ABSTRACT
Andrew Hiscock's far-reaching study, Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature, at once synthesizes and significantly enlarges upon varied approaches to early modern memory, offering something of a meta-history of England. The expansion of memory studies owes much to the desire to remember the past and speak with the dead, and it owes much to history – or, more accurately, to older and newer forms of historicism. Shakespeare's memory theatre dramatizes the negative capability of memory itself. With Memory in Shakespeare's Histories: Stages of Forgetting, Jonathan Baldo elucidates the complex dynamic of remembering and forgetting in the context of Shakespeare's history plays, specifically the second tetralogy. As memory studies and Shakespeare studies evolve in increasingly interdisciplinary ways, William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane, and Grant Williams' The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology, offers students at all levels a way to access and appreciate the historically interdisciplinary nature of the memory arts.
