The Dark Lady of the Sonnets

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.