by Robert Nye
Mary Fitton’s claim to Dark Lady status rests on no more, in reality, than the fame and the scandal of the way men of all ages flocked to her like moths to a candleflame when she was young.
I never heard the late Mr Shakespeare so much as mention her, though he would have known her name, and she may have crossed his mind from time to time when he was not busy.
I saw this lady once myself, at a bear-baiting in the Paris Garden, when the great bear Sackerson was in his prime. She was eating tarts beneath the smoke-dried leaves. She had a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of curls falling on each side of her face under a shepherdess’s hat. She had big, bright eyes.
Unfortunately for history, those curls were soft and fair – not at all like the black wires which Shakespeare mentions as growing on the head of his mistress in sonnet 130. As for those eyes: in sonnet 127 the mistress’s eyes are described as raven black, but the eyes I saw at the bear-baiting were not only bright, they were grey as squirrels.
All things considered, I do not think the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton.
Chapter Seventy-Four
The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 2
I stayed once at the house of the second candidate. She is rather more interesting.
Her name was Jane Davenant, and she was the wife of an Oxford innkeeper who became eventually the Mayor of that city. The Davenants kept the Tavern Inn, in Cornmarket Street. Shakespeare often stayed at this house on his journeys between London and Stratford – that is, when he took his preferred way through Woodstock and High Wycombe instead of riding via Banbury and Aylesbury, two towns he always avoided if he could. When we played before the Mayor and Corporation of Oxford on 9th October 1605 our whole Company lodged at the Tavern Inn, and I slept in a chamber the walls of which were adorned with an interlacing pattern of vines and flowers, and along the top a painted frieze which exhorted me to FEAR GOD ABOVE ALL THING, and I saw Mrs Davenant for myself, and she had dark hair.
But so do half the women in the world, and it is only because the Queen was fair that Mr Shakespeare ever pretended dark hair was out of fashion. Anyway, as we shall see, he meant something more when he harped upon his mistress being black.
Jane Davenant’s claim to be the Dark Lady rests on the word of her son, Sir William Davenant, our present Poet Laureate, who decided some years ago to proclaim among his friends that the melancholy innkeeper (no one ever saw him smile) could not have been his father, and that William Shakespeare was. Please notice he said nothing of this until Shakespeare was dead. Please notice also that he was entirely silent on the subject until he had lost his nose as the result of mercury treatment for the pox. If he ever looked like Shakespeare he assuredly does not now, though of course no one says any such thing out of pity for the fellow.
Davenant is to be blamed for the introduction of female players to the English stage, and other things including movable scenery. His Gondibert is unreadable, which I think it would not be if William Shakespeare’s blood really flowed in his veins. You will say these are matters of opinion; so here is a fact. Davenant was not born until 1606, by which time the events of the sonnets were long past. I suppose that Mr S could have rekindled an old passion, and fathered his alleged bastard in that autumn when our Company played Oxford; but if he did then it was no more than an epilogue to the whole affair.
There is, however, a curious work called Willobie his Avisa, or The True Picture of a Modest Maid, and of a Chaste and Constant Wife which might be used to link Jane Davenant with the Dark Lady. This piece, a farrago of prose and verse, was published in 1594, and signed with the pseudonym Hadrian Dorrell. From a chance remark of Mr Shakespeare’s, I know that its author was really a Henry Willoughby, a connection by marriage of Shakespeare’s Warwickshire friend Thomas Russell, an overseer of the poet’s will, in which he was left £5. In short, the thing was written by someone who might have heard some gossip about Shakespeare. I’d put it no higher than that. Whatever, the pamphlet gave serious offence to somebody with influence (Rizley?), even though it must always have been hard to understand. It was banned and burnt before the last century was out.
That, friends, is why Pickleherring has a copy, here, in this 74th box. The thing is in essence a complicated libel upon the wife of an innkeeper. This woman is so beautiful that she draws to the inn a crowd of importunate gallants. But she is apparently so virtuous that she drives them all away, even threatening to murder one of them, a nobleman, rather than permit him to besmirch her honour. This perfect spouse is a rare bird (rara Avis or Avisa), but the author says a contrary meaning must be given to his epithets. Beneath the exterior of a Lucrece the reader is invited to see a wanton: Let Lucres-Avis be thy name.
Enter Henrico Willobego. He is conquered at first sight of Avisa, and begins to pine, until his friend WS, who has undergone the same torments, counsels him with wisdom born of experience. Amongst other wooden stuff, WS says this to his ‘friend Harry’:
She is no saint, she is no nun:
I think in time she may be won.
Awful crap, but I suppose it does recall two lines from Titus Andronicus:
She is a woman, therefore may be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore may be won.
Since WS is described as ‘the old player’, and Henrico Willobego quotes proverbs belonging to the collection made by Rizley’s tutor John Florio, I suppose identification of these two men with Shakespeare and Southampton is not far-fetched. And Avisa might well be Mrs Davenant. After all, the nest of this ‘Britain bird’ that ‘outflies them all’, is clearly indicated: ‘See yonder house where hangs the badge of England’s saint’. The tavern kept by the Davenants had the red-cross shield of St George hanging outside its front door.
The allegory enacted in Willobie his Avisa is, all the same, much more obscure and difficult to follow than my summary may be leading you to think. Here, let me quote verbatim what seems the most relevant passage in it, and you can make up your own minds:
Henrico Willobego. Italo-Hispalensis.
H. W. being sodenly infected with the contagion of a fantasticall fit, at the first sight of A, pyneth a while in secret griefe, at length not able any longer to indure the burning heate of so fervent a humour, bewrayeth the secresy of his disease unto his familiar friend W. S. who not long before had tryed the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recovered of the like infection; yet finding his frend let bloud in the same vaine, he took pleasure for a tyme to see him bleed, & in steed of stopping the issue, he inlargeth the wound, with the sharpe rasor of a willing conceit, perswading him that he thought it a matter very easy to be compassed, & no doubt with payne, diligence & some cost in time to be obtayned. Thus this miserable comforter comforting his frend with an impossibilitie, eyther for that he now would secretly laugh at his frends folly, that had given occasion not long before unto others to laugh at his owne, or because he would see whether an other could play his part better than himselfe, & in vewing a far off the course of this loving Comedy, he determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor, then it did for the old player. But at length this Comedy was like to have growen to a Tragedy, by the weake & feeble estate that H. W. was brought unto, by a desperate vewe of an impossibility of obtaining his purpose, til Time & Necessity, being his best Phisitions brought him a plaster, if not to heale, yet in part to ease his maladye. In all which discourse is lively represented the unrewly rage of unbrydeled fancy, having the raines to rove at liberty, with the dyvers & sundry changes of affections & temptations, which Will, set loose from Reason, can devise, &c.
The part of this which rings most true to me is that WS does not leap to the aid of his afflicted friend, but rather ‘took pleasure for a tyme to see him bleed’. The late Mr Shakespeare was not always gentle.
From my own observation at the Tavern Inn I can report that Mrs Jane Davenant was a woman of great beauty and a sprightly wit. Mr Shakespeare afforded her every courtesy in public, and the degree of their intimacy wo
uld have struck strangers as in no way improper, yet I admit that I can entertain without too much difficulty the thought that he might have shared her bed from time to time. Perhaps that’s why her husband looked so miserable?
The truth is that William Shakespeare, when not at home with his wife in Stratford, did not live a life of perfect chastity. He was never debauched, but took pleasure where pleasure was offered. His couplings of this kind were mostly ephemeral. There is, for example, a story I picked up from John Manningham of the Middle Temple, which I can well believe because of the wit in it. This concerns a lady of some breeding who had seen Dick Burbage playing Richard III, and fallen enamoured of more than his bunch-back. She made an assignation with him on leaving the playhouse. Burbage was to call upon her that night, announcing himself at her door in the name of his part. Mr Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game before Burbage appeared on the scene. Then, message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made: ‘William the Conquerer came before Richard III!’
To be brief with Jane Davenant, as perhaps many men were, I can believe that she is Avisa, but I once heard her sing and she was deaf to tunes. It passes credence that she could have played well on the virginals. Believe me, reader, she was not the Dark Lady of the sonnets. Who was? Be patient. I shall give you my best suggestion soon.
Chapter Seventy-Five
The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 3
Before I do that, there is Emilia Lanier to dispatch …
The delectable, the enigmatic Emilia is at first blush quite a plausible Dark Lady. Of Italian blood, it might be supposed for a start that her colouring was right. Then, as the illegitimate daughter of Baptiste Bassano, one of that famous family of Venetian musicians who have served the English Court since the reign of King Henry VIII, it can also be assumed that she knew her way up and down the keyboard of the virginals.
Emilia’s talents did not end there. I have heard from several men with much experience in the matter that her accomplishments in bed were well out of the ordinary.
She always had to fight for her way in the world. Her father died when she was still a child, and she was brought up in the household of the Countess of Kent, becoming the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, who was old enough to be her grandfather. Falling pregnant by him, she was married off to Alphonse Lanier, another Court musician and one of a family of musicians from Rouen.
Hunsdon, who was the Queen’s cousin, proved no Pembroke. He made adequate provision for Emilia, but her husband’s extravagance was notorious and the family soon fell on hard times. Alphonse sought to repair their fortunes by taking service under the Earl of Essex in his expedition to the Azores and then in Ireland, having been instructed by the astrologer Simon Forman that his horoscope favoured such courses.
The astrologer, of course, was sleeping with Emilia. I doubt, all the same, if she let him fuck her properly. This lady preferred her soldiers to give her unconventional salutes.
From another of her lovers, Dr Walter Warner, I learnt that Emilia Lanier favoured sodomy to satisfy men’s lusts. She would permit that little warp-handed physician to feel all the nooks and crannies of her body, and to kiss her, and to play with her bubbies while she was sitting naked upon his lap, but Emilia would never allow him access to her cunt. Penetration via the bum-hole, Warner told me, was much to her taste, however. She could not get enough of it, and sometimes had three or four men spending themselves successively in this fashion upon the altar of Aphrodite Steatopyga.
Warner reported that he had more than once heard Forman declare that Emilia Lanier was an incuba rather than a woman. I know that Biarmannus, and Wierus, and other doctors, stoutly deny the existence of such devils, but Austin and Erastus and Paracelsus say that it is possible. Philostratus, in his fourth book De vita Apollonii has a memorable instance of this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man going between Cenchreas and Corinth, who met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman. Taking him by the hand, she carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her ‘he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank’. The young man, a philosopher, tarried with her awhile to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius, who, by some probable conjectures, found out the creature to be a serpent, a Lamia, and that all her furniture was like Tantalus’ gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusion. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant. Many thousands, the good doctor says, took notice of this fact, for ‘it was done in the midst of Greece’.
Now, let me speak frankly, friends, I do hot believe a word of all this taradiddle, myself. I think your incuba is a nightmare all right, but she is a nightmare caused by eating too much cheese and sleeping upon your back. All the same, it is interesting that such particular fantasies were visited by men on the person of Emilia Lanier. Certainly there appears to have been about her a perfume of hot and perverse and mysterious eroticism which to some noses would suggest that here at last we are in the presence of the true Dark Lady.
Sir, I don’t think so at all, and I’ll tell you why. Emilia reformed during the latter part of her life, and turned poetess, and in 1611 she published a long religious poem called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a sort of vindication of the principal female characters in the Bible, from Eve to the Virgin Mary. I have not read it, but am told that it shows much learning.
My point is this: Had such a talented and articulate women ever been the mistress of William Shakespeare, I think that she would have told us so, herself.
Consider, madam. If you were the Dark Lady of the sonnets, and you had now turned poet yourself, would you not publish it to the world that you had been in bed with Mr Shakespeare? And that you were (perhaps) not satisfied either by him or by those things that he had said you were? Would you not be filled by a desire to set the record straight, either in verse or prose, and to get your own back?
Emilia Lanier perished, in silence, having done no such thing.
She wrote about the women in the Bible.
But she wrote not a word about her own case, and she wrote not a word on the subject of William Shakespeare, who (had she been his mistress) would have been the love of her life.
Nor, in my opinion, did William Shakespeare write a word on the subject of her. He may have seen her in Lord Hunsdon’s company, when she was very young, since Hunsdon was Lord Chamberlain and our Company of actors was then known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants. Yet Hunsdon was more a patron than a playgoer, and I cannot recall ever seeing Emilia Lanier with my own eyes.
Latterly, so I heard tell, this lady kept a school for the children of gentlemen. Her own son (by Hunsdon) was musician to King Charles I. She lived to a grand old age, dying only about ten years ago, sustained in her last years by some pension she had succeeded in acquiring from the Crown.
What happened to the much-cuckolded Alphonse? He died about the time that his wife turned poet. Music and sweet poetry do not always agree, you see, sir. But I can’t help feeling sorry for the fellow.
I feel sorry for Emilia also, yes, madam. She had indeed a miserable bitch of a life.
Poor Alphonse.
Poor Emilia.
Requiescant in pace.
I do not believe that this remarkable woman is the Dark Lady of the sonnets, and my clinching argument is that Dr Walter Warner told me her skin was white as snow and soft as swansdown. Those who claim that Forman described her body as ‘very brown in youth’ have simply misread the astrologer’s handwriting. I have seen the passage in question. The word is BRAVE. Emilia Lanier was very brave in youth, and no doubt very wanton. Later she was no less brave, and no doubt very religious. But the Dark Lady of the sonnets she was not.<
br />
Chapter Seventy-Six
The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 4
Now then, my dears, before I tell you the name of the Dark Lady, let’s consider for a moment the sense in which there is no Dark Lady.
I mean, that sense in which outside the sonnets there is no Friend either, nor indeed a constant and unchanging (but strangely colourless) ‘I’.
No Dark Lady.
No Friend.
No I.
These are not persons. They are patterns. While individuals went into their creation, giving substance to shapes in the poet’s imagination, yet in the last and most serious analysis these figures have no existence save as the words they are, black marks on a white page.
Thus, I have already filled you in on how not just Rizley was the Friend. Pickleherring was in some small part Mr Shakespeare’s Friend, also. And (who knows now?) there may have been others. There very probably were others.
Similarly, with the figure of the so-called Rival Poet who crops up in eight of the sonnets, who seems a rival not only in art but in the affections and perhaps the patronage of the Friend. I am half-convinced that Marlowe is implied here, especially when Shakespeare speaks of ‘the proud full sail of his great verse’. The epithets suit Marlowe’s verse as they suit no other of Mr S’s contemporaries, and Marlowe as we have learnt from the tender allusion to the ‘dead shepherd’ and the ‘infinite reckoning in a little room’ was the rival poet most liked and most admired by Mr Shakespeare. Yet I am equally half-sure that it is George Chapman who is sometimes thought of. There’s all that stuff in Chapman about ‘spirits’. While most people were doing their best to keep body and soul together, he was always busy trying to separate them. Admittedly his verse is less like a proud full sail than it is like the rush of a game of football, where its subject is like the ball kicked here and there by opposing teams of thoughts. But Chapman was known to have claimed immortal if not divine inspiration in his own behalf, saying that one day when he was sitting on a hill near Hitchin, being still a boy at the time, he had been prompted to write by the spirit of Homer. Is it not likely that Mr S had this in mind, in his sonnet 86, when he goes on from the ‘proud full sail’ bit to ask the question