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Copyright © (2008)JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved
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.
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“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
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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?
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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.
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Conclusion
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References
Altimont, Alan J. “The meaning of Nedar in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Notes and Queries 54 (2007): 275-77.
Belkin, Ahuva. ed. Leone de’ Sommi and the Performing Arts. Tel Aviv:
Tel Aviv University, 1997.
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Berry, Edward I. Shakespeare and the Hunt: a Cultural and Social Study.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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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.
Rathmell. J.C.A. ed. The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess
of Pembroke. New York: New York University Press, 1963
Rowse, A.L. The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. New York: Clarkson N.
Potter, 1979.
Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996.
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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
Woods, Susanne. The Poems of Aemelia Lanier: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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.
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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
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