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The death of Desdemona, with Megan McGrath as Amelia andMimi Hirt as Desdemona © John Watts (2009
)
SEPTEMBER 19, 2009: RADIO INTERVIEW
AMELIA BASSANO LANIER AS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE
After working on it for the last five years, the idea that Shakespeare’splays were written by Amelia Bassano, a Converso or Marrano womanpoet, and the so-called ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets, still seemsastonishing. But that is what an independent examination of the evidencesuggests. Leading scholars have looked at the evidence and so farnobody has managed to refute it. In fact it is the only major theory thathas not yet been easily refuted.So there needs to be a proper public debate about this new possibility.Certainly it is something that the public are interested in. A survey doneby a market research agency, the Illumination Business, in 2006, foundthat 49% of people in the West Midlands do not think Mr Shakespearewrote the plays. And nationwide 43% of the UK population are interestedin finding out more about the case for Amelia.Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645) was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, who grew up in London opposite the theater district. She
 
was a major experimental poet, who wrote the first published volume of original poetry by a woman. The case for her rests on five points.
i. Religious Allegories.
The plays are very complex, multilayered and usereligious allegories. They need to be read with the same sort of attentionto detail and structure that you would use in reading the Torah. The textsdemand that we should question them very carefully.If we do so, we see that many of the plays contain deep Biblical themes.For instance,
As You Like It 
contains an underlying allegory about theFall from Paradise and the Flood. If you want to see how it works go towww.darkladyplayers.comand look at the video of our productions lastyear.The 3,000 Biblical and religious references in the plays are mainly used tocreate impious anti-Christian parodies. For instance the death of Bottomin
Midsummer Night’s Dream 
is a parody of the crucifixion in theGospels. That makes it easy to track down the author. In ElizabethanLondon, there was only one major poet who wrote covert anti-Christiansatires; Amelia Bassano Lanier. Her main poem is an 1840 line crucifixionparody.
ii. Theater background.
Part of the case for Mr. Shakespeare was that asan actor he had the necessary contacts in the theater world to write theplays. But so did Amelia. Her family were professional musicians, whomade up half of the musicians who played music to accompany theShakespearean plays—and had small roles as extras. So her family wereat every performance. She was also for ten years the mistress to LordHunsdon, the man in charge of the English theater. That also gave heraccess to the plays that were performed at Court---which influenced thewriter of the plays, but to which a non courtier would not have hadaccess. In addition, she had access to the royal libraries and had the timeto do scholarly research and to write---which would have been hard fora working actor walking around the country on tour in the early 1590’s.
iii.
 
Rare Knowledge.
The plays also contain around 20 unusual areas of knowledge, including knowledge of Judaism and Hebrew, knowledge of Italy and Italian, advanced knowledge of music (since these plays are themost musical in the world), knowledge of girls’ literature, rare plants,Denmark and so on. So one needs to match up all this rare knowledge tothe author’s known social networks. For Mr Shakespeare the fit is zero.For Amelia the fit is nearly 100%.
iv. Literary Signatures
. Classical writers left their literary signature ontheir writings as a sort of copyright. The same device is used in the plays.
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reply03 / 14 / 2010
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