9.18. Bodily Memory in the Renaissance and the Contemporary Shakespearean Imaginary

This roundtable focuses on embodiment as both a means by which to inscribe personal memory on an individual and as a means to transmit cultural memory through time. Keeping with the conference's focus on 'Communities and Change', each of the presentations examines how contemporary literary adaptations of Shakespeare's work builds linkages across authors even centuries apart. The presenters explore how each contemporary adaptation echoes themes and operations from the Renaissance memory arts, which evocatively depended upon invoking embodied memory, even if the memory art has been at times conceived as a mental or imaginative system. By showcasing an adaption from our own contemporary era, each presenter will consider how body as a vessel for transmitting memory across time and thus generating a network that binds contemporary authors to earlier ones as well as early modern bodies to modern ones.