Presentation Script: Shakespeare's 'Dark Lady': A Sexual Revolutionary?

I have decided to use this blog to track some of my research ideas and findings as I begin the process of writing my Masters dissertation. The following is the script of a presentation I delivered on the 25th of May 2017. The conference was a chance to explore our dissertation proposals, and I delivered my paper in a session chaired by Professor Phillip Schwyzer titled: Early Modern Discourses: Bodies, Politics, Performance.

Shakespeare's 'Dark Lady': A Sexual Revolutionary?

Hello, I am Antonio Hehir, and I have been conducting research into sex and sexuality in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the Dark Lady of the sonnets and how we can seek to redefine her and to ask the question: Was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets a sexual revolutionary?

When it comes to the sonnets, there has been a tendency among Shakespeare scholars to focus on the ‘Fair Youth’ sonnets (1-126) and much of that focus has orbited around a biographical fascination with the homoerotic aspect of those sonnets. Criticism towards the latter sonnets (127-152 ) ,which I will refer to as the Dark Lady sonnets, have largely been dismissed as uninteresting, misogynistic poems that do little more than work in juxtaposition to the ideal and spiritual nature of the Fair Youth. The sonnets have been widely considered to be a pastiche or parody of the 300 year old tradition of the Petrarchan love sonnet, but I would argue that, despite the homoerotic nature of the Fair Youth sonnets, there is little radically original in the first section. The love between the speaker and the youth seems to be that of a spiritual, transcendent love and one which is not as out of sync with the Petrarchan tradition as many critics have argued.

When it comes to the Dark Lady, she has not received the same attention as the Fair Youth and some critics have even echoed the misogynistic language of the speaker towards her. Joel Fineman calls her: “black on the inside" and both “corrupt and corrupting”. Stephan Greenblatt describes her as: “everything that should cause revulsion” and John Kerrigan tells us that she: “morally inhabits, as she sexually enshrines, a hell.”  It is beyond doubt that the dark lady sonnets are deeply misogynistic in tone, and though that may be problematic, I believe that if we separate ourselves from the obsession to read the sonnets as confessional, biographical poems, and instead look on them as dramatizations; then Shakespeare’s Dark Lady emerges as a rebellious and revolutionary figure; A woman who attempts to disrupt a social structure largely dominated by men.

 It can be tempting for feminist criticism to dismiss these sonnets as misogynistic discourse or to defend the Dark Lady against claims of promiscuity, but to do so is to accept the terms set by the patriarchal society in which she is judged. If we set aside our heteronormative assumption that the best sex occurs within a loving and monogamous relationship, then we can begin to redefine what the Dark Lady represents.  As Melissa E Sanchez rightly claims: “To suppose that women want love while men want sex (or that women want sex only as an expression of love) is to move uncomfortably close to pathologizing women’s desire for sex as sex.” So thus we should approach the dark lady sonnets from a new angle. Yes indeed the dark lady is promiscuous but so what?

The Dark Lady is rebellious she does not fit the “chaste, silent and obedient” woman that Elizabethan handbooks idealize, on the contrary, she is promiscuous, assertive and unruly. She is a threat to patriarchy and a threat to an established order in which male dominance and female subservience is assumed.  The Dark Lady very much dominates men and dictates the terms of her relationship between both the speaker and the love rival. I want to demonstrate this further through a reading of Sonnet 135.

Sonnet 135, perhaps Shakespeare's most sexually explicit sonnet, gives us a dazzling word play that puns on the word “will”. The term “Will” has multiple meanings in this sonnet; referring to the speaker, sexual desire and both the male and female sexual organs. In this sonnet the speaker denigrates the dark lady for her sexual promiscuity and asks her, “Wilt thou whose will is large and spacious not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine”. He is literally asking her to hide his penis in her capacious vagina, and he goes on to make this analogy of the sea having an abundance of water yet still being able to receive rain.  The word ‘will’ is repeated thirteen times in this sonnet and with so many multiple contexts that the word seems to lose all meaning; echoing the deadening and numbing experience of sexual intercourse that the speaker attributes to the Dark Lady. We also see this mirrored in the rhyme scheme which disrupts the conventional pattern with the repeated use of the A rhymes. But it is not the characterization of the Dark Lady that I want to highlight here. We should not be drawn into defending the Dark Lady, but instead highlighting the attitude of the speaker. The tone of the sonnet is one in which the speaker is attempting to badger the Dark Lady into sleeping with him. It is not her promiscuity that disturbs the speaker, but rather her assertion of sexual subjectivity, of agency, of choice. She is dominant in the relationship and resist being categorized as whore as she does not have sex with everyone, but rather who she wishes to. It is that resistance to categorization that empowers her. The speaker is left helpless faced with female potency and Shakespeare’s language makes legible the stigma attached to women who desire non-monogamous sex- women who desire like men, and it makes evident the imputation of promiscuity as a means of limiting sexual subjectivity. The speaker presumes that since she sleeps with many men, she must sleep with all men and it is precisely that she has control over with whom she engages sexually that is so problematic to him.

The Dark Lady is a woman who is endowed with a wild sexual appetite and is more than willing to satisfy it, but the she is not only revolutionary because she is a woman who gives in to her own physical desires, but also because she opens up the possibility for poetry to explore lust and sex. The sonnet form had been synonymous with the Petrarchan tradition in which sonneteers would extol the virtues of an unattainable love, and thus the idea of the Petrarchan woman is one of absolute purity that has its foundations in Christian ideals of chastity and the sexual identification of lust with sin.  It can be argued that the Fair Youth sonnets, although professing love for a fellow man, in many ways they conform to Petrarchan ideals and so the sexual aspect of the love between the speaker and the Fair Youth is always denied. The Dark Lady sonnets are the antithesis of the Petrarchan ideals. The relationship between the speaker and the dark lady is rooted in the idea that they are both guilty of the inherent weaknesses of human nature. The Dark Lady sonnets offer us not only an acceptance but a celebration of the human condition and a subversion of the Christian and puritan ideas of sin and purity. We see the speaker contemplate this in Sonnet 129.

 At face value, this sonnet seems to warn against the dangers of lust. The speaker calls it “perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust”. The speaker continues his contemplation of the nature of lust and the rhythm flows freely from line to line until we reach the full stop before the couplet, and it is almost as if the speaker takes a breath to consider his conclusion in which he tells us: “All this the world well knows, yet none knows well/ To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell” He is saying here that despite everyone knowing well the dangerous nature of lust no one is able to avoid it. As Joseph Pequigney points out, the speaker “recollects finally, the erotic ‘heaven’ consisting of ‘a joy proposed’ and a ‘bliss in proof’. This recollection, representing a marked change in attitude, also foreshadows the revival of carnal desire.” Pequigney points at the sonnet being a mark of a cultural shift, one that embraces carnal desire, and one that is made evident in the contrasting courts of "the virgin queen" Elizabeth I and the scandal ridden court of James I. The sonnet takes a stance against the fanatical puritan idea of absolute purity and against the idea that you can renounce the sinful flesh and all its desires. Instead, it speaks to a deeper human condition; one that unites the heaven with the hell, the body with the soul, and the good with the evil. It highlights the absurdity of Petrarchan expectations and not only accepts the flawed human desire for sex, but celebrates it. It sets the terms through which the dark lady sequence will continue to demonstrate through its dramatization of the relationship between the speaker and the Dark Lady.

So is the Dark Lady a sexual revolutionary? Well, this is an idea I will look to expand on through further close textual analysis of the sonnets and by contrasting the dark lady sonnets in juxtaposition with the representations of love we receive in the Fair Youth sonnets. But the Dark Lady is certainly a woman who dominates her relationship with men. She is a woman who does not supress her sexual desires, but claims agency over them. She is a woman who subverts the Christian notions of lust and sin, and who acts against heteronormative sexual conventions. She is a woman who challenges all the axioms upon which the 300 year old Petrarchan ideal was based and that, I would argue, was truly revolutionary.

Thank you for listening.