The Dark Lady
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The Dark Lady – and you will know this if you have been listening to this podcast or are at all familiar with the Sonnets, but if you are jumping in at this point, let me briefly summarise – is the woman who appears in the collection for the first time as an identifiable figure with Sonnet 127 and who stands to a greater or lesser degree directly at the centre of 25 out of these remaining 28 poems, the collection consisting of a total of 154.
William Shakespeare himself never actually calls her 'The Dark Lady' – the 'name' has established itself over the centuries in contrast to the 'Fair Youth' of the first part of the collection – but he repeatedly and unmistakably describes her has having black hair, black eyes, and a dark or tan skin tone. He also clearly characterises her as someone who is sexually active, so as not to say voracious, who has and pursues other lovers and therefore is habitually unfaithful to them as well as to Shakespeare, and who may, like Shakespeare himself, well be married. This licentiousness not withstanding, the sonnets also portray her as someone who blows hot and cold on the poet and sometimes does, sometimes does not grant him sexual favours; and they leave us in no reasonable doubt that she at one point also has a relationship, in all likelihood sexual, with Shakespeare's young male lover, the Fair Youth. What also comes across with striking force – and what is in view of all of the above perhaps not entirely surprising – is the expression of a highly conflicted, indeed troubled, relationship to this woman and his sexual needs. His tone ranges from intense lust and desire for her to abject disgust with himself, with her, and with sex quite generally, contrasting the "bliss" and "heaven" of fulfilling your desire and reaching climax with the "woe" and "hell" of having done so. Mixed in with his moral and emotional struggle that stems from loving someone effectively in spite of himself and apparently against his better judgment, and in plain view of her many alleged faults, he also alludes in what editors generally believe to be fairly obvious puns and references to venereal disease, which, seen in the context of the promiscuous lifestyle he, his mistress, and his young lover all seem to be leading in a 16th century London that has no meaningful healthcare and by our standards exceptionally bad hygiene absolutely is a constant threat and reality. And in fact, Shakespeare having been brought in contact with such an infection would at least in parts account for his in places disturbingly repulsed and dejected tone in these poems. Just as with the Fair Youth the very first question that presents itself when looking into this 'Dark Lady' is: was there such a person, at all? And as with the Fair Youth, this ties into the much more fundamental question of whether these sonnets are rooted in lived experiences with real life human beings, or whether they are essentially poetic inventions. Much of this ground we have covered throughout this podcast, and so I won't present the same arguments here again in detail. My contention is – and as I expound in the special episode on the Fair Youth in particular, there are plenty sound reasons for this – that a series such as the one we find here almost certainly has to be the result of lived experience with actual real life 'characters'. There is, as there would always be in literature generally, a good possibility that William Shakespeare enriches these 'characters' with his poetic imagination, but the way in which these figures are drawn, the passions they elicit, the particular pattern in which they constellate, and, perhaps most compelling of all, the fundamentally flawed nature of their personalities make William Shakespeare's such a highly unorthodox and in places so troubled a series that it is difficult to imagine him sustaining it without good internal, emotional reason for long, let alone over 154 poems, or even over 152 if you count to where we have got to now and leave out the two remaining allegorical pieces. As has been noted, and stated too on this podcast: the collection does not draw a single narrative arc, and when it was finally published in 1609 it was not a great success, unlike for example his long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis, and, to a somewhat lesser extent The Rape of Lucrece. So if he sits down to create these sonnets for a market, then why not do so, pulling the registers of your craft and make sure they go on to sell? Add to that the existence of highly plausible candidates for the Fair Youth who match not only the relatively few but nonetheless distinctive physical attributes mentioned in the sonnets, but most specifically also the young man's personality traits, and the profile in external published documents and pamphlets which provides scant but again astonishingly close-fitting evidence, and the argument for the Fair Youth being a fully fictional or largely 'composite' character all but collapses. On our Sonnetcast likelihood scale from 1-12, where 1 is so unlikely as to be effectively impossible and 12 so likely as to be practically certain, I would posit that the existence of a real life Fair Youth sits at around 11 to 11.5. Can the same then necessarily be said of the Dark Lady? Is it as likely – and we forever want to bear in mind that in the absence of certainty, likelihood is our friend – that she too exists? The evidence for her, both textual and external, is slightly weaker, not least because there are far fewer sonnets that were composed directly to or about or in the context of the relationship with her, and we cannot entirely rule out that Shakespeare, even if the young man is real, more or less makes up a counterpart to him who is in almost everything his direct opposite, and that he does so mostly for poetic effect. This is possible. Is it likely? By the sounds of these sonnets, not very. We would, in order for this to be the case, have to allow for William Shakespeare to entertain a fantasy about his real life young lover getting off with his imaginary mistress, and he, William Shakespeare, composing bitter remonstrations to both him – real – and her – imaginary – pretending he couldn't be certain at one point just how far their relationship had gone, while elsewhere permitting no doubt that it had gone all the way, at least in a sexual sense. Overall, in view of everything we have discussed throughout the Dark Lady section of the sonnets – her vivid evocation both physically as well as in terms of her conduct, and her relationship with Shakespeare, with the young man, with her other lovers, and indeed, if the last poem addressed to her directly, Sonnet 152, with its broken 'bed vows' is not entirely misleading, her husband – I would put the probability that there is a Dark Lady who inspires and informs these sonnets nearly as high as the existence of a Fair Youth, at perhaps a 10.5 to 11 out of 12. Which then of course brings us straight to the question: who is she? To which the answer, as with the Fair Youth, is, we don't know. At least not for certain. Only, with the Fair Youth we have two principal candidates, of which I find it increasingly easy to come down in favour of one, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, whereas with the Dark Lady we have principally one front runner and then several comparatively minor contenders. The woman you will hear most often mentioned as the most likely candidate for the Dark Lady by some margin is Emilia Lanier. Born Emilia Bassano into a Venetian family of musicians in 1569, she is five years younger than William Shakespeare, and by the time he arrives in London she is already the mistress of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain who would later become patron of William Shakespeare's acting company, which therefore thenceforth was known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men. By that time, though, the affair had ended, after she had given birth to Hunsdon's child, been paid off by him, and gone on to marry her first cousin once removed, Alfonso Lanier, who was a musician at the court of Queen Elizabeth I. This already ticks several convenient boxes: she is Italian by descent, possibly, so speculation goes – though this is both, not proven and also disputed by some scholars, Jewish – and a miniature portrait by Nicholas Hilliard shows her certainly with rich dark hair, though not, it has to be said, particularly black eyes, or eyebrows, or indeed especially tan skin. This, however, may simply be a case of the artist flattering the sitter, because the ideal of beauty at the time so categorically demands a pale, indeed dove-white complexion. If she was in fact of a mediterranian appearance then that would quite possibly give her a natural skin tone that could be described – in Sonnet 130 – as 'dun', 'dun' when referring to the coats of horses, for example, being a light brown colour. Her affair with Lord Hunsdon was well known, and thanks to the diligence or indiscretion of her personal physician and astrologer, a Dr Simon Foreman who kept copious notes and effectively produced – and left behind – the first known casebook by an English medical practitioner, we also know that she was unhappily married and had enjoyed her time as Hunsdon's mistress. This would attest to at least some degree of sexual independence, though it does not necessarily quite amount to the level of promiscuity implied by the sonnets. Notable is the fact that in 1611, two years after the Quarto Edition of the Sonnets appears, now aged 42, Emilia Lanier publishes a collection of her own poetry under the title Salve Deus, Rex Judaerum – Hail, God, King of the Jews, which makes her the first Englishwoman to do so with a substantial poetic work of her own. This, if nothing else, attests to a certain 'poetic temperament' and of course to literacy and learning, which would appear to fit the sophistication portrayed in the Dark Lady. What speaks against her being the Dark Lady are three factors of varying significance. First, and perhaps least significant, considering the dearth of external evidence we have about any of Shakespeare's relationships, is that there is no proof that she and Shakespeare actually knew each other. Second, and to be taken seriously although treated with caution, is the suggestion that her own poetry reflecting values of moral gravity points towards a person who could not in real life be as fickle and, in Shakespeare's, words "false" in her conduct and "black" in her behaviour as the Dark Lady is characterised. Third, and perhaps most significant, she is, as Professor Phyllis Rackin pointed out in our conversation on Shakespeare and Women, by far the best known of all the candidates in terms of actual information we have about her, and so there is a genuine danger that we may simply fall victim to temptation and retrofit our Dark Lady to her, because she is so famous. There may be any number of women, as Professor Rackin also suggests, to whom what we know about the Dark Lady similarly applies, but we have no idea who they are, because nobody ever wrote about them and they themselves were not in a position to publish their own poetry. That said, William Shakespeare does talk about this woman in terms that imply that she is a known entity: not only does she appear to have a great deal of independent agency, but in a highly hierarchical society such as this, it would be odd to say the least for a young nobleman like the Fair Youth to be having a relationship with a mistress of Shakespeare's serious enough for Shakespeare to get upset about it, if she were not of some social standing: it may not suit our idea of an equal society, but at the time a woman of low social status who allowed herself many lovers would have been unlikely to be held in sufficiently high regard by either the young man or by Shakespeare to make a big deal of. On the Sonnetcast probability scale, I would therefore propose that Emilia Lanier score approximately an 8.5 to maybe 9 out of 12 for being the Dark Lady. Which then leads us on to the other known candidates. Mary Fitton, born 1578 and thus 14 years younger than Shakespeare, was a gentlewoman and maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth I. In 1600, aged 22 she had a relationship – often referred to as 'a scandalous affair' – with William Herbert, who would later become the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, then aged 20. This led to her becoming pregnant with his child, but he, although acknowledging the child as his, refused to marry her, for which he was sent to Fleet Prison for a short while. In March 1601 Mary gave birth to a boy who died immediately, and both she and William Herbert were subsequently barred from Court. Herbert ultimately was reinstated to become an important courtier to King James I/VI, while Mary Fitton went on to have further affairs and to give birth to further children who survived, resulting from both, these affairs as well as two marriages. Mary Fitton thus certainly matches the portrayal of a sexually liberated woman. How 'dark' she was in appearance is debatable. A portrait of the era by an unknown artist depicts her as rather more brown-haired than black, but this does not necessarily prove anything, as we know. What speaks against her is that this places the Dark Lady Sonnets in 1600 which is later than is widely believed they were written, and there is no known connection between her and Shakespeare other than through William Herbert, while both the Fair Youth Sonnets and the Dark Lady Sonnets are unequivocal in presenting the two relationships as existing separately before the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady meet and get it together. And of course it would presuppose that William Herbert is the Fair Youth, which I consider to be less likely than Henry Wriothesley, but other people will disagree on this point in particular. All in all then, I would consider the probability of Mary Fitton being the Dark Lady on a still appreciable but lower level of about 7 out of 12. Lucy Negro, also known as 'Black Luce', real name Lucy Morgan. She was a brothel keeper in Clerkenwell, of African or mixed-race origin, and research has uncovered a connection that links her through an associate to Philip Henslowe. He is the impresario who built the first Bankside playhouse in London, The Rose Theatre in 1591, to which The Globe Theatre of William Shakespeare and his partners became a direct competitor in 1599. Several of Shakespeare's early plays appear in Henslowe's diaries as having been performed by his players at his theatre, and in any case the London theatre world was a small and interconnected one indeed, so it is entirely possible that Shakespeare knew Lucy Morgan and had a relationship with her. She would certainly match the description of someone with black hair and black eyes, and her skin tone may well have been light enough to be described as 'dun', while her profession and lifestyle would match with the notion of a woman who liberally pursues sex with other men. What would appear to speak against her though is on the one hand that any link to Shakespeare is tenuous and speculative at best, and that the Dark Lady of the sonnets does suggest someone of a more elevated social status at the time than that of a sex worker. Both William Shakespeare's outrage that his Fair Youth should have 'had' his mistress and his despair towards her over her now having "engrossed" his "sweet'st friend" sound somewhat at odds in the context of a woman who offers sex for a living. Which makes her one of the possible but less plausible candidates, whom I would place on an approximate 6 out of 12 on the Sonnetcast probability scale. Various other names are being offered, among them Elizabeth Vernon who in 1598 married Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, our chief candidate for the Fair Youth, and thus became Elizabeth Wriothesely, Countess of Southampton. She is problematic for several reasons: firstly, she was a lady-in-waiting to the queen and so would have been a very high risk person for William Shakespeare to have any kind of dalliance with, let alone complain to the young Earl about effectively 'stealing' her from him, or to her about 'ensnaring' him. The Queen herself, as it happens, was not best pleased when she found out the two had got married without her permission and locked them both up in Fleet Prison, dismissing them both from court entirely. Secondly, none of the existing portraits of her depict her as especially 'dark' in appearance, but again, this may not mean all that much. And thirdly, perhaps most importantly, there is no indication that she was in any way sexually liberal beyond the fact that she got pregnant before her wedding. But then so did Anne before she got married to William Shakespeare, and so, no doubt, did many women at the time. An intriguing but probably outlandish suggestion has been made that the Dark Lady could also be the wife of John Florio. John Florio was a highly influential translator, poet, linguist and tutor, among others to Henry Wriothesley. Of Italian origin himself, he married an Italian woman in 1574, Anna Soresollo, with whom he had six children. Little is known about her, and a most likely rogue theory appears to confuse her with the sister of poet and playwright Samuel Daniel, but although no evidence for this exists, it is at least possible that in the 1590s, with her children no longer in their infancy, she embarks on an affair with the increasingly successful playwright who would have to be at least four to five years her junior. According to the sonnets though, this would be one affair among many, one of them one with his Fair Youth. Is that likely? One has to concede: not very. Further theories you may come across mention an Oxford innkeeper named Jane Davenant, who features extremely low on the probability scale because there is virtually no way in which she could plausibly be connected to the Fair Youth; and even Anne Hathaway, William Shakespeare's wife, who some scholars theorise is here being placed in the role of a morally ambiguous mistress; but nothing in the sonnets, in Shakespeare's home life as far as we know, in anything that has ever been documented seriously supports this. All of which of course leaves us, in relation to the Dark Lady as to the Fair Youth, with this fairly long answer on the one hand, and the very short answer to the question: who is it? We don't know. What we do know though, and can say with absolute certainty, 12 out of 12 on the Sonnetcast probability scale, is that whoever this woman is, whether any of these mentioned individuals or someone completely different and to us unheard of, whether real or imagined, whether a composite of several actual individuals or a fabrication of pure fantasy: she lives in Shakespeare's mind. She occupies his heart and agitates his loins enough for him to write two dozen poems to and about her and to allow her to enter his either lived, real, or really imagined relationship with his beautiful young man. This woman, whoever – whatever – she is, is important to Shakespeare. And so she is important to us. And so any suggestion that it doesn't matter who she is is simply not right: it may not matter to you, or to some individual person who doesn't care, but it clearly does matter generally, and to our understanding of Shakespeare. Which is why for four hundred plus years now we have speculated, wondered, conjectured about her, and why, until the trunk is found and opened to reveal documents that provide incontrovertible proof that settles all and any argument, which may be never, we will and really probably also should continue to do so. What all of this says about our poet – and what it says will to quite some extent be dependent on whether she is real or imagined, or both, and if real at all then who she is – will similarly continue to interest and intrigue us because the picture our Will paints of himself with these sonnets, as we have seen throughout this journey of exploration, is nothing if not intriguing... |
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!