Emilia: art instructing life
Listen to every woman who came before you and listen to every woman with you now. That anger that you feel. It is yours and you can use it. We need you to, we want you to. See how far we have come, don’t stop now. The houses that have been built around us are not built from stone.
Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm is a play about Emilia Lanier née Bassano, England’s first published female poet who died in 1645 in her seventies. The play was first performed by an all-female cast at The Globe in 2018 but, to mark Women’s History Month, is currently available online until the end of March.
Having missed it the first time around, I watched it this week from my living room and the lines above, taken from the final monologue of the play, struck an instant chord. The last sentence in particular rang true.
The recent coverage for International Women’s Day, a large portion of which details the disproportionate adverse impact of the pandemic on women, is proof enough that the houses around us are indeed not built by stone.
PwC’s Women in Work Index 2021 reported that, without immediate action, more women are at risk of leaving the workforce permanently due to the unequal burden of unpaid care and domestic work exacerbated by COVID-19. They summarised: ‘even at double the rate of historical progress, the OECD will not catch up to its pre-pandemic equality growth path until 2030.’
A survey by Theirworld, a children’s education charity, indicated that the pandemic’s gendered impact due to persistent gender norms isn’t just affecting adults. They reported that 66% of girls and women aged 14-24 years old are spending more time cooking for their families since schools have closed, more than double the rate of their male counterparts (31%), putting their education further at risk. Similar statistics were found for cleaning, shopping, and caring for relatives.
The government’s move to take the pressure off companies has halted crucial progress towards closing the gender pay gap. In February, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission delayed the enforcement for UK companies to report on their pay gap by six months to October 2021, by which time it will have been two and a half years since the last mandatory reporting (it was completely suspended in 2020).
The lesson from all this is the same as Emilia’s: we cannot afford to take any progress for granted when unexpected forces have the power to undo progress and set us back.
In Emilia’s world, being a female professional poet was unprecedented and it is her struggle to be heard that forms the backbone of the play. Largely forgotten by history, there is very little stone-cold fact available about her and as a result Lloyd Malcolm flexes her artistic license throughout.
In one such instance, Emilia despairs at the impossibility of getting published, when a confidante says to her: ‘write a religious text but inside it, deep inside what you write, place your messages for us. We who have read your poems will know what you are trying to say to us. The censor won’t suspect a thing.’
In 1611, she was eventually published. She wrote Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a collection of religious poetry that has only recently been studied and analysed for its satire and protofeminist themes.
Thankfully, the world that Emilia lived in is vastly different to the one we live in today; we have come a long way since women had to lie and conceal their way into work. But, as we know, we’re not there yet.
Her reasons for anger – and the play is angry, I had to stay on volume duty throughout to avoid upsetting my neighbours with deafening shouts – may seem a distant memory but on further inspection the gap closes. She is forced into marriage, her work is stolen and repurposed by men, she is refused opportunities, she is slandered by society and disproportionately scrutinised by the press.
Clare Perkins, who plays Emilia at the end of the play (the character is portrayed by three different actors) addresses the issue of ‘her anger’. She says: ‘I have been told that my anger is not to be seen on my outside, that it is not seemly, it does not help, that [it] detracts from what I have tried to say.’ But she lets it out in full force anyway and delivers the play’s incredibly rousing final words.
I’m not suggesting we need to start screaming through our office corridors and banging down the doors but the energy that runs through Emilia is certainly necessary if we want to one day live in a world where the changes we want to see are set in stone; where International Women’s Day is a nice to have rather than a crucial annual milestone to remind everyone of what is yet to be done or, worse, what has been undone.
Good theatre treads the boundary between fiction and reality with ease; it holds up a mirror and encourages us to look inwards, backwards, and into the future. By the end of Emilia, however, the boundary seems to disintegrate entirely. You get the sense that the words spoken don’t just belong to Lloyd Malcolm or Emilia but also to Clare, to the entire cast standing behind her, to all women. And they aren’t just for women, they are for everyone.
Maybe one day our plays won’t need to end in a call to arms against ongoing gender inequality but, until then, there seems to be a lot we can learn from theatre.
Written by Fiona Johnston, Research Manager at Audley