Here is an example from an old book. I know it’s old but it can’t be simply discarded, I hope.
"I never dare have spoken — never dare have told you that my love for you was killing me"
So, I wonder if the following three all mean the same thing?
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I never dare have told you.
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I never dared to have told you.
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I didn't ever dare to have told you.
I would like to know how popular in terms of the usage frequency the combination of dare and a perfect infinitive is.
Best Answer
This is a very rare usage and cannot be regarded as idiomatic today.
Dare is an odd word—it wanders back and forth between performing as an ordinary lexical verb and as a sort of modal. For instance, it is used with both marked and unmarked infinitives, and it may be used with or without DO-support:
I dare have spoken/told is a use consistent with treatment as a full modal—except that every instance of such use I find (in a quick-and-dirty survey on Google Books) employs the present form in a past sense, as your example does. This suggests that the few authors who used it (all such uses I found appeared in the last half of the 19th century) were influenced—and somehow confused!—by the conventional of use of the “perfect infinitive” to backshift past modals employed in a present sense, as when “I might do this” is backshifted as “I might have done this”.
It’s a fascinating phenomenon, and I am glad to have had it drawn to my attention. But it was never common, and for practical purposes you may ignore it.