The Dark Lady Sonnets: Who Was She?

The Dark Lady is the name given to the unnamed woman addressed in Sonnets 127 through 154 — the second and darker half of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. She is unfaithful, sexually compelling, morally troubling, and described with a specificity that the Fair Youth sonnets conspicuously avoid. She has fascinated readers for four centuries. Her identity remains unknown.

At a Glance

The key facts about the Dark Lady sonnets for quick reference.

What the Poems Tell Us

The Dark Lady sonnets are the most physically specific poems in the sequence — and yet they describe a person defined almost entirely by what she is not. Sonnet 127 opens the sequence by establishing that dark colouring, which earlier generations called “black,” was not considered beautiful by conventional Elizabethan poetic standards. The Petrarchan tradition demanded fair skin, golden hair, and light eyes. The Dark Lady has none of these. She has dark eyes, dark hair, and a complexion that does not conform to the idealised beauty the sonnet tradition had been celebrating for a century.

Sonnet 130 — “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” — makes this anti-Petrarchan argument explicitly, refusing every conventional comparison and arriving at the couplet’s claim that honest perception is superior to false praise. Her eyes are not like the sun. Her lips are not as red as coral. Her breath, frankly, reeks. And yet Shakespeare’s love for her, established on accurate rather than flattering description, is as rare as any love built on fiction.

What the poems do not tell us — and this is the crucial point — is almost everything else. We do not know her name, her social position, whether she was married, whether she was English, whether the relationship was real or a literary construction. The name “Dark Lady” was not given by Shakespeare; it was invented by later readers and critics to describe the figure. Shakespeare himself never names her.

What the poems do establish is the emotional texture of the relationship: it is not idealized. The speaker knows the woman is unfaithful. He knows the attraction is partly or largely physical and that the physical attraction is not something he is proud of. Sonnet 129 — “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame” — is the sequence’s most violent poem about lust, describing desire as something that degrades before, during, and after gratification, and acknowledging that this knowledge changes nothing. Sonnet 138 describes a relationship sustained by mutual lying, each party pretending not to know what both know perfectly well.

This is not the emotional world of the Fair Youth sonnets. It is darker, more self-aware, more uncomfortable, and in some ways more honest about what desire actually is.

The Candidates

Scholars and enthusiasts have proposed numerous women as the Dark Lady’s real-world identity. The leading candidates each have something to recommend them and something significant that argues against them.

Emilia Lanier is the candidate who has attracted the most serious scholarly attention in recent decades. Born Emilia Bassano, she was the daughter of a court musician, became the mistress of Lord Hunsdon (who was the Lord Chamberlain and therefore the patron of Shakespeare’s company), and later married Alfonso Lanier. She was dark-complexioned — her family were Venetian Jews — was educated and musically accomplished, and moved in court circles that would have brought her into contact with Shakespeare’s world. She later published a volume of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), making her one of the first women to publish a substantial collection of original verse in English. The scholar A. L. Rowse argued vigorously for her identification in the 1970s, though his case was more confident than the evidence warranted. The connection is plausible and circumstantially interesting, but no document links her to the sonnets.

Mary Fitton was a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth who had an affair with William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke — one of the men proposed as the Fair Youth. She was dark-haired, which fits the description, and her social circles overlapped with the theatrical world of the period. The problem is that portraits of her show light-coloured eyes, which conflicts with the sonnets’ emphasis on dark eyes, and there is no evidence connecting her to Shakespeare personally.

Lucy Morgan (also known as Lucy Negro) was a woman of African or mixed heritage who appears in court records as a gentlewoman to Queen Elizabeth and later in more ambiguous social contexts. She fits the physical description and the social marginality that the Dark Lady sonnets suggest, but the evidence connecting her to Shakespeare is even thinner than for the other candidates.

Penelope Rich — the “Stella” of Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella — has also been proposed, but her colouring does not particularly match, and the proposal has not attracted serious support.

Why the Identity Question Is the Wrong Question

The honest answer about the Dark Lady’s identity is that we do not know, will very probably never know, and that the uncertainty matters less than it might seem.

The sonnets are poems, not confessions. They are highly crafted literary works produced by a professional writer working within and against a tradition of sonnet-writing that goes back to Petrarch. The Dark Lady may be based on a real woman, or she may be a literary construction assembled from the conventions of anti-Petrarchan poetry. Most likely she is somewhere between these — a real relationship refracted through a literary tradition until the real and the constructed are inseparable.

What is clear is that the Dark Lady figure serves a specific function in the sequence. The Fair Youth sonnets idealize, argue, philosophize, and construct elaborate justifications for love. The Dark Lady sonnets do none of this. They describe desire that the speaker knows is degrading, a relationship he cannot make morally comfortable, an attraction that coexists with clear-eyed recognition of its object’s flaws. Where the Fair Youth is elevated beyond description, the Dark Lady is described — imperfectly, honestly, uncomfortably.

This contrast is the sequence’s structural achievement. The Fair Youth sonnets ask what love can do against time and death. The Dark Lady sonnets ask what desire does to a person who is paying attention. Both questions are important, and neither answers the other.

The Sonnets Worth Reading First

For readers coming to the Dark Lady sonnets for the first time, four poems give the clearest sense of what the sequence is and what makes it distinct from the Fair Youth poems.

Sonnet 127 opens the sequence and establishes its anti-Petrarchan position — dark beauty as beauty, against the convention that only fairness qualifies. Sonnet 129 is the sequence’s most extreme statement about lust — violent, self-aware, and without consolation. Sonnet 130 is the sequence’s most readable poem — the anti-blazon that refuses every flattering comparison and arrives at honest praise. And Sonnet 138 is the sequence’s funniest and most uncomfortable poem — a portrait of mutual deception that the couplet’s pun on “lie” makes suddenly sordid.

Read together, these four sonnets give a complete picture of the relationship: its physical basis, its moral cost, its honesty about its own dishonesty, and its strange, uncomfortable persistence.