Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Dark Lady is the unnamed woman Shakespeare addresses in sonnets 127-152, described as having black wiry hair and dun-colored skin. A widely held scholarly opinion holds that she is a construct of Shakespeare's imagination rather than a real historical person.
A. L. Rowse claimed to have solved the identity of the Dark Lady in 1973, in his book Shakespeare's Sonnets, the Problem Solved. His case relied on astrologer Simon Forman's journal entries about Emilia Lanier, though it later emerged Rowse had misread Forman's description of her as brave in youth, not brown in youth.
Black Luce was a Clerkenwell brothel-owner who performed under the stage name Lucy Negro and took part in the Gray's Inn Christmas revels of 1601-1602, the occasion of the first performance of Twelfth Night. G. B. Harrison tentatively proposed her as the Dark Lady in 1933, though scholar Duncan Salkeld notes no record directly links her to Shakespeare.
Jonathan Bate proposed in his 2008 book The Genius of Shakespeare that the unnamed wife of linguist John Florio, also lover of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, was the Dark Lady. Aubrey Burl took up the same case and named her Aline Florio, pointing to wordplay linking the Rosaline character in Love's Labours Lost to the Earl's family name Wriothesley.
Mary Fitton was proposed as the Dark Lady by Thomas Tyler in the preface to his 1890 facsimile edition of the sonnets, based on a rivalry read into the early poems between Shakespeare and William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke. The identification fell out of favor after a portrait discovered in 1897 showed Fitton with fair skin, brown hair, and grey eyes.
Shakespeare's Dark Lady has appeared in George Bernard Shaw's 1910 play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Ngaio Marsh's 1966 novel Killer Dolphin, and the Doctor Who episode The Shakespeare Code, in which Shakespeare calls Martha Jones his dark lady. She also appears in the sitcom Upstart Crow and in Jessica B. Hill's stage play The Dark Lady, staged at Bard on the Beach in Vancouver from July to September of 2025.