Portrait by Nicholas Hilliard
By John Hudson
Aemilia Lanyer (Also known as Amelia Bassano Lanier) [1] is a controversial figure. The traditional approach to constructing her biography typically takes literary history and gender theory as its disciplinary boundaries. Within these contexts, the basic facts of her biography, which are a matter of record are included. The more speculative aspects are ignored: Aemilia’s Jewish background, so that she is modeled as a representative Protestant gentlewoman; that, therefore, her religious poetry is unexceptional; and evidence from other fields particularly the possibility of any Shakespeare associations. This conservative view generates the conclusion that her poetry is merely a “work of somewhat long-winded piety” as John Buxton concluded in 1954 when he discovered her writings.[2] To this may be added the recognition that she was England’s first feminist poet and one of the earliest women in Great Britain to publish a book of original poetry.[3]
In this female biography, however, an inter-disciplinary approach is adopted which takes additional fields into account, including Jewish history, the sociology of knowledge, religious, and Shakespeare studies. It emphasizes Lanyer’s family background as Marrano Jews passing as Protestants, her social networks, sees her writing as exceptional, and considers her relationship to Shakespeare and other texts. This approach seeks to engage a wider range of audiences of different interests and persuasions, than the traditional approach.
In 1569, Aemilia was born into the Bassano family, who had moved from Venice in 1538 to work for King Henry VIII as his Recorder troupe. They are likely to have been Marrano Jews, since the Catholic Inquisition, outwardly Protestant but practicing Judaism in secret– since the family originally had an anti-Semitic nickname, intermarried with known Jewish families, distributed heretical books, and defended a public meeting space that later became the first synagogue in London after the Restoration in 1660. Aemilia was educated from the age of 7 by Countess Susan Bertie, who was part of the extended Willoughby family, a highly educated and literate family of Protestant reformers. Her poetry shows she had read Gower, Chaucer, Ovid, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Agrippa, De Pizan, Margurite of Navarre, Mary Sidney, Anne Locke (1530-1590), among other writers. In addition, Lanyer’s country house poem titled ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ draws upon Horace’s tradition of praising the country life, as well as Virgil’s First Eclogue which provides the model of a dedication to a place.
For nearly a decade, Aemilia was mistress to Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain who in addition to being a judge, a general, and the Royal Falconer, was responsible for the English theater and court entertainments. In 1594 he became patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men which performed the Shakespearean plays. The Bassanos’ Venetian background, her reading of the poetry of Veronica Franco and other factors suggest to Pamela Benson that “Lanyer behaved like an honest courtesan” on the Italian model, who provided Lord Hunsdon with the sophisticated cultural skills in poetry and music that he himself lacked.[4] Maureen Duff’s (2011) suggestion that Lanyer is shown in a poem by Greene as having an affair with Christopher Marlowe, deserves to be considered.[5] Whether Lanyer was also the author of Willobie His Avisa (1594) and whether her experience with Lord Hunsdon is recorded in that poem, also remains to be discussed.
After leaving Court, Lanyer does not appear in the records again until the early 1600s when she was a member of the household of the Countess of Cumberland, and had some role in the education of young Anne Clifford. Her exact position has to be inferred but could have ranged from being a musical companion to some kind of pedagogical function. Lanyer’s later work as a school teacher suggests she would have been equipped to take on some kind of tutoring.
In 1609 Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published, and historian A.L. Rowse (1973 and 1978) proposed an inter-disciplinary view that Lanyer was the ‘dark lady’ mentioned therein.[6] This identification initiated Lanyer studies, and since then many alternative candidates have been suggested. Rowse’s identification was widely rejected at the time as having insufficient evidence, although Martin Green (2006) has reaffirmed it, with greater factual support.[7] Some scholars argue that the potential relationship to the Sonnets should be considered, not in isolation, but as part of Lanyer’s broader relationship to the entire Shakespeare canon.
In 1610 Lanyer published Salve Deus, one of the earliest books of poetry to be published by a woman in the United Kingdom. This passed the censors because it appears on the surface to be a volume of devotional religious poetry similar to that being written by Protestant women of the period. Traditional critics like Woods have claimed that Lanyer’s work is purely Protestant on far-fetched grounds such as when growing up, the daughter of her next-door neighbors married a radical Protestant, and that she was educated by someone whose parents were radical Protestants.[8]
Underneath the surface however, Salve Deus can be considered as a complex rewriting of the Passion Narrative and the Book of Revelation that seems less a work of devotion than a highly dramatic work of Biblical exegesis which envisions a post-Apocalyptic world. Modern readers like Guibbory (1998)[9], Molekamp (2012)[10], Roberts (2005)[11] and Richey (1997)[12] who have examined its theology, have detected a highly transgressive sub-text which subverts Pauline authority and revises “the fundamental Christian myths: Eden, the Passion of Christ, the Communion of Saints” (Lewalski, 1993).[13] Achsah Guibbory ‘The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred’ (1998) gives some detailed instances: Lanyer is assuming a quasi-priestly role, her work constitutes an “oppositional alternative” to the King James Bible, the Gospel is not the word of God. Guibbory concludes that the work is “radically at odds” with the values of the Church of England, which is not surprising considering her family background as a Marrano Jew,
Gary Kuchar (2007) argues that the poetry seems to borrow from multiple denominational perspectives, and provides an unusual, even exceptional mixture of traditions, some Protestant, some pre-Reformation, and some not found in any Christian denomination at all.[14] Roberts concludes that Salve Deus “subverted the Genesis narrative in a daring manner unique among her contemporaries,” and that Lanyer’s reading of the Tree of Knowledge “does not concur with any orthodox Christian tradition”. Other commentators suggest that the writer of Salve Deus was not truly committed to any of these Christian traditions at all.
While traditional critics see the form of her work as unexceptional, similar to that of other women Protestant writers, several contemporary readers dispute this. Salve Deus is exceptionally long,[15]was written seeking patronage, obtained publication, and is addressed to a community of noble women. White (2003)[16] notes that Lanyer’s work “clearly deviates from normative praise of Elizabethan women”; Guibbory’s reading is that “it is hardly a conventional modestly pious poem for a woman”. Lynette McGrath (2002) observes, “although the title of Lanyer’s poem suggests a fairly straight-forward project of Christian praise…the work itself deviates considerably from the conventional norms for women’s sacred poetry”. [17]
In her later life, Lanyer lived in poverty, and became one of the earliest women in England to own and operate a school. Large gaps remain in her biography however. Some commentators are addressing these within an inter-disciplinary approach that also takes the Shakespeare canon into account. A.L.Rowse’s provocative suggestion about the Sonnets has been modified by writers like Martin Green. More straightforward is the proposal by Roger Prior (a lecturer in English at Queens University, Belfast), that Lanyer influenced specific Shakespearean plays, including Titus Andronicus, Othello and Merchant of Venice. In his family biography The Bassanos (1995), Roger Prior concluded,“It seems likely that Emilia Bassano influenced Shakespeare’s work in some fundamental ways”. [18] For instance, Prior (2008) identified references in Othello to the family’s hometown of Bassano, as well as the appearance of members of her family in the text.[19] Variations on Lanyer’s name also appear across the two Venetian plays, in each case associated with the Ovidian image of the great poet, a swan who dies in music. Melchiori (1982) in an article in Shakespeare Survey has argued that the character Emilia in Othello expresses onstage what has been called the ‘first feminist manifesto’, which is compatible with Lanyer’s own views.[20] Dorothea Kehler (1991) specifically finds similarities between Lanyer’s feminist sensibility and sense of female community, and the views of several Emilia characters in the plays.[21] In addition to shared feminist viewpoints, there are also many similarities between her poetry and the plays of literary technique, use of sources, structure, rare words, and a common use of Biblical typology.
Ilya Gililov (2003) hinted at a possible explanation, namely that the writer of Salve Deus was also a co-author of some of the Shakespearean canon.[22] Salve Deus demonstrates that Lanyer knew the plays of Daniel and Lyly, that her use of sources matches the Shakespearean plays, that she had access to the social networks and situations to acquire the rare knowledge found in those plays, and makes use of at least two Shakespearean works.[23] The innovative rewriting of the New Testament in Salve Deus has some resemblances to the reworking of the Gospels and the Book of Revelation found in the allegorical level of the plays. This possibility was addressed in depth by John Hudson in his biography, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady (2014).[24] A review by David Lasocki in ‘The Bassano Family, The Recorder, and William Shakespeare’ (December 2015) , judges that Hudson’s case for Lanyer’s involvement in writing the plays is “surprising”, “excellent” and “persuasive” concluding that “The circumstances of Emilia’s life, the knowledge she could have picked up from them, and aspects of her own writings all fit numerous features of the plays and poems well”.[25]
The scholarly debate continues, while Lanyer’s poetry is taught, read, and considered within the emerging narrative of Women’s Intellectual History.
[1] Spelling was not standardized at this period in England. Her volume of poetry is published under the name ‘AEmilia Lanyer’ in which the first two letters are capitalized and merged. Her baptismal record calls her ‘Emilia’. Her mother’s will calls her ‘Emelia’. Her medical records refer to her as ‘Lanier’, which is the spelling favored by historians of members of that family such as the musician Nicholas Lanier. In the first modern edition of her work A.L.Rowse refers to her as ‘Emilia Lanier’. Some modern sources, beginning with the biography by Woods in 1999 include her original family name ‘Bassano’, and others modernize ‘AEmilia’ to Aemilia or Amelia.
[2] John Buxton Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London Macmillan: 1954)
[3] Suzanne Woods, (ed.) The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer; Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Women Writers in English 1350-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
[4] Pamela Benson, ‘The Stigma of Italy Undone: Aemilia Lanyer’s Canonization of Lady Mary Sidney’ in (ed.) Pamela J. Benson and Victoria Kirkham Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France and Italy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
[5] Maureen Duff, ‘Marlowe and the Dark Lady’ September 15, 2011. Downloaded on 8 April 2015 from http://marlowe-shakespeare.blogspot.com/2011/09/marlowe-and-dark-lady-by-maureen-duff.html
[6] A. L. Rowse ‘Revealed at Last, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady’ The Times (London, England) 29 January 1973:12 and The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978).
[7] Martin Green ‘Emilia Lanier IS the Dark Lady of the Sonnets’ English Studies 87, 5 (2006) 544-576.
[8] Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 7.
[9] Achsah Guibbory, ‘The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred,’ in (ed.) Marshall Grossman Aemelia Lanyer: Gender,Genre and the Canon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998).
[10] Femke Molekamp, “Reading Christ the Book in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611): Iconography and the Cultures of Reading’. Studies in Philology. 109,3(2012) 311-332
[11] Wendy Roberts, ‘Gnosis in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’ Rocky Mountain Review 59,2 (2005)11-18.
[12] Esther Gilman Richey ‘”To Undoe the Booke”: Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer and The Subversion Of Pauline Authority’ English Literary Renaissance 27,1 (1997)106-128.
[13] Barbara K, Lewalski, ‘Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer’ in Cedric Clive Brown Patronage Politics And Literary Tradition in England, 1588-1658 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993)78.
[14] Gary Kuchar ‘Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon: Theology and Iconography in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’ English Literary Renaissance 27 (2007) 47-73
[15] The main poem (1840 lines) is perhaps eight times the length of all Mary Sidney’s work.
Lanyer’s entire book of poetry is about 2,500 lines, about the length of a short Shakespeare play, which demonstrates sustained literary capacity. The only longer, unpublished, collection of women’s poetry was Elizabeth Melville’s at 4,500 lines, of which her ‘Any Godly Dream’ poem was 480 lines. Isabella Whitney’s published ‘Sweet Nosegay’ is just over 400 lines. Anne Locke’s sonnet sequence is 364 lines. The adaptation of a French prose chronicle, the 2,400 line poem ‘The French History’ published in 1589 by Ann Dowriche in Cornwall, contains more lines than Salve Deus, however the line lengths are much shorter.
[16] Micheline White, ‘A woman with Saint Peter’s Keys?: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the Priestly Gifts of Women’ Criticism 45,3(2003) 323-341.
[17] Lynette McGrath, ‘The Feminist Subject: Idealization and Subversive Metaphor in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’ in Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 209-249.
[18] David Lasocki and Roger Prior, The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument makers in England 1531–1665, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).
[19] Roger Prior, ’Shakespeare’s Visit to Italy’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies 9 (2008) 1–31.
[20] Giorgio Melchiori ‘The Rhetoric of Character Construction;Othello’, Shakespeare Survey 34 (1982)61-72.
[21] Dorothea Kehler, ‘Shakespeare’s Emilias and the Politics of Celibacy’, in (ed.) D. Kehler and S. Baker Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1991).
[22] Ilya Gililov, The Shakespeare Game: The Mystery of the Great Phoenix (New York: Algora Press, 2003).
[23] Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 205
[24] John Hudson, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier: The Woman
Behind Shakespeare’s Plays? (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2014).
[25] David Lasocki ‘The Bassano Family, The Recorder, and William Shakespeare’ The American Recorder, December (2015)
Bibliography
L. Rowse ‘Revealed at Last, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady’The Times(London, England) 29 January 1973:12 and The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978).
Achsah Guibbory, ‘The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred,’ in (ed.) Marshall Grossman Aemelia Lanyer: Gender,Genre and the Canon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998).
Barbara K, Lewalski, ‘Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer’ in Cedric Clive Brown Patronage Politics And Literary Tradition in England, 1588-1658 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993)78.
Behind Shakespeare’s Plays? (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2014).
Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 205
David Lasocki ‘The Bassano Family, The Recorder, and William Shakespeare’ The American Recorder, December (2015)
David Lasocki and Roger Prior, The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument makers in England 1531–1665, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).
Dorothea Kehler, ‘Shakespeare’s Emilias and the Politics of Celibacy’, in (ed.) D. Kehler and S. Baker Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1991).
Esther Gilman Richey ‘”To Undoe the Booke”: Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer and The Subversion Of Pauline Authority’ English Literary Renaissance 27,1 (1997)106-128.
Femke Molekamp, “Reading Christ the Book in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611): Iconography and the Cultures of Reading’. Studies in Philology. 109,3(2012) 311-332
Gary Kuchar ‘Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon: Theology and Iconography in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’ English Literary Renaissance 27 (2007) 47-73
Giorgio Melchiori ‘The Rhetoric of Character Construction;Othello’, Shakespeare Survey 34 (1982)61-72.
Ilya Gililov, The Shakespeare Game: The Mystery of the Great Phoenix (New York: Algora Press, 2003).
John Buxton Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London Macmillan: 1954)
John Hudson, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier: The Woman
Lynette McGrath, ‘The Feminist Subject: Idealization and Subversive Metaphor in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’ in Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 209-249.
Martin Green ‘Emilia Lanier IS the Dark Lady of the Sonnets’ English Studies 87, 5 (2006) 544-576.
Maureen Duff, ‘Marlowe and the Dark Lady’ September 15, 2011. Downloaded on 8 April 2015 from http://marlowe-shakespeare.blogspot.com/2011/09/marlowe-and-dark-lady-by-maureen-duff.html
Micheline White, ‘A woman with Saint Peter’s Keys?: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the Priestly Gifts of Women’ Criticism 45,3(2003) 323-341.
Pamela Benson, ‘The Stigma of Italy Undone: Aemilia Lanyer’s Canonization of Lady Mary Sidney’ in (ed.) Pamela J. Benson and Victoria Kirkham Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France and Italy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Roger Prior, ’Shakespeare’s Visit to Italy’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies 9 (2008) 1–31.
Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 7.
Suzanne Woods, (ed.) The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer; Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Women Writers in English 1350-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Wendy Roberts, ‘Gnosis in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’ Rocky Mountain Review 59,2 (2005)11-18.
Page Citation:
John Hudson. “Amelia Lanyer.” Project Continua (November 22, 2015): Ver. 1, [date accessed], http://www.projectcontinua.org/aemilia-lanyer/
Tags: Playwrights, Poets, Religious Thinkers
