Article: Shakespeare's "books of memory": 1 and 2 Henry VI.(William Shakespeare)

In Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI (1589-90), Plantagenet tells Somerset and Suffolk that he will note them "in [his] book of memory" and scourge them later for their gibes about his father (2.4.95, 101-02), and in 2 Henry VI (1590-91), Gloucester repeats the phrase in assessing the effects of Henry's marriage. It has canceled peers' fame, "[b]lotting [their] names from books of memory,/Rasing the characters of [their] renown,/Defacing monuments of conquer'd France;/[And] Undoing all, as all had never been" (1.1.99-103). Both expressions are part of what, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), Ernst Curtius sees as Shakespeare's preoccupation with the book. ...

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