The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
1910
George Bernard Shaw's 1910 comedy imagines a midsummer night in London where William Shakespeare, that great poet of desire, finds himself in exactly the wrong room. Intending to keep a tryst with the mysterious Dark Lady of his sonnets, he instead stumbles into the presence of Queen Elizabeth I and must improvise. What follows is a delightfully awkward negotiation: Shakespeare, desperate to secure patronage for his dream of a national theatre, tries to convince the Virgin Queen to fund his ambitious scheme while simultaneously trying not to lose his head. Shaw, that perpetual agitator for cultural reform, wrote this slight farce as part of an actual campaign to establish a Shakespeare National Theatre by 1916. The play functions simultaneously as comic entertainment and sly argument, using the Bard himself as an unlikely lobbyist for the arts. The comedy emerges from the collision of Shakespeare's earthy poetic ambitions with the political calculating required to survive Elizabeth's court. Clocking at under an hour's read, the piece rewards anyone curious about the endless negotiation between art and power, between the poet's private passions and public necessities. Shaw fans will recognize his characteristic wit, while anyone intrigued by the Shakespeare mythology will find fresh amusement in watching the mythmaker himself squirm.
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“Oh that. Men do fall in love with me. They seem to think me a creature with volcanic passions; I'm sure I don't know why. All the volcanic women I know are plain little creatures with sandy hair. I don't consider human volcanoes respectable. And I'm so tired of the subject. Our house is always full of women in love with my husband and men in love with me. We encourage it because it's pleasant to have company.””
— Bernard Shaw
“It is positively because he is quick-witted that he is long-winded.””
— Bernard Shaw
“But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It's filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.””
— Bernard Shaw
“One sunny afternoon, a hansom drove at great speed along Belsize Avenue, St. John’s Wood, and stopped before a large mansion.””
— Bernard Shaw
“All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle and aimless”
— Bernard Shaw
“professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even””
— Bernard Shaw
“She had learned from Jack, much to her surprise, that she could not make her face express anger or scorn by merely feeling angry or scornful.””
— Bernard Shaw
“MRS. FARRELL. I wouldnt compare risks run to bear living people into the world to risks run to blow them out of it. A mother’s risk is jooty: a soldier’s nothin but divilmint.””
— Bernard Shaw
“Perhaps it was a presentiment that it might become a part of our old Bridgenorth burden that made me warn our Governments so earnestly that unless the law of marriage were first made human, it could never become divine.””
— Bernard Shaw
