The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Seventy-Six The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 4

Now then, my dears, before I tell you the name of the Dark Lady, let's consider for a moment the sense in which there is no Dark Lady.

I mean, that sense in which outside the sonnets there is no Friend either, nor indeed a constant and unchanging (but strangely colourless) 'I'.

No Dark Lady.

No Friend.

No I.

These are not persons. They are patterns. While individuals went into their creation, giving substance to shapes in the poet's imagination, yet in the last and most serious analysis these figures have no existence save as the words they are, black marks on a white page.

Thus, I have already filled you in on how not just Rizley was the Friend. Pickleherring was in some small part Mr Shakespeare's Friend, also. And (who knows now?) there may have been others. There very probably were others.

Similarly, with the figure of the so-called Rival Poet who crops up in eight of the sonnets, who seems a rival not only in art but in the affections and perhaps the patronage of the Friend. I am half-convinced that Marlowe is implied here, especially when Shakespeare speaks of 'the proud full sail of his great verse'. The epithets suit Marlowe's verse as they suit no other of Mr S's contemporaries, and Marlowe as we have learnt from the tender allusion to the 'dead shepherd' and the 'infinite reckoning in a little room' was the rival poet most liked and most admired by Mr Shakespeare. Yet I am equally half-sure that it is George Chapman who is sometimes thought of. There's all that stuff in Chapman about 'spirits'. While most people were doing their best to keep body and soul together, he was always busy trying to separate them. Admittedly his verse is less like a proud full sail than it is like the rush of a game of football, where its subject is like the ball kicked here and there by opposing teams of thoughts. But Chapman was known to have claimed immortal if not divine inspiration in his own behalf, saying that one day when he was sitting on a hill near Hitchin, being still a boy at the time, he had been prompted to write by the spirit of Homer. Is it not likely that Mr S had this in mind, in his sonnet 86, when he goes on from the 'proud full sail' bit to ask the question

Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,

Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?

In short, this 86th sonnet provides a perfect paradigm of my thinking here. I believe that in it, within the space of a few lines, Shakespeare is invoking first Kit Marlowe then George Chapman. Both of them were rivals of his, envied and admired. Each of them figures here as Rival Poet.

Patience, madam. I agree that the Dark Lady is a far more intriguing conundrum. And I do still feel, as you do, that there is one woman who was (so to speak) more Dark Lady than all the other dark ladies who may or may not have put their shadows into her creation. I am not dodging the question. Pickleherring's next chapter will answer it, in fact, to the best of a comedian's ability.

But never forget that Mr Shakespeare's sonnets were not all written at the same time, nor even necessarily in the same period. They were like entries in a diary kept over several years. They may not even be printed in the correct order, for that matter.

What I am trying to impress upon you is that the three exterior personages - Friend (or Fair Youth), Dark Lady, Rival Poet - are real in Shakespeare's mind. Outside that mind there could have been several persons who contributed to each Idea or Image. For that matter, the 'I' of the sonnets is several persons too. WS was everyone and nobody. He did not stop being capable of dramatic characterisation when he started writing sonnets. Have you noticed that the first nine sonnets have no 'I' in them? And that even when the poet does speak in these sonnets in the first person singular he makes much less of an exhibition of himself than poets usually do?

Bear it in mind, sir: Mr Shakespeare was all his working life a playwright. The making of dramatic fictions was this man's trade. It was the air he breathed, the world he knew. Consider even further, then: What if the Friend and the Mistress, the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady, were in one sense parts created by Shakespeare? And what if like parts in any play they were at different times played by different people? Thus Rizley played the Friend, but so did I. Thus several women were the one Dark Lady. Mr Shakespeare created the originals in his heart and his head, and then upon the page. Life copied them. Living can follow poetry in these matters. Ask any poet who is worth the name.

Reader, permit me to suggest that there is even an especial strange sense in which I served him later as the Dark Lady. I'll be coming to that, when it's time for such seasons in hell.

Meanwhile, entertain at least the possibility that both Fair Youth and Dark Lady are simple puzzles compared with the complexity of the identity of the 'I' that stalks and fleets through these sonnets.

Who is the Dark 'I' of the sonnets? That is the question. He makes his first appearance (in sonnet 10) declaring that he will change his mind, and he bows out of the action in sonnet 152* with a pun upon his 'perjur'd I' (or eye). In between, all that is constant is this elusive self's capacity for apparent truth-telling, made the more credible by the great number of occasions on which he accuses himself of lying.

There seems, indeed, an infinite number of selves of William Shakespeare who play that part of the 'I' in the drama of the sonnets. Even when we think we have grasped him, this shape-shifter escapes definition by reminding us that he is also an actor, and that motley is his business. His poems are not just love letters written to Henry Wriothesley, nor private jottings on the conduct of his mistress. They are the heart's truth of William Shakespeare. But who was William Shakespeare?

Understand old Pickleherring, please. I am trying to speak simply of something complicated. I am not saying that Shakespeare's sonnets were the artificial products of his fancy. To suppose as much (or as little) mistakes and misrepresents all sonnets, all poems and all poets, not just those Elizabethan artificers who are sometimes said to have written sonnets thus. When Shakespeare said that he had 'two loves', of 'comfort and despair', and that one of them was 'a man right fair' and the other 'a woman colour'd ill', believe me, gentle reader, he was not kidding!

But then the late Mr WS was (as I hope I may be proving by this Life) both many men and no one. Therefore be sure that all that is certain is that the sonnets were written by a man or men named Will. (There are sufficient puns on the name to make this more than likely.) As to the names of the other apparent persons in them, though, nothing is certain. The Dark Lady could be all the ladies I have dealt with in the last three chapters, plus the lady I will canvas in the next, or she could be one or none. She could be a perfect fiction. Like Cleopatra. Like Shakespeare's mother. Or like me.

Talking of perfect fictions, here is another riddle for your delight. Who was William Shakespeare when he was playing Prospero? Was he Shakespeare playing Prospero, or was he Prospero playing Shakespeare? Remember the enchanter's last speech to the audience:

I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples.

For Naples, try reading Stratford. And he goes on to say that he must remain spell-bound on stage until we (the audience) break the spell by our applause. In this speech Mr Shakespeare confesses the limitations of his own necromantic art, and craves our prayers, like any other sinner:

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

[Exit]

I say it is not just Prospero who exits then.

Who is the 'I' whose exits and whose entrances form the substance of the sonnets? That, as I say, is the question. It is the question I try to answer by this book. My method, friends, is to answer it indirectly by the asking.

Lady Southampton once referred to Mr Shakespeare as if he was Sir John Falstaff. 'Your friend Sir John Falstaff,' she wrote to Rizley. Think about it. That was a part that Shakespeare never even played when he was an actor. Yet I say there is a sense in which the lady got it right. That is the sense in which there is no Dark Lady.

Now then, at last then.

Enough metaphysics.

As my grandfather the bishop--

As you say, madam, and about time too, not to speak of providing a 'simple answer' to a 'simple question'.

The Dark Lady: who was she?

* The last two sonnets are plainly out of sequence. Either they are free translations of a fifth-century Greek epigram by Marianus Scholasticus, or they refer to a cure for the pox which Mr Shakespeare once took at Bath.