News at Eleven: But it's the addition of the female,

Jewish contender--[Amelia Bassano Lanier,] a pioneering woman poet--that will turn heads.

The principal proponent of this theory is 55-year-old John Hudson, a British Shakespeare scholar and director of the New York theatre ensemble the Dark Lady Players. In The Oxfordian, Mr. Hudson argues that if Bassano (Lanier was her married name) did not write all of the plays, she was certainly a major collaborator.

Her name is not new to Shakespeare studies. In 1979, British historian A.L. Rowse suggested that Bassano, with her family's Mediterranean skin colouring, was the famous "dark lady of the sonnets," Shakespeare's mistress. Ridiculed at the time, that view is now commonplace among scholars.

from The Globe and Mail: Was Shakespeare a woman?

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