Miss me? I apologize for my absence last week; an unexpected illness teamed with finals to make my life impossible. But healthy as a horse again and finished with the semester, this week I am looking at Shakespeare's later sonnets and the identity of the dark lady.
Looking to Shakespeare's writing to glean information from his life is not a novel approach; scholars have been looking to his sonnets for centuries to speculate on the life (particularly the love life) of Shakespeare the man. Unlike his plays, the majority of the sonnets seem to have no historical or literary background. With the exception of the last two sonnets, written about Cupid, Shakespeare seems to have plucked the subject of the sonnets from thin air...or, as many speculate, from real life. Sonnets 1-126 are addressed to a young man, dubbed the "dark lad," with whom Shakespeare seems to have had an interesting relationship. In recent years, as the gay rights movement has come to the front burner in world politics, scholars have begun to speculate on the possibility of the dark lad's being Shakespeare's gay lover. But the idea of a gay Shakespeare has not always been so readily discussed; particularly in the 19th century, scholars studiously avoided the first 126 sonnets and their possible implications. Instead, they concentrated on sonnets 127-152, written to a "dark lady" whose complex relationship with Shakespeare seems to have fluctuated rapidly between love and hate, adoration and disgust. But who was this dark lady, and what was her appeal?
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