The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Seventy-Seven The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 5

The last time I saw a dildo like the one young Anne was wearing when she fucked the Countess it was down at Lucy Negro's.

Lucy Negro, alias Lucy Morgan, kept a brothel in St John Street, Clerkenwell. She was known as the Abbess of Clerkenwell, head of the infamous sisterhood of the Black Nuns.

Her priory was amply provisioned, a palace of carnal delights. Once within its walls, the real world no longer existed. It was folly there to think of it, or indeed to think at all. The abbess demanded obedience, and she got it. Appliances of pleasure were everywhere. Here were women, here were boys, here were dancers, here were musicians, here was beauty in many strange forms, and here was wine. It was a convent sacred to amorous rites.

It was a soft-lit place, a maze of corridors. Each of her rooms held a different delight. There were pleasures here to match and satisfy each taste, no matter how outlandish or extreme. Sometimes I thought of that brothel as the very house of fiction. It was like the stories in the Decameron, one self-complete imagination leading into another, each particular pleasure foretelling the pleasure of the next room but only when you looked back (so satisfying each was in itself). I never exhausted it. Nor, I believe, did Mr Shakespeare, and he was certainly in more rooms than I tried for myself.

There were seven main rooms in the house of Lucy Negro - to mirror, no doubt, the seven deadly sins. None of the rooms had windows that looked out upon the world. Instead, in each of the rooms, to the right and the left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow window looked back into the corridor which connected them. These windows were of stained glass whose colour varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue, and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange, the fifth with white, the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only the colour of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet - a deep blood-colour.

Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers; but in the corridors that followed the suite there stood opposite each window a heavy tripod bearing a brazier of fire that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. I thought once that I saw Helen of Troy in the blue chamber, and Dr Faustus in the purple; then, at other times, it was Merlin the magician that seemed to stalk before me as I entered the green chamber, and the enchantress Vivian was seen dancing in the orange; as for the white chamber, I saw Joan of Arc within it, and she was burning, with her henchman Gilles de Rais in the violet room. The seventh chamber I never went inside, but I can well believe what Mr Shakespeare once told me - that he found Othello therein, and Lady Macbeth. I believe that in that western or black chamber the effect of the fire light that streamed upon the dark hangings, through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered that there were few bold enough to set foot within its precincts at any time, and fewer still who would stay there once they had got there.

In spite of these things, or because of them, the house of Lucy Negro was an enchanted place, and a home to magnificent revels. The tastes of its mistress were exotic and expensive, her imagination unparalleled when it came to any matter touching upon sensual gratification. She had a fine eye for all colours and effects. Her plans were bold and fiery, and her conceptions always glowed with barbaric lustre. There were some who would no doubt have considered her mad. Her followers, myself among them, felt sure she was not. It was perhaps necessary to hear her, and to see her, and to touch her - to be sure that she was not.

She had not always been a whore, of course. Come to that, I would not have dared to call her a whore in the days that I knew her. She was the Queen of Air and Darkness, to my young mind. I was only in her house a dozen times. I never even took my shoes off, though once (as you shall hear) I did perform in her clothes there. (I'll tell you of that when it's time, and not before.) It was a very strange place, and being in it was like being inside the mind of a very strange woman. So you'll see, sir, this is not at all what you may have been supposing.

There are two lines in one of the sonnets addressed to the Fair Youth which I believe might first have been addressed to the Dark Lady. They run as follows:

What is your substance, whereof are you made,

That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

That is Lucy Negro and her house.

Lucy means light, and Negro of course means black. Some say that her real name was Lucy Morgan. Those who can credit this put it about also that from March 1579 to January 1582, while yet very young, she had been one of Queen Elizabeth's most favoured attendants. She was then expelled from Court after the usual fall from grace. I cannot believe that she ever did anything she did not choose to do. Who the gentleman was who first dishonoured her, I do not know. I do know that Mr Shakespeare knew her before she came into her own and established the house in St John Street. But where she was and what she was doing when he first met her I have no idea.

She had in her possession seven sumptuous dresses, dresses which Elizabeth herself was said to have given her after wearing them on great occasions. It was one of these dresses, virgin-white, all sugared over with diamonds, which she was wearing the first time I saw her, at the revels in Gray's Inn.

In that seventh chamber of the house of Lucy Negro a shadow prowls back and forth without ceasing. It is the shade of one denied the power to find himself outside these walls. It is the shadow of the late William Shakespeare. There he is who was my friend. A damned soul, madam? He would not have said so, and no more do I. Mr Shakespeare is on the other side of Lucy Negro's seventh door, that's all.

Never elsewhere have I seen such obscene furniture. She keeps two dildoes, crossed, on the wall of her jakes. She is no common doxy, dell, or bawdy-basket. Some say her mother was Lilith, and that Lilith is the devil. Her cunt is like an oyster with soft teeth.

Lucy Negro called herself a KINCHIN-MORT. These words I cannot find in my father's dictionary. But when I played Pickleherring for the Germans I learnt that there a child is called a kindchen, and in the Netherlands the name for a brothel is a mot-huys. Possibly, though, that MORT is from amourette, being French for a passing love affair. Barbarous and beautiful, there was something Babylonian about the woman. She had her own argot. It was the language of a perfect blackness. 'Master Shag-beard, I am your kinchin-mort.'

Call her up now as she appeared to me then, at the Gray's Inn Revels, that year at Christmas. Her pins, her little head, her crown of silver and of lace, her eyes between two shining silver candlesticks, each lifting a trembling flame to worship her, her skin that seems to be listening as she stands there on tiptoe, her mouth with that frozen line of irony on her lips, her swaying haunch that speaks of snake-like copulations, her wayward hair, the velvety slope of her breasts - these things are the merest echoes of her presence. Her body is only the perfume of her soul. She laughs and then she is gone. She is melted into air, into thin air.

Poor Shakespeare! Lucy Negro was his punishment. It is a demon's arms that hold him now. Listen, down the maze of the corridors, through the seven airless, perfumed rooms, the music of her playing on the virginals. Will the door of that seventh sable chamber ever open again? Will the music of those virginals never end? The sound of the music is like the wash of waves on a far-off shore of sleep. You can scarcely hear it playing. Yet once heard you can hear nothing else. Her fingers play the music of your blood.

They say when she first came to the house in St John Street she called herself Lucy Parker. But always she was known as Lucy Negro. The name came from the colour of her skin. She was a mulatto or quadroon from the West Indies. There was African blood a-coursing through her veins.

Dusky-skinned, with eyes as black and shining as the wings of a raven, her breasts were dun, and her hair was like black wires - it was thick and twisting, curly in the extreme. By no means conventionally beautiful, she was on my oath a woman of rare beauty. Summoned, if she could be said to be summonable, amid candles and mirrors that could not hold her reflection, through flame-shaken gloom, answering to such titles as Black Luce, or (in later years) Old Lucilla, she was in great demand with the young gentlemen of the Inns of Court. For them she wore green gowns, or fragile sheaths of crimson. These were her natural colours. Also the white of shrouds. What colour she wore for Shakespeare I do not know. I never saw them together. I know that he worshipped her.

At the Gray's Inn Revels, at that masquerade, homage was paid to her. She sat on a throne, and she wore Queen Elizabeth's white gown. Her raven hair was down about her shoulders, her skin gleaming like ebony where she showed her thighs and breasts to her adorers. Lucy Negro came among them with a whip.

It was said that Lucy Negro liked whipping best of all things. She would whip men's buttocks until they were in a frenzy. It is said that men would walk miles with their pricks erect to have her whip them.

Lucy Negro called all pricks WILLS.

'Get out your will,' she would order her servants, 'and let's see what you're made of.'

Or: 'Come here with your will, little man, and let your mother see if you are willing.'

She would wear a will herself, when in the mood. 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' she used to say then. (I wonder why Mr Shakespeare never used that for one of his titles, when he was making up one of those last-minute names which told you he was tired of the whole damned play.) The word WILL occurs twenty times in twenty-eight lines in sonnets 135 and 136, which pun furiously on Lucy Negro's usage, among others.

Lucy Negro was a spirit who sold her body to earn her living. She was a mystery, she was also a common whore. When Rizley came her way, she deserted Mr Shakespeare. She was after the highest game that was available. WS, besotted, forgave them both, though perhaps the forgiveness should not be attributed to the besottedness. To Rizley he wrote:

That thou hast her it is not all my grief,

And yet it may be said I lov'd her dearly;

That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,

A loss in love that touches me more nearly.

Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:

Thou dost love her because thou know'st I love her;

And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,

Suff'ring my friend for my sake to approve her.

If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,

And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;

Both find each other, and I lose both twain,

And both for my sake, lay on me this cross.

But here's the joy: my friend and I are one;

Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

I must admit that I do not find this very convincing. It strikes me that Mr Shakespeare was trying to cheer himself up.

The sonnet addressed to Lucy Negro is more truthful. From it, I have sometimes surmised that Shakespeare wanted the three of them in bed together. It would not much surprise me. Lucy Negro's bed was wide. And it is said that when done whipping she liked to have two men pleasure her at the same time, one at the front door, one at the back:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still:

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill:

To win me soon to hell, my female evil

Tempteth my better angel from my side,

And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,

Wooing his purity with her foul pride.

And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend

Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;

But being both from me, both to each friend,

I guess one angel in another's hell:

Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,

Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

This, then, was William Shakespeare's true Dark Lady. Lucy Negro, mistress of the enchanted house in St John Street, the Abbess of Clerkenwell, was his 'woman colour'd ill', and his living exemplar of the fact that as he says in sonnet 127, 'In the old age black was not counted fair'. That is the first sonnet which is addressed to the Dark Lady. Mark well that it uses the word BLACK three times in its fourteen lines. Not 'dark', sir. BLACK.

Never despise the obvious, my friends. When Shakespeare goes on in these sonnets about the blackness of his mistress, he means just what he says. It should be readily discernible that from the outset it is not merely a matter of the lady having dark hair. It is her total blackness that obsesses and fascinates and torments him. Her hair is black, her eyes are black, her skin is black. No doubt, since he called her his 'female evil', and again characterised her cunt as a 'hell' in the last line of sonnet 129, Mr Shakespeare would have said that Lucy Negro's heart was black as well. And yet, as I insist, he worshipped her, which is to say that he went on loving her through hate and out the other side. He may still be imprisoned in her seventh room, but the sonnets are not.

Lucy Negro appeared before the Queen's Bench, that year I first came to London, charged with keeping a house of ill repute. Her friends in high places kept her out of jail on this occasion. Later she was not so fortunate. In January 1600, she was sentenced to a spell in the Bridewell, though even then strings were pulled and she was spared the usual carting through the streets. Her name appears on the warrant as 'Morgan or Parker'.

She died in 1610 - of the pox, it was said. She was a queen bee that had buzzed herself to death. It was bruited about that she had the pox as early as 1595, and that she had stung others along the way. It is possible that Mr Shakespeare caught the foul disease from her. That would explain some of the vehemence of his expressions in her regard. It is possible also that Lucy Negro gave him, first, blains, and then the Neapolitan bone-ache, or (as some call it) the malady of France. In short - sigh, Phyllis!

Lucy Negro died a Papist, so I have it on good authority. May her strange soul rest in peace. I thought her, sir, a not dishonest woman. Her house was like no other I was ever inside.

There are several epitaphs, of which I quote one by Davies of Hereford as being typical:

Such a beginning, such an end. This I'll not applaud.

For Luce did like a whore begin, but ended like a bawd.

But we can't leave things there, with such hobbling moral comment. Not for one who was in many ways the mistress of her craft. Better to quote Mr Shakespeare's reference to Mrs Overdone in Measure for Measure as 'a bawd of eleven years' continuance'. Was he thinking of Lucy Negro when he wrote that? Measure for Measure was first performed at Court at the Christmas festivities of 1604, and it was then about eleven years since Lucy Negro first set up her house in St John Street.

What more is there to say of such a woman? Like Cybele, her forehead was crowned with the twin towers of the impossible, those strange second thoughts of all the twice-born in the world. Apuleius, the African from Madaura, had his Lucius the Ass blessed with a vision of her. He called her Queen Isis. Others have called her Ceres and Hecate, Minerva, Diana, Venus, Bellona, Proserpine, Juno, Aphrodite. These are all one. In London, for a spell, she was known as Lucy Negro. She revelled in cynical songs and expressions, and in lascivious attitudes and gestures, and she came among her followers with a whip, yet she was in her heart what she said she was, a girl-child who had been carried in a sheet on her mother's back, a KINCHIN-MORT. She would furiously demand coitus, yet she gave herself for love because she loved it. Her desire for sexual gratification seemed unlimited, yet there was that in her which lifted her high above her body threshing on the bed, and crowned her head with stars, and made a poet love her and adore her. Like Messalina she was driven to prostitution perhaps in an attempt to find satisfaction and relief with one man after another, yet she became for William Shakespeare his most demanding Muse.

Sometimes I think that Mr Shakespeare lived a life of allegory, and that his work was a commentary upon it. When I think that I think of Lucy Negro. The women in his plays all flow from her. As for the sonnets, they are full of the conflict of the masculine and the feminine, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and their resolution is the interweaving and fusion of those two great forces. William Shakespeare learnt most of Dionysus in the house of Lucy Negro.

'Not many men amuse me by meaning to,' she said once, when I displeased her.

I think that Mr Shakespeare was one of those exceptions. I hope at the end, at least, she knew his worth.

Let Shakespeare's disciple John Weever have the last rhymed word on the subject of Lucy Negro. Among his epigrams there are verses about a woman he calls Byrrha which I am sure are about the mistress of that house in St John Street, Clerkenwell:

Is Byrrha brown? Who doth the question ask?

Her face is pure as ebony, jet-black.

It's hard to know her face from her fair mask;

Beauty in her seems beauty still to lack.

Nay, she's snow-white, but for that russet skin,

Which like a veil doth keep her whiteness in.

Weever was in many respects a weevil, but I always found this moving. He must have followed Mr Shakespeare to the whore-house, and worshipped the Dark Lady from afar.