“My job is writing women back into history,” says novelist Mary Sharratt, a Minnesota native who lives in northern England. “I want people to know that there’s nothing new about women trying to break out of old roles and claim power for themselves. They existed in every era, and sometimes fiction is a more fun place to learn than textbooks.”
In Sharatt’s sixth historical novel, “The Dark Lady’s Mask,” she tells the story based on the life of strong-willed, beautiful and accomplished Aemilia Bassano Lanier (sometimes spelled Lanyer). Lanier’s long poem “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” published in 1611, is considered the first significant book of original poetry published by an English woman.
In Sharratt’s novel, Aemilia has a love affair with young Will Shakespeare, collaborates with him briefly and becomes the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The book is published in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death on April 23, 1616.
“I was so fascinated with the life of this woman who disappeared into the mists of time,” Sharrat says of Lanier. “She was a groundbreaking poet. Her epic poem ‘Salve Deus’ is a tale of the passion of Christ narrated exclusively from a woman’s point of view. It’s a vindication of the rights of women in the form of religious poetry. In her Elizabethan era, women were only allowed to write religious verse, but she turned it on its head by making it a feminist polemic. That was considered radical back then.”
Lanier’s work languished in obscurity until 1973, when Shakespeare scholar A.L. Rowse identified her as the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Although the theory was refuted by other scholars, the controversy brought attention to Lanier and her writing.
Sharratt points out more is known about Lanier’s life than Shakespeare’s.
Born in 1569, Aemilia was the privileged, illegitimate daughter of Battista Bassano, a Venetian Jew in exile and musician at the court of Elizabeth I, and his common-law wife. Educated by a Puritan noble woman, Ameilia was musically talented and very much her own person. She frequently dressed as a man to escape restrictive women’s clothing and to travel safely. She was 16 when she became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the queen’s powerful lord chamberlain and Shakespeare’s first patron. When she became pregnant at 23 with Hunsdon’s child, he married her off to a dissolute Frenchman, Alfonse Lanier.
“We aren’t even sure that Aemilia and Shakespeare ever met, although they probably did at some point because his patron was her former lover,” Sharratt says, “but we can’t prove they were ever lovers. We don’t even know there was a Dark Lady. Is she real or are these just poems? I thought it would be fun to have her tell her side of the story.”
In “The Dark Lady’s Mask,” Aemilia and Shakespeare have an idyllic affair in Italy, where Aemilia has been given a family bequest of land. Although both are married to other spouses, they lie to a clergyman and wed in Verona, where they write “Twelfth Night” and a comic version of “Romeo and Juliet,” agreeing to split any profits.
When Shakespeare learns of the death of his son, he breaks off the affair, and he and Aemilia return to England by separate routes, never to see one another again. But Aemilia, who bears Shakespeare a daughter, sees traces of her life in some of his later plays, including what she feels is a cruel attack on her father’s Jewish heritage in “The Merchant of Venice.” But it is the Dark Lady sonnets that cut into her heart.
Unlike the plays, this attack on her was not veiled, but direct and personal. Will had painted a hideous but unmistakable caricature of her, Aemilia Bassano Lanier, a dark woman with musical accomplishments, a woman of bastard birth, unfaithful to her husband, who had tempted Will into adultery. A woman who had aroused the poet’s desire, driving him into a sickening frenzy. Anyone reading might guess her identity. Will’s sonnets had stripped her bare for all the world. How could she live this down.
Aemilia is so angry at Shakespeare she decides to publish “Salve Deus” with the help of wealthy noblewomen whose patronage she sought. She praises several of them in her poem, including her friend Margaret Clifford, countess of Cumberland, whose home she memorializes in “The Description of Cooke-ham,” which may be the first published house poem in English. It is the countess who inspires Aemilia to go public with her poem when she tells her, “To publish is to immortalize.”
After Shakespeare’s death (spoiler alert), he bequeaths to his former lover a gift that shows she might have been in his thoughts for decades after they parted:
Aemilia wept to imagine that “The Winter’s Tale,” written in the winter of Will’s life, resurrected both their love and their lost daughter. Let Odilia live again in Perdita. Had he spent the past twenty-one years rueing their estrangement?
Still, the Bard doesn’t come off too well in the book, both in his treatment of Lanier and his wife, Anne Hathaway. Sharratt knows she’s going to get some criticism from “bardolators.”
“I hope I didn’t paint too bleak a portrait of him,” Sharratt says of Shakespeare. “I tried to portray him as human. Because we idolize his plays, we want to put him on a pedestal as a literary saint. But he was human with foibles like the rest of us.”
Aemilia Lanier lived until 1645. She tried running a school, but people didn’t want to send their children to a place run by a fallen woman. Before her husband’s death, they had reached a sort of contentment, and she fought for her right to some taxes owed to him because she was supporting her orphaned grandchildren.
Despite Lanier’s prowess as a poet, she experienced no lasting fame. “Aemilia died in obscurity at age 75. I don’t know if she wrote or published anything else,” Sharratt says. “I feel she’s one of those people unjustly written out of history. I fell in love with her and I wanted to do her justice”
‘SALVE DEUS REX JUDAEORUM’
Aemilia Lanier’s epic poem, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” uses 17th-century spelling so it’s difficult for contemporary readers. But there’s no doubt about what she’s saying in the portions that absolve Eve:
Our Mother Eve, who tasted of the Tree,
Giving to Adam what shee held most deare,
Was simply good, and had no powre to see,
The after-comming harme did not appeare:
The subtile Serpent that our Sex betraide,
Before our fall so sure a plot had laide.
A few stanzas later, she takes aim at Adam:
But surely Adam can not be excusde,
Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame;
What Weaknesses offerd, Strength might have ruefusde,
Being Lord of all, the greater was his shame:
Although the Serpents craft had her abusde,
Gods holy word ought all his actions frame,
For he was Lord and King of all the earth,
Before poore Eve had either life or breath …
Lanier was among a handful of talented women writers in the Renaissance, some of whom wrote to praise her poem. They include Anne Locke, first person to write a sonnet sequence in the English language; Elizabeth Cary, vicountess of Falkland, first English woman to write a full-length original play, prolific poet and translator; Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke, poet, playwright, translator, one of the first English women to achieve literary fame; Lady Mary Wroth, Mary Sidney’s niece, first English woman to write a full length work of fiction and first English woman to write a significant body of secular poetry.
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY
Mary Sharratt grew up in Bloomington and worked her way through the University of Minnesota, where she studied German and English, saving enough money to spend her junior year in Germany.
When she graduated in 1988, she got a Fulbright Fellowship to teach in Innsbruck, Austria, then moved to Munich to teach creative writing. She didn’t like her job much, so she started working in the evenings on a manuscript that would become her debut novel, “Summit Avenue,” about two St. Paul women who find love in pre-World War I. Published by Coffee House Press, it was inspired by the Victorian house she lived in at University and Western in St. Paul.
Her other novels, all widely praised and featuring strong women who break the rules, are: “The Real Minerva” (2004), about a Minnesota farm girl in 1923; “The Vanishing Point” (2006), set in 17th century Maryland, a mystery, romance and ghost story; “Daughters of Witching Hill,” (2010), story of Lancashire witches, hanged in 1612; and “Illuminations” (2012), the life of Benedictine nun Hildegard von Bingen, composer of sacred music, healer, philosopher, abbess and author of nine books.
In 1989, Sharratt married Belgian-born Jos van Loo, whom she met in a youth hostel when she was backpacking through England. She looks forward to their visits to the Twin Cities, where she has lots of friends and relatives, including her mother, Adelene.
AUTHOR APPEARANCES
Mary Sharratt introduces “The Dark Lady’s Mask” at these locations: 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 20, book launch, Common Good Books, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul; 7 p.m. Thursday, April 21, The Bierstube, 109 W. 11th St., Hastings, presented by Chapter2Books, Hudson, Wis.; 7 p.m. Friday, April 22, Authors After Hours panel discussion, Daily Grind Coffee Shop, 217 N. Main St., Stillwater, presented by Valley Bookseller (ticketed event); 2 p.m. Saturday, April 23, Hudson Area library, 700 FirstSt., Hudson, Wis., presented by Chapter2Books; 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aprill 26, Barnes & Noble, 3225 W. 69th St., Edina; 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 27, Shakespeare’s birthday party, Excelsior Bay Books, 36 Water St., Excelsior (tickets must be purchased in advance; call 952-401-0932); 3-4 p.m. Thursday, April 28, University of Minnesota bookstore, Coffman Union, 300 Washington Ave. S.E., Mpls.
