ABSTRACT

Everybody who knows anything about Aemilia Lanyer, author of the first original poem by a woman to be published in the seventeenth century, knows that she had black eyes, black hair and a dark past. Her poems are only available to modern readers in complete form in A.L.Rowse’s edition which advertises them as The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and prefaces them with pages of repetitive prose, the gist of which is to insist on reading the text, ‘rampant feminism’ and all, as the Dark Lady’s revenge:

It is obvious that something personal had aroused her anger. Shakespeare’s Sonnets had been published, though not by him, in 1609, with their unforgettable portrait of the woman who had driven him ‘frantic-mad’, dark and musical, tyrannical and temperamental, promiscuous and false,…The portrait was defamatory enough. The very next year, 1610, her book was announced and in 1611 published.1