Be Dark but Not Too Dark

Her breasts are “dun” (130.3), her hair a coronet of “black wires” (130.4), her nothing-like-the-sun eyes “raven black” (127.9). ¹ The complex overlapping orbits of inverted praise in sonnet 127, the first poem to address her color explicitly, associate her with slander and illegitimacy and shame (4), with anonymity and exclusion from religious sanctuary (7), with profanation and disgrace (8), mourning (10). In 133, she has robbed the speaker of the affection of the fair young man, who is now “slave to slavery” (4); her “cruel eye” has taken “[m]e from myself” (5)—has stripped the subject of subjectivity. The overpowering contraiy beauty of Shakespeare's dark lady and the corrosive effects of desire for her are, in part, direct consequences of her color. Yet her darkness has been a matter of persistent difficulty for students of Shakespeare's Sonnets for centuries. The issue is not so much how dark she is but rather how dark we are going to allow her to be.