SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Dark Lady, A Question of Identity," in Shakespeare and Others, Associated University Presses, 1985, pp. 63-79.

In the following excerpt, first published in 1980, Schoenbaum challenges A. L. Rowse's theory that Lanyer was the "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets.

On January 29, 1973, The Times carried a feature article, headed "Revealed at Last, Shakespeare's Dark Lady," by A. L. Rowse. Once published, The Times article was summarized in newspapers and magazines the world over. For weeks afterwards the correspondence columns of the paper reverberated with responses—heated, facetious, or merely informative. Even Dame Agatha Christie entered the lists. Dr. Rowse had made a stir.

In his controversial biography of Shakespeare, Dr. Rowse claimed to have solved all the problems of the Sonnets but one; everything "except for the identity of Shakespeare's mistress, which we are never likely to know." That was in 1963. At the Bodleian Library, Dr. Rowse was then...