Bbc Radio Interview About Amelia As The Author Of Shakespeare

The death of Desdemona, with Megan McGrath as Amelia and Mimi 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’s plays were written by Amelia Bassano, a Converso or Marrano woman poet, and the so-called ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets, still seems astonishing. But that is what an independent examination of the evidence suggests. Leading scholars have looked at the evidence and so far nobody has managed to refute it. In fact it is the only major theory that has 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 done by a market research agency, the Illumination Business, in 2006, found that 49% of people in the West Midlands do not think Mr Shakespeare wrote the plays. And nationwide 43% of the UK population are interested in 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 use religious allegories. They need to be read with the same sort of attention to detail and structure that you would use in reading the Torah. The texts demand 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 the Fall from Paradise and the Flood. If you want to see how it works go to www.darkladyplayers.com and look at the video of our productions last year. The 3,000 Biblical and religious references in the plays are mainly used to create impious anti-Christian parodies. For instance the death of Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream is a parody of the crucifixion in the Gospels. That makes it easy to track down the author. In Elizabethan London, there was only one major poet who wrote covert anti-Christian satires; Amelia Bassano Lanier. Her main poem is an 1840 line crucifixion parody. ii. Theater background. Part of the case for Mr. Shakespeare was that as an actor he had the necessary contacts in the theater world to write the plays. But so did Amelia. Her family were professional musicians, who made up half of the musicians who played music to accompany the Shakespearean plays—and had small roles as extras. So her family were at every performance. She was also for ten years the mistress to Lord Hunsdon, the man in charge of the English theater. That also gave her access to the plays that were performed at Court---which influenced the writer of the plays, but to which a non courtier would not have had access. In addition, she had access to the royal libraries and had the time to do scholarly research and to write---which would have been hard for a 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 the most musical in the world), knowledge of girls’ literature, rare plants, Denmark and so on. So one needs to match up all this rare knowledge to the 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 on their writings as a sort of copyright. The same device is used in the plays.

The standard image of the great poet was as a dying swan who would die to music. It is a classical image that comes from Ovid. In Othello the person who says she will die like a swan to music is Amelia. In MOV the person who will die like a swan to music is Bassanio. Put them together and her name AMELIA BASSANIO is being linked with the standard image of the great poet. A probability analysis can show this is no co-incidence. What is more, this piece of text in Othello didn’t appear in the 1622 Quarto, it seems to have been added in 1623 just to make this point. And this was 7 years after Mr Shakespeare was dead. v. Poetic capacity. Amelia is the only candidate for the authorship who is a major poet. She also is known for using many different literary styles. Her volume of poetry also has similar rare words, rare word clusters, use of sources, and techniques of literary composition, to the plays. Salve Deus also is the same genre—a Neo-Platonist apocalyptic allegory—as the Shakespearean poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. Her major poem is an anti-Christian parody that resembles the parodies in the Shakespearean plays. Since Amelia grew up in a family of Marranos, with Marrano servants—this implies they are both Marrano satires, and that she was their creator.

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