Did a woman write Shakespeare’s plays? Globe to stage new play about the ‘Dark Lady’

The new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe is to launch her first season with a play exploring the theory that a woman may have written some of the Bard’s plays. Michelle Terry has commissioned a writer to produce a new work about Aemilia Bassano, a published poet in her day and the mistress of Henry […]

The new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe is to launch her first season with a play exploring the theory that a woman may have written some of the Bard’s plays.

Michelle Terry has commissioned a writer to produce a new work about Aemilia Bassano, a published poet in her day and the mistress of Henry Carey, first cousin of Elizabeth I.

Born into a Jewish family with Venetian origins and married to an Italian musician, she is thought by some academics to be the ‘Dark Lady’ who inspired Shakespeare’s sonnets. Others have gone further, suggesting that she may have authored some of his work.

It is a radical suggestion dismissed by most historians, but Terry is open-minded on the question of whether Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name. “Some people think she authored some of the plays. I’m not going to go any further than that because I don’t know,” she said of Bassano.

“My view is: whether it was one man, one woman or 10 people, it exists. And no one else, or no other body of people, has ever matched it. It is the greatest offering to literature that has ever been made.”

Terry replaces Emma Rice, who repeatedly clashed with the board over her experimental productions featuring amplified sound and artificial lighting rigs.

Rice’s recent staging of Romeo and Juliet featured nuclear warheads, pounding music, and Juliet’s father dancing to disco music in a dinosaur costume.

The job description stipulated that the new post holder must return to the old way of doing things, and Terry agreed. “That decision has been made. There will be no amplified sound, there will be no imposed lighting rig,” she said, describing the theatre as “a raw, naked space” in which the ability to see the audience from the stage is paramount.

She promised an “unplugged” approach, and suggested that during Rice’s tenure something of the Globe’s uniqueness was lost.

“My offer to a director would be: if you want to do disco-dancing Capulets, if you want to get people to dance in a production… go as far as you can with your imagination, and then unplug it.

“What can you do with a drum? People dance to ceilidhs every night of the week and that’s a drum and a fiddle. What can you do to unplug your idea?

“Every other theatre can do lights and sounds. What is unique to the Globe is that we don’t.”

 She has read every Shakespeare play and “loves all of them” – a contrast to Rice who, in a quote that came back to haunt her, said she would rather listen to The Archers than plough through some of his texts.

An actress by trade, Terry has no directing experience. “Luckily I’m not going to direct, so nobody has to worry about that. I think it’s a skill that I don’t have, and my passion is acting,” she said, adding that she hoped to appear in one production per season.

“I hope that by putting an actor in this position goes some way to dismantling those labels because actually we’re all multi-taskers,” she said of the job.

Terry got the job after sending a letter to the Globe’s chief executive “pledging allegiance and saying I’d love to be part of the artistic conversation”. He wrote back suggesting she make a formal application.

Joking that she hoped to survive in the job at least until Christmas, she added: “I take great courage in the fact that they are taking an enormous risk by putting an actor in this position. I think that smacks of bravery. That gives me great hope.”

Source: Telegraph.co.uk