Dramaturgy

Dramaturgical Services Available

Laura King is an Atlanta playwright and dramaturg. She holds an MFA in playwrighting, with a concentration in dramaturgy from the Playwrights Lab at Hollins University and a master’s in English from Northwestern University. She has provided dramaturgical services to Georgia theaters and theatre artists since 2013.

The Dark Lady by Jessica B. Hill at Synchronicity Theatre (June 2025)

The Dark Lady Program Note

It wasn’t until 1973 that Emilia Bassano Lanier was first recognized as a potential candidate for the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In his book Shakespeare’s Sonnets—The Problem Solved, A. L. Rowse proposed Emilia as the Dark Lady based on his study of the journals of astrologer Simon Forman. Additional evidence was later provided by Martin Green in his work “Emilia Lanier IS the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.” In 2009, Shakespearean scholar John Hudson took this speculation a step further, introducing the idea that Bassano was the primary author of Shakespeare’s work. Since 2009, this theory has been hotly debated among literary scholars, with those supporting the theory pointing to Bassano’s upbringing, family background, literary prowess, and education as evidence of her authorship and those discounting the theory pointing to Bassano’s more conventional religious writing style, the likelihood that she and Shakespeare knew each other and “borrowed” from each other, and the unlikelihood that Bassano’s authorship could have been hidden because of Shakespeare’s enormous fame.

In her play The Dark Lady, Jessica B. Hill explores the rumored relationship between Bassano and Shakespeare—their literary partnership and their romantic entanglement. Using a contemporary lens, Hill gives us the chance to examine the importance of Bassano, a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual female writer, while still appreciating the genius of Shakespeare. We are asked to consider the role of this marginalized woman in creating the greatest literary canon of the English Renaissance. Whether you support or discount the theory of Bassano’s authorship of Shakespeare’s work, Hill’s play gives us a love story for the ages—a love between writers and their love for words.

Whether a co-writer, muse, or acquaintance, Bassano deserves to be recognized for her own abilities. She was the first woman in England to seek patronage and identify herself publicly as a writer. In 1611, she published her collection of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. The work contains several short poems each dedicated to an influential woman, the first English country house poem (“The Description of Cooke-ham”), and a long poem on the crucifixion of Christ in which she considers the importance of women in the crucifixion story. Although her legacy is inexorably linked to Shakespeare’s, Bassano on her own was a trailblazer—an early feminist and the first published female author in England. After all these years, it is time for the Dark Lady to step into the light.