Art Drop | Who is the “Dark Lady”? Shakespeare’s Plausible Plagiarism of Amelia Bassano Lanier | Dropped by Kurimeo Ahau
“the Case for AMELIA BASSANO LANIER is as PLAUSIBLE as Shakespeare’s”
(‘RETHINKING SHAKESPEARE’ The Queen’s Quarterly, 2008)
Who is the “dark lady”?
Hundreds of years of searching for the author of the plays reached a climax when the Dark Lady Players put forward an innovative new solution. Our methodologies suggested they were written by the so-called ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets, Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645). The first woman to publish a book of original poetry, she came from a family of Venetian Jews and was the long-term mistress to the man in charge of the English theater.
Our work soon led her to be listed as one of the leading authorship candidates with the Shakespearean Authorship Trust. In October 2009 Amelia Bassano Lanier; A New Paradigm, a major article on our Dark Lady, appeared in a special issue of the Shakespearean authorship journal, The Oxfordian, focused on the top candidates.