My exploration of the cultural significance of ‘bodies of stone’ will be focused on the threshold of modernity, and in particular on the early modern stage. During that age, dominated by important epistemological changes, spectators would quite frequently find plays staging characters whose bodies temporarily or permanently experienced some kind of statue-like state. Frozen in death, real or apparent, fixed in the present moment or simply unable to move or take action, these characters certainly offer a spectacular unsettling of the boundaries separating the animate from the inanimate and the human from the non-human. In this chapter I would like to relate the stone-like bodies that may be found in a number of Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays to some theories about memory and forgetting that were circulating in late sixteenth-century philosophical and medical discourses. In particular, I shall attempt to explore the contrast between the immovable and the moving statue-like body from the perspective of the different attitude towards memory that these bodies entail.

Statues of memory

Early modern culture inherits from the Middle Ages a fascination with the power of visual exemplato assist the processes of remembrance. As scholars such as Frances A. Yates, Lina Bolzoni and Pietro Corsi have amply demonstrated, the so-called art of memory was a system of mnemonic techniques that, dating back to the Classical age, bloomed in the Renaissance thanks to its eminently visual power.