Memory and Making: From Simonides to Shakespear

The Greeks believed that Memory was the mother of the Muses. Memory and Making examines this relationship as ideas of memory divide into Platonic reminiscence, natural recall, and artificial or assisted memory, and as the ideas are modified by St. Augustine into Christian memory and used by Shakespeare the Henry VI plays, Richard III, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, and The Comedy of Errors. In the histories the ideas contribute to a preoccupation with individual and national identity, and in Hamlet and Lear to a way of avoiding madness and “intestine devisions.” The book also examines claims of “occult memory” in The Tempest and twins in The Comedy of Errors, proposing throughout mimesis as an “act of memorization through identification” and method of instruction.