Not much is known about the life of Emilia Bassano, a writer and teacher who lived from 1569-1645 and whose poetry was the first printed in the English language by a woman. Yet plenty of intrigue and conjecture surrounds this little know figure from our national literacy heritage.
As the daughter of a court musician and mistress of Elizabeth I's Lord Chamberlain, it's highly likely that Emilia, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, would have crossed paths with the Bard, and some speculation suggests that she is, in fact, the "Dark Lady" mentioned in several of his sonnets. That her legacy as a writer has been largely forgotten in favour of being a hypothetical muse is just one of the wrongs set to rights in Emila, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s 2018 Olivier Award-winning play currently being performed by the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at Circomedia in St Pauls.
Lloyd Malcome's play takes things further, suggesting that Emilia was responsible for some of Shakespeare's work, offering a hypothetical biography of an extraordinary woman who carved out a space as a professional writer at a time when stepping outside the norm could provoke accusations of witchcraft. With just enough fact and plenty of societal truth, Emilia packs an unashamedly feminist punch in its postmodern retelling of history.
