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History, Memory and Re-enactment in Shakespeare
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Anthony B. Dawson |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In plays such as Henry V and Julius Caesar, the re-enactment of historical events forms the basis of the plot. But Shakespeare offers his audience the opportunity to do more than simply observe history being re-created. The texts of the plays actually draw the audience into the events themselves, thereby allowing the past to participate in the present, and vice versa. In this extract from The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England (available through Fathom), Anthony Dawson outlines how Shakespeare was able to achieve this feat of time travel. |
 want to begin with two exemplary memorial moments. The first is from Henry V, in the lull before the battle at Agincourt. It is a famous moment of social remembering, framed as reminiscence in the future tense:
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd--
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition...
(4.3.49-63)
As Harry presents it, the source of social cohesion is the potential for future re-telling offered by the events that are about to take place. Both the soldiers clustered around Henry and the audience in the theatre are projected forward, into a narrative moment that will give the present (or, more precisely, the near-future) retrospective meaning. The story will be passed on, and embellished ("with advantages"), gaining a momentum of its own, a fictional reality that will allow it, among other things, to be staged at the Globe theatre almost 200 years later. The performance curls around on itself: within the fiction, the triumphs that will be memorialized in narrative have not yet happened, but in order to engage with the scene, the Globe auditors are required to remember them. As a curious aid to such remembering, Warwick and Talbot put in an unexpected rhetorical appearance; since they were not present at Agincourt but loom large in Shakespeare's earlier tetralogy, the past that is thus evoked is in part a stage past, that of the Henry VI plays, which are recalled again in the final Chorus. (For this point, I am indebted to Patricia Parker whose question, when I delivered a version of this chapter at Stratford in August 1998, provoked me to think about why Talbot is mentioned at all.) At the same time the Globe auditors, in order to experience the pleasure of identifying themselves with Henry's onstage audience, have to "forget" the future that the moment evokes (i.e. the present moment in the theatre, with its attendant reminiscences). Engaging with the scene thus requires them to participate in the projection into the future of the narrative delights, but also involves recognizing that that future has arrived and now the battle is being nostalgically played out, "with advantages" and, at least figuratively, "in flowing cups." |
<i>Julius Caesar</i>
My second example is from Julius Caesar, when, following the blood-bath of the assassination, the conspirators kneel over the felled Caesar and literally wash themselves in his quasi-sacred blood. Having succeeded in erasing the man but not his memory, they represent themselves briefly as the actors they actually are, casting their minds and those of the audience forward to endless re-enactments, both political and theatrical:
CASSIUS: How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
BRUTUS: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,
That now on Pompey's basis lies along
No worthier than the dust! (3.1.111-16)
As in the Henry V passage, the play's performance stands as a memorial of an originary event, one that is strangely both present and absent. (And, incidentally, in both plays memorial power is linked to a shedding and sharing of blood.) The assassination is the model for a potentially infinite series of future re-enactments, in both the actual world and on the stage, of which the Globe performance is one example, even while it represents itself as the original. Such future performances will remind their viewers that these were "the men that gave their country liberty" (3.1.118). Despite the revolutionary optimism of the characters, the scene's uncertain position between past and future, between the event remembered and the prophecy of its replays, gives this performative moment a ghostly presence that hovers over the play the way Caesar's spirit comes to haunt his assassins. |
In both these passages, a strange kind of historical consciousness is produced as part of the performance. The audience in the theatre is not only a witness to a re-enactment of a singular historical event, but is also encouraged to see the performance as part of a re-telling that was implicit in that originating event. Witnessing the process of re-telling in the performance before them, the audience recognizes that what connects them to the past is precisely that that past contained in it the seed of this future. The past is its future narratives. In moments such as these, the theatre is helping to shape historical consciousness, but in a complex way. The past is being remembered--represented or re-enacted--but at the same time the very act of re-telling, of making history, is foregrounded by being made part of what purportedly happened. Narrative and performance are represented as co-extensive with historical understanding, including even the participants' understanding that history is being made at Agincourt or the Roman Capitol. Meta-theatrical awareness, in other words, is a constituent of historical memory, even as it destabilizes the "truth" of memory by underlining its constructedness. |
Iconic struggle
In the passage from Julius Caesar quoted above, as the conspirators stoop to partake symbolically of Caesar's blood, the decisive historical event is given a Eucharistic valence, and linked to a theatrical process of memorialization. The ritual is of course not "real"--it is invented on the spot, as part of a political strategy. It is hence a performance, its Eucharistic overtones a construction. (It is significant that Plutarch gives no hint of any such ritual, concentrating instead on the panic of the senators and the conspirators' vain attempts to calm their fears.) Such self-conscious memorialization does not, however, make the moment any less potent as a focus of memory. Quite the opposite--my argument is that the theatre establishes social memory by highlighting performance. The scene evokes the sacred without being so, suggesting a correspondence between sacred and secular ceremony while simultaneously exposing such a correspondence as a convenient fiction. (Of course, in the eyes of the Reformers, traditional Eucharistic ritual was itself a false performance that generated a phony presence, while Protestants saw what they called the "Lord's Supper" as strictly memorial.) Cassius and Brutus, intent on constructing a certain reading of the events in which they have taken center stage, are as yet unaware that the interpretation of such memorial images is far from stable. To produce such an image and send it out into the interpreting world is to lose control of it--memories and meanings are malleable, the act of interpretation potentially dangerous. |
One aspect of the play about which most recent commentators agree is its concern with the making and reading of images. (For a thorough and illuminating account of this strain in the play, see James Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm, 1985, pp. 122-66.) From the first scene, when Flavius instructs his fellow tribune to "disrobe the images, / If you do find them deck'd with ceremonies" (1.1.64-65), to the last, when Antony holds up Brutus as an icon of Roman manliness and Octavius quietly insists on guarding Brutus' bones as a trophy for himself, the play returns obsessively to the question of how images are produced and interpreted. Whether it is the superstitious Casca finding portentous signs in the storm only to be brought up short by the hermeneutically suspicious Cicero ("men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves"--1.3.34-35); Brutus "fashioning" an image of Caesar as a gestating serpent or reminding his fellow conspirators to construct the assassination as a sacrifice; Decius re-reading Calphurnia's dream; Brutus and Antony promoting competing versions of the assassination after the fact--these, and many similar sequences, keep before us the deeply divisive issue, for Elizabethans, of the value of images. Iconic power and the spirit of iconoclasm (the latter arising out of an acknowledgment of the former) are locked in conflict throughout the play, just as they had been in England for seventy-odd years before the play was written. |
In the often bitter theological debates that characterized the iconoclastic controversy, moderates argued that the dangers of images could be offset by the word, while radicals condemned all images as idolatrous. For most, images were acceptable as commemoration, just as the efficacy of the Lord's Supper was seen as memorial. The Edwardian Injunctions of 1547 permitted images as objects of "remembraunce, whereby men may be admonished of the holy lives... of them that the said images do represent" (quoted in E. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 1992, p. 450). Images as "memorials" were also approved by Luther, though Calvin was deeply ambivalent about them. The debate about images was not simply an esoteric theological scrum--its effects reached everyone in every parish of the realm. Elizabethan people had lived through a prolonged period of iconoclasm during which they witnessed massive changes in the iconic landscape that they inhabited. Eamon Duffy (ibid., p. 480) calls iconoclasm a "sacrament of forgetfulness," a paradoxical formulation since sacramental rituals are typically designed to generate remembrance. But the phrase aptly suggests the dialectic between cultural remembering and forgetting which was produced by iconoclasm. |
Theatre and trauma
During the struggles over "iconophobia," the nation had experienced a kind of trauma and, on the analogy of personal trauma, makers and consumers of narrative returned again and again to the issues the nation had confronted (see P. Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia, 1993). Thus the consuming interest in Julius Caesar and so many other plays of the period, in the construction, meaning, and value of images, may be read as a (perhaps unconscious) reminiscence of similar struggles in a related and painful cultural sphere. The pseudo-sacred ritual that I have taken to represent the ambivalent production of spectacle is a performance which, escaping the control of its participants, generates a multiplicity of meanings. The initial purpose is to bind together the participants in a ritual of violent community ("Stoop then, and wash" [3.1.111]). There are evident analogies to the Catholic mass. But the precise meaning of what is being performed is up for grabs. As Antony's later response, and that of Octavius' servant, make abundantly clear, Cassius' interpretation is far from stable. Further, an analogy to the Catholic mass is not necessarily calculated to win unambiguous affirmation on a late Elizabethan platform. The scene recalls the anti-theatricalist charge that the stage trades in idolatrous shows, and it seems to invite the suspicion of spectacle characteristic of both the reformed view of church ceremony and anti-theatricalism. Thus the moment's ritual analogies, its status as performance, its reminiscence of iconoclastic controversy, and its lodgment within a larger performance all complicate its reception--like the climactic moment in Faustus, it is both iconic and iconoclastic. The anti-theatrical undercurrent is the more apparent since the construction of the performative moment is as fraudulent (i.e. politically motivated) as it is expressive. The sacred ritual is framed with irony, implicit in the complex motivation and public-relations campaign conducted by Brutus before and after the actual event, and voiced sardonically by Antony when he enters a minute later to shake each conspirator by his "bloody hand." The play's metatheatrical resonances, that is, serve an iconoclastic narrative, even as this, the play's most intense moment, vividly proclaims the power of spectacle. |
The particular configuration of the English church, the so-called Elizabethan settlement, was a product of conflict and compromise, a theology that was dominantly Calvinist linked to a liturgy that retained ceremonial features not found in the stricter Reformed churches on the continent. The struggle to define a theology and a church government that were unique, and strategically placed in relation to both Catholic and Protestant Europe, contributed to a developing sense of a specifically English identity during the period. The iconoclastic movement was a key element of that struggle. In connecting the strife over images to theatrical spectacle, Julius Caesar not only recalls that history, but extends its resonance into a different cultural field. |
There is a curious passage in Titus Andronicus that may throw some oblique light on this matter. An unnamed "lusty Goth" comes triumphantly forward leading as prisoner Aaron, the transgressive Moor: Renownèd Lucius, from our troops I stray'd
To gaze upon a ruinous monastery,
And as I earnestly did fix mine eye
Upon the wasted building, suddenly
I heard a child cry underneath a wall. (5.1.20-24)
How strange that in late antique Rome an early German tourist should be fixing his wayward eye on a sight new to the English countryside of Shakespeare's England: a ruined monastery! Gratuitous as it is, the reference recalls the painful strife of the recent past, and signals how theatrical allusion can evoke a brief nostalgia. The alien nature of Aaron is framed within a landscape that is both foreign and domestic, "Roman" (Catholic) and English, suggesting perhaps that Aaron's "otherness" masks a hidden sameness. It is a singular and ironic feature of cultural history that, as Margaret Aston has shown, the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction and/or dissemination of a vast array of antiquities that had been housed therein led to a self-conscious awareness of the past in England, which in turn prepared the historical ground for an enriched national consciousness. Paradoxically, then, iconoclasm, the sacrament of forgetfulness, had a direct, material effect on the development of social memory and, in consequence, national identity. (M. Aston, "English Ruins and English History: the Dissolution and the Sense of the Past," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973), pp. 231-55.) |
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