[In the following essay, Crewe examines the “racializing potential” of Shakespeare's drama and poetry, arguing that “race is ubiquitous in Shakespeare's work.”]

At present, any attempt to discuss “Shakespeare and race-writing” in general will almost certainly appear misconceived. To suppose, for a start, that Shakespeare engages in something we might call race-writing is already to risk begging the question entirely. Even if the term “race” is granted, recent studies have rightly emphasized the heterogeneity and historical specificity of “racial” construction in the early modern period. These inhibiting considerations notwithstanding, I have posed the question of Shakespeare and race-writing in general terms. I have done so because it seems to me that prevailing historicist and/or cultural-studies categories make it difficult to precipitate the issue of “race” in Shakespeare broadly or fluidly enough to do justice to the phenomenon. Some further constriction may result from anxieties attendant on the discussion of so hurtful a topic as race. Without denying the sensitivity of the issue, I do not believe that these forms of constriction do any good. I shall proceed to argue, therefore, that insofar as Shakespeare can be seen to engage in “race-writing” at all, that writing is not confined to overtly racialized characters and situations in a handful of plays. On the contrary, “race” is ubiquitous in Shakespeare's work: ubiquitously prophesied; ever-present even when not deliberately foregrounded; constituted exorbitantly from the start.

Before elaborating on these remarks, I shall mention that they have not been prompted simply by consideration of Shakespeare's plays. Nor have they been exclusively prompted by recent discussion of Shakespearean and/or early modern racial construction.¹ An important instigation came from outside the field in the guise of Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game. Arguably, Jordan's film is one that seeks to realize the politically progressive potentialities of crossing in both the gendered and the racial senses of the term, the transvestite character Dil being the crossing figure in both those senses. Yet any assumption of progressive homology between the film's destabilizing sex-gender representations and its racial-ethnic ones would be questionable.² The ironic brilliance, articulateness, and political purposiveness of the film's gender-discourse are simply not matched in the film's racial/ethnic discourse. Perhaps it is because so many people now believe that sexuality and gender are culturally constructed and performed—or at least that the constructive-performative dimension is more consequential than the biological one—that Jordan's gender-bending tour de force could be produced as a mainstream film and received with broad public acclaim. As I have suggested, however, the film's racial/ethnic script remains fragmentary, relatively inarticulate, in comparison with its “performative” sex-gender script. Does this difference imply a lack of public conviction that race, too, is culturally constructed and performed? A strong residual belief that race is an intractable biological fact? Or does it imply a continuing deficiency in our critical discourses of “race”?

Consider the analogy apparently set up in the film between crossing (or passing) in gender terms and in racial/ethnic ones. Played by the “dark-skinned” Jaye Davidson, the gender-crossing transvestite character Dil can also be seen as a highly-eroticized racially or ethnically indeterminate figure, deconstructing the film's black-white polarities and constituting a valued third term. As an eroticized intermediary, Dil appears capable of negotiating racial/ethnic differences.³The Crying Game might thus be understood to promote ethnic plurality—and maybe “ethnicity” as such—in place of antagonistically “pure,” reductive, racial identities (black man-white man; “nigger”-Irish). Some difficulties may be posed for this thesis, however, by the different ways in which Dil is seen by different viewing audiences.⁴ A more serious difficulty arises from the apparent bodily coding—indeed, color-coding—of Dil as a figure of racial/ethnic indeterminacy or non-identity in the presence of sharply defined (black-white) bodily alternatives. In racial/ethnic terms, Dil does not represent a performative option so much as a particular look—one that leads bell hooks to characterize him/her as the type of the eroticized mulatta in an all too familiar racial schema. While I do not believe this characterization is necessarily correct, it raises a question about what Dil can stand for in the racial/ethnic context of the film.⁵

What, in fact, can Dil's racial/ethnic indeterminacy stand for if not the eugenic undoing of “pure” racial identity and hence antagonism? Failing any positive ethnic identification, to what can Dil's indeterminability attest if not a eugenic dream of benign mixture, with deracialization as its utopian telos? Yet no eugenic politics can be enunciated in film, or with reference to it, given both the current discrediting of racial eugenics and current reinvestment in ethnicity as distinct from race.⁶ The film's discursive blockage on this subject is rendered virtually complete by the fact that any explicit eugenic idealization of Dil would be no less disturbing in its complicated invidiousness than is the abjecting disdain for persons of “mixed race” in strongly race-polarized and race-identified cultures.⁷

In short, although The Crying Game is an actively anti-racist film, it is also a film at once possessed and thwarted by racial consciousness. Such “passive” racialism, which is certainly not confined to The Crying Game alone at present, can be regarded as a troubling residue of Western racial construction at least since the actively formative (perhaps strictly reformative) early modern period. It is for participating momentously and overtly in such racial construction—among other things—that Shakespeare stands out among his English contemporaries. The study of Shakespeare's race-writing may thus enable us to recognize the extensiveness of the racial residue of Western cultural construction as a preliminary to further consideration of any “post-racial” identification or consciousness. It is on this premise that I wish to broach once again the broad question of Shakespeare's race-writing, concluding with an example from the sonnets as an important “racial” text.

Racial readings of Shakespeare are hardly new. In an essay titled “The Getting of a Lawful Race,” however, Lynda Boose makes a case for reading the Shakespearean racial text more systematically and less anachronistically than has generally been done in the past from any point of view. These two requirements virtually mandate a fresh start in racial reading of Shakespeare, although it should be added that this fresh start has effectively been made by Shakespeareans working in postcolonial and cultural studies frames of reference. Some of the best new work appears in the very volume in which Boose issues her call for renovation.⁸ Insisting, nevertheless, that such reading be properly historical, Boose establishes three caveats. First, racial categories and imaginary racial genealogies are fluid at the time Shakespeare is writing. To read these texts into stabilized modern racial categories is anachronistic. Second, to the extent that early modern racial categories are stabilized, or are in the process of being stabilized, they differ from modern ones. Categorical misalignments in racial readings of Shakespeare are thus also to be avoided. (These caveats resemble the one now widely accepted about the impropriety of applying modern categories of sexuality to Renaissance texts.) Third, racial categories are never constructed independently of other cultural-political categories, notably those of class, sexuality, gender and nationality. Crossing of categories can thus easily entail double or multiple crossing. For example, the speaker in Micro-Cynicon: Sixe Snarling Satyres (1599), by T- M- (Thomas Middleton?) alludes to a prostitute-figure anticipating Dil in The Crying Game as a “pale Checkquered black Hermaphrodite.”⁹ This strongly eroticized multicategorical figure resists any exclusively racial reading, apparently figuring instead a disturbingly magnetic indeterminability.

Boose focusses mainly on the formation of white racial ideology through an interplay between what might be called the Renaissance ethnographic Imaginary (comprising the essentially fictional constructions of race inherited from classical antiquity and the middle ages) and the empirical data of early modern inter-ethnic encounters, the latter occurring mainly under the impetus of European imperial expansion. As part of this discussion, she notes the formativeness of English colonial/racial construction of the Irish for later constructions of race that will, so to speak, be ever more elaborately color-coded and body-typed, thus technically becoming subject to empirical verification. The perniciousness of racial othering (and enslavement) arises not only from the power-differential governing these encounters but from their overwhelming predetermination by texts concerning the savagery, wildness or Plinian monstrousness of “other” races. (Clearly, idealization of racial others as noble or prelapsarian is another mode of imperious othering that does no service to its objects.) Yet this history, voluminous, complicated, and still in the process of being written, is not the whole story. I particularly want to focus here on the discursive matrix from which Shakespeare's race-writing is historically precipitated. The racializing potentialities of that matrix—what we might call its many proto-racial components—are as much responsible as any other immediate circumstance for Shakespeare's production of a racialized text.

The common, gendered term “matrix” is one I choose deliberately. In the first instance, I use it to designate the loose ensemble of logical categories and operations, rhetorical tropes, semantic units, grammatical and prosodic forms, and whatever other elements comprise the language-situation for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Admittedly, the term “matrix” may, when used in this sense, seem barely distinguishable from “discourse.” In use, the term may thus seem only to reiterate the post-structuralist point that language stands in a constitutive rather than a derivative or mimetic relation to social reality.

In fact, however, the term “discourse,” even in Foucault's historically inflected usage, still adheres to its structuralist antecedents. Its use still recalls the structuralist model of language as a synchronic system, and it recalls more specifically the linearization of signifying utterance in structuralism, whether in terms of Saussure's single axis or Jakobson's coordinating axes. The systemic autonomy and unqualified originary status of language are likewise recalled, and have been dogmatically reiterated in a great deal of post-structuralist work. While “matrix” may still imply the constitutiveness of language, it does not invest language with primordial structural autonomy. Instead, a relatively unstructured, temporal grouping of elements—one capable of being troped, perhaps, as fecund, but also as “hysterically” mobile—is designated by the term. To the extent that structural binaries remain present in the matrix, their primordial constitutiveness is attenuated and their oppositional alignment is unsettled.

In The Renaissance Notion of Woman, for example, Ian Maclean refers Western gender-discourse (as we might also refer racial discourse) back to such primordial binaries as male-female; limited-unlimited; odd-even, etc., the series culminating in light-darkness; good-evil.¹⁰ Obviously, these binaries cannot be regarded as neutral structural ones, but must rather be seen as value-laden residues of an unrecoverable but nonetheless real prehistory. In other words, their diachronic and culture-specific character is already manifest. Yet insofar as these binaries enter recorded (Western) cultural history, they do so within a loose, historically shifting, ensemble, not as fatefully determining structural poles. It is to this ensemble that the term “matrix” can be applied.

If there is a further justification for preferring the term “matrix,” it is that it tropes linguistic constitutiveness and historical limitation in a way that appears to me reasonably consonant with Shakespearean practice. This consideration is not unimportant if, as I do, one attaches considerable heuristic as well as historical importance to Shakespeare's practice in race-gender representations. Insofar as “matrix” is irreducibly gendered, however, it remains unavoidably implicated in conflict between idealization of the prolific female source and misogynistic stigmatization of the female threat to masculine idealization.¹¹ Yet the term can still be usefully employed to designate the (admittedly very large) set of particulars constituting speech and writing as agencies of cultural production at any given moment; it is not therefore a term exclusively bound either to mythic engendering or biological procreation. To turn attention to the Shakespearean matrix as one in which a strong, widely dispersed, racializing potential exists is not to turn away from the historical specifics of Shakespearean racial construction, but rather to reconnect those specifics to the language-situation enabling such construction.

To indicate what I mean by the racializing potential of the matrix, I shall begin with an example from “The Rape of Lucrece.” As one would expect, gender-conflict is strongly foregrounded in the poem, while categories of racial difference seem irrelevant given the implicit uniform “whiteness” of the poem's Roman characters.¹² Yet the moral terms of the poem are proto-racial as well. At Lucrece's death, her blood becomes a “purple fountain” bubbling from her breast, but as it spreads on the floor around her the mixed color purple begins to separate out into fractions:

Some of her blood still pure and red remain’d,
And some look’d black, and that false Tarquin stained.(13)

Lucrece's death is needed, in effect, to undo the internalized moral stain that is already tantamount to biological admixture. Only the most limited resemanticization would be needed to turn the “false” Tarquin who taints Lucrece's blood into an anxiously guilty yet sexually violent “colored” man, and Lucrece into the raped white woman. This resemanticization would still require Lucrece's noble death, not merely to uphold Roman honor in the abstract, but to forestall the birth of a child of mixed blood, an outcome strongly foreshadowed in the lines quoted above.

The initial purification-scenario, however, in which Lucrece's and Tarquin's blood separate out after flowing from the common purple source, proves revealingly insufficient. The red and the black components turn out not to be the only ones, while the diacritical antithesis between them in terms of purity and impurity requires further elaboration. Contemporary “experimental” knowledge of the bodily humors apparently supplied the basis for a further refinement:

And as there are four elements out of which our bodies are compounded, so there are four sorts of humors answerable to their natures, being all mingled together with the blood, as we may see by experience in blood let out of one's body. For uppermost we see as it were a little skim like to the flower or working of new wine. … Next we may see as it were small streams of water mingled with the blood. And in the bottom we see a black and thicker humor, like to the lees of wine in a wine-vessel.¹⁴

Each of these blood-fractions represents one of the four humors, blood containing all of them in varying proportions.

One could argue that in “The Rape of Lucrece” this humoral observation, the empiricity of which is confirmed by its non-distinction from viticultural observation, undergoes moral allegorization as Lucrece's spilt blood composes itself into an emblem. I believe it would be more accurate to say, first, that a fateful empirical ligature is being produced here between humoral physiology and race, and, second, that unstably hierarchized physiological and moral elements are present in the matrix, along with a strong personifying agency that is also proto-racial:

About the mourning and congealed face
Of that black blood a wat’ry rigol goes,
Which seems to weep upon the tainted place,
And ever since, as pitying Lucrece’ woes,
Corrupted blood some wat’ry token shows,
And blood untainted still doth red abide,
Blushing at that which is so putrefied.(15)

[1744-50]

As regards the previous diacritical antithesis between red and black, purity and impurity, it appears that untainted red blood is an irreducible oxymoron (it will “abide”). Yet the oxymoron will apparently be tolerable for ordinary moral and potentially procreative purposes (untainted blood can “abide” red). It is of this pure blood that the white woman will remain the primary vessel. Red blood cannot itself, however, be the signifier of purity. That at which it blushes is also its colored self. The signification of purity additionally requires that a completely untainted “wat’ry rigol” be separated out, and remain separated from, blood in any of its compromised colors. It is this colorless essence, of which the tears that forever bewail the tainted human condition also seem to be composed, that remains wholly antipathetic to any admixture with the blackness it also circumscribes.¹⁶ Perhaps it is on this strange essence that the projection of a full-blown white racial ideology will eventually depend. Here, however, the only human face that materializes is the one into which the dark Tarquin-blood congeals. Essential purity has no picturable face, or, perhaps, human embodiment. This emblem's strange condensation of darkness, sexuality, loss, melancholia, death, sanctity and taint recurs in Sonnet 127, to which I shall turn in due course. It is in this knot or complex, however, that the human image is simultaneously precipitated and disavowed as black.

It is not only in this passage that a discourse of “color” is produced in the poem. Before the poem's tragic resolution transpires, another field of color has been negotiated through conventional Petrarchan troping of the red and the white:¹⁷

When at Collatium this false lord arrived,
Well was he welcom’d by the Roman dame,
Within whose face beauty and virtue strived
Which of them both should underprop her fame.
When virtue bragg’d, beauty would blush for shame;
When beauty boasted blushes, in despite,
Virtue would stain that o’er with silver white.
But beauty, in that white entituled,
From Venus' doves, doth challenge that fair field;
Then virtue claims from beauty beauty's red,
Which virtue gave the golden age to gild
Their silver cheeks, and call’d it then their shield,
Teaching them thus to use it in the fight,
When shame assail’d, the red should fence the white.

[50-63]

Shakespeare is, as we know, among the English Renaissance writers who seek to reconstruct the figure of the Petrarchan woman as one in whom desire and chastity are reconciled, this reconciliation being solemnized through marriage. Such reconciliation under the aegis of “married chastity” represents an alternative to the old Petrarchan war between desire and chastity which is, on one hand, a gendered battle between male desire and female chastity, and on the other hand a civil war between desire and chastity in the woman herself.¹⁸ In the woman's case, the red and white, respectively signifying the desire of her blood and her chaste spiritual purity, remain at odds. In “Lucrece,” however, the alternative of reconciliation and interchange between desire and chastity, and between everything else those terms encode, is projected through an extraordinarily fluid, inventive, miscegenating blazon in which primary colors and significations are mingled, promising an end to the war of the sexes (and, of course, in the Elizabethan context, to the War of the Roses). Insofar as both race and gender are interchangeably constituted and color-coded, which is not to say that they are ever identically constituted, the blazon can provide a model for benign interchange and crossing as well as opposition. The apparent inability of this revisionary blazon to function as an effective model for nontragic resolution in the poem, or to resolve contradictions without revealing new ones, may simply reveal the power of countervailing imperatives of (racial) purity and (gendered) identity in the early modern period.¹⁹ It is these highly reductive imperatives, to be written even or above all on people's bodies, that the protoracial discourse of “Lucrece” announces.

Local examples of racializing potential abound in the Shakespeare canon. Neither Macbeth nor, presumably, Shakespeare is thinking racially in the famous lines:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

[II.ii.57-60]

Nor, presumably, is Lady Macbeth thinking racially when she says:

Out, damned spot! out, I say!

.....

What, will these hands ne’er be clean?

[V.i.35, 43]

Yet the preternatural staining power of blood can be mobilized in Shakespearean and post-Shakespearean racial construction to signify the fatal effects of even the smallest admixture of bad/black blood; the characteristic exorbitancy of racialization—of racial discourse—is strongly anticipated in these hyperbolic locutions.²⁰ It is not just the indelibly tainting power of blood but its limitless dispersion that renders the dark woman-as-mother singularly threatening, as Boose has argued, to “white” patrilineal construction.²¹

Some examples of racializing potential are less local than this one. The strongly gendered Elizabethan language of cosmetic coloration, so well discussed by Frances Dolan in the context of misogyny, is already rife with anticipations of racialized “blackening,” “whitening” and passing, while the cosmetic taint that impeaches female chastity also implies an underlying “darkness” equally capable of bearing race, class or gender implication.²² (Thus the representation of the chaste woman, who must never be “colored,” tinted, or tainted, becomes a virtual impasse for the male Elizabethan poet or painter.)²³ Racial actualization is already under way when Lysander blackens Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream by saying: “Away, you Ethiope” [III.iii.257] or “Out, tawny Tartar, out!” [III.ii.263]. Lysander's capacity to blacken Hermia arbitrarily and aggressively in this way implies a still-nascent power both of racial construction and “exposure.” At the same time, Hermia's stereotypical characterization as the dark twin to the ideally fair Helena does not prevent Helena from seeing herself in competition with a fair Hermia [I.ii.227] for the Athenian beauty-prize. The fact that a dark beauty can be fairer than the fair depends, obviously enough, on the double and hence separable meanings of “fair” as blonde and as beautiful, implying the manipulable contingency of these characterizations. Yet the embeddedness of a small set of virulent Africanist or Orientalist tropes in the contemporary discursive matrix facilitates both a racial vectoring of representation and associative conjunction between logically disparate fields.²⁴

The terms of cosmetic and bodily coloration merge, for example, with the terms of rhetorical coloration in the key racialized figure of Othello. Or, to put it differently, the figure of Othello materializes from a field in which, among other things, rhetorical, cosmetic, and bodily coloring become intermingled. Othello's bodily coloring seems almost complementary to the high rhetorical coloring he also manifests, while his denial of both these forms of coloring represents a paradoxically internalized cosmetology of passing. These denials notwithstanding, Othello's high “coloring” suffices to taint the chaste white woman (Desdemona), even or above all in his own mind.²⁵ Both the racist discourse of speakers in Othello and the play's racialized representation of Othello as “Moor” actualize a broad tainting potential of the play's matrix. In other words, Othello's emergence as a racialized character depends on a great deal more than the empirical contingency of Renaissance inter-ethnic encounters.

Examples of this kind could be multiplied almost indefinitely, and not only with respect to Shakespeare's overtly racialized characters or situations. Cumulatively, such examples project racial differences as deep-dyed ones, so to speak, while that projection in turn connects racialization via the discourse of purity to nameless archaic horrors of blood-taint. For Shakespeare, I would suggest, this racializing potentiality of the matrix, actualized as historical pressure and occasion dictate in such figures as Aaron, Tamora, Shylock, Jessica, Othello, Cleopatra and Caliban, is not exhausted by the production of these characters and situations.²⁶ The fact that the racializing potentiality is not localized, and cannot be bounded within a set of racial characters, means that it is indeterminable, always exorbitant. It is to this state of affairs that the sonnets testify as a “racial” text.

A racial reading of the sonnets is strongly anticipated by Joel Fineman in Shakespeare's Perjur’d Eye, when he refers periodically to their “miscegenating” discourse.²⁷ In speaking of the sonnets as a script for miscegenation, Fineman is not speaking pointedly of them as a racial text. It is to an incongruous mixture of categories that he is primarily referring, heterosexuality already constituting a categorical mixture as opposed to the categorical purity of the male homoerotic bond. Yet on one hand Fineman cannot purge the term “miscegenation” of its latter-day racial meaning, which, according to the OED, dates from 1864, while on the other hand his application of the term to the sonnets makes them historically anticipatory of a racial discourse in which racial miscegenation will be tabooed or formally outlawed. In effect, Fineman's etymologically correct use of the term “miscegenation” hovers delicately between historical anticipation and retrospect. Boose, too, finds race not yet fully operative but unmistakeably emerging as the dominant European cultural category in the early seventeenth century.

In Fineman's terms, the sonnets constitute the Shakespearean master-code in which, among other things, modern Western subjectivity is decisively programmed. Fineman construes this subjectivity in Lacanian terms, making it first an effect of specular identification and then of symbolic reconstruction, the two phases corresponding roughly to the Young Man and Dark Lady sonnets respectively. No racial thematic is entailed in Fineman's reading, yet insofar as it is propped, like so many other sonnet-readings, on the imaginary master-narrative of the Young Man and the Dark Lady, it registers a strong racial-genetic potential. Fineman declines to thematize race because Lacanian subject-formation remains normatively if tacitly centered on the white, male, Western subject. For Lacan, just as there is explicitly “no woman,” so there is implicitly no person of color, yet this constitutes erasure without prejudice, so to speak.²⁸

What can be tacit for Lacan and Fineman, however, as well as being repressed in innumerable readings of the sonnets, is not tacit for Shakespeare, who problematically and momentously posits (or historically recognizes) the fair young man as the cultural ideal, with respect to whom all others will stand in abjected, specular or invisibly inmixed relation. This prospect comes close to being fully enunciated in Sonnet 20 (“A woman's face with nature's own hand painted”). Although now practically read to death for its gender-ambiguity, the sonnet's preoccupation with color has largely escaped notice, as has the proto-racial implication of the line “a man in hue, all hues in his controlling.” While “hue” may refer to a male appearance in the first instance, thus prophesying only gender-subordination, the normative fairness of this man is also implied, thus prophesying the subjection of all other “hues” to this one. However complicated, mixed, or self-alienated normative Western subjectivity may become, it will be vested in the specularized, white, male body.

Partly under the impetus of race-class-gender critiques as well as ethnic and multicultural politics, however, this state of affairs can no longer be taken for granted. What follows—or has already followed to a significant degree—is widespread reading of Shakespeare at, or somewhere between, two conceivable limits. At one end of the spectrum, Shakespeare is readable as a leading early modern promulgator of hegemonic Western race/class/gender norms, while at the other end he is read as profoundly and resistantly Other with respect to those same norms. At this end of the spectrum, Shakespeare's prolific, multipositional dramatizations, coupled with his personal “absence” or invisibility as author, make it possible for him to be critically relocated in the productive position of the black mother rather than the white father—to salutary effect, perhaps, on those still invested in Shakespeare as the canonical guarantor of white-male-universal Western culture.²⁹ That the theater should be the imagined locus of such “maternal” production is consistent with repeated troping of the theater, in Shakespeare and elsewhere, as countercultural and prolifically female (it is the scene of Cleopatra's triumph). In turning to Sonnet 127, however, I wish, instead of positioning Shakespeare in relation to these limits, to engage with his heuristic and self-reflexive troping of the racializing matrix.

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slander’d with a bastard shame,
For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false-borrow’d face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bow’r,
But is profan’d, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, that they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland’ring creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.

To begin by rehearsing some fairly common observations about this sonnet, it is strategically placed as the first of the so-called Dark Lady poems in the 1609 quarto sequence, following the truncated, twelve-line sonnet in rhyming couplets that ends the Young Man series. An important break and a transition are thus apparently marked; we might add that they are metrically re-marked in line 3 of the sonnet through the abrupt inversion and jarring caesura of “black/beauty's.”³⁰ A modal shift from Petrarchan to anti-Petrarchan also coincides with the first appearance of the Dark Lady. This complex transposition and inversion of Petrarchan idealization seemingly includes a proto-racial critique of an entire value system predicated on an arbitrary coincidence between the “true,” the “good” and the “fair.”

These ordinary terms of approach to Sonnet 127 facilitate a racial reading. Rather than presenting a racial “character,” however, Sonnet 127 seemingly enacts a struggle between romance precipitation and continuing repression of the powerful, racialized female character as a strong potentiality inherent in the matrix. Struggle occurs for many reasons. First, in Boose's terms, the black woman is the unrepresentable in white racial-genetic ideology. Bringing the black woman to consciousness and representation is thus a formidable counter-ideological undertaking. The degree to which the emergence of Cleopatra represents this “triumph” remains debatable, not only with reference to the play but to complex ongoing debate about the “blackening” and “whitening” of Cleopatra in Western cultural history.³¹ Second, more is involved in Sonnet 127 than the substitution of one leading character (or addressee) for another in the sonnet sequence. An inversion of the figure-ground relation between fair young man and “colored” woman is also involved; an entire structure of representation (and of repression) is thus being painfully reconceived. Third, the emergence of the black woman entails a strongly reflexive turn to (troping of) the gendered matrix rather than the figures hitherto precipitated from it. The potentiating and simultaneously threatening relation of the matrix to its products comes dimly into view, as does the power of the matrix as the “tainted” source and ultimate undoing of all that is thought fair, good and true. In this moment of dawning recognition, the “normal” Petrarchan monotony of idealization and its discontents gives way to a state of volatile, highly charged ambivalence. Fourth, the emergence of the black woman subverts the narrative in which she is comprehended. In the “old days,” we are told, “black was not counted fair,” thus the emergence of “black beauty” as a historical novelty prophesies an epochal reversal and lamentable transvaluation of values. In a sense, however, these old days are no further back than the previous sonnet, and any contemporary reader of Sonnet 127 could have been aware that the female “black beauty” of the Song of Solomon may well have antedated the “fair” ideal of the previous sonnets. The coincidence between fair, true, and good is thus threatened with exposure as a latter-day imposition—and form of denial—given spurious originary status. A wholly false, supplanting cultural genealogy and value-system may therefore be represented by the fair young man, not by the stigmatized black woman. Finally, the entire order of visionary, specular optics in which the “I” is precipitated as a function of the “eye,” and which, according to Fineman, constitutes premodern Western subjectivity, is undone, exposing a range of disconcerting alternatives. The mirror of identity becomes one of melancholy difference rather than sameness; or absorbs instead of reflecting; or confronts the beholder simultaneously with the lack of any identity and corresponding pathos of a shared, senselessly martyred dark humanity, from which the name of “beauty” is witheld; or, finally, becomes the mirror of a human mortality at once denied and projected onto the dark person as distinct from the immortally fair one.

The near-inconceivability for the speaker of everything being registered in this sonnet is made explicit in a number of ways that barely require commentary: it is enough to note the poem's scandalized citation of the purity-threatening universality of cosmetic color; the disappearance of nature; the indeterminability of the bastard; the rupture of true genealogy, and so on. Beyond the speaker's concern about these fetishes of the period, however, a deeper dislocation is implied in the poem by the persistence of logical and rhetorical forms that no longer make normal logical and rhetorical sense. “Therefore,” which opens the sestet, is a logical ligature that makes no intelligible connection, and it is shortly followed by what seems like a failed rhetorical progression from “her eyes are raven black” to “her eyes so suited.” The unexpected and baldly infelicitous repetition of “eyes” creates a sense of logical and rhetorical deficiency while apparently undermining any distinction between the eyes and something else in which, or to which, they might be “suited.” If, on the other hand, the eyes are well-suited for the paradoxically funereal occasion of their debut, as is the black face that appears in Lucrece's spilt blood, they also seem to mark the point of disappearance between the suit and that which is suited, the costume and the wearer of the costume. The lady is being painted black-on-black, as black takes over everywhere. The double negative construction in the line “At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack” makes the affirmative virtually unrecoverable, both in the line and as an antecedent to “Slandering creation with a false esteem.” Effects of this order are not containable by a merely antithetical conception of anti-Petrarchanism, which, as Fineman among others has pointed out, is anticipated from the start in Petarchanism. (“My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun” is more programmatically anti-Petrarchan yet considerably less charismatically dark than Sonnet 127.)

Sonnet 127 is not a text that produces a racial character—a “black woman” in any sense in which that term would now be understood—but it is certainly one that engages in reflexive thematization of the unbounded potentialities of the racializing matrix. Perhaps only tentative conclusions can accordingly be drawn from the poem. One such conclusion is that since race has not yet been fully hardened into a master category or yoked to a master-narrative of white racial supremacy, the poem holds both racialized “truth” and its momentous undoing in prophetic suspension. In the moment of anticipation, both “white” racial ideology and its dismantling—not merely its unmasking—are prophesied. Insofar as history can be said to have verified the ambiguous prophecy, however, it cannot yet be said to have produced closure or anything close to “post-racial” consciousness; the residues, the continuing impasses, and the threats of reversal remain in historical contention.

Another, related, conclusion is that racial consciousness persists in the present because it cannot be dissipated simply through attacks on racism, by critiques of overtly racialized texts and cultural situations, or even, for that matter, by postcolonial revision and cultural critique of the Shakespearean text. Indispensable and consequential though these remain, race-writing is too insidiously pervasive, too unconfined, to be fully encompassed in these ways; indeed, a dangerously premature sense of mastery or enclosure may be produced by critiques of racial ideology as such. To return to the Shakespearean text is not (redundantly) to begin the critical reckoning with race all over again, but rather to begin a critical reckoning with “post-racial” residues even more threatening when unrecognized than when seen in all their alarming magnitude.

Notes

1. Although their bearing remains only indirect here, I want to acknowledge the importance of the race-critiques produced by Kwame Anthony Appiah, notably “Illusions of Race” and “Topologies of Nativism,” in In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28-72.

2. For one negative view of the film's racial representations, see Frann Michael, “Biology Notwithstanding …,” Cineaste, 20 (1993): 30-35.

3. I make no presumption about actor Jaye Davidson's ethnicity or his “racial” identity, to neither of which any reference is made in the film.

4. Since racial categories and perceptions are by no means universal, how Dil is seen may differ significantly between the U.S. and England (or Ireland), and may differ again between those English-language settings and their Latin counterparts.

5. bell hooks, “Seduction and Betrayal: The Crying Game meets The Bodyguard,” Outlaw Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 53-62. While this characterization of Dil may partly explain the favorable U.S. reception of The Crying Game, I believe the term “mulatta” is misplaced with reference to any figure in a contemporary British film, that term belonging more recognizably to U.S. than to English racial discourse. Although the mestiza can be positively troped as a cultural figure in contemporary Latina writing, as, for example, in Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands = La frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), racial body-typing remains a form of literalism by no means transcended in The Crying Game.

6. The last flourishing of eugenics as a pseudoscience under the Third Reich served to discredit it almost entirely. The eugenic complement to racialist thinking is evident in various historical guises, however, including prescientific ones. Insofar as race is taken, in one sense or another, as a natural fact, eugenics becomes the mode of cultural intervention and control. Intervention can take the form of “getting a lawful race,” of aristocratic “breeding,” or of maintaining pure “bloodlines.” Genetic engineering has now reopened the prospect of eugenic manipulation, whether in science fiction or scientific fact. It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore the continuities and discontinuities between “race” and “ethnicity” in contemporary discourse, yet it seems fair to say that impulses towards positive ethnic identification tend to inhibit any final undoing of “race,” as do suspicions of genocidal intent.

7. Repression rather than mere blockage might seem to be the operative term here, given bell hooks's observation that “Neil Jordan [has] repeatedly said that [his film] has nothing to do with race.” “What’s passion got to do with it?” Outlaw Culture, 43.

8. Lynda Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race:’ Racial discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 35-54. My discussion of Shakespearean race writing “in general” is not meant to devalue or deny precedence to many important specific discussions, including, in this volume, ones by Jean Howard, Kim F. Hall, Margo Hendricks, and Jyotsna Singh. Nor is it meant to deny the multiplicity of specific “racial” types being constructed in this period (Irish, Jewish, Scottish, etc.). If I have focussed primarily on Boose's essay, it is because of the methodological principles it enunciates.

9. Quoted in Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 181.

10. Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 2-3.

11. My essay-title (“Out of the Matrix”) recalls a chapter-title (“Escaping the Matrix”) in Janet Adelman's Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992). I believe my argument is broadly compatible with Adelman's, although her primary concerns are maternity and male gynophobia.

12. In Titus Andronicus, however, lawful Roman paternity and whiteness are not just assumed but actively constituted in doubly antithetical relation to Aaron's lawless paternity and blackness, and Tamora's racially othered (Gothic) maternity and femininity.

13. “The Rape of Lucrece” in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) 1741 II: 1742-43. (All further references are to The Riverside Shakespeare).

14. Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academy, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Cyrus Hoy, 2nd. ed. (New York: Norton, 1992), 109.

15. Presumably following OED, “rigol” [l. 1745] is glossed as “ring, circle” in The Riverside Shakespeare. The OED definition seems primarily inferred from this passage, however, and one other in Shakespeare (2 Henry IV, IV.v.36) where the term is applied to the crown.

16. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613), reports that: “Some ascribe it [black skin color] (as Herodotus) to the blacknesse of the Parents sperme or seede.” Cited in Boose, “The Getting of a Lawful Race,” 43. It should be recalled, however, that geographical as well as genetic theories of racial (color) difference were widely entertained in the Elizabethan period.

17. Notoriously, the self-division of the woman tends to undermine her ideal integrity or wholeness in Petrarchan scenarios, while her spontaneous blushing “betrays” both her own desire and her complicity with her male assailant. The lines I have quoted, “Some of her blood still pure and red remain’d, / And some look’d black, and that false Tarquin stained,” leave the question of sexual desire and agency in suspense. “False” can apply either as an adjective to Tarquin's character or as the adverb “falsely” to the staining of his character by Lucrece's accusation. Whether Lucrece has “black” blood herself, and is thus the passive, subsequently guilty, and ultimately suicidal sexual aggressor, or whether she is the blackened innocent, remains at least grammatically unresolved.

18. Roland Greene observes that “in English as well as other European languages, the matter of racial difference comes into the word color in the early modern period, especially through the history of international exploration” (“Petrarchism among the Discourses of Imperialism,” in America in European Consciousness: 1493-1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995]: 147).

19. Rigorous logical opposition to forms of categorical merging, blurring or admixture, (i.e., logical opposition to miscegenation in its root sense), is a feature of Calvinist thought that has widely been regarded as racially (even genocidally) consequential in U.S. history. I simply note this widely held view, as well as the strongly Calvinistic strain in English reformation thinking. An iconoclastic dedication to pure whiteness or chastity is apparent in the work of major English poets from Spenser through Milton; perhaps Shakespeare is unusual in construing this dedication as fatal.

20. Indeed, the “one drop” criterion of racial impurity, familiar in the context of American studies, is anticipated in this memorably phobic locution. See, for example, Walter Benn Michaels, “The No-Drop Rule,” Critical Inquiry, 20 (Summer, 1994): 758-69.

21. In Boose's view, Eurocentric racial ideology stringently delegitimizes any procreation between a black man and a white woman or vice versa, though interracial sexual encounters are variably coded and tolerated—even licensed as a mode of white male seigneurial right or white woman's romance. The tragedy of Othello conveniently (yet imperatively) precludes the generation of offspring between Othello and Desdemona, lawful marriage notwithstanding.

22. Frances Dolan, “Taking the Pencil Out of God's Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA, 108 (March, 1993): 224-39.

23. The locus classicus for this impasse is the Proem to Book 3 of The Faerie Queene, in which it falls to the (male) author to depict chastity. For chastity to be credible, however, it must remain uncolored, untainted, and untinted, hence unpictured (it must in fact be de-picted), as must the perfectly chaste figure of Elizabeth I.

24. The virulence and/or exorbitant mobilization of these embedded tropes can be gauged from such instances as Francis Bacon's utopian New Atlantis. In that text, “the Jew” having been assimilated as rational skeptic affirming the all-white, “virgin” (sic) Christian patriarchy, the main symbolic threat remaining is “the Spirit of Fornication” that appears in the likeness of “a little, foul ugly Aethiop.” Francis Bacon, New Atlantis and The Great Instauration in Crofts Classics, ed. Jerry Weinberger (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1989), 66. See also G.K. Hunter, “Othello and Color Prejudice,” in Interpretations of Shakespeare, ed. Kenneth Muir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 180-208, for an important discussion of the classical and patristic prehistory of early modern “race,” and Karen Newman, “‘And wash the Ethiop white’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 141-62.

25. The taint that unhinges Othello in the play has been identified by Stephen Greenblatt, “The Improvisation of Power,” Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 222-54, as the sexual taint, discursively produced by a confessional Christian culture and materialized by the blood-spotted sheets of the marriage bed. In Greenblatt's view, Othello is anxiously at war with his own sexuality. That he should be especially or exemplarily so is, however, related to the hypersexualization of the black man already being effected in “white” early modern culture.

26. The political economy of this “dictation” is considered in broad terms by Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, and Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, tr. Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989).

27. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjur’d Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). It is all too easy to hear “miscegenation” as a pejorative term formed with the prefix “mis-” (as in mistake, misbegotten, misconceived, etc.) rather than as a compound noun formed from L. miscere + genus. Although the earliest OED citation identifies “miscegenation” as a pseudoscientific racist coinage dating from 1864, the term etymologically designates only a mixture of kinds, not necessarily a mismatch. Nineteenth-century racialization of logico-scientific terminology is, however, apparent in this coinage.

28. I am not accusing Lacan or Fineman of political incorrectness. Their claims are rigorously and unsentimentally developed, and have been found usefully provocative—more so than many conciliatory claims—by a number of feminists and cultural theorists. Franz Fanon's well-known appropriation of Lacan in Black Skin, White Masks is a case in point.

29. I am not aware of any professional work in which these limit cases are systematically argued, though the limits have been apparent. The “black mother” thesis has been propounded by Marjorie Garber in the semi-formal context of a talk at Dartmouth College. However salutary, this repositioning of Shakespeare is potentially invidious along lines suggested by Tania Modleski in Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (New York: Routledge, 1991). Insofar as the white, male author-subject is presumed capable of assuming any cultural position and mastering its discourse, he can be taken to represent all “others,” thus rendering their particular experience and even existence redundant.

30. By whom and under what circumstances they were so marked in the 1609 quarto we have no idea. I attach neither more nor less significance to the quarto sonnet-order than is skeptically allowed by Stephen Booth (ed.) in Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 545-46. “Dark Lady” is of course a critical fabrication to which the objections are now obvious: the term is embarrassingly gentrifying and euphemistic.

31. Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra (New York: Routledge, 1993), 5 ff, notes that the historical Cleopatra was ethnically Greek, not Egyptian, as was the contemporary ruling class in Egypt. Cleopatra appears generally to have been represented as fair-skinned in the Western iconographic tradition surveyed by Hamer. Whether Shakespeare was unaware of Cleopatra's ethnicity or was blackening her in a process of denegation isn’t clear, but her “tawniness” connects her via the lines I have already cited from A Midsummer Night's Dream to the “Ethiope,” while her being “with Phoebus' amorous pinches black / And wrinkled deep in time” [I.V.28-29] strongly connects her to the sonnet-figure of the woman. The psychoanalytic trope of the sexualized woman as the “dark continent” rather than as a bounded character is strongly anticipated in all of this. Standard Elizabethan punning might further suggest the doubleness of this figure as both incontinent and all-encompassing (continent), doubly forestalling ideological enclosure while effortlessly containing its own contradictions.