Mini: Aemilia Bassano Lanyer, the Proto-Feminist Poet of Shakespeare's Time

In today's episode, we are exploring the life of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Aemilia Bassano Lanyer (whose name is also spelled as Emilia Lanier), who was one of the first women in England to publish her writing and is the author of the first published book of poetry by an English woman. 

First, we will explore Aemilia's early life before discussing her groundbreaking volume of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. We will talk about what is known of the rest of Aemilia's life before giving a brief overview of what she is most known for today: her possible ties to William Shakespeare.

Kourtney Smith (KS): Welcome to another Shakespeare Anyone mini-episode! In these mini-episodes, we’ll be exploring topics that are related to Shakespeare but aren’t necessarily connected to whatever play we’ve been discussing. 

Elyse Sharp (ES): And they’re mini, because, well, they’re shorter than our other episodes. They’re like quartos if the regular episodes are folio editions.  

KS: In today’s episode, we’ll be talking about Shakespeare’s contemporary, Aemilia Bassano Lanyer, who was one of the first women in England to publish her writing and is the author of the first published book of poetry by an English woman. 

ES: Aemilia Bassano was born in late January 1569 and was baptized at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate in London on January 27. She was the daughter of Baptist Bassano and his common-law wife, Margaret Johnson. Not much is known about Margaret, though she may have been an aunt of the Elizabethan court composer, Robert Johnson, who also worked with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s theatrical troupe.

KS: Aemilia’s father, Baptist, was an Italian (and possibly Jewish) immigrant who came to England from Venice with his four brothers. The Bassano brothers all became musicians in the English court. Baptist’s first performance at court was for the coronation of Edward VI in 1574, and he continued to serve as a court musician in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. 

ES: When Aemilia was seven years old, her father died, and Aemilia went to live in the household of Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent. Scholars are unsure if Aemilia was fostered in the Countess of Kent’s household or if she was a servant, as there is no conclusive evidence to either possibility. However, it was in this aristocratic household that Aemilia received a Protestant and humanist education at the direction of the Countess of Kent’s mother, Catharine Bertie, Duchess of Suffolk. When Aemilia was 12, her education was cut short as Susan Bertie left the English court. 

KS: Aemilia then went to live with Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, and Margaret's daughter, Lady Anne Clifford, possibly as a tutor and companion for Lady Anne. Aemilia would later write of the Cliffords’ scholarly and predominately female home in her poem The Description of Cook-ham, which is the first country-house poem published in English.

ES: Aemilia’s mother, Margaret, died in 1587 when Aemilia was 18. Shortly after, Aemilia became the mistress of Henry Carey,  The 1st Baron Hunsdon, a courtier and cousin of Queen Elizabeth I. Carey was the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain and the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, William Shakespeare’s theatre company. Carey was also sixty-two-years’ old when he took eighteen-year-old Aemilia to be his mistress.

KS: As his mistress, Aemilia received 40 pounds a year as an allowance from Carey and records indicate that he provided her with a life of luxury. When Aemilia was 23, she became pregnant–presumably with Carey’s child, though their arrangement may not have been exclusive. Carey paid Aemilia off with a sum of money and arranged for her to marry her first cousin once removed, Alfonso Lanyer, who like Aemilia’s father, was part of a family of court musicians.

ES: Aemilia and Alfonso were married on October 18, 1592. At the time of their marriage, Aemilia was independently wealthy due to the money and gifts of jewels from Carey (and possibly other courtiers, and reportedly the queen), as well as a 100 pound dowry left to her in her father’s will. Aemilia gave birth to a son in 1593, who she named Henry (presumably after Henry Carey), and five years later gave birth to a daughter with Alfonso Lanyer, named Odillya, who died in infancy. 

KS: Much of what we know about Aemilia’s personal life during her early adulthood comes from the medical diary of Simon Forman, an astrologer and fortune teller. Aemilia met with Forman multiple times in 1597 while her husband was away in service of the Earl of Essex during the Islands Voyage naval campaign against the Spanish armada. Forman took detailed notes on Aemilia because he found her attractive and tried to use their sessions to figure out if she would be interested in a sexual relationship with him. Meanwhile, Aemilia’s purpose for visiting Forman was to try and learn if her husband, Alfonso, would be knighted for his service to Essex and therefore, she would become a lady. 

ES: Forman’s notes on Aemilia show that she was an ambitious woman who was eager to gain entry into the gentry class and who was anxious about financial security. Forman details that Aemilia seemed to have enjoyed her arrangement with Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, and was happier as Carey’s mistress than as Bassano’s wife, saying “a nobleman that is ded hath Loved her well & kept her and did maintain her longe but her husband hath delte hardly with her and spent and consumed her goods and she is nowe... in debt."

KS: Aemilia stopped visiting Forman shortly after he started to actively pursue a sexual relationship with her, and the relationship appears to have ended on a sour note in late 1597. Aemilia reached out to Forman at least once more in 1600 when her husband was away again with Essex, however Forman’s notes indicate that he did not appreciate the contact, and it is unknown if they actually met again as she does not appear in his casebooks after 1600.

ES: Years later, in 1611, at the age of 42, Aemilia published her volume of poetry entitled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. The volume, printed by Valentine Simmes for Richard Bonian, was the first substantial volume of poetry to be published with a female author’s full name on the title page. As we mentioned earlier, it also included the first known published country house poem, The Description of Cooke-ham.

KS: Additionally, the volume contains nine dedications written in prose and verse, all of which are addressed to prominent women, in an attempt to gain patronage (it was typical for patrons to pay two pounds per dedication). Thus, the volume also makes Aemilia the first English woman to overtly seek patronage as a professional poet, and distinctively, she sought support exclusively from other women. 

ES: The prominent women to whom Aemilia dedicated her poetry and from whom she sought patronage include: 

• Members of the royal household: Queen Consort Anne of Denmark, Lady Elizabeth Stuart (daughter of King James I and Queen Anne), Lady Arabella Stuart (cousin of King James I), and Lady Katherine Howard (Countess of Suffolk and lady-in-waiting to Anne of Denmark)

• Women who had previously provided patronage to Aemilia: Susan Bertie (Countess of Kent, who Emillia lived with until the age of 12) and Lady Margaret Clifford (Countess of Cumberland) and Lady Anne Clifford (Countess of Dorset), who Aemilia also lived with and whose home at Cooke-ham would also be praised by Aemilia. 

• Major arts patrons:  Lady Lucy Russell (Countess of Bedford, who was a patron of Ben Johnson) and Lady Mary Sidney (Countess Dowager of Pembroke and patron of poets and playwrights).

KS: According to Oxford Bibliographies and scholar A. Eliza Greenstadt, Aemilia’s dedication to Lady Mary Sidney, entitled The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke, is the earliest surviving poem in English that was “written by a female author in praise of another woman’s literary achievements.” That’s a lot of firsts in just the publishing and front material of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. 

ES: The rest of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum contains the title poem, the country house poem The Description of Cooke-ham, and a prose address to any doubtful readers. The title poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, is the longest poem in the volume. The title translates to “Hail God, King of the Jews,” and the poem focuses on the events of Jesus’s crucifixion through a female point of view. It re-examines the role of men and women in original sin and their roles in the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ministry of Jesus; the men surrounding Jesus are depicted as ineffective, dull, and untrustworthy while the women are compassionate, faithful, and perceptive.

KS: In the most famous subsection of the poem, called “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women,” Lanyer shines a spotlight on a minor character from the gospels, the wife of Pontius Pilate who, in Lanyer’s version, reasonably pleads with her husband to spare the life of Jesus. This is a stark contrast to medieval portrayals of Pilate’s wife, which depicted the unnamed woman as a parallel to Eve who is similarly duped by the devil. 

ES: In “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women,” Lanyer makes Pilate’s wife the speaker of the poem, delivering a reasoned argument to her husband against crucifying Jesus in which she reframes Eve’s role in the Fall of Humanity. It’s important to note that in this title, apology means defense or justification of something that others criticize, not an admission of error. 

KS: Through the voice of Pilate’s wife, Lanyer argues that in the Garden of Eden, Eve would have had no concept of death or deception, and therefore would have been completely unable to understand what was at stake when she ate from the Tree of Knowledge. However, Lanyer argues, since Adam was the perfect man who was created by God to be lord of the entire earth, he should have, and must have, known better. Lanyer places the fault of original sin not in the taking of the fruit but in the awareness of it being forbidden and still taking it. Thus, Lanyer absolves Eve of wrongdoing and places the blame for original sin on Adam who had to have knowingly and willingly committed sin. In this, Lanyer uses the misogynistic stereotype of women being intellectually inferior and weaker-willed compared to men to point out how unstable the idea of male supremacy is.

ES: Lanyer continues to argue that everything Eve did was done in the quest for knowledge and understanding, which should be seen as a worthwhile motivation for Renaissance humanists. Lanyer also turns this into an argument against male superiority, using it as evidence that whatever knowledge men have was obtained for them by women; women are the source of all human knowledge and of the sophistication which men pride themselves on. The speaker continues on to claim that whatever guilt women bore for original sin was canceled out by men’s complicity in the crucifixion of Jesus and eventually calls for the end of female subordination and a new era of gender equality. 

KS: These proto-feminist arguments, and the focus of the volume on women as patrons, were revolutionary in the Jacobean era. Unfortunately, there is no surviving evidence that Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was influential or received any recognition in Lanyer’s lifetime or that any of her intended patrons did actually pay her for her work. Only one edition of  Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was printed in Lanyer’s lifetime, and her work remained largely forgotten until the late 20th century. 

ES: In 1613, two years after the publication of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Aemilia’s husband Alfonso died, after which her financial status worsened. Alfonso had received a patent from King James I which had allowed him to receive money for every load of hay and straw brought into London and Westminster. However, Aemilia signed this patent over to her brother-in-law, Innocent, upon Alfonso’s death, expecting to still receive half of the profits–more on that later. 

KS: In 1617, Aemilia opened a school for children of nobility in St. Giles in the Field, an affluent suburb. However, disputes with her landlord over the price of rent led to Aemilia being arrested twice between 1617 and 1619. After this, parents were unwilling to send their children to be taught by a woman with Aemilia’s arrest record, so she closed the school in 1620.

ES: Aemilia’s son Henry died in October 1633, leaving behind a wife and two children. Court records indicate that Aemilia helped raise and provide for her two grandchildren, which would have put further strain on her finances. Two years after Henry’s death, in 1635, Aemilia sued her brother-in-law for money owed to her for her portion of the profits on the hay and straw patent. She claimed that she was owed half but had only received 8 pounds in the 22 years since she had signed over the patent rights. Innocent had since signed over the patent to another brother, Clement, which further complicated the legal case.

KS: Charles I ruled in Aemilia’s favor, requiring Clement to pay her 20 pounds a year. However, Clement was unable to pay this right away, and Aemilia brought the case back to the privy court two more times, in 1636 and 1638, to get Clement to pay up. While there are no records that indicate if she ever received the full amount she was owed, at the time of her death, Aemilia was described as a pensioner, or someone who receives a regular income. Aemilia Bassano Lanyer died at age 76 and was buried on April 3, 1645 in Clerkenwell, London.

ES: In recent years, Aemilia Bassano Lanyer has most often been discussed not because of her own works but because of her possible ties to William Shakespeare. In 1973, Shakespeare scholar A.L. Rowse proposed the idea that Lanyer was the “Dark Lady” to whom Sonnets 127-152 are addressed. This was based on Rowse’s misreading of astrologer Simon Forman’s diary entries that describe meetings with Aemilia. Forman wrote of Lanyer being “brave in youth” which Rowse misread as “brown in youth.” This misreading and the details Forman included in his casebook of Lanyer’s sexual history (and Forman’s own sexual desire and frustrations towards Lanyer) led Rowse to conclude that Lanyer was a prime candidate for Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. Even after acknowledging his misreading of Forman, Rowse continued to assert his opinion of the Dark Lady’s identity. 

KS: Additionally, as with many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Lanyer is considered by some of those who engage with the Shakespeare Authorship Question to be a possible candidate for being the person who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. As recently as August 2024, a New York Times best-selling author released a novel that entertains this idea.

ES: We here at Shakespeare Anyone would like to take a moment to note that no surviving documentary evidence suggests that Shakespeare and Lanyer knew each other, though their social and professional circles may have had some overlap, especially with Lanyer being the mistress of the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men during her early adulthood. Most scholars agree that the Dark Lady (along with the Fair Youth) of the Sonnets is a construct born of Shakespeare’s imagination and cannot be identified as a real person. 

KS: And of course, most scholars (and we) agree that William Shakespeare, guy from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote his plays, and it is classist to think otherwise. 

ES: It’s also not feminist to disregard the very real accomplishments of Aemilia Bassano Lanyer because someone thinks it would be cool if she was the author of Hamlet. Instead, she should be remembered and celebrated for the groundbreaking, proto-feminist work that was published under her own name during her lifetime.

KS: And that’s Aemilia Lanyer! 

ES: Thank you for listening.

Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.

Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.

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Works referenced:

Benson, Pamela. ‘Emilia Lanier’, A Critical Introduction to the Casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634, https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/using-the-casebooks/meet-the-patients/emilia-lanier, accessed 6 October 2024.

Cooley, Ron. “Aemilia Lanyer  Biographical Introduction.” Aemilia Lanyer, Biographical Introduction, University of Saskatchewan English Department, 8 Aug. 1998, drc.usask.ca/projects/emet/phoenix/lanyerbio.htm.

Greenstadt, A. Eliza . "Aemilia Lanyer". In obo in Renaissance and Reformation. 6 Oct. 2024. <https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0434.xml>.

Grossman, Marshall, editor. Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon. 1st ed., University Press of Kentucky, 1998. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jkm3. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.

Lanyer, Aemilia. “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” Edited by Risa S. Bear, Renascence Editions , Luminarium/The Univeristy of Oregon, 21 Nov. 2009, www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/lanyer1.html.

Lanyer, Aemilia. “The Description of Cooke-Ham.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2024, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50661/the-description-of-cooke-ham. 

McBride, Kari Boyd (2008) Web Page Dedicated to Aemilia Lanyer Archived 25 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine, accessed on 06 Oct. 2024

McDonough, M.G., host. “More than the Dark Lady: Aemelia Lanyer’s “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women.” The Classic English Literature Podcast, season 1, episode 65, 05 May 2024. https://theclassicenglishliteraturepodcast.buzzsprout.com/2024786/episodes/15012587-more-than-the-dark-lady-aemilia-lanyer-s-eve-s-apology-in-defense-of-women. Accessed 05 October 2024.

Teysko, Heather, host. “Amelia Lanier: England’s first Female English Poet.” Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors, season 1, episode 220, 10 January 2024. https://www.englandcast.com/podcast-archive/. Accessed 05 October 2024.