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The Dark Lady figure in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
*小茶的通选课论文
The “dark lady” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is always a puzzle for scholars and readers. Since the Sonnets are the only works that Shakespeare speaks seemingly “with something like his own voice” (Schoenfeldt 129), people are very nature to relate those poems with Shakespeare’s true life experience and ask who the dark lady is. As we know now, the “dark lady” has three possible candidates: Amelia Lanyer, Mary Fitton and Jane Davenant, among whom no one can be confirmed to be the original “dark lady”. However, knowing the original “dark lady” is indeed less meaningful for literature study than biography writing. The image of that lady created by the poet or the lady that exits in poetry counts more.
Then how is the dark lady like in Shakespeare’s Sonnets? Even what “dark” means has different understandings. It “may refer to her personality or manner, to her eyes, her hair or her complexion, or indeed to all of these” (Blades 148). Or the dark lady is “simply Shakespeare’s variation on the Renaissance poetic game of finding ways to praise ‘brown beauty’ in a lyric discourse that traditionally preferred lightness and fairness” (Schoenfeldt 129). Blades concludes that “darkness have a great more to do with social status than with actual hair and eye colour” (149). As for my opinion, I agree that darkness contains layers of meaning but mainly represents the personality of the lady and also reveals the perspective of the poet or the speaker. The best way to confirm it is to return to the sonnets.
We can directly find that the dark lady is depicted as a black beauty with “raven black”(127)eyes, “dun”(130)breasts, black hair(130).Then one thing that is most interesting and instantly catch my eyes is that the speaker is not generous with his faculty to praise his mistress’s beauty. In the first group of Sonnets, taking Sonnet 53 as an example, the young man is perfectly beautiful:
Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you.
On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,
And you in Grecian tires are painted new. (5-8)
And in Sonnet 99, the speaker attributes the beauty of all kind of flowers to his friend:“More flowers I noted, yet I none could see/But sweet or color it had stol’n from thee”(13-14).By contrast, the dark lady, in sonnet 130, being far from perfect beauty, has neither a delight odour nor a pleasing voice:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak; yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound: (1-10)
Curiously, though the speaker is always criticizing her appearance, he admires her as a whole. See the couplet in Sonnet 130: “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/ As any she belied with false compare” (13-14). And we also see “now is black beauty’s successive heir” (127), “Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place” (131.12). So is she beautiful or not on earth? I think she’s beautiful, at least charming and attractive with an exotic appearance, for more than two men, the speaker and the young man, chase after her (142,150). It is her personality or her behavior that makes her “black”. Thus the couplet in Sonnet 131 reads as “In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds, /and hence this slander as I think proceeds”. Besides, the speaker also uses other negative words to show her “black deed” like “tyrannous” (131),“usurer” (134),“false-speaking tongue”(138),“unkindness” (139), “cruel”(140) and we also can infer that she is unfaithful, having many lover affairs (see Sonnet 142,150), flattering (see Sonnet 138) and also capricious (see Sonnet 145), which result in betrayal, jealousy and endless torture for the speaker. However, instead of giving up this relationship, he’s always begging for her love (see Sonnet 143).
Though the speaker cannot restrain his passion for the exotic lady, he considers his love as a “fever” (147) and degrades such erotic love, for this kind of love is “too young to know what conscience is” (151), though his is quite old (see Sonnet 138), which means the lover loses his reason and judgment, and he believes “desire is death” (147), especially in Sonnet 129, he “tells all lovers that they desire what will ultimately destroy them, morally and physically” (Schoenfeldt 133). He even compares the lady as “female evil” who wants to win him “soon to hell” and would “corrupt” his young friend (144). On the contrary, the young man is a saint who represents “fair, kind, and true” (105) Even though the “friendship” is not totally platonic, it’s more spiritual than the one with the dark lady, so he trusts the relationship between them for it will not do any harm to him. Therefore, when he praises her, it means he does love her; when he criticizes her specific organs, it means he abhors such love and wonders why he loves her. It’s his complicated feeling and his unwillingness to indulge himself in this love relationship that makes the usage of the adjective “black”, which can also be regarded as a lover’s complaint. It reminds me of Swann in Proust’s Swann’s way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, when he finally finds that he doesn’t love his wife, Odette, any more, he breaks out and cries in his heart: “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style”(494). In contrast, the speaker in the Sonnets is not the most unfortunate, for he’s quite sober at least he’s aware of his obsession. From this point view, poetry is the distillation of the reality and also a remedy for heartbreak.
Return to the dark lady, she has other characteristics besides her darkness, one of which is her melancholy eyes. In Sonnet 127, the poet compares her eyes to mourners, and they seem to mourn “At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack” (11). Whether she mourns or not, it tells a basic truth that her eyes look sad. And her eye may be the only organ the speaker praises without hesitation. Sonnet 132 talks about her eyes almost the whole poem:
Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,
Knowing thy heart torment me with disdain,
Have put on black and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
And truly not the morning sun of heaven
Better becomes the gray cheeks of the east,
Nor that full star that ushers in the even
Doth half that glory to the sober west
As those two mourning eyes become thy face. (1-9)
Her eyes glorify her face. While eyes are often considered as the window of the soul, we can find something about the dark lady through her eyes. Why her eyes show pity and look melancholy? Does she really sympathize him as he hopes?
Synthesizing her darkness, her unfaithfulness, her caprice, and her melancholy, I think she is similar to Dostoevsky’s heroines, for example, Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot who is a beautiful and proud young woman and chased by many men. She considers herself as a woman with a pure soul and despises most of men, but still she condemns herself and even hates herself because she was once a mistress of a very rich capitalist when she was 17 and this relationship lasted five years. She takes such experience as her greatest humiliation and misfortune and thinks she could never have a chance to get happiness. In Sonnet 142, it says “Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate/Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving” (12), and also in Sonnet 145: “Those lips that Love’s own hand did make/Breathed forth the sound that said ‘hate’” (12). I speculate that she doesn’t necessarily hate “me”, or why “when she saw my woeful state, /Straight in her heart did mercy come” (45), instead, she may be hates other things or just hates nothing outwardly but because of her own psychological state. Maybe she suffers in her life and the speaker’s passion toward her mixed with sympathy, pity and mercy, which can account for his never-failed love even he abides numerous pain.
Though I quoted words and lines as much as I can to confirm my interpretation of the dark lady in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, I believe that, different readers may get a totally different portrait of the dark lady. Just as John Roe points out, in essence, “We are the context” and “There never was a young man or dark lady. We imagine or contextualize them in accordance with rhetorical practice” (50). That these Sonnets are so extraordinarily related to universal human feelings that they are open to every ordinary man is why they “have become Shakespeare’s all-time bestseller” (qtd. Cheney 8).
Works Cited
Cheney, Patrick, “Introduction: Shakespeare’s poetry in the twenty-first century”. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry. Ed. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007.1-13.Print.
Blades, John. Shakespeare: Sonnets. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Trans. C. K. Moncrieff. Random House, 1928. Print.
Roe, John. “Rhetoric, Style, and Poetic form”. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry. Ed. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007. 33-53. Print.
Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. Ed. Stephen Orgel. London: Penguin, 2001.Print.
Schoenfeldt, Michael. “The Sonnets”. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry
. Ed. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007. 125-143. Print. |
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发表于 2014-6-19 14:22:11
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