Dark Lady
Many suggest Shakespeare was influenced to write the Dark Lady Sonnets by a person. However, attempts to locate the Dark Lady have failed. There is no consensus as to who the identity of the dark lady belongs to; the Sonnets give away nothing referring to age, background or station in life.
The Dark Lady sonnets delve into sexuality, jealousy, and beauty. The first sonnet of this series, Sonnet 127, begins with Shakespeare's Speaker apologizing for his mistress's un-ideal beauty, associated with old age. Instead of shying away from unauthentic interpretation, he emphasizes his mistress’s cruel and "black" state. Some understand "black" to represent more than a color. Ronald Levao sees it as interchangeable with the term foul.
The relationship between language and color is important for understanding the Dark Lady sonnets. Elizabeth Harvey explains: “The parallel between language and art was far from simple, and that rhetoric's colors depended upon a ghostly discourse of natural historical knowledge that invisibly shaped the chromatic lexicon of Shakespeare's sonnets.” The meanings and qualities associated with color are not necessarily universal or timeless, however. Recent critics have made arguments linking darkness with race and ethnicity. Scholars of early modern colonialism find it appropriate to portray the sexual relationship as a white man being sexually attracted to a negro.
The sonnet may also be understood as portraying an early reaction to women using cosmetics. The introduction of cosmetics should be viewed as a paradigm shift rather than a progression along the same spectrum. Margreta de Grazia reads Sonnet 127 in these terms: “Old values have been purged. Sweet beauty is stripped of her title (hath no name) and her sanctioned place (no holy boure), cast out into the contaminating open air (profaned) and thereby exposed to abuse and violation (in disgrace). In the place of 'beauties rose' now rules black.” Helen Vendler also examines this sonnet with an eye on cosmetics, “How did a black haired, black eyed woman come to be the reigning heir of beauty? The sonnet explains that the invention of cosmetics disgraced true beauty by allowing every ugly woman to become beautiful.” The speaker in sonnet 127 is therefore someone mourning the cheapness of cosmetic beauty but also recognizing that he finds himself to be attracted to a woman or women that use it.
Read more about this topic: Sonnet 127
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