"Shakespeare's Memory" (original Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 title: "La memoria de Shakespeare") is a short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

 originally published in 1983, in the book of the same name

Shakespeare's Memory (book)

Shakespeare's Memory is a short story collection published in 1983 that collects the last stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, which had been published in diverse mediums, such as the national newspapers La Nación and Clarín...

. This is one of Borges' (who died a few years after writing it) last stories, but it differs little, both thematically and stylistically from the much earlier stories that made him famous. The story's themes include memory

Memory

In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....

, Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

, and writing

Writing

Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...

.

Plot

The main protagonist and narrator is Hermann Sörgel, a self-described devotee of Shakespeare. After giving a short list of works that he has written on Shakespeare, he tells the story of how he came to be in possession of Shakespeare's Memory: He meets a man named Daniel Thorpe at a Shakespeare conference, and after relating a story about a ring that had a price so high it could never be sold. Thorpe then offers Sörgel Shakespeare's memory, and after a short retelling of how he managed to get hold of it, passes it on to him. The memory, Thorpe says, has to be 'discovered': Sörgel whistles melodies he has never heard, and slowly starts seeing unknown faces in his dreams. Later, he gains insights into Shakespeare's works and techniques, and considers but decides against writing a biography. Soon after, Shakespeare's memory almost overwhelms his own: one day he becomes confused as he does not recognise engines and cars. Finally he decides to give away the memory by telephone: he phones random numbers (sparing women and children from the memory), and at last gives the memory to a man on the other end of the phone.