The mass drowning of Protestants in Portadown is the defining cultural memory of the 1641 rebellion, yet it is a little known and highly contested incident. In this essay I return to the earliest recorded memories of the massacre found among the 1641 depositions to show how the Portadown drownings were represented by eyewitnesses as well as through rumour and hearsay; by survivors and by the bereaved; by refugees speaking within weeks and months of the event, to those recalling the event over a decade later. Identifying different ‘stories’ of the atrocity, and considering how they were shaped by time and circumstance, I discuss how a range of deponents diversely remembered the Portadown atrocity, and illuminate the tensions, inconsistencies and contradictions in their memories. By recovering part of the history of 1641 memories, I suggest that the 1641 depositions are a rich resource for memories of the rebellion but not its ‘facts’.

This essay explores the changing place of the 1641 rebellion in the memory cultures of Ulster loyalist communities before and after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Focusing on the loyalist centres of Portadown and West Belfast, I show that commemorative activities particularly flourished during periods of crisis in these communities as they moved (or were moved) towards compromise. The 1641 Depositions Project has argued that the 'memory' of 1641 must be replaced by 'history'. The potential for the transformation or dissolution of loyalist memories depends on the willingness of these communities to forget a long-established element of the expression of a 'besieged' Ulster Protestant identity, which in turn depends on their investment in the peace process. Nascent attempts to accommodate the history and memory of 1641 in post-conflict Northern Ireland suggest that perhaps the fledgling peace is not yet secure enough for such divisive memories to disappear.

You try to dignify what you do, but it's just misogyny. Age old male violence against women. (Stella Gibson, The Fall). The Fall is a television crime drama filmed and set in Belfast. The first series premiered in May 2013, giving BBC Two their highest ratings for a drama in eight years; the second series was screened in November and December 2014. It was created and written by Allan Cubitt, whose most significant previous work was the crime drama Prime Suspect 2 (1992), which shares thematic and stylistic correspondences with The Fall. The latter is haunted by two spectres that show uncanny correspondences: Paul Spector's femicide and the legacy of the Troubles. It follows two main narratives: Spector (Jamie Dornan), a serial killer in Belfast, and the Metropolitan Police Officer, DSI Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson), charged with reviewing the investigation into his first murders. Spector's chosen victims are young, professional women, whom he first stalks and then murders, usually by strangulation. His shocking crimes are contrasted with depictions of him as loving husband and father, and working as a grief counsellor. Gibson's public and private roles also alternate and overlap during the drama: while she ceaselessly works to catch Spector she also has sexual intrigue through casual trysts with junior colleagues James Olsen

Two Noble Kinsmen were omitted; on the other hand, Dawson and Minton admit, cowritten All is True was included in the collection. (Indeed, and co-written Titus Andronicus, 1 Henry 6, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure were included too.) The usual evidence for dating a play is missing in this case: there is no Stationers' Register entry, no quarto, no records of or allusions to early performance. Dawson and Minton's best guess is that the play was composed in 1607. However, there is a likely allusion to the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 in "set whole realms on fire" (3.3.34). If Shakespeare returned to Plutarch's Lives (used in 1599 for Julius Caesar) in order to write Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus in 1607-8, he would have found there the story of Timon of Athens (pp. 15-16). Coriolanus is like Timon in detesting ingratitude and leaving his city, and like Alcibiades in attacking his city and then giving it a reprieve. An upper limit to the date is set by Timon of Athens's avoidance of a five-act structure, which the King's men started using once they got the Blackfriars in 1608. There is something like an act-division structure to the first half of the play, but it ceases with the Timon-in-the-woods scene. Dawson and Minton explain that they retain the "conventional act breaks (though we acknowledge their arbitrariness), partly for convenience of reference, and partly because the first half of the play really does reflect that kind of structure" (p. 17n1).

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