ABSTRACT
This chapter explains scenic citation in an attempt to demonstrate that the reception of particular scenes by early modern spectators was strongly inflected by their familiarity with particular stage images. The force of scenic memory here is to point up the moral contrast between the two superficially parallel stage pictures; though how audiences responded to their recognition of that contrast would have depended on how they were positioned in relation to both magic and religion, at a time when the valencies of each, as Keith Thomas, were equally variable. Scenic memory before that point was typically a random matter of singular strong impressions, like those of Robert Willis, quoted. Yael Zerubavel, writing in the 1990s, argued that the power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.
