Current News about the Shakespeare Authorship Debate Hughes sided with A.L. Rowse in identifying the Dark Lady as Emilia Bassano Lanier, a lady of some distinction in the Court in the 1590s, of Mediterranean extraction (and hence "olive-skinned"), and intellectually an equal of Oxford/Shakespeare (she published a book of her original poetry under her own name in 1611, the first such book ever published by a woman in England, and a book that--like the Sonnets--had very few surviving copies).