104 Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies 98(1)

dialectics of love and hate, trust being the thin line between the two. At some point, trust
is broken as the dancers slowly part ways.

Author biography
Nora Galland is a doctoral student and teaching assistant at University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3.
She is writing a PhD about the pragmatics of racial insults in early modern English drama, co-
supervised by Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin and Jean-Christophe Mayer. Her research interests include
early modern race and gender studies, the pragmatics of insult and contemporary performances of
Shakespeare’s plays.

Emilia, by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, directed by Nicole Charles for the Shakespeare’s Globe
2018 Summer Season, London, 14 August 2018 (matinee performance), middle gallery, north
tower.

Reviewed by: Nora Galland, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3

Emilia is a production about how to respond to the oppression of the patriarchal, white
supremacy that has been controlling the narratives of recorded history to maintain a
biased cultural hegemony. Adopting an intersectional approach, Morgan Lloyd Mal-
colm (playwright) and Nicole Charles (director) have created a play raising the issues
of race, gender, and literary legitimacy from the point of view of Emilia Bassano
Lanier (1569–1645). She was one of the first female poets to be published in England,
but also a mother, a wife and the mistress of several lovers over the years. No explicit
mention of her racial identity has been found so far in recorded history, so it remains a
mystery that Malcolm and Charles decided to flesh out. In their production, Emilia
Bassano is a black woman whose ‘otherness’ is pointed out from the beginning of the
play by Lady Katherine who asks her repeatedly where she comes from to remind her
that she does not look like the others.
In 1611, Emilia Bassano published a collection of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
(Hail God, King of the Jews). Religious writing was the only outlet for a woman who had
literary ambitions – Emilia complied with this convention, but she subverted it by
developing a political subtext. She put an emphasis on women, reminding her readers of
their significant role in Christianity and insisting on Christ’s respectful attitude towards
women. In the preface ‘To the Vertuous [sic] Reader’, she announces her proto-feminist
point of view with a statement that aimed at empowering women:
Men, who forgetting they were born of women, nourished of women, and of they were not
of the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a final end of
them all; do like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred.

This play was commissioned for Shakespeare’s Globe for the 2018 summer season.
Artistic director Michelle Terry encouraged Malcolm and Charles to do some research
about Emilia and to fill in the gaps if need be. Malcolm wrote the first history play
Play reviews 105

devoted to an early modern, black, female poet – asserting her political commitment to
protest against the populist claims of right-wing movements about British national
identity. As Malcolm writes in a foreword in the published edition of the playtext:
‘It isn’t an accurate representation of Renaissance England, it isn’t a historical repre-
sentation. It is a memory, a dream, a feeling of her’. In a post-performance session (15
August 2018) at the Globe, Malcolm insisted on the fact that this performance must
therefore be regarded as a dramatic narrative of a woman whose story was erased from
the archives of recorded history and so as a resistance to the power of the patriarchal,
white supremacy.
Emilia was an unconventional woman whose literary ambition and unruly tongue put
her in a series of predicaments that are dramatised in the play. Interestingly, she is
performed by three different actresses: Leah Harvey playing the youngest Emilia, when
she comes of age; Vinette Robinson cast as Emilia during adulthood; and Claire Perkins
performing the oldest Emilia, opening and ending the performance with a rallying cry.
Moreover, this production is meant to be performed with an all-female cast, thus sub-
verting the early modern tradition of having male actors playing female roles.
Cross-gender acting led to several moments of comedy with the drag performances of
actresses that explored the performativity of masculinity. In this production, gender is
presented as a performance and a social construct. The patriarchal codes of society are
denounced through high and low comedy. Sexual harassment and domestic violence
targeting women are challenged throughout the performance with numerous hints at
Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In as well as the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements.
Powerful women were a threat to the social status quo; they were charged with witchcraft
or had their reputations tarnished by being called whores.
The play overflows with witty humour and pastiches of Shakespeare’s plays or
poems. There are also many satirical comments seeking to engage the spectator to be
‘woke’ – in the sense of being aware of social and racial injustice issues. When Lady
Katherine Howard (Nadia Albina) attacks Emilia for being part of an invading wave of
imagination threatening England, the scene reaches a climax of cringe comedy with
many echoes to topical discourses of Brexiteers about national identity. Furthermore,
one of the highlights of the performance is undoubtedly the radically misogynist speech
of Lord Thomas Howard, played by Sophie Russell. He acts as a hysterical fool yelling
and gesturing to condemn women who dare to be freethinkers. Lady Margaret Clifford
(Sophie Stone) remains calm and composed as he attempts to assert his authority and
tame his wife. As Lord Howard goes on and on about the shameful gross misconducts of
women bold enough to read and write, Lady Margaret Clifford is impassive and shows
how much she is unconvinced by his arguments, which makes Lord Howard fly off the
handle in the most foolish, grotesque manner.
There are also recurrent moments of slapstick comedy with scenes of boasting,
drunkenness, fighting and buffoonery. The performance of masculinity through drag is
even farcical at times when ridiculed with the grotesque exaggeration of male stereo-
typical body language leading for instance to caricatural facial expressions.
The intersectionality of the production is also asserted through the diversity of the cast
that includes actresses from different ethnic backgrounds and different accents and an, a
106 Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies 98(1)

deaf actress (Stone), and a disabled actress (Albina). Inclusion and acceptance of dif-
ference are the keywords of this production seeking to put the margins to the centre for
once and achieving a decentring with the help of the audience.
The play follows the young Emilia as she is about to be introduced into society.
She is pressured into becoming the passive, obedient servant that patriarchal society
expected her to be. She is repeatedly told that she has no choice, as she puts it
herself: ‘I was being changed’. However, Emilia remains convinced that choice is
always a possibility for any woman who has access to a proper education. A few
years later, she opens a scriptorium and a literacy school to teach washerwomen
how to read and write in order to sharpen their minds and find their own voices.
From the beginning, Emilia announces that she does not aspire to find love or get
married – her true dream is to write and be read. She accepts marriage to Lord
Alphonso Lanier (Amanda Wilkin) to comply with her lover’s wishes, Lord Henry
Carey (Carolyn Pickles). She is not in love with Lanier, but the latter is satisfied with
this arrangement insofar as he is a closeted homosexual, thus getting a beard to protect
him from gossip about his sex life. Men too suffer from the status quo of the hetero-
normative patriarchy. Over the years, Emilia gives birth to children and takes several
lovers, among whom is William Shakespeare (Charity Wakefield). She is introduced as
the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In this production, the Bard is desacralised
and performed as a cowardly playwright stealing Emilia’s words to use them in his
plays. Her literary skills are not acknowledged and her ambition to write is constantly
crushed by a society that compels women to be contained in the domestic, private
sphere. Emilia is struggling to write and make herself heard, but there is always a price
to pay. One of her students from the literacy school is sentenced to be burned at the
stake for having read a poem. As she dies, the oldest Emilia reminds the audience of the
fact that more than half of the world’s population is female, telling spectators that if
they want change, the choice is theirs.
Emilia is a play in which the oldest eponymous character is given a choric function
making her the mistress of ceremony of the performance. The three actresses playing
Emilia haunt the stage throughout the production and remind the spectators of the
complexity of this woman whose story has been left out by the patriarchal, white
supremacy. The audience is expected to become ‘woke’ and consider the importance of
education to be able to resist oppression – then and now. Throughout the production,
books, quills, scrolls, inkpots and parchments occupy the stage and symbolise the
importance of education in the fight against the biased epistemology of the patriarchal,
white hegemony.
It is not a coincidence that Emilia was chosen to kick off the festival ‘Shakespeare and
Race’ that took place at the Globe (11–20 August) with conferences, research work-
shops, round tables, Q&A sessions with actors and directors as well as a scholarly
symposium of international scholars seeking to think about race within the context of
Shakespeare’s studies.