ABSTRACT
This essay considers the work of three novelists and two playwrights who use information from the life of the poet Aemilia Lanyer to create a fictionalized Emilia, in each case contending with the historian A. L. Rowse’s claim that she was the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The essay emphasizes the use of darkness as a trope for exotic difference, sexuality, and disguise. It considers whether Rowse’s founding fiction is a satisfactory basis for these further biofictions, or merely an inescapable one, and contrasts them with Lanyer’s own poetry.
