The Dark Lady’s survival in contemporary Black women’s writing

ABSTRACT

This article discusses contemporary literary texts that feature the Dark Lady from Shakespeare’s sonnets as a Black woman from the past inhabiting the present: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Bernadine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005), and Caroline Randall Williams’s Lucy Negro, Redux (2019). The analysis draws on recent approaches to temporality that offer a critique of linear concepts of time and their function for discourses of progress and modernity as well as ‘race’. Through the figure of the Dark Lady, Smith, Evaristo, and Williams address Black history and project anachronic relations between the early modern era and the present moment, as well as between Shakespeare and the contemporary Black woman writer.

KEYWORDS:

• William Shakespeare
• the sonnets
• Dark Lady
• Black women’s writing
• adaptation
• temporality

If Black Luce alias Baytham alias Luce Baynham alias Lucy Negro […] might have been Shakespeare’s Dark Lady then she is indeed the Dark Lady and is me also.

   (Carol Randall Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux)¹

Shakespeare’s sonnets ‘have for a long time now been haunted by the specter of a possible Africanist presence (the dark lady)’,² Kim F. Hall noted in a 2013 article on ‘Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’. In the last two decades, this observation has been confirmed by a considerable number of publications on the Dark Lady, including literary and historical studies³ as well as adaptations into various genres and media. Fictionalisations of Shakespeare’s biography that explore the erotic triangle of the Poet, the Fair Youth, and the Dark Lady from the sonnets are, of course, anything but new.⁴ But whereas many earlier works revolve around the figure of ‘Shakespeare’ – from Anthony Burgess’s novel Nothing Like the Sun (1964) to William Boyd’s TV-drama Waste of Shame (2005) – more recent adaptations and spin-offs have shifted attention to the female perspective:⁵ Victoria Lamb’s historical novel His Dark Lady (2013), Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play Emilia (2018), and Paula Marantz Cohen’s farcical novel Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan (2004). I want to focus on a small selection of literary texts from this corpus that, in line with Kim Hall’s observation, imagine the Dark Lady as a Black woman from the past who inhabits the present. This includes Caroline Randall Williams’s collection of poetry Lucy Negro, Redux (2019), as well as Bernadine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005), a novel only partially based on Shakespeare’s sonnets.

The scene for my analysis will, however, be set by a short passage from Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth (2000):⁶

‘Is she black?’

‘Is who black?’

‘The dark lady?’⁷

This question about the racial identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady is posed by Irie Jones, the teenage daughter of a white English father and a Black Jamaican mother, and the protagonist of Smith’s novel. Growing up in London, Irie is suffering from the fact that her body does not conform to white beauty standards. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, which she reads at school, she suddenly discovers a figure in which she sees herself reflected – for the very first time in her life. Until this moment, England appeared to her as ‘a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection’.⁸ But the novel’s nod to Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage does not include the jubilant recognition of the self. Irie’s identification with the ‘Dark Lady’ is called into question by her condescending English teacher, who tells her that her presentist interpretation is flawed:

She’s not black in the modern sense. There weren’t any … well, Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at that time, dear. That’s a modern phenomenon, as I am sure you know. But this was the 1600s. I mean, I can’t be sure, but it does seem terribly unlikely, unless she was a slave of some kind, and he’s unlikely to have written a series of sonnets to a lord and then a slave, is he? […] You are reading it [the sonnet] with a modern ear.

Disappointed, Irie gives up. ‘Irie reddened. She had thought, just then, that she had seen something like a reflection, but it was receding’.⁹ The passage is of course highly ironic because it is the teacher’s historicist reading, and not Irie’s, that is flawed. The teacher erroneously assumes an unbridgeable divide between the present and the early modern past and cannot imagine the presence of a Black woman in early modern London.

Ayanna Thompson, in her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (2021), tells a similar story. When she was at university in the 1990s, she writes,

My Shakespeare professor said that I was being anachronistic when I attempted to link Shakespeare’s inclusion of Moors, like Aaron, Othello, and the Prince of Morocco, with the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade of the seventeenth century; he said, to look at race in early modern texts is to misapply modern concepts to them.¹⁰

Thompson notes that even though New Historicists ‘were the first scholars to put pressure on the imperial conditions of Shakespeare’s world’, they ‘were loath to take up the concept of race, racialized epistemologies, and/or the notion of race-making as central elements in this newly expanding imperial world’.¹¹ They insisted that the modern concept of ‘race’ did not exist before the eighteenth century. Times have changed, though, and Thompson concludes that the answer to her initial question would be very different today: ‘If you ask today in the 2020s if the concept of race existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the answer is an emphatic yes’.¹²

In my article, I argue that the texts by Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo, and Caroline Randall Williams move beyond the binary between presentist and historicist approaches to early modernity. Through the figure of the Dark Lady, the texts challenge the construct of Shakespeare the Renaissance humanist and project non-linear relations between the early modern era and the present moment. They evoke the figure of the Dark Lady in order to address a history of race-making that can be traced back to early modernity. The Dark Lady figures as an ephemeral visitation from the past and ‘plac[es] a demand on the present in the form of an ethical imperative’.¹³

‘Against that time (if ever that time come)’¹⁴ Anachronic Ruptures

Carla Freccero’s claim, that the past may proleptically call for an ethical response in the present, was suggested in a 2006 virtual roundtable discussion on ‘Queer Temporalities’, convened by Elizabeth Freeman. The panellists stressed their dissatisfaction with Western and straight concepts of time that inform the belief in linear progress, heteronormative biographies, and the political principle that Lee Edelman has called ‘reproductive futurism’.¹⁵ The focus of my analysis will not be on queer sexualities, but I take from these discussions the impulse for a reconceptualization of historical analysis. This includes the question whether marginalised communities can form bonds across temporal divides and how their ‘experience gets transmitted from one generation to the next’.¹⁶ ‘Queering time’ also draws attention to the shortcomings of traditional approaches to early modern literature, which often have either flattened time (as in presentism) or proposed an unbridgeable gap between the past and the present in ‘altericist’ approaches¹⁷ like those taken by Irie Jones’s and Ayanna Thompson’s teachers. Queer historians have suggested alternatives to this binary by insisting that social formations in the present appear as multi-layered ‘palimpsests with residues of earlier discourses and histories written on them’.¹⁸ The project of ‘queering time’ thus ‘also challeng[es] the methodological orthodoxy’ of traditional historiography and its ‘strictures of knowability itself’,¹⁹ as Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon have stressed.

The recent interest in temporality is not confined to Queer Studies; indeed, some have posited a veritable ‘temporal turn’ in the Humanities and Social Sciences,²⁰ marked by the rethinking of temporality in the philosophical works of Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Michel Serres, as well as in Literary Studies and Art History.²¹ In addition, scholars have shown how the Enlightenment concept of time, history, and progress have justified and reinforced power structures.²² In my discussion of the Dark Lady, I will draw upon some of these theoretical approaches that offer a critique of, and deviate from, linear notions of time, ‘marked by an unquestioned assumption of temporal homogeneity and singularity – yet stained in blood and violence’.²³ This will include Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’, Homi Bhabha’s exploration of ‘the ambivalent temporality of modernity’,²⁴ and Aby Warburg’s comments on the ‘Nachleben’ (survival) of vestiges from Classical Antiquity in the artworks of later periods. It is the English translation of Warburg’s concept that I have adopted for the title of my article.

Such reconceptualizations of the relation between the present and the (early modern) past seem to have been anticipated by Stephen Greenblatt, who famously motivated his Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) with his ‘desire to speak with the dead’.²⁵ Greenblatt also speaks of the ‘intensity’ and the ‘energy’ of Shakespearean plays, which have affected audiences until the present day, and he draws attention to the ‘“life” that literary works seem to possess long after both the death of the author and the death of the culture’²⁶ from which they originate. However, in the 1980s his approach was not an early exercise in ‘hauntology’ but, instead, concerned with developing a new understanding of reading historical texts. Deviating from New Criticism’s focus on the single text, as well as ‘Old’ Historicism’s reduction of literature to a mere source, New Historicism suggested a ‘poetics of culture’, i.e. an anthropological study of history in which text and context are considered to be inextricably interconnected. However, this did not include a theorisation of temporality.²⁷

My article is not New Historicist, and its purpose is not to reconsider Shakespeare’s sonnets in the light of historical studies, as for instance Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives (2008), a comprehensive collection of records of Black people in early modern England.²⁸ Instead, my analysis is informed by the different concepts of temporality briefly mentioned above, which will allow me to tease out the literary strategies in Evaristo’s novel and Williams’s poetry. Despite their heterogeneity, which I will not seek to level out, these approaches all break with the Enlightenment model of linear time, not least in order to challenge Western notions of progress, development, and modernity. It is this ‘anachronizing’ tendency that makes them particularly pertinent to an analysis of the interconnection between race-making and the construction of linear time. They additionally disturb the traditional narrative of Shakespeare rewritings when this narrative is based on the assumption of a single source and the unilinear relation between original and adaptation.²⁹ The reappearance of the figure of the Dark Lady in contemporary literature is therefore neither a testimony to Shakespeare’s enduring greatness, nor does it corroborate Ben Jonson’s celebratory exclamation that ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’

More specifically, I argue that the Dark Lady in contemporary Black women’s writings can be understood as an instance of what German art historian Aby Warburg has described as ‘Nachleben’ (survival). The ‘surviving form’ in artworks of later periods, Georges Didi-Huberman explicates in his reading of Warburg, is not the outcome of a teleological evolution nor is it a mere ‘return to the same’ or ‘to the identical’, ‘but only something similar’.³⁰ The Dark Lady in contemporary literary texts does not serve to reconstruct a past ‘as it actually happened’ (Leopold von Ranke). As a surviving form, she does not safely belong to the historical archives, but neither can she be smoothly integrated into the here and now. Instead, she disturbs the present and shows that it is informed, or haunted, by an unacknowledged past. She thus ‘cuts across any chronological scheme’, ‘anachronizes history’ and breaks ‘with the very notions of historical “progress” and “development”’.³¹ Past, present, and future do not form a linear succession but co-exist and mutually inform each other so that ‘the present is woven from multiple pasts’.³² In this way, the Dark Lady resembles the Derridean spectre: she is also a figure that, after having vanished from sight, ‘reappears much later, at a moment when, perhaps, it is not expected; it has survived, therefore, in the still poorly defined limbo of a “collective memory”’.³³ In contemporary texts, the Dark Lady emerges from such a half-buried memory, and her figure evokes the history of race-making in early modern England, Shakespeare’s poetry, and its reception history. The figure simultaneously responds to, and is evoked by, current debates about white supremacy, the intersections of race and gender, and Shakespeare’s canonicity. The Dark Lady is therefore not the ghost of a historical individual but a witness to a social constellation in the past which has a lasting impact on the present.³⁴

‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’³⁵ spectral encounters in Bernadine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists

What in White Teeth is merely a glimpse of Black female presence in early modern England and canonical English literature, serves as the central plot device of Bernadine Evaristo’s ‘road-novel’ Soul Tourists. In a 2008 article, Evaristo stresses that her ‘primary interest in Europe is its black history. The grand and sometimes terrible white European histories have been channelled into every creative medium. The hidden histories, however, are still waiting to be sourced for creative enterprises – to enter Europe’s collective memory, to become enshrined in our myths’.³⁶ The ‘hidden histories’ are the stories of Black men and women who contributed to European culture but whose Blackness has been effaced in white historiography.³⁷ In Soul Tourists, Evaristo sets out to challenge this myth of the ‘White continent’, and she does so by having her two Black protagonists, Stanley Williams and Jessie O’Donnell, travel from London across Europe. Stanley, whose parents migrated from the Caribbean to the UK in the 1960s, realises that he has inherited his mother’s gift to see ghosts. The various sites that he visits as a tourist, including the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the Café de Fantômes at Paris, and a former slave market in Istanbul, function as chronotopes that interrupt the linear course of their journey. Stanley there encounters the ghosts of eminent Black men and women: Alessandro di Medici, Hannibal, Mary Jane Seacole, Aleksandr Pushkin, and others. Their appearance can be described with Derrida’s notion of ‘hauntology’, which – through its wordplay on ‘ontology’ – combines ‘a spectrally deferred non-origin’ with ‘metaphysical terms such as history and identity’.³⁸ Stanley’s interlocutors similarly oscillate between non-origin and historical reality, and Stanley manages what seems to be impossible, namely ‘to speak to the specter, to speak with it, therefore especially to make or to let a spirit speak’.³⁹ By listening to their life stories, Stanley inadvertently turns into an amateur historian different from the ‘traditional scholar [who] does not believe in ghosts’.⁴⁰ Stanley is the recipient of silenced voices that rectify (white) historiography and ‘flesh’ out Black people’s stories from the history books – but without reconstructing a coherent or complete account.

One scene at the beginning of the novel is of particular relevance for my discussion. Before they set out for the Continent, Stanley and Jessie spend the night together at her room in Clerkenwell, London. Jessie has fallen asleep, but then suddenly opens her eyes and, as the text reads, ‘appear[s] to morph into someone else: A certain Lucy Negro standing/ in her tumbledown lodgings in Clerken-well’.⁴¹ ‘Lucy Negro’, as Stanley will find out, was a historical person, one Lucy Baynham, a Clerkenwell brothel-keeper who went by the nickname of ‘Black Luce’ or ‘Lucy Negro’ and had connections to the London theatre scene. Her story has been (partially) reconstructed by Duncan Salkeld in Shakespeare among the Courtesans (2012), a literary and cultural history of early modern sex workers. Salkeld suggests that Luce ‘may have been a black woman’,⁴² thus reconsidering a proposition that was first made by G. B. Harrison in 1933. Salkeld does not claim that ‘Black Luce’ was Shakespeare’s mistress or that she served as an inspiration for the Dark Lady.⁴³ However, he gives ample proof that the two may have met or known each other. He furthermore stresses that ‘Black Luce’s bad name was so well-known that anyone reading Shakespeare’s “sugar’d sonnets” circulated among his “private friends” in the 1590s and early 1600s may perfectly reasonably have brought her to mind’.⁴⁴ In Soul Tourists, Evaristo adapts this story (perhaps from Salkeld’s monograph); but whereas Salkeld the historian remains necessarily cautious, Evaristo takes a clear decision. Her Lucy (or, rather, Lucy’s ghost) is of African origin, and there is also no doubt that she is Shakespeare’s lover. In early modern London, she is an outsider marked by her skin colour and her body painting. ‘A circle of cicatrice dots’ suggests her temporal, spatial, cultural, and ontological difference: ‘Another time. Another place. Another people. Perhaps not fully human at all’.⁴⁵ She evokes a different temporality that is not in sync with the seemingly homogeneous time of the here and now. But her ‘other time’ is also not the object of nostalgic memory. Lucy’s life is too hard to develop any ‘sentimental longings of an African Albion’, as the narrative stresses with an ironic reference to the ‘village on the Guinea coast’⁴⁶ where she was born. In 1563, she was enslaved and brought to Europe on the Jesus of Lübeck, a historical carrack which was used in the 1560s for the transatlantic slave trade.⁴⁷ Lucy is purchased by one Lady Margaret Measse of Linton in Yorkshire, who sets her free and sends her to London. Trying to make a living, Lucy establishes her trade ‘outside the Swan, a beershop in Turnball Street’.⁴⁸ What Evaristo offers is a possible story of Lucy as a Black woman.

For a few moments (or pages in the novel), Lucy, the early modern woman of African origin, takes possession of the unconscious body of Jessie, the modern-day bi-racial woman with a Ghanaian father and a Yorkshire mother. In this way, the novel explores what Carolyn Dinshaw calls ‘the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now’, of a time that ‘is lived; […] is full of attachments and desires, histories and futures’.⁴⁹ Clerkenwell, the part of London where Jessie lives, consequently turns into a palimpsest whose temporal layers are porous and intersect with each other so that the two women become con-temporaries.⁵⁰ But Lucy’s ‘ghost’ ‘inhabits without residing’.⁵¹ In this way Soul Tourists stages a temporal rupture in the narrative, which is not unlike the one in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) but far less traumatic. Daylanne K. English, referring to Morrison’s novel, speaks of ‘a glitch in linear time’, from which ‘a distinctive black time’ emerges ‘that supplants (white) modern time’.⁵² English quotes Homi K. Bhabha, who also highlights the ‘interruptive time-lag in the ‘progressive’ myth of modernity’ that is brought about by the ‘ghosts’ from an unsettled past of marginalisation, violence, and slavery.⁵³ The temporal glitches in Soul Tourists similarly give way to an alternative (but ephemeral) Black time that is experienced by both Stanley and Jessie, but in different ways.

In the narrative, Lucy has a visitor: William (Shakespeare). ‘A well-known playwright and bit-part thespian, William sits on a three-legged stool, looking slavishly up at Lucy. […] In his right hand are several sheets of foul papers, drafts of some love poems. Oh, and he stinks. They all do’.⁵⁴ He is mourning the death of his son Hamnet, but in contrast to Lucy’s history of enslavement, his ‘slavish’ attitude is a mere pose. William pities himself because ‘No one understands him. He is always having to prove himself. Because he is the son of an illiterate glove-maker. The upstart playwright who didn’t go to university. Because the woman he loves is a bloody strumpet […]’.⁵⁵ Stanley then witnesses a conversation between William and Lucy, printed in the novel like a dialogue in a play. William recites lines from his sonnets ‘like an actor, typically over-egging his vowels, and attacking consonants with an excess of plosive gusto’. While he ‘wants to test [his poems] on his current objet d’amour’ and becomes increasingly absorbed in ‘the miracle of his own poetry’, Lucy’s worries are more down to earth. She needs money to pay her landlady and is afraid that Queen Elizabeth’s ‘warrant’ of 1596 to deport the ‘blackamoors’,⁵⁶ will be put into practice. This is a reference to the monarch’s plans to quench social unrest by expelling the Black community from England. Lucy therefore represents the victims of the first onslaught of a new form of colour-based racism in early modern England, which attempted ‘to put into place a race-based cultural barrier of a sort England had not seen since the expulsion of the Jews at the end of the thirteenth century’.⁵⁷ Even if the warrant was never put into practice, it marks the beginning of a racialised understanding of English nationality, which excluded Black people. Lucy reaches out across the centuries, as it were, and establishes an affective connection to Stanley in the novel’s present. He has also never felt a sense of belonging to white England, metonymically represented by his London apartment, decorated in ‘so many […] shades of white’: ‘Bone white, white lead, blond, blanc d’argent, blanc de fard, blanc fixe, antimony white, titanium white, strontium white, Paris white, zinc oxide, zinc sulphide’.⁵⁸

In the early modern scene that Stanley witnesses, William fails to listen to Lucy’s plight, instead reciting the first line from sonnet 130, ‘My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun’,⁵⁹ as well as lines from sonnets 131, 144, and 147. He becomes sexually aroused by his own love poetry, but before he has sex with Lucy, the vision disappears and Lucy morphs back into Jessie, who has not remained unaffected by the visitation (or the sonnets): ‘Jessie awoke sensuously beside him [Stanley], placed her palm on his lower back and curled into him with the suppleness of a cat’.⁶⁰ While she is not consciously aware of what has happened, Stanley tries to make sense of the ghostly encounter, and he does so in verse – in five unrhymed tercets, as if his thoughts had been informed by Shakespearean poetry, but with a twist, because he does not think in the sonnet form:

Was it all true and how did Lucy Negro die?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Though art so right, dear, somnolent Jessie.⁶¹

What is denied to Irie in White Teeth becomes possible in Soul Tourists, namely to imagine the historical presence of a Black woman in early modern London. Lucy is evoked through (Evaristo’s adaptation of) Shakespearean poetry, but her biography remains fragmentary. And yet, her literary survival relegates the self-enamoured figure of William (Shakespeare) to the background, whereas she moves centre stage, together with the Black couple in contemporary London. This revision of English history through Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the concurrent dismissal of ‘the Bard’, who ignores the precarious social situation of his Black lover, is presented in the form of an affective encounter across centuries, between Stanley and Lucy, which disrupts the realism of the present-day setting. For Stanley, it offers, through cross-gender identification with a Black woman, a connection with English history – in defiance of the racialised notion of Englishness that has marginalised both him and Lucy:

Though no one resembled me – until now.

Somewhere, out there, in this great unknown ether.

This history, this country – could it really be mine?⁶²

This tentative adoption of Englishness goes along with his appropriation and reworking of Shakespeare’s poetry.

Interestingly, the novel refrains from exclusively reclaiming the Dark Lady for Black women. Stanley encounters both male and female ghosts; in addition to Lucy he meets Mary Jane Seacole, Queen Charlotte of England, and Louise Marie-Thérèse, ‘the Black Nun of Moret’, who is assumed to have been the illegitimate bi-racial daughter of the Queen of France, Maria Theresa of Spain. In London, it is Jessie’s transformation into Lucy (and vice versa) and the potentially erotic nature of Stanley’s ghostly encounter that initiate his emancipation, ‘offering [him] the keys to the kingdom of freedom’.⁶³ Jessie, in contrast, refuses to acknowledge the ghosts; later in the story she calls Stanley ‘insane’⁶⁴ and leaves him.

In response to the encounter with Lucy, Stanley imagines a fantastic merging of past and present in a figure resembling the ancient ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail:

I dreamt another world, magicked into this one.

Lingering at the tail-end of the twentieth,

yet mauling the rotten gut of the sixteenth.⁶⁵

The lines reiterate the ‘magical’ rupture of the realist narrative: they develop the idea of a bodily encounter of the late sixteenth and the late twentieth centuries, in which the ‘other world’ of the sixteenth century is both dead and alive; it joins the late twentieth century and simultaneously feeds on its own decomposing body. ‘Tail-end’ has a temporal meaning, referring to the ‘concluding part of […] a period of time’, here the end of the twentieth century, which is the setting of the novel. But the more literal and by now archaic meaning of the word is ‘the backside, rump’,⁶⁶ which in the quotation metonymically evokes the ‘rotten gut’, the end of the late sixteenth century and also a comment on its decadence and corruption, including the racism which continues to feed modernity. The visceral image thus challenges both nostalgic (re)constructions of the past and ‘Western modernity’s false narrative of uninterrupted progress’.⁶⁷ It suggests a co-presence of the past and the present, in a disconcerting encounter that transforms both early modern and late twentieth-century England as well as the characters meeting in this temporal confluence: Stanley and Jessie, Shakespeare and Lucy. At the beginning of their trip across Europe, this encounter drives Stanley forward in his metaphorical journey to himself. Crucially, this happens in a hybrid text whose combination of prose with poetry and drama deviates from ideals of generic purity. It simultaneously relativizes the white canonical writer of English literature, not least through an inscription of a Black woman, and the history of Black presence in early modern England, into his poetry. But the scene does not promise a general narrative of progress: like the other encounters, it has no lasting impact on Jessie.

‘Then will I swear that beauty herself is black’⁶⁸ the Dark Lady in Caroline Randall William’s Lucy Negro, Redux

In Caroline Randall William’s Lucy Negro, Redux (2019), a poetry collection based on her MA thesis submitted in 2015 to the English Department at the University of Mississippi, Williams multiplies the anachronic encounters with the Dark Lady. She ‘uses the lens of Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” sonnets to explore the way questions about and desire for the black female body have evolved over time, from Elizabethan England to the Jim Crow South to the present day’.⁶⁹ The book was adapted to the balletic stage in 2019, directed and choreographed by Paul Vasterling, and premiered at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center on 8 February 2019.⁷⁰

Lucy Negro, Redux is introduced by the final couplet from Shakespeare’s sonnet 132, ‘Then will I swear that beauty herself is black,/ And all they foul that thy complexion lack’.⁷¹ Without the preceding twelve lines, this quotation offers an unconditional celebration of Blackness and thus reverses the colour symbolism of the sonnets. This ‘motto’ is followed by the first of altogether four ‘BlackLucyNegro’ poems, which imaginatively calls forth the bodily presence of Black Lucy: ‘The idea of her/ warm brown/ body long stretching/ under his hands/ is a righteous want –’. The enjambement in the following line connects Lucy’s Otherness to the contemporary speaker’s agenda to address the issue of race: ‘she’s become an Other/ way to talk about skin’.⁷²

Early on in the collection, then, the speaker takes a clear position regarding the question that troubles Irie in White Teeth: ‘Is she black?’ As in Evaristo’s novel, the answer is positive, and other theories about the historical identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady are swiftly discarded: The poem ‘Aemilia Lanyer was a white girl’ addresses the hypothesis, first made by A. L. Rowse in 1973, that Shakespeare’s real-life model may have been Aemilia Lanyer, the daughter of Baptisto Bassano, an Italian (and perhaps Jewish) musician at the court of Queen Elizabeth.⁷³ Rejecting this idea, the speaker emphatically stresses the relevance of the Dark Lady’s skin colour that sets her apart from that of a (white) woman of Italian descent: ‘The dark lady is black! Black wires Black./ Colored ill black. More black. Blacker./ Blackamoor black’.⁷⁴

The poems of the collection are interlaced with an account of how in 2012, their author ‘got it into [her] head that Shakespeare had a black lover, and that this woman was the subject of sonnets 127 to 154’.⁷⁵ Once again, in both this account and the introductory ‘BlackLucyNegro’ poems, the point of departure is a modern Black woman’s cross-temporal imagination of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. Williams admits to have been inspired by Salkeld’s Shakespeare among the Courtesans, which triggered her wish to fly to ‘England in mid May 2013 to meet Professor Salkeld, and, as it turns out, Lucy Negro’. She describes her encounter with the British historian as that between a man with ‘spectacles, tweed coat, grey sweater, and thinning hair’ and a ‘black American girl with wild hair, high heeled boots, a suitcase, and a Shakespeare book’.⁷⁶ This narrative passage is followed by the third ‘BlackLucyNegro’ poem, in which the speaker identifies with the (imaginary) woman who bridges the temporal gap between the past and the present:

Lucy Negro

I am you

Lucy Negro

[...]

There is beauty in the dark

Lucy⁷⁷

As in White Teeth and Soul Tourists, the Dark Lady is evoked through the palimpsestic chronotope of London/Clerkenwell:

I have walked Lucy’s walk all of my life

have walked where Lucy walked

right through London […]

clicked black booted on brown stone

all through Clerkenwell

on the same Clerkenwell stone after stone

after stone⁷⁸

Williams’s ‘Lucy Negro’ is inspired by Shakespeare’s sonnets; and yet, like Evaristo’s Lucy, she is not identical with Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, but ‘only similar’, transformed through the perspective of the contemporary poet, a Black woman herself. This inevitable difference from the Shakespearean figure is already indicated by the word ‘redux’ in the book’s title: this Lucy has indeed been ‘[b]rought back, restored; […] considered for a second time; revisited’.⁷⁹ Caroline Randall Williams’s Lucy is a new interpretation, ‘woven from multiple pasts’.

In addition to poetry and narrative, Williams’s volume also includes excerpts from the historical documents at the Bridewell Prison archive that were studied by Salkeld. But the larger part of the book consists of poems, twenty-four of which are titled with lines from Shakespeare’s sonnets. All of them are variations on ‘Lucy Negro’, her body and her sexuality, her life and her lovers. Another set of poems revolve around Lucy’s visits to the Shakespearean theatre, where a performance of Much Ado About Nothing makes her think that ‘some people don’t have enough real things to worry about’, while Othello leaves her ‘mildly indignant’.⁸⁰ In contrast, ‘Black Luce would have loved Josephine Baker’, as the title of another poem reads.⁸¹ There is no obvious historical connection between the three Black female figures in this poem: ‘Black Luce’ a.k.a. the Dark Lady from Shakespeare’s sonnets, the French-American dancer Josephine Baker (1906–1975), and the speaker of Caroline Randall Williams’s poems. And yet, there are similarities: both ‘Black Luce’ and Baker were performers whose appeal to her white audience depended very much on their exoticised (and eroticised) Otherness. Baker’s songs and dances in turn link her to Williams’s poems (and their balletic adaptation); in addition, Baker’s support for the Civil Rights Movement in the US in the 1960s loosely connects her with Williams’s grandfather, the Nashville lawyer Avon Williams, a key figure of the movement. The ‘I’ evoked in Williams’s poems is therefore not the Cartesian subject, and it adds to the postmodern understanding of identity as ‘fragmented and fractured’⁸² a temporal dimension: like Stanley in Soul Tourists this self is established through interaction with various voices from the past. Williams’s poetry thus ‘suggest[s] an identity that is transient and a self that is composed of many’⁸³ – a prominent feature of African American metafiction, as Madelyn Jablon has stressed.

In the poem, the Dark Lady and Josephine Baker are revoked from their respective moments in the past, and their co-presence in the same poem, their joint survival, as it were, is indeed unexpected. The links between the two Black women are established rhetorically, through homonymy and paronomasia, metaphor and metonymy: ‘My venus,/ bronze venus,/ mons venus’.⁸⁴ Josephine Baker was called the ‘Bronze Venus’ in acknowledgement of her erotic dances on the stage of the Folies Bergère in Paris, in which she sometimes only wore a banana skirt. Her name is associated with these performances (and the photographic pictures of them) but it is also the very sound of the ‘Bronze Venus’ that suggests the Black female body and female genitals (the ‘mons venus’), and hence Black Luce’s profession. The next stanza quotes Baker’s famous song ‘J’ai deux amours’ (‘I’ve got two loves’, 1931): ‘la Baker said – / Two loves have I,/ my country/ and Paris’. Baker’s two loves echo Shakespeare’s ‘two loves’ from sonnet 144, but they erase the sonnet’s sexism, which is couched in racialised imagery:

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, […]

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.⁸⁵

In Williams’s poem, the position of Shakespeare’s white male speaker has been adopted by the Black woman; and neither ‘Black Luce’ nor Baker appear as a ‘worser spirit’. Josephine Baker’s agency emerged from her ambivalent performance that ‘both played and undercut […] the language games of racism and sexism’.⁸⁶ In a similar way, the poem performatively appropriates the sexism of Shakespearean poetry for Black female empowerment. Baker’s ‘country’, her first love mentioned in the English translation of her song, leads to the homonym of the next lines (‘cunt/tree’), which transforms into the ‘two loves’ mentioned by Williams’s speaker:

   Say

two loves.

   Say

I. Say my cunt.

Say tree. Say

my tree –

   its kinky

   roots –

   say

I got

two loves baby.

My cunt.

Yes. And

my tree.⁸⁷

The poem replaces the derogatory image of the Dark Lady in Shakespeare’s sonnets and instead celebrates what the speaker of the sonnets denounces: the woman’s sexuality as well as her looks, including her hair that resembles ‘black wires’.⁸⁸ Her deviance from white beauty standards, which so much troubles Irie in White Teeth, is a source of pride for Williams’s ‘Black American girl with wild hair’ as well as for Lucy, who proudly refers to ‘My black wires’.⁸⁹

The sonnets’ critique of the sexual encounter between the Fair Friend and the Dark Lady is evoked in another poem, whose title once again quotes the lines from sonnet 144 ‘{THE BETTER ANGEL IS A MAN RIGHT FAIR, THE WORSER SPIRIT A WOMAN COLORED ILL}’. Love in this poem is not sentimentalised but appears as a long history of violent sexual encounters between a Black woman and a white man. Crucially, this history is rendered in the remote past aspect of African-American vernacular: ‘Love, in the Remote Perfective, is/ “She been did him,/ and his White way, too”’.⁹⁰ Shakespeare’s ‘two loves’ are repeatedly evoked in Williams’s poem as a broken echo that is reflected in poetry and music: it emerges from Shakespeare’s sonnet and resonates in a different form in Baker’s song and Williams’s poem (and ballet). The echo reverberates through four hundred years of Black history in Europe and America, from the late sixteenth to the mid-twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. It thereby establishes a link from the present moment to the European slave trade and the Civil Rights Movement, and thus to a history of racialised violence as well as Black emancipation. Like Bernadine Evaristo, Williams also merges lines from Shakespeare’s sonnets with different historical moments, in a similarly experimental text that crosses generic boundaries. From the very beginning, the shifting figure of ‘Lucy Negro’, the brothel owner and lover of Shakespeare, is embraced by the Black American woman writer – not despite but because of her sexuality. In an interview, Williams stressed that.

sex, sexuality, and sensuality are such an important part – for better or worse – of the ways in which women have lost, claimed and used power, from time immemorial right on through to the present day. For black women, especially black American women, and for this black American woman in particular, that truth is deeply complicated. I am light skinned because my white male ancestors were (most likely) rapists, and their victims were my black female ancestresses. That is an ugly truth. But I believe those women were beautiful. […] Black Luce was a brothel owner, and did very well. […] I love that. I love the idea of choosing how to live in your body, even if your choice might look ugly. What looks ugly changes. What feels deep-down good seldom does.⁹¹

The collection revolves around the ambivalent nature of Lucy’s sexual desire and self-determination that cannot be separated from the sexual violence that she experiences. One example among many is ‘Brown Girl, Red Bone’, a poem that is inspired by a children’s song from the West Indies, as the subtitle states,⁹² and thus another surviving form. The figure of the ‘brown girl’ is metonymically evoked by the ‘Dark Lady’ (and vice versa) so that the poem establishes a connection between early modern England and the Caribbean, hence the transatlantic slave trade, in which England became engaged as of the 1560s. The song was popularised in 1978 by the German-Caribbean pop group Boney M., and the beginning of the poem quotes the well-known verses from their easy-going song:

There’s a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la

There’s a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la

There’s a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la

And she looks like the sugar in the plum, plum plum.

But the next stanza, formally structured like the first, disrupts the seemingly carefree scene of children’s pastime and 1970s pop music when it replaces the ‘brown girl in the ring’ with a ‘red bone in the field’, who ‘looks like the house girl in the house. His house’.⁹³ In African-American slang, ‘redbone’ means ‘a black person (esp. a woman) having light-coloured, reddish-tinted skin’.⁹⁴ And indeed, the fourth stanza identifies the girl as the unacknowledged daughter of a white man: ‘Now don’t say who your daddy is, hush girl, hush girl, hush, hush / […] And she looks like the children in the house. His house’.⁹⁵ Unexpectedly, the scene has turned into a slave plantation in the South of the United States. Other poems also evoke the history of slavery; they mention the ‘middle passage’, the ‘pillar’, and the ‘auction block’; they quote the line from sonnet 133: ‘But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be’, or conceive of the sexual relation between a white man and a Black woman as ‘play[ing] masters and slaves’.⁹⁶

The Dark Lady’s presence in Williams’s poems emphasizes the urgency to address the history of slavery and racist violence, which disrupts the seemingly cheerful surface of the pop song or the present-day love story between ‘Lucy [and] a White Boy’.⁹⁷ The Dark Lady figures as a witness to this history and by celebrating her, Williams discards a therapeutic model in which Shakespeare is constructed as the representative of Western liberal humanism.

*  *  *

The literary encounters with the Dark Lady that I have discussed in this article are impacted by a shift in Shakespeare Studies, which have ‘benefited from the birth, growth, and influence of African American studies, critical race theory, post-colonial studies, queer studies, and more recently critical white studies’,⁹⁸ as Ayanna Thompson stresses. In addition, they testify to a new interest in complicating historical studies and rethinking the relationship between past, present, and future, thus moving beyond the dualism of Historicism versus Presentism. One of my intentions in this article was to show that these two critical paradigms are closely interrelated. The survival of the Dark Lady in White Teeth, Soul Tourists, and Lucy Negro, Redux marks a clear break with the West’s linear notions of temporality and progress in order to address Black history, the legacy of racism, and the presence of Black women in early modernity. The figure of the Dark Lady therefore does indeed call for an ethical response in the present, and she invites (anachronic) forms of bonds among Black people across history. In all three texts, the temporal rupture explores, from a contemporary and explicitly Black perspective, the affective impact of such a historical project – on both intra- and extradiegetic levels. These emotions are not reduced to the feelings of an individual but are instead responses to social power structures.

Lucy Negro, Redux ends with a passage entitled ‘Lucy’s Ex[am]i[n]at Sayeth That’. It echoes a statement in the Bridewell Court Minute Book quoted by Salkeld (and also earlier in Williams’s collection), in which ‘Black Luce’ is described as ‘a vilde bawde and lyveth by it and East and his wiffe and she agree together and devide the monye that is geven to the harlots’.⁹⁹ In Caroline Randall Williams’s version, Lucy has adopted these words for her confident self-identification:

This exiat sayeth that

I am wild, and that I live by it, and that I like it; like the money, and the witness, and the grotesque, and the yes, yes.¹⁰⁰

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous readers of Textual Practice for their helpful comments on my essay. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the SEDERI Conference for Junior Researchers at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2022, and at a workshop on ‘Women's Rights and Global Adaptations of Shakespeare' at FU Berlin in 2021. I would like to thank the organisers for the invitation and the conference participants for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Caroline Randall Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux (Nashville, TN: Third Man Books, 2019), p. 19.

2 Kim F. Hall, ‘“These Bastard Signs of Fair”: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 66.

3 See e.g. Margreta De Grazia, ‘The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Survey, 46 (1993), pp. 35–50; Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1996); Marvin Hunt, ‘“Be Dark but Not Too Dark”: Shakespeare’s Dark Lady as a Sign of Color’, in James Schiffer (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 369–89; David Schalkwyk, ‘Race, Body, and Language in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays’, English Studies in Africa, 47.2 (2004), pp. 5–23; Robert F. Fleissner, Shakespeare and Africa: The Dark Lady of His Sonnets Revamped and Other Africa-Related Associations (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2005); Paul Franssen, ‘How Dark is the Dark Lady?’, in Sonja Fielitz (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Loves, Layers, Languages (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010), pp. 31–42; Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500–1650 (2012; London and New York: Routledge, 2016); Joyce Green MacDonald, ‘The Legend of Lucy Negro’, in Janell Hobson (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 66–74.

4 For a discussion of these biographical fictions, see Franssen, ‘How Dark’, and his Shakespeare’s Literary Lives: The Author as Character in Fiction and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

5 See Katherine Scheil, ‘Millennial Dark Ladies’, Critical Survey, 33.2 (2021), pp. 79–92.

6 Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso discusses Evaristo’s Soul Tourists, Smith’s White Teeth, and Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood as texts that use ‘Shakespeare’s work as intertext in their exploration of the lives of Africans and minorities in Britain and in Europe’ (‘Shakespearean Intertexts and European Identities in Contemporary Black British Fiction’, Changing English, 19.4 (2012), p. 467).

7 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000; London: Penguin, 2001), p. 271.

8 Smith, White Teeth, p. 266.

9 Ibid., pp. 271–72.

10 Ayanna Thompson, ‘Did the Concept of Race Exist for Shakespeare and His Contemporaries? An Introduction’, in Ayanna Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 1.

11 Thompson, ‘Did the Concept of Race Exist for Shakespeare’, p. 5.

12 Ibid., p. 2.

13 Carla Freccero, in Elizabeth Freeman et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 13.2 (2007), p. 184.

14 William Shakespeare, ‘The Sonnets’, in Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2016), sonnet 49, line 1.

15 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 2.

16 Nguyen Tan Hoang in Freeman et al., p. 183.

17 Carla Freccero, ‘Queer Times’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 106.3 (2007), p. 487.

18 Roderick A. Ferguson in Freeman et al., p. 180.

19 Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, ‘Queering History’, PMLA, 120.5 (2005), p. 1609.

20 Cf. Thomas M. Allen, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas M. Allen (ed.), Time and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 2.

21 See e.g. Allen, ed., Time and Literature; Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); and Matthew D. Wagner, Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012).

22 See e.g. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Where Is the Now?’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), pp. 458–62; Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips, ‘Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn: Race, Gender, Temporalities’, Women’s Studies in Communication, 43.4 (2020), pp. 369–83; José E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009); Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities of Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

23 Houdek and Phillips, ‘Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn’, p. 377.

24 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 240, emphasis in the original.

25 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1988), p. 1.

26 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 2, 6.

27 Despite its concern with ghosts, Greenblatt’s 2001 monograph Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001) is also not based on Derrida’s ‘hauntology’ but offers a genealogy of ghosts from the Catholic doctrine of purgatory to early modern theatre.

28 Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

29 Douglas Lanier has also challenged such an understanding of adaptation in an article on ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics’. By thinking of adaption ‘rhizomatically’, i.e. in its multiple relations to other texts and media (some but not all of them Shakespearean), rather than to the one original, the notion of ‘a grand genealogical narrative’ becomes problematic. Cf. Douglas Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value’, in Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (eds), Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 31.

30 Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2017), p. 105.

31 Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image, pp. 48, 38.

32 Ibid., p. 30.

33 Ibid., pp. 36–37.

34 Cf. Ibid., pp. 35, 110.

35 Shakespeare, sonnet 18, line 1.

36 Bernardine Evaristo, ‘CSI Europe’, European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 23.4 (2008), p. 6.

37 For a critique of the notion of Europe as ‘white’ see also Paul Gilroy, ‘Foreword: Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe’, in Heike Raphael-Hernandez (ed.), Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. xi–xxii; and the special issue ‘Sketches of Black Europe in African and African Diasporic Narratives / Esquisses de l’Europe noire dans les récits d’Afrique et des diasporas africaines’, of CompLit: Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society, 2.6 (2023).

38 Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, ‘Introduction: A Future for Haunting’, in Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 11.

39 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (1994; New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 11.

40 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 12.

41 Bernadine Evaristo, Soul Tourists (2005; London: Penguin, 2006), p. 60.

42 Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans, p. 137.

43 Cf. Ibid., p. 120.

44 Ibid., p. 149.

45 Evaristo, Soul Tourists, p. 62.

46 Ibid.

47 Cf. Wade G. Dudley, ‘Elizabeth’s Sea Dogs’, Military History, 30.4 (2013), p. 59.

48 Evaristo, Soul Tourists, p. 62.

49 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 4, 3.

50 In her study of Soul Tourists, Polo B. Moji suggests to read Europe in the novel ‘as a palimpsest […] in which multiple histories of race and racism are rendered visible in the present’; ‘The Hauntological Imaginary in Bernadine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005)’, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 56.1 (2019), p. 19.

51 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 21.

52 Daylanne K. English, ‘Race, Writing, and Time’, in Thomas M. Allen (ed.), Time and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 230.

53 Bhabha speaks of moments in which ‘the past’ is staged ‘as symbol, myth, memory, history, the ancestral’ (The Location of Culture, p. 247).

54 Evaristo, Soul Tourists, p. 63.

55 Ibid., p. 64.

56 Ibid., pp. 64, 66, 63.

57 Emily C. Bartels, ‘Too Many Blackamoors: Deportation, Discrimination, and Elizabeth I’, Studies in English Literature, 46.2 (2006), p. 306.

58 Evaristo, Soul Tourists, p. 11.

59 Ibid., p. 65.

60 Ibid., p. 68.

61 Ibid., p. 69.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., p. 67.

64 Ibid., p. 252.

65 Ibid., p. 69.

66 ‘tail-end’, n. 1, Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2023).

67 English, p. 230.

68 Shakespeare, sonnet 132, line 13.

69 Caroline Randall Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux. MA thesis. University of Mississippi, 2015. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1256/, p. ii.

70 The book publication of Lucy Negro, Redux (2019) also includes the libretto and further material on the ballet. All quotations from Lucy Negro, Redux are to this edition.

71 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 5.

72 Ibid., p. 7.

73 David Lasocki and Roger Prior have suggested that the Bassanos may have been of Jewish descent; cf. The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531–1665 (1995, repr. London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 92–98 and 114–39. Susan Woods, however, considers the evidence as ‘highly speculative’; cf. Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5; see also pp. 72–98. The identification of Emilia Lanyer (née Bassano) with the Dark Lady provides the basis for Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play Emilia (2018). Paula Marantz Cohen’s novel Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan (2004), in which the Dark Lady is also granted survival, plays with he idea that the Dark Lady may have been of Jewish origin. The titular Jessie, an elderly Jewish woman in modern-day America, claims to have survived since early modernity, and in her character, the Dark Lady from the sonnets merges with Jessica from The Merchant of Venice.

74 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 15.

75 Ibid., p. 8.

76 Ibid., pp. 12, 13.

77 Ibid., p. 14.

78 Ibid., p. 33.

79 ‘redux’, adj. 1. Oxford English Dictionary Online.

80 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, pp. 67, 66.

81 Ibid., p. 23.

82 Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”’, in Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), p. 4.

83 Madelyn Jablon, Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 139. I am grateful to Matilda Jones for drawing my attention to Jablon’s book.

84 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 23.

85 Shakespeare, sonnet 144, lines 1–4.

86 Samir Dayal, ‘Blackness as a Symptom: Josephine Baker and European Identity’, in Raphael-Hernandez (ed.), Blackening Europe, p. 36.

87 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 23. The ‘tree’ and ‘its kinky roots’ suggest an Afro hair style or a technique of hair braiding (‘tree braids’).

88 Shakespeare, sonnet 130, line 4.

89 These are the first three words of “{IF HAIRS BE WIRES, BLACK WIRES GROW FROM HER HEAD}” (Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 52).

90 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 49.

91 ‘Caroline Randall Williams’ Lucy Negro, Redux. Interview by Kristin Sanders’, New Orleans Review 42 (2016), p. 103.

92 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 40.

93 Ibid.

94 ‘redbone’, n. 2.b. Oxford English Dictionary Online.

95 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 40. The ‘redbone’ also features prominently in contemporary hip-hop music (see e.g. Childish Gambino’s song ‘Redbone’, 2016), where Black women with light skin appear as sexual objects and potentially unfaithful; cf. Morgan L. Maxwell, Jasmine A. Abrams, and Faye Z. Belgrave, ‘Redbones and Earth Mothers: The Influence of Rap Music on African American Girls’ Perceptions of Skin Color’, Psychology of Music, 44.6 (2016), pp. 1488–99.

96 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, pp. 54, 57, 20.

97 Ibid., p. 20.

98 Thompson, ‘Did the Concept of Race Exist for Shakespeare’, p. 3.

99 Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans, p. 137; see also Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 19.

100 Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux, p. 74.