Shakespeare, Memory, and the 21st Century

For the past several posts, I have examined many topics in memory that relate mainly to psychology and brain science, but as my class nears the end of the masterpiece Hamlet by Shakespeare, I believe it is important to note that the study of memory is also an extremely hot topic in the humanities, especially in literary analysis. To write this post, I tried to learn about the relationship between memory and specifically the role of Shakespearean literature in society today, but I was surprised to discover that my research was nearly fruitless; after all, memory seems to be an important theme in Shakespeare’s works. Even in Hamlet alone, the concepts of memory and remembrance are discussed quite often, notably when Hamlet felt that Gertrude and other people’s commemoration of his father’s death was only pretended and ephemeral. Nevertheless, I was lucky to locate one incredible anthology, named Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance by Peter Holland--described by one reviewer as the “first of its kind”--that explore the relationship. Here are some of the ideas that I was able to parse out.

While the book is divided thematically into five sections, I want to focus primarily on the last one, which is about the incorporation of memory and modern technologies into Shakespearean performances. In one (page 281) of the articles, “Fond Records: Remembering Theater in the Digital Age,” the author W. B. Worthen entertains the question, “How are Shakespeare’s masterpieces relevant today?” He claims that whether or not Shakespeare’s readers believe characters such as Hamlet are apt representations of ourselves is irrelevant; the beauty of the plays is that they discuss a “slice of human experience in some way.” That seems to be the principal explanation for the ability of Shakespeare’s works to remain insightful even in today’s society--so much different from the Elizabethan era. As a result, the medium for performing Shakespeare may be subject to change. On this point, Worthen focuses on how contemporary Shakespeare dramatizes the impact of new technologies on the “performance of human experience.”

One such notable example that Worthen discusses is Michael Almereyda's Hamlet. Here's the film's version of the famous "Mousetrap" scene:

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Your reactions? When I first watched that scene in class, I was immediately struck by how anachronistic it seemed in comparison to other versions that are much more in line with the original context of Hamlet. While the fact that the “Mousetrap” is a combination of film segments rather than a theatrical performance was pretty novel, I felt that Almereyda’s version was just a confusing juxtaposition of modern society and Shakespeare’s language. However, I realized that the version still retained major aspects of the original Hamlet, most importantly the overall themes of the masterpiece. As Worthen noted, while the version ironically made no reference to theater performance, it proved itself to be a very different yet effective way of capturing and preserving, through “recording,” the “human action” in Hamlet. Almereyda’s focus on the “recording experience” may shed some light on how memory can play in Shakespeare in the 21st Century. Worthen lists numerous examples from the entire film: Hamlet’s video diary, the Ghost stuck in an elevator on a security monitor, and Ophelia’s photographs all suggest different ways that people and objects are preserved in memory.

Another bent to this memory concept is how actors and editors collaborate to produce performances of Shakespeare’s works. Also included in the collection with Worthen’s article, the essays of Michael Cordner and Margaret Kidnie, according to this review by Alexander Huang, how the intersection of performances and editorial practices is affected by cultural memory. The authors state that actors face a “clash” while performing between speaking their authentic feelings and reciting their actual parts. This problem results partly from the fact that editors can be excessively prescriptive in their interpretation of Shakespeare. This seems somewhat counterintuitive because certain limits on how to perform Shakespeare’s plays, whose fictional worlds are very disparate from today’s society, should be implemented so that the overarching meaning and themes are not distorted. However, the authors state that actors should not be told definitively what and what not to do; in actuality, the act of memorizing specific aspects of the play contributes, according to Kidnie, to performance disruptions. The freedom of the actors to play Shakespearean roles naturally allows the audience to understand society’s cultural memory. All of the actions and props that today’s Shakespearean actors make and use have their own narratives that contribute to their unique interpretation of the plays. 

In all, because the significance of Shakespeare’s works today is due to their representation of the timeless human experience, how Shakespeare plays in the 21st Century is not defined by how disparate they are, but how the editors and actors collaborate to perform Shakespeare with their cultural memory.