The praise of ‘blackness.’
In two sonnets (cxxvii. and cxxxii.) Shakespeare amiably notices the black complexion, hair, and eyes of his mistress, and expresses a preference for features of that hue over those of the fair hue which was, he tells us, more often associated in poetry with beauty. He commends the ‘dark lady’ for refusing to practise those arts by which other women of the day gave their hair and faces colours denied them by Nature. Here Shakespeare repeats almost verbatim his own lines in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’(IV. iii. 241-7), where the heroine Rosaline is described as ‘black as ebony,’ with ‘brows decked in black,’ and in ‘mourning’ for
her fashionable sisters’ indulgence in the disguising arts of the toilet. ‘No face is fair that is not full so black,’ exclaims Rosaline’s lover. But neither in the sonnets nor in the play can Shakespeare’s praise of ‘blackness’ claim the merit of being his own invention. Sir Philip Sidney, in sonnet vii. of his ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ had anticipated it. The ‘beams’ of the eyes of Sidney’s mistress were ‘wrapt in colour black’ and wore ‘this mourning weed,’ so
That whereas black seems beauty’s contrary,
She even in black doth make all beauties flow. [119a]
To his praise of ‘blackness’ in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ Shakespeare appends a playful but caustic comment on the paradox that he detects in the conceit. [119b] Similarly, the sonnets, in which a dark complexion is pronounced to be a mark of beauty, are followed by others in which the poet argues in self-confutation that blackness of feature is hideous in a woman, and invariably indicates moral turpitude or blackness of heart. Twice, in much the same language as had already served a like purpose in the play, does
he mock his ‘dark lady’ with this uncomplimentary interpretation of dark-coloured hair and eyes.