Dark Lady of the Sonnets
Dark Lady of the Sonnets
Book Excerpt
he "onlie
begetter" of the sonnets, with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert),
and promulgated his own identification of Mistress Mary Fitton with
the Dark Lady. Whether he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did
not matter urgently to me: she might have been Maria Tompkins for all
I cared. But Tyler would have it that she was Mary Fitton; and he
tracked Mary down from the first of her marriages in her teens to her
tomb in Cheshire, whither he made a pilgrimage and whence returned in
triumph with a picture of her statue, and the news that he was
convinced she was a dark lady by traces of paint still discernible.
In due course he published his edition of the Sonnets, with the evidence he had collected. He lent me a copy of the book, which I never returned. But I reviewed it in the Pall Mall Gazette on the 7th of January 1886, and thereby let loose the Fitton theory in a wider circle of readers than the book could reach. Then Tyler died, sinking unnoted like a stone in the sea. I observed that Mr
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