This Idiotic Meme Says A Black Woman Wrote Shakespeare. It Has 20,000 Retweets.
The reason we didn’t learn that fact in school, Ms. Johnson, is because the claim is simply horse manure. As snopes.com wrote in debunking the ridiculous claim, Aemilia Bassano (later Emilia Lanier) was a published author; the Shakespearean Authorship Trust points out 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, and guess what else?
She was Jewish, from Morocco.
Snopes continues: “No contemporaneous accounts describe Bassano as 'black' (or 'African') … 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."
The reason we didn’t learn that fact in school, Ms. Johnson, is because the claim is simply horse manure. As snopes.com wrote in debunking the ridiculous claim, Aemilia Bassano (later Emilia Lanier) was a published author; the Shakespearean Authorship Trust points out 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, and guess what else?
She was Jewish, from Morocco.
Snopes continues: “No contemporaneous accounts describe Bassano as 'black' (or 'African') … 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."