ABOUT THE PLAY

What if all the great female parts in Shakespeare's plays were based on the love of his life?
What if she happened to be a writer herself?

Enter Emilia Bassano: a trilingual, multicultural musician and ambitious poet.
Scholars have named Emilia a top contender for being the mysterious 'Dark Lady' in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Here's what's remarkable: Emilia's life story seems to encompass the breadth of Shakespeare's work. Compounding coincidences, historical timelines, characters in his plays, mirroring verse lines, friends in common...it's all too astonishing to ignore. Writing this play often felt like uncovering a 400-year-old secret. 

 

But it was reading her own poetry that truly floored me. Her message jumps off the page, searingly white-hot: an appeal to be taken seriously, an appeal for women to be seen as equal to men. A fervent female voice that immediately made me think of Kate, Beatrice, Viola, Rosalind, Juliet, Paulina and Cleopatra, all in one. Her infinite variety.

 

Emilia Bassano came from a family of Venetian court musicians. She was half Italian, very likely secretly Jewish, possibly with North African ancestry. Shakespeare wrote plays based on Italian novellas that had never been translated into English. Emilia and her family spoke Italian and would have known the stories, if not owned those very books. Many of Shakespeare's beloved plays heavily feature music, musicians, dancing: he likely would have worked intimately with some of Emilia's family members. In fact, there's proof one of her cousins composed several songs in The Tempest.

Shakespeare was a man of his time, yet that's the very fact that makes his expansive humanism so profoundly remarkable and timeless. He often subverts stereotypes, defends the Other, and invites his Elizabethan audience to see the human heart first, above all. 

"Hath not a Jew eyes?"
"Is Black so base a hue?"
"Ay but I know - too well what love women to men may owe"
"Mislike me not for my complexion"
"No face is fair that is not full so black"

What if these two great minds did more than cross paths? What if they learnt from and influenced one another?
What if they fell in love? 

Emilia was one of the first women in England to publish her own poetry. She was likely the very first to call herself a professional poet and actively seek patronage. She aspired to create a community of female patrons and readers, at a time when such a concept didn’t even exist.

One of the themes of this play is legacy. What lives on, whose story gets told, what can never be destroyed? Musicality runs deep in Emilia's genetic line, all the way up to this present day. Quincy Jones is a relative of hers. So was Tennessee Williams. So is the most recent head conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, Peter Bassano. You might be related to her and not even know it. Perhaps that's the legacy she's left for us. And perhaps one day we'll be able to prove that she really is all over Shakespeare's work.

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ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Jessica is an actor, playwright and educator. She has starred for several years at the Stratford Festival of Canada, most recently coming off a flagship season where she was featured as Viola in Twelfth Night. Past Stratford credits include Helen in All's Well That Ends Well, Lady Anne in Richard III and Emily Brontë in the world premiere of Jordi Mand's Brontë: The World Without. Jessica made her debut as playwright in 2023 with two plays: Pandora, a one-woman show about myth, meaning and quantum mechanics; and The Dark Lady, which has since won six theatre awards across three Canadian provinces. Both plays were published this past spring, The Dark Lady will be part of Bard on The Beach's 2025 season, in Vancouver. 

 

Originally from Montreal, Jessica is fluently bilingual and works in both English and French on stage, screen, voice work and videogames. She trained at Stratford Festival's Birmingham Conservatory, and holds a BA in English from McGill University. Jessica is currently playwright-in-residence with Necessary Angel Theatre in Toronto, and is commissioned across three theatres for three new plays from 2024-2026. She is a visiting instructor at the National Theatre School of Canada, where she has taught Chekhov and Shakespeare.  She's the first recipient of the Elsa Bolam award, a twice recipient of Stratford Festival's Mary Savidge award, a recipient of National Theatre School's Bernard Aymot teaching award, and has recently won a SATA award for her premiere performance in The Dark Lady.  Instagram: @jessicabhill 

 

The Dark Lady is available for purchase online or in select bookstores.