Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare's Sonnets - Hardcover

"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