10Never Forget a Quotation
“The best books are those whose readers think they could have written them.”
— Blaise Pascal (1623–62)
PREPARING YOURSELF
If you are studying English literature or training for the dramatic arts, this is the chapter for you. In English literature you can expect to sit one or more of three types of examination: open book, unprepared text or closed book. In open book exams, you are allowed to take your own text into the exam and you can refer to your own handwritten margin notes. For this type of exam you must have a thorough knowledge of the text and its context, as it is your understanding, commentary and analysis that are being tested.
If your literature exam involves passages of unprepared text, you will need to rely on your understanding of literary techniques to write a response to the text, but at least you have the words in front of you – no problems of forgetting characters’ names or key themes and how they are related.
In closed book exams, however, you are not afforded the luxury of seeing any text, and under these conditions you must be able to produce short quotations from memory, as well as providing evidence that you have a clear insight into the work itself. You will not be expected to quote at great length, but having key lines of poetry, phrases of prose or dramatic speeches fixed confidently in your mind will enable you to support your points with speed, assurance and skill – which will impress examiners no end.
In this chapter I will outline a simple method for learning quotes similar to a very successful one used by the Greeks and Romans, and by some actors today. It can dramatically cut down the amount of time you devote purely to arduous rote learning, allowing more time to get on with the job of interpreting a text’s meaning. If you are taking a course in theatre studies or performing arts, you will find this method invaluable for learning lines for performance as well as for exams.
The process of memorising poetry, prose or lines from plays should be a joy, not a burden. It’s not only the pleasure that’s removed by repetition of a line ad infinitum; the significance and appeal of the words can also get lost as they dissolve into a bland, rhythmically predictable singsong. This is why I’m reluctant to play some of my favourite CDs too often, lest their attraction should be spoiled by overkill.
If you remember words produced from images rather than relying purely on the sounds made by your tongue, you will have a richer appreciation of the literature you are studying, longer retention of it and a greater, more significant comprehension of its meaning.
In chapter eleven, I will show you how to learn a basic foreign vocabulary by mentally placing key images in a familiar town or village. You won’t be surprised to find that to remember quotes you’ll need to adopt a similar method. As always, the three essential, inseparable components of this method are imagination, association and location.
Remembering short quotes
There are a number of ways to store individual quotes or separate lines of poetry ready for deployment in an exam. The best way is to “house” them all in a certain building or contained area in the same way that you will house foreign vocabulary in certain parts of town in chapter eleven and chemical elements around your school or college in chapter thirteen. As it’s the written word we’re dealing with, you could store them in your local library or bookshop. In some cases, a single image attached to an object, piece of furniture or special feature in the building may be enough to trigger off the memory of a whole quote.
What would your key image be to remind you of the opening line of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night?
•“If music be the food of love, play on …”
Mine is a heart-shaped chocolate guitar. Positioned at the entrance of my local bookshop, music is wafting from the guitar, luring in passers-by.
•“… To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub …”
How would you remember this famous line-and-a-half and that it occurs in Act III, scene 1 of Hamlet?
I would imagine the area around the cash tills as a stage. The curtain rises to reveal Charlie’s Angels (CA = 31), who are rubbing tears from their eyes. They are grieving at the sight of a dead man who appears to be asleep. Notice how this time I have combined III and 1 to give me the number 31. You should decide for yourself how best to use the systems I have outlined for converting numbers into images (see chapter nine); then combine your number image with the information you need to memorise.
Now try to memorise the following quotations and short literary extracts by translating them into what for you is the most direct symbolic imagery. Remember, as ever, to enrich your images by bringing into play as much of the following as you can: all your senses (touch, taste, sight, smell, sound), motion, emotion, sexuality, colour, association, substitution, exaggeration, humour, symbolism and – most important of all – imagination. Don’t forget to house the images somewhere so that you have a backdrop. For an exam, you could house quotes by different authors in different locations.
“Through the Jungle very softly flits a Shadow and a sigh –
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is fear!”
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), The Song of the Little Hunter
“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”
Aristotle (384–322BCE)
“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
William Blake (1757–1827), Songs of Innocence and
of Experience
“We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart,
dispossessed, had stopped.”
Henry James (1843–1916), The Turn of the Screw
“Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of
Arabia will not sweeten / this little hand.”
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Macbeth V.1
Remembering a lengthy speech
Some dramatic speeches are so important to an understanding of themes, character and plot that it is worth knowing them in their entirety. The example I am going to use is an extract from Shakespeare’s Hamlet given to me by a student who was having difficulty trying to memorise it.
ACT I SCENE 2
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
130
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this –
But two months dead – nay, not so much, not two –
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother
140
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly! Heaven and earth,
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on, and yet within a month –
Let me not think on’t; frailty, thy name is woman –
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she –
O God, a beast, that wants discourse of reason
150
Would have mourn’d longer – married with mine uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules; within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing of her galled eyes,
She married. O most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
159
This particular soliloquy contains thirty-one lines. So if you wanted to commit this to memory for an exam or performance, the best way would be to take a mental journey consisting of thirty-one stages. To learn a foreign vocabulary, you place your key images in various places around a town as each word comes up at random. But as these lines are presented in a fixed order, your journey must possess a logical set sequence to protect the natural order of the words.
When I’m memorising poetry I find that the best locations are ones situated in open spaces. Because there are several words on each line, you are going to need enough room to spread out the key images formed for each stage of your journey. A city or built-up area may be too congested, with far too many distractions obscuring or confusing these images. As suggested by the anonymous Roman author of Ad Herennium – a work we have already encountered in chapter eight (see pages 85–86):
“It is better to form one’s memory loci in a deserted and solitary place, for crowds of passing people tend to weaken the impressions.”
If you are a golfer like me, the layout of your local course will serve as an excellent location. The sequence of holes will provide a natural path for your journey, the tees, fairways and greens acting as progressive stages along the way. Or you could use a favourite walk, preferably one in the countryside, that you knew as a child or make regularly now. Note interesting or significant landmarks along the way as you take a gentle stroll down your memory lane, counting them off as you go. Once you have thirty-one stages in your journey and know them back to front, you are ready to absorb the entire soliloquy.
Let’s assume that you are already familiar with the play, maybe even to the extent of being able to recite individual lines. The problem is that you can’t manage to string them together and get them to flow because you keep forgetting the order, or you get a mental block – a chronic problem for some budding thespians. All you need in this situation is a simple cue for each line in the form of a symbolic prompt.
Hamlet, as we know, is distraught to the point of suicide over the murder of his father and his evil uncle’s marriage to his mother. Leaving this aside for the moment, concentrate on finding key symbols for the first few lines:
•Stage 1:
“O that this too too solid flesh would melt,”
The idea is to convert the first word of each line into a key symbolic image and then mentally “place” it along one stage of the journey. Picture yourself at the start of your walk and imagine a big ring or hoop standing in front of you. This will then always serve as a reliable cue for O, the first word of the first line. To remind you of the line itself, choose a suitable key image which you think best represents it – in this case, melting flesh.
My starting position is the first tee at East Herts golf club, where I imagine walking through a tall ring of fire as my right foot sinks into a pile of flesh that is melting from the heat. This scene, morbid as it is, will always remind me of the opening line.
•Stage 2:
“Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,”
At the second stage of your walk, use whatever your association for the word “thaw” might be to form the next line prompter, such as snow or thunder. On the first fairway I picture Thor, the Norse god of thunder, holding a glass of Resolve; a big dewdrop hangs off the end of his nose.
•Stage 3:
“Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d”
Moving on to the third stage, create more symbols making “Or” the most prominent one. I see an oar sticking out of the hole on the green. Just beyond that is Eve, a friend, fixing something.
•Stage 4:
“His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God,”
Although the text relates to God’s law (canon), it’s easier to imagine a cannon and, in this case, one that self-destructs. Watching the explosion is a pair of gods, or are you suffering from double vision? This scene, of course, takes place at the fourth stage of your journey.
Only you can judge how many key images you will need to form at each step of your journey in order to remember the whole line. It may even pay you to make up a mnemonic for every single word if you’re starting to learn a piece from scratch.
•Stage 5:
“How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable”
With a little practice, you’ll be able to find an association for any word. These are mine; your ideas may be different:
| How | Apache Indian |
| weary | clothes rack |
| stale | bread with curled edge |
| flat | spirit level |
| and | Andrew |
| unprofitable | professor under the table |
I said that it was preferable to use wide open spaces to allow enough room for your images to spread, and now you can see why. Once the words have been transformed into tangible images, they too can be joined together using the link method, and anchored to their particular stage.
But does all this really work? Yes – and for good reasons. You’ll notice that because the images you create are so striking, and therefore memorable, you will be able to:
1keep moving through the text as you are learning it without having to return so frequently to re-read, as you would if trying to memorise it by verbal repetition
2retain the images, and therefore the words, far longer than you would by remembering the rhythm of the words alone.
The journey ensures that you always stay on track, and the individual stops along the way make it impossible for you ever to jump a section, miss out a line or lose the order.
The key images act as guide ropes or stepping stones enabling you to steer a smooth course through each line from word to word. As the Roman orator Cicero said,
“Memory for words, which for us is essential, is given distinctness by a greater variety of images, for there are many words which serve as joints connecting the limbs of a sentence … of these we have to model images for constant employment; but a memory for things is the special property of the orator – this we can imprint on our minds by a skilful arrangement of the several masks [singulis personis] that represent them, so that we may grasp ideas by means of images and their order by means of places.”
— Cicero, De Oratore (emphases are mine)
Once you are really familiar with the text, the mnemonic symbols will always be there to protect you from mental blocks by acting as three-dimensional idiot boards. The images will stick out in your mind, preventing you from “drying up”.
After a while you will naturally gain a strong verbal recollection of the speech, guided by metre, cadence and rhythm. Although learning it line by line is the easiest way to memorise it, it necessarily divides the sense up artificially. Within a short time, though, the speech will flow so naturally that you will hardly notice your mnemonic journey – you’ll be on “autopilot” – and the meaning of the speech, rather than just the words, will begin to emerge. However, should your “autopilot” let you down at any point, being able to see the words means you can always take over to fill any verbal gaps and keep yourself in full flight.
What’s my line?
The method described above is particularly beneficial if you are an actor. As you can see all the lines of your part in the script laid out in front of your mind’s eye, you’ll know exactly how much space there is between other cast members’ lines and your own; and this gives you time to prepare for your cue, as well as perfect synchronisation with everyone else. It’s as though you are carrying a real script around with you all the time.
You can also pinpoint the exact position of a line by a simple calculation. If you make a mental note of every fifth or tenth stage along the route, you will quickly be able to work out the number of any particular line. I usually arrange it so that there is a door on the twenty-first stage on my route, and stairs with a sharp incline at the eleventh stage. For example, to find out what the twenty-second line is, you would picture stage 20 of your journey and then go forward by two stops. For immediate access to the twenty-ninth line, you would mentally walk back one stage from the thirtieth stage.
The soliloquy of Hamlet’s that we have been looking at starts on line 129. To remember this, you could apply the DOMINIC System to provide a marker. By breaking the number of the line down into 12 – 9, I arrive at the complex image of Anne Boleyn (AB = 12) holding a balloon and string (number-shape for 9). Now, if you fuse this image to the first stage of your walk you will be able to quote any line at will thereafter, assuming of course that you have numbered a few intervals along the way.
•What is line 131 Act I, scene II of Hamlet?
A quick calculation tells you that the answer must lodge at the third stage of your journey, where you will again encounter the oar and immediately quote, “Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d …”.
•What is line 158?
Again, you can deduce that this must be stage 30 of your journey, or the last line but one, “It is not, nor it cannot come to good.”
This is how I am able to “recite” the order of a pack of playing cards. By giving every card a mnemonic symbol and then placing them at predetermined intervals along an imaginary walk, I know precisely where each card is located along with the exact sequence. What people find most baffling, though, is the apparent ease with which I can give the numerical position – such as the fourteenth or twenty-sixth – of any card they nominate. But now you know the secret!
The language of Shakespeare
As all living languages evolve over time, so the meanings of words change. The word “silly” used to mean holy, and to “doubt” something meant that you had good reason to believe in it. To be able to interpret Shakespeare’s plays fully, you will need to learn the meaning of certain phrases or individual words. There are several good study guides available on the market for all levels of examination.
To link interpretation to the words of the speech, simply add a new element to your key image for the line. For example, in the first line of the speech, Hamlet expresses his desire to commit suicide:
•“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt”
Modify the image at the first stage of your journey so that when you see the melting pile of flesh the effect is so revolting that you look away – only to notice someone standing on the ledge of a building ready to jump.
In the second line, the word “resolve” means “dissolve” in modern terms; simple – just picture the god Thor’s Resolve fizzing as it dissolves in the glass of water.
By now, you should know Hamlet’s soliloquy well, and the muscles of your imagination should be exercised enough to create some links to remind you of the following interpretations of words and phrases in the speech.
•canon ’gainst self-slaughter
God’s law forbidding suicide
•merely
fully, completely
•Hyperion
sun god
•satyr
half-human, half-goat
•Hyperion to a satyr
contrast like chalk and cheese
•beteem
permit, allow
•visit
blow against
•Niobe
heroine turned into stone as she wept for her children
•wants discourse of reason
is not capable of rational thought
•unrighteous tears
false, crocodile tears
•to post
to hurry
•dexterity
speed
Study tips
It is your understanding, interpretation and opinions that are going to be tested in the final reckoning, so it is very much in your own interest to take as much of an active role as possible when studying a play.
Put yourself in the shoes of each character. Imagine what it must be like for Hamlet. How would you react to your mother marrying your uncle less than two months after he’d taken your father’s life? Try to feel the grief and understand Hamlet’s mental breakdown brought about by the surrounding circumstances.
By working your way through the play several times, each time playing the part of a different character and trying to see their point of view, it will give you a better insight and help prepare you for the sort of questions you’re likely to receive at exam time. Once you have formed your own interpretation, compare this with others’, either in group discussion or by further reading.
If your mind works very visually, imagine key scenes being performed. Who would you cast as Hamlet? Which actor would best convey Hamlet’s character traits?
Always try to think about the writer – in this case William Shakespeare. What was he trying to achieve in a particular scene? Why did he decide to have a particular character say a particular line using a particular choice of words? Do certain words conjure up associations in your mind that he wanted you to notice? What do these associated ideas, or connotations, add to the presentation of the character or situation?
SUMMARY
•Before committing literary material to memory, get to know the text thoroughly by:
1taking an active role during reading
2developing empathy with one or more of the characters
3studying the interaction between characters.
•To help identify the main plot and theme, imagine it all taking place in a familiar geographical setting, and use people you know to act as the characters portrayed.
•Seek help from English literature guides, a dictionary of literary terms, critical essays and group discussions.
•Learn some of the background of the author and the circumstances under which the text was written.
•To memorise a section of a play, a poem or a prose text, choose a familiar walk or journey to lay down individual lines which will preserve the natural order of the text.
•Use your imagination to translate key words or themes from a line into key mnemonic symbols.
•Then anchor these symbolic images along the various stages of your mental journey.
•Use association and the link method to understand and remember the meanings of certain words or phrases that have either changed or are obsolete now.
•You can reduce individual quotations into complex images and store them all in a familiar building, such as your local library or bookshop.
•Above all, use the combination of association and location with your inventive imagination to lift the text from its two-dimensional linear form, and bring the words alive by animating the characters and making the scenery vivid.