SOURCE: "Awareness Lost," in The Mind in Character: Shakespeare's Speaker in the Sonnets, University of Missouri Press, 1987, pp. 139-85.

In the following excerpt, Weiser briefly contrasts the idealized love of the sonnets in what he calls the "Fair Youth section" with the "destructive" and "distressing " sex of the "Dark Lady " section. Weiser then looks more closely at the relationship between the poet and the Dark Lady,and argues that initially at least, the Dark Lady sonnets reveal more about the poet's own selfish needs than about the lady herself

To separate the last twenty-eight sonnets from all the others is a vulnerable but by no means arbitrary decision. It is impossible to prove that sonnets 127-54 do revolve on one sustained relation without obtaining a signed, notarized statement by the poet, yet the traditional view that these sonnets deal with a "Dark Lady," real or imaginary, has much...