An Analysis Of Richard Gardiner's Essay 'The Dark Lady'

In Gardiner’s essay, Shakespeare’s sonnets consist of two genre; love and time. The sonnet sequence begins with seventeen sonnets that the poet encourages a young man to have children which moves on to himself falling in love with the young man and having a rival poet seeking after the young man and lastly and then the young man becoming The Dark Lady’s lover. The sonnets have the immortality ability to reverse nature and freeze time as long as people live.

Courtship between homosexual is a social taboo and with the union of both male’s minds in the sonnets. It is inevitable that the portrayal of the male and female subjects receives different treatments in the sonnets. The male subject is being idolised and adored over the female subject. The poet only has passionate love for The

Similarly, unlike the praises that are lavished on for the young beautiful man, the poet again attempts to justify the unconventional beauty just like how he has done it in justifying the down to earth treatment on The Dark Lady throughout the sonnet 130. This can be seen by the deliberately chosen position with the use of verbal links such as “bastard”, “born”, “disgrace”, Nature, “Art”. It can be implied that the poet is being tempted by his lust and he is being tortured by his desire for a lusting woman that makes him guilty and sinful towards his true love in the manner that Art has made the old version of beauty readily counterfeited with a false effigy: “Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,/ But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.” The sonnet ends off with The Dark Lady being the icon of beauty: “Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,/ That every tongue says beauty should look so.” In this manner, the poet is lustful towards The Dark Lady and only loves her