ABSTRACT
Shakespearean scholar Duncan Salkeld has argued that one Lucy Negro, also known as “Black Luce,” was a Black woman in Elizabethan London who ran a Clerkenwell brothel and is the likeliest candidate for the real-life “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Recognizing the quality of Salkeld’s archival work, I am nevertheless less interested in the accuracy of his identification than I am in the legendary uses that the idea of a Lucy Negro – an African-descended woman in a geographical place that has until recently been conceived of as culturally entirely white – serves in the present. We can see one example of these modern uses in Caroline Walker Randall’s 2015 poetry collection, Lucy Negro, Redux; another emerges in the ballet inspired by Randall’s poems and performed by the Nashville Ballet in 2019. The chapter I plan for this volume will take up the question of what it might mean to imagine a Black Shakespearean muse and – more importantly, I think – to discuss the place of creativity, sexuality, and Black women’s elusive and policed cultural presence in early modern terms.
