I recently read a fascinating article on Medium by Peter McIntosh where he claims that the Dark Lady never existed and was instead another form of the Fair Youth, but in the following article I will attempt to refute this claim.

First, the trajectory of the Fair Youth sequence is as follows: budding friendship; deepening admiration; conflict in the form of jealousy, betrayal, and fear; and maturity and acceptance. McIntosh claims that after this, starting in Sonnet 127, we return to stage 3, where the poet’s relationship with the Fair Youth is precarious; however, clearly by this point the conflicts have been resolved, and the poet has moved on. Returning to step 3 would undo all the progress of the Fair Youth sequence.

Next, Sonnet 127 also suggests that the Dark Lady is separate from the Fair Youth, as the references to “Beauty slander’d” suggest that the Dark Lady’s bewitching qualities far outstrip the Fair Youth’s charms and indicate a usurpation of the poet’s affections. Rather than being central to the content, this line serves as a transition from the Fair Youth sequence to the Dark Lady sequence. Additionally, Sonnet 130, rather than being written in jest, enhances the motif of the paradoxical nature of love and particularly finding beauty in what lacks it at face value.

Additionally, Sonnet 20 reveals that the relationship between the Fair Youth and the poet is, though intense, platonic and explicitly not sexual, since lust and sexuality are not referenced in relation to the youth and Shakespeare even states that if he has the youth’s love women can have his body. In contrast, the Dark Lady sonnets often include sexual themes (see Sonnet 129 in particular).

This argument also overlooks the purpose behind the shift from the Fair Youth sequence to the Dark Lady sequence. The purpose of the Fair Youth sequence was to explore idealistic love and the Dark Lady to explore real, gritty, dark love. If the Fair Youth became the same as the Dark Lady, there would be no exploration of good, idealistic love and only an extended look at real, dark love.