Lucy Negro, Redux

"This is by Caroline Randall Williams, a writer who resides in Nashville, Tennessee. She employs a different strategy, through speculating who the addressee (the “dark lady”) of the later sonnets might have been. Shakespeare’s poems describe a woman with dark features: black eyes, black hair, black eyebrows. Was the addressee a historical individual? A composite of multiple women? An entirely fictive figure? Among the many candidates for who that addressee might have been, the brothel co-owner named “Black Luce” has been proposed by the scholar Duncan Salkeld. This woman might have been of African descent, and might have been someone that Shakespeare would have encountered in the 1590s. “She ‘got it into [her] head that Shakespeare had a black lover, and that this woman was the subject of sonnets 127 to 154” While Williams concedes that this candidate is but one of many conjectures, she “got it into [her] head that Shakespeare had a black lover, and that this woman was the subject of sonnets 127 to 154.” Her conjecture inspires a series of response poems, in the voice of Black Luce. These responses are often generated by a line from the Sonnets , such as “For I have sworn thee fair” (147) or “Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place” (131). And her book’s already enjoyed its own afterlife, as it was recently adapted as a ballet, with new music composed by Rhiannon Giddens. One chapter, “Of Constraint,” addresses much of what we’ve been discussing. Artists have always worked within limits, found ways to stretch those limits to their own advantage, revised those limits for new circumstances, new occasions. We all think through inherited forms. Part of our task, as creative human beings, is to think our way into those forms, think through those forms: how can we make them vibrant for us today, even though they might look dead to us, on first glance? Both the Bervin and the Williams books are good examples of that continued vibrancy, taking the sonnets in entirely new directions that could never have been anticipated in 1609. The book emerged from two parallel strands: one professional, one parental. As a professor, I’d been reading a lot of scholarship about the kind of education, the kind of intellectual infrastructure that would have enabled Shakespeare’s creativity to flourish. Admittedly, many of those practices of are downright backwards to us today, and we’d rightly never want to revive them. But some of them still remain effective, and are still worth sustaining — like something as basic as copying a good model, and puzzling over what makes it work. Thinking of Shakespeare as a maker has made me a better teacher (I hope!), as I’ve been striving to help students think of him as someone who inherits (and modifies) forms, rather than as a stand-alone genius. As a parent, I’d been frustrated with some experiences my children encountered over the last decade in their schooling, in part because we’ve split some things into binaries that are actually not binary. So, for example, we think of imitation as being the opposite of creativity. We have a romanticized notion of creativity, that it emerges by just doing whatever you want, and that imitation is just slavish (a modifier that’s often deployed), something that stifles creativity. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In fact, in the best circumstances, imitating another creator is a great way for you to figure out what you want to do yourself. We readily grant this in bodily practices, such as practising piano, or holding a certain dance pose, or making a move in sports. You imitate, and you emulate, and eventually the practice becomes part of your own repertory — one of the many things that you can enact as a fully autonomous human being, expressing yourself in the world. Like I said: we’re happy to grant the virtues of imitations in music and sport, yet are less ready to concede the same in the arts of reading and writing and thinking. But part of the way we all grow to be good readers and writers and thinkers is by emulating models whom we admire. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a healthy developmental stage — and I think that’s something educational reforms of the past couple of decades have forgotten."