Memory in Shakespeare's Histories

Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England

Jonathan Baldo

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Hardback

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English

Routledge
22 December 2011

Humanities

Series: Routledge Studies in Shakespeare

A distinguishing feature of Shakespeare’s later histories is the prominent role he assigns to the need to forget. This book explore the ways in which Shakespeare expanded the role of forgetting in histories from King John to Henry V, as England contended with what were perceived to be traumatic breaks in its history and in the fashioning of a sense of nationhood. For plays ostensibly designed to recover the past and make it available to the present, they devote remarkable attention to the ways in which states and individuals alike passively neglect or actively suppress the past and rewrite history. Two broad and related historical developments caused remembering and forgetting to occupy increasingly prominent and equivocal positions in Shakespeare’s history plays: an emergent nationalism and the Protestant Reformation. A growth in England’s sense of national identity, constructed largely in opposition to international Catholicism, caused historical memory to appear a threat as well as a support to the sense of unity. The Reformation caused many Elizabethans to experience a rupture between their present and their Catholic past, a condition that is reflected repeatedly in the history plays, where the desire to forget becomes implicated with traumatic loss. Both of these historical shifts resulted in considerable fluidity and uncertainty in the values attached to historical memory and forgetting. Shakespeare’s histories, in short, become increasingly equivocal about the value of their own acts of recovery and recollection.

By: Jonathan Baldo
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Volume: 8
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 560g
ISBN: 9780415896832
ISBN 10: 0415896835
Series: Routledge Studies in Shakespeare
Pages: 218
Publication Date: 22 December 2011
Audience: College/higher education , Primary , A / AS level
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jonathan Baldo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rochester, USA.

Reviews for Memory in Shakespeare's Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England

'This book will be a welcomed resource to students and teachers of Shakespeare, especially those interested in the contested memories of opposed historiographic raditions; to scholars concerned with the social and political ramifications of mercantilism and nationalism; and, above all, to readers drawn to the complex interplay of memory and forgetting in early modern literature.' - Renaissance Quarterly