A picaresque tale of Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady’ veers close to Blackadder
Who was Emilia Bassano Lanier? An Elizabethan woman, born in London’s Spitalfields around 1569 to a Venetian court musician, and his “reputed wife”. A mistress, at 18, to Henry Carey, the 61-year-old Lord Chamberlain; a wife to Alphonso Lanier, a musician and spendthrift. A muse to Shakespeare, immortalised in his poetry and plays. A poet in her own right, and a protofeminist thinker whose contribution has been written out of history.
In this new play, commissioned by Michelle Terry, the Globe artistic director, from playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm as the centrepiece of the theatre’s summer season, Emilia is all of these things and more.
It’s easy to see her appeal as a character. As with many figures of the period, particularly women, very little concrete detail is known about Emilia, and a good deal of our information is refracted by the not entirely disinterested eye of Simon Forman, the court astrologer, whose diary entries about her mainly concern his repeated unsuccessful attempts to “halek”, or sleep with, her.
But we do know that, in 1611, Emilia became one of the first English women ever to publish her own collection of original poems.
The title – Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum (“Hail God, King of the Jews”) – and themes were respectably religious, but the subtext – Christ’s respect for women, and their centrality to Christian doctrine – was arguably subversive. This is the irresistible position taken by Lloyd Malcolm, who posits Emilia as a woman out of time: a freethinker and a writer of imagination and ambition, in a time when such identities were denied to women.
Her play offers us Emilia’s life as a picaresque tale, in which the character’s creative urges are repeatedly crushed, but ultimately fly beyond the limits of her gender and position.
It’s an intriguing proposition, and one staged with energy and commitment by emerging director Nicole Charles and her all-female cast. Three actresses share the role of Emilia, each embodying a different stage of her long life (she died at 76, far exceeding the life expectancy of a mother-of-two).
The rest of the cast split all the other roles, crossing ages and genders, in a neat twist on the Elizabethan tradition of forbidding women from the stage.
Some of these cross-dressing moments are funny – Carolyn Pickles and Amanda Wilkin are particularly good as Emilia’s lover Henry Carey and husband Alphonso Lanier – and Lloyd Malcolm has a great time filling in the gaps in our knowledge of Emilia’s life. In this interpretation, Shakespeare (Charity Wakefield), becomes Emilia’s lover, stealing her words to put into the mouths of his characters: there’s a lovely scene in which the real Emilia storms the stage during a performance of Othello, reclaiming the words of her fictional namesake.
It’s a brave and interesting move, too, to interpret Shakespeare’s possible description of Emilia as his “dark lady” literally, adding an additional racial dimension to Emilia’s exclusion.
It’s a shame, then, that the play as a whole is marred by some seriously clunky dialogue and an uneven tone, veering wildly between populist laugh-chasing and leaden, didactic speechifying. It’s over-long, too, and there are several moments when the anachronistic humour veers dangerously close to Blackadder territory.
But the spirit and big-heartedness of the show are undeniable, and it’s impossible not to be intrigued by a woman who is finally getting the chance to make herself heard on a stage from which she may well, like so many other women, have been excluded all those centuries before.