[In the following essay, Roach argues that an incident recorded in the Diary, in which Pepys kisses the mummy of a long-dead queen, represents an attempt to “preserve a sense of the relationship with the past by making physical contact with the dead,” a gesture that inscribes the connection between static history and active memory.]

We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left.

—Pierre Nora

On the afternoon of Shrove Tuesday, February 23, 1669, Samuel Pepys, clerk of acts to the Navy Board, violated the corpse of Katherine of France, Henry V's queen. Pepys proudly recounted this act of lèse majesté in his remarkable diary. As the frank repository of so many of the theatre-loving clerk's observations and adventures, The Diary of Samuel Pepys has long provided theatre historians with their most valued eyewitness accounts of plays, players, playgoers, and playhouses during the decade that began with the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. But the reports that Pepys makes on the performance of his daily life—and by the word performance in this context I mean the kinesthetic and vocal embodiment of social memory and self-invention—are often no less theatrical than his accounts of the stage. They certainly can be more uncannily revealing, most emphatically so in the diarist's self-congratulatory memoir of fondling and kissing on the lips the partially mummified remains of Queen Katherine, the “queen of all, Katherine” of Shakespeare's Henry V, which were then on display by special arrangement at Westminster Abbey.

On the cusp of the most intimate of memories and the most public of historical events, this bizarre entry in The Diary of Samuel Pepys introduces a way of thinking about performance that discloses an urgent but often disguised passion: the desire to communicate physically with the past, a desire that roots itself in the ambivalent love of the dead.

Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is, after all, mother to the Muses. In the daily ritual of Pepys's inscriptions there occurs a kind of secular devotion to memory. By its protocols, the diarist transcribes the sounding lyre of Terpsichore, representing the purposive actions of diurnal social performance, onto the many-layered palimpsest of Clio's silent scroll. The terms in which I want to understand this ritual—memory, history, and necrophilia—underscore my view that the most promising approach to the history of performance resides in the history of memory itself. Since the seventeenth century at least, the relationship between history—as the archival record of events—and memory—as the transmission of tradition through performance—has been as troubled as the relationship between the living and the dead. Historians record that social and material relations with the dead underwent a fundamental change during the European Enlightenment (Curl, Ragon), a change that French historian Pierre Nora locates in the substitution of what he calls “places of memory” (lieux de mémoire), the artificial sites of the modern production of national and ethnic memories, for “environments of memory” (milieux de mémoire), the behavioral retentions of unscripted tradition, in which the dead, taking the form of ghosts and ancestral spirits, once participated more actively. As Jacques Le Goff sums up in History and Memory, “While the living have at their disposal an increasingly rich technical, scientific, and intellectual memory, memory seems to turn away from the dead” (85). Standing on the divide between history and memory, the dead and the living, Pepys ironically enacted a sensuous physicality of human continuity, a gestural Dance of Death that folded the erotic into nostalgia, what Georges Bataille, in Erotism: Death and Sensuality, terms the “paradoxical experiences of plethora and swoon” (104).

In this regard, Pepys's Shrovetide visit to the tombs of Westminster Abbey in the company of his family staged an exemplary performance. Mrs. Pepys and he were entertaining out-of-town cousins, including Barbara (Bab) and Betty Pepys, aged twenty and eighteen respectively, who hailed from provincial Impington and to whom the shows of London beckoned. Having been disappointed by the postponement of the opening of Thomas Shadwell's Royal Shepherdess at the Duke's playhouse, the party settled on an alternative entertainment, as the diarist proudly recounts:

Therefore I now took them to Westminster Abbey and there did show them all the tombs, very finely, having one with us alone (there being other company this day to see the tombs, it being Shrove Tuesday); and there we did see, by perticular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois, and had her upper part of her body in my hands. And I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birthday, 36 year old, that I did first kiss a Queen.

(Pepys 9:456-57)

Among the antiquarian delights stimulated by this performance must be numbered the diarist's pleasure in writing down its particulars. Queen Katherine died in 1437 at the age of 36, precisely the age of Samuel Pepys on the day of his assignation with her remains 232 years later. In the dialectic of history and memory, this was a significant encounter, one acted out, as if on a stage, in the most sacred shrine of English national memory by one of its most prurient blabbermouths.

The clerk of acts found quite a leading lady. As the daughter of Charles VI of France, Katherine lived within a polity that Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities calls “dynastic” (19-22). Henry V of England insisted on marrying her as part of the price of peace after Agincourt. Their son became Henry VI. Widowed early, Katherine married Owen Tudor. Their grandson became Henry VII. As an important functionary in a nascent bureaucracy of the seventeenth-century nation-state, Samuel Pepys, by contrast, lived within a polity that emerged from the decline, in Anderson's words, of “the automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy” (21). The turbulent history of events between Katherine's reign and Pepys's career is weirdly embodied by the restless perambulations of her corpse. It is more subtly (dis)embodied by the slow transformation of the abbey itself from an environment of memory, in Nora's sense of hallowed corporeal tradition, to a touristic place of memory, which contains “the rituals of a society without ritual” (Nora 12). When Queen Katherine's sepulcher in the Lady Chapel was disturbed by renovations ordered by Henry VII, her body was placed in a coffin with a removable lid at the east end of the Confessor's Chapel at the side of the tomb of Henry V. There she remained on view by “especiall favour” until at least the mid-eighteenth century, her most recent reburial dating from 1878 (Pepys 9:457n). By the time Pepys handled the fragile segments of this macabre heirloom, the torso had become detached from the pelvis and legs.

To say, however, as Pierre Nora does, that modernity creates a society without ritual is to underestimate the expanding power of the quotidian rites of secular society—institutional, familial, and recreational. On the day of the Pepys family outing in 1669, the stage of the Duke's theatre and the tombs of the abbey offered the early modern celebrants two different but related versions of what Polonius might call historical-pastoral drama, either one of which would serve to make more memorable their London holiday. The pastoral play, as exemplified by such oxymorons as “royal shepherdess,” stages the erotic possibilities of social inversion. The historical play, here put on by Pepys himself, usurps the place of Henry V on the stage most sacred to English dynastic memory, the place where all English kings save Edward V went to be crowned and the place where many others were buried. Osculation with the corpse of a queen of England, performed by an upwardly mobile commoner on the festive, calendrical coincidence of Shrovetide (Mardi Gras) and his birthday, locates in a specific anecdote tensions between history and memory, the individual and the state. On the one hand, the partially preserved corpses of kings and queens, no less than the effigies fabricated to symbolize the immortality of their “body politic,” insist on their physical as well as their spiritual presence among the living. On the other hand, the self-inventing carnivalesque of Pepys's necrophilic performance transforms the milieu de mémoire of dynastic tradition into a version of what contemporaries like Charles Gildon knew as the “Mimic State” of the English theatre (Life of Betterton 10). Here actors, perhaps the prototypical modern subjects, stood in for kings.

In Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, I have explored the ways the royal effigy and the performance of cultural memory are closely cognate in both theory and practice. Such a convergence of practices, embodied in Pepys's act of raising Queen Katherine's mummified lips to his own, activates the semantic network of a complex word:

Normal usage employs the word effigy as a noun meaning a sculpted or pictured likeness. More particularly it can suggest a crudely fabricated image of a person, commonly one that is destroyed in his or her stead, as in hanging or burning in effigy. When effigy appears as a verb, though that usage is rare, it means to evoke an absence, to body something forth, especially something from the distant past (OED). Effigy is cognate to efficiency, efficacy, effervescence, and effeminacy through their mutual connection to ideas of producing, bringing forth, bringing out, and making.

(Roach 36)

The key point here is that beyond ostensibly inanimate effigies fashioned from wood or cloth there are more elusive but also more powerful effigies fashioned from flesh. Such effigies are made by performances. They consist of a set of actions that hold open a place in memory. A theatrical role, for instance, like a stone effigy on a tomb, has a certain longevity in time, but its special durability stems from the fact that it must be re-fleshed at intervals by the actors or actresses who step into it, condensing the complex erotics of memory into a singularly tangible object of desire. As such, the living effigy, the actor, functions as a fetishized substitute for the corpse. And as such, the stage functions as a lieu de mémoire on which modernity presents what it calls “period revivals,” necrophile spectacles from the high canon that Nora could have been describing when he wrote of “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded” (12).

Pepys, whose stolen backstage kisses from pretty actresses made his diary notorious (Pepys 8:27-28), took particular note of the player-queens. Shakespeare's Henry V was not the stage version of the betrothal of Katherine of France performed during Pepys's lifetime, but the diarist's delight that he “did kiss a Queen” resonates equally in the one that he did see enacted, the version in rhymed couplets by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. In it Mary Betterton (“Ianthe”) played Katherine, for whose hand King Henry V, played by Henry Harris, and Owen Tudor, played by the great Thomas Betterton, are rivals. Pepys records his enthusiasm for the play and the production, with but one significant reservation:

And to the new play at the Duke's house, of Henery the 5th—a most noble play, writ by my Lord Orery; wherein Batterton, Harris, and Ianthes parts are most incomparably wrote and done, and the whole play the most full of heighth and raptures of wit and sense that ever I heard; having but one incongruity or what did not please me in it—that is, that King Harry promises to plead for Tudor to their mistress, Princess Katherine of France, more then when it comes to it he seems to do; and Tudor refused by her with some kind of indignity, not with the difficulty and honour that it ought to have been done in to him.

(Pepys 5:240-41)

Here Pepys sides with the self-fashioning new man in his morganatic wooing of Katherine. The Elizabethan historian Raphael Holinshed, one of Shakespeare's and Orrery's sources, put a transgressive spin on this liaison, recording that Katherine, on the death of Henry V, “being yoong and lustie, following more hir owne wanton appetite than fréendly counsell, and regarding more priuate affection than princelike honour, tooke to husband priuilie a galant gentleman and a right beautiful person, indued with manie goodlie gifts both of bodie & mind, called Own Teuther” (Holinshed 3:190). Perhaps the careerist Clerk of Acts Samuel Pepys identified himself with Owen Tudor. He certainly insisted on the dignity and honor required by the fact of the ultimate succession of the House, which Holinshed puffed up with a spurious genealogy, styled as “descended of the noble linage and ancient line of Cadwallader last king of the Britains” (3:190).

Onstage, in the spectacular living memory of Restoration theatrical performance, the physical production of Orrery's Henry V attempted to make a point with emphasis similar to Pepys's. The producers did so by casting the sympathetic Betterton as Owen Tudor and by costuming the royal effigies in a most remarkably authentic, if anachronistic, way. King Charles II, the duke of York, and the earl of Oxford were somehow persuaded to loan their actual coronation robes to the theatre for this production. The old prompter John Downes records that whereas Harris as Henry V wore the duke of York's suit and William Smith as Burgundy wore Oxford's, King Charles's own robes were assigned to Betterton, an unrealistic but powerfully symbolic anticipation of the eventual ascent of the Tudor (and perforce the Stuart) line (Roscius Anglicanus 52, 61).

One necessary preliminary to that ascent was the marriage contracted (or extorted) by King Henry V with Katherine of France. In Shakespeare's version, the warrior king woos (or coerces) the young princess through a translator, speaking in broken French but with unremitting purpose. As in Samuel Pepys's manipulation of the corpse, the king's triumph turns on a kiss, but a kiss that he explicitly performs on her silent lips as a prerogative of self-fashioning:

King Henry: It is not a fashion for the maids in France to kiss before they are married, would she say?

Alice: Oui, vraiment.

King Henry: O Kate, nice customs cur’sy to great kings. Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confin’d within the weak list of a country's fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate; and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouths of all find-faults, as I will do yours, for upholding the nice fashion of your country in denying me a kiss; therefore patiently and yielding. [Kissing her]. You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate; there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French council; and they should sooner persuade Harry of England than a general petition of monarchs.

(Henry V, V.ii.265-79)

Katherine maintains a deathly stillness through this speech and thereafter: the witchcraft is in her unspeaking lips; like Pepys's in the Abbey, Henry's vanity requires no response. Onstage in effigy, Katherine, once “yoong and lustie,” becomes a voiceless vessel of collective memory, as in life her body became the vehicle for dynastic succession and national destiny, only to be reinhabited by actresses from Mary Betterton to Emma Thompson as a mortified souvenir, putrefying Muse to the “makers of manners” in succeeding generations.

I am arguing here that the necrophilic impulse on which Pepys acted in Westminster Abbey serves the ends of performance in a particular way. It seeks to preserve a sense of the relationship with the past by making physical contact with the dead. It uses the word effigy as a verb. Before the eyes of his wife and family members, Pepys struck a bargain with the dead, one through which their tangible presence among the living could be performed. Like Shakespeare's Henry V before him, he sealed that bargain with a stolen kiss. Like the performance of Orrery's or Shakespeare's histories, he parlayed what can be known of history into what can be experienced, however phantasmally, as memory.

The next day, February 24, 1669, it was back to the office for Pepys, “doing of much business” (Pepys 9:458). Business for Pepys meant helping invent the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state, first as clerk of acts and eventually as the king's secretary for admiralty affairs. At both work and leisure, then, the relationship between memory and history was a matter of performance in the name of—and even in the place of—the sovereign. In this effort of imagining the future, effigies continued to exert their considerable charm, as they still do today in the tradition-bearing (and tradition-inventing) form of “makers of manners” of many kinds—beauty queens, carnival queens, queens for a day, drag queens, welfare queens, queens of the silver screen, and now the queen of hearts. In assessing the significance of these messengers, communicating between the imagined past and the no less fantastic present, historians of performance must reckon more boldly with Mnemosyne. Even in death—especially in death—she has witchcraft in her lips.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. Rev. ed., London: Verso, 1991.

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. 1957. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.

Curl, James S. A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the Buildings, Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western European Tradition. New York: Scribner's, 1980.

Downes, John. Roscius Anglicanus; or, An Historical Review of the Stage. 1706. Ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1987.

Gildon, Charles. The Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton, the Late Eminent Tragedian. London: Printed for Robert Gosling, 1710.

Holinshed, Raphael. Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. 6 vols. 1577-86. Reprint, London: J. Johnson, 1808.

Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (spring 1989): 7-25.

Pepys, Samuel. Diary. Ed. Robert Latham and William Mathews. 11 volumes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Ragon, Michel. The Space of Death: A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration, and Urbanism. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.