One of the most productive trends in Renaissance scholarship of the last decade has been a deliberate turn toward issues of memory and forgetting. Jonathan Baldo contributes significantly to this endeavor by showing the extent to which historical memory was problematic, “a threat to political identity as well as its foundation” (8). His theoretically sophisticated account of the complex role of forgetting in Shakespeare’s history plays builds profitably on Hayden White’s notion of the historical sublime, F. R. Ankersmit’s typology of forgetting, Edward Casey’s phenomenological treatment of memory, and John Frow’s two conceptual models for memory in the West.

By focusing on telling moments in the histories where forgetting involves displacement and dispossession (and much is made of the activities in Ireland and, to some extent, Wales), Baldo demonstrates how the second tetralogy plays down and moves away from the retrieval model of memory associated with the Middle Ages in favor of the textual model. King John is seen as a transitional play and, in the closing chapter, treated as a palimpsest with respect to the process of erasure, what is written over the chronicle sources and what rewritten from previous dramatic versions of John’s reign that Shakespeare could count on being conjured up by his audience.

The emphasis throughout is on what drops out of the playwright’s treatment of the early modern nation as a work-in-progress, whether owing to omission, forgetting, or suppression. The argument put forward is that, from the time of Shakespeare’s writing King John to the final play of the second tetralogy, Henry V, he became increasingly aware of his role in producing an imagined unity that reflected the movement from a dynastic realm with medieval rites and privileges to the modern nation-state “founded on a forgetting that frequently masquerades as remembrance” (8). This sense of development in Shakespeare’s thinking about how to craft and reform English national identity gives added significance to the book’s subtitle, Stages of Forgetting, a self-conscious evocation of Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History (1990) that brought to prominence the playwright’s demonization of all that stood in the way of English aspirations for nationhood (more often than not figured as French and feminine).

Building on the recent work of Garrett Sullivan, Jennifer Summit, and Lina Perkins Wilder on memory and forgetting, and that of Claire McEachern and Thomas Anderson on performance and trauma, Baldo makes good on his bold assertions that Richard II “is nothing less than Shakespeare’s daring revaluation of mnemonic values” (3), and that it “enacts the birth of historical consciousness and shows such consciousness to originate in traumatic loss” (11). Among the resulting virtues of this approach is the central place given to the Reformation — whether with respect to the revision of the ritual year or the renovation of King John — such that Shakespeare can be considered, among other things, as “a chapter in the English Reformation” (46). Far from merely recalling the past, Shakespeare’s history plays, in their steady exploration of the politics inherent in forgetting, interrogate and bring to light the motivations giving life to historical memory and its drawing out and writing over his own culture. And this culture, where Falstaff is emblematic of the uses of forgetting, is situated by Baldo as a “post-Reformation culture of rising nationalism, mercantilism, and self-invention” (72).

The forty pages of notes are of two kinds: citational (frequently exhaustive in their listing of sources relating to the point at hand) and excursive (several covering more than a page). Readers of the notes will appreciate the thoroughness as well as the insights that otherwise would have gone unrecorded. For example, the contention that “Henry VIII develops thematically the contrast between enduring memory and the threat of oblivion that pervades the histories” (154), and a recap of the percentage of Edward III currently attributed to Shakespeare based on computer analysis (158). This book will be a welcomed resource to students and teachers of Shakespeare, especially those interested in the contested memories of opposed historiographic traditions; to scholars concerned with the social and political ramifications of mercantilism and nationalism; and, above all, to readers drawn to the complex interplay of memory and forgetting in early modern literature.