You are on page 1of 20

Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

SHAKESPEARE’S JEWISH RELIGIOUS ALLEGORIES


AND WHAT THEY IMPLY
by John Hudson
contact; Darkladyplayers@aol.com
Introduction
This paper discusses the use of Biblical allegory in the
Shakespearean plays, together with their use of Hebrew and their
author’s familiarity with Judaism. It examines Titus Andronicus,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, and shows that
these contain allegories relating to the Roman-Jewish War, which
led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE. The strange
presence of these allegorical satires implies they could have
been created by a Marrano Jew, and suggests that the major
contributor to the plays could have been the experimental poet
Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645).

Judaism and Hebrew


One of the most peculiar features of the Shakespearean plays is
the familiarity that their author demonstrates with Judaism and
Hebrew. Such knowledge was extraordinarily rare in Elizabethan
London. After all Jews could not legally live in England at the
time and there were only 200 secret Jews or Marranos/Conversos in
the whole country, of whom the Bassano family of court musicians
were the most prominent. Surprisingly, the subject has attracted
only a handful of investigators, for instance David Basch had
suggested that the playwright quoted from the Talmud in half a
dozen places, and a few words of spoken Hebrew and many Hebrew
puns have been found in the plays by Florence Amit. I will
present four out of the scores of examples that have been
identified.

My first example comes from The Merchant of Venice. Portia says


“I am lock’d” (3,2,40) and “I am contain’d” (2,8,5) in one of the
caskets. These are strange statements because it is her portrait
that is inside the casket and not Portia herself. But a Hebrew

1
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

speaker would know that PoRTia’s name in Hebrew is spelt PRT.


They would see the lead casket, know that the word ‘lead’ in
Hebrew is YPRT (oepheret--the first letter is a soundless letter
the ayin), and realize that the Hebrew pun shows that Portia
(PRT) is contained inside the lead (Schöenfeld 1979). Naturally
this is the casket chosen by the suitor Bassanio, whose name is
the original spelling of the name of the Bassano family who, we
might suppose, would recognize a Hebrew pun.

My next example is from As You Like It. There are several clues
that the start of the play is set in Paradise. One of these is
the rib-cracking which the playwright has added to the wrestling
which has been taken from the original novel. We are told that
rib-cracking is a sport for ladies because indeed it was by rib-
cracking that Eve was created in the Book of Genesis (Gen 2;21).
She was a broken consort, meaning both a companion and also the
kind of orchestra that would play “broken music” as it was
called. But why does Rosalind say that this broken music is “in
his sides” (1,2,134), thereby linking the word rib to the word
for side? The answer is that the Hebrew word ‘tsela’ was always
translated into English as rib, but where the word appears in the
Hebrew Bible it usually means side, referring for instance to the
sides of the Ark of the Covenant. So the playwright seems to be
showing their knowledge of the meaning of the original Hebrew
usage.

My third example is of the actual spoken Hebrew (or perhaps the


dialect Ladino), in the plays which comes from the nonsense
language in All’s Well That Ends Well. The interpreter says to
Parolles (whose name is Mr. Words) "Boskos vauvado. I understand
thee, and can speak thy tongue. Kerely-bonto, sir, betake thee to
thy faith..." (4,1,75-77). The nonsense language the interpreter
is speaking is actually Hebrew. If translated, the interpreter is
not reciting nonsense but saying something that makes sense in
the context of the play "In bravery like boldness, and in surety,

2
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

I understand thee, and can speak thy tongue. I am aware of his


deception sir, betake thee to thy faith...",
B'oz K'oz; In bravery like boldness
Vah vado; And in his surety ( vah = and; vado=vad meaning
‘sure’ with an ‘o’ ending meaning his, ie. Surety)
K’erli; I am aware (ki = since, erli = er, aware, li =
grammatical suffix meaning to me)
b’onto; his deception (b'on(na) = deception, grammatical
ending ‘o’ meaning his.i

My last example comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Helena


questions her beauty and describes herself as being ugly as a
bear, while Lysander calls Hermia “tawny” to which she replies
she is fair skinned. They are then contrasted in terms of their
height, one being dwarfish and the other a maypole. Many
audiences might not notice, but the two girls are successively
contrasted in this manner in terms of their ugliness/beauty,
their darkness/fairness and their shortness/tallness. Now in
chapter 9 of the Tractate Nedarim, (part of the Mishnah), there
is a discussion of when marriage vows are made in error. The
Talmudic discussion concerns exactly these same pairs of
qualities, and they appear in exactly the same order. Moreover,
although Helena’s absent father never comes on stage, he is twice
referred to by name as “Nedar”. Nedar is the Hebrew verb meaning
‘was absent’—very appropriate for an absent father—but
additionally it is an amusing pun on the Hebrew word neder
(plural nedarim) meaning a vow, which wittily alludes to the very
name of the Tractate the playwright is using (Altimont 2007).

Finally, in addition using to Hebrew sources, the playwright uses


the work of Fernando de Rojas, the Marrano author of La
Celestina. This is used to create the Nurse’s scene in Romeo and
Juliet and may be used for some of the love dialogue in As You
Like It---which as in La Celestina is a parody. It is also
possibly used in Henry VIII, The Winter’s Tale, in Troilus and

3
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Cressida and Hamlet (Carroll and Bagby 1971).

Jewish Biblical allegories


More than any other source, the Shakespearean plays draw upon the
Bible, to which Shaheen identified over 2,000 references. These
use 14 different translations, and what may be the author’s own
occasional translations from the Hebrew. The care that the author
has taken to create these references is very remarkable. For
instance, to write Othello the playwright took an original
Italian text by Cinthio— which had no religious allusions-- and
added in 64 religious references. In the case of King Lear the
playwright did not re-use any of the 30 religious references in
the source text Leir, but created 40 new ones.

These references form part of an overall system of religious


allegory. Solving allegorical puzzles was a major pastime at
Court and as the Queen’s cousin Sir John Harington observed,
allegory was used in literature in order to communicate hidden
meanings which would remain undetected by those who did not know
enough to understand them. Allegory was also used in English
stage plays including the mystery plays, and those of Lyly and
Wilson. The use of allegory and personified characters in the
Shakespearean plays has already attracted some recent attention
(Kiefer 2003, Hoff 1988). For instance Julius Caesar has been
identified as containing an “impious parody” (Sohmer 1999; 130).
Similarly, Othello’s allegorical sub-plot contains a parody of
the Virgin Mary (Desdemona), presumably pregnant by the Holy
Ghost, being smothered in revenge by an allegorical Joseph
(Othello) on the night before Easter (Sohmer, 2007),echoing the
body of Jesus in the tomb with its face covered by a
handkerchief.

The existence of such unlikely allegorical riddles in the plays


perhaps explains why the preface to Troilus and Cressida refers
to the plays making people “better witted than they came” with

4
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

“an edge of wit set upon them”. Similarly the First Folio insists
not that we should go to more performances, but that we must read
the plays “againe and againe” in order to understand them. Yet,
until now there has been no adequate explanation of why the
playwright should have created such peculiar allegories.ii

In the 1930s, various scholars attempted to identify how the


religious references in the plays created a consistent
Christological allegory, but failed. Similarly Battenhouse, Velz
and Wentsdorf separately pointed out that running across all the
plays there was a very strange pattern of imagery about
cannibals, amputations and disparaging allusions to Caesar. It
now turns out that all of these references form part of a
consistent and meaningful allegorical system which constitutes
the deepest layer of the plays. They do not however reflect
conventional Christian doctrine. Rather these allegories reflect
a strange Jewish theological perspective relating to the Roman-
Jewish war fought by Vespasian and Titus Caesar 66-73CE.

It has long been known that the First Folio’s introductory


dedication to the two Earls— in its reference to the dedication
of cakes to the gods— is a strange re-writing of Pliny’s
dedication of his encyclopedia to Titus Caesar (Dawkins 357).
While for most people today this subject seems rather obscure,
the Roman-Jewish war was a relatively common topic in Elizabethan
London,iii and among Jews even today the synagogue liturgy is a
constant reminder to remember the destruction of the temple. The
following discussion will examine three of the plays suggesting
that they contain religious allegories concerning the Flavian
Caesars, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian and the Roman-Jewish War.
At least two of my examples are clearly pastorals, and since the
genre of pastoral was designed to deceive and to conceal hidden
meanings, it should not be surprising that they do so.

5
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Jewish Allegory in Titus Andronicus


The German touring version Titus Andronicus and the Haughty
Empress included an additional character called Vespasian, who is
the first to speak and who offers Titus the throne. So
conceivably Titus is an allegory for Vespasian’s son, the Flavian
Emperor Titus Caesar. If so, then his brother Marcus would be an
allegory for his real brother Domitian, whose hobby, according to
his biography by Suetonius in Lives of the Twelve Caesars, was
impaling flies on the point of “a very sharp writing implement”
presumably a stylus. This bizarre hobby offers an excellent fit
with the 85 extra and otherwise unnecessary lines that were added
into the 1594 Quarto which describe Marcus killing a fly with his
knife (3,2,1-85), and this extraordinary motif supports his
allegorical identity as Domitian Caesar. This line of allegorical
reasoning can then be continued for the rest of the play.
Although the Roman battle is against the ‘Goths’, this is a
medieval allegorical term for Jews, which maybe is why in the
Folio the ‘Moor’ has the Jewish priestly name of Aaron, and why
some of his lines (5,1,128-140) echo those of the Jew Barabas in
The Jew of Malta.

Jewish Allegory in As You Like It


As You Like It is supposedly set either in the Ardennes or in the
Forest of Arden in Warwickshire. But it is a strange sort of
forest. A hunt is going on—which seems more like a massacre---in
which deer are being killed like “native burghers of a desert
city” and as “greasy citizens” (2,1,55) who wear leather coats
and make their wills like men do. The forest is surrounded by a
“circle” (5,4,34), is described as a “temple” (3,3,43),and a
“desert” (2,6,17). Many people like Orlando, Adam, Celia, and
Rosalind seem to be starving (2,6,1-2). There are some trees, on
which Orlando hangs like an acorn, on which Touchstone will be
grafted, and on which Rosalind’s verse body is hung with lame
feet, stretched from East to West. All this is very odd, but the

6
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

key clue is that the man who killed the deer will be taken to the
Duke like a “Roman Conqueror” (4,2,3). Why has the playwright
added in a piece about ancient Roman hunting practices from
Elyot’s Book of the Governor, and why introduce a Roman
Conqueror? For that matter, why is Celia’s conquest of Oliver
compared to Julius Caesar’s maxim “I came, I saw, I overcame” (or
“I conquered”) (5,2,30-1) and highlighted by the positioning of a
rhetorical ‘staircase’ either side of this central passage? What
are these two references to Roman conquering doing in this play?

My suggestion is that the forest is an Elizabethan allegory.


While scholars have developed ad hoc explanations for each of
these features, those explanations do not provide an overall
coherent explanatory framework. Yet every single one of these
odd features—the hanging on trees, the starvation, the cutting
down of trees to turn the land into a desert, the massacre of the
citizens, the temple, the surrounding by a circle, and the
presence of a “Roman conqueror”, precisely corresponds to the
Roman conquest of Jerusalem in the year 70CE, as described in the
writings of Josephus. If so, then this part of the play is an
allegory of the Roman-Jewish war, the “Roman conqueror” Duke
Senior is an allegory for Vespasian Caesar, and his child
Rosalind/Ganymede is once more an allegory for Domitian, which
explains why the character is otherwise inexplicably associated,
although more casually than in Titus Andronicus, with the
extraordinary motif of fly killing (4,1,102). Ganymede’s
companion in Greek mythology is Tithonus (not Celia/Aliena),
which suggests the character’s underlying allegory as Titus, and
explains why the character conquers the ‘olive’ (a New Testament
symbol of the Jewish people) in a manner resembling the actions
of a Caesar (5,2,30-31).

Richard Knowles had suggested that AYLI contained allegories but


because he had been unable to show how the allegory operated, he
concluded it was essentially decorative (Knowles 1966). It isn’t.

7
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

For instance, although at a surface level the ending of this play


makes very little sense and is often regarded a problem, at the
allegorical level the ending is very funny and dramatic. When
Touchstone concludes his dueling speech, with its blatant use of
the rhetorical figure partitio (5,4,68-101), the Partition
between Earth and Heaven opens for the Last Day, when Celia and
Rosalind return from Heaven. The Duke expects that there will be
music, dances and marriages, but these keep being oddly
interrupted. Instead two characters called Jacques come on stage-
--the word Jakes is the Elizabethan for toilet (3,3,68). We are
also told that another Flood is coming (5,4,35), so Touchstone
and Audrey are going off to Noah’s Ark. There have been several
previous references to floods (3,3,8), and the name Audrey comes
from Saint Ethelreda—the woman who was saved from a flood.

Touchstone escapes into the Ark, because God is sending another


Flood to wipe away the corrupt world in the implicit allegorical
flushing of the two Jakes. Finally, to confirm that this is the
right interpretation, the fool Touchstone owns a very rare pocket
watch like Sir John Harington (2,7,20), the inventor of the flush
toilet, which was invented two years before this play was
performed, and to which there are several allusions.iv So at a
macro level, it appears that the peculiar end of the play is a
massive allegorical toilet joke, in which the Roman conqueror and
his associates will all be washed away.

Now I want to look a micro level at one of the more detailed


aspects of As You Like It, the nonsensical piece about Jane
Smile---and suggest it is a comic gospel parody. In 3 Henry VI
the playwright had simply taken an account from Holinshed’s
Chronicle and added in references to “outstretched arms”, to a
“passion” and to “my blood be upon your heads” in order to
allegorize Richard’s death as a crucifixion (1,4,69-169). As You
Like It is more sophisticated because the playwright uses a
rhetorical technique from the Hebrew Bible called inclusio or the

8
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

‘envelope’, so the Jane Smile section opens and closes with a


reference to the ‘passion’ (2,4,38 and 56), the technical term
for the death of Christ. In the middle there is a rhetorical
cross or chiasmus. The name Jane comes from the Hebrew Yohannan,
meaning ‘the Lord is gracious’. There are also references to a
kissing by night and drawing a sword upon a stone, which are
allusions to the Garden of Gethsemane where Judas went a kissing
and where Peter (Petros meaning the stone) drew his sword. Could
this nonsensical little passage in As You Like It refer not to a
“smile”, but rather a simile, a comic parody of the Garden of
Gethsemane in the gospels? This might seem dubious if this were
the only case of such a peculiar literary construction in the
plays, but it isn’t.

Jewish Allegory in Dream


The next example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, contains an
equivalent micro level parody (Hudson 2008). This is the death of
Bottom/Pyramus which again uses the rhetorical ‘envelope’
structure to open and close with a reference to the ‘passion’
(5,1,277 and 303). In between, the light disappears, there is a
stabbing in the side, a reference to dice-playing (5,1,296-7),
and a death, all of which echo the descriptions of the
crucifixion given in the gospels, including the men who cast lots
at the foot of the cross (shown on stage in the mystery plays as
dice-playing).

Deciphering both dreams and allegories were two of the leading


pastimes at the Elizabethan court, and in either capacity
courtiers would have puzzled over the macro level in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream which contains yet another broad parody of the
Jewish war. In 1998 Professor Patricia Parker demonstrated that
the play contains an allegory set in first century Judea in which
Thisbe is an allegory for the church and Peter Quince is an
allegory for Saint Peter. Bottom/Pyramus is a conventional
medieval allegory for Jesus, while the Wall, the “wittiest

9
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

partition”(5,1,165), is another allegory for the Partition


between Earth and Heaven which comes down on the Last Day. So in
the play-within-the-play, Peter Quince presides over the Last
Day, in which Jesus comes again to be re-united with the Church.
But it all goes wrong and both die, with Bottom/Pyramus dying in
another comic parody of the passion story.

To build on Parker’s work further, Oberon is an “invisible”,


“jealous”, “Lord”, some of whose lines come from the solar
Psalms, so he evidently represents Yahweh, the Hebrew God. He is
also fighting a war--- possibly the Roman-Jewish war—--since it
is being fought against Titania, who turns out to be an allegory
for Titus Caesar. So, for instance, the reason Titania so
strangely gives orders to cut off the legs of the bees (3,1,163)
is that like the amputations in Titus Andronicus, this parallels
an order that Titus gave during the war to cut off the limbs of a
Jewish leader who was a descendant of the Maccabees (Atwill 106).
It is a simple pun on bees/Maccabees. There is also a line in
Bottom’s crucifixion scene that alludes to the crucifixions that
Titus ordered towards the end of that war.v

In the play however, the war is being fought over a little


‘Indian’ boy (2,1,22). Since other characters come from Judea,
this should rather be read—as in the well-known equivalent
passages in the Quarto and Folio text of Othello--—as a little
Judean boy. Titus/Titania has stolen away this boy from the
Hebrew God and turned him into a “changeling” (2,1,120) who is
crowned like Bottom/Jesus with thorny flowers (2,1,27) and whose
mother is a virgin votress or nun (2,5,123) associated with the
sea (like the Virgin Mary, who had that title in the 7th century
works of Isidore of Seville and Christian hymns from the 8th
century). In other words, Titus/Titania has stolen away the
figure of the Messiah from the Jews, and changed him into the
literary character of Jesus. The Hebrew God wants him back and
plans to take comic revenge by making Titania fall in love with

10
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

the Jesus figure, wearing Bottom’s asshead. While remarkable,


this anti-Christian satire appears compatible with a radical new
paradigm that is emerging in New Testament studies which suggests
that the account in the play is to some extent symbolically
conveying actual history.vi Although aspects of the play echo
historical details from the Roman-Jewish war, which the Jews
lost, in Oberon’s war on the Last Day the Jews will be
victorious.

Here in three different plays are a reference to Titus in Dream,


and to Titus, Domitian and Vespasian in the German version of
Titus Andronicus, and more covertly in As You Like It. It is also
possible to observe in these three plays how over a decade the
playwright developed skill in using the allegorical level of the
plays to convey increasingly more complex material. While
allegorical interpretation must always be done with great care,
because some commentators suggest an isolated parallel without
explaining what purpose the allegorical dimension fulfills
(Vickers 1993), these three examples suggest a consistent
underlying pattern which takes comic Jewish revenge upon the
Flavian Caesars and also against Christianity.

References to the Flavian Caesars in other plays


The allegorical exegesis could be continued for the references to
the apocalypse and to Titus Flavius in other plays. Some of these
appear covertly, while overt mentions include the peculiar
reference to a Titus who has his leg amputated in Twelfth Night
(5,1,61), and the Titus who appears on crutches in Coriolanus
(1,1,241). There is also the character‘s name in Julius Caesar
which has been slightly modified from the source in Plutarch to
create Titinius who stabs himself in the heart (5,3,90) in a
scene that parallels another character, a clown called Flavius.
In Timon of Athens, Titus makes a comic cameo appearance as a
cursed debt collector trying vainly to collect money from
Flavius! In Measure for Measure Vincentio (meaning ‘the

11
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Conqueror’) represents Vespasian who was known as invictus,


meaning ‘the Unconquered’, who razes the “sanctuary” like the
Temple. While supposedly in Rome, as Vespasian did, he left the
city in charge of his deputy which is why he asks “send me
Flavius” (4,5,9) shortly before the entrance of the deputy, who
allegorically represents Titus Flavius.

Examples from plays where, as in As You Like It, we have to work


out the allegorical identities from covert clues, include the
character Cassio in Othello who is skilled in generalship,
associated with a “Roman” “triumph” (4,1,119), will “stand by
Caesar” (2,3,118), has his leg amputated (5,1,2), and is caught
by his “brother” (5,1,71) like a great “fly” (2,1,169). In
Macbeth the central character is a “Roman fool” (5,8,1), who is
compared to Tarquin ruler of Rome, and who destroys “the Lord’s
anointed Temple” (2,3,67) in circumstances that echo the signs of
the destruction of Jerusalem as described by Josephus in The
Jewish War, most notably the dagger improbably suspended in the
air. Further fly-killing examples could be given from Coriolanus
and from King Lear. Finally Cymbeline makes a precise historical
allusion since King Cymbeline and his two sons historically
fought against a Roman army (half of which was commanded by
Vespasian, his brother, and Titus) in battles in which men are
oddly depicted as being killed like “mortal flies” (5,4,31). The
disparaging Caesar references and strange Christ imagery that
other writers have detected across the plays form part of the
same overall pattern.

Implications for authorship


Several different explanations have been put forward for the
appearance of Hebrew and Jewish materials in the plays. The first
and most incredible, is that the man from Stratford was himself a
Marrano (Hirschson 1993). But thanks to Stratfordian scholarship,
it is quite clear that Mr. Shakespeare grew up apparently as a
Catholic, and when he was in London—instead of living in a house

12
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

of hidden Jews in which he could have secretly kept kashrut---he


lived instead with a family of French Huguenots. Later in life he
retired to Stratford which was not known to have a Marrano
community, where he was buried prominently in the local church.

A second proposed solution is that Hebrew appears in the plays


because they were written by the Earl of Oxford, who had an M.A.
from Oxford University where Hebrew was taught (Goldstein 1999).
The problem is that the honorary M.A. he received was conferred
on him as a “gift” and, as Alan Nelson puts it in his recent
biography, implies no “academic accomplishment”.

So we come to the third solution has been put forward, that the
author of the plays was Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Now
Sidney did complete her brother’s versification of the Psalms—at
least, to be precise, she authorized the circulation of the
completed manuscript. However the standard edition notes that
there is “no reason to believe that either Sidney or the Countess
of Pembroke could read Hebrew” (Rathmell, xix). The probable
explanation is that Mary Sidney had an assistant, which is
supported by the inscription on the Bodleian manuscript that they
were Sidney’s Psalms “finished by the Right honorable his
Countess of Pembroke, his Sister and by her direction and
appointment.”

Now for the fourth proposed solution. As Altimont says about the
word-play on Nedar, the man from Stratford “clearly lacked the
wherewithal to use Hebrew so cleverly”. However, Mr. Shakespeare
may have known a Marrano who gave him all the Jewish information
he needed. Since in Elizabethan England there were only around
200 people living as secret Jews or Marranos, we don’t have to
look far for a plausible source. Several writers in the last 15
years have proposed that the playwright’s information came from
the Bassano family (Gollob 2002). They were a family of Venetian
Jews who had moved to England in 1539 to become Court musicians.

13
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Some of the Bassanos lived in a household with members of the


Lupo family---some of whom had actually been imprisoned as
Marranos—and with whom they intermarried.

More specifically still, it has been proposed that the source of


this Jewish information in the plays was Amelia Bassano (1569-
1645), the so-called ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets. She was a major
experimental poet in her own right, a proto-feminist, the author
of the first book of poetry published by a woman Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum (1611) and mistress to Lord Hunsdon, the man in charge
of the English theater. Moreover, if she was giving Mr.
Shakespeare lessons on Hebrew puns, the Talmud, and the Torah,
presumably she could also have given him the 2,000 musical
references found in the plays as well as the Italian and falconry
references, the various allusions from girls’ literature, the
views of the strong women characters and so on. Coming from a
Marrano Jewish family—-Italian Jews spoke Hebrew as their first
language (Belkin 23)— Amelia Bassano is a precise fit for these
uses.vii

But rather than imagining Mr. Shakespeare merely as a passive


receptacle for these references that Amelia Bassano gave him,
perhaps we should start imagining her as actually the primary
author, while Mr. Shakespeare was simply the person who fronted
the plays and handed them off to the actors. If we look, for
instance, at how the playwright used the original Italian of
Dante and Tasso, these allusions do not seem to have been simply
inserted or added on. Rather they are integral to the way that
the verse was composed. So also with the Hebrew puns, which are
completely integral to the overall verse. So also with the dozens
of musical puns.

This therefore leads to the fifth and most radical solution,


which argues that the plays were substantially written by Amelia
Bassano herself. I have shown elsewhere that like classical

14
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

poets she left her sphragis or literary signatures spread across


half a dozen of the plays.viii She even has written herself into
the plays by using character sketches. For instance in As You
Like It Touchstone is a brilliant, but misunderstood poet (3,3,6-
10), who is in exile from court. His name in Greek is basanos,
and he is put to his “purgation” (a kind of legal ordeal by
torture which in Greek is also basanos). If allegorically
Touchstone represents Amelia Bassano this may explain why
Touchstone hates the clown William, and steals away his girl.

Conclusion

The finding that the Shakespearean plays contain covert religious


and historical satires is entirely compatible with the long
satirical crucifixion poem Salve Deus. Critics have noted that
the poem has “a sense of mischief, perhaps of satire” (Berry
212). No such compatibility exists however, with the major
document known to have been created by Mr. Shakespeare, namely
his Will, a legal declaration stating that he believed in the
“only merits of Jesus Christ.” This might well represent the
views of a practicing Catholic (Wilson 2004) but was a view
evidently not held by whoever placed the crucifixion parodies in
the plays.

This and the previous paper have established direct literary


connections between Amelia and Rape of Lucrece, the Sonnets, The
Passionate Pilgrim, Shrew, Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Merchant of
Venice, The Tempest, Othello and King John. This is a greater
number of allusions to past Shakespearean works than in any other
contemporary writer. She has historical family connections to
Cymbeline, The Tempest, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, and Two Noble
Kinsmen and connection through her lover to the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men. This is stronger than the case for any other
alternative authorship candidate. Further, in several of the

15
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

works the characters appear to have been modeled on Amelia


herself, notably the dark lady of the Sonnets, Katherina in
Shrew, Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, and probably Aemelia
in Othello whose part was significantly increased after the
publication of the 1622 Quarto.

This allegorical reading of the plays has led to the


identification of a plausible alternative authorship candidate.
Her biography offers a new explanation why the Shakespearean
plays were written in such a polysemous and multi-layered
fashion. This has implications for how the plays are to be read,
what they mean, and how their underlying allegories may be
performed. This is why the case for Amelia Bassano has unusual
and startling significance, and why it deserves to become both
the subject of serious scholarly inquiry and the basis for
exploring a new allegorical Shakespearean dramaturgy.

References
Altimont, Alan J. “The meaning of Nedar in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Notes and Queries 54 (2007): 275-77.

Amini, Daniela. “Kosher Bard: Could Shakespeare’s plays have been


written by the ‘Dark Lady’, a Jewish woman of Venetian-Moroccan
ancestry? John Hudson thinks so” New Jersey Jewish News 28 February,
2008: 32-33.

Amit, Florence. “Apples of Gold Encased in Silver” Mentalities/


Mentalities, 17, (2002) np.

Atwill, Joseph. Caesar’s Messiah. Berkley: Ulysses Press, 2005.

Basch, David. Shakespeare's Judaica and Devices: Judaic influences in


Shakespeare's work. West Hartford: Revelatory Press, 1996.

Battenhouse, Roy. ed. Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension: An Anthology


of Commentary. Bloomington Indiana:Indiana University Press, 1994.

Belkin, Ahuva. ed. Leone de’ Sommi and the Performing Arts. Tel Aviv:
Tel Aviv University, 1997.

Berry, Boyd. “’Pardon though I have digrest’: Digression as a style in


Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum”. Aemilia Lanyer; Gender, Genre and the Canon.
Ed. Marshall Grossman. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
1998.211-233.

16
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Berry, Edward I. Shakespeare and the Hunt: a Cultural and Social Study.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Bevington, David. “A.L. Rowse’s Dark Lady”. Aemilia Lanyer; Gender,


Genre and the Canon. Ed. Marshall Grossman. Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1998.10-28.

Bowen, Barbara. “Beyond Shakespearean Exceptionalism”. Shakespeare


Matters: History Teaching, Performance. Ed. Lloyd Davis. Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2003. 209-221.

---. “The Rape of Jesus; Aemelia Lanier’s Lucrece”. Marxist


Shakespeares. Eds. Jean E. Howard and Scott C. Shershaw. London:
Routledge, 2001. 104-127.

Carroll, William and Albert Bagby ”A Note on Shakespeare and the


Celestina.” Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 5 (1971): 79-93.

Dawkins, Peter. The Shakespeare Enigma. London: Polar Publishing. 2004.

Gollob, Herman. Me and Shakespeare: adventures with the Bard. New


York; Doubleday, 2002.

Goldstein, Gary. ‘Shakespeare’s Little Hebrew’ Elizabethan Review 7,1,


(1999)70-77

Guibbory, Achsah. “The Gospel According to Aemilia; Women and the


sacred”. Aemilia Lanier: Gender,Genre and the Canon. Ed. M. Grossman.
Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998.191-211.

Hirschfleld, Heather. Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the


Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theatre. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.

Hirschson,Niel. “Shakespeare, Shylock and the Marrano Factor”


Midstream, 31,9, (1985) 51-54.

Hirschson,Niel. “Shakespeare and the Marrano World” Midstream 39,9,


(1993) 6-11

Hoff, Linda Kay, Hamlet’s Choice: Hamlet A Reformation Allegory


Lewiston: E. Mellon Press, 1988.

Hudson, John. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: An Experiment in Allegorical


Stagecraft”. M.A. thesis, The Shakespeare Institute: University of
Birmingham, 2008.

Hudson, John. “Amelia Bassano Lanier: A New Paradigm for the


Shakespearean Authorship” Unpublished paper, 2009.

Jones, G. Lloyd. The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third


Language. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983.

Kiefer, Frederick. Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the


Personified Characters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

17
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Knowles, Richard. “Myth and Type in As You Like It.” ELH 33, 1, (1966)
1-22.

Nelson, Alan. Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl
of Oxford. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.

Parker, Patricia, “Murals and Morals: A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”


Editing Texts APOREMATA; Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte Ed.
Glenn W.Most. Gottingen: Vanenhoeck and Ruprech, 1998. 190-218

Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and Interpretation: the Conditions of


Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1986.

Posner, Michael. “Rethinking Shakespeare.” The Queen’s Quarterly 115, 2


(2008): 1-15.

Price, Diana. Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an


Authorship Problem. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Prior, Roger. “Jewish Musicians at the Tudor Court.” The Musical


Quarterly, 69, 2 (1983): 253-265.

Rathmell. J.C.A. ed. The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess
of Pembroke. New York: New York University Press, 1963

Round, Nicholas G. “Rojas' Old Bawd and Shakespeare's Old Lady:


Celestina and the Anglican Reformation." Celestinesca 21, 1-2 (1997):
93-109.

Rowse, A.L. The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. New York: Clarkson N.
Potter, 1979.

Schoenbaum, S. “Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: A Question of Identity”.


Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir. Eds. Philip
Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank and G.K.Hunter. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980.221-240.

Schöenfeld, Schelomo Jehuda. ‘A Hebrew Source for The Merchant of


Venice’ Shakespeare Survey 32, (1979): 115-128.

Shaheen, Naseeb. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays. Newark:


University of Delaware Press, 1999.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. ed. Juliet Dusinberre. London:


Thomson, Arden Shakespeare, 2006.

Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996.

Sohmer, Steve. Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe


Theater 1599. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Sohmer, Steve. Shakespeare for the Wiser Sort: Solving Shakespeare’s


Riddles… Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

18
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Stewart, Alan. ’Jewish Musicians at the Tudor Court’ Pre-concert talk


The Miller Theater, New York City, November 4, 2006.

Velz, John W. “‘Sir Thomas More and the Shakespeare Canon’ Shakespeare
and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and its Shakespearean Intent
Ed. T H Howard-Hill Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 171-
195

Wentsdorf, Karl P. ‘Linkages of Thought and Imagery in Shakespeare and


More’ Modern Language Quarterly, 34,4(1973):384-405.

Wilson, Richard. Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and


Politics. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004.

Woods, Susanne. The Poems of Aemelia Lanier: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

---. Lanier: A Renaissance Woman Poet. New York: Oxford University


Press, 1999.

i
my thanks to Florence Amit for allowing me to use this unpublished
example
ii
There are only a few surviving accounts of audiences recognizing the
allegories in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. However the inclusion of
the character Vespasian in the touring version of Titus Andronicus
suggests that whoever made this change had some awareness of the
underlying allegory.
iii
According to the EEBO database, the theme of the Jewish War appeared
roughly in one publication a month over 1590-1596, including sermons,
theological and literary works.
iv
footnotes 48 page 152, 82 page 155, 104 page 167,
v
detailed in John Hudson ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream; An Experiment in
Allegorical Stagecraft’.
vi
Following scholars like Dr. Randel Helms who showed that the gospels
are not records of a historical Jesus but fiction, and Agnew and Dungan
who suggested an association with the Flavian Court, Atwill has
suggested they were created at the Court of Vespasian and Titus Caesar
as anti-Semitic literary satires, to persuade the Jews to worship a
pacifist messiah figure--which would accord with the allegory in the
plays.

19
Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

vii
The definition of a Jew remains a complex question. The Government’s
view, as shown in their torture of John Traske in 1618, was that being
a Marrano Jew was not a matter of whether one had passed through a
mikveh nor even ethnicity, but rather of holding anti-Christian
beliefs, keeping kosher and following Hebrew ceremonies.
viii
my thanks to Sophie Klein for drawing this classical usage to my
attention

20

You might also like