The Dark Lady of the Sonnets is a 1910 short comedy by George Bernard Shaw in which William Shakespeare, intending to meet the "Dark Lady", accidentally encounters Queen Elizabeth I and attempts to persuade her to create a national theatre.

The play was written as part of a campaign to create a "Shakespeare National Theatre" by 1916.

He persuades the Beefeater to allow him to stay to meet his girlfriend, a lady of the court, who will be arriving soon for a secret tryst.

The Queen demands that he should apologise to her, but Shakespeare insists that his family is more respectable than hers, and that she only has her job by accident of birth.

Shakespeare complains that his worst plays, As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, are the most popular, but is most proud of the ones with intelligent female characters, such All's Well that End's Well.

Many attempts have been made to identify the "Dark Lady" and "Fair Youth" with historical personalities.

At the time Shaw's play was written, a favoured candidate for the Lady was Mary Fitton (this identification had been made by Shaw's friend Thomas Tyler but later dropped)[3] and for the Youth was William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, who is known to have had an affair with Fitton.