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Hi Friends,
In my last newsletter I gave you some of the details of Emilia Bassano’s life, and how circumstances put her either in Denmark (where Hamlet is set) or in close proximity to the ambassador to Denmark. On the contrary, Shakespeare never left England, and did not move in those elite circles of court. But it isn’t just Emilia’s upbringing that led me to believe she was the actual writer of Hamlet. Let’s dive into the text for more reasons.
In the famous play-within-a-play scene of Hamlet, Hamlet lies about the storyline they are about to see. He says an Italian woman set the story in motion, and that her name is Baptista. In the First Folio version of the play, Baptista is written as the character who becomes the Player Queen in the vignette.
Baptista is not a common name for the time. But it happened to be the first name of Emilia’s father, and it was her middle name in her baptismal records.
Hamlet then goes on to say that the recorder music they are about to hear will not be eloquent but excellent - a pun on “exilent” – which is the name of the smallest kind of recorder. It’s an instrument all of Emilia’s family (employed as the court recorder consort) would have played, yet Shakespeare did not play any musical instruments. Moreover, in spite of Shakespeare’s lack of knowledge of instrumentation, there are over 3000 references to music in the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
And then there’s poor, mad Ophelia. In recent years, scholars have posited that her madness is the result of an unwanted pregnancy thanks to Hamlet sleeping with her, and Hamlet’s fake madness prevents her from finding a solution to this via marriage. In a very famous rant before she commits suicide, Ophelia lists herbs -- fennel, rosemary, rue – all known to be plants with contraceptive or abortifacient qualities at the time. Shakespeare got Anne Hathaway pregnant, and married her as a result. But Emilia would have known firsthand what it was like to be a woman in Elizabethan times, pregnant outside of marriage, with no option to marry the father of the child. In fact, it was the very circumstance she found herself in after ten years of being the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain.
Add to this the timing of the writing of Hamlet – right around the time when Emilia’s second child, a daughter, died at ten months of age…and the crushing blows that life kept sending her seems well-suited to the question, To be…or not to be. She was a woman who had been bartered as a mistress at age 13, who lived with the wealth of court for ten years before being evicted and married off to a man who abused her, who buried a child, who lost all the money she had, who hid her true religion (Judaism), and who could not write under her own name without penalty from society. It’s a bit harder to imagine William Shakespeare – by then making money off plays to which he attached his name – being despondent.
I don’t think Emilia was the only person using Shakespeare’s name as a front to publish their own writing…but I do think she was the most interesting one. This example of Hamlet is only one of many where Emilia’s life story and the subject matter or content of the plays intersect in ways that point toward her as the real author…with Shakespeare as her cover, to keep her anonymous.
Or in other words: don’t judge a book – or a Shakespearean play – by its cover.
XO,
Jodi
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