Shakespeare’s muse

Natasha Tripney

The name Emilia crops up often in Shakespeare’s plays. She’s there in Othello most prominently, but also The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Winter’s Tale and The Comedy of Errors. This recurrence has helped support the theory that the early modern poet Emilia Bassano, later Lanier, might well have been Shakespeare’s muse — the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.

Born in 1569, she was the daughter of a royal musician and had a relationship with Queen Elizabeth I’s cousin Henry Carey. She was also a poet, who published a collection of poetry called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews) in 1611 at a time when it was extremely unusual for a woman to do so.

Forgotten for centuries, she has become a source for scholarship in recent years. Her life is now the subject of a new play by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, part of Michelle Terry’s inaugural season as artistic director at Shakespeare’s Globe. Terry was so fascinated by Bassano and the place she occupies in Shakespeare, that she shaped her first season around her. Othello (starring Andre Holland and Mark Rylance), The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Winter’s Tale are all being performed.

Lloyd Malcolm didn’t know much about Bassano when she first discussed the project with Terry. “I was aware she was this shadowy figure who was potentially someone Shakespeare knew and possibly loved, but she’s more than that. She published her own poems, which was a rarity, and she was clearly a feminist given what she had written.”

That Bassano was an artist, a creative force in her own right, as well as just a potential muse to a man, is central to Lloyd Malcolm’s approach. In writing her play, she wanted to draw her own conclusions. “It was a case of reading between the lines and looking at what she was dealing with as a woman at that time.” She describes the play as an experiment. She and director Nicole Charles wanted to “challenge the way history plays are usually told”.

— The Independent