is a methodology to improve natural memory. Classical artificial memory systems employ an architectural metaphor, emphasising regularity and striking imagery. Classical memory systems also frequently describe the memory as a blank page. This thesis follows the path of transmission of these ideas and the perennial relationship between memory and forgetting and memory and fiction, as well as the constant threat of memorial collapse. ii Contents Introduction: 1–6 Chapter One: 7–39 Creation and Destruction: Simonides and the Classical Art of Memory Chapter Two: 40–65 Neoplatonism: Memory, Forgetting and Theatres Chapter Three: 66–96 Medieval Memory: Dreams of Texts Chapter Four: 97–129 Cicero in the Early Modern School: Grammar, Rhetoric and Memory Chapter Five: 130–161 Traumas of Memory: The English Reformation Chapter Six: The 162–193 Materials of Early Modern Memory Chapter Seven: 194–224 Hamlet; ‘Rights of Memory’ and ‘Rites of Memory’ Coda 225–231 Figures: 232–238 Bibliography 239–256 iii List of Figures Figure 1. Ramon Lull, Ars Brevis ([Montpellier (?)], 1308), cited in Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Lull Reader, ed. by Anthony Bonner (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 300. Figure 2. Ramon Lull, Ars Brevis ([Montpellier (?)], 1308), cited in Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Lull Reader, ed. by Anthony Bonner (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 302. Figure 3. Ramon Lull, Ars Brevis ([Montpellier (?)], 1308), cited in Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Lull Reader, ed. by Anthony Bonner (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 305. Figure 4. Ramon Lull, Ars Brevis ([Montpellier (?)], 1308), cited in Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Lull Reader, ed. by Anthony Bonner (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 307. Figure 5. Jehan de Beau-Chesne, A Book Containing Divers Sorts of Hands (London, 1571), p. 5. Figure 6. Peacham Drawing of Titus Andronicus, from Titus Andronicus, ed. by Eugene M. Waith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 21. Figure 7. Thomas Fisher, Chapel of the Trinity at Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire [1804?], ART Vol. d58 nos.1, 3. reproduced at <http://www.folger.edu/html/folger_institute/cultural_stress/church_idolatry_1.html>, accessed on 3.12.12. iv Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to a number of people for their invaluable help and guidance in the research and writing of this thesis. Professor Nandini Das has provided tireless support, excellent advice and seemingly inexhaustible patience. Dr Michael Davies and Dr Nick Davis have also given constructive feedback and very valuable suggestions during the writing of the thesis, helping to improve it at every stage. I am also indebted to my fellow research students in the School of English at the University of Liverpool for providing willing ears and perceptive commentary on various sections of the thesis that have been presented in the form of academic papers. In researching this thesis I have benefited greatly from the support of the administrative staff of the School of English who have assisted me whenever an issue has arisen. I am also grateful to the various academic libraries that have enabled this research, the staff of which have proven invariably positive. I also thank my family for their warmth and help during the writing of the thesis. Finally, I would like to thank Maxi Briggs, whose love and unfaltering support has contributed so much to the research and writing of this project. It goes without saying that the responsibility for errors of argument or fact contained within is solely my own. v Presentation Principles I have throughout tried to maintain both clarity and fidelity to the source material. The original interchangeable usage of i/j, u/v, vv/w and long s/s have been silently regularised according to modern practice. I have followed MHRA guidelines in the presentation of citations. vi Introduction ‘A man’s memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities.’1 Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ relates the tale of a Shakespeare scholar who inherits the memory of Shakespeare. It is a gift given by another academic, who had received it in his turn. The memory proves to be intensely problematic. Shakespeare’s memory arrives slowly and in a fragmented manner, and is accompanied by confusions of the narrator’s own memory. The narrator begins to think of the two memories as a palimpsest, and his increasing recovery of Shakespeare’s memory is accompanied by his own forgetting of the experiences of modern life. Finally, the narrator chooses to give the memory away, having explained the burden and complexity of such a gift. ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ captures in microcosm some of the main thrusts of this thesis. Borges writes of Augustine’s caves and palaces of memory as well as the aforementioned idea of memory as palimpsest. These two models of memory, spatial and textual, and their interrelationship, provide a central structural principle of the thesis. Equally, in Borges’s telling Shakespeare’s memory is partial, burdensome and associated with loss and the possibility of destruction; the man who gives the memory to the narrator has inherited it from a man dying on a battlefield, whilst as indicated above the narrator begins to forget his own life. This idea of memory and potential destruction is explored throughout the thesis. Finally, the memory of Shakespeare in Borges’s account is a fraught legacy given from one person to another. This thesis of course draws upon and must acknowledge the pioneering work of Frances Yates in the field, as all studies on early modern memory and the artificial memory systems written in her wake should.2 Before this thesis can be situated in relation to other critical works on memory, a brief summary of my research is in order. There is a kind of circularity inherent inevitably in memory and thinking about memory. In many ways the concluding chapter returns to the themes of the beginning of the thesis; so here, the discussion begins at the end. 1 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’, in Collected Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges, ed. and trans. by Andrew Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1999), pp. 1078–95 (p. 1089). 2 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Penguin, 1966). 1 'Must I remember'? Hamlet's famous quotation has generated a whirlwind of words, words, words. The issue of memory in the play has long been recognised as crucial; Hamlet is instructed to ‘remember me’ by the ghost of his father and speaks insistently about the centrality of his memory. However, given this context the suggestion of compulsion and the inability to forget seem problematic. Must Hamlet remember? The thorny issue of whether Hamlet must remember and the relationship between memory and forgetting is fully evident in Hamlet’s words that establish memory as both necessary and contingent: ‘Remember thee! | Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat | In this distracted globe. Remember thee? | Yea, from the table of my memory | I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, | All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past [...]’.3 Hamlet’s memory depends upon the globe (both his head and the wooden stage upon which he stands) and the tables of his memory, which simultaneously stage the erasure of all other memories. These two approaches of memory as a place and of memory as a writing tablet provide the means into answering the question of whether Hamlet must remember, and how. These two approaches reach back to the origins of the art of memory, a now widely forgotten group of methods for ordering memories and thinking that emerged from a classical Greek and Roman context, and strongly shaped the classically inflected culture of early modern England. The art of memory is traced from its origins in classical Greece through Rome and to medieval England, culminating in a reading of Shakespeare’s classically orientated education. Along the way the evolution of the idea in different contexts is explored, from the physical streets of Rome through the dream-shaped medieval memories, and to the bookishness of Shakespeare’s schoolroom learning. As well as this, the persistent threat of forgetting and its unshakeable relationship to remembering is explored. In diverse periods, memory is not only haunted by forgetting but forgetting is haunted by the inescapability of memory; must I remember? Throughout the thesis a variety of memorial texts are considered, helping to locate the evolution of the arts of memory in differing genres and contexts. As part of this approach, the thesis culminates in a reading of Hamlet, a central memorial text situated in a period in which memory seems 3 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), I. 5. 95–100. 2 to loom inevitably. The close interrelationship of memory and forgetfulness is frequently interrogated. The associations between memorialising and fiction are also explored across the diverse literary texts considered. A fear of forgetting leads to attempts to remember and memorialise. Insistent attempts to remember in their turn generate fiction, with concomitant negative effects upon what is being remembered. The perennial links between memory and story suggest that this is a central fact of memorialising. As mentioned above, the significance of the models of text and architecture for memory form one of the central concerns of the thesis. These two patterns for memorialising recur again and again and are deeply embedded within the history of thought.