The Art of Memory: Remembering Shakespeare

By Features Reporter Oisín Henebery

I am quite a fan of poetry. Ever since my school days, the draw of a set of couplets, the lure of repeating rhyme, has always fascinated me. I could never see how other students complained about understanding a poem, how they bemoaned the inaccessibility of a poem. For me, understanding was never even a prime motive. I would try to in the end, yes, but when I heard aloud a poem for the first time, I could not care less what it meant. The message was beside the point for that enduring moment. It was the sound, how it sounds that mattered. Indeed, my approach to architecture is quite similar. I can see in it an aesthetic importance irrespective of its function.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that Judi Dench’s recitation on television this week of Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 perked my ears. As much as I admire Shakespeare, my feelings for Judi Dench go much further than I dare admit. There is rarely a time when she has appeared on screen or stage that the act has not been magnificent. When she spoke on this occasion, one could detect an audience in stupor, as their ears methodically followed her voice. At first, I did not understand the meaning of the sonnet, but after hearing her, I had to find out.

Later, however, I came to reflect on something I rather regret. I came to regret the fact that a body of poetry, a corpus of literature, is not necessarily something on which we may all routinely call. The audience was audibly and visual amazed at Dench’s recitation. However, their amazement, I viewed, was not a response to her delivery, or perhaps even the beauty of what was said. Rather, the possibility that a human being may call upon a preinstalled poem, that he may have committed to memory words of such splendour, provoked surprise.

Now, obviously Dench is a famed actress of stage and screen for whom sonnets and lines are job realities. However, we are all exposed to countless poems, countless sonnets, countless plays in our life. A commitment to memory of these works is no more a commitment than one to brushing your teeth. Yet we seem now to inhabit a society where the value of such knowledge cowers to AI technology, computers, and stem subjects. That is not to diminish the great importance of these areas. Much of the luxuries on which we rely today spring from these fields. However, in pursuit of perfection in science and technology, recourse to knowledge, knowledge of things said, seems to have disappeared. Rightly or wrongly, fewer people are interested in whether you know some Shakespeare. They might be interested in whether your capable of researching information on him, but not of actual knowledge.

Now this is not a backwards cry for rote memory of lines, nor does it represent a desire to dismiss the supremely important role of technology in our world. I seek not either to suggest that we should all pick up our nearest novel and learn it. What I think is important though, in an age where information is all too easy to access, and all too easy to misunderstand, is knowledge. Being able to call upon a knowledge of a subject is an immense skill, but also, is of immense importance.

So, although we must quite rightly set about improving our knowledge of technology, we should not do so at the expense of forgetting that committing facts and works to memory. Being able to recite a poem, call on a fact in history, ought to be even more important in a society where facts seem disputable, and knowledge dismissed as somewhat unnecessary.