Dark_Lady

Dark Lady One of the many intriguing aspects of Shakespeare's Sonnets is the identity of the principal characters within them, of which there are three: The Young Man, the Dark lady, and the Rival Poet. Nowhere in the Sonnets are these people explicitly identified and their anonymity has spawned much debate as to who these people could have been. The content of the Sonnets that refer to these people however, undoubtedly show that these were indeed real, living people and not imaginary inventions by the author for the sake of literary exercise. “They are love poetry beyond what was considered love poetry by the Petrarchan sonneteers […] they are, often, ingenious exercises in wit-verbal, rhetorical, logical. They are not in any way poems meant to be overheard. They speak, most of the time, to a persona, perhaps invented, and perhaps derived, in some way from an actual person. They are lyric poems, expressing mainly feelings that any capable reader can respond to as profound and true. But they are poems of the second voice, poems addressed to an audience of one or more […] The persona of the hearer enables the reader to participate in the poem in a more dark, young, man, lady, sonnets, shakespeare, poems, love, sonnet, people, just, yet, way, two, says, talking, red, one, eyes, even, black, woman, wires, white, true, think, sun, shakespeare’s, poetry, poem, mistress, head, feelings, far