If Conscience is Born of Love then What does thou mine eyes,/ That they behold,

and see not what they see?: Shakespeares Dark Lady Paradox
For most scholarship surrounding the Dark Lady sonnets, lines such as the
famous For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright/ Who art as black as hell, as
dark as night (137.13-14) reveal Shakespeares latent early modern misogyny. In
comparison with the Young Man sonnet sequence especially, such scholars are quick
to note the stark difference in treatment between the two, for even when the Dark Lady
is praised it seems to be in mockery. Simply put, since men were regarded as superior
to women, relationships between men were more valued and, especially when made the
subject of poetic praise, tended to be treated with far more reverence and respect than
Shakespeares speaker treats the Dark Lady. However, Shakespeares apparent
misogyny is hinged upon a particular experience with a particular person, and so this
calls for a focus on the internal logic of the Dark Lady sonnet sequence rather than the
sociocultural and historical context alone.
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Thus I argue that Shakespeares treatment of
Liana Willis
Prof. David Anderson
ENGL 3523
10 December 2013
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Dympna Callaghan expresses this position succinctly in her introduction to Shakespeares Sonnets:
For all the complexity of the sonnets, whose meanings unfold through layer upon layer of
reading and rereading, it is also important to reassure ourselves that they are not beyond normal
human understanding. While deeper knowledge of the sonnets will indeed afford a more
profound complexity to their meaning, they have been subject to an undue degree of interpretive
mystication especially by those who have been looking to decode a hidden meaning about
Shakespeare's lifeI have tried to maintain the sense that poetry can never be reduced to or even
separated from its rhythms, from the very fact that it is verse and therefore an exacerbated act of
language. (xi)
the Dark Lady has less to do with a desire to slight the Dark Lady in accordance with
Early Modern misogynistic discourse, and more to do with expressing the poets
subjective experience, that is to say, to solely express the plight of the poet in love, not to
blame and place judgement upon her gender, but to lament loves hardships. Moreover,
rather than simply argue something along the lines of Shakespeare is just a product of
his culture as some analyses seem to, I take into consideration the earlier sonnets in the
sequence which assertively praise the Dark Lady in order to argue that Shakespeare
offers a critique of not only the popular sentiments of his culture, but of the experience
of love altogether. While some may argue that the last sonnets in the sequence seem to
undermine any sincerity posed toward the Dark Lady in earlier sonnets , I believe that
an emphasis on the poet-in-love or poet-as-mad actually positions the subject of
these sonnets to be more about love and desire, rather than a tirade about the Dark
Ladys aws in keeping with the standard early modern misogynistic format. Central
to this analysis is a focus on Shakespeares use of paradox and binaries in the Dark Lady
sonnets as an expression of madness that clearly dees reason, opening up a space for
the speaker to not only criticize the Dark Lady, but also himself and, more importantly,
the experience of love itself.
To understand the contrast between the speakers treatment of the Dark Lady
established in the beginning of the sonnet sequence and those of the Petrarchan
tradition with which it directly contradicts, Sonnet 127 perhaps serves as the best
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example. He says that 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, /And beauty slandered
with a bastard shame, meaning that his mistress actually is the rightful heir to the
standard of beauty that has, until this moment, been understood to be that of the
Petrarchan beauty: fair skin, blue eyes, blonde hair and coral lips (127.1-4). In fact,
Shakespeare directly refutes these aspects of Petrarchan ideal beauty more directly in
Sonnet 130 (My mistresss eyes are nothing like the sun...). But what is important to
note about Sonnet 127 is the fact that the speaker begins the paradoxically tenuous
relationship between what is fair and foul later to be elaborated in the sequence.
He says (of these other supposed ideal beauties) that For since each hand hath put
on natures power it continually is caught Fairing the foul with arts false borrowed
face (5-6) to the point of Slandring creation with a false esteem (12). On a surface
level, Shakespeare is criticizing women who borrow art by painting their faces and
thus appear to be other than they really are. However, this also can be seen as an
indictment of those who follow the Petrarchan tradition and make what is foul seem
fair. As Dympna Callaghan puts it, Of course golden hair and a fair complexion
were the features praised in the Petrarchan blazon, the lyrical itinerary of female
beauty and so Shakespeare is not merely claiming beauty for someone who is 'black'
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but simultaneously creating an aesthetic contrary to the orthodoxies of the genre in
which he is writing" (52).
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Yet the more salient consideration to be made about Shakespeares apparent anti-
Petrarchanism is what purpose it may serve in terms of the personal experience of the
speaker. In Sonnet 130, in spite of the fact that his lover does not adhere to the
conventions of an early modern and/or Petrarchan beauty, he proclaims that he nds
her beautiful nonetheless: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she
belied with false compare (13-14). What I nd notable about this sonnet, in addition to
its deliberate reversal of Petrarchan tropes, is the way in which he states such tropes.
There are a lot of conditional ifs as well as yets which, overall, give off a tone of
doubt and uncertainty. For example he says If snow be white... If hairs be wires (2-3)
and I love to hear her speak, yet well I know, as well as And yet, by heaven, I think
my love as rare(13). In a discussion of Sonnet 148, M.L. Stapleton points out in My
False Eyes: The Dark Lady and Self-Knowledge that "The twice-used 'If' makes
everything conditional in this quatrain indicating that to [Shakespeare], 'fair' has a
dozen associated meanings that lose their force through repetition: 'beautiful,' 'chaste,'
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Shakespeares Anti-Petrarchanism is not central to my argument, but Callaghan makes an important
aside about the Petrarchan tradition which may sometimes be pitted as a more idealistic and a therefore
more attering topos, especially when compared to Shakespeares often caustic treatment of the Dark
Lady:
Nor should we think of the Petrarchan blazon as simply idealizing and its Shakespearean
reversal as simply misogynist. In fact, there was a kind of violent anatomical dissection at play in
many poems of the Petrarchan tradition as the mistress was broken down into discrete body parts
to be itemized by her male appraiser. Petrarchanism, in fact, worked to efface female subjectivity
and to reduce the woman to little more than the objects to which she was compared. (55)
and 'true' are three. Yet he does not tell us explicitly whether the dark lady is 'fair' or
not. He hints at the negative by asking a question: why does 'the world' deem her not
fair?" (220; emphasis mine). In Sonnet 148, however, unlike Sonnet 130, the speaker has
already begun his descent into self-doubt about his judgement regarding the Dark
Lady:
O me! What eyes hath love in my head.
Which have no correspondence with true sight?
Or if they have, where is my judgement ed,
That censures falsely what they see aright?
If that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,
What means the world to say it is not so?
If it be not, then love doth well denote,
Love's eye is not so true as all men's: no,
How can it? O how can love's eyes be true,
That is so vexed with watching and with tears?
No marvel then though I mistake my view:
The sun itself sees not, till heaven clears.
O cunning love, with tears thou keep's me blind,
Lest eyes well seeing thy foul faults should nd.
Once again, the binary of fair and foul is implicit, and here the speaker expresses a
concern with not knowing whether or not he is judging the mistress correctly: is she
really foul or fair? The conditional ifs are now attached to the conception of fairness
itself (If that be fair) and the falsity is attached to his own perception (whereon my
false eyes dote). However, while Stapleton goes on to emphasize the speakers concern
with, if his peers are correct, whether his own judgment would then be confounded
because it censures her falsely, or evaluates her incorrectly as beautiful, thus sticking
to the intense personal nature of the sonnets, there is also something broader occurring.
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As he says the meaning of true sight remains obscure; Will cannot possibly elucidate
such a global concept (220) but he cannot do so because, as he says over and over
again, Loves eye is not so true as all mens: no. That is to say, he is blinded by love and
thus truths remain obscure and out of reach and, necessarily, rebukes whatever all
men may think.
Stapleton goes on to say that confusion is the ostensible point, the surrender of
reason in those whom love victimizes in Sonnet 148, pointing to another aspect of the
paradox: the poets madness which obscures right judgement or reason (222; emphasis
mine). Many commentators have noted that this must mean that the speaker is owning
up to the corruption of his right reason at the expense of his passionate, heedless desire
for the Dark Lady, especially given the fact that, in Sonnet 147, he admits to being past
cure for a love which is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the
disease, / Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,/ Theuncertain sickly appetite to
please. The metaphor for love is clearly that of it as a disease which is slowly killing
the speaker because his reason, the physician to [his] love, / Angry that his
prescriptions are not kept,/ Hath left [him]. Reason is meant to temper the
irrationality of love and the speaker admits to not having heeded it, therefore desire is
death. It is here that some scholars chime in with the comment that the black mistress
is as deceptive a beauty as misogynist sensationalism would have women (Matz 129).
As Robert Matz states in his Introduction to Shakespeares Sonnets:
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Besides associating the black mistress with disease, deceit, madness, sin
and death, Shakespeare in a culturally resonant manner regards his love
for the black mistress as a mistake both strange and terrible. His desire for
her raises the misogynist question, how can men love a being inferior to
themselves, except by a mysterious, and probably malign, enchantment?
'O, from what power hast thou this powerful might / With insufciency
my heart to sway," Shakespeare asks at the beginning of sonnet 150. (129)
Matzs interpretation rests upon the idea that men expressed fears about losing over
women through the stereotype of female deceitfulness (120) and thus when the
speaker famously says For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright / Who art as
black as hell, as dark as night, following his logic, Shakespeare is using misogynistic
discourse as a means of expressing his discontent with his mistresss behavior, as it is at
this point in the sonnet sequence the reader discovers that there is a love triangle
occurring between the Young Man, the Dark Lady, and the speaker.
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While this is true
on some level, Matz ignores the fact that the bulk of Sonnet 147 is dedicated to
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3
While I nd Matzs interpretation of the Dark Lady sonnets particularly forced, I do not doubt the
historical accuracy of his observations. He elaborates this Early Modern male habit to blame females for
their vulnerabilities quite well:
Men who think to trap a desirable woman nd themselves entrapped by her, their minds
enchanted and bodies enfeebled. If a man desires a woman, how can one explain this desire of a
superior for an inferior? It must be male weakness caused by female deceit. The deceit of female
beauty, moreover, is nothing less than soul killing. Like the cosmetics and fancy clothing that
enhance it, female beauty is deceitful because it involves a blinded love for "this world's pleasure"
rather than for spiritual things. Deceived by a woman's beauty a man may believe he is falling in
love with something heavenly. He does not realize he is falling in love with dangerously
irrational passion, the mortal body and sin. (121)
discussing love rather than the Dark Lady. Thus, when he says he is frantic mad with
ever more unrest with thoughts and discourse like a madmans, while such a
condition has obviously been instigated by the Dark Lady, as she is complicit in the love
affair, what Shakespeare is focusing on is love as maddening, not the Dark Lady. Why
then take the last two lines to be the prevailing meaning and theme of the entire sonnet
or the sequence as a whole? The speaker has admitted that he is mad, so might not his
conclusions that now the Dark Lady is foul be just as suspicious as those in Sonnet
127 and 130 who believe their own Petrarchan beauties are the epitome of virtue? If
"lust, or, as it is usually and more decorously called in sonnet sequences, desire, is
typically the subject of personal introspective sonnets in which it does battle with the
lover's reason, virtue, or sanity, is it not true then for all men in Sonnet 148, just as it
is for the speaker in Sonnet 147 too (Neely 90; emphasis mine)?
Indeed, Matzs analysis goes on to consider Sonnet 148 in conjunction with
Sonnet 147 and, whereas I have noted above the emphasis on love as maddening, he
instead believes that the speaker is testifying to his false judgement, admitting that he
was wrong beforehand but now is right to think that the lady is dark as hell, black as
night:
This sonnet almost sounds like a testament to romantic passion, in which
the lover dees conventional beliefs about the worthiness of his beloved
But Shakespeare does not quite write this plot. Instead, he agrees with the
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world's disapproval of his love and judgment. His only defense is that, as
in A Midsummer's Night's Dream, the eyes of lovers ('lover's eye') 'have
no correspondence with true sight.' Shakespeare metaphorically suggests
that were his eyes not clouded with desire-- 'The sun itself sees not till
heaven clears'--he would readily nd the black mistress' 'foul faults. (130)
I disagree with this analysis for, as discussed above, Sonnet 148 is a testament to
romantic passion. While Shakespeare readily admits that he feels as though he has
misjudged her virtue, he is simultaneously admitting that the reasons for this blurred
judgment has to do with the romantic passion that has enslaved him. As he says in
Sonnet 141, for example, his ve wits, nor [his] ve senses can / Dissuade one foolish
heart from serving thee and thus he is [her] proud hearts slave and vassal wretch to
be (9-12). He is clearly still enthralled with his mistress and, if indeed the speaker
admits to his desire clouding his judgement, how can this really be? He knows as do all
men in Sonnet 129, that he should be acting otherwise, so why does he not do so? He
is confused more than he is denitive that the dark lady is "foul because its simplicity
blurs into paradox, pointing directly toward the lying logic and punning truths of the
sonnets that follow" after Sonnet 129, i.e. including Sonnet 147 and 148 (Neely 83;
emphasis mine).
Thus the conception of the Dark Lady as foul should be regarded as doubtful
as her being judged as fair, just as Shakespeare points out in Sonnet 127 and 130 when
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he directly comments upon the Petrarchan blazon. We can perhaps say that the speaker
would like to believe the things he is saying, yet he emphasizes that he does not know
what to believe--so should we not then be somewhat suspicious of the assumption that
the "Dark Lady" is really foul in his eyes? Or is the speaker more aware that he is
emotionally compromised? He admits that he is a slave to her and is fully aware of this
(No marvel then, he says in Sonnet 148), but is it solely out of desire, or does it look
more like love?
Of course, as Shakespeare himself observed, 'The course of true love never
did run smooth' (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.134)...Love in the
sonnets, far from being addressed only in its rose-tinted or romantic
manifestations, is more often explicitly sexual, complicated, messy, and
unsettling. Love in the sonnets is living, textured, never static, and
contains more than a dash of rage, frustration, and even hate. (Callaghan
59)
It is interesting that Matz quotes A Midsummer Nights Dream and Callaghan does too,
but the two come up with somewhat drastically different analyses. Callaghan goes on
to say that We cannot say what love is, only what it is not-- prideful, envious, boastful,
angry, selsh, and so on, epithets directed at the Dark Lady herself (63). Such
slanderous language is reminiscent of Sonnet 129 in which lust is heavily denounced
and while All this the world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven
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that leads men to this hell (13-14). To know is to reason, and, as Katherine Boote
Attie notes in Passion Turned to Prettiness: Rhyme or Reason in Hamlet, passion's
rule is not playful but pathological. In Hamlet too, the sway of passion, or more
precisely passion as a kind of madness, is represented through rhyme, which is both
source and symptom of reason's overthrow" (398). But it is not to say that the
contradictory feelings rendered through blurred binaries and paradoxes are somehow
illogical or false because they are only emotional, something I think Matz and other
like-minded scholars attest when assuming that Shakespeares attitude toward the Dark
Lady is distinctly misogynistic. It is more the case that "[These poems] are attempts to
step back and escape from the immediate painful situation--contemplate, hypothesize, 'x'
itact[ing] as momentary stays against the incessant motion" (Neely 83; emphasis
mine).
To think of these sonnets as "in motion" is helpful, because I think it may suggest
that when interpreting Shakespeare's attitude toward the Dark Lady we may be able to
come to the conclusion that to assert anything about his attitude in a way that is
denitive and explanatory of the "whole" is essentially futile, since the individual
sonnets themselves are so rife with contradiction and nuance. It would be like
attempting to describe this overall "motion" of love itself based on one crescendo or
diminuendo, singling out parts that are really part of an entire composition-- a
symphony--and picking out one line of the cello, meanwhile forgetting the rumble of
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the timpani. As seen in the characteristic ambiguity Shakespeare Nothing is xed in
these sonnets. They describe with manic accuracy the corrupted and corrupting
relationship in which the poet is entangled and, in their couplets, paradoxically and
desperately justify it (Neely 91; emphasis mine). Indeed, I believe Shakespeare
justies the turmoil the speaker has undergone by the end of The Passionate Pilgrim, for
he says Love is too young to know what conscience is: / Yet who knows not conscience
is born of love? It is a line that is yet another open-ended question hinged upon a
yet, and so we should not take it to mean he denitively thinks this way, but simply
recognize that nevertheless it seems to express a fundamental truth of some kind, even
if maddeningly ambiguous.
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Works Cited
Attie Boote, Katherine. Passion Turned to Prettiness: Rhyme or Reason in Hamlet.
The Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 63, No. 3. The John Hopkins University Press,
Fall 2012. 393-423. Online.
Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2007. Print.
Matz, Robert. An Introduction to The World of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland &, 2008. Print.
Neely Thomas, Carol. Detachment and Engagement in Shakespeares Sonnets: 94, 116,
and 129. PMLA. Vol. 92, No. 1. Modern Language Association, January 1977.
83-95. Online.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Thomas
Nelson and Sons, 1997. Print.
Stapleton, M.L. My False Eyes: The Dark Lady and Self-Knowledge. Studies in
Philology. The University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Online.
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