Shakespeare and the Dark Lady

This play by poet/playwright Enzo Condello dramatizes the intense love triangle between Shakespeare, his wife Anne Hathaway, and his unattainable muse/poet Emilia Bassano. The play explores universal themes: the torments of unrequited love and desire, illusion/fantasy and reality, sexual/romantic extra-marital love verses marital fidelity and its complications. It also suggests how frustrated or thwarted desire can sometimes be sublimated into artistic creativity.

Emilia Bassano, historically the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets, was of Italian heritage and the first female poet published in the English language. She immediately bewitched Shakespeare when they met, this tempestuous affair having had a profound effect on him as evidenced in his sonnets. After this dark relationship his plays moved from comedies to tragedies.

''Condello's writing is skillful enough to stand with Shakespeare's.'-- Helen Thomson, The AGE.
' Condello is a master playwright who takes up where Shakespeare left off'-- Brenda Addie, Theatre academic, Melbourne University.