Could a Jewish ‘Dark Lady’ be the secret author of Shakespeare’s plays?

Emilia Bassano sounded like a “woke fantasy” when playwright JOHN WARSZAWSKI first heard of her. He tells DEBORAH STONE why he is bringing her to life.

Shakespeare mysteries have been the stuff of literary speculation for hundreds of years.

A third of his sonnets are addressed to a “Dark Lady” who has never been identified.

The theory that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a front for another writer has resurfaced periodically, with various men in the running, including Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere and Christopher Marlowe.

Melbourne carpenter-turned-playwright John Warszawski had no particular thoughts on the matter until he stumbled across an article in the Atlantic Monthly which made a radical suggestion: the author of Shakespeare’s plays was an Elizabethan poet named Emilia Bassano. 

Bassano had a lot against her: she was a woman at a time when women were banned from the stage, she was dark-skinned, and she was, very probably, of Jewish heritage, at a time when Jews were banned from England.

“On the surface, it seemed like a woke fantasy – a woman, Jewish, dark-skinned, writing Shakespeare’s plays: come on!” Warszawski recalls.

But the more he read, the more convinced he became. The evidence, he felt, was compelling, and all those barriers might also explain why a talented woman used the identity of a jobbing Stratford actor to peddle her work.

Warszawski read John Hudson’s book, Shakespeare's Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier, The woman behind Shakespeare's plays?, and mentioned to a friend that it would make a good play.

“Why don’t you write it?” came the response.

The result is I am Emilia Bassano, which will premiere in Melbourne in August. The play is an intimate, cabaret-style two-hander in which Bassano and a fellow actor, named Touchstone, time travel from the 16th century to tell her story.

It will be performed at Justin Art House Museum, the home and gallery of Charles and Leah Justin, in association with their current exhibition Art and Gender.

While the play is a work of the imagination, Warszawski no longer sees the story as a fantasy. “Personally, I believe it. I have tried to be as rigorous as I can in examining the evidence and I am convinced that she was the real author. She is definitely a more likely author of Shakespeare’s plays than any of the other candidates.”

The belief that Shakespeare did not write his own plays – known as the anti-Stratfordian theory – is derived from a paucity of biographical evidence and the theory that Shakespeare could not have had the education to write such sophisticated work.

It is not widely accepted but for those who embrace it, the Emilia Bassano argument is tempting.

Bassano, whose married name was Emilia Lanier, is regarded as the first woman to assert herself as a professional poet. She could never have worked on the stage but was known to perform privately. She was baptised at birth, but her father was a Venetian-born migrant of Moroccan background, generally thought to have been a Jew forced to hide his background.

She had the depth of education Shakespeare’s plays required and a background which means there is no way she could have got them performed under her own name.

“Emilia Bassano’s life encompassed the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its low-class references and knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and Jewish allusions; its music and feminism,” wrote Elizabeth Winkler in The Atlantic.

Proponents point out that Emilia - not a fashionable name at the time - is the most common female name in the plays, alongside the more popular Katherine, and that forms of the name Bassano also recur.

The plays are also filled with examples of women discussed as men and characters forced to disguise their identity.

 “The fact that she had to hide as a woman is explored in play after play,” Warszawski said.

But what of the Merchant of Venice, with its antisemitic portrayal of Shylock? Or the racism of Othello? Could these have been written by a dark-skinned Jew?

Warszawski believes Bassano took on the attitudes of the times so as not to expose herself.

“She would also have had to hide her Jewish background. Jews had been banned for 300 years in England and any connection to Jews was suspect. There are these bizarre stories, drinking Christian blood, having horns and a tail. To be a Jew would have been a very dangerous situation.”

But he also thinks there are clues in the plays. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock defends the humanity of Jews, a position no other writer of the day took.

Perhaps it was Emilia Bassano, that dark-skinned, Jewish, woman who wrote, “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions …”

"I am Emilia Bassano" will be performed at Justin Art House Museum on August 13, 14, 20 & 21. Tickets here.