Who Was Shakespeare’s Muse? A Black Woman, This Play Imagines

By Bonnie Greer via https://www.nytimes.com

 We know her eyes were “raven black” and her hair like “black wires.” But so much about the mysterious “Dark Lady” in Shakespeare’s final sonnets is unknown.

In “Emilia,” a new play running through Sept. 1 at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the British playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm centers on Emilia Bassano, one of the first professional female writers in Shakespearean England. The play imagines her as Shakespeare’s lover and muse — and as an even better writer. But Shakespeare goes from triumph to triumph, while Emilia faces the realities of being a woman in 17th-century Britain, and struggling to publish.

The play is a meditation and a provocation, staged with an all-female cast including Clare Perkins and Carolyn Pickles.

Here are edited extracts from a conversation with the play’s director, Nicole Charles, about Shakespeare, race and gender in an …

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