‘Lest We Remember … Our Troy, Our Rome’

Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus (ca. 1594), and his most satirical play, Troilus and Cressida (ca. 1601), exhibit similarities that are opportune for exploring the functions of memory. ¹ A basic premise for this exploration is that memory is essential to the construction of identity, to one’s sense of continuity of the self over time and space, and to one’s relationship with society; and that memories and identities, as John R. Gillis has argued, are ‘representations or constructions of reality’ that are subjective, selective and changing, since ‘we are constantly revising our memories to suit our current identities’. ² For the Elizabethans, memory was one of the faculties of the human soul, together with imagination and reason, ³ and was, as Andrew Hiscock stresses, ‘intimately bound up with an understanding of how their everyday selves were constructed’. ⁴ Affective bonds tying the individual to other individuals are formed through memory ⁵ as are the moral and legal relationships established within a given social order, so that forgetting these bonds entails a departure from social normative pressures, often expressed as ‘forgetting oneself’. ⁶ In the early modern period, memory was also at the centre of identity constructions based on lineage and reputation. Remembrance of one’s lineage was often invoked in order to require a particular behaviour and to seek legitimation of one’s acts. Fame and honour, as acquired by one’s behaviour through memorable acts, especially heroic deeds, ensured that one was remembered and respected by others and that one’s memory lived on after death. Similarly, the collective identity of cities and nations was moulded by ways in which citizens remembered their past. They invested history with meaning in order to define the present, often appropriating the past in the interest of specific political agenda. ⁷