* Henry L. Roediger III and Magdalena Abel, ‘Collective memory: A New Arena of Cognitive Study’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 359-61.
* Anne Barton, ‘Harking back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia’, English Literary History, 48 (1981), 706-31; a version of the article appears as chapter 14 of Barton’s Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984).

It’s nice to make a link between a brief new article in Trends and a longer one from the 1980s that I read when I was an undergraduate. Not in the 1980s. Quite. Roediger and Abel say that recent empirical studies are showing ways in which scientific thinking can give insights into a phenomenon that has already been of interest in the humanities. This is the kind of thing that seems promising to me.
      Collective memory is group-level recall, the things that ‘everyone knows’, but it’s also about how things are lost to the group consciousness. There is a nice graph showing how US presidents are forgotten over time. It is attributed some predictive value, so that (for example) it is hypothesized that by 2040 Harry Truman will be as forgotten as, say, Franklin Pierce is now. I find that a bit difficult to believe, what with the atomic bomb and the United Nations and all, but I dare say that there was a time when people would have said similar things about Pierce, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Ostend Manifesto.

Collective memory may have a characteristic structure, in that it ‘seems to be shaped by schematic narrative templates, or knowledge structures that serve to narrate the story of a people, often emphasizing heroic and even mythic elements while minimizing negative or inconsistent ones’. I suppose that is kind of what you’d expect; but there is enough in the experiments they cite, I think, to be quite promising. Perhaps there may be some more counter-intuitive characteristics of collective memory; perhaps literature already knows something about them.

Anne Barton’s article is about Ben Jonson’s late plays and the ways in which characters recall the time of Elizabeth I. She puts this in the context of a wider cultural phenomenon in early Stuart England: a nostalgia for various qualities that the earlier reign seemed, in retrospect, to possess. There was a similar nostalgia in Elizabethan England, for the time of Henry VIII. The past could sometimes seem simpler, clearer, more coherent, more leisurely, an altogether merrier England. I am going to come back to this in another post, because there are some very interesting moments where the text works with collective memory and, especially, exposes an interesting uncertainty about what is collectively remembered, and what is not.

Here I want to offer just one example of shortish-range Jacobean nostalgia for Elizabeth I, but one where it’s not clear whether the memory is operating or not. When Cleopatra dies, her maid Charmian remembers her mistress as ‘a lass unparallel’d’. Some people think this is a way of evoking Elizabeth I; the last place I encountered the idea was in an essay by . The idea is that an audience in 1607 might be led, by the challenge of ‘unparallel’d’, to make a parallel with the former Queen, who like Cleopatra was powerful, capricious, and challenging. Female monarchy was something they knew, and here it was again, playing out very differently, but with the flickering potential of a connection.
      I think the subtlety and doubtfulness of the lass / Elizabeth link might be the point. Around 1606 or 1607, when Antony and Cleopatra was first performed, Shakespeare left his audience to wonder whether they do in fact collectively remember Elizabeth so readily when they think of royal lasses and parallels. Individuals can have complex relationships to collective memory; the faint hint in Antony and Cleopatra might have produced an odd sense of isolation-amid-the-collective, the uncomfortable feeling that if ‘I’ am prompted to recall, ‘we’ may not be; or if ‘I’ feel indifferent, the furrowed brows and muttered prayers of ‘we’ might tend another way.
      Of course, in the simple sense that Roediger and Abel are working with, this ‘we’ all do remember Elizabeth, who only died in 1603. Perhaps she hadn’t been a ‘lass’ for a while before that. The experience of remembering, however, how readily, vividly, automatically something comes to mind, how confidently or otherwise that remembering assembles into a collective memory: these are important nuances.