The Strange Case of Ray Comfort: Banana Man

Ray Comfort Wallpaper by Dobbed

deviantart.com 

The amusing story of Ray Comfort, aka Banana Man, isn't new, but it's always worth retelling ... 

Comfort is a Christian and a creationist, famous for putting forward the so-called banana argument which claims that this particular fruit provides irrefutable proof of intelligent design and God's benevolence. For not only does the banana have great nutritional value, but it's easy to hold in the human hand, comes ready-wrapped in a convenient to peel skin, and is colour-coded in a manner that accurately reveals its degree of ripeness.

Indeed, so perfect is the banana in form and function, that Comfort describes it as the atheist's nightmare. How, he asks, could a natural object so perfect just evolve - there just has to be an intelligence behind this fruity miracle ... Which, ironically, there is; though it's human in origin and not divine. The same scientific intelligence, in fact, that lies behind much of the cultivated produce we enjoy. 

For regardless of what environmentalists, organic farmers, and alarmists in the media like to believe about the inherent dangers and evil of Frankenstein food, the truth is man has been selectively breeding and genetically modifying what he eats for millennia. Comfort entirely ignores this fact and says nothing of the banana's agricultural history (the fact it was first domesticated around 9,000 years ago in SE Asia is of course doubly embarrassing for a Christian and a young Earth creationist).        

Ultimately, the modern banana is neither natural nor supernatural; it's a pure piece of artifice, far removed from its wild and almost inedible predecessors; an asexual clone, vulnerable to a range of diseases due to its lack of genetic diversity, that is entirely dependent upon human cultivation for its survival.

Whether Comfort likes to admit it or not, this tropical, sugar-rich fruit - much loved by monkeys as well as man - was something unbeknown to the authors of Genesis and never once tasted by Jesus or his disciples.    

Reflections on Hassan Hajjaj and His 'Kesh Angels

Hassan Hajjaj: Rider (2010)  

'Kesh Angels exhibition (2014) 

Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York

Moroccan-born, London-based artist and photographer Hassan Hajjaj has a new exhibition opening at Somerset House next month, as part of the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair. And this, I think, is a good thing ...

Because Hajjaj produces work that is not only visually exciting to look at, but philosophically interesting to discuss, reflecting as it does his deterritorialized existence spent not simply hip-hopping between two very different countries and cultures, but oscillating, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, between two poles of delirium, struggling to be free and to reinvent each and every gesture, invoking in the process a people to come whose identity is aesthetically styled from diverse elements in a Pop-Punk fashion and who pride themselves on belonging to a race that is impure and illegitimate.

Hajjaj is perhaps best known for a colourful and provocative series of portraits depicting traditionally dressed Arab-Muslim girls on motorbikes, as in the image above; not so much angels with dirty faces, as imagined by Rowland Brown and Jimmy Pursey, as 'Kesh Angels with hidden faces.

However, I don't think he should be defined by these images alone - anymore than he should be obliged to labour under the ridiculous idea that he's the Andy Warhol of Marrakesh. Hajjaj has far more to offer as an artist than such a lazy comparison allows. He is a man who - after much hard work - is finally able to say and do something in his own name, without asking permission or referencing the past from which he flees.


Notes

For details of the Somerset House exhibition, La Caravane, by Hassan Hajjaj, beginning October 5, 2017, please click here. 

For details of the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, also in London next month, click here. 

For a related post to this one on Pop Art from North Africa, click here. 

To see more images from the 'Kesh Angels exhibition, please visit the Taymour Grahne Gallery website by clicking here.

Thanks to Kosmo Vinyl for suggesting this post.

Pop Art from North Africa (with Images of Marilyn Veiled and Unveiled)

Libyan Marilyn 

Alla Abudabbus

This just in from dear friend and fellow blogger, Nahla Al-Ageli, over at Nahla Ink (a site that chronicles the adventures of an independent Arab woman and freelance journalist living in London, with particular reference to events happening within the world of Arab art and culture) ...

September 21st sees the launch of the Pop Art from North Africa exhibition at the P21 Gallery (London), featuring work by fifteen artists from the region, who have all been inspired by a movement that first emerged in Britain and the United States in the mid-late 1950s, but which has since expanded into a global phenomenon, challenging the art traditions of numerous countries with imagery drawn from the worlds of mass media, commerce, and popular culture.

The exhibition, curated by Najlaa El-Ageli and Toufik Doubi, will examine how Pop Art's postmodern irony plays out within the social, political and cultural environments unique to North Africa. For more details, please go to the P21 Gallery website by clicking here, or visit nahlaink.com

Personally, I would think this exhibition worth attending if only to see the beautiful image by Alla Abudabbus shown above.

Of course, it's not the first time that Marilyn has been depicted pop art style in a veil; the Iranian artist, Afshan Ketabchi, produced her work Marilyn Monroe Undercover in 2008, for example.

But I think it's my favourite such picture, reminding me as it does of Douglas Kirkland's famous series of photographs of Marilyn from 1961, in which she poses naked in a white sheet and shows that - veiled or unveiled - she was one of the most fascinating women of the twentieth century ...

A New Entry in the Big Book of Little Girls: Alma Deutscher (The Prodigy)

Photo of Alma Deutscher 
By Anna Huix (2016)

I.

One of the books I would still like to write, is my Big Book of Little Girls - a work dedicated to all of those fantastic creatures who are so much more than merely young females destined to grow up to be women in a conventional bio-cultural manner.

At their best - which is to say at their most phenomenal and inhuman - little girls are extraordinary events whose individuation doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. They are defined, thus, not by their age, sex, or material composition (sugar and spice), but by the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

I already have an index of possible candidates for the book, both living and dead, actual and fictional. And now I have another name to add: Alma Deutscher ...   


II.

Born in February 2005, Alma is a highly celebrated and much-loved composer and performer. Starting her musical career early - she began playing the piano aged two, followed by the violin at three - this wunderkind has already written sonatas, concertos, and operas.

For some, she's an angel sent to redeem the world through melody and she herself contrasts the simple beauty of her music with the ugliness and complexity of the times. Anyone wanting to see people in jeans or hear works that deal with social issues, should probably stay away from her recitals: Let them look at passersby in the street or watch TV, she says, with the regal disdain perfected more by Marie Antoinette than by Mozart.

And suddenly one recalls that the term prodigy refers not only to a young person with exceptional gifts, but - as her own mother reminds us - to a monstrous being who violates the natural order and brings with them something more troubling than a nice tune; something unbidden and unexpected ...

At the very least, I think it reasonable to regard this young girl as genuinely inspired, if not, indeed, one possessed; a witch who whirls a magical skipping rope about her head and allows strange forces to work through her. Whether these forces be divine or daemonic in nature is debatable; but it's surely worth remembering that the Devil has all the best tunes and that the positing of Beauty as the highest of all high ideals has, in the past, put dreamy Romantics on a path to Hell ...

But then I'm just one of those whom Robert Schediwy characterises as an advanced culture-theorist, suspicious of any attempt to steer contemporary classical music back to the 18th and 19th centuries with their "uninhibited love of melody", before those decidedly ungalant, 20th century composers dared to experiment with dissonance and require listeners to develop new ears.

As for Alma, obviously I wish her well. But I also hope that, as she matures, she rethinks her relationship to the present, to reality, and to popular culture and sees how even beauty can become an ugly impediment to genius ...


See Robert Schediwy, 'Alma und die gefährliche Liebe zur Melodie', Der Standard (13 Jan 2017): click here.

To listen to Alma play, or to read numerous other press reports and interviews with her and her parents, go to her website by clicking on the link already given. Alternatively, there are plenty of videos available to watch on YouTube, including this one, in which Alma not only performs her own piano and violin compositions, but speaks about her work before an invited audience at the WORLD.MINDS Annual Symposium (2016).

On the Portrait of Ms Ruby May, Standing

Portrait of Ms Ruby May, Standing 
Oil on canvas (2012) 
Leena McCall

I.

There is something of a tradition within the world of fine art for portraits of women standing.

Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals, for example, completed his contribution to this genre sometime around 1610. Indeed, such a lover was he of upright women that he produced another portrait of a woman standing just a few years later (c.1618-20).   

Neither of these unidentified women, however, arouses my interest as much as the fabulous Ms Ruby May, pictured above, standing, hand-on-hip and pipe in mouth, by UK based visual artist Leena McCall.

The painting is obviously intended to be sexually provocative. There's that defiant look in the eye of the subject, returning and challenging the male gaze, for a start; clearly this is a woman who knows how to construct and express a playfully ambiguous model of sexual identity on her own terms.

And then there's the fact that her breeches are unbuttoned, exposing her lower body or loins such that her pubic hair is clearly visible ...


II.

I recently published a post reflecting on the issue of female pubic hair, referring to its representation within the world of art.* A woman kindly wrote to me afterwards to say that whilst she enjoyed the piece, she couldn't help thinking it was essentially a non-concern within what she insisted was a sexually liberated  - or, at any rate, sexually indifferent - age:

"Some women wax, some women shave and shape their bushes, and some just leave things to grow naturally; the point is no one really cares and it's not a big issue, even if it remains subject to changing fashion. Thankfully, the days when people freaked out at the sight of a pubic hair have long gone."

I wonder, then, how she explains the fact that McCall's painting was swiftly removed by the Mall Galleries from the Society of Women Artists' 153rd annual exhibition in 2014, following a number of complaints and the concern that perhaps children or vulnerable adults might view it ...?

According to McCall, the picture was branded as pornographic and disgusting precisely because it showed Ms May as an amorous subject proudly displaying her pubic hair as a sign of mature womanhood. Afforded the opportunity to provide a replacement work, McCall admirably refused on the grounds that to do so would be to concede there was something inherently offensive or obscene about the portrait (and/or the body) of her friend Ruby May.  

So, to my correspondent I say thank you very much for writing, but I beg to differ with your analysis of the times in which we live.

For if there's been a pornification of culture on the one hand, so too is this the age of safe spaces, trigger warnings, political correctness, censorship, and the new puritanism in which the greatest crime is to cause offence (either wilfully or inadvertently) to the easily offended, be they snowflake liberals, religious maniacs, or - apparently - London gallery owners worried about their trustees and sponsors, etc. ...


* See: Where the Turtle Doves Sing ... the post mentioned above that reflects on pubic hair.

Reflections on the Vacuum-Sealed Nature of Objects 2: Ethico-Political Considerations

Hiromi and Lisa by Photographer Hal

# 24 from the series Zatsuran (2013)

I illustrated in part one of this post how D. H. Lawrence's little read (and undervalued) 1922 novel Aaron's Rod anticipates the work of philosopher Graham Harman on the vacuum-sealed nature of objects. Here, I'd like to critically examine the latter's controversial and challenging notion in more detail ...

In a nutshell, Harman wants us to acknowledge something very obvious but not so easy to explain; namely, the fact that discernible, individual objects exist and that being isn't some shapeless, unified totality. Further, whilst these objects have relations with other objects, they aren't defined, determined, or exhausted by such. They always keep something of themselves withdrawn and in reserve; something hidden and untouchable, as Harman says, in the basement of being.

Ultimately, then, what gives to things their absolute distinctness is the fact that they are vacuum-sealed in perfect isolation and only ever have indirect (metaphorical) contact with one another; i.e., they only ever relate by translating one another (and in so doing generate difference).

This - if true - has interesting if not, indeed, crucially important ethical and political consequences; not least of all for any Lawrentians still hoping to establish a democracy of touch based on the interpenetration of bodies, the glad recognition of souls, and the re-establishment of the vital relations between objects which, according to Lawrence, were destroyed by the grand idealists.

Having said that, there is a positive aspect to Harman's thesis of withdrawal and isolation; namely, it allows objects to retain their volcanic integrity and thus to resist all attempts by external forces to control, coordinate, and exploit them. In other words, at some level, despite increasingly extended networks of power and surveillance, objects are essentially autonomous and ontological Gleichschaltung is an impossibility.

As Levi Bryant notes, nothing, for Harman, "is ever so defined, reduced, or dominated that it can't break free and be otherwise ... People, animals, minerals, technologies, and microbes are always threatening to erupt ..." In other words, all objects carry the potential for surprise, which is, of course, a revolutionary potential.

It's also a reason why we should treat them with caution and respect and attempt to see things from their perspective (Ian Bogost refers to this as alien phenomenology). This is more than simply a  question of exercising our human curiosity; it's about acknowledging that the world exists - and doesn't simply exist for us. Again, to quote Bryant here: "We live in a universe teaming with actants where we are actants among actants, not sovereigns organizing all the rest as the old Biblical narrative from Genesis would have it."

In conclusion: some commentators, I know, have little time for Harman and his object-oriented ontology; they aren't seduced by the speculative nature of his realism, nor charmed by the weirdness of his arguments. But, like Bryant, I still think that, at it's best, his work is original and engaging and does what all good philosophical writing should - i.e., encourage us to think outside the gate, even at the risk of losing our way or, perhaps, ending up on yet another foolish quest for that mysterious thing called the soul ...

See:

Levi Bryant, 'Harman, Withdrawal, and Vacuum Packed Objects: My Gratitude', posted on Larval Subjects (May 30, 2012): click here. 

Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

To read part one of this post - Egoism a Deux - click here. 

Reflections on the Vacuum-Sealed Nature of Objects 1: Egoism a Deux

Rem and Marina by Photographer Hal 

# 07 from the series Flesh Love

Japanese photographer Haruhiko Kawaguchi (aka Photographer Hal) has been vacuum-packing lubed-up couples since 2009. The idea, he says, is to bring two people as physically close as possible and then hermetically seal them in their own world; united in love, united in life, united in death. 

I know exactly how D. H. Lawrence would describe this - egoism a deux; two people self-consciously contained in their own idealism and obscene personal intimacy to the point they can no longer move freely or even breathe.*

For like Rawdon Lilly, his fictional mouthpiece in Aaron's Rod (1922), Lawrence hates couples who pose as one and stick together like two jujube lozenges. Ultimately, they must recognise the intrinsically singular nature of being and be able to stand apart; to know that, at the core, one is alone and the heart beats alone in its own silence:

"'In so far as I am I, and only I am I, and I am only I ... I am inevitably and eternally alone, and it is my last blessedness to know it, and to accept it, and to live with this as the core of my self- knowledge.'" 

And so, whilst there's a time to love and to seek out others, so too is there a time to leave off loving altogether and recognise that two of the greatest things in life are fresh air and solitude. 

Now, as far as I remember, at this point in the novel someone tells Lilly that he's getting too metaphysical for anyone to understand. And, it's true, he is venturing onto philosophical ground - indeed, one might even argue that he's anticipating Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology, which I shall discuss in more detail in part two of this post.

For one of the key - and most challenging - ideas of the latter is that all objects, including human beings, are essentially self-sealed or vacuum-packed, never to be known, never to be violated. That is to say, objects always keep some aspect of their being withdrawn in darkness and can never be fully defined or exhausted by their relations; they can never be touched, as Lawrence would say, on the quick.

I'm not sure that Harman would term this hidden element of the thing in itself, as Lilly does, the Holy Ghost or Godhead, but he's certainly not adverse to spooky language and I suspect he'd agree that it's the innermost, integral and unique element. Or, to put it another way, the object's singular destiny; that volcanic core of the self that can never be lost or surrendered - not even in the name of Love ...


See: D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lawrence uses the phrase egoism a deux in ch. 9.  The lines quoted from Rawdon Lilly are taken from ch. 18. and the words italicised in the last paragraph are taken from the final chapter, 21.

*Note: Social psychologist and theorist Erich Fromm famously discusses the concept of egoism a deux in The Art of Loving (1956). According to Fromm, it's a mistaken attempt to find refuge on the part of alienated individuals from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness, masquerading as true love - something which, according to Fromm, requires learning to care for all mankind. Obviously, this is anathema to Lawrence, who loathes the universal love ideal even more than he does a vain attempt at complete intimacy formed between two individuals.   

To read part two of this post on the ethics and politics of object-oriented ontology, click here.

Where the Turtle Doves Sing (Reflections on Pubic Hair with Reference to the Cases of D. H. Lawrence and Eric Gill)

Gustave Courbet: L'Origine du monde (1866)

Oil on canvas (55 × 46 cm)

Controversial D. H. Lawrence aficionado, David Brock, reminds us in his latest column for the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser that the young Lawrence was shocked and horrified to discover that women, like men, possess pubic hair on and around the genital area, as a secondary sexual characteristic.

When, after sketching a female nude that he believed to be full of life and the carefree promise of youth, Lawrence was told by a friend that he needed to add hair under the arms and to the lower body if he wished it to look like an actual woman, rather than an idealised figure, the future priest of love physically assaulted his friend whilst shouting 'You dirty devil! It's not true, I tell you!'   

This lack of knowledge regarding female anatomy was fairly widespread, of course, amongst young men in Lawrence's day, even though they were growing up long after Ruskin's marriage to Effie Gray was annulled for non-consummation - so repulsed was he by the sight of her pubic hair on their wedding night - and after Gustave Courbet painted his voyeuristic masterpiece, revealing the hirsute origin of the world.

Indeed, even Eric Gill was surprised to find out - having seen photographic evidence - that women had hairy cunts. But whereas this realisation shocked Lawrence and tragically disconcerted poor Ruskin, it was, for Gill, a source of erotic excitement and soon established itself as one of his fetishistic delights; filling all the nooks and crannies of his pornographic imagination, both day and night, for the rest of his life.

As his biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, notes:

"Gill's fascination with the hair of the female, hair of the head as well as the belly, its waviness and density, its soft but springy texture, its symbolic use in both attracting and concealing, recurs all through his work, from his very early sculptures to the last of his nude drawings in the year in which he died."      

Of course, as David Brock also points out, Lawrence eventually overcomes his horror of pubic hair becoming something of a champion of the au naturel look and an exponent of such in his painting. And, in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), there's a famous scene in which Connie and Mellors examine and play with one another's pubes; he threading a few forget-me-not flowers in her soft-brown maidenhair.      

In sum, whilst I don't think Lawrence's pubephilia was ever as strong as Gill's, he was nevertheless partial to a bit of bush in his maturity, for sexual, aesthetic, and philosophical reasons and - somewhat ironically - one suspects he would react with reverse shock and horror at the thought of Brazilian waxing.


See: 

David Brock, 'Book revealed author's 'late development'', Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, (25 Aug 2017), p. 22. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ch. 15.

Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989), pp. 46-7. 

Blood, Sex, and the Inviolable Nature of Objects

Still from the video for the song Animals by Maroon 5 

Featuring Adam Levine and his wife Behati Prinsloo 

Dir. Samuel Bayer, (2014)

The amorous subject of John Donne's metaphysically conceited poem The Flea, cleverly attempts to persuade his beloved into consenting to a premarital sexual relationship by drawing her attention to a parasitic insect that has suck'd and sampled them both. His argument is that since their separate bloodstreams are united within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife and so may as well fuck without any further hesitation, embarrassment, or feeling of shame.  

It's a witty and imaginative argument, that rests on the religious idea that sex is a form of blood covenant or physical union consummated between two people. But, like most religious arguments, it's a fallacy; one that even D. H. Lawrence, for whom coition is a vital experience providing a crucial clue to existence, has to concede at last ...  

In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence describes how the blood of a man "acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity ... rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge" towards the polarized blood of a woman. Thus, the desire on the part of both parties to engage in genital intercourse. And, in the act of coition, says Lawrence, "the two seas of blood ... rocking and surging towards contact ... clash into a oneness", resulting in a great flash of interchange, before the two individuals fall separate once more, reinvigorated and tingling with newness in their blood and being.

Writing in A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' (1930), however, Lawrence subtly qualifies his position; now, rather than talking about two seas of blood surging towards contact and clashing together into a oneness, he writes about marriage as a correspondence of blood and insists "the blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled ..." [my emphasis].

Thus, whilst the phallus may indeed be a column of blood that enters the valley of blood of woman, no matter how deeply the former penetrates the latter, neither breaks its bounds. In other words, there's a degree of communion, but there's no actual merging - and, if there were, it would be deadly to both parties; a horrible nullification of identity and singular being.

Ultimately, it's not only a fallacy but also a fatal form of idealism to posit the idea of two-becoming-one (even within the body of a flea). Whether we accept it or not, man, like all other objects, is limited, isolate and alone and all the penetrative sex in the world - be it oral, anal, or vaginal in character - doesn't change this. We are, if you like, unfuckable at last; that is to say, we never encounter or touch one another in our deepest being, which is forever withdrawn and vacuum-sealed.

See:

John Donne, The Flea, click here to read online at the Poetry Foundation and click here to read my analysis of this verse on Torpedo the Ark.

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and Other Essays, (Penguin Books, 1961).

Note: I am indebted to Graham Harman for the idea of vacuum-sealed objects existing in subterranean cellars of being beyond all relations - an idea that presents a serious challenge to the Lawrentian notion of touch as advanced in Lady Chatterley's Lover and elsewhere. 

See: Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

Notes on Shakespeare's Dark Lady

Jasmin Savoy-Brown cast as Emilia Bassano, 

believed by some to be Shakespeare's Dark Lady 
Photo: John Willy (2016)

I have written elsewhere on this blog about Baudelaire and his bi-racial mistress and muse, Jeanne Duval, whom he fondly (if rather predictably) termed his Vénus noire [click here]. The 19th century French poet and critic was not, however, the first European male to have a taste for brown sugar. Nor should the fetishization of non-white womanhood be seen as a trope that originated within the Decadent movement.

There are many instances of such to be found within Elizabethan and Baroque literature, including, for example, Edward Herbert's poem La Gialletta Gallante, or the Sun-burn'd Exotic Beauty and Giambattista Marino's Bella schiava ('Beautiful Slave-Girl').

And, of course, mention must also be made of Shakespeare's notorious Dark Lady, the subject of the openly erotic sonnets 127-52 and of ongoing speculation concerning her identity and whether her darkness should be understood literally or metaphorically (i.e., does it refer to her colouring and complexion, or to her character and the fact she's wrapped in mystery). Either way, we can assume she wasn't a typical English rose, or born on a Monday.

The majority of scholars believe she was more likely to have been from a Mediterranean background, rather than of black African descent. But the truth is we don't know; there is simply not enough evidence, either textual or biographical in nature. Amongst possible candidates for the role of the Dark Lady, three stand out:

(i) Emilia Lanier (née Bassano)  

In 1973, Shakespearean scholar A. L. Rowse claimed to have solved the mystery surrounding the identity of the Dark Lady, confidently asserting that it was Emilia Lanier - an attractive, independent-minded woman of Italian (and possibly Jewish) background who came from a famous musical family (the Bassanos).

Not only was she the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the Queen's Lord Chamberlain, but she was also the first woman to publish a full collection of original poetry under her own name in English - Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). As talented as she was, she probably didn't look like the lovely American actress Jasmin Savoy-Brown who plays her on TV in the TNT series Will (2017) ...

(ii) Aline Florio

Meanwhile, Dr. Aubrey Burl, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, piecing together whatever clues there are about the Dark Lady's identity in his own inimitable manner, insists that she is Aline Florio, wife of Italian translator, John Florio. She certainly had dark hair. And, like Shakespeare's heroine, was said to be self-centred  and sex-obsessed. And ... er, that's about it! (Though it might be noted that distinguished Shakespearean, Jonathan Bate, also came to the same conclusion as Burl - indeed, he arrived at it fifteen years earlier ...)

(iii) Black Luce (or Lucy Negro)

In August 2012, the Independent reported that it was possible that the Dark Lady was in fact a notorious London prostitute and madam called Black Luce or Lucy Negro. According to Dr. Duncan Salkeld - author of Shakespeare Among the Courtesans (2012) - not only did the Bard have associates and, perhaps, family in the Clerkenwell area where Lucy ran her brothel, but she was mentioned in the diary of Philip Henslowe, the theatre owner who built the Rose and one of Shakespeare's great contemporaries.

It seems highly likely, therefore, that she would have been known to Will and given her sexual reputation and charms - she was described by those who knew her as an arrant whore and bawde catering to men of all types - it's not unreasonable to assume she would have been the object of his interest and desire ... But, again, who knows?

Who knows - and, indeed, who really cares?

For it seems to me needless and naive to read a work of art in this manner; to reduce literature to a form of biographical confession; i.e., to regard Shakespeare's sonnets as an account of real events and real people. As Howard Jacobson rightly says, enough's enough already:

"Let the Dark Lady be whoever the Dark Lady was. It is not our affair personally, given that Shakespeare chose it not to be, and it is not our affair aesthetically ..."

He continues:

"Of the misconceptions that continue to bedevil literature, this is among the most obdurate: that it is a record, straightforward or otherwise, of something that actually happened. Even the most sophisticated readers will forget all they know of the difference between literature and life when biography perchance shows its slip."

Shakespeare, as an artist, creatively transforms the latter, life, into literature; poetry is a magical reality that exists in the unique space opened up by experience and imagination. When we forget this and read the sonnets merely as a form of lyrical reportage, says Jacobson, "we diminish thought, we diminish imagination, and we diminish art".


See:

Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans, (Routledge, 2012).

Werner Sollors (ed.), An Anthology of Interracial Literature, (NYU Press, 2004).

Note: the Howard Jacobson article in the Independent (11 Jan 2013) that I quote from, can be read by clicking here.