‘Have you forgot your love?’

One of memory’s most common metaphors is that of the book, a material association that is supposed to give tangibility to that sometimes elusive notion. ¹ In Shakespearean drama, one of the famous examples of that need for concreteness and search for signs is when Hamlet asks for his ‘tables’ (I.5.107) in order to better remember the injunction of his father’s ghost, after having decided to erase all previous encumbering facts from the ‘table of [his] Memory’ (I.5.98), ² thus associating memory with the written text, in both the metaphorical and the literal sense. However, early modern practices of memory did not necessarily favour the written word, and paper memory was sometimes an object of suspicion, with or without the reference to Plato’s Phaedrus, the most often quoted origin for this mistrust. The topos that the use of the written word favours laziness and hinders the capacity to reminisce is thus found throughout the early modern period, from William Fulwood who, in his translation of Guglielmo Gratarolo’s treatise The castel of memorie (1562) recommended his readers ‘Take heede leste the writinge of thinges doe not hurte your Memorye’, ³ to Edward Reynolds, in his Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640), who pointed to the limitations of writing in the practice of reminiscence, opposing the external memory of the desks to that of the mind:

Plato telleth us, that the use of Letters, in gathering Advarsaria and Collections, is a hinderance to the Memorie; because those things which wee have deposited to our Desks, wee are the more secure and carelesse to retaine in our Minds. ⁴