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“This is by Caroline Randall Williams, a writer who resides in Nashville, Tennessee. She employs a different strategy, through speculating who the addressee, the ‘dark lady’, of the later sonnets might have been. Shakespeare’s poems describe a woman with dark features: black eyes, black hair, black eyebrows. Was the addressee a historical individual? A composite of multiple women? An entirely fictive figure? Among the many candidates for who that addressee might have been, the brothel co-owner named ‘Black Luce’ has been proposed by the scholar Duncan Salkeld. This woman might have been of African descent, and might have been someone that Shakespeare would have encountered in the 1590s. While Williams concedes that this candidate is but one of many conjectures, she got it into her head ‘that Shakespeare had a black lover, and that this woman was the subject of sonnets 127 to 154.'” Read more...
The best books on Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Scott Newstok, Literary Scholar
