Veiling an Indian beauty: Shakespeare and the<i>hijab</i>

Abstract Bassanio's suspicion of the "beauteous scarf / Veiling an Indian beauty" belongs within an Orientalist discourse in which the "Dark Lady" figures the impenetrability of global trade to western unveiling, an endless "travailing" of "sails and veils" that (like Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous) Shakespeare associates with the secretion of silk. But in a culture that craved eye-to-eye openness, his plays valorize masked desire as a means of inserting private faces in public spaces, and so introduce the fashionable silk visor as a screen, like the hijab, which puts secrecy on display. Thus, the "Moorish" subtext of The Merchant of Venice constitutes a new Catholic "closet" sphere that is the foundation of modern religious and sexual toleration, as the overdetermined silk veil is emptied on the stage of its history of cultural suspicion and fundamentalist violence. Keywords: The Merchant of VeniceveilsailmasksilkIndiaDerridahospitalityinteriorityclosetsecrecytoleration Notes 1. Cf. "In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, East and West met on much more equal terms … East met West in strenuous and constructive competition" (Jardine Jardine , Lisa , and Jerry Brotton . Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West . London : Reaktion , 2000 . [Google Scholar] and Brottom 184–85). 2. For an alternative reading of Bassanio's lines, Hopkins Hopkins , Lisa . "'An Indian Beauty?' A Proposed Emendation to The Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare Newsletter 50 ( 2000 ): 27 . [Google Scholar] argues for a punctuation of the lines as "the beauteous scarf / Veiling and Indian; beauty – in a word, / The seeming truth … ". But this emendation diminishes the Orientalist "dark lady" metaphor. 3. See Maus Maus , Katharine Eisaman . Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance . Chicago : Chicago UP , 1995 . [Google Scholar] for a sustained critique of the idea that in Shakespearean culture "the individual derived a sense of self from external matrices" (2). 4. For Mary Ward and the debate about the clausura, see Rapley Rapley , Elizabeth . The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France . Montreal : McGill-Queen's UP , 1990 . [Google Scholar] (28–29, 54–56). 5. For beards as signifiers of Renaissance masculinity, see Fraser Fraser , Will . "The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England." Renaissance Quarterly 54 ( 2001 ): 155 – 87 .[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. But for the prosthetic construction of facial hair, see also Johnston Johnston , Mark Albert . "Prosthetic Absence in Ben Jonson's Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair." English Literary Renaissance 37 ( 2007 ): 401 – 29 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. 6. "The dress of the bridegroom is of gold-cloth, with an immense bunch of silver trimming that falls over his face, and answers to the purpose of a veil … and to his mouth he keeps a red silk handkerchief closely pressed to prevent devils entering" (Ali Ali , Meer Hassan . Observations on the Mussulmauns of India Descriptive of their Manners, Customs, Habits and Religious Opinions . London : Humphrey Milford and Oxford UP , 1832, repr. 1917 . [Google Scholar] 204). 7. For Thisbe's veil as a feature of a Babylonian love-story and so the ancient prototype of the modern hijab, see Shirazi (3–4). 8. For Queen Anne's defiant "drama of feminine blackness", see Tomlinson Tomlinson , Sophie . "Theatrical Vibrancy on the Caroline Court Stage." Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens . Clare McManus . Basingstoke : Palgrave , 2003 . 186 – 203 . [Google Scholar] (194–95).

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