Peter Erickson

Patriarchal Structures in The Winter's Tale

From the perspective of sexual politics, The Winters Tale is a remarkable achievement: it recovers the possibility of harmonious male-female relations from the destructive antagonism between the s...

Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture

This essay examines the relation between the genre of portraiture and the emergence of black identity from the vantage point of a cross-historical perspective. The range of artists extends from Hans Holbein, Anthony Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Jacob Jordaens and Karel van Mander III through Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Tiepolo to Derek Walcott and Glenn Ligon. Rather than imagining a series of increasingly positive steps organized as an upward linear trajectory toward freedom, the approach here envisions a jagged line of mixed outcomes and concentrates on testing the limits of portraiture as a mode of representation at each moment across multiple contexts. Instead of giving access to a fully satisfactory image of black identity, the portrait medium can be seen as developing an internal process of consciously questioning, exposing, and resisting its own limits.

Artists' Self-Portraiture and Self-Exploration in Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound

The symbolic plot of Tiepolo’s Hound can be quickly summarized as working through the overarching opposition between two stark images: the white hound named in the title, which epitomizes the European artistic tradition, and the black mongrel, which represents the reality of Caribbean culture. The tension is increased by the graphic contrast between white and black. Despite Walcott’s belated disclaimer that he “made too much of the whiteness of the hound” (4.19.4; p. 121),1 the racial implications of the two colors are obvious and unavoidable. The poem begins with an insistence on the “epiphanic detail” (1.1.3; p. 8) of the white hound. But, over its long course, the poem enacts a counterepiphany by which the black mongrel gradually gains recognition and eventually supersedes the white hound as the primary focus of attention. As the concept of an aesthetic “epiphany” suggests, Walcott draws on Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Adopting the figure of the artist as Daedalus, he depicts the confrontation with the Minotaur as an encounter with “my fear, my self, my craft” (4.20.4; p. 127). While echoing Joyce’s commitment “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” Walcott reformulates this quest as his own project “to elevate my race from its foul lair” (4.20.4; p. 128). Thus redirected, the word race is inflected with a specifically Caribbean resonance. One of the poem’s key challenges is to explain by what means—by what process of formal and psychological negotiation—Walcott makes the switch from the symbolism of the white hound to that of the black mongrel. How can what is presented as an absolute obsession to find the image of the white hound be, in the end, so easily abandoned? In retrospect, we can see the poem’s strategy is not so much to reject the white hound outright as to render it irrelevant. Translating the literary form of Joyce’s Portrait into the visual medium of self-portraiture, I shall argue that the consideration of artists’ self-portraits is one of the principal means by which the imagery of the black mongrel becomes the higher priority that displaces the white hound. Visual logic is at the heart of the poem, and I begin with a more general overview of the way Walcott’s own visual art serves as a vehicle for the poem’s conclusion.

Othello's Back: Othello as Mock Tragedy in Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica

The intrusion of Shakespeare’s Othello marks the defining moment in the fate of the hero for whom Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica is named, the black violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1780–1860). Popularized Othello is invoked to dramatize and to explain the protagonist’s cross-racial sexual moves that occasion his falling out with his musical sponsor Ludwig van Beethoven. The famous composer rescinds his dedication of the Mulatto Sonata to Bridgetower, leading to the abrupt reversal of Bridgetower’s remarkably successful rise and future promise. This drastic turn of fortune, represented in terms of the automatic inevitability of Othello’s fate, should shape our response according to the conventions of tragedy. Yet Dove rescues the violinist from the seemingly fatal clutches of the Othello-Bridgetower equation that she herself has set up. The purpose of this essay is to explore what artistic resources enable Dove to intervene in Bridgetower’s tragic destiny to produce a different outcome.1 The novelist Caryl Phillips offers useful testimony to the force of Shakespeare’s tragic model of interracial sexuality. As a son of parents who came to England from St. Kitts in the first wave of Caribbean immigrants, Phillips explains that his father, then married to a white woman, passes this cultural information to the next generation: “he told me that I must be very careful if I was out driving at night with a white girl in the

Mining Shakespeare: Fred Wilson’s Visual Translations of Othello

Shakespeare is a cultural institution whose racial structures Fred Wilson began mining in his exhibition, Speak of Me as I Am, at the Venice Biennale in 2003. As the quotation from Othello’s concluding speech signals, Wilson initially focused on the play’s black figure. Wilson’s next step, Iago’s Mirror (2009), shifts attention to Othello’s nemesis. The mirror’s silence corresponds to Iago’s refusal to talk announced in his final statement: “From this time forth I never will speak word.” How does Wilson’s mirror speak, and what critical perspective does it imply toward the racial dynamic of Shakespeare’s plot? By using visual art to intervene in a literary classic, Wilson’s work performs an excavation that disrupts the conventional response to Shakespeare’s tragic script and opens up new possibilities for revisionary interpretations capable of transforming our view of the racial drama Othello enacts.

Book reviews: Rewriting Christine

THE BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES by Christine de Pizan. Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards. Persea Books, 1982. COMIC WOMEN, TRAGIC MEN: A STUDY OF GENDER AND GENRE IN SHAKESPEARE by Linda Bamber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982. 211 pp. (

Concluding Othello: Contrasting Endings by Shakespeare and Fred Wilson

18.50) THE UNDISCOVERED CONTINENT: EMILY DICKINSON AND THE SPACE OF THE MIND by Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. REGINA by Leslie Epstein. Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York. 251 pp. (

Shakespeare and the Process of Appropriation

13.95). Avon Books (

From Lear's Button to Harmond's Paintbrush: a conversation with Harry Lennix

3.95). MORE WORK FOR MOTHER: THE IRONIES OF HOUSEHOLD TECHNOLOGY FROM THE OPEN HEARTH TO THE MICROWAVE by Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Basic Books, New York, 1983. 219 pp.

Respeaking Othello in Fred Wilson’s Speak of Me as I Am

Abstract:Lodovico’s urgent reaction—“The object poisons sight. / Let it be hid”—shapes the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Othello. The gesture to shut the bed curtains to cover up the dead bodies of Othello, Desdemona, and Emilia on the bed signifies not only Lodovico’s refusal to look but also his refusal to reflect or to understand what has happened. Consequently the ending remains unresolved. By contrast, the African American artist Fred Wilson can bear to reflect and to question and brings us to the conclusion that we cannot possibly understand without the lens of race.Wilson’s sequence of sculptures posits an open and expanded field in which all aspects of mourning become a potential source of emotional complexity and deeper insight. Lodovico’s command “Let it be hid” ultimately means hiding from the understanding that full analysis could reveal. Fred Wilson’s art undoes and reverses the effect of Lodovico’s hiding. Unlike the closed bed curtains, his formal structures create symbolic spaces for ceremony, contemplation, and critical breakthrough. The artistic process of Wilson’s alternative endings releases Shakespeare’s character Othello—and releases us, too.