SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Long-time local family practice physician Brooks Martin has published a book titled Ms. Shakespeare, I Presume: The Case for Amelia Bassano Lanier, and it is available from Amazon in Print or eBook versions. 

The question of who wrote the works of William Shakespeare has remained unanswered for hundreds of years. It is hard to match Mr. Shakspere’s biography (which is how his name was actually spelled, without one e and one a, and probably pronounced Shack-Spur) with the person who wrote plays using specific locations in Italy, used fluent Italian and Hebrew phrases, used technical musical terms, wrote about nobles, falconry, and other rarefied subjects, and had a feminist outlook.

Mr. Shakspere’s Last Will and Testament lists no books, writing utensils or desks, and both his parents and his two daughters were illiterate, an unlikely family to be the source for the greatest writer in English history.

The idea that Amelia Bassano Lanier might be the author of Shakespeare’s works was first proposed by John Hudson in 2014 in his book, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. Recently, Jodi Picoult wrote a fictional treatment of this theory, By Any Other Name.

But Brooks Martin’s book provides a strong case with new research. It combines the usual kind of biographical and literary arguments, both for Amelia Bassano and against William and then combines it with this new evidence. 

She was a published poet of Jewish and Italian heritage who, despite not being of noble birth, had the background required to have written the Shakespeare works through liaisons with various noble families. She was a member of a family of prominent Italian-Jewish musicians from Venice who were recruited by Henry VIII to provide music at his court. After her father died, Amelia was “adopted” by a noble family and received an aristocratic education. Later, she became the paramour of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the cousin of Queen Elizabeth, and more importantly, the Lord Chamberlain in charge of English theater. When she became pregnant, she was forced to marry another musician, a cousin named Alfonso Lanier, who then squandered their money and spent them into poverty. In contrast, William Shakspere became rich very rapidly by being a play broker and pretending to have written the plays, and was paid very well to keep his mouth shut. 

Brooks investigated the names of characters in the plays. His analysis showed that Amelia’s name (spelled Emelia in the plays), the names of her family members, and the names of significant other people in her life show up very frequently in the Shakespeare plays, typically for very positive characters. This included both actual names, but also many made-up proxy names which would have been used to hide their identities. In addition, the name William was always derided by being attached to a drunk, a knave, or a country bumpkin. 

He was also struck by an unusual pattern for the name Antonio, twice paired with a side-kick character named Sebastian. Why would the playwright Shakespeare, who was very creative with character names, like Toby Belch for a drunk knight, pair these two common names together in similar relationships to each other? There must have been a reason. The clue lay in the third Antonio, the title character in The Merchant of Venice.  It turns out Antonio was her uncle, a real Merchant of Venice, and the character’s sidekick was Bassanio, whose name points directly to Amelia’s father, Baptista Bassano. In Twelfth Night, Antonio is paired with Sebastian, and Amelia gave us many clues that Sebastian was a proxy name for her father. In The Tempest, she even adds a third member, a character named Alonso, which is suspiciously similar to Amelia’s husband’s name, Alfonso. This means that the trio of characters in that play are her uncle, father and husband.

Nothing in the authorship question is conclusive, but this book shows that Amelia had the noble-adjacent educational and social background to have been the author, William Shakespeare. She also left us clues by choosing names for her characters that pointed back to herself and her family, so that the world would eventually (400 years later!) figure out that she had written them. 

Brooks is currently working on getting Amelia Bassano listed as one of the possible authors on the London-based Shakespearean Authorship Trust website, the largest and most important organization promoting alternative authors in trying to solve the question of who wrote the works of William Shakespeare. 

He will also be a speaker at the Shakespeare Roundtable annual Zoom conference on Saturday, October 17, at 11 A.M. PDT. It can be watched live (get Zoom link here) or seen at a later date at shakespeareauthorship.org.