Social Anthropologist – Scherin Barlow Massay
Some time, after leaving the Queen’s Court, Luce Morgan married a man by the surname of Parker.
She was still friends with Queen Elizabeth and over the yuletide period of 1588 and early 1589, Luce gave her a box of cherries as a present.
By then, she had separated from her husband and an affair with Shakespeare began around the same time, Shakespeare was twenty-three and Luce, four years older.
However, just prior to his relationship with Luce Morgan, Shakespeare had begun a liaison with someone, five years his junior.
After her social demise, Luce Morgan moved to Clerkenwell. As always when people fall from grace, they are ridiculed and she got the nickname ‘Black Luce’ or ‘Luce Negro’. Clerkenwell at that time had a sizable African community.
Some African women worked in brothels and had patrons who were actors, musicians, lawyers and the nobility, who saw them as desirable sex symbols. She became a courtesan, and because of her former contacts with those at Court, her clientele were wealthy or upper class men.
Records show that in 1594, Luce Morgan was running a brothel. One of her other names at that time was ‘Abbess of Clerkenwell’. Despite the pious title, the term was full of Elizabethan sardonic wit, intended to mock or deride, for it was another way of saying that she was a brothel owner or bawd.
Will i am plays Shakespeare. Photo courtesy www.mirror.co.uk
Perhaps because of her connections she seems to have escaped punishment until 1600, when she was sent to Bridewell Prison for a few months. Luce Morgan died in 1610, having contracted venereal disease many years earlier.
Controversy surrounding the Sonnets begins with the dedication to a Mr. W.H.William Hadcliffe (1569-1633) was an exceptionally handsome, clever and charismatic.
Individual, however, he was also vain and hedonistic. At eighteen, he was studying law and had just been crowned prince of revelry (one of the traditions of Gray Inn) when he met Shakespeare.
Apart from studying law, the scholars at Grays Inn were responsible for translating the Greek and Roman Classics into English and many of those young and influential men lived lives that were akin to the manner recorded in the Classics.
Hadcliffe’s good looks and wit made him desirable to both sexes and he exploited this for his carnal pleasure. Five years Shakespeare’s junior, critics argue that what Shakespeare felt for him was an agape love, yet the Sonnets are full of sexual overtones that would not have been lost to the Elizabethans.
The affair, however, is short lived and Hadcliffe quickly moves on to his next conquests that included Luce Morgan. Because of the liaison with Hadcliffe, Shakespeare contracts the pox, which leaves him balding and disfigured.
Later Hadcliffe moves in with Luce, much to the annoyance of Shakespeare, who feels doubly betrayed, but more so because of his feelings for Hadcliffe than for Morgan.
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