On The Claim That Shakespeare Was A Black Woman

A book is coming out arguing that William Shakespeare was really a black woman.

The book is entitled The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet. It’s scheduled for release on April 28, but a number of reviewers have seen advance copies, so we have an idea of Coslet’s arguments.

First, I’ll write about this book and why it is attracting so much attention. Second, I’ll consider why some people are always maintaining that William Shakespeare is actually someone else and why they are wrong. Finally, I’ll write about Emilia Bassano, who, though she’s not Shakespeare, is interesting in herself.

That Shakespeare Was a Black Woman

Coslet’s thesis is that William Shakespeare’s works were written by Emilia Bassano, a dark skinned woman of Jewish and Moorish descent. (A “Moor” would not be a black African, but an Arab, probably by way of Spain, not Africa. But we’ll let that pass.) She was the mistress of Henry Carey, Queen Elizabeth’s chamberlain, who was in charge of court entertainments, and the patron of Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. She published a book of her poetry, the first English woman to have done so. (That part is true.)

So Coslet deduces that she was the one who actually wrote the works of William Shakespeare, a male persona she adopted because women were not allowed in that patriarchal era to publish their writings openly. (So how did she get her distinction of being England’s first female published poet?)

Her evidence? Codes and ciphers hidden in the texts. Alleged parallels between her and Shakespeare’s characters. An anagram (the letters in “shakespeare” can be re-arranged to spell “a she speaker”). If you fold Shakespeare’s portrait in a certain way you can sort of see a resemblance with Emilia’s portrait. She had a dream about it.

British author Andrew Doyle has read an advance copy and is incredulous, to the point that he suspects a hoax. In a review for Unherd, he writes,

We should not dismiss the idea that Irene Coslet is a pseudonym for a humorist seeking to excoriate the fraudulence of academics with a monomania for identity politics. The Real Shakespeare is so shoddily written and evidence-free that it seems implausible it would have reached the publication stage unless there was some kind of mischief afoot.

After all, Irene Coslet has no academic or online presence that he could find. He quotes passages that are so ludicrous and ludicrously written that they are unintentionally or maybe intentionally funny.

At any rate, whether this is an example of postmodern scholarship or a satire of that scholarship, since truth is seen not as objective reality but as a construction, that hardly matters. The job of a postmodernist scholar is to construct “plausibility structures” to advance a political agenda, and that is what Irene Coslet–or whoever she is– has done.

So what is the appeal of thinking of Shakespeare as a black woman? Well, the fashion today is to study the great figures of Western culture by interrogating them and revealing their crimes, showing how they are representative of the evils of their day. This is true not only in elite universities but also in primary and secondary schools. But Shakespeare and his plays are so likable! If the bard of Avon turns out to really have been a black woman, that would make it acceptable to like Shakespeare again! That would encourage young people–especially girls and racial minorities–to read literature and pursue degrees in the humanities!

I would be ..glad at efforts to make Shakespeare more sympathetic, but I don’t think Irene Coslet’s effort will be accepted, certainly not among traditional scholars but also not among postmodern scholars. If the latter adopted her view, what would happen to all of the others who have made an industry of showing how racist, sexist, homophobic, and colonialist Shakespeare is? Besides, Coslet leaves another reason to resent him. If she is right, Shakespeare is a Jew! And in today’s academic and youth culture that can outweigh race and gender. Shakespeare is a Zionist! She is responsible for the genocide in Gaza!

Not Believing in the Existence of Shakespeare

OK, I exaggerate. The bigger question is why so many people don’t believe in the existence of William Shakespeare. Dating back to the 19th century, writers have been claiming that the man from Stratford “could not have written those plays” and coming up with alternative figures who must have written them instead. Coslet is not even the first to propose Emilia Bassano.

Other authors don’t get this kind of treatment. The fact is, we have an abundance of historical, documentary evidence on the life of William Shakespeare, more so than for just about any one else in the 16th and early 17th centuries. The portrait in the historical record emerges of someone who is not a flamboyant artiste with a forceful personality crusading for a cause. Rather, he is a quiet, middle class sort of guy from the country, a businessman whose vocation was to write plays for a living. Surely, it is thought, someone so ordinary could not be such a titanic literary genius!

Well, the main arguments against such an ordinary man being able to write such great plays are, to me, the best arguments that he, in fact, did.

It is claimed that the author of such complex works must have been highly educated. The Shakespeare of the records had a decent classical village education, but he never went to the university. Surely, the true author must have distinguished himself at Oxford or Cambridge!

But one thing we know for a fact is that the author of these plays could not have graduated from Oxford or Cambridge. The playwrights who did, such as the second-best playwright of the day Ben Jonson, were all writing works that imitated the drama of the Greeks and Romans. Renaissance higher education was absolutely enamored with classical antiquity. The well-educated playwrights followed the rules of classical drama: that is, they adhered to the unity of time (the action depicted in the play should correspond to length of the play itself, or at most depict a single day); the unity of action (there can only be one plot); and the unity of place (the story must unfold at one fixed location). There were other rules: no violence onstage and characters must be presented with decorum according to their rank.

Shakespeare could write that way–his first play (The Comedy of Errors) and his last (The Tempest) follow the unities. But all of the others break the classical rules, with stories that cover years in the lives of his characters, with multiple plots and subplots, with locations that jump from place to place. He also shows violence onstage and depicts complex characters in ways that defy the classical conventions. All of this is in line with the native dramatic tradition of the Mystery Plays, the Biblical dramas that likewise broke all the classical rules. Well-educated intellectuals looked down their noses at this old-fashioned play-acting of the countryside, but this is what Shakespeare knew.

Another argument is that the author of these plays could not be an ordinary middle class sort. He knows so much about the inner lives of kings and nobles, he must surely be an aristocrat. Or, for Coslet, he knows so much about the inner lives of women, he must be a woman.

Besides neglecting the nature of the imagination, this line of thought makes an even bigger error. The great writers and great artists are nearly all from the middle class! Name an aristocrat in the literary pantheon. Lord Byron. OK, who else? Alfred Lord Tennyson. He was ennobled by Queen Victoria for his work as poet laureate. There were a few, mostly of the very minor nobility, but not many. The thing about Shakespeare is that he can write convincingly about human beings from all walks of life. Aristocrats back then were ensconced in their castles and scorned the vulgar masses who waited upon them. Shakespeare is not like that. An ordinary bloke who has had to work for a living, mingling with the high and low, can best write about the whole range of humanity, as Shakespeare does. He knows so much about human beings because he is a normal human being.

The Real Emilia Bassano

First of all, Coslet has her name wrong. It’s Emilia Bassano (her maiden name) Lanier (her married name). She calls her Emilia Bassano Willoughby, evidently to stress that after her parents died she was brought up in the household of Lord Willoughby where she was educated by the Countess Susan Bertie. Note the obligatory aristocratic connection.

As was said, she became the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain Henry Carey. When she got pregnant, she was married off to a court musician named Alfonso Lanier. So references to her during her lifetime and in scholarly sources call her Emilia Lanier. (The link takes you to her Wikipedia entry under that name.)

When she was with the Lord Chamberlain, what with his involvement in Shakespeare’s company of actors, Emilia Bassano and William Shakespeare may well have known each other. There has long been speculation that she was the mysterious “Dark Lady” that Shakespeare writes about in his sonnets. If she was–and this is contested–this means that it would be unlikely that she would have written about feelings of guilty desire for herself.

It is also contested that Emilia Lanier had a dark complexion. As the Wikipedia entry about her points out, calling a woman “dark” or even “black” (something said of her cousins, but not her) usually meant that she had dark or black hair. This is borne out by existing portraits of her, like the one illustrating this post, which show a young woman with a pale complexion and dark hair.

It is also contested that she was of Jewish stock. We do know that she herself was a Christian. We have the record of her baptism. And the landmark poem that she published is about the crucifixion of Christ. It is entitled Salve Deus Rex Iudæorum. That is, “Hail God, King of the Jews.” The title alludes to the mockery of Jesus (John 19:3) and to Pilate’s inscription on the cross (John 19:19). It confesses the deity of Christ. That she emphasizes that He is king of the Jews may be a reason that she has been assumed to be Jewish. Or it may be an affirmation of her family’s conversion and her personal faith, that she, with her Jewish heritage, acknowledges the crucified Jesus as her God and King.

The long poem, published in 1611, includes a defense of women, citing the women of the Bible and focuses on the women who, unlike the Disciples, did not forsake Jesus when He was being crucified. The poem is touching. You can read it here. But her poetry is nothing like Shakespeare’s. Here is one of her stanzas:

¶ That very Night our Saviour was betrayd,
Oh night! exceeding all the nights of sorrow,
When our most blessed Lord, although dismayd,
Yet would not he one Minutes respite borrow,
But to Mount Oliues went, though sore afraid,
To welcome Night, and entertaine the Morrow;
And as he oft vnto that place did goe,
So did he now, to meet his long nurst woe.

Compare that to a poem by Shakespeare. Let’s honor Emilia Lanier with a Dark Lady sonnet, in which the poet (surely not her) mocks the idealized descriptions of courtly romance, the sort of poems the aristocrats were writing, to praise a real, down-to-earth woman:

SONNET 130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Do you see the difference? Her simplicity vs. Shakespeare’s complexity. Her labored rhythm and rhymes vs. Shakespeare’s musical lines. Nothing against her, but, like everyone else, she just isn’t Shakespeare.

Rather than make her into someone she is not–rather than belie her with false compare–let’s appreciate Emilia Lanier for who she was: a woman who lived a hard, sometimes wayward life, but who confessed Jesus Christ as her Savior and King.

Illustration: Emilia Lanier (1590) by Nicholas Hilliard – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=152747