Judaizing Emilia Lanier: Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

Abstract

In 1973 A.L. Rowse brought Emilia Lanier (née Bassano) to much wider attention by announcing that he had identified her as the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets, though the claim was somewhat deflated when it was discovered that he had misread the word ‘brave’ in Dr Simon Forman’s Casebooks as ‘brown’. There was no evidence that she was ‘dark’ at all, though Rowse attempted to save his argument by emphasising her ‘Italianate’ lineage on Lanier’s father’s side (but ignoring her English mother). Six years later Roger Prior, an early supporter of Rowse, first made the claim that Lanier was in fact of Jewish extraction, the Bassano family having first moved to northern Italy (and adopted the name of the town where they settled) to escape persecution; and that they then moved to England, finding employment as royal musicians, but hiding their Jewish faith. For Prior this seems mainly to have bolstered the ‘Dark Lady’ thesis; the evidence for it was circumstantial at best, but he kept adding to and adjusting his claim for the next fifteen years until he and the musicologist David Lasocki brought out The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians in England, 1531-1665 (1995). With this Prior’s case became widely accepted, being repeated in the Dictionary of National Biography and elsewhere. A number of Italian scholars, including Giulio Ongaro, Alessio Ruffatti and Stefano Pio had in fact already challenged it on several grounds, most notably that it misrepresented the actual situation of Jews in Northern Italy in the early Sixteenth Century, that none of the documentation required of converted Jews in Venice had ever been associated with the Bassanos, and that the family could be traced back in the region to a time before the major migrations of Jews from (in particular) the Iberian peninsula from which Prior latterly claimed they came. But this has made little mainstream headway and the argument that Lanier either was, or could have been, of Jewish derivation is rarely challenged. And it has been made the basis of several highly questionable readings of her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a work of pious Protestant orthodoxy only unusual in its proto-feminist perspective. It has been the basis of increasingly extreme claims that Jewish heritage was central to Lanier’s identity (her ‘Jewish’ father died when she was only seven), that she passed on Hebrew scholarship to the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and indeed that she wrote the plays of Shakespeare. This essay is an attempt to put that genie back in the bottle.