Emilia Lanier[a] (née Aemilia Bassano; 1569–1645) was the first woman in England to assert herself as a professional poet,[2] through her volume Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews, 1611).

Emilia Lanier's life appears in her letters, poetry, and medical and legal records, and in sources for the social contexts in which she lived.

[3] Researchers have found interactions with Lanier in astrologer Dr Simon Forman's (1552–1611) professional diary, the earliest known casebook kept by an English medical practitioner.

Her father, Baptiste Bassano, was a Venetian-born musician at the court of Elizabeth I, making Lanier a member of the minor gentry.

Lanier's sister, Angela Bassano, married Joseph Hollande in 1576, but neither of her brothers, Lewes and Phillip, reached adulthood.

[7] Leeds Barroll says Lanier was "probably a Jew", her baptism being "part of the vexed context of Jewish assimilation in Tudor England.

[10] Not long after her mother's death, Lanier became the mistress of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, a Tudor courtier and cousin of Queen Elizabeth I.

Parents then proved unwilling to send their children to a woman with a history of arrest and Lanier's aspirations of running a prosperous school came to an end.

[11] In 1611, at the age of 42, Lanier published a collection of poetry called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews).

Previously, Isabella Whitney had published a 38-page pamphlet of poetry partly written by her correspondents, Anne Dowriche, who was Cornish, and Elizabeth Melville, who was Scottish.

It was also the first potentially feminist work published in England, as all the dedications are to women and the title poem "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum", about the crucifixion of Christ, is written from a woman's point of view.

[12] Source analysis shows that Lanier draws on work that she mentions reading, including Edmund Spenser, Ovid, Petrarch, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Agrippa, as well as protofeminists like Veronica Franco[13] and Christine de Pizan.

The title poem, a narrative work of over 200 stanzas, tells the story of Christ's passion satirically and almost entirely from the point of view of the women who surround him.

[19] Other scholars including A. L. Rowse view Lanier's conversion as genuine and her passionate devotion to Christ and to his mother as sincere.

She also defends women by noting the dedication of Christ's female followers in staying with him through the Crucifixion and first seeking him after the burial and Resurrection.

In Salve Deus, Lanier also draws attention to Pilate's wife, a minor character in the Bible, who attempts to prevent the unjust trial and crucifixion of Christ.

Lanier repeats the anti-Semitic aspects of the Gospel accounts: hostile attitudes towards the Jews for not preventing the Crucifixion – such views were the norm for her period.

Although there is no agreement on intent and motive, most scholars note the strong feminist sentiments throughout Salve Deus Rex Judæorum.

The Clifford household possessed a significant library, some of which can be identified in the painting The Great Picture, attributed to Jan van Belcamp.

[22] Helen Wilcox asserts in her book, 1611: Authority, Gender, and the Word in Early Modern England, that the poem is an allegory of the expulsion from Eden.

It appears in David Lasocki and Roger Prior's book The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument makers in England 1531–1665 (1995) and in Stephanie Hopkins Hughes.

[30] In 2005,[31] the English conductor Peter Bassano, a descendant of Lanier's brother, suggested she provided some of the texts for William Byrd's 1589 Songs of Sundrie Natures, dedicated to Lord Hunsdon, and that one of the songs, a setting of the translation of an Italian sonnet "Of Gold all Burnisht", may have been used by Shakespeare as the model for his parodic Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.

The Irish poet Niall McDevitt also believes Lanier was the Dark Lady: "She spurned his advances somewhere along the line and he never won her back....

[33] John Hudson points out that the names Emilia in Othello and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice coincide with mentions of a swan dying to music, which he sees as a standard Ovidian image of a great poet.

Bassano points to the similarity of Hilliard's alternative miniature to a description of Lord Biron's desired wife in Love's Labour's Lost: "A whitely wanton, with a velvet brow.

The play Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, produced in London in 2018, is a "mock history" piece with a feminist message, in which Lanier rebukes Shakespeare for "lift[ing] her words".

[43] A musical The Dark Lady by Sophie Boyce and Veronica Mansour is in development, depicting the "what if" scenario whereby Lanier uses William Shakespeare's name in order to have her plays seen.