‘In the old age black was not counted fair’

Abstract Statistical analyses of Shakespeare's vocabulary have suggested that the order of the sonnets in the 1609 edition does not reflect their chronological order of composition, and that the ‘Dark Lady sonnets’ might be placed among the earliest, thus predating the ‘Fair Youth sonnets’. While sharing the hypothesis that the composition of the sonnets may have been discontinuous, I attempt to approach the question from a methodologically alternative viewpoint, namely text linguistics . In my view, the Sonnets reveal a structural unity which, far from being the result of a final artificial reordering, is likely to have shaped the author's writing process since its early stages. For instance, I argue that some of the ‘Dark Lady sonnets’ contain probable anaphoric references to the ‘friend’, thus disclosing their full meaning only if read in conjunction with the first section. Further evidence comes from a comparison of the Sonnets with Love's Labour's Lost , which is characterised by a similar thematic and structural relationship between the ‘fair’ and the ‘black’.