John Hudson

The Dark Lady, Author

John Hudson is the author of the book, "Shakespeare's Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier the woman behind Shakespeare's plays?", which Five Fifty Five has partnered with Rainshine Entertainment for a new production.

Hudson is the founder of the experimental Shakespeare ensemble The Dark Lady Players in New York City and has taught Advanced and Experimental Shakespeare to actors at H.B. Studios. He has researched and directed Shakespeare for nearly two decades, using a meta-theatrical style derived from medieval and experimental theatre. This highlights the text as an artifact and how it was constructed, enabling an audience to see its deepest, multiple, levels of meaning and to inter-relate them as the writer intended.

He says “A Shakespeare play is analogous to a piece of Renaissance polyphony in which each track of meaning can be examined separately, but needs to be integrated with the others to comprehend the full meaning. Once uncovered, the real meaning of these plays is far, far more provocative and important than anything to be gained by overlaying them with elitist, fashionable, allusions to modern politics”.

John has a previous history of working on contrarian ideas, like alternative energy and global warming in the 1970s and on the internet in the early 1990s. He sees the Shakespeare industry as an example of ‘groupthink’, based on untenable assumptions which need to be re-examined to build and test alternative models. He has degrees from The Shakespeare Institute, the London School of Economics and the University of Exeter where he developed new approaches to the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of literature.