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Shakespeare and Memory explores Shakespeare's plays and poems in the light of current interest in memory studies. It sets out key features of the historical, religious, and cultural context of Shakespeare's own time.
List of contents
Note on Texts; List of Illustrations; 1 Introduction; 2 The Art of Memory: Hamlet; 3 Remembering Rome: Titus Andronicus, The Rape of Lucrece, Troilus and Cressida; 4 Remembering England: The Histories, Henry VIII; 5 Remembering the Dead: Hamlet; 6 Remembering love: Twelfth Night, the Sonnets, Troilus and Cressida; 7 The Memory of Things: The Winter's Tale, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Hamlet; 8 Remembrance of Things Past: The Sonnets, The Winter's Tale; 9 Epilogue: Remembering Shakespeare; Notes; Further Reading; Index
About the author
Hester Lees-Jeffries is a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where she teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature. Her first book, England's Helicon: fountains in early modern literature and culture, was published in 2007. She works on early modern literature, especially drama, with a particular interest in performance, and visual and material culture.
Summary
Shakespeare and Memory explores Shakespeare's plays and poems in the light of current interest in memory studies. It sets out key features of the historical, religious, and cultural context of Shakespeare's own time.
Additional text
"Why memory?" Hester Lees-Jeffries asks at the beginning of this absorbing book, but by the end of her compelling analysis it is tempting to think that there is nothing in Shakespeare's work but meditations upon, versions of, or entanglements in, memory ... Lees-Jeffries contends that "Shakespeare both engaged with and changed the ways in which people remembered", and she demonstrates this with some distinction ... Hamlet, of course, figures highly in any discussion of Shakespeare and memory, and Lees-Jeffries' readings of that fraught play are illuminating ... enlightening and thoughtful.
