In Search of Shakespeare by Michael Wood

Author:Michael Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473530256
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

SHADOW LIVES: EMILIA LANIER AND THE WOMAN’S CASE

So who was she? The subject of poems, a well-known musical gentlewoman, the mistress of nobles, she moved on the fringes of high society with her two Wills, the one a nobleman, the other a writer and actor. Distinguished by her dark skin, according to the poet she was, in some unexplained way, perceived by the world to be ‘unworthy’. Despite many guesses, the identity of Shakespeare’s lover remains a mystery. But if the sonnets are autobiographical and she was a real person, we probably do not have far to look to find her in the very small world of theatrical and musical society in late 1590s’ London.

Just such a woman moved in Shakespeare’s circle at precisely that time. She first appears in the consultation books of Simon Forman in May 1597. A well-known ‘astrological’ physician, later mocked by Jonson in his play The Alchemist, Forman was highly sought after. Part doctor, part analyst and part soothsayer, his clientele was mainly lower-class but he also saw musicians, theatre people and aristocrats, and among his clients that year were the wives of Shakespeare’s colleagues Richard Burbage, Augustine Philips and Richard Cowley, Shakespeare’s printer Richard Field, Philip Henslowe, and even Shakespeare’s future landlady Mrs Mountjoy. Forman’s still largely unpublished notebooks give a wonderfully vivid portrait of the Elizabethan world: its ambition and class envy, its struggle for money and patronage, its medical knowledge and superstition, and the sexual habits of the time. The contents of the notebook that runs from May 1597 until the autumn of that year, probably the very period of the writing of the sonnets to the woman, are tantalizing.

On 17 May a courtly gentlewoman went to Forman’s house in Philpot Lane near London Bridge. Her name was Emilia Lanier and she was seeking advice about her husband’s prospects of advancement. Alfonso Lanier was from a French musical family, one of the queen’s musicians; but at this moment he was about to leave his wife for several months, to accompany the Earl of Essex on his expedition to the Azores to attack the Spanish treasure fleet on its return from South America.

Her small talk was of preferment, class and sex. Like many of Forman’s patients, Mrs Lanier wanted to know the future. Would her husband be promoted? On the 25th she came again and revealed much more about herself. She told Forman she was twenty-four (actually she was twenty-eight). She was the daughter of Baptista Bassano from Bishopsgate – a member of the famous family of royal musicians, who had come from Venice in Henry VIII’s day. Some years earlier she had been the mistress of the chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, who until his death the previous summer had been the patron of Shakespeare’s company. Hunsdon, she told Forman, ‘had loved her well and kept her and did maintain her long’. However, in the manner of the upper classes, when she became pregnant by him, she was married ‘for colour’ [for appearance’s sake] to Alfonso Lanier in October 1592.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.