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Who Is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets: Shaw Versus Shakespeare

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Who Is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets: Shaw Versus Shakespeare WHO IS THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS: SHAW VERSUS SHAKESPEARE BILJANA VLAŠKOVIĆ University of Kragujevac Abstract: Many questions have been raised concerning the identity of the two persons to whom Shakespeare dedicated his Sonnets. The paper concentrates on Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” and delves into G. B. Shaw’s play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets whilst trying to disclose the true identity of the woman in question – was she Emilia Lanier, Mary Fitton, or someone else? Keywords: The Sonnets, the Dark Lady, William Shakespeare, G. B. Shaw 1. Introduction Imagine reaching the end of a detective novel and not being told who the killer is! The sensation can be compared to the fascination which surrounds the everlasting mystery of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Although indisputably miniature masterpieces in and by themselves, the Sonnets are indebted to the undisclosed identities of a Mr. W H and a Dark Lady for their unremitting popularity. This paper is an attempt at unraveling the mystery of the Dark Lady’s identity: but, what started with a narrow range of options as for who this woman might have really been has amounted up to a narrow investigation of both the Sonnets and the historical context which surrounds them. This investigation in turn provided me, the literary sleuth, with evidence connecting the Dark Lady of the Sonnets with as many as seven Elizabethan women! Indubitably, all the women had to share certain characteristics as described in the Sonnets, and a sole missing element would be enough to eliminate a lady from the group of suspects. Consequently, the elimination method is what we accepted for a suitable means of finding the “culprit”, so to say. The seven women are confronted, their histories compared and contrasted, their relation to Shakespeare examined, the traces of their womanly scent sniffed out. The outcome of this literary investigation may or may not astound us: ultimately, does it really matter what the true name of the Dark Lady was? To answer this, we turn to George Bernard Shaw in the second part of the paper and discuss the parody he wrote based on the sonneteer’s misery. After all, as Shaw (1916:24) asserts, “it is the score and not the libretto that keeps the work alive and fresh”. Hence, following Mr. Shaw’s opinion, the key to the fame of Shakespeare’s sonnets is their music (or the music of their lines), for “in a deaf nation” (they) “would have died long ago” (ibid). 2. The magnificent seven The first question we should raise is the following: are Shakespeare’s Sonnets autobiographical? There exist two opposing schools of thought concerning this question: one which believes we can learn everything we need to know about Shakespeare simply by reading the sonnets, and the other which thinks that Shakespeare’s life is of no consequence whatsoever for the pure enjoyment one finds in the sonnets as exclusively verbal icons. Rather than describing these, their critical agenda can be summarized by two outwardly similar, yet fairly different lines by William Wordsworth and Robert Browning: Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart. William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), “Miscellaneous Sonnets” ‘With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart’ once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he! Robert Browning (1812 - 1899), “House” Wordsworth clearly supported the autobiographical school of thought, whereas in Browning we see the accusation against what W. K. Wimsatt 1954:3- 68) called “the Intentional Fallacy” and “the Affective Fallacy”: “The Intentional fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins. […] The Affective fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results. […] The outcome of either fallacy is that the poem itself, as an object of a specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.” (Wimsatt 1954: 21) Literally, when analyzing a poem, we should exclude everything that is external to it, and after we have detached the verbal artifact from its surrounding social context (Petrović 2004:27), we can discard the extrinsic approach to poetry and replace it with the intrinsic and immanent approach. Both approaches seem enticing when we are faced with Shakespeare’s sonnets, but the autobiographical/extrinsic approach seems to have resulted in a frenzy of a kind – a reason enough to try and see when, how and why a literary theory became such frenzy. The seven women who are all in various theories believed to be the Dark Lady are: Anne Whateley, Mary Mountjoy, Jane Davenant, Lucy Morgan, Mary (Sidney) Herbert (Countess of Pembroke), Mary Fitton, Emilia Bassano Lanier. One by one needs to be examined. It will be noted, however, that people who supported a particular theory tended to forge the evidence, or adjust and fit the theory to the evidence, or vice versa. This forgery is described in Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Portrait of Mr. W H”, where Wilde says that these so-called literary forgeries were “merely the result of an artistic desire for perfect representation; that we had no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which he chooses to present his work; […] to censure an artist for a forgery was to confuse an ethical with an æsthetical problem.” (Wilde 1889). That is most likely the case with every one of these women. After closely inspecting the evidence, it was found out that Anne Whateley, for example, was actually Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, but it so happened that her name was misspelled on the marriage license to Shakespeare. Nonetheless, many scholars believe even today that there existed two Annes, one Whateley and one Hathaway, and that Shakespeare was in fact forced into marrying the latter. There are other theories on this question as well, one of them being that Whateley was Anne Hathaway’s alias, or another surname, another that there were in fact two Shakespeares: a Wm Shaxpere and a Wm Shagspere who married two different Annes, etc. But even though we read two somewhat different spellings of the names in the marriage license and the financial guarantee for the wedding – Wm Shaxpere et Annam Whateley, and William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey respectively, the fact remains that the second was issued the very following day: November 28th, 1582, thus making it highly likely that it was a simple spelling error on the part of the cleric. And what do the sonnets say? The one sonnet in which there is a possible pun on Anne’s surname is 145, in which the Dark Lady altered ‘I hate’ with an end ‘not you’, thus saving the poet. The couplet: 'I hate' from hate away she threw, And sav'd my life, saying 'not you', can be pronounced variously. We can pronounce ‘hate away’ as ‘Hathaway’, or ‘And sav'd my life’ as ‘Anne saved my life’, but this is mere artificial adjustment of the theory to make it fit the libretto of the sonnets. We may safely conclude that there is no hard evidence connecting Shakespeare’s wife or an Anne Whateley, if she ever existed, to the Dark Lady. The described method of critical forgery can be applied to all the other women. Following the evidence of a lawsuit between Bellott and Mountjoy, Charles Nicholl discovered that Shakespeare was a lodger at the Mountjoys (see Nicholl 2007:3-17). Mary was the daughter of the family, and Shakespeare played a prominent role in the courtship of Mary Mountjoy and Stephen Bellott, who later sued his father-in-law for not paying the promised dowry. The “old” landlady was also called Marie (although her name is spelled differently), and Nicholl at first thinks that “Shakespeare was rather too busy to be conducting the rather exhausting business of having an affair with a married woman while living in her husband's house”. To connect Marie to the persona of the Dark Lady would be a bold step indeed. And then, quite suddenly, Nicholl takes that step boldly, by saying: “I raise the spectre of the Dark Lady for a moment; I point out that various women have been identified as her, and that Shakespeare's French landlady has as good a claim as any of the others. Whether fictional or real, the Dark Lady is described within the sonnets as undoubtedly a foreign-looking woman. There are other dark ladies in his comedies, so one gets the general idea, to sum it up somewhat bluntly, he finds foreign women rather sexy!” (Nicholl 2012) The above shows that this is merely a conjecture, an ironic one for that matter. The same argument applies to Jane Davenant and her son William Davenant, who was named Poet Laureate in 1638 and thought by some to have been Shakespeare’s illegitimate son. Let us consider the excerpt from Victor Hugo’s article “William Shakespeare”: “Shakespeare went from time to time to pass some days at New Place. Half-way upon the short journey he encountered Oxford, and at Oxford the Crown Inn, and at the inn the hostess, a beautiful, intelligent creature, wife of the worthy innkeeper, Davenant. In 1606, Mrs. Davenant was brought to bed of a son, whom they named William; and in 1644 Sir William Davenant, created knight by Charles I., wrote to Rochester: "Know this, which does honor to my mother,--I am the son of Shakespeare;" thus allying himself to Shakespeare.” (Hugo 1889: 27) The truth is that Shakespeare may have been William’s godfather, and we can only guess that he was a regular guest at the inn owned by Jane Davenant. No hard evidence supports this theory either.
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