Welcome to Litsy!

�Men, who forgetting they were born of women, nourished of women, and if they were not of the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a final end of them all; do like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred.� Emilia Bassano, �To the Vertuous Reader� In 1611 Emilia Bassano penned these words to her �Vertuous Reader�, as part of a volume of radical, feminist and subversive poetry. It was one of the first published collections of poetry written by a woman in England. The little we know of Emilia Bassano is restricted to the possibility that she may have been the �Dark Lady� of Shakespeare�s Sonnets � and the rest of Her Story has been erased by History. Commissioned specifically for Shakespeare�s Globe, and with an all-female cast, this world premiere will reveal the life of Emilia: poet, mother and feminist. This time, the focus will be on this exceptional woman who managed to outlive all the men the history books tethered her to.