This compendium distils and synthesises the principal material and arguments presented in the Preface and the drama The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. It preserves the author’s critical stance, documentary anecdotes, and dramatic scenario while rendering them in a concise, organised form.

Preface and critical essay
The author opens by explaining the theatrical identification of Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” with Mistress Mary Fitton, explicitly disclaiming any firm historical claim: a recently discovered portrait apparently contradicts Tyler’s thesis by depicting Fitton as fair-haired. Two practical reasons for using Fitton in the play are given: a dramatic convenience suggested by a collaborator (Mrs Alfred Lyttelton) and a personal connection to Thomas Tyler, the eccentric antiquarian who promulgated the Fitton theory.

Thomas Tyler is sketched vividly: a visually unforgettable British Museum reader, marked by physical disfigurement and singular intellectual preoccupations — a translator of Ecclesiastes, an enthusiast of pessimism and of a cyclical-history theory, and the promoter of the Fitton identification. Tyler’s edition of the Sonnets and his researches are noted, as is his solitary death and the author’s debt for first publicising his claims.

Frank Harris appears next as both cultural figure and interpretive rival. Harris produced a serious play and a readable, polemical study of Shakespeare, arguing a sentimental, broken-hearted Bard and reiterating Tyler’s identifications yet differing on several conjectures (notably the model for certain female characters). The author admires Harris’s range of sympathy, his capacity for pity, and his unconventionality, while criticizing Harris’s tendency to neglect Shakespeare’s ironic gaiety and to over-emphasise a love-sickness explanation for late pessimism in Shakespeare’s work.

Arguments about Shakespeare
The essay contests three linked positions: that Shakespeare lacked “middle-class” formation, that he was little esteemed by contemporaries, and that his later pessimism derived principally from amorous disaster. The author argues Shakespeare saw himself as a gentleman of lineage, that Ben Jonson’s qualified panegyric implies widespread idolisation rather than neglect, and that pessimism is intrinsic to his dramatic temperament — mitigated, however, by an irrepressible comic spirit. The sonnets to the Dark Lady are read as satirical, cruel, and characteristic of a writer who both exalts and derides his objects; the Jupiter-and-Semele model is preferred to any notion of devotional idolatry. Finally, the author presses the practical grievance that Shakespeare lacked institutional support for serious drama and advances a plea for a National Theatre.

The play (dramatic précis)
Set on a midsummer night at Whitehall, the short drama stages a jealous encounter among Shakespeare, his Dark Lady (Mary), and Queen Elizabeth. Comic and sharply ironical exchanges culminate in Shakespeare’s petition for a public endowment for a national playhouse. The Queen demurs, promising only to consider the idea, while court tensions and human frailty—art, vanity, and statecraft—are exposed. The text concludes with the usual publication acknowledgment to Project Gutenberg.