Or sent to Naples.
For Naples, try reading Stratford. And he goes on to say that he must remain spell-bound on stage until we (the audience) break the spell by our applause. In this speech Mr Shakespeare confesses the limitations of his own necromantic art, and craves our prayers, like any other sinner:
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
[Exit]
I say it is not just Prospero who exits then.
Who is the 'I' whose exits and whose entrances form the substance of the sonnets? That, as I say, is the question. It is the question I try to answer by this book. My method, friends, is to answer it indirectly by the asking.
Lady Southampton once referred to Mr Shakespeare as if he was Sir John Falstaff. 'Your friend Sir John Falstaff,' she wrote to Rizley. Think about it. That was a part that Shakespeare never even played when he was an actor. Yet I say there is a sense in which the lady got it right. That is the sense in which there is no Dark Lady.
Now then, at last then.
Enough metaphysics.
As my grandfather the bishop--
As you say, madam, and about time too, not to speak of providing a 'simple answer' to a 'simple question'.
The Dark Lady: who was she?
* The last two sonnets are plainly out of sequence. Either they are free translations of a fifth-century Greek epigram by Marianus Scholasticus, or they refer to a cure for the pox which Mr Shakespeare once took at Bath.
Chapter Seventy-Seven The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 5
The last time I saw a dildo like the one young Anne was wearing when she fucked the Countess it was down at Lucy Negro's.
Lucy Negro, alias Lucy Morgan, kept a brothel in St John Street, Clerkenwell. She was known as the Abbess of Clerkenwell, head of the infamous sisterhood of the Black Nuns.
Her priory was amply provisioned, a palace of carnal delights. Once within its walls, the real world no longer existed. It was folly there to think of it, or indeed to think at all. The abbess demanded obedience, and she got it. Appliances of pleasure were everywhere. Here were women, here were boys, here were dancers, here were musicians, here was beauty in many strange forms, and here was wine. It was a convent sacred to amorous rites.
It was a soft-lit place, a maze of corridors. Each of her rooms held a different delight. There were pleasures here to match and satisfy each taste, no matter how outlandish or extreme. Sometimes I thought of that brothel as the very house of fiction. It was like the stories in the Decameron, one self-complete imagination leading into another, each particular pleasure foretelling the pleasure of the next room but only when you looked back (so satisfying each was in itself). I never exhausted it. Nor, I believe, did Mr Shakespeare, and he was certainly in more rooms than I tried for myself.
There were seven main rooms in the house of Lucy Negro - to mirror, no doubt, the seven deadly sins. None of the rooms had windows that looked out upon the world. Instead, in each of the rooms, to the right and the left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow window looked back into the corridor which connected them. These windows were of stained glass whose colour varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue, and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange, the fifth with white, the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only the colour of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet - a deep blood-colour.
Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers; but in the corridors that followed the suite there stood opposite each window a heavy tripod bearing a brazier of fire that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. I thought once that I saw Helen of Troy in the blue chamber, and Dr Faustus in the purple; then, at other times, it was Merlin the magician that seemed to stalk before me as I entered the green chamber, and the enchantress Vivian was seen dancing in the orange; as for the white chamber, I saw Joan of Arc within it, and she was burning, with her henchman Gilles de Rais in the violet room. The seventh chamber I never went inside, but I can well believe what Mr Shakespeare once told me - that he found Othello therein, and Lady Macbeth. I believe that in that western or black chamber the effect of the fire light that streamed upon the dark hangings, through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered that there were few bold enough to set foot within its precincts at any time, and fewer still who would stay there once they had got there.
In spite of these things, or because of them, the house of Lucy Negro was an enchanted place, and a home to magnificent revels. The tastes of its mistress were exotic and expensive, her imagination unparalleled when it came to any matter touching upon sensual gratification. She had a fine eye for all colours and effects. Her plans were bold and fiery, and her conceptions always glowed with barbaric lustre. There were some who would no doubt have considered her mad. Her followers, myself among them, felt sure she was not. It was perhaps necessary to hear her, and to see her, and to touch her - to be sure that she was not.
She had not always been a whore, of course. Come to that, I would not have dared to call her a whore in the days that I knew her. She was the Queen of Air and Darkness, to my young mind. I was only in her house a dozen times. I never even took my shoes off, though once (as you shall hear) I did perform in her clothes there. (I'll tell you of that when it's time, and not before.) It was a very strange place, and being in it was like being inside the mind of a very strange woman. So you'll see, sir, this is not at all what you may have been supposing.
There are two lines in one of the sonnets addressed to the Fair Youth which I believe might first have been addressed to the Dark Lady. They run as follows:
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
That is Lucy Negro and her house.
Lucy means light, and Negro of course means black. Some say that her real name was Lucy Morgan. Those who can credit this put it about also that from March 1579 to January 1582, while yet very young, she had been one of Queen Elizabeth's most favoured attendants. She was then expelled from Court after the usual fall from grace. I cannot believe that she ever did anything she did not choose to do. Who the gentleman was who first dishonoured her, I do not know. I do know that Mr Shakespeare knew her before she came into her own and established the house in St John Street. But where she was and what she was doing when he first met her I have no idea.
She had in her possession seven sumptuous dresses, dresses which Elizabeth herself was said to have given her after wearing them on great occasions. It was one of these dresses, virgin-white, all sugared over with diamonds, which she was wearing the first time I saw her, at the revels in Gray's Inn.