Memory and Making

About the Book

The Greeks believed that Memory was the mother of the Muses. Memory and Making examines this relationship as ideas of memory divide into Platonic reminiscence, natural recall, and artificial or assisted memory, and as the ideas are modified by St. Augustine into Christian memory and used by Shakespeare the Henry VI plays, Richard III, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, and The Comedy of Errors. In the histories the ideas contribute to a preoccupation with individual and national identity, and in Hamlet and Lear to a way of avoiding madness and “intestine devisions.” The book also examines claims of “occult memory” in The Tempest and twins in The Comedy of Errors, proposing throughout mimesis as an “act of memorization through identification” and method of instruction.

About the Author

In 1996, Jerome Mazzaro retired from the State University at Buffalo where he had long been Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature. Born in Detroit, Michigan, he earned academic degrees from the State University of Iowa and Wayne State University and has published widely as a critic, scholar, and poet. His Transformations in the Renaissance English Lyric (1970) was named an MLA Scholar’s Library Selection. Other works include well-regarded studies of Dante, Luigi Pirandello, Robert Lowell, and William Carlos Williams as well as four volumes of poetry and a verse translation of Juvenal’s Satires. In 1964, he was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and in 2001, he moved to Manhattan where he currently resides.