THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS(十四行诗里的黑夫人)
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THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
1
THE DARK LADY OF
THE SONNETS
BY BERNARD SHAW
THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
2
PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY
OF THE SONNETS
How the Play came to be Written
I had better explain why, in this little _piece d'occasion_, written for a
performance in aid of the funds of the project for establishing a National
Theatre as a memorial to Shakespear, I have identified the Dark Lady with
Mistress Mary Fitton. First, let me say that I do not contend that the
Dark Lady was Mary Fitton, because when the case in Mary's favor (or
against her, if you please to consider that the Dark Lady was no better than
she ought to have been) was complete, a portrait of Mary came to light
and turned out to be that of a fair lady, not of a dark one. That settles the
question, if the portrait is authentic, which I see no reason to doubt, and
the lady's hair undyed, which is perhaps less certain. Shakespear rubbed
in the lady's complexion in his sonnets mercilessly; for in his day black
hair was as unpopular as red hair was in the early days of Queen Victoria.
Any tinge lighter than raven black must be held fatal to the strongest claim
to be the Dark Lady. And so, unless it can be shewn that Shakespear's
sonnets exasperated Mary Fitton into dyeing her hair and getting painted
in false colors, I must give up all pretence that my play is historical. The
later suggestion of Mr Acheson that the Dark Lady, far from being a maid
of honor, kept a tavern in Oxford and was the mother of Davenant the poet,
is the one I should have adopted had I wished to be up to date. Why, then,
did I introduce the Dark Lady as Mistress Fitton?
Well, I had two reasons. The play was not to have been written by
me at all, but by Mrs Alfred Lyttelton; and it was she who suggested a
scene of jealousy between Queen Elizabeth and the Dark Lady at the
expense of the unfortunate Bard. Now this, if the Dark Lady was a maid
of honor, was quite easy. If she were a tavern landlady, it would have
strained all probability. So I stuck to Mary Fitton. But I had another
THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
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and more personal reason. I was, in a manner, present at the birth of the
Fitton theory. Its parent and I had become acquainted; and he used to
consult me on obscure passages in the sonnets, on which, as far as I can
remember, I never succeeded in throwing the faintest light, at a time when
nobody else thought my opinion, on that or any other subject, of the
slightest importance. I thought it would be friendly to immortalize him,
as the silly literary saying is, much as Shakespear immortalized Mr W. H.,
as he said he would, simply by writing about him.
Let me tell the story formally.
Thomas Tyler
Throughout the eighties at least, and probably for some years before,
the British Museum reading room was used daily by a gentleman of such
astonishing and crushing ugliness that no one who had once seen him
could ever thereafter forget him. He was of fair complexion, rather
golden red than sandy; aged between forty-five and sixty; and dressed in
frock coat and tall hat of presentable but never new appearance. His figure
was rectangular, waistless, neckless, ankleless, of middle height, looking
shortish because, though he was not particularly stout, there was nothing
slender about him. His ugliness was not unamiable; it was accidental,
external, excrescential. Attached to his face from the left ear to the point
of his chin was a monstrous goitre, which hung down to his collar bone,
and was very inadequately balanced by a smaller one on his right eyelid.
Nature's malice was so overdone in his case that it somehow failed to
produce the effect of repulsion it seemed to have aimed at. When you
first met Thomas Tyler you could think of nothing else but whether
surgery could really do nothing for him. But after a very brief
acquaintance you never thought of his disfigurements at all, and talked to
him as you might to Romeo or Lovelace; only, so many people, especially
women, would not risk the preliminary ordeal, that he remained a man
apart and a bachelor all his days. I am not to be frightened or prejudiced
by a tumor; and I struck up a cordial acquaintance with him, in the course
of which he kept me pretty closely on the track of his work at the Museum,
THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
4
in which I was then, like himself, a daily reader.
He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind. He
was a specialist in pessimism; had made a translation of Ecclesiastes of
which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism of
Shakespear and Swift with keen interest. He delighted in a hideous
conception which he called the theory of the cycles, according to which
the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally repeating itself
without the slightest variation throughout all eternity; so that he had lived
and died and had his goitre before and would live and die and have it
again and again and again. He liked to believe that nothing that
happened to him was completely novel: he was persuaded that he often
had some recollection of its previous occurrence in the last cycle. He
hunted out allusions to this favorite theory in his three favorite pessimists.
He tried his hand occasionally at deciphering ancient inscriptions, reading
them as people seem to read the stars, by discovering bears and bulls and
swords and goats where, as it seems to me, no sane human being can see
anything but stars higgledy-piggledy. Next to the translation of
Ecclesiastes, his _magnum opus_ was his work on Shakespear's Sonnets,
in which he accepted a previous identification of Mr W. H., the "onlie
begetter" of the sonnets, with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert), and
promulgated his own identification of Mistress Mary Fitton with the Dark
Lady. Whether he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did not
matter urgently to me: she might have been Maria Tompkins for all I
cared. But Tyler would have it that she was Mary Fitton; and he tracked
Mary down from the first of her marriages in her teens to her tomb in
Cheshire, whither he made a pilgrimage and whence returned in triumph
with a picture of her statue, and the news that he was convinced she was a
dark lady by traces of paint still discernible.
In due course he published his edition of the Sonnets, with the
evidence he had collected. He lent me a copy of the book, which I never
returned. But I reviewed it in the Pall Mall Gazette on the 7th of January
1886, and thereby let loose the Fitton theory in a wider circle of readers
than the book could reach. Then Tyler died, sinking unnoted like a stone
in the sea. I observed that Mr Acheson, Mrs Davenant's champion, calls
THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
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him Reverend. It may very well be that he got his knowledge of Hebrew
in reading for the Church; and there was always something of the
clergyman or the schoolmaster in his dress and air. Possibly he may
actually have been ordained. But he never told me that or anything else
about his affairs; and his black pessimism would have shot him violently
out of any church at present established in the West. We never talked
about affairs: we talked about Shakespear, and the Dark Lady, and Swift,
and Koheleth, and the cycles, and the mysterious moments when a feeling
came over us that this had happened to us before, and about the forgeries
of the Pentateuch which were offered for sale to the British Museum, and
about literature and things of the spirit generally. He always came to my
desk at the Museum and spoke to me about something or other, no doubt
finding that people who were keen on this sort of conversation were rather
scarce. He remains a vivid spot of memory in the void of my
forgetfulness, a quite considerable and dignified soul in a grotesquely
disfigured body.
Frank Harris
To the review in the Pall Mall Gazette I attribute, rightly or wrongly,
the introduction of Mary Fitton to Mr Frank Harris. My reason for this is
that Mr Harris wrote a play about Shakespear and Mary Fitton; and when I,
as a pious duty to Tyler's ghost, reminded the world that it was to Tyler we
owed the Fitton theory, Frank Harris, who clearly had not a notion of what
had first put Mary into his head, believed, I think, that I had invented Tyler
expressly for his discomfiture; for the stress I laid on Tyler's claims must
have seemed unaccountable and perhaps malicious on the assumption that
he was to me a mere name among the thousands of names in the British
Museum catalogue. Therefore I make it clear that I had and have
personal reasons for remembering Tyler, and for regarding myself as in
some sort charged with the duty of reminding the world of his work. I
am sorry for his sake that Mary's portrait is fair, and that Mr W. H. has
veered round again from Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his work
was not wasted: it is by exhausting all the hypotheses that we reach the
THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
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verifiable one; and after all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.
Frank Harris's play was written long before mine. I read it in
manuscript before the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre was mooted;
and if there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is Tyler's property)
in my play which is also in Mr Harris's it was I who annexed it from him
and not he from me. It does not matter anyhow, because this play of
mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest impossibilities at that; whilst Mr
Harris's play is serious both in size, intention, and quality. But there
could not in the nature of things be much resemblance, because Frank
conceives Shakespear to have been a broken-hearted, melancholy,
enormously sentimental person, whereas I am convinced that he was very
like myself: in fact, if I had been born in 1556 instead of in 1856, I
should have taken to blank verse and given Shakespear a harder run for his
money than all the other Elizabethans put together. Yet the success of
Frank Harris's book on Shakespear gave me great delight.
To those who know the literary world of London there was a sharp
stroke of ironic comedy in the irresistible verdict in its favor. In critical
literature there is one prize that is always open to competition, one blue
ribbon that always carries the highest critical rank with it. To win, you
must write the best book of your generation on Shakespear. It is felt on
all sides that to do this a certain fastidious refinement, a delicacy of taste, a
correctness of manner and tone, and high academic distinction in addition
to the indispensable scholarship and literary reputation, are needed; and
men who pretend to these qualifications are constantly looked to with a
gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the great feat. Now if
there is a man on earth who is the utter contrary of everything that this
description implies; whose very existence is an insult to the ideal it
realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice denounces, whose
cold shoulder jostles every decency, every delicacy, every amenity, every
dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet life of mutual admiration in which
perfect Shakespearian appreciation is expected to arise, that man is Frank
Harris. Here is one who is extraordinarily qualified, by a range of
sympathy and understanding that extends from the ribaldry of a buccaneer
to the shyest tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to
THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
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all men, yet whose proud humor it is to be to every man, provided the man
is eminent and pretentious, the champion of his enemies. To the
Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the
Bismarckian Imperialist an Anacharsis Klootz, to Anacharsis Klootz a
Washington, to Mrs Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia a John Knox: in
short, to everyone his complement rather than his counterpart, his
antagonist rather than his fellow-creature. Always provided, however,
that the persons thus confronted are respectable persons. Sophie
Perovskaia, who perished on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to
fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet's
Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name-- Things
standing thus unknown--I leave behind! but Frank Harris, in his
Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice, and enshrined her among the
saints. He has lifted the Chicago anarchists out of their infamy, and
shewn that, compared with the Capitalism that killed them, they were
heroes and martyrs. He has done this with the most unusual power of
conviction. The story, as he tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces
all the vulgar, mean, purblind, spiteful versions. There is a precise
realism and an unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a
strange dignity to the work of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable
impulse it is to kick conventional dignity whenever he sees it.
Harris "durch Mitleid wissend"
Frank Harris is everything except a humorist, not, apparently, from
stupidity, but because scorn overcomes humor in him. Nobody ever
dreamt of reproaching Milton's Lucifer for not seeing the comic side of his
fall; and nobody who has read Mr Harris's stories desires to have them
lightened by chapters from the hand of Artemus Ward. Yet he knows the
taste and the value of humor. He was one of the few men of letters who
really appreciated Oscar Wilde, though he did not rally fiercely to Wilde's
side until the world deserted Oscar in his ruin. I myself was present at a
curious meeting between the two, when Harris, on the eve of the
Queensberry trial, prophesied to Wilde with miraculous precision exactly
THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
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what immediately afterwards happened to him, and warned him to leave
the country. It was the first time within my knowledge that such a
forecast proved true. Wilde, though under no illusion as to the folly of
the quite unselfish suit-at-law he had been persuaded to begin,
nevertheless so miscalculated the force of the social vengeance he was
unloosing on himself that he fancied it could be stayed by putting up the
editor of The Saturday Review (as Mr Harris then was) to declare that he
considered Dorian Grey a highly moral book, which it certainly is. When
Harris foretold him the truth, Wilde denounced him as a fainthearted
friend who was failing him in his hour of need, and left the room in anger.
Harris's idiosyncratic power of pity saved him from feeling or shewing the
smallest resentment; and events presently proved to Wilde how insanely
he had been advised in taking the action, and how accurately Harris had
gauged the situation.
The same capacity for pity governs Harris's study of Shakespear,
whom, as I have said, he pities too much; but that he is not insensible to
humor is shewn not only by his appreciation of Wilde, but by the fact that
the group of contributors who made his editorship of The Saturday
Review so remarkable, and of whom I speak none the less highly because
I happened to be one of them myself, were all, in their various ways,
humorists.
"Sidney's Sister: Pembroke's Mother"
And now to return to Shakespear. Though Mr Harris followed Tyler
in identifying Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady, and the Earl of Pembroke as
the addressee of the other sonnets and the man who made love
successfully to Shakespear's mistress, he very characteristically refuses to
follow Tyler on one point, though for the life of me I cannot remember
whether it was one of the surmises which Tyler published, or only one
which he submitted to me to see what I would say about it, just as he used
to submit difficult lines from the sonnets.
This surmise was that "Sidney's sister: Pembroke's mother" set
Shakespear on to persuade Pembroke to marry, and that this was the
THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
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explanation of those earlier sonnets which so persistently and unnaturally
urged matrimony on Mr W. H. I take this to be one of the brightest of
Tyler's ideas, because the persuasions in the sonnets are unaccountable and
out of character unless they were offered to please somebody whom
Shakespear desired to please, and who took a motherly interest in
Pembroke. There is a further temptation in the theory for me. The most
charming of all Shakespear's old women, indeed the most charming of all
his women, young or old, is the Countess of Rousillon in All's Well That
Ends Well. It has a certain individuality among them which suggests a
portrait. Mr Harris will have it that all Shakespear's nice old women are
drawn from his beloved mother; but I see no evidence whatever that
Shakespear's mother was a particularly nice woman or that he was
particularly fond of her. That she was a simple incarnation of
extravagant maternal pride like the mother of Coriolanus in Plutarch, as
Mr Harris asserts, I cannot believe: she is quite as likely to have borne
her son a grudge for becoming "one of these harlotry players" and
disgracing the Ardens. Anyhow, as a conjectural model for the Countess
of Rousillon, I prefer that one of whom Jonson wrote
Sidney's sister: Pembroke's mother: Death: ere thou
has slain another, Learnd and fair and good as she, Time
shall throw a dart at thee. But Frank will not have her at any price,
because his ideal Shakespear is rather like a sailor in a melodrama; and a
sailor in a melodrama must adore his mother. I do not at all belittle such
sailors. They are the emblems of human generosity; but Shakespear was
not an emblem: he was a man and the author of Hamlet, who had no
illusions about his mother. In weak moments one almost wishes he had.
Shakespear's Social Standing
On the vexed question of Shakespear's social standing Mr Harris says
that Shakespear "had not had the advantage of a middle-class training." I
suggest that Shakespear missed this questionable advantage, not because
he was socially too low to have attained to it, but because he conceived
himself as belonging to the upper class from which our public school boys
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