‘Dark Lady’
‘Dark Lady’.All Shakespeare's sonnets unambiguously addressed to or concerned with a woman occur towards the end of the sequence, from Number 127 onwards. Most commonly characterized as ‘black’, in both appearance and character, she has come to be known as the ‘dark lady’, though the phrase itself does not occur in the Sonnets. In 1797 George Chalmers argued that all the Sonnets were addressed to Queen Elizabeth. Since then, innumerable other attempts—all doomed to failure in the absence of documentary evidence—have been made to identify the dark lady with one or more real women (including the former Anne Hathaway) of Shakespeare's time. Gerald Massey, in The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1880), expanded his earlier claim that she was Penelope, Lady Rich. A popular candidate until she was discovered to have been fair was Mary Fitton, one of the Queen's maids of honour, disgraced in 1601 when she had a son by the Earl of...
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