Dark Lady Research Articles

Sexing Shakespeare's Sonnets: Reading Beyond Sonnet 20

AbstractCritics of Shakespeare's Sonnets typically accept the premise that Sonnets 1–126 are addressed to a young man, and Sonnets 127–52 to a woman. Two main schools of analysis, by no means mutually exclusive, have dominated the discussion of these groups: either the Young Man and Dark Lady sonnets are read as belonging to sustained, and usually interlaced, narrative sequences, or the sonnets are seen as a series of n number of contiguous mini‐sequences connected by themes and images; we might call these the strong and weak sequence theories. Despite the widespread acceptance of these two approaches, serious weaknesses and inconsistencies underlie the arguments offered in support of both theories. A review and rebuttal of these dubious arguments may help to reestablish the burden of logical proof where it belongs, at the door of those critics who want to make sweeping interpretive claims about the sequence of the sonnets.

Veiling an Indian beauty: Shakespeare and the hijab

Bassanio's suspicion of the “beauteous scarf / Veiling an Indian beauty” belongs within an Orientalist discourse in which the “Dark Lady” figures the impenetrability of global trade to western unveiling, an endless “travailing” of “sails and veils” that (like Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous) Shakespeare associates with the secretion of silk. But in a culture that craved eye-to-eye openness, his plays valorize masked desire as a means of inserting private faces in public spaces, and so introduce the fashionable silk visor as a screen, like the hijab, which puts secrecy on display. Thus, the “Moorish” subtext of The Merchant of Venice constitutes a new Catholic “closet” sphere that is the foundation of modern religious and sexual toleration, as the overdetermined silk veil is emptied on the stage of its history of cultural suspicion and fundamentalist violence.

Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison. By Kelly Lynch Reames

A challenge rang out from the back of Beveridge Hall, during the opening keynote address at the University of London-sponsored conference, At the Millennium: Interrogating Gender, on 9 January 1998. The keynote speaker was Elaine Showalter. The challenge concerned not only Showalter's proposed celebration of “the role of Margaret Thatcher in changing perceptions of women's capacity for political power,” but also the complete exclusion of black women from Showalter's elaboration of three paradigms of the female intellectual: the Cassandra, the feminist Messiah, and the Dark Lady—criticism that Showalter chose not to incorporate into the subsequently published version of her paper in Women: A Cultural Review. However, an altogether different challenge, waged against white, feminist critics and theorists through the 1990s, concerned not oversights and exclusions but appropriation. Hence, an apparently more contentious 1992 conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz, focused on “Psychoanalysis in African American Contexts: Feminist Reconfigurations,” produced the fascinating volume, Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Among various thorny issues with which this collection grapples, the appropriation of African American women's creative writing by white feminist critics is criticized by contributors such as Ann duCille.

MicroReviews by the Book Review Editor: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA: Brenda Maddox

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Love's Usury, Poet's Debt: Borrowing and Mimesis in Shakespeare's Sonnets

This essay was runner-up in the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Shakespeare Section. In Shakespeare's sonnets, sustained self-reflexive deliberation on the nature of poetic representation is at times figured in terms of the nascent capitalism of early modern England: an intersection of ‘mimesis’ and ‘economics’ that is manifested in images of usury found in a number of the sonnets. This article surveys critical responses (by David Hawkes, James Dawes, Thomas Greene, John Mischo, Howard Felperin and others) that offer some insight into this aspect of Shakespeare's work. In doing so, the article attempts to reconcile potentially divergent perspectives on Shakespeare; it also suggests new ways in which the sonnets can be read, revisiting the relationship of the speaker/poet not only to certain figures in the sonnet sequence (the ‘fair youth’ and the ‘dark lady’) but also – perhaps more importantly – to his own poetic enterprise.

The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque by Patrizia Bettella

MLR, IOI.2, 2006 553 is illusory, for itmust finally return to thewomb ofMother Earth; and accompanying the depictions of bodies absorbed by swamps and rivers, Cestaro finds a concomitant stress upon semiotic flow and the instability of language. The final chapter seeks to show how, in the latter part of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, the metaphor of the nurse's body is deployed by Dante to articulate a new Christian understanding of selfhood and language. In the maternal presence of Beatrice and Matelda, the classical paradigm is deconstructed tomake way for a new Christian subject which, throughout the Paradiso, will remain inseparable from the mother. The book ends with a brief survey of metaphors of nutrition and maternal corporeality in the Paradiso. One disappointment here is the brevity of Cestaro's treatment of the Empyrean cantos and, in particular, the fact that he misses the opportunity to contrast the balia image of canto xxx, as it declares the symbiotic dependence of the commune on the empire, with the definition which he finds in the Inferno of both 'ego and empire' as 'patriarchal projects' that require the repression of nursing corporeality (p. 78). These reservations aside, however, Cestaro's subtle, complex, and thought-pro voking book is awelcome demonstration of how much can be gained by reading the Commedia not only as a product of preceding traditions but also as an anticipation of themes central to thinkers such as Kristeva and Lacan. Above all, his thesis of fers a cogent challenge to the standard view that the poem tends ultimately towards evanescence and the diminution of corporeality, for Cestaro recognizes that at the heart of the Paradiso there is an affirmation of the body as 'a site of joyous process' (P. 136). SHINSHUUNIVERSITY DAVID RUZICKA The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from theMiddle Ages to theBaroque. By PATRIZIABETTELLA. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2005. viii+259pp. $6o. ISBN o-8020-3926-x. The reader would be justified in thinking that this is essentially a book concerning the history of misogyny in Italy. In fact it could be argued that the book would benefit from an outline of such a history, since, as the author admits, 'the antifeminist theme in medieval and early modern Italian literature, and poetry specifically, has been long ignored and largely eschewed' (p. I3). This aspect of Patrizia Bettella's research is partly covered by the introduction and by Chapter i. These are followed by three further chapters, dealing respectively with 'Transgression in the Trecento and Quattrocento: Guardian, Witch, Prostitute', 'The Portrait of the Ugly Woman in the Renaissance: The Peasant, theAnti-Laura', and 'New Perspectives inBaroque Poetry: Unconventional Beauty'; each chapter has clear subdivisions. The chapters are followed by a short conclusion (pp. I65-70), an appendix (pp. I7 i-86) containing some texts concerning old women, extensive notes (pp. I87-232), a bibliography (pp. 233-49), and an index (pp. 25 I-59). Although this work has been in the making for a number of years (it started as a Ph.D. thesis written in Italian, presumably in the early nineties), it still bears the traces of an academic dissertation. It is a diligent and scholarly piece of work, covering a substantial number of primary texts, but it is still rather dependent on secondary material, even when this is rather bland, and the author's views are therefore obfuscated. One example will suffice, but I could quote many. When talking about the praises of a dark lady by Marcello Giovanetti (1598-I631), the words ofWilliam Crelly, who wrote amonograph on this author, are quoted, as follows: the poet 'is polite and correct and never betrays the slightest hint of controversy, vulgarity or even 554 Reviews satire. Though bright and inventive it is resolutely discreet and high-minded' (p. I38). These are the kinds of statement we ask our students to avoid. Considering primary sources, some of the unpublished material which is referred to remains marginal to the main narrative and is quoted without clear reference to its present location, at least in the appendix, where the numbering of texts is sometimes confused with that of the stanzas. The book deals mainly...

Tourists or Exiles? American Modernists in Paris in the 1920s and 1950s

The titles of Richards Brooks's film The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) open against a tableau ofthe city, overlooked by a picture book Eiffel Tower and accompanied by Jerome Kern's romantic tune. A thirty-something man played by Van Johnson emerges from the Gare du Nord: he hails a taxi, strolls by the Europa news agency, visits Notre-Dame, and rests in the Jardin du Luxembourg, without once engaging in dialogue. He appears to be an American tourist absorbing a picturesque Paris, but his melancholic gaze is filled with regret as ifhe is returning to scenes charged with emotional resonance. The introduction of an innocent American abroad raises expectations of naIvete and cultural travel in the tradition of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Henry James's early novel The American (1877). But the visitor's deeper emotions also invoke exile from the past and the homeland in the spirit of James's later modernist The Ambassadors (1903) and the 'lost generation' gloom of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1925). The film is actually based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Parisian story' Babylon Revisited' (1931) set just after the 1929 Stock Market Crash. While Fitzgerald's tale explores the consequences of the hedonistic lifestyle of middle-class metropolitan Americans abroad in the 1920s, Brooks's film shifts the time frame into a post-World War II context, with American GIs returning to Paris to recapture the excitement and passion of their fleeting wartime visits. When Charles Wales revisits the city in Fitzgerald's story he is disappointed 'to find Paris so empty'; rather than the frenzy of the mid-1920s he finds the stillness of the city' strange and portentous': a mirror image of his own spiritual vacuity. I Just as Fitzgerald's tale pieces together the ghostly revenants of Charles ' s past, so the film does not begin formally until the American visitor, Charlie, has completed his sentimental journey through the sights of Paris. He enters a bar and strikes up a conversation with the barman who greets him affectionately. When he glances at a striking portrait of a dark lady, it is clear that the narrative will reveal hidden links between the city, the portrait and Charlie's haunted face and, as they begin to reflect changes since the War, the scene dissolves into the past. In many ways the film's narrative is very conventional: Charlie falls in love with a flighty American girl, Helen, played by Elizabeth Taylor, whose iconic picture hangs in the bar. When Charlie meets Helen she has recently dropped out of university and has enough bohemian traits to make her into an enigma, without being wildly nonconformist. Her sister Marion initially takes a liking to the American in his GI uniform, but Helen and

Review: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox

Book Review| August 01 2005 Review: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNABrenda Maddox Carolyn S. Nevin Carolyn S. Nevin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The American Biology Teacher (2005) 67 (6): 380. https://doi.org/10.2307/4451869 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Carolyn S. Nevin; Review: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox. The American Biology Teacher 1 August 2005; 67 (6): 380. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/4451869 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe American Biology Teacher Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright National Association of Biology Teachers Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book reviews

Twelve book reviews in the May 2003 issue of Notes and Records : Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin––the dark lady of DNA . Lisa Jardine, On a grander scale: the outstanding career of Sir Christopher Wren . Physicists of Ireland , edited by Mark McCartney and Andrew Whitaker. The Cambridge Companion to Newton , edited by I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith. David Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley: science, religion and archaeology in eighteenth-century England . Martyn Beardsley, Deadly winter: the life of Sir John Franklin . J. Browne, Charles Darwin: the power of place . M. Chisholm, Such silver currents: the story of William and Lucy Clifford 1845-1929 . Olivier Darrigol, Electrodynamics from Ampère to Einstein . Johanna Levelt Sengers, How fluids unmix: discoveries by the school of Van der Waals and Kamerlingh Onnes . Charles H. Townes, How the laser happened: adventures of a scientist . A. Macfarlane and G. Martin, The glass bathyscaphe: how glass changed the world .

‘ROSALIND FRANKLIN, THE DARK LADY OF DNA’

The untold story of the woman who helped to make one of humanity's greatest discoveries - DNA - but who was never given credit for doing so. 'Our dark lady is leaving us next week.' On 7 March 1953 Maurice Wilkins of King's College, London, wrote to Francis Crick at the Cavendish laboratories in Cambridge to say that as soon as his obstructive female colleague was gone from King's, he, Crick, and James Watson, a young American working with Crick, could go full speed ahead with solving the structure of the DNA molecule that lies in every gene. Not long after, the pair whose names will be forever linked announced to the world that they had discovered the secret of life. But could Crick and Watson have done it without the 'dark lady'? In two years at King's, Franklin had made major contributions to the understanding of DNA. She established its existence in two forms, she worked out the position of the phosphorous atoms in its backbone. Most crucially, using X-ray techniques that may have contributed significantly to her later death from cancer at the tragically young age of thirty-seven, she had taken beautiful photographs of the patterns of DNA. This is the extraordinarily powerful story of Rosalind Franklin, told by one of our greatest biographers; the single-minded young scientist whose contribution to arguably the most significant discovery of all time went unrecognised, elbowed aside in the rush for glory, and who died too young to recover her claim to some of that reputation, a woman who was not the wife of anybody and who is a myth in the making. Like a medieval saint, Franklin looms larger as she recedes in time. She has become a feminist icon, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology. This will be a full and balanced biography, that will examine Franklin's abruptness and tempestuousness, her loneliness and her relationships, the powerful family from which she sprang and the uniqueness of the work in which she was engaged. It is a vivid portrait, in sum, of a gifted young woman drawn against a background of women's education, Anglo-Jewry and the greatest scientific discovery of the century.

Book ReviewRosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. By Brenda Maddox. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Review Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. By Brenda Maddox. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.Ruth HubbardRuth HubbardHarvard University Search for more articles by this author Harvard UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 28, Number 3Spring 2003Gender and Science: New Issues Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/345333 Views: 69Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author(s).PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The first lady of DNA

Rosalind Franklin: The dark lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox HarperCollins, New York, NY 400 pages, $29.95 ISBN 0 00 257149 8 ![][1] The story of Rosalind Franklin never ceases to fascinate, and the publication of her biography as told by Brenda Maddox is indeed pertinent: in a few weeks’ time we will celebrate 50 years of the most illuminating discovery in life sciences, namely the revelation of the structure of DNA. In the 25 April 1953 issue of Nature , three consecutive short papers ushered in a new era in biology by unveiling an ingenious model of the DNA structure, together with the X‐ray diffraction data crucial for its formulation. The best known of the three papers is the one by James Watson and Francis Crick, who both then worked at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. Watson and Crick proposed that DNA forms a right‐handed helix composed of two anti‐parallel DNA strands, which are kept together by specific hydrogen bonds between adenines and thymines and … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

Encounters with a dark lady

Encounters with a dark lady

Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life

This lively, readable and challenging new biography, by the editor of the acclaimed Arden edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, takes a fresh look at an enduring cultural icon, about whose life it is widely claimed that nothing is known. As a result Shakespeare has tended to be viewed in Romantic isolation: the Bard as lonely inspired singer enthroned on a mountain peak.The aim of this study is to replace the image of the lonely genius with one of Shakespeare as deeply involved, even enmired, in the geographical, social and literary context of his time. This Shakespeare is a man who lives in a congested city and has to deal with disease, debt and cut-throat competition; his manifest brilliance often makes him the object of envy and malice, rather than adulation. Much of his life and writing is seen as the result of accident and circumstance, rather than the product of artistic vision or a grand career plan. From his shotgun wedding at the age of 18 to the burning down of the Globe Theatre over 30 years later, he is beset by bad luck. His most brilliant works are seen as creative responses to external constraints, such as the plague outbreaks that frequently closed the public theatres during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Katherine Duncan Jones also takes a fresh look at the tradition of Shakespeare's love for a 'Dark Lady' and concludes rather that he devoted his most personal and passionate writing to the service of young men.

Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (review)

228Comparative Drama refer to a stage property representing the tomb, or does it merely indicate that the actor is expected to evoke the existence ofa tomb in the imagination ofthe viewer? Such questions cannot be answered definitively, and Dessen and Thomson are careful to announce within their entries when such conundrums arise. Possible criticisms of this volume are few and are confined to quibbles over the content of particular entries. For instance, one may observe a slight inconsistency in the authors' treatment oftermswhose current meanings differ from their earlymodern connotations. Dessen and Thomson prudentlydeclare that "presendy," in Renaissance stage directions, means "immediately" rather than "soon," but in their treatment ofthe word "sad," they neglect to point out that the term often means "serious" (OED 4) rather than "sorrowful." Also, consecutive entries for "thunder" and "thunder and lightning" cover much of the same ground and could probably have been combined into a single entry. However, these cavils do little to tarnish the noteworthy achievement of this dictionary, which admirably fills a void on the reference shelffor both scholars ofearly modern drama and beginning students. Michael D. Friedman University of Scranton Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens, eds. Discontinuities: New Essays on RenaissanceLiterature and Criticism. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1998. Pp. xx + 244. $65.00. You will not agree with everything in this book. What is probable is that, whatever your specialty and your point ofview, you will find parts ofit much more convincing (or unconvincing) than the rest. A diverse and often contentious set ofreflections on the studyand teaching ofearlymodern texts, Discontinuities abounds with disjunctions and contradictions. In their introduction, the editors themselves anticipate the reader's "experience ... of constantly having the ground from underneath one cut away" (xviii). Whether or not the reader herself is so unsure of matters as to react with such insecurity, Comensoli and Stevens have succeeded in creating a forum for an exceptionally honest and provocative exchange of opinions. Although no such volume can be comprehensive , this one exposes to an unusual degree of scrutiny many of the conflicting forces that shape the field as it stands now, in the aftermath of the upheavals ofthe 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and offers contrastingalternatives for Reviews229 renewal. The essays, contributed for the most part (and in comparable numbers) by critics from Canada and from the United States, mainly attest to the importance of six interrelated influences in the study of Early Modern texts today: new historicism, post-structuralism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and questions about canonicityand textual tradition or"reproduction." (This seems a large enough net to cast in one book—even ifit does not extend to the equally prominent subjects ofpost-colonialism and race, or to queer theoryapart from one briefappearance.) With a few exceptions, however, these authors share an overriding concern with die theoretical significance ofhistoricism. Many contributors see our uncertaintyabout the latter as symptoms ofa long-term crisis, in which die stakes are high for future scholars as well as for the broader reception —if there is to be any—of Renaissance texts into the culture of a new millenium. Among the manifesto-writers is Linda Woodbridge, whose essay, "Dark Ladies: Women, Social History, and English Renaissance Literature," is one of several in Discontinuities that are so trenchandy written as to qualify as position papers on the state ofthe discipline.Woodbridge evokes a nightmare prospect in which, "stretched on a hermeneutical torture rack with new historicists pulling on our arms and deconstructionists on our feet,we maybecome unable to read or interpret at all" (67). When she then pleads for the adoption of a "middle ground—readings that, given what we know about social history and literary history, are more probable than others" (68), her eloquence gains plausibility from the inclusive, eclectic, undogmatic quality of her own work as a critic. Throughout her career,Woodbridge has stood squarelywhere she stands here; whatever her proposal may lack in systematizing pretentions it makes up in its honest pragmatism, its unmysterious concern with maintaining (or recovering ) a common ground for practical criticism after the ideological divisions ofthe recent past. Close to Woodbridge in this respect, yet far more concerned with the blind spots ofdeconstruction than with those ofhistorians, is Sylvia...

Susan Sontag: the making of an icon

The first--and unauthorized--biography of the so-called dark lady of American letters. Ever since she took American culture by storm with the publication of her Notes on Camp in 1964, Susan Sontag has been a star. Her austere glamour has been a critical factor in her success, making her a role model for intellectual women, a sex symbol for brainy men. She has never ceased to fascinate the public: as brilliant wunderkind, bringing the latest in French thought to America; as sophisticated analyst of her own experience with cancer in Illness as Metaphor; as champion of free speech in the Rushdie Affair; as theater director in besieged Sarajevo; and, with the publication of The Volcano Lover, as best-selling historical novelist. Yet she has both courted that fascination and insisted on holding it at a distance, demanding control over her public image. This first--and most definitely unauthorized--biography delves beneath the surface to examine the forces that made Susan Sontag an international icon. Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock explore her public persona and private passions, including the strategies behind her meteoric rise to fame and her political moves and missteps. Above all, they show how the life of Susan Sontag reveals to us the way we live now.

Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium

The role of the intellectual is traditionally gendered masculine, and women are excluded from consideration. Contemporary discussions of the 'death of the intellectual' noticeably make no reference to feminist intellectuals. On the other hand, women in academia have been reluctant to adopt the role of public intellectual as conventionally defined. There is an anxiety about the contemporary place of the intellectual, and about the necessity for the distinction made by some feminists between theory and practice, the intellectual and the activist, and where this might lead. In exploring the role of feminist intellectuals over the last two centuries, three paradigms of the feminist intellectual are proposed for consideration: Cassandra (the prophetess cursed with disbelief), for example Florence Nightingale; the feminist Messiah (the exceptional female saviour who would sacrifice herself to change women's lives), for whom the exemplar is Margaret Fuller; and the Dark Lady (the token woman in a community of men), such as de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag. Indeed, Camille Paglia's rivalry with Sontag lends itself to being interpreted as evidence of her current desire to occupy this 'dark lady' role. In conclusion, after discussing contemporary, late twentieth-century feminism (Natasha Walter, Elizabeth Wurtzel, gurrl power, 'women behaving badly'), the role of Margaret Thatcher in changing perceptions of women's capacity for political power is proposed for celebration. Finally, there is Cixous's image of the feminist intellectual as the laughing Medusa, who turns men to stone, but turns laughter on herself.

Aemilia Lanyer: gender, genre, and the canon

Aemilia Lanyer was a Londoner of Jewish-Italian descent and the mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain. But in 1611 she did something extraordinary for a middle-class woman of the seventeenth century: she published a volume of original poems. The essays in this volume establish the facts of Lanyer's life and use her poetry to interrogate that of her male contemporaries, Donne, Jonson, and Shakespeare (she was once thought to be Shakespeare's Dark Lady). Lanyer's work sheds light on views of gender and class identities in early modern society. By using Lanyer to look at the larger issues of women writers working within a patriarchal system, the authors go beyond the explication of Lanyer's writing to address the dynamics of canonization and the construction of literary history.

:Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England

Between i640 and i66o, English colonists in Virginia developed a legal system of chattel slavery out of the English hierarchical class system of indentured servitude. Bondage became marked by distinctions of skin color defined by the condition of the mother. Kim F. Hall's important book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, traces the rhetorical preparation for that legal distinction in the conquest of a racialized dark lady enacted in travel narratives, plays, and masques, but primarily in English lyric poetry. Hall grounds her analysis in two powerful and disparate strands of investigation: first, the historical analysis of the languages of race by Winthrop D. Jordan in White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550o-182 (Chapel Hill, i968) and, second, the feminist analysis of gender developed from Nancy Vickers's influential work on the dismemberment of the beloved implicit in the Petrarchan blazon ('The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman [New York, I9851) and from Parker's own investigation of the rhetorical challenge of gender difference in New World texts (Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property [London, I9871). Hall situates herself as a black feminist reader confronting the canonical texts of European elite culture. She reads with scrupulous care and a full awareness of the consequences of figures of speech. She has two critical commonplaces to confront: the belief that the English were unfamiliar with African complexions and the belief that the black-white binarisms of Elizabethan poetry were not racialized categories. Hall's work on English elite investment in the slave trade powerfully challenges such narrow assertions. The familiarity and availability of tropes of race is clear in the figure of an enslaved black man in chains that the College of Heralds granted as an augmentation to John Hawkins's coat of arms after his second slave voyage in I562. Heraldic emblems are riddles to be deciphered; the reference to the racial characteristics of a African male body is simple. Hall also has the more delicate task of tracing the process of race in the language and definition of beauty in lyric poetry. The core of Hall's book is the argument over the lyric. She exposes the links between blackness and economics in the English (p. 66), primarily Sir Philip Sidney's. The dynamic of the poet's transformation of his dark lady into white is a mechanism that employs not simply neoplatonic love poetry but also cultural values regarding the proper 'use' of foreign materia, both economic and discursive (p. 71). Hall organizes the chapter around an analysis of four different tropes: the racialized light/dark dichotomy of the Elizabethan sonnet cycles, the colonialist nexus of beauty and cosmetics, the problems of sunburn with the implicit anxieties over climate embedded therein, and finally the binary of race in the Song of Songs.

:The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531- 1665

Contents: Part One: Family Affairs: From Venice to England The Charterhouse and After The Second Generation The Third Generation Economic Affairs, Privileges and Social Standing The Bassano's Jewish Identity Part Two: The Dark Lady: Emilia Bassano and Alphonso Lanier Was Emilia Bassano the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's Sonnets? Part Three: Musical Affairs: Performing I: The Court Recorder Consort Performing II: Other Instruments Composing Instrument Making and Repairing Part Four: Concluding: Reflections Appendix I: Music and the English Bassanos after 1665 Appendix II: Jacomo and the Venetian Bassanos Bibliography Index.