Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare's Sonnets

by Elaine Scarry

Overview

A fascinating case for the identity of Shakespeare’s beautiful young man

Shakespeare’s sonnets are indisputably the most enigmatic and enduring love poems written in English. They also may be the most often argued-over sequence of love poems in any language. But what is it that continues to elude us? While it is in part the spellbinding incantations, the hide-and-seek of sound and meaning, it is also the mystery of the noble youth to whom Shakespeare makes a promise—the promise that he will survive in the breath and speech and minds of all those who read these sonnets. “How can such promises be fulfilled if no name is actually given?” Elaine Scarry asks, and this book is the answer.

Naming Thy Name lays bare Shakespeare’s devotion to a beloved whom he not only names but names repeatedly in the microtexture of the sonnets, in their architecture, and in their deep fabric, immortalizing a love affair. By naming his name, Scarry enables us to hear clearly, for the very first time, a lover’s call and the beloved’s response. Here, over the course of many poems, are two poets in conversation, in love, speaking and listening, writing and writing back.

In a true work of alchemy, Scarry, one of America’s most innovative and passionate thinkers, brilliantly synthesizes textual analysis, literary criticism, and historiography in pursuit of the haunting call and recall of Shakespeare’s verse and that of his (now at last named) beloved friend.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374537234
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/12/2017
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Elaine Scarry is the Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her book The Body in Pain was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

1 Spellbound 9

2 The Birthplace of Shakespeare's Sonnets 32

3 A Day to Regret 56

4 Brief Names, Beloved Names: Hal, Hyella, Hen 83

5 The Rival Poet 119

6 Last Names 156

An Afterword About Afterward 181

Notes 243

Editorial Reviews

"Scarry . . . poses a surprising answer to a question that has puzzled readers of Shakespeare’s sonnets for 400 years [about] the “lovely boy" of the poems. . . .She also makes a fresh suggestion identifying the “rival poet” of Shakespeare’s sonnets . . . Scarry’s conclusions . . . invite a close reading of the sonnets and a pure enjoyment of the metaphorical power and linguistic intricacy of each line." —Publishers Weekly

“Naming thy Name is a beautiful book. It is a love story: of the love between William Shakespeare and Henry Constable, and of another writer’s true love for that love. There has been no book that has so thoroughly explored the practice of poetic conversation among the sonneteers of the English Renaissance. And there has been no book, at least since Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Mr. W. H., that has been so passionate in pursuit of a theory, a theory of the love behind all Shakespeare’s other loves. Scarry has given us the latest, bravest answer to a question no reader of the sonnets can fail to ask.”—Jeff Dolven

“I picked up Naming thy Name and, as they say in Dublin, I couldn’t leave it down. I expected brilliance, having read Elaine Scarry's previous works, but am persuaded that this time she has managed somehow to outdo even her own previous outdoing. This is a major, impressively eloquent work of scholarship—who would have thought there was anything new and important to say about the exhaustively annotated Bard?—that will be read and discussed for years, no, for decades to come.” —Joel Conarroe

“. . . devoted Shakespeareans will be ravished by her brilliant speculations.” —Ray Olson, Booklist

“. . . a tantalizing exercise in literary puzzle-making.”—The New Yorker

“The book is a joy to read even if you are not completely convinced of the accuracy of Scarry’s thesis. The stories are entertaining and you can certainly appreciate the scholarship and the opportunity to see the work of William Shakespeare in a new light—the work of a man more human than demigod.”—Michael L. Ramsey, Roanoke Times

"Elaine Scarry accomplishes [a] seemingly impossible feat with a fresh, enthralling argument: The bulk of Shakespeare’s sonnets are a paean to his muse, poet Henry Constable, who in turn acknowledged mutual feelings in his own work. Naming Thy Name, then, is a model of literary criticism, scholarly yet rendered with flair, a beautiful portrayal of secretive, enduring love.” —Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune

From the Publisher

08/15/2016
Scarry (The Body in Pain) poses a surprising answer to a question that has puzzled readers of Shakespeare’s sonnets for 400 years: the “lovely boy” of the poems is Henry Constable, fellow poet, diplomat, and, after his conversion to Catholicism in 1591, a religious exile in France. Scarry pulls her evidence from their poetry, examining shared images, incident, language, and the names of the beloved “smuggled” into the lines of the other’s to suggest a relationship recorded in verse. She also makes a fresh suggestion identifying the “rival poet” of Shakespeare’s sonnets as King James I, in whose court Constable briefly served. Incorporating much speculation on authorial intentions, acrobatic feats of interpretation, and in some cases wild surmise, Scarry’s conclusions nevertheless invite a close reading of the sonnets and a pure enjoyment of the metaphorical power and linguistic intricacy of each line. Her approach regards each poem as a direct and truthful expression of deeply felt experience, an assessment easily doubted by readers familiar with the sophisticated rhetorical strategies found in poetry at the time. Scholars of this most studied author of English literature may remain unpersuaded based on the lack of supporting biographical matter, but skepticism needn’t bother Scarry; in her highly detailed, attentive reading, the poetry speaks for itself. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

10/15/2016
Shakespeare's sonnets may be the most beautifully baffling poem sequence in all literature—memorized by high school students, argued over by academics, and tenderly spoken by lovers. The sonnets have stimulated debate on the nature of the relationship described, the identity of the Dark Lady, and of the rival poet within them. But perhaps most intriguing—who is the beautiful, young man addressed in 125 of the 154 sonnets? The sonnets have immortalized a softly sketched, anonymous young man, yet Scarry (Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics & General Theory of Value, Harvard Univ.; The Body in Pain) here changes all that. Henry Constable is the name in question; unknown to all but a few today, he was a poet, royal favorite, and Catholic recusant. Through a close reading of the poetry of both men, Scarry illuminates a conversation between the two, what she calls "cross talk," even pointing to key lines that spell out each other's name when rearranged anagram-style. VERDICT This is wonderfully heady stuff recommended for academics as well as engaged lay readers; Scarry's work is groundbreaking, and as she makes her case, she also identifies the rival poet and begins to explain some of the mysteries in Shakespeare's will.—Paul A. D'Alessandro, Brunswick, ME

Library Journal

Sept. 8, 2016
Who was the “young man” William Shakespeare addressed in his sonnets?That’s the never-ending mystery wide-ranging literary scholar Scarry (Aesthetics and General Theory of Value/Harvard Univ.; Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom, 2014, etc.) sets out to resolve in her latest book. The list of contenders is already long, but Scarry comes up with a new one: Shakespeare’s contemporary Henry Constable. The author theorizes that the sonnets are, actually, only part of a conversation between the poets, who left cryptic mash notes to each other in their work. Her proof mostly amounts to highly imaginative, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious, code-breaking—such as her discovery that lines of the sonnets have the letters of Constable’s name scattered within them (not sequentially, mind you, just there). Also, a nickname for Henry is Hal, and the sonnets use words like “shall” and “halt”—and sometimes “will” is close by. Also, there’s that last name, and Shakespeare often uses “constancy” or “constant.” Constable’s own poems likewise seem to Scarry to both directly answer his genius friend and leave behind similar anagrams. Beyond the textual argument, there’s the historical possibility that their paths crossed as Elizabethan England was undergoing endless religious conflict; maybe Shakespeare even provided cover to the Catholic Constable, who returned the favor by nursing his beloved through his final illness. As a novel, like Anthony Burgess’ Nothing Like the Sun, or a movie, like Shakespeare in Love, the story has possibilities; as speculative literary detective work, it feels forced. Almost from the beginning, Scarry seems less like the redoubtable polymath of legend—whose past subjects have ranged from torture to critical care to plane crashes—and more like a mad scholar whose delusional literary criticism takes on a life of its own. Close readers of Shakespeare will respect Scarry’s arduous homework but likely won’t be convinced by her conclusions.

Kirkus Review