ABSTRACT
In 1988, Bernard Richards published a brief piece in Notes and Queries entitled ‘Hamlet and the Theatre of Memory.’ 1 In it he observes with some surprise that in The Art of Memory (1966) and Theatre of the World (1969) Frances Yates does not remark upon a possible allusion to Renaissance memory theatre in Hamlet’s second soliloquy: ‘Remember thee? | Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat | In this distracted globe.’ 2 Noting that theatres were among the structures recommended by memory theorists as models for mnemonic systems, Richards speculates that the great unacknowledged referent of Hamlet’s soliloquy may be the Renaissance theatre of memory. Yates’s failure to remark on this possibility is particularly striking because in her books Yates advances the argument that Robert Fludd’s illustration of a memory theatre in History of the Two Worlds (1619) was modelled on Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. If it is possible that one of the most important memory theatres of the Renaissance was patterned on the Globe, then it seems equally possible that the Globe may have been imagined as a kind of memory theatre.
