Book Review: The Real Shakespeare - Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet

Given my blog's domain name, I don't write nearly enough about Shakespeare. Luckily, the good folks at NetGalley have sent me Irene Coslet's provocative new book to review.

Who was the real Shakespeare? It's the sort of low-stakes conspiracy theory which is driven by classism ("a low-born man couldn't write such poetry!"), plagiarism ("he stole from other writers!") and, according to this book, sexism and racism.

From the blurb:

Now, in this intriguing and well-documented book, Irene Coslet conclusively demonstrates that Shakespeare was a not a man, but a woman: a dark-skinned lady, of Jewish origin, born into a family of Court musicians from Venice, and the mother of the English-speaking world. Her name was Emilia Bassano.

Yes! In your face, Bacon! Get stuffed, Marlowe! Edward de Who?!

The life of Emilia Bassano is genuinely fascinating. The book offers some excellent insights into the lives of women, Moors, and Jews during the time period. The analysis of the sexual politics - both in the plays and real life - are both interesting and well researched. For that reason, I have to give it some stars.

The book starts with Kuhn and his ideas about paradigm shifts - the more tweaks we have to bolt on to a model, the more likely it is the model will eventual collapse and a new model will emerge. I'm 100% behind that - given the deficiencies in Shakespeare's biography, people keep adding more and more fantastical explanations to it. But the counterpoint is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

So, what evidence is there that Emilia Bassano was the writer of Shakespeare?

• Shakespeare's name is an anagram of "A-She-Speaker".
• Beatrice from Much Ado shares the same Myers-Briggs type as Emilia Bassano.
• The names "Emilia" and "Bassano" pop up in several plays.
• If you fold the portrait of Shakespeare in a certain way, it looks like a portrait of Emilia.

And so it goes on. Sadly, the evidence presented rarely rises to the level of circumstantial, let alone extraordinary. Some of it is of the sort found in the discredited Bible Code. If you selectively squish the data, you can make it say anything:

Here, the author exploits the similarity in Hebrew between the word Portia (PRT) and the word lead (YPRT). Portia (PRT) is nested within the lead (YPRT), embedding one one term inside the other to create multiple layers of meaning. Only a person who is fluent in Hebrew [...] would be able to make such a pun.

This book is a monument to what happens if you start with a conclusion and then selectively pick only the clues which support your case. There's no testing of the evidence against other candidates - for example, the author describes folding the Droeshout portrait in a specific way until it looks a bit like one of the portraits which might be of Emilia Bassano. It's a bit "Mad Magazine Fold In" - but can the image be folded different ways? Are there other people that it looks like? Sadly, the folded image isn't included on (dubious) copyright grounds.

There's also no mechanism suggested. Let's suppose that Emilia Bassano did write all these plays and poems. What was the method whereby "The Man From Stratford" took them and passed them off as his own? Was there payment? Why did she keep writing if they were being stolen? Wouldn't someone have noticed her slipping in all these "clues" about the true authorship and then removed them?

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea of trying new ways to look at old problems and I genuinely found some of the analysis interesting. I tried to keep an open mind and to steelman the arguments. Nevertheless, I found most of it unconvincing.

Here are some of the arguments I have trouble with.

Scholars agree that the plays are ‘feminist’ but have not been able to explain why the author was interested in gender issues.

To which a suitable response might be "Hath not a man eyes? hath not a man hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" It also ignores all the decidedly unfeminist tropes and characters in Shakespeare.

Emilia Bassano tells about this portion of her life in Cymbeline through the character of Posthumus Leonatus. Posthumus is the son of Sicilius, a reference to the Sicilian origin of the family. Sicilius has two other sons, who both die prematurely, an allusion to Lewis and Philip, Baptista and Margaret’s sons who died in infancy.

You could pick any random character out of any play and find someone in history who it could be an allegory for.

But, again, there are some reasonable arguments that Shakespeare may not be who we think. Emelia Bassano certainly had some of the background necessary:

The playwright had direct knowledge of the Veneto region. The playwright is familiar with the Commedia dell’Arte. [...] In 1582, Emilia Bassano travelled to Denmark, and that journey, according to Hudson, provided the material for Hamlet. [...] They all stayed at the Castle of Elsinore – which is renowned today as the setting of the play Hamlet. The delegation met two prominent Danish noblemen: Georgius Rosencrantz and Petrius Guildenstern

Most of these arguments seem to be taken from John Hudson's 2014 book "Shakespeare's Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier The woman behind Shakespeare's plays?" with very little in the way of original research.

The author does prove that there are a few positive connections between Emilia Bassano and Shakespeare. For example, she was the paramour of Henry Carey - founder of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Could that have taken her into the orbit of Shakespeare's theatre company?

Yet, in 1594, Henry Carey was a sixty-eight military General (he died in 1596): it is hard to believe that the creation of a theatre company was his initiative. It is more likely that it was Emilia Bassano’s idea, who was twenty-five and a playwright at the peak of her creativity.

That's just pure speculation! When you go looking for evidence, and squint your eyes, it's possible to make anything seem like a connection:

Ophelia – whose name rhymes with ‘Emilia’ – has a relationship with the Lord Hamlet and gets pregnant. Ophelia is the daughter of the Lord Chamberlain – a reference to the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, who was her fiancé in real life.

The book veers between cold-reading and the Forer effect. For example, the author asserts that one of Shakespeare's characters is based on a friend of Emilia Bassano. How can that be proven?

Shakespeare had the uncanny ability to give an accurate impression of the characters without describing them in detail. There is a painting by Thomas Francis Dicksee entitled Anne Paige (circa 1862). Although Dicksee was not aware that the character of Anne Paige is based on Lady Anne Clifford, his impression of Anne Paige looks strikingly similar to the portrait of Lady Anne Clifford by William Larking (1618): brown-haired, big-eyed and with a rounded face. It appears that the way the audience imagines Anne Paige when reading the play – and the way Dicksee represented her – is exactly how Anne Clifford looked. Same goes with Falstaff: Shakespeare gives such an accurate impression of Falstaff, without describing him in detail, that now we have an idea of how Alfonso Lanyer looked in real life.

I don't know how to fully respond to that. Two paintings looking slightly similar is not evidence! Where are all the other paintings of Anne Paige? Do they all look similar? There's cherry-picking, and then there's this!

Anyway, I give you Dicksee's portait and Larkin's so you may compare their similarity.

Similarly, some of the discussion is of the sort you might have after imbibing a few bottles of wine:

It is fascinating how two very different cultures and religions used the same sounds, Shekinah and Shakti, to indicate the divine feminine presence, and how these sounds can also be found in the name Shakespeare: Shekinah, Shakti, Shakespeare.

Emilia Bassano is the acknowledged author of the poem "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum". Surely a textual analysis of her work and that of Shakespeare's would throw up some similarities? Alas, all we get are:

Prospero asks Miranda: ‘Cants thou remember / A time before we came unto this cell?’. In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum Emilia Bassano says that she lives in a cell: ‘I that live clos’up in Sorrowes Cell’

And

there are many rhetorical similarities between the Passion in Salve Deus and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. For example, Jesus is associated with the colours white and red, like Lucrece. In Salve Deus we read: ‘The purest colours both of White and Red’ (1828). In the Rape of Lucrece: ‘To praise the clear unmatchèd red and white’

Frankly, that's less than nothing!

The book concludes with this:

From the viewpoint of white men and businessmen, the story of the Stratford man is inspiring. It is the story of a white boy, a merchant, with little education, who resorted to writing and miraculously became a genius. Society likes the narrative of the genius, because when we say ‘genius’ we think of a miracle and it does not require much explanation. It is all about magical thinking.

I agree that there's a lot to be said about Shakespeare and race. There may well be arguments about the true authorship of the plays and sonnets - and it is certainly interesting to approach them from a new perspective. The book does a reasonable job of contextualising some of the gender politics surrounding Shakespeare's propaganda for Queen Elizabeth and, similarly, the historical context in which the plays were written. But most of the evidence presented is somewhere between magical thinking and divine inspiration.

Emilia Bassano was undoubtedly a fascinating woman - poet, teacher, entrepreneur, confidant of the Queen - she deserves better than this scattershot ramble through her life.