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In August 2015, a meme claiming that a black woman named Amelia Bassano Lanyer was the true (uncredited) author of all of William Shakespeare's plays began circulating online: Although the authorship of Shakespeare's plays remains a topic of some debate among scholars, the above-displayed meme contains several factual errors. First, Aemilia Bassano (later Emilia Lanier) was indeed a published author, not someone whose work was suppressed because of her race or gender. In fact, the Shakespearean Authorship Trust notes that Bassano became the first woman to publish a book of original poetry when her work Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was put into print in 1611: Second, Bassano was not black. She was born to Baptista Bassano (a Venice musician at the court of Elizabeth I) and Margaret Johnson in 1569, and biographies of her note that she was part of a family of Italian court musicians of Moroccan/Semitic ancestry who lived as clandestine Jews. No contemporaneous accounts describe Bassano as black (or African), and although its provenance is uncertain, many historians believe that this miniature portrait by Nicholas Hilliard depicts Amelia Bassano: Amelia Bassano may have been dark-complected, however. A 2009 paper published in the Oxfordian, the journal of Shakespearean authorship studies, stated that some of Bassano's relatives were referred to as black when they arrived in London, likely due to their dark complexions: Lastly, the claim that Amelia Bassano wrote all of William Shakespeare's plays is a decidedly fringe notion, even within the world of Shakespearean authorship controversies. While she is listed as a potential candidate by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust (a group seemingly determined to credit Shakespeare's work to anyone but Shakespeare himself), even among that group she is included as just one of 66 candidates identified so far:
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