Books: Dark Lady

Two LOVES I HAVE—Clara Longworth de Chambrun—Lippincott ($2.50).

The plain man-in-the-street sometimes feels that William Shakespeare never existed at all as a real person, or that perhaps he actually was Francis Bacon or an incarnation of Ignatius Donnelly in disguise. Most experts agree, however, that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was the Shakespeare of the Plays and Sonnets which are still the highest peak in the jagged outline of English literature. But there remain many mysterious gaps in Shakespeare's personal history. Who, for instance, was the famed Dark Lady of the Sonnets Bernard...