Outing the Dark Lady
Mar 01, 2020
4 minutes
by LINDA HERRICK
A good number of Shakespeare’s most formidable characters were women – Lady Macbeth, Cordelia in King Lear, Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew – but he always ended up subduing their spirit by death, madness or marriage.
As demanded by the mores of the Elizabethan era, his scripts centred on the male, and all his characters – male and female – were played by men.
However easily he disposed of his fictional women, Shakespeare was fixated, in an ongoing sense, on one in particular, the “Dark Lady” mentioned in the final 27 of his 154 sonnets, published in 1609. Writing about her
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