Madness and Memory: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear

Abstract

Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601) and King Lear (1605-06) offer those interested in changing memory systems a unique opportunity to gauge the practical and worldly attitudes toward memory that occur in the Renaissance. The plays do so by showing natural memory's relation to madness or the inability of individuals to function in the world. In providing intelligibility, memory, as Edward Grimestone writes in his Introduction to Nicholas Coeffeteau's A Table of Humane Passions (1621), relies on the proper registering, storage, and retrieval of forms. Memory serves the sensitive soul and knowledge by continually the common sense the forms which are consigned unto her. It also serves the intellectual powers and will by faithfully retrieving these same forms enlightened with the light of the understanding and purged from the sensible and singular conditions which they retain in the imagination and representing them general . . . under the form of good and evil.l In the plays, Shakespeare introduces Ophelia and Lear whose memories are clearly disrupted by madness. In addition,

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