More usual as an argument made by a man to a woman, as part of his seduction. When you become old, you should be able to show that you have a successor to your beauty – but only if you beget a child. 'When forty winters shall besiege thy brow' Possibly the Dark Lady is an amalgam of many different women.ĭescriptions of a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets from our Artistic Director Gregory Doran drawing on Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells' new book All the Sonnets of Shakespeare (published September 2020). The wife of John Florio, a linguist and translator of Montaigne, who may have been satirised as the pedantic Holofernes In Love’s Labour’s Lost.Black Luce, a brothel owner in Clerkenwell.Emilia was also a member of the Venetian Bassano family, who were musicians at court.
Emilia Lanier - mistress of Lord Hunsdon, (Henry Carey) the Lord Chamberlain, and thus Shakespeare’s boss, as patron of his company.Mary Fitton - maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth, and the mistress of William Herbert.No one knows the identity of the 'Dark Lady' but possible candidates include: Far from idealising a perfect woman, they feature a female lover accused of making the poet sexually obsessed, furiously jealous, of cheating on him, stealing away his boy friend, and giving him a dose of the clap.
#Shakespeare sonnet 73 series#
Towards the end of the series there are 28 sonnets addressed to a woman.
He has the correct initials, just reversed - perhaps to conceal his identity.