As an essay in cheap comedy the show is a great success: Emilia reviewed

Emilia is a period piece about Emilia Bassano who may have been the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The writer, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, declines to turn the subject into a history play and instead creates a larky sketch show with snippets of literary gossip. Our heroine enters as a frightened teenager contemplating the horrors of courtship: ‘Men sniff at me like dogs.’ Marriage, she shudders, will crush her, mind and body. ‘As I grow, I must shrink.’ She’s also a poet who needs a publisher but she’s thwarted by institutional sexism in the book trade. ‘Women’s poetry?’ screeches a male reader. ‘The most dangerous rubbish I’ve ever seen.’ At court, she encounters racists who sneer at her Spanish heritage. ‘My father,’ sniffs a baroness, ‘believes we are being inundated by families like yours.’ Emilia snaps back: ‘I’m not accountable to you or your father’s questionable opinions about people seeking new lives.’ It’s hardly Elizabethan repartee.

The slang continues even when Shakespeare shows up. The Bard, it seems, is a world-class bounder who seduces Emilia purely in order to filch her expressions and nick her ideas for play titles. When the sonnets are published, she throws a wobbly. ‘He takes my name and rubs it through the mud for his own gain. Is there anything more violating?’ Their liaison produces a baby, Cordelia. ‘Well done for not dying,’ says a midwife. ‘That would have been a massive drag.’ But the child doesn’t survive. Poor Emilia has to cope with her grief while sneaky Shakespeare sidles up behind her and takes dictation as she weeps. ‘I cannot heave my heart into my mouth,’ she sighs, a line that makes it into the first act of King Lear.

The political and emotional patterns of the play never vary and every scene is dominated by wars between the genders.