We Have Always Lived in the Castle ch. 3: the part about Constance making rhubarb jam had me trying to remember how much of the rhubarb plant is poisonous.* So I tried Googling it and now Google thinks someone's been poisoned. 🏰
*the leaves are definitely toxic, it turns out.
![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)
![Flyleaf of an old book covered with handwritten text labeled “Extract.” Text reads (as best as I can tell): “Our first parents when driven from the garden of Eden on looking back beheld their once happy abode [illegible] by that flaming brand some natural tears they drop’t but dried them soon, the world was all before them where to choose their place of rest and Providence their guide; they hand in hand with wandering steps and slow through Eden took their solitary way.” Underneath are the name Louisa Douglas and the initials LD.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:sf35qlpqpoqlbz64t6bqp5mi/bafkreifpn6khbvcguyzdxic2twfljayn4rie74zknskiz5wo27zkcixecm)
![Text:
"SOAVE SIA IL VENTO: [happens]
AUDIENCE: wow
human civilization was worth inventing actually
DON ALFONSO: okay
time to psychologically destroy four young people for sport"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:sf35qlpqpoqlbz64t6bqp5mi/bafkreicgw2b47yegtbkoeidnjpq2b6al7zdwuwfwebj2snnuocacvwutfu)
![Label for the book, reading "[ANONYMOUS]. Sea Moss Souvenir, Cal [Monterey, CA?]: ca. 1900. HERBARIUM BOUND IN WHALE VERTEBRAE. $5,800."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:sf35qlpqpoqlbz64t6bqp5mi/bafkreifmw6ib4tbsbzpiqa24tkjvb43riowcwqtdhht63i22zj2jorsy3e)
