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Amanda Watson
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Librarian, literature geek, knitter, opera fan, book history person. Writing a book about commonplace books and poetry readers. Opinions here are my own. She/her/hers. Queer and furious. 🏳️🌈
![First page of Chapter 2:
SHAKESPEARE, MEMORY, AND PRINT CULTURE
Amanda Watson
"It's so full of quotations!"
(Apocryphal theatergoer’s reaction to Hamlet)
Introduction
If writing is exteriorized memory (an association that stretches back at least as far as Plato's Phaedrus), then the printed word is exteriorized memory made reproducible on a large scale, and the history of the printing and reprinting of Shakespeare's works is at least in part a history of commemoration by an ever-widening set of editors, publishers, and readers. Print preserves texts by reproducing more copies of them than scribal transcription can, increasing their influence and their chances of survival. When Leontes greets Florizel in Act V of The Winter's Tale, he does so with a metaphor that links printing, paternity, and the continuance of the past:
Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince;
For she did print your royal father off,
Conceiving you. Were I but twenty-one, Your father's image is so hit in you
His very air, that I should call you brother,
As I did him.
(V.1.123-128)
For Leontes, printing signifies making a copy exact enough to trigger recognition. But Florizel also activates Leontes' memory, calling back Polixenes’ "image" and his “very air” from the past; the faithful replica is also a mnemonic figure. Leontes’ print metaphor draws together his (and the play’s) preoccupations with faithful reproduction and memorialization, suggesting that the printed word can stand for the latter as well as the former. Print commemorates, with varying degrees of exactness; it propagates both true representations and less-true ones, like the outrageous "ballad[s] in print” that Autolycus sells to the gullible Mopsa and Dorcas (IV.4.261).
Paulina uses the same printing metaphor to describe the infant Perdita as “the whole matter | And copy of the father” even though “the print be little” (II.ii.98-99). In so doing, she reminds us that print can change the appearance of a text…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:sf35qlpqpoqlbz64t6bqp5mi/bafkreihu5j37pv7nd2lkexwdv4knxdh5kn2taskbok7ibdprcwfoum56zm)
