Drama and the History of Memory

Abstract

The ways in which memory is normally discussed reflect the common terminology of past millenia. Even today, popular conceptions of memory are frequently couched in a vocabulary that was old in Aristotle’s time. Though the history of memory has been addressed occasionally by historians of psychology and glancingly by philosophers, there has been no comprehensive attempt to correlate developing concepts of memory with dramatic representations of memory. At the same time, memory as a variable in character construction over time has largely gone unnoticed. The work of this chapter, then, is to observe changes in how playwrights have constructed memory in the context of memory’s more distant intellectual history.¹

We have not only forgotten what it is to remember—and what remembering is—we have forgotten our own forgetting.

Edward Casey, Remembering