The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Seventy-Three The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 1

Some say the Dark Lady of the sonnets was a woman named Mary Fitton.

This Mary Fitton was one of Queen Elizabeth's maids of honour, a coveted position she first assumed at the age of seventeen, though even by then she had little honour left and was probably not a maid. She owed her advancement to Sir William Knollys, a friend of her father's. Knollys, a married man, was besotted with this girl who was thirty years his junior. He made a laughing-stock of himself by his pursuit of her, even dyeing his beard in a pathetic attempt to look young.

Miss Mary had a mania for men. She was of good ancestry, highly cultured, sweet-natured, very modest-looking, and blushed easily. Yet she was always the terror of her family. It was said that from the age of twelve she had been in the habit of masturbating her brothers. The whole Court knew that she performed the same office for Knollys, since the fool boasted of it. She always wore a fur glove for the act, he said, and silver bracelets which he had given her for her fifteenth birthday. Her bracelets tinkled as she played the harlot with him. Old Knollys adored it.

Mary Fitton was not long at Court before making herself the cause of an even greater scandal. She fell pregnant by William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. It is said that she used to slip out of Elizabeth's chambers to meet her lover in the dead of night, disguised as a man in a long white cloak, with her lady-in-waiting's skirts tucked up. Pembroke had her regularly on a tomb in Westminster churchyard - Will Kempe, that lugubrious flea, once pointed it out to me, though God knows how he knew which one it was. The influence of the tomb could not have been good for her. Her unfortunate infant died soon after birth. Pembroke behaved swinishly throughout, refusing to marry the mother of his child, even though the Queen in her usual fashion took this as a personal insult and packed him off to the Fleet Prison for a spell in an attempt to concentrate his mind upon the matter.

Miss Mary then became the mistress of Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, who took her to sea with him in the garb of a cabin-boy. After he died, worn out with voyaging, in 1605, she found a husband of her own at last, a retired sea captain called Polwhele, with one leg, and the rest of her life was Cornish and respectable.

Mary Fitton's claim to Dark Lady status rests on no more, in reality, than the fame and the scandal of the way men of all ages flocked to her like moths to a candleflame when she was young.

I never heard the late Mr Shakespeare so much as mention her, though he would have known her name, and she may have crossed his mind from time to time when he was not busy.

I saw this lady once myself, at a bear-baiting in the Paris Garden, when the great bear Sackerson was in his prime. She was eating tarts beneath the smoke-dried leaves. She had a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of curls falling on each side of her face under a shepherdess's hat. She had big, bright eyes.

Unfortunately for history, those curls were soft and fair - not at all like the black wires which Shakespeare mentions as growing on the head of his mistress in sonnet 130. As for those eyes: in sonnet 127 the mistress's eyes are described as raven black, but the eyes I saw at the bear-baiting were not only bright, they were grey as squirrels.

All things considered, I do not think the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton.