The Dark Lady Read Free Page B

deprecatingly. "I believe it had three performances. However, it gave me the chance to study the sonnet sequence and make my own guesses. Why not? It's a garden where nobody fears to tread."
    "And I, of course, have been one of the nonangels in that enclosure," Pemberton told them. "I have even published a work on the subject entitled, perhaps optimistically,
The Riddle Solved.
It was my theory that Shakespeare's feeling for the youth was the most intense passion of his lifetime and the principal source of the high tragic mood that preceded the composition of
Hamlet
and
Othello.
Of course, it had a homosexual aspect, but not necessarily in any vulgar or physical sense. The young man was obviously of the highest birth—very possibly the Earl of Pembroke himself—and a corporeal liaison may not have been feasible."
    "I suppose the Earl's family may have had something to say about
that,
" the now utterly disgusted Pat Schurman put in sharply. "Shakespeare may be a god to you, Professor Pemberton, but to the Pembrokes he was probably a dirty old man."
    "Hardly old, Ma'am."
    "I confess I've had misgivings about the sonnets," Elesina interjected, to take the initiative from Pat. "To me there is something
malsain
about them. They are too crawling, too syrupy, too self-pitying."
    Irving Stein seemed shocked at this. "But, Miss Dart, you are speaking of the greatest love poetry in the English language!"
    "Oh, love, pooh, Judge. It's not love at all. It's a kind of crush. Or series of crushes, really. For if the sonnets cover a period of many years, as some scholars say, they must have been addressed to a series of young men. We all know that middle-aged pederasts keep changing the objects of their affection. After all, how long does a pretty boy stay pretty?"
    Pemberton proved unexpectedly hospitable to this variation of his theory. "You have a point, Miss Dart! As a matter of fact, in
The Riddle Solved
I state that Shakespeare's great love could have been for two men, first Southampton and then Pembroke. But I fear we're going to shock Miss Cranberry." He lowered his voice as he glanced down the table at the poetess, a huge blond woman with straight hair pulled to a bun in back and a fleshy, pendulous, menacing face. "You know her theory, don't you? She claims there was no youth
or
dark lady. That the sonnets are a literary exercise, a novel in verse, a jeu d'esprit. But how can an old maid comprehend the eclecticism of the Elizabethan male?"
    "We're talking about you, Miss Cranberry!" Elesina called boldly down the table. "Professor Pemberton doesn't believe that unmarried women can understand Shakespeare."
    Miss Cranberry's heavy, square face turned, with slowly mounting hostility, to her critic. "As much as unmarried men, anyway," she retorted with a grunt.
    "I understand that
you
are not married, Miss Dart," Pat Schurman observed suddenly. "But surely nobody could accuse you of naivete where Shakespeare is concerned."
    The acidity of the comment created a general atmosphere of embarrassment. "Oh, well, I'm an actress, and we don't count," Elesina responded with a shrug. "There was a time when we couldn't even be buried in hallowed ground. But the professor, Miss Cranberry, seems to imply that you turn Shakespeare into a sort of Kate Greenaway."
    "Better than turning him into a sort of Oscar Wilde. I have often wondered if those critics who persist in finding evidence of inversion in the sonnets do not betray what I shall be polite enough to call their subconscious preferences."
    "My friends, my friends!" interposed Clara Stein. "Please let us not be so heated. Erna, do talk to Mr. Simkins. He has told me how much he loves your poems. And David, you must help our end of the table to understand the sonnets." Clara, with a nod to her husband and a wink at David, signified that she wished the table divided into two sections to separate the combatants. It was an instance, Elesina supposed, of what Ivy had told her: that the