WAS SHAKESPEARE JEWISH?

An article written for the Jerusalem Post

by
John Hudson

One of the most peculiar features of Shakespeare’s 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 (they had been expelled in 1290 and would not be invited
back until 1656, 40 years after Shakespeare died) and there were only 200
secret Jews or Marranos (Conversos) in the whole country. Some years ago
David Basch suggested that the playwright quoted from the Talmud in half a
dozen places. Schelomo Jehuda Schöenfeld suggested in Shakespeare Survey
that a Hebrew source lay beneath Merchant of Venice. Several writers have
separately noted different examples in which the author used the original Hebrew
text of Genesis. But perhaps the clearest evidence is that there are a few words
of spoken Hebrew, possibly Ladino, in the plays, as well as various
transliterations and Hebrew puns.

In 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 at the very least intriguing statements
because it is her portrait that is inside the casket and not Portia herself. But a
Hebrew 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
(opheret--the first letter is a soundless ’ayin), and realize that the Hebrew pun
shows that Portia (PRT) is contained inside the lead.

In As You Like It another set of puns appear, none of which appeared in Lodge’s
Rosalynde, the play’s source document. There are several clues that the start of
the play is set in Paradise. One of these is the rib-cracking that the playwright
has added to the wrestling in the original novel. We are told that rib-cracking is a
sport for ladies because it was by rib-cracking that Eve was created in the Book
of Genesis (Gen 2:21). She was thus a “broken consort,” meaning not just a
companion with cracked ribs, but also the kind of orchestra that would play
“broken music.” 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
knowledge of the meaning of the original Hebrew usage.

Now for some of the actual spoken Hebrew or Ladino in the plays, which
Florence Amit has found hidden in the nonsense language used in All’s Well That
Ends Well. The interpreter says to Parolles, "Boskos vauvado. I understand thee,
and can speak thy tongue. Kerely-bonto, sir, betake thee to thy faith..." (4,1,75-
77). In the allegory in the play Parolles is a Jew. Not surprisingly, then, the
nonsense language the interpreter is speaking is actually Hebrew. If translated,
the interpreter is saying something that makes sense in the context of the play.
B'oz K'oz means “In bravery like boldness” and Vah vado means “And in his
surety” (vah = and; vado = vad, meaning ‘sure,’ plus an ‘o’ ending for ‘his’). And
so we get: "In bravery like boldness, and in surety, I understand thee, and can
speak thy tongue. Similarly, K’erli, “I am aware” (ki = since, erli = er, aware, li =
grammatical suffix meaning to me) and b’onto; his deception (b'on(na) =
deception, with the grammatical ending ‘o’ meaning his. Thus, “I am aware of his
deception sir, betake thee to thy faith..."

Finally an interesting example, discovered by Alan Altimont, appears in A

Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the play, Helena questions her beauty, describing
herself as being ugly as a bear, while Lysander calls Hermia “tawny” – to which
Helena replies she is fair skinned. The two women are then contrasted in terms
of their height, one being dwarfish and the other a maypole. Thus the two women
are successively contrasted in terms of their ugliness/beauty, their
darkness/fairness and their shortness/tallness. In the Mishnah, in Tractate
Nedarim 9:10, there is a discussion of when marriage vows are made in error.
The 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 of course
the Hebrew verb meaning ‘was absent’—very appropriate for an absent father—
but it is also a pun on the Hebrew word nedarim meaning vows, which is
precisely the name of the Tractate the playwright is using.

These are not isolated examples, and there appear to be over 100 of them
throughout the plays. So what are the possible explanations? Several different
solutions have been put forward.

The first and most incredible is that the man from Stratford was himself a
Marrano. This has been independently proposed by several writers, who have
published papers in Midstream with titles like ‘The Marrano of Stratford’ and ‘Was
Shakespeare a Marrano?’ But thanks to Stratfordian scholarship, the answer to
that question is quite clear. Mr. Shakespeare grew up apparently as a Catholic,
and when he was in London—instead of living in a house of hidden Jews in
which he could have secretly kept kashrut---he lived instead with a family of
French Huguenots, and later in life 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 the
plays were written by the Earl of Oxford – who had an M.A. from Oxford
University, where Hebrew was taught. 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.” Yet there are some indications that whoever did some of the
versification was familiar with medieval rabbinic commentaries, and was
responsible for creating translations that are unusually faithful to the Hebrew
original. The probable answer to this 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 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 from Venice
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. They were a family of Venetian Jews who had moved to England in 1539
to become Court musicians. 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 the Bassanos 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.

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.
This therefore leads to the fifth and most radical solution, and the latest
Shakespeare authorship theory—my own. This argues that the plays contain
complex and extremely clever Jewish allegories, and were written by a Jewish
poet, Amelia Bassano herself. I have shown elsewhere that she even left her
literary signatures spread across half a dozen of the plays. All of this implies that
Mr. Shakespeare was merely her play-broker, the front man who handed over
the fair unblotted copies of the scripts to the acting company. Had anyone in a
government filled with spies seeking out subversion against the Protestant
Christian order discovered the subversive Jewish meanings that are finally being
uncovered only now, just in time for the 400th anniversary of Amelia’s own book
of poetry, Salve Deus, in October 2010, Shakespeare’s background would have
made the imputation incredible – thus protecting the real author.

John Hudson has a degree in Shakespeare and Theater from the Shakespeare
Institute at the University of Birmingham. He is dramaturge to the Dark Lady
Players, an experimental Shakespeare company. The first chapter of his book
The Dark Lady is available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/15586686/The-Dark-
Lady-the-Woman-who-Wrote-Shakespeare He may be reached at
Darkladyplayers@aol.com.