The Dark Lady: A Threat to Class Structure

With my dissertation well under way, I hope to use this blog to think through some of my ideas and share the direction of my writing. The overarching aim of my dissertation, titled Large and Spacious Will: Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare's Sonnets, is to attempt to reclaim the 'dark lady' from a figure which functions merely as an example of misogynist discourse to a woman who is a rebel and a threat to patriarchy and social order. To achieve this aim, I am taking an intersection approach. The oppression of race, class, gender, sexuality and many other spheres of oppression are always interlinked and inseparable and so, in my analysis of the sonnets, I feel it is important to consider the role of race, class, gender and sexuality. In this blog I want to outline some of the ways in which the woman of sonnets 127-154, sometimes known as the 'dark lady', disrupts class structures.



The first 18 of Shakespeare's sonnets urge a fair young man to procreate in order to pass on his beauty to his children. The young man is probably of high or aristocratic birth and is most certainly a on a higher social standing than the speaker. The young man at the centre of these sonnets is repeatedly praised for being"fair". Although this word of course refers to physical beauty, there is also a sense that it is related to class. The young man is fair-born; he is of good stock and thus it is important that he reproduces. As the opening line of Sonnet 1 states: "From fairest creatures we desire increase". The characteristic of fairness is a distinguishing charateristic of the dominant class. The sonnet form is so intrinsically linked to courtly love that to think it would be used to extol the fair beauty of a lower class woman is plainly absurd. So these opening 18 sonnets perform a societal role not dissimilar from an Althussian state apparatus. They urge the dominant class to preserve their blood line and reproduce in order to consolidate their power.

The language used in the sonnets suport this claim. In Sonnet 13 the speaker rhetorically asks:

Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold
Against the stormy gust of winter's day
And barren rage of death's eternal cold?

By utlising words such as "honour", and the metenomic "house", the speaker evokes a sense of duty. It is the young man's duty to pass on his heritage, and not to do so would be a threat to the dominant class. This type of language is seen also in Sonnet 10 when the speaker scolds the young man for: "Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate/ Which to repair should be thy chief desire". These sonnets propagate the duty of the dominant class to pass on their fair-born blood, and reiterates that the failure to do so could "ruinate" their "beauteuous roof"; bringing down the very structure which maintains social order and their position as head of the hierarchy. It is interesting to note that sonnets were particularly popular in court and would have circulated among the higher echelons of society. The patrons of such sonnets would have recognised this rhetoric as a blueprint for reproducing the fair values of the dominant class.

Although early modern England is a feudal society, the sonnets are produced and published in a society that is on the cusp of capitalism and the marks of this are seen in the sonnet's language. The commodity fetishism that is a characteristic of capitalist society inevitably accelerates what Karl Marx and Greorg Lukacs call reification. Reification is the reduction of human subjects to the status of things or commodities. The economic and market orientation of the speaker's rhetoric in the procreation sonnets lead to the reification of the woman from a human to a mere vessel for the young mans seed; "make sweet some vial" the speaker instructs in Sonnet 6. The value of women in a capitalist society is  merely a machine for procreation; a means to birth children to meet the demands of the market workforce. The procreation sonnets reduce the woman to a "vial", devoid of human qualities, who must passively receive what the male decides to put into her.

Sonnets 19-126 sometimes known as the fair youth sonnets continue supporting class distinctions and social order, but the "dark lady" sonnets are far more intriguing. If the young man's principle characteristic is all that is "fair" the lady of sonnets 125-154 is the antithesis. She is dark, black, dun, coloured ill. The speaker questions her morality, denigrates her promiscuity, ridicules her with misogynistic language, but the lady is the ultimate deconstructer of the class structure and social order that is so prominent in the sonnet sequence. The position of these sonnets after the fair youth sonnets is particularly interesting as it is almost as if a black child is born of a fair parent.

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name.
But now is black beauty's successive heir.

In the 'dark lady' sonnets, it is almost as if we have seen a schism that tears asunder the social structure. She has seized the sonnet form, the language and geneology of that which is deemed fair. The social order and distinction which is established in the procreation sonnets and is maintained in the fair youth sonnets becomes severely disrupted. If the young man was to sleep and procreate with a woman of a lower social status it would water down his blood. The distinctions between dominant and subordinate class become blurred and with it so does the distinctions between good and evil, heaven and hell, black and fair. The mistresses sexuality is a threat to class structure. It is for this reason that women in early modern England were punished more harshly for their sexual discretion than men. Nothing threatens the patriarchal and hierarchical social formation more than the 'dark lady's' promiscuous womb. A place where blood lines co-mingle; a place that has the potential to destroy the very fabric of society. The patriarchal dream of producing a dynasty of fair young men threatens to turn into a social melting-pot nightmare; a notion made more horrific by the mistresses blackness being not only in opposite of fair, but in opposite of white.