SOURCE: “History, Memory, Necrophilia,” in The Ends of Performance, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, New York University Press, 1998, pp. 23-30.

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...