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What book(s) are you currently reading or listening? 11 March
(discuss.online)
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Does this book require any prior knowledge of Dark Lady?
Nope. The "Dark Lady" is not a play or a poem, but rather scholars' nickname for the subject of a couple dozen Shakespearian sonnets, and one of the plausible candidates is the woman in Newman's novel, which isn't really "about" Shakespeare anyway.
Here's one, Sonnet 130, where our boy is taking the piss, trying to reframe cultural expectations around literary love, or maybe a bit of both. Poems like this show why he was both brilliant and perfectly likely to have been the educated-ish son of a provincial merchant. Christopher Marlowe didn't write shit like this.