The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Seventy-Five The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 3

Before I do that, there is Emilia Lanier to dispatch ...

The delectable, the enigmatic Emilia is at first blush quite a plausible Dark Lady. Of Italian blood, it might be supposed for a start that her colouring was right. Then, as the illegitimate daughter of Baptiste Bassano, one of that famous family of Venetian musicians who have served the English Court since the reign of King Henry VIII, it can also be assumed that she knew her way up and down the keyboard of the virginals.

Emilia's talents did not end there. I have heard from several men with much experience in the matter that her accomplishments in bed were well out of the ordinary.

She always had to fight for her way in the world. Her father died when she was still a child, and she was brought up in the household of the Countess of Kent, becoming the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, who was old enough to be her grandfather. Falling pregnant by him, she was married off to Alphonse Lanier, another Court musician and one of a family of musicians from Rouen.

Hunsdon, who was the Queen's cousin, proved no Pembroke. He made adequate provision for Emilia, but her husband's extravagance was notorious and the family soon fell on hard times. Alphonse sought to repair their fortunes by taking service under the Earl of Essex in his expedition to the Azores and then in Ireland, having been instructed by the astrologer Simon Forman that his horoscope favoured such courses.

The astrologer, of course, was sleeping with Emilia. I doubt, all the same, if she let him fuck her properly. This lady preferred her soldiers to give her unconventional salutes.

From another of her lovers, Dr Walter Warner, I learnt that Emilia Lanier favoured sodomy to satisfy men's lusts. She would permit that little warp-handed physician to feel all the nooks and crannies of her body, and to kiss her, and to play with her bubbies while she was sitting naked upon his lap, but Emilia would never allow him access to her cunt. Penetration via the bum-hole, Warner told me, was much to her taste, however. She could not get enough of it, and sometimes had three or four men spending themselves successively in this fashion upon the altar of Aphrodite Steatopyga.

Warner reported that he had more than once heard Forman declare that Emilia Lanier was an incuba rather than a woman. I know that Biarmannus, and Wierus, and other doctors, stoutly deny the existence of such devils, but Austin and Erastus and Paracelsus say that it is possible. Philostratus, in his fourth book De vita Apollonii has a memorable instance of this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man going between Cenchreas and Corinth, who met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman. Taking him by the hand, she carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her 'he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank'. The young man, a philosopher, tarried with her awhile to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius, who, by some probable conjectures, found out the creature to be a serpent, a Lamia, and that all her furniture was like Tantalus' gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusion. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant. Many thousands, the good doctor says, took notice of this fact, for 'it was done in the midst of Greece'.

Now, let me speak frankly, friends, I do hot believe a word of all this taradiddle, myself. I think your incuba is a nightmare all right, but she is a nightmare caused by eating too much cheese and sleeping upon your back. All the same, it is interesting that such particular fantasies were visited by men on the person of Emilia Lanier. Certainly there appears to have been about her a perfume of hot and perverse and mysterious eroticism which to some noses would suggest that here at last we are in the presence of the true Dark Lady.

Sir, I don't think so at all, and I'll tell you why. Emilia reformed during the latter part of her life, and turned poetess, and in 1611 she published a long religious poem called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a sort of vindication of the principal female characters in the Bible, from Eve to the Virgin Mary. I have not read it, but am told that it shows much learning.

My point is this: Had such a talented and articulate women ever been the mistress of William Shakespeare, I think that she would have told us so, herself.

Consider, madam. If you were the Dark Lady of the sonnets, and you had now turned poet yourself, would you not publish it to the world that you had been in bed with Mr Shakespeare? And that you were (perhaps) not satisfied either by him or by those things that he had said you were? Would you not be filled by a desire to set the record straight, either in verse or prose, and to get your own back?

Emilia Lanier perished, in silence, having done no such thing.

She wrote about the women in the Bible.

But she wrote not a word about her own case, and she wrote not a word on the subject of William Shakespeare, who (had she been his mistress) would have been the love of her life.

Nor, in my opinion, did William Shakespeare write a word on the subject of her. He may have seen her in Lord Hunsdon's company, when she was very young, since Hunsdon was Lord Chamberlain and our Company of actors was then known as the Lord Chamberlain's Servants. Yet Hunsdon was more a patron than a playgoer, and I cannot recall ever seeing Emilia Lanier with my own eyes.

Latterly, so I heard tell, this lady kept a school for the children of gentlemen. Her own son (by Hunsdon) was musician to King Charles I. She lived to a grand old age, dying only about ten years ago, sustained in her last years by some pension she had succeeded in acquiring from the Crown.

What happened to the much-cuckolded Alphonse? He died about the time that his wife turned poet. Music and sweet poetry do not always agree, you see, sir. But I can't help feeling sorry for the fellow.

I feel sorry for Emilia also, yes, madam. She had indeed a miserable bitch of a life.

Poor Alphonse.

Poor Emilia.

Requiescant in pace.

I do not believe that this remarkable woman is the Dark Lady of the sonnets, and my clinching argument is that Dr Walter Warner told me her skin was white as snow and soft as swansdown. Those who claim that Forman described her body as 'very brown in youth' have simply misread the astrologer's handwriting. I have seen the passage in question. The word is BRAVE. Emilia Lanier was very brave in youth, and no doubt very wanton. Later she was no less brave, and no doubt very religious. But the Dark Lady of the sonnets she was not.