The Dark Lady
Via a mailing list: the NJJN reports on a new Shakespearean authorship theory: the Dark Lady herself did it!
[John Hudson] gradually devised the latest approach to Shakespearean authorship, the Amelia Bassano Theory — recently recognized by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust as one of the top eight authorship theories.
The figure of Amelia Bassano Lanyer had turned up before in Shakespearean scholarship. In 1973, celebrated historian A.L. Rowse identified her as the actual “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s famed sonnets. Bassano — known as the first woman in England to have published a book of original poetry (Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 1611), which has been interpreted as an early feminist critique of the Christian Gospels — was part of a family of Italian court musicians of Moroccan/Semitic ancestry who lived as clandestine Jews.
© 2008 M. C. DeMarco
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