Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: planting oblivion
- 1 Embodying oblivion
- 2 “Be this sweet Helen's knell, and now forget her”: forgetting and desire in All's Well That Ends Well
- 3 “If he can remember”: spiritual self-forgetting and Dr. Faustus
- 4 “My oblivion is a very Antony”
- 5 Sleep, conscience and fame in The Duchess of Malfi
- 6 Coda: “Wrought with things forgotten”
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
2 - “Be this sweet Helen's knell, and now forget her”: forgetting and desire in All's Well That Ends Well
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: planting oblivion
- 1 Embodying oblivion
- 2 “Be this sweet Helen's knell, and now forget her”: forgetting and desire in All's Well That Ends Well
- 3 “If he can remember”: spiritual self-forgetting and Dr. Faustus
- 4 “My oblivion is a very Antony”
- 5 Sleep, conscience and fame in The Duchess of Malfi
- 6 Coda: “Wrought with things forgotten”
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
Summary
“Anyway, it took a bit of forgetting, but I've forgotten now all right.”
“All's well that ends well, then.”
Early in All's Well That Ends Well, Helena, upon being told that she “must [up]hold the credit of [her] father,” declares that she cannot remember him:
I think not on my father,
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him. My imagination
Carries no favor in't but Bertram's.
I am undone, there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away.
This is just one moment among several in the first eighty-five lines of the play that concerns the loss of fathers. Helena here reacts to the Countess's inaccurate assertion that, for Helena, “The remembrance of her father never approaches her heart but the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood from her cheek” (1. 1. 49–51). What the Countess takes as evidence of sorrow for a dead father, Helena reveals to be grief over unexpressed love. The status of her tears, however, is complicated. Helena tells us both that she cries over Bertram and that the tears she spills “grace [her father's] remembrance more / Than those [she] shed for him” in the past, presumably at his funeral. She has “forgot” her father, but she also “grace[s] his remembrance”: how do we explain this paradox? The answer lies in the disjunction between the public effect Helena's tears produce and the unseen longing that motivates them.
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- Information
- Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance DramaShakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, pp. 44 - 64Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005