Exporting Oblivion in The Tempest

Theatre and Memory: The Body-as-Statue in Early Modern Culture

“…The conversion of future into past actually operates also in the case of The Tempest's collocation in the First Folio, with this play intended as a prologue to Shakespeare's whole corpus precisely because it offers itself, as Baldo puts it, as 'a recollection of old issues, themes, characters, and worlds'. 41 What the play puts forward against the fixedness of the past is animation and the liquid dissolution of forgetfulness, which is the condition for forgiveness to occur. A striking example is Prospero's tableau in Act 5, 1: as the play approaches conclusion, the audience is confronted with the sight of the characters involved in Prospero's story of usurpation and exile.…”

Shakespeare and Memory

“…Postcolonial criticism on The Tempest – too vast to survey here – finds a similarly combative, loss‐inflected concept of memory (see, among others, Brown). In different ways, Baldo, in “Exporting Oblivion in The Tempest ,” Tribble, in “‘The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time’: The Tempest and Memory,” and Kearney, both in his article on The Tempest and in the revised version of this article included in his book, The Incarnate Text (178–223), expand and elaborate on the postcolonial reading of this play and on the function of memory in this reading.…”