Stepping into memory

Earlier this year I was invited to contribute an essay to the programme for Omar Elerian‘s new production of As You Like It at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. My essay explores how memory functions in what has been described as ‘Shakespeare’s most elegant play’, and it is reproduced here with permission.

This company of actors take their places on a crowded stage. Each slips into a role that others have played before them, inhabiting a part they have previously made their own. We can’t retrace our steps without stirring up traces – without remembering what it was like to be the people we were before. 

Life gives us many such opportunities for reinhabiting our past selves. You could say that this is what memory is: stepping back into old identities and looking out at the world through those eyes.

Remembering, in As You Like It, is a communal thing. If Orlando’s manners seem familiar to Adam, it is because he functions as a ‘memory’ of old Sir Rowland. The whole community of the forest joins together in remembering a past: the ‘golden world’ of Robin Hood and his merry men. Although Arden is a new environment for them, it triggers memories of other forests, other leafy glades. Place is one of the most powerful cues to memory, as countless scientific studies have shown. Simply being back in the location where an event happened boosts your chances of remembering it in detail.

As You Like It even comes with its own neuroscientific model of how memory works. Jaques speaks of a rememberer’s brain as having ‘strange places crammed with observation, the which he vents in mangled forms’. Memory rehashes, reconstructs, rebuilds. Remembering is not about opening a mental media file and setting it to play; it is about remaking an event in the moment of recollection, from a collage of all sorts of information – including some that should not be in the memory at all. Memory creates a narrative that coheres with the self that is making it, even if that means twisting the interpretation along the way.

That makes memory perfectly editable. We are doing it all the time: retelling the past in a way that fits with what we know now rather than what we knew then, structuring it to align with what others have told us, the shared story we have negotiated. Memory is an artist rather than an out-and-out liar. It may not always be right about the facts, but it tells the truth about who we are, just as eloquently as something we create tells of the personality that made it. And it gives us a chance to live again, differently. In going back to roles we used to play, we can always tweak, edit, improvise, try something new – even if it’s not in history’s script.

The cast of As You Like It are playing characters feeling freedom, love and jealousy for the first time. None of the company are new to the emotions themselves, and none will forget how these roles have been played before. We often think of memory as being triggered by particular sensory triggers: scents, tastes, musical phrases. But pure emotion can be as powerful a cue. When I was researching the topic for my book, a friend told me that merely being in a mildly depressed state as a forty-something would trigger memories of being in that same state when he was a teenager. The actors of this company re-experience first love or first betrayal, and simply being in those particular emotional states unlocks other, intervening memories, creating cascading imaginative possibilities. Who knows how important that is to the actor’s craft? And whether some version of it is happening to all of us all of the time, as we live and relive our roles?

It turns out that this relationship with our own remembered pasts is central to a journey we are all embarked upon. Researchers are starting to understand how looking back at one’s own past from the vantage point of later life – what is known as ‘life review’ – is an essential part of gaining acceptance of one’s own self and its voyage. Those who are happiest in their autumnal years are not those who judge their past actions from the viewpoint of hindsight, where all too often the only possible response is regret. Healthy ageing seems to be about re-experiencing past moments of crisis and decision in a flexible, creative, imaginative way, testing out those decisions again and understanding how they were made on the basis of the best information available at the time. The past is never past. It is never locked down for good, but only ever in a state of constant renegotiation. You have memories to look back on today.

Charles Fernyhough is the author of Pieces of Light: The new science of memory (Profile). He is Director of the Centre for Research into Inner Experience at Durham University.