APPEARING IN APRIL 2014 FROM AMBERLEY PRESS (UK)

SHAKESPEARE’S
DARK LADY
‘Well researched, fascinating and thought provoking.’
(Kirkus Review) shakespeare dark lady

‘Amelia Bassano Lanier is an amazing character and well

worth the study.’ (Mark Rylance). shakespeare dark lady

‘Controversial and provocative, this well researched

and wide ranging book represents a legitimate new area
for scholarship.’ (Dr Catherine M.S. Alexander, Fellow, The
Shakespeare Institute, was formerly Secretary of the
International Shakespeare Association. She is co-editor with
Stanley Wells of Shakespeare & Race and Shakespeare &
Sexuality, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays, and editor of the
Cambridge Shakespeare Library). shakespeare dark lady

‘This research is absolutely fascinating and supported by a huge amount of documentary

evidence.’ (Dr William Green was formerly Professor of English Queen’s College, CUNY, and is
past President of the International Federation for Theatre Research, and Secretary of the
American Society for Theatre Research.He is co-editor of Elizabethan Drama).shakespeare dark
lady

‘the circumstances of Amelia’s life, the knowledge she could have picked up from them, and
aspects of her own writings all fit numerous features of the plays well.’
(Dr David Lasocki is a music historian, who previously taught at Indiana University and is the
co-author with Roger Prior of the biography The Bassanos). shakespeare dark lady

SCROLL DOWN TO
READ A FREE EXCERPT! shakespeare dark
lady shakespeare dark lady
‘Marvelous and revolutionary. I read it with awe and
reverence and a feeling of real excitement in my guts.’
(Vicky McMahon, Lecturer, Drama Department,
University of Winnipeg).

‘the case for Amelia Bassano Lanier is as plausible as

Shakespeare’s.’(Michael Posner, ‘Rethinking
Shakespeare’, The Queen’s Quarterly, summer 2008).
‘Through his ample research and scholarly probing of the canon, John Hudson has unearthed
fascinating evidence that the poet Amelia Bassano Lanier had a hand in crafting what we
know as Shakespeare's plays.’(Professor Andrew B. Harris was formerly Chair of Theatre at
Columbia University. He is a playwright and theatre historian.) shakespeare dark lady
shakespeare dark lady
‘These insights could open new and breathtaking performance avenues for professional
companies and a multitude of possibilities for academic researchers.’
(Professor Kelly Morgan was formerly Chair of Theatre at Case Western Reserve University and
is the founder of the Mint Theatre Company). shakespeare dark lady shakespeare dark lady

‘Your scholarship, research and willingness to put it on the line and on its feet makes your
efforts rare and totally worthy of applause---it is valuable and exciting.’
(Dr Jack Wann is professor Emeritus, and former Chair of Theatre, at Northwestern State
University. He teaches Shakespeare at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts).

‘What an amazing story! This meticulous and thoughtful research is groundbreaking. Its
'radical reading' suggests that 'William Shakespeare' was actually the nom de plume of a woman
living in Queen Elizabeth's Court. We have to re-think everything we know about Shakespeare.’
(Dr Jane Gabin has written two books restoring the reputations of forgotten women writers).
Full KIRKUS REVIEW
Hudson’s first book is a scholarly examination of the ongoing debate about the authorship of the
works of William Shakespeare. Hudson argues that an obscure but talented woman named Amelia
Bassano Lanier—posited to be both Shakespeare’s “dark lady” of the sonnets and a “secret Jew”—was
in the right place at the right time, and had the right skills and knowledge, to be the true creator of
classics such as Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing . Regardless of one’s opinion on the subject of
the Bard’s works and their provenance, this book is a smart, wide-ranging examination of the
societyand circumstances of the 16th and 17th centuries. Subjects covered include Shakespearean
scholarship itself (and its methods), life in late Renaissance London and the British royal court, English
theater, plagues, gender, religion, intellectual life and a great deal more. Hudson argues that
Shakespeare’s plays, like Lanier’s work, are highly critical of Christianity, that they reflect her travels
(including a journey to Denmark) and that Lanier—like Shakespeare—is said to have undertaken a
brief career as a schoolteacher. That Lanier had so much of the same background as Shakespeare
supports Hudson’s theory; that she had even more of the necessary background than the Bard did (as
a musician, a law clerk, etc.) makes Hudson’s case even more compelling. Even if Lanier didn’t write the
works of Shakespeare, she is a notable person in her own right. Exhaustively documented, with a
lengthy bibliography and full index, the volume is clearly written and makes a deeply intriguing case for
its thesis. Although many readers will take exception to its ideas from the very beginning (not everyone
agrees that the generally known biography of Shakespeare makes him “superhuman” or his efforts
“impossible”), Hudson’s historical sleuthing and careful speculation make the Lanier theory at least as
plausible as most of the others (from Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon on
down). With graphics that include a “knowledge map” of which candidates might have been able to
write which plays and symmetry analyses of some of the major works, the book advances these ideas
concisely and with great rhetorical conviction. Well-researched, fascinating and thought-provoking.
EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER TWO

In the next chapters we

will examine the
extraordinary
knowledge possessed
by the major author of
the Shakespearean
works, the extent to
which this is matched
by the Man from
Stratford and other
claimants, and we will
then evaluate the fit of
a new candidate,
Amelia Bassano Lanier.
However, to establish
the background, it is
important to reflect on
the character of
Elizabethan London as
an early modern city,
how the entire
Government and the
Court operated as a
kind of theatre without walls, and in which courtiers were ‘dissemblers’ or actors performing
roles. We know that the early history plays in particular show especial knowledge of both the
Court, and of Tudor family history. So the nature of Court life is a good starting point, since
Amelia Bassano’s relationship with certain key individuals at Court, including Lord Willoughby,
Countess Susan Bertie, and Lord Hundson, gave her unusual insight into the stagecraft that
permeated Court affairs. Reflecting the sequence of illustrations in this book, we begin with a
perspective on London itself, then focus on the Government and the Court, and then go even
deeper to identify some key individuals.

Elizabethan London was a crowded, hectic, city of about 200,000 inhabitants, compressed into a
tiny area stretching along the river from the power center of Westminster Abbey and Whitehall
Palace in the west to St. Pauls and the Tower of London in the east. The Strand was the city’s
luxury district of goldsmiths, jewellers and clock makers and this was where the greatest nobles
had their mansions, with gardens running down to the river. The Thames was the main route
through the center of the city, populated by fleets of boats, including water taxis that would take
you from one side of the river to another. This saved the need to use London Bridge, decorated
as it was with dozens of black, boiled heads of traitors hanging on spears which can still be seen
sticking out from the roof of the gatehouse in Claes Visscher’s famous engraving. Facing St
Pauls Cathedral was Bankside, South London’s entertainment district, offering bear baiting,
numerous brothels and the Rose Theatre.

The other popular entertainment

district, Shoreditch, with its two
purpose built theatres the Curtain
and the Theatre---each with the
capacity of a modern Broadway
theatre-- lay north of the City walls.
These theatres were in some ways
the predecessor of today’s mass
media---places in which plays, at
least those which had passed the
censors, could be produced by local
companies and offer an alternative
reality to the State corporate
theatre of pageantry and church
sermons.

Today, the nearest we can get to a

street in pre-industrial London
might be a bazaar in the more remote parts of Asia. The streets were stinking and slippery, with
not just horse droppings underfoot but the refuse of pigs and goats who wandered down the
streets, and the contents of chamber pots thrown out of the windows of nearby houses onto
those below. The streets were packed with people, with carts, men on horses, large crowds of
boys playing football, musicians, contortionists, acrobats, female impersonators, dwarfs, giants,
men with talking chickens, people selling everything imaginable in tiny quantities, butchers
slaughtering animals in the street, and stalls like those found today at country fairs. Every street
swarmed with beggars, lunatics, peddlers, prostitutes, shouting and jostling and trying to get
each other’s attention. The theatrical pretences of Court life were mirrored, just in a less
glamorous form, on the streets. In addition to commonplace inhabitants, the street was
populated with ‘Abraham men’ pretending to have mental illness, ‘Whipjacks’ who pretended to
have lost everything at sea, ‘Counterfeit Cranks’ who feign epilepsy, ‘Walking Mortes’ who
pretend to be widows, and a whole rowdy rabble of amputees, ‘conycatchers’ and confidence
tricksters. In Elizabethan London, a fabulously wealthy elite lived cheek by jowl next to the
desperately poor who they kept in their place through a mixture of religion, propaganda, threats
of torture and State theatrics……