ABSTRACT
For the Middle Ages, a strong memory was held to be a sign of moral virtue and a strong and necessary guide to an individual’s ethical behaviour, so that, according to Mary Carruthers, ‘prodigious memory is almost a trope of saints’ lives’. 1 In what follows I will examine two of Shakespeare’s Roman plays that challenge the assumption that a strong memory, or at least a strong allegiance to memory, breeds virtuous behaviour. Both Julius Caesar (1599) and Antony and Cleopatra (1606–8) enact a clash of values associated with memory. Memory holds no more stable sway in Shakespeare’s Rome than does the recently assassinated Pompey the Great or the soon-to-be-assassinated Julius Caesar. Objects and devices that ordinarily serve to reinforce and stabilize memories—the calendar, images, statues, and monuments—often become distractions in these two plays and wear the mantle of forgetting as often as that of memory. Shakespeare’s staging of the death of Caesar, the would-be ruler over time and memory, reveals the fluid and uncertain nature of historical memory and the provisional and insecure nature of any rule over the past. Rather than an anchor to the past, memory in Shakespeare’s Rome is revealed to be a present performance, one requiring repeated restaging, and bearing all the uncertainty of a performance, including a variable and sometimes unpredictable effect on a public.
