Note 415 — APPENDIX

It is unnecessary, after what has been said above (p. 123), to consider seriously the suggestion that the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets was Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady, who was at one time Pembroke’s mistress and bore him a child, has been introduced into a discussion of the sonnets only on the assumption that her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the sonnets were addressed. Lady Newdegate’s recently published Gossip from a Muniment Room, which furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke’s mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Lady Newdegate states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury, and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond doubt, and the endeavour lately made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is satisfactorily met by Mr. C. O. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second edition of Lady Newdegate’s book. We also learn from Lady Newdegate’s volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the attentions of a middle-aged admirer, a married friend of the family, Sir William Knollys. It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the persons named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare and the supposititious ‘Will Herbert’ for ‘the dark lady’s’ favours in the sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.) But that is a shot wholly out of range. The wording of those sonnets, when it is thoroughly tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person of that Christian name.