Critical Survey

This 'Introduction' argues a case for extending memory studies with the study of commemoration, or of 'historical remembrance' (Jay Winter). Memory and commemoration play a vital role not only in the work of Shakespeare, but also in the process that has made him a world author. There is no single approach to the phenomenon of commemoration, as it occurs on many levels, has a long history, and is highly unpredictable in its manifestations. A serious study of commemorative practices involving Shakespeare – preferably with an international focus, and comparative in scope to include the afterlives of other artists – is likely to enhance our appreciation of the dynamics of authorship, literary fame, and afterlives in its broader socio-historical contexts.

Despite the importance of the epitaph in early modern England, Shakespeare is considered by most critics to have had little regard for the commemorative potential of the genre. But his English history plays take seriously the trope of the living acting as epitaphs for the dead: through embodied epitaphic performances in these plays, Shakespeare draws upon the cultural valences of the epitaph to disrupt and critique the very relation of continuity and obligation between present and past, living and dead, that epitaphs more conventionally propose. The embodied epitaphs of the history plays make a case for rupture rather than continuity, and challenge the notion that the present should imitate the past. Shakespeare uses these epitaphs to interrogate what it means, and costs, to remember the past by remaking the present in its image.

This essay focuses on David Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee held in 1769 and the Royal Gala of 1830, comparing the two Stratford-based events in function, festivity, and form. Both occasions furthered Shakespeare's status as the national Bard and both included processions and grand balls. But there were striking differences in format. Some of the divergences include issues of class, while others echoed Shakespearean debates, such as the tension between page and stage Shakespeare. By looking at the commemorations side-by-side, we will be able to use the two gatherings as a microcosm to help us chart the various changes in the cultural and theatrical climate in London and Stratford vis-à-vis Shakespeare during the half-century that separated the festivities.

The continuous active presence within contemporary culture of a body of work such as Shakespeare's induces that form of amnesis encapsulated in Ben Jonson's phrase 'not for an age, but for all time': that the past may be eternally present. Rituals of commemoration, such as the annual 'Shakespeare's Birthday Celebrations' held in Stratford-upon-Avon, can operate to cultivate such obliviousness, as if the author were still alive and still piling on the years. A number of modern critical strategies in literary theory, historical analysis, textual editing, and creative appropriation have offered ways of generating anamnesis, jolting the reader into remembering that the past and the present are radically discontinuous. When Heminge and Condell introduced the First Folio, they explicitly connected the absence of the author, by death departed, with the posthumous reconstruction of his works. Their language mingles epitaph and preface, mourning and celebration. The plays, maimed, and deformed, dispersed like scattered body parts, are here restored and reanimated; but their completeness is haunted by the death of their author. The edited plays now stand in for the Shakespearean body, pieced together and made whole, cur'd, and perfect of their limbes. A living monument, a resurrection of the dead, a corpse re-membered. But what is the relationship between memory and the reality it remembers? In the garden of the church of St Mary the Virgin in Aldermanbury a memorial plaque, dedicated in 1896 to Heminge and Condell, states that the world owes to them 'all that it calls Shakespeare'; in other words, all that we have left. This monument ironically commemorates not Shakespeare, but Shakespeare's first editors; memorializes not the author, but the process via which the author's works are transmitted to the modern reader and playgoer. Shakespeare's grave in Holy Trinity Church may also be, metaphorically and even perhaps literally, an empty tomb. This paper examines the interactions of memory as recollection and memory as re-membering.

In late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, hundreds of Shakespeare clubs met regularly to read, study, and perform Shakespeare's works. Their motives ranged from personal improvement to community betterment, and they were frequently involved in initiatives designed to memorialize Shakespeare and celebrate their own intellectual achievements. Dozens of public gardens, libraries, and other civic projects are a result of the efforts of clubwomen, in small towns and large cities. Privately, club members also memorized Shakespeare by incorporating a variety of domestic practices into their Shakespeare-centered labors, which preserved Shakespeare as a prominent part of American cultural life.

This article examines the celebrations organised for the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary in three American locations: Wellesley, MA; Atlanta, GA; and Grand Forks, ND. By focusing on these hitherto neglected events, the article extends the investigations, initiated by Thomas Cartelli and Coppélia Kahn, into the ways in which the Tercentenary activities in the U.S. participated in the contemporaneous debates concerning American national identity. These investigations have until recently concentrated almost exclusively on the Tercentenary festivities organised in the metropolitan centre of New York City. An examination of the provincial celebrations in regions as diverse as New England, the South, and the Midwest, indicates that the Shakespeare Tercentenary provided a platform for the negotiation of a complex network of interrelated, and sometimes conflicting, national and local identities.

David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937) is the most ambitious attempt in English literary writing to commemorate the experience of the Great War. In its allusions to Shakespeare's Henry V Jones is less interested in the king than in 'Fluellen' and his mantra, 'the disciplines of war'. In Parenthesis de-centres not just Henry V, not just Shakespeare, but the conventional reading of English literary history itself. Important as the idea of discipline was to Jones - disciplines of war, of memory, of art - in the figure of 'Dai Great-coat' he celebrates an excess that challenges and eludes what 'Fluellen' represents. In doing so Jones exposes the uses and the limits of Shakespeare for the creative artist writing in English, not least when it comes to representing the experience of war and the action of memory.

Shakespeare's histories have been staged as cycles increasingly often in the post-war era, with cycles from the 1950s and 60s proving particularly influential on successive cycles. But the features of those early cycles are due as much to the commemorative contexts of their production as to the qualities of their interpretations. Cycles were mounted by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre for the 1951 Festival of Britain, an event ambiguously commemorative of both older and more recent pasts that also looked self-consciously ahead to an increasingly technological future. A decade later, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged their 'Wars of the Roses'; acclaimed as innovative, it is in fact shaped by the same commemorative impulse as the Festival of Britain cycles. Asking why the histories were appealing and how they fit - or failed to fit - into their commemorative, celebratory contexts elucidates how and why the histories have become essential to the post-war English stage.

Anywhere on the 65 Global Distress PAUL McLOUGHLIN

Stylus The Wind Farm JOHN LEVETT

What He Says Is Things I'd Like to Say Al’s Garden Nurses’ Station ROSIE GARNER

Notes on contributors