“And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.”
—Sonnet 130

Jessica B. Hill’s The Dark Lady is a captivating and intimate story that shines a spotlight on Emilia Bassano, a brilliant woman almost lost to history. Many have suggested that she could be the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets—but what does that actually mean?

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets during the 1590s, with Sonnets 127-152 addressed to a woman with dark skin and hair, often referred to as “the dark lady.” One of the most provocative questions in Shakespeare studies is the extent to which the sonnets are about his life, with some believing that certain sonnets were written about Shakespeare’s own romantic affairs. While popular theories abound, the story of the sonnets is shrouded in mystery—and likely to remain that way.

Still, scholars and hobbyists have worked over the centuries to try and determine the identity of this figure. The person most often suggested as the “dark lady” was born Emilia Bassano and was a remarkable artist in her own right. She was the first woman in England to publish a substantial volume of original poetry, and her long poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was a powerful and unflinching critique of traditional attitudes towards women in the Bible, with some considering it a piece of early proto-feminist literature. For example, in the defense of Eve, she writes:

Our Mother Eve, who tasted of the Tree, 
Giving to Adam what she held most dear, 
Was simply good, and had no power to see, 
The after-coming harm did not appear: 
               The subtle Serpent that our Sex betrayed, 
               Before our fall so sure a plot had laid.

The Dark Lady reclaims the story of Emilia Bassano from the margins of history, while also imagining the circumstances that could have set this extraordinary woman on a collision course with a budding young playwright named William Shakespeare. In what feels like an inevitability, these two forces are drawn together in a creative—and romantic—entanglement that can still be felt to this day.

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