The Mystery of Shakespeare’s Dark LadyBy Rebecca Wilson
The stereotypical Renaissance man was self-fashioned and educationally well-rounded, qualities which stemmed from the new mindset and attitude that defined the Renaissance. But what about the Renaissance woman? If we were to look at the literature of the time, focusing primarily on the sonnet form, we would find a far less appealing picture. Women, while beautiful, were aloof, unattainable, and often overly idealized. All these characteristics, collectively labeled as the Petrarchan ideal woman, developed into a standard after Petrarch published his sonnet series in the 1300’s. With his constant adulation for his beloved Laura, Petrarch became the father of the Renaissance sonnet, and his ideal woman ruled until she met resistance from Shakespeare’s “dark lady.” Writing in the later 1500’s and early 1600’s, Shakespeare battled with the stereotypical lover-as-goddess theme; rather than conform to the over-used ideal woman, Shakespeare wrote about an altogether different woman—no longer light and shining, but dark and difficult—who served as an antithesis to Petrarch’s beautiful lady. Unlike Petrarch’s immortalized Laura, Shakespeare’s dark lady does not represent an actual person; she is Shakespeare’s invention—a way to express his boredom and subsequent sarcasm for the conventional Petrarchan ideal woman. Most of Petrarch’s feminine images are rooted in his deep-seated love for Laura, one of the courtly ladies. His sonnets continually construct her as the perfect feminine character, possessing no faults. In the rare moments in which he portrays her as a whole person as opposed to a collection of separate physical features, he does not actually describe her. Instead, “She is too lovely for mortality; / The gods are looking eagerly on her” (210: 7-8). This gives the reader no actual details, but an over-arching idealization. He believes she is not simply a woman, for she is too perfect to share the natural mortality of all humans. He “makes no attempt at realism” and “exalts her as nature’s most perfect creation” (Bermann 26, 30). When she is given human virtues, they again do not give the reader any insight into her character. Petrarch instead focuses on the socially accepted virtues: “And she’s all beauty and all modesty” ( 216: 6). The reader now knows that she is beautiful and modest, but there is no real sense of her as a tangible human. She has no feelings, nor does she have a voice—she is simply an object to be admired and immortalized within the sonnet. When Petrarch finds the need to give details, they are scattered throughout his sonnet series. There is no one sonnet that describes his lady in full—a reader must piece together the fragments, which have been randomly dispersed, in order to form a full picture. In line six of sonnet 120, he says she has “lovely eyes” and in sonnet 166 her “Adorable eyes from dazzling distance come” (10). The description leaves the details of color, shape and size out, allowing the reader to form his/her own image of beauty. The question “Were ringlets ever so loosed of gold more sheer / To wayward breeze by nymph in pool or glade?” comes from lines five and six of sonnet 126, depicting the stereotypical blonde beauty. “To view her locks that shone bright gold above, / Then loose, but now with pearls and jewels bound: / Those locks she sweetly scatter’d to the wind” is another extravagant description of Laura’s hair within sonnet 163, lines seven through nine. No single phrase gives a simple, straightforward description of any part of her; all details are set within an ideal phrasing, creating an exaggerated portrayal of her as a celestial being. He not only isolates her eyes and hair, but also idolizes her hands, breasts, and face within other sonnets. “The poet thus fragments her […] into bodily parts” and the reader must wade through the mess to piece together some form of perfect beauty (Bermann 27). Because of this fragmentation, the reader is left with a muddled—but standard—representation of ideal feminine beauty.
This scattered approach may be linked to the speaker’s specific relationship with the idealized woman within the sonnets. As a part of the Petrarchan ideal, the speaker never obtains his object of passion. Because Petrarch never had the opportunity to be with Laura, he keeps the woman within his sonnets just out of reach, and the speaker lives in constant pain because of the separation. In sonnet 120, Petrarch writes: “Tell her, though fully you can never tell, / That, while her days calm and serenely flow, / In darkness and anxiety I dwell” (9-11). She, as the perfect woman, is aloof and distant from the relationship—free from care—while the speaker is tortured with her eternal absence. The barrier Petrarch creates between his speaker and the idealized woman is a constant theme throughout his sonnet series, and it remains linked to the Petrarchan woman within Renaissance literature. Writing about the Renaissance sonnet form in general, Sandra Bermann says “Passions are never fulfilled nor, given the tradition as Petrarch used it, do they end” (Bermann 34). Until Shakespeare’s time, it was conventional for the sonnet speaker to be tortured with the distance perpetuated between him and the woman of his obsession and adulation. Finally, over two hundred years after Petrarch, the sonnet saw a drastic change. Shakespeare, bored with the over-used ideal woman, took the opportunity as a challenge to create his own feminine character—one that contradicted the Petrarchan tradition and shattered the concept of an ideal beauty. Rather than constructing an immortal being as Petrarch did, the speaker within Shakespeare’s sonnets makes it clear that “My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground” and is not a divine being (130: 12). She is not the ideal beauty, and instead the speaker realizes that “In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, / For they in thee a thousand errors note” (141: 1-2). Shakespeare uses his poetic skills to overthrow the typical idealization and, rather than his woman being “All virtue, and all gentle-mannered ways” like that of Petrarch, his woman is dark and foreboding, plagued with an un-comely figure (Petrarch 210: 7-10). Shakespeare “strikes a new, more humanistic note” in direct contrast to the ethereal woman of past traditions, and the ideal woman is replaced with a more natural and far more believable female object of adulation (Bermann 87).
With this new “earthly mistress” comes a slew of details (Bermann 88). They are not scattered throughout the series, however, and are instead located within a few sonnets, giving the reader a much better grasp on the physical, as well as psychological, nature of the Shakespearean dark lady. Sonnet 130 reads more as a catalog of the mistress’s faults than a traditional sonnet:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. (130: 1-8)
This sonnet in particular condenses many traditional Petrarchan idealizations and directly contradicts them. Each stereotypical representation is openly opposed, and the mistress is portrayed as, not perfect, but fault ridden and homely. “Shakespeare managed to work a direct critique of sonnet clichés into a serious sonnet sequence and to use these parodic interludes to underscore his own originality” (Bermann 86). With the slow decline in interest in the ideal woman, which began around the time he writes, Shakespeare takes the opportunity to show his skill as well as his contempt for the outworn theme. Thus, he creates a woman who is the exact opposite of the Petrarchan ideal woman, and he represents her in her entirety—as a whole being—rather than a fragmented depiction of personified beauty. Just as he blatantly satirizes the other Petrarchan concepts, Shakespeare also changes the relationship between the characters. While Petrarch’s ideal woman is forever out of reach, Shakespeare’s dark lady is in a direct relationship with the speaker. As a lover, she is never absent, and the sonnets focus more on the speaker’s struggle with his acquisition rather than his loss. Sonnet 138, stating “Therefore I lie with her and she with me,” while punning on the word “lie,” still gives the reader a sense of the fulfilled relationship between the speaker and the dark lady (138: 13). “The frank sexuality almost always left obscure in the Petrarchan tradition as an unattainable, if not immoral, possibility, here receives explicit treatment,” and the sonnets are charged with sexual tension as the speaker comes to terms with his love for a less than perfect mistress (Bermann 85). More than just illustrating a fulfilled relationship, Shakespeare creates a dramatically tense situation between his characters. His satire for the traditionally idealized love becomes painfully apparent with the less-than-perfect affection that exists between the speaker and the dark lady. The speaker in sonnet 141, after listing the faults of his lady, says:
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unsway'd the likeness of a man,
Thy proud hearts slave and vassal wretch to be:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain. (141: 9-14)
With such an error-ridden mistress, the reader, following Petrarchan thought, would not assume a love bond between the speaker and the lady. However, regardless of her faults, the speaker still loves her and is held prisoner by his feelings for her. Shakespeare has “moved away from Petrarchan orthodoxy towards a cynically realistic presentation of love,” leaving the reader in the same position as the speaker: they must both accept the more natural version of love (Winny 99). For Shakespeare, love is not easy, nor is it linked solely to beauty; his two characters fell in love, regardless of physical features, and both the speaker and the dark lady must face reality and work to make their relationship a success. Tired of the over-idealized love sonnet tradition, Shakespeare does not portray a distant female object to be admired and lamented over, but a far more realistic woman who has entered, with her lover, into a complicated relationship that takes time and effort to maintain. With two hundred years of Petrarchan tradition trailing behind him, Shakespeare took the sonnet form to another level, changing the themes and the over-arching meaning behind the sonnet. Petrarch gave to the reader a fantasy of perfect love and immortal beauty, producing “a lyric world filled less with sensuous things than with distanced, contemplated concepts of things” (Bermann 12). He did not try to imitate real life but instead wrote about that which was unattainable: an ideal woman. Shakespeare, in contrast, wanted to satirize the old tradition, as he was weary of the stereotypical beauty standing afar, teasing both the speaker and the reader. In response, his dark lady is described in full, with realistic features and faults. His sonnets
construct her purely in terms that could be taken to be referential to the sonnet convention, reading her off as the result of an attempt to continue to write sonnets about a woman in the midst of the crisis in mimetic representation. (Innes 180)
There was nothing new that could be said about the Petrarchan woman; she was static and had become lifeless by the time of Shakespeare. In order to overcome this, Shakespeare wrote a new character to combat the worn-out image. Just as in many of his later theatrical works, Shakespeare here displays his talent as a poet, demonstrating for his audience his ability to transform a once standard and over-used theme into a new and more tangible representation of life and love.
© Rebecca Wilson |