ABSTRACT
In Shakespeare’s plays, acts of memory are articulated in a host of different contexts. Remembering can be intimately involved with bids for moral authority, power assertion or appropriation. Notable and repeated exertions of the faculty can denote intellectual prowess, a fine-grained sensibility negotiating change or elsewhere the mental life of those rendered inert by the burdens of the past. Equally importantly, in all Shakespearean writing, to recollect has the potential to bind and loose human communities, and in a play such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream this potential comes to be seen as profoundly unsettling. After their night in the woods outside Athens, the young lovers are awoken by Theseus, who demands an account of the night’s events. Like Bottom, the lovers find a clear narrative of their experiences in the woods to be elusive. ‘I wot not by what power—’, Demetrius tells Theseus, ‘But by some power it is—my love to Hermia, / Melted as the snow, seems to me now / As the remembrance of an idle gaud / Which in my childhood I did dote upon’ (IV.1.161–164). Theseus departs, and Demetrius adds:
These things seem small and indistinguishable
Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.
Hermia Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When everything seems double.
Helena So methinks,
And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,
Mine own and not mine own.
(IV.1.184–189)