Emilia by Shakespeare's Globe (review)

In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum(1611), Emilia Lanier reshaped a number of poetic genres to place women at their heart, dedicating the work to Queen Anne and the great women patrons of her day and then envisioning religious and country house poetry through a feminist lens. Barbara K. Lewalski asserts that Lanier's work rewrote "patronage in female terms, imagining for the poet Lanyer a family of maternal and sisterly patronesses who will honor and reward her celebrations of them and of the female sex" (106). In Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's new play a similar celebration of this remarkable woman took place, Lanier finally, and deservedly, taking center stage.

The performance elements were deceptively simple. To distinguish between genders in an all-female cast, female characters were dressed in blue and male in red. The scheme was mirrored in the mammoth bookcases that made up the set, although here the red far outweighed blue. In a nice touch, Emilia was at one point given a blue-boxed gift by a suitor, placing it immediately on the shelf where it was subsumed by the books. There were also two library ladders onstage, but these were barely used and came to stand for the lack of mobility in the society into which Emilia was born. On the balcony was a huge circular wooden bookcase of red spines in which Emilia's Muses sat in the first scene; her own "Wooden O."

The idea, too, was simple—a dramatization of the life of Emilia Bassano, later Lanier. English Literature undergraduates may become aware of her poetry on their early modern literature modules, perhaps reading some of the more startling stanzas of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. That she was the first woman to declare herself a poet tends to be assimilated among all of the extraordinary facts of the period. But to dislocate her life from her peers and to treat it as a subject in its own right is to accord her astonishing achievements the respect that they merit; to ensure that she does not, like the gift, get lost among the books of men; to give Lanier her proper place.

Malcolm's play is so much about place, and finding one. Young Emilia is repeatedly told by her superiors to remember her place as she emerges into womanhood: "As I grow, I must shrink," she says. At the beginning of the second half, disoriented and wandering Bankside after the tragic death of her only daughter, she finds a seedpod on the shore. It is foreign, too large and lovely for this country, and Emilia wades into the Thames to hold it. Seeds are a motif of the play, the seeds of children, of ideas, of desires for more. Sometimes Emilia is seeded by others: a sense of being colonized is her reaction to finding out she is pregnant by her lover, Henry Carey, for instance, but it also happens when William Shakespeare— Emiliadramatizes the theory that Lanier is the Sonnets' "dark lady"—hijacks her words and plants them directly into the mouth of his fictional Emilia in one of Othello's most famous speeches.

Where can Emilia lay roots? How can she grow? What is the least hostile environment for a literary woman of color—in this play her heritage is African, not European—at this time? Malcolm's Emilia struggles to find her place, either in her childhood home with the Countess of Kent, at court, as Carey's mistress, or as wife to Alphonso Lanier. She is told she lacks a place because she has not understood how the system...