Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T08:31:00.761Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 4 - “If I should tell / My history”

Memory, Trauma, and Testimony in Pericles and Hamlet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2021

Caroline Bicks
Affiliation:
University of Maine, Orono
Get access

Summary

Chapter Four explores the rear-brain faculty of memory, and considers both its increasingly ethical function and depictions of adolescent girls’ brains as key negotiators of this work. In Hamlet and Shakespeare and George Wilkins’ Pericles, Ophelia and Marina remember and testify to narratives of the past that are intimately connected to questions of moral leadership and to the preservation of suppressed communities and individuals. Analysis of Pericles begins with Wilkins’ contemporaneous prose account of the play in which he graphically describes the rape of Antiochus’ daughter by her “unkingly” father — an act that the play excludes. The chapter argues that Wilkins’ account is a suppressed history of tyrannical misgovernment that emerges in the play-text through its stagings of paternal violence and the recuperative memory-work of fourteen-year-old Marina. Next, the chapter explores Ophelia’s role in preserving and distributing the memory of regicide in Denmark’s recent history as well as the shared and suppressed histories of Catholics living in Shakespeare’s England. The chapter also argues that Ophelia evokes the exiled Catholic girls, training to commit themselves to God, who were no longer a part of English people’s authorized day-to-day spiritual lives and practices.

Type
Chapter
Information
Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare's World
Rethinking Female Adolescence
, pp. 127 - 159
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×