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This imaginative and richly detailed study explores the deep connection between desire and recollection in Shakespeare's poetry. Drawing on cognitive science, the early modern memory arts, and psychoanalysis, as well as works by contemporary authors, the book shows how Shakespeare's Sonnets treat memory as a form of poetic narrative.
The Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets uses Shakespeare's poetry as a case study for the mutually formative relationship between desire and recollection. Through a series of close readings that are both historically situated and informed by recent theory, it traces how the speaker of the poems strives for a more agential relationship to his own memory by treating recollection as a form of narrative. Drawing together insights from cognitive science, the early modern memory arts, and psychoanalysis, John S. Garrison connects the Sonnets to the larger Renaissance project of conceiving memory as a faculty to be developed and managed through self-discipline and rhetoric. In doing so, he reveals how early modern thought presaged many theories that have emerged in contemporary neuroscientific and psychoanalytic understandings of the self and its longing for pleasure. The Sonnets emerge as a collection that contemplates the affective dimensions and conceptual overlaps that bind anticipation to retrospection in the fraught pursuit of erotic pleasure. Indispensable for students and scholars working on Shakespeare's poetry, this study appeals also to a broader audience of readers interested in affect, memory, and sexuality studies. Shakespeare's most beloved sonnets are discussed, as well as less familiar ones, alongside contemporary adaptations of the poems. Garrison brings the Sonnets further into the present by comparing them with treatments of pleasure and memory by modern authors such as C.P. Cavafy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Michael Ondaatje.
The question of what happens after death was a vital one in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Early moderns held surprisingly diverse beliefs about the afterlife and about how earthly life affected one's fate after death. Was death akin to a sleep where one did not wake until judgment day? Were sick bodies healed in heaven? Did sinners experience torment after death? Would an individual reunite with loved ones in the afterlife? Could the dead communicate with the world of the living? Could the living affect the state of souls after death? How should the dead be commemorated? Could the dead return to life? Was immortality possible? The wide array of possible answers to these questions across Shakespeare's work can be surprising. Exploring how particular texts and characters answer these questions, Shakespeare and the Afterlife showcases the vitality and originality of the author's language and thinking. We encounter characters with very personal visions of what awaits them after death, and these visions reveal new insights into these individuals' motivations and concerns as they navigate the world of the living. Shakespeare and the Afterlife encourages us to engage with the author's work with new insight and new curiosity. The volume connects some of the best-known speeches, characters, and conflicts to cultural debates and traditions circulating during Shakespeare's time.
This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact. Are erotic experiences heightened or deflated by the presence of memory? Can a sexual act be commemorative? Can an act of memory be eroticized? How do forms of romantic desire underwrite forms of memory? To answer such questions, these authors examine drama, poetry, and prose from both major authors and lesser-studied figures in the canon of Renaissance literature. Alongside a number of insightful readings, they show that sonnets enact a sexual exchange of memory; that epics of nationhood cannot help but eroticize their subjects; that the act of sex in Renaissance tragedy too often depends upon violence of the past. Memory, these scholars propose, re-shapes the concerns of queer and sexuality studies – including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body. So too does the erotic revise the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts.