The Dark Lady Lifts Her Dress

I was going to get into my totally new interpretation of Hamlet that I started with the last posting, but I’ve become a bit sidetracked because of something I read this week.

It was a bunch of twaddle about the Dark Lady and who she might be and I just couldn’t resist bashing this nonsense. The “Dark Lady” begins putting in “her” appearances in the sonnets about 127. Now, the first one hundred and twenty-six sonnets are an ever-increasing obsession with a young man, and then, voila, a “dark lady” appears.

Critics fall all over themselves trying to identify this Elizabethan lass, and they think themselves quite clever by quoting all the possibilities buried in obscure places. But no matter how clever our scholars are, they make one huge mistake: They take the sonnets out of context!

De Vere did not suddenly abandon his obsession. People, even bards, just don’t do that. Perhaps the critics feel relieved that FINALLY there is a woman seeming to enter Oxford’s life and this puts to rest those nasty innuendos that perhaps our bard was walking a bit too far away from the fence on the gay side of the pasture. So people have jumped on the Dark Lady (well, a poor wording) like a sailor who’s been at sea way too long on the first strumpet he lays eyes on.

But this Dark Lady mystery is not solved by looking into dusty records of that long-ago time, but rather must be solved, as are all of Shakespeare’s mysteries, by looking into the sonnets themselves.

Granted, there is the illusion of a new character finally being introduced in the sonnets about the 120’s, but rather than the emergence of a new person, it is really something quite different. The mystery is not WHO the Dark Lady is but rather WHAT she might be!

In 121, de Vere says, “I am that I am.” Almost Biblical, that, don’t you think? Though the great King James translation wouldn’t be done during his lifetime, I wonder if someone on the committee didn’t put this wording there in honor of our bard. Well, be that as it may. What does he mean by this quote? He’s clearly confessing something that he sees about himself that is vile (“Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d”) but he doesn’t get around to identifying what this is.

Well, if the previous 120 poems aren’t enough to tip you off, then you are being deliberately obtuse. He’s referring, of course, to his compulsive homosexual attraction, that same flamboyant obsession that probably landed him in disgrace (or at least out of fashion) with “fortune and men’s eyes.” But until relatively recently, homosexuality truly was the love that dared not speak its name, and so it was wise to speak in heavily veiled terms, lest one’s outspokenness might lead one to some nasty imprisonment, torture, and death or banishment.

I believe that he had already come to be known as the second queen of the time, and that it was only his lineage, connections, and quick wit that saved him this fate. As Henry was slipping inexorably from his orbit of control, he dabbled more in the dark recesses of his sexuality until finally, in sonnet 130, he comes right out and says who his mistress is: His Homosexual Lust!

Think about it. No man of Oxford’s stature would have had a female mistress of such lowness and ugliness that he would refer to her in the terms he does in 130. Sonnet 129, its immediate precursor, laments his one true love which is “lust in action.” His sex drive is “past reason” and “no sooner had” than hated. This is no woman he’s talking about.

Read Sonnet 130 again and you’ll realize that the cheeks he’s talking about are ass cheeks on a man—hence no roses there! And the breath? Well, I need not get graphic. Every detail makes much more sense describing the object of his lust that is not a female—and what’s more, it makes sense in context.

The Dark Lady is man-to-man sex; “black” is his code for this and lets us make sense of lines like “Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place,” and “In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds” (Sonnet 131).

Yes, our bard was indeed in love with his Dark Lady, but she is a part of him that he was able to compartmentalize and, somewhat, conceal from his contemporaries. But then, they didn’t have access to the whole flood of sonnets and we do, and yet we choose to ignore what he is telling us.

So, the next time you read something about Shakespeare’s love for a mysterious Dark Lady, roll your eyes heavenward and think what fools these mortals be.

Oxford's Dark Lady didn't mysteriously come into being after 126 sonnets had been composed. She wasn't some new lady in waiting who surfaced at Hampton Court or anywhere else. This gal was present from the start of the sonnets though he himself wasn't acknowledging her presence or the power of her appeal to him. Shakespeare's mistress was alway trotting along with him but so heavily veiled that maybe even he didn't recognize her. But when he finally does unveil her, to us and to himself, he knew she must have no name.