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Naming Thy Name

Cross Talk in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Elaine Scarry

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374537232
ISBN13: 9780374537234

Trade Paperback

304 Pages

$19.00

CA$26.00

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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 the youth 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. This book is the answer.

Naming Thy Name lays bare William 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.

Reviews

Praise for Naming Thy Name

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

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt


INTRODUCTION


 


Unable to find a shadow of you,


                              a...