ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Globe’s 2018 world premier play Emilia aimed to restore the spotlight to Aemilia Lanyer, a poet who has been proposed as the true “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In so doing, playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm proposed that only fiction, not history, can free women of the past from the dismissal and neglect perpetuated by patriarchal historians. This chapter explores the nature and methods of this rejection of the possibility of feminist historical scholarship, tracing Lloyd Malcolm’s historical and cultural influences and the nature of audience response to the production to demonstrate the radical possibilities both permitted and foreclosed by Lloyd Malcolm’s approach.
