54-) English Literature

54-) English Literature

Emilia Lanier

Feminist themes

Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum has been viewed by many as one of the earliest feminist works in English literature. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski in an article, "Writing Women and Reading the Renaissance", actually calls Lanier the "defender of womankind". Lewalski believes Lanier initiates her ideas of the genealogy of women with the first few poems in the collection, as dedications to prominent women. This follows the idea that "virtue and learning descend from mothers to daughters."

Marie H. Loughlin continues Lewalski's argument in "'Fast ti'd unto Them in a Golden Chaine': Typology, Apocalypse, and Woman's Genealogy in Aemilia Lanier's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" by noting that the genealogy of women began with Eve. Loughlin argues that Lanier advocates the importance of knowledge of the spiritual and the material worlds in women's connection. Lanier seems to argue that women must focus on the material world and their importance in it, to complement their life in the spiritual world. The argument derives from Lanier's seeming desire to raise women to the level of men.

Dark Lady theory

The Sonnets

Some have speculated that Lanier was Shakespeare's "Dark Lady". The identification, first proposed by A. L. Rowse, has been repeated by several authors since. It appears in David Lasocki and Roger Prior's book The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument makers in England 1531–1665 (1995) and in Stephanie Hopkins Hughes. Although the colour of Lanier's hair is not known, records exist of her Bassano cousins being referred to as "black", a common term at the time for brunettes or people with Mediterranean colouring. Since she came from a family of Court musicians, she fits Shakespeare's picture of a woman playing the virginal in Sonnet 128. Shakespeare claims that the woman was "forsworn" to another in Sonnet 152, which has been speculated to refer to Lanier's relations with Shakespeare's patron, Lord Hunsdon. The theory that Lanier was the Dark Lady is doubted by other Lanier scholars, such as Susanne Woods (1999). Barbara Lewalski notes that Rowse's theory has deflected attention from Lanier as a poet. However, Martin Green argued that although Rowse's argument was unfounded, he was correct in saying that Lanier is referred to in the Sonnets.

Playwrights, musicians and poets have also expressed views. The theatre historian and playwright Andrew B. Harris wrote a play, The Lady Revealed, which chronicles Rowse's identification of Lanier as the "Dark Lady". After readings in London and at the Players' Club, it received a staged reading at New Dramatists in New York City on 16 March 2015. In 2005, the English conductor Peter Bassano, a descendant of Emilia's brother, suggested she provided some of the texts for William Byrd's 1589 Songs of Sundrie Natures, dedicated to Lord Hunsdon, and that one of the songs, a setting of the translation of an Italian sonnet "Of Gold all Burnisht", may have been used by Shakespeare as the model for his parodic Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. The Irish poet Niall McDevitt also believes Lanier was the Dark Lady: "She spurned his advances somewhere along the line and he never won her back.... It's a genuine story of unrequited love." Tony Haygarth has argued that a certain 1593 miniature portrait by Nicholas Hilliard depicts Lanier.

Plays

John Hudson points out that the names Emilia in Othello and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice coincide with mentions of a swan dying to music, which he sees as a standard Ovidian image of a great poet. He asserts that the "swan song" may be a literary device used in some classical writings to conceal the name of an author. However, the notion that a dying swan sings a melodious "swan song" was proverbial, and its application to a character need not prove the character is being presented as a poet. So the evidence remains inconclusive and perhaps coincidental.

Furthermore, Prior argues that the play Othello refers to a location in the town of Bassano, and that the title of the play may refer to the Jesuit Girolamo Otello from the town of Bassano. The character Emilia speaks some of the first feminist lines on an English stage and so could be seen as a contemporary allegory for Emilia Lanier herself, while the musicians in both plays, Prior argues, are allegories for members of her family.

Hudson further believes that another "signature" exists in Titus Andronicus, where an Aemilius and a Bassianus each hold a crown. Each mirrors the other's position at the beginning and end of the play, as rhetorical markers indicating that the two names are a pair, and book-end the bulk of the play.  

In November 2020, Peter Bassano, a descendant of Lanier's uncle, published a book, Shakespeare and Emilia, claiming to have found proof that Lanier is the Dark Lady. Bassano points to the similarity of Hilliard's alternative miniature to a description of Lord Biron's desired wife in Love's Labour's Lost: "A whitely wanton, with a velvet brow. With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes."

Reputation

Lanier was a member of the minor gentry through her Italian father's appointment as a royal musician. She was further educated in the household of Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent. After her parents' death, Lanier was the mistress of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, first cousin of Elizabeth I of England. In 1592, she became pregnant by Carey and was subsequently married to court musician Alfonso Lanier, her cousin. She had two children, but only one survived into adulthood.

Lanier was largely forgotten for centuries, but study of her has abounded in recent decades. She is remembered for contributing to English literature her volume of verses Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, for which she is seen as the first professional female poet in the English language. Indeed she is known as one of England's first feminist writers in any form, and potentially as the "dark lady" of Shakespearean myth.