His blood burns to get wit dat…
The dark lady. Who is this mysterious woman that got Shakespeare playing with more than just his quill pen?
She has black wiry hair. “Dun” colored skin. His intentions strictly sexual.
Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady Sequence” covers sonnets 127-152 and distinguishes themselves from the rest of his sonnets in that dis dude right here is just looking to clap cheeks. The poems are sensual, explicit, and sometimes downright bawdy, son.
Take Sonnet 130, talking about breasts, hairs, cheeks, and even her stank breath, we realize that Shakespeare was a freak, obsessed with gross chicks. Or Sonnet 151; “I do betray my nobler part to my gross body’s treason.” Shakespeare describing their affair, talking about rubbing his white flabby body all up on her.
Think of these sonnets as the first “sext” or “verbal dick pick.”
Think of these sonnets as the first “sext” or “verbal dick pick.”
For years, Shakespeare scholars have tried to attribute personage to this mysterious woman, similar to their attempts to connect the “Fair Youth” to a historical individual.
The problem is, Shakespeare was probably creepin’ with multiple shorties when in London, and figuring out who this shadowy jump off, this ill-lit honey dip is, has plagued experts for centuries.
So who might this Dark Lady be or not be? That is the question, and one we might have some possible answers to.
Theory #1: “That Ride or Die Down the Way,” Emilia Lanier
A mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain. As a known side-chick among the well-informed upper-class, it is fair to say that other men might have lusted upon this woman of loose morals and think they had a chance to get with that. She was a musician and possibly of Sicilian descent… Shakespeare knew what was up. First, musicians are promiscuous as hell when they’re on the road, and two, a Sicilian knows how to keep her mouth shut.
Theory #2: “A Little Jungle Fever” named Black Luce
Every cock in Elizabethan England visited the henhouse every once in a while, and Shakespeare was no spring chicken when it came to whorehouses, regularly rubbing elbows (and bumping uglies) with some of the lowest class citizens at The Globe. Enter (multiple times it seems) Black Luce, a Clerkenwell brothel-owner who possibly and probably mixed it up with Shakespeare at a performance of Twelfth Night at Gray’s Inn. Can you blame a guy for tasting a piece of chocolate and then developing a sugar tooth?
Theory #3: “The Hoe of John Florio,” Aline Florio
In 2008, Jonathan Bate, author of The Genius of Shakespeare, submitted his own theory of the identity of Shakey’s “Side Line Ciera,” lowborn wife of Italian linguist John Florio. Why Aline Florio? Because it was confirmed that she was also “nilla waifing” with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Not only that, but there are some cryptic clues found in Love’s Labor’s Lost where the name Rosaline (rose, reference to the Earl+aline) is a dark-haired character possibly of African descent! You know Shakespeare had to be laying with her in bed one time and he was like “I promise I’ll name a character after you if you allow me to do anal,” or something probably something a little more poetic (but maybe not).
Theory #4: Mary “Not Afraid to Use a Finger” Fitton
Another dude’s mistress…you’re seeing the pattern here. Once word gets around that you wah ching in da club, it’s hard to shake the reputation. This girl is actually rumored to be the girl from another early Shakespeare sonnet, where the poet and the Earl of Pembroke argue over who will get the first meal and who will get the sloppy seconds. Not only that but also because there is a portrait of her with blackish hair and George Bernard Shaw centered his play Lady of the Dark Sonnets around her, she is fair game for speculation.
Theory #5: Jacqueline "Jackie the Shackie” Field
Another girl within Shakespeare’s circle because she was married to one of Shakespeare’s friends, Richard Field, and had features vaguely similar to the Dark Lady. Richard was a publisher and friend from youth in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Richard probably had some weird dom fetish because he knew he could never really satisfy her sexually since she was, you know, French. This little chatelaine probably had a ton of boyfriends who rode cool Vespas, wore horizontal striped shirts, and had dongs as long as baguettes. He prob watched when Jackie the Shackie had her interludes with Shakespeare and after lit her weird-smelling cigarettes she bought in Paris.
Theory #6: Jennet Davenant, “Some Paternity Test Seeking Shortie”
You are not the father! Shakespeare danced a little boogie when he found out that William Davenant was not his biological son. Davenant made multiple claims after the Bard allegedly visited his biological mother Jennet while she was a tavern-wench between London and Stratford. That doesn’t mean that Shakespeare didn’t have a toss here or there with this innkeeping inamorata, and it certainly doesn’t disprove that Davenant was not his son. It just means there is not enough to prove the pussy was good enough to bewitch the poet into immortalizing her as the Dark Lady in his sonnets.
Whoever the Dark Lady might have been, it’s obvious that she got Shakespeare all twisted. On the other hand, does her identity even really matter? Let’s not completely rule out the possibility that the woman might not have existed at all and only lived within Shakespeare’s mental spank bank.
If I know anything about writers, it’s that they have very large spank banks and sometimes perverted imaginations.
Remember, this is the playwright who ended his play having Juliet penetrate herself with Romeo’s “rusty dagger.”