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The figure commonly known as the “Dark Lady” is the second of the two love objects the speaker addresses in the sonnets. After the lengthy sequence of poems devoted to the Fair Youth, the speaker turns to the Dark Lady for the final twenty-seven sonnets (127–154). As their conventional names imply, the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady stand in opposition to each other. Whereas he is younger and less experienced, she is older and more mature. Whereas he boasts a conventional form of beauty characterized by the fairness of his skin, she is an unconventional beauty with darker coloring. Finally, whereas the speaker regards the Fair Youth as an object of spiritual affection, he regards the Dark Lady as an object of more overtly sexual desire. The speaker’s relationship with the Dark Lady is characterized by psychological and sexual turmoil. Her sensual nature attracts him intensely, yet he also finds her infidelity maddening. The speaker also reflects that their relationship is founded on lies. Yet as he acknowledges in sonnet 138, the particular ways they lie to each other also brings mutual comfort. Namely, he doesn’t tell her she’s cruel, and she doesn’t tell him he’s old.
Just as the Fair Youth’s gender makes him a unique love object for a sonnet sequence like this, the Dark Lady is similarly remarkable. The conventional addressee of love sonnets is a chaste, fair-skinned young woman who, despite the poet’s zealous and idealizing language, remains frustratingly aloof. The Dark Lady is none of these things. As an older, sexually experienced woman, she drives the speaker mad not through her chastity and aloofness, but through her licentiousness and knowing manipulation of his desire. In these ways, the Dark Lady subverts the expectations readers might have developed from reading the famous love sonnets of Francesco Petrarch. The speaker, knowing this, writes an explicitly anti-Petrarchan description in sonnet 130, which famously begins, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Instead of the piercing brightness associated with blue eyes, the Dark Lady’s eyes are black. In the same sonnet, the speaker describes her hair as “black wires” and her skin tone as “dun.”
These details about the Dark Lady’s physical appearance deserve further note. The speaker’s description of this figure as a woman with black eyes, wiry hair, and dun-colored skin has led many critics to suppose that the Dark Lady may be a woman of African heritage. Others have suggested that the Dark Lady could well be a woman of Mediterranean descent, or else from another ethnic background typified by dark hair and eyes and ruddy skin. Either of these interpretations can be supported. However, it’s also important to exercise caution when interpreting the speaker’s use of the color “black” to describe the Dark Lady. This color term cannot easily be equated to a modern, racialized understanding of Blackness. Elizabethans did not use the same conceptual language for talking about race as we do now. Thus, during Shakespeare’s time, the color black was more likely to be understood symbolically, as a color associated with nighttime, ugliness, evil, and sexual license. It is precisely these symbolic associations the speaker resists in sonnet 127, where he declares that, though “in the old age black was not counted fair, / . . . now is black beauty’s successive heir.” Historically, however, it’s less clear whether these lines may be legitimately read in racial terms.
