ABSTRACT
Early modern actors and playwrights were skilled in manipulating audience attention and memory. Iago's ability to manipulate memory is a key reason for his well-known skill in improvization. The tragic mnemonics sketched in Romeo and Juliet dominate Othello. Iago is a canny and skilled mnemonist, well aware of the susceptibility of memory to retrospective manipulation. Both Romeo and Juliet and Othello have quasi-conclusions that take the events out of the tragic frame and unbundle them, momentarily distributing memory across a variety of characters and devices, such as letters and retrospective narratives. In Shakespeare's plays the malleable memories become contagious, affecting other characters, moulding the shared experience of the events of the play both for the other characters and for the audience's unfolding perception of it. In the wake of the chaotic events, which inevitably divide and fracture the attention of the audience, Shakespeare uses the technique of post-action exposition to mould the audience's memory.
