The third of Sander Cooke’s important female friends is Amelia Bassano Lanyer (Her name is variously spelled: Amelia, Emilia, or Æmelia and Lanyer or Lanier.) The Bassano family were musicians in the court of Henry VIII, natives of Venice and conversos, that is, originally Jewish. Amelia was the common-law daughter of Baptiste Bassano and Margaret Johnson, also from a musical family. Her personal story, however, goes beyond that of her ancestors. Until female literacy became prevalent, literate women didn’t tell their own stories. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, literate English women chiefly wrote religious reflections and occasional poems. Such history as was recorded of their lives was written by men.
Thus, Amelia’s personal reputation was established by the scandalous diaries of Dr. Simon Forman, written around 1597. He describes her as a beauty and a tease who consults him about whether her husband Alfonso Lanyer will return from a voyage to the New World wealthy. Based primarily on Forman’s description of Amelia, in 1937 A.L. Rowse proposed that she was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets (that is, if there was a real-life inspiration for her, the young man, or the rival poet in the sonnets.) Shakespeare writes about such a woman in Sonnet 127:
In the old age, black was not counted fair,
Or, if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame. . . .
Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland’ring creation with a false esteem.
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.
This dark-haired beauty captivates, then torments the poet in the sonnets describing the arc of his love for her and ending with the bitter Sonnet 129, which begins “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ is lust in action.”
We don’t know if Rowse’s speculation holds, but novelists, myself included in Dark Venus, are enticed by idea that Amelia Bassono was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. When she attended court on the arm of her older, noble lover, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, Amelia broke the Elizabethan standard of beauty, a rosy complexion and red-gold hair, with her striking black eyes, dark hair, and olive skin. [The portrait image here doesn’t emphasize these details.]
By the time Amelia and Sander Cooke become friends, the dark beauty no longer keeps company with Lord Hunsdon, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain and, as son of her sister Mary Boleyn by Thomas Carey, her cousin—or possibly the Queen’s half-brother. Forty-five years older than Amelia and father of ten children, Hunsdon became her lover when she was eighteen. Five years later, pregnant by Hunsdon, he marries her to her musician cousin Alfonso Lanyer.
In Bedtrick, Amelia’s child Henry, known as Harry, is growing into a musician himself. When Alfonso is off on his voyages to Peru, Amelia and Sander’s friendship thrives.
Today Amelia Bassano Lanyer’s reputation depends not on her lovers, marriage, or Forman’s gossip, however, but on her own achievement. Presumably Lanyer wrote songs all along, as in 1611 she published the first full-length book of poetry by a woman, Salve Deux Rex Judaeorum. Thus, like Mary Sidney Herbert (and Moll Frith in a very different walk of life), Amelia was notably accomplished.
What surprises contemporary readers of Bassano Lanyer’s book is her feminist consciousness. A large part of it is a vindication of Eve! It’s original in other ways as well: her dedication poems to noble women and one to Coke-ham, the first country house poem in a genre that later became popular. Chiefly, however, is her perspective on Adam and Eve: “Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he took/ From Eve’s fair hand, as from a learned Book.”
For a male actor who plays female roles, Sander’s friendship with Amelia isn’t surprising. Both are somewhat fringe characters in London society, though not blatant outlaws like Moll Frith. Likewise the friendship between Sander and Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, isn’t unusual, as she’s known for patronizing artists. In the man’s world of Elizabethan London, Sander needs female allies who won’t reveal her true sex.
Besides these three, the other important women to Sander Cooke are her wife Frances Field and, problematically, Queen Elizabeth herself. The other four have no trouble keeping Sander’s secret; it’s dangerous knowledge in the Queen’s hands.