Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

THE DARK LADY

By
John Hudson

PART 1: AN INTRODUCTION

This research makes an extraordinary claim, namely that the plays of

Shakespeare were written by a Jewish woman of color; her name is Amelia
Bassano Lanyer ...who has so far been known as the first woman in
England to publish a book of original poetry in 1611, and as a candidate
for the ‘dark lady’ of the Shakespearean Sonnets.

In Elizabethan London if a woman wanted to be a writer she could only

write translations, religious verse and adaptations—or else publish
anonymously. In this environment if any writers had anything to say that
criticized the Government or religion, they had to do it covertly, by using
secret messages or allegory – the common literary technique by which
one thing is said explicitly, but it symbolizes something different. It was
in this threatening climate that somebody wrote the plays of William
Shakespeare. Questions about who the author was have a long history. As
early as 1678 Edward Ravenscroft wrote that someone anciently
connected with the stage told him that the play Titus Andronicus was
“brought by a private author to be acted” and that Mr. Shagspere -- to
give him his original name before he changed it – was merely the
producer, who provided a cover story for the true “private author”.

1
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

The Revisions in the 1620’s

The most powerful evidence why Mr. Shagspere could not have written
the plays is that he died in 1616. However, subsequently someone
undertook very extensive re-writing of certain plays before they were
published in the First Folio. Most significantly, Othello which had just
been printed in 1622, was amended between 1622 and 1623 with
hundreds of minor changes and 163 extra lines. These lines are added
especially in Act 4, expanding the character Aemelia and her death
scene—and create the literary signatures described below, the so-called
‘swan signatures’. A reference to the circulation of the blood appeared in
Coriolanus in 1623---although Harvey’s discovery was only announced
to the College of Surgeons in April 1616, while Mr. Shakespeare was on
his deathbed in Stratford. Newspaper reports published in October 1621
were used to make additions to Measure for Measure which are
consistent with the underlying allegory in the play. They are therefore
likely to have been made by the author if they were alive—which Amelia
Bassano was, unlike either Mr Shagspere or the popular alternative
candidate the Earl of Oxford.

The Fool William In The Plays

The character “William” appears twice in the plays as an uneducated fool
who has to be given basic lessons. In The Merry Wives of Windsor a
passage was added in to the quarto version to show William being given
lessons in basic Latin, to make him into an educated ‘page’. In As You
Like It, William has to be taught rhetoric. It looks as if the true author is
giving us their satire on William Shagspere. This view is reinforced by the
fact that one of the other Williams hinted at is the ancestor of Christopher
Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, who is so much a drunken fool he
confuses William with Richard the conqueror. However he does have
relatives in the Stratford area, in precisely the same villages as Mr.
Shagspere. The identification of Mr. Shagspere with this character is not
new—it was first made in 1669. These three associations of a fool with
the name William are not a co-incidence.

PART 2: WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Author’s Social Contacts & Knowledge

Rigorous textual analysis of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare suggests
that whoever wrote them had social contacts and specialist knowledge of
many fields that would have been beyond the life of the son of a glove
manufacturer from rural Stratford, who had recently arrived in London
and still spoke the Warwickshire dialect. From the evidence of the plays
and poems, the author must have been a major poet who had;

2
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Friendship with Earl of Southampton

Extensive contact and collaboration with the atheist Christopher Marlowe
Contact with the Ambassador to Denmark, Lord Willoughby
Contact with Earl of Oxford
Contact with Sir John Salisburie who commissioned The Phoenix and the
Turtle
Good contacts with Lord Hunsdon and Sir George Carey who
commissioned plays
Familiarity with the household of Anne Clifford, referred to in Twelfth
Night
Contacts with the musicians for the plays such as Robert Johnson
A musical knowledge more extensive than any other playwright
Knowledge of Italy and Italian
Knowledge of Hebrew, Judaism and the Talmud
Technical knowledge of falconry
Technical legal knowledge
Military knowledge including generalship
Knowledge of girls’ literature and early feminism
Very extensive knowledge of the Bible in multiple translations

None of these criteria match the man from Stratford. However they
precisely match the social circles in which Amelia Bassano lived.

The World’s Most Musical Plays

The author uses 300 technical musical terms throughout the plays,
referring both to music theory and to musical technique. Many take the
form of musicians’ jokes that would be appreciated only by other
musicians. Altogether there are nearly 2,000 musical references in the
plays, including quotations from one hundred songs. But very oddly there
are hardly any references to sacred religious music and settings of the
mass by composers like Tallis or Byrd even though in these years such
music was at its peak.

The play that has most references is The Taming of the Shrew with 110
musical references, roughly one every minute, followed by Twelfth Night
with 91 references. This is unusual since plays by educated gentlemen
like Marlowe, Chapman, Lodge and Greene average only 18 such
references per play. English literature’s most musical play up to this point
had been by Lyly with 47 musical references and that had been composed
to be acted by boys choristers. The average Shakespearean play contains
23% more musical references than that, and 300% more than the average
play by other writers.

3
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

The Italian Connection

The plays not only quote Italian in several places, they show a detailed
knowledge of Italian geography, clothes, household objects, art and
architecture, especially of Venice, Mantua and Padua. The author is aware
of paintings that were located in the Ducal palace in Mantua. The author
is familiar with the industries in certain towns and the transport systems
linking them. The author is familiar with Venetian slang “Sound as a fish"
and many obscure details of the towns like the unusual timing of church
services and the landing points for the boats and what sort of trees grow
on which side of town. The author knows the types of characters of the
people in each town, they know what it feels like to travel in a gondola.
They are familiar with the peculiar Venetian calendar as well as the city’s
shoe styles. They also know obscure people like a lawyer in Padua who
acted as a judge in Venice. They are familiar with unpublished teachings
of professors in the medical school in Padua. Most important of all the
author read Dante, Tasso and other sources in Italian. So we add to the
author’s profile a strong Italian connection, especially to Venice, in which
two plays were set but which, unusually, do not make use of standard
English stereotypes of the Venetian people.

The Plays use Spoken Hebrew

The author knew Hebrew, which was very uncommon in Elizabethan
England. Some scholars read Hebrew, but only Jewish merchants spoke it.
The plays include certain passages in the plays composed directly in
Hebrew, and secondly write some passages (mostly in The Merchant of
Venice) that sound like English sentences, but also sound like Hebrew
sentences with a very different meaning.

For instance in All’s Well that Ends Well the interpreter says "Boskos
vauvado. I understand thee, and can speak thy tongue. Kerely-bonto, sir,
betake thee to thy faith..." (IV.i,75-77). What appear to an English
speaker to be nonsense are actually Hebrew words, and the sentence can
be translated as "In bravery like boldness, and in surety, I understand
thee, and can speak thy tongue. I am aware of his deception sir, betake
thee to thy faith...". The other kind of usage is transliteration—which
requires a very high level fluency in Hebrew. Florence Amit has identified
at least 50 different examples in The Merchant of Venice alone.

The author also uses four quotations from the Talmud, an allusion to the
Zohar, another to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, possibly drew
upon one of de Sommi’s untranslated Hebrew plays, and made use of
Lurianic kabbalah only available in Hebrew manuscript or in oral teaching
in Jewish communities.

4
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

The Profile Just Doesn’t Fit Mr. Shagspere

We know that Mr. Shagspere, after being taught at the local school in
Stratford, in the local Warwickshire dialect, arrived in London probably in
1592. The legal records show his primary occupation as a money lender.
A year or two later somebody published the poems The Rape of Lucrece
and Venus & Adonis (1593-4). Neither show any trace of Warwickshire
dialect. Both are written in the kind of English found at the court and the
universities. There is no evidence that Mr. Shagspere had any advanced
musical training and expertise. As to Hebrew, there would have been no
way for him to learn this in Stratford, yet in 1596 The Merchant of Venice
would contain various transliterated Hebrew and knowledge of Judaism.
He had no Italian relatives and there is no evidence he knew Italian. So if
Mr. Shagspere wrote the plays, then he would have had to accomplish
this implausible feat all the while maintaining his day job as a money
lender, wiping out his native accent, and somehow developing close
friendships with several courtiers and statesmen of high social rank with
whom he had no previous connection. There is a similarity of name here-
--but no match of life and biography to the author.

Does Any Single Social Circle Fit The Bill?

But if we reject Mr. Shakespeare as the author, is there is single social
circle in Elizabethan London which might provide such knowledge? One
of the key social circles for music, and especially recorder music, was the
Bassano family. They were the Queen’s recorder troupe. They were
Italian, originally from Venice. They knew Hebrew because they were
Jewish and they were Marrano Jews who therefore would not have been
interested in Christian church music. So being a member of the Bassanos
covers all of these. They lived in Spitalfields a few hundred yards from all
the theatres.

What's With All The Falcons?

Although some knowledge of falconry was widespread among the nobility
and gentry, and those involved in hunting, the plays show unusual
expertise. They distinguish between 43 different sorts of birds including
eagles, ospreys, falcons, hawks, kites, and buzzards. The plays show a
detailed knowledge of falconry, using technical language about the way
to raise and manage the birds, their health, their life expectancy, their
flight patterns, the sorts of equipment needed, their slang names, and
even how to repair a broken feather, a process known as ‘imping ‘. The
author seems to have a special interest in falcons. They are the second
most popular bird of prey mentioned sixteen times in the plays, coming
behind eagles. This requires a deeper explanation than simply a
layperson’s love of falconry.

5
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Spoken Like A Lawyer -- Or A General

Although some knowledge of the law was important for every educated
person in Elizabethan England, the author has more than this. They
provide descriptions of 25 different trials, and refer to issues like
summer’s leases having too short a date, or querying why a short lease
should be so expensive. The author uses 200 different legal terms in
1600 different places. In addition to this legal vocabulary the author has
been very close to soldiers and to generals planning military strategy,
because they use 400 words of special military vocabulary such as about
mustering an army. So we can add to the author’s profile, falconry, legal
knowledge and knowledge of military campaigns and generalship.

Lord Hunsdon; Royal Falconer, Judge & General

London’s centre for falconry was based around Lord Hunsdon who for 30
years was master of the royal falcons at Court. The falconries were for
many years in Charing Cross village next door to his palace of Somerset
House on the Strand. One of the most powerful men at court, as cousin
and possibly half brother to the Queen, he also held three judgeships and
was a general in the army. So a strong association with Hunsdon and his
circle would explain those three vocabularies. Around the age of 13
Amelia became Hunsdon’s mistress and moved into his palace, Somerset
House. She stayed with him for the next ten years. That is how she could
have become familiar with his language and expertise.

Knowledge Of Denmark
One of the odd pieces of knowledge in the plays is the description of the
castle and port in Hamlet. These include the lay-out of the castle, the
platforms where the guns were located (1,ii,213), the arrangement of the
rooms including the ‘Queen’s Closet’, the ‘lobby’ (II,ii,161), which is
reached by going up stairs(IV,iii,36-7), the floral garlands or ‘crants’
worn at Ophelia’s funeral, and the depictions of the 111 dead kings of
Denmark that were on the tapestries hanging on the wall of the
banqueting hall. Other knowledge included the way that dawn comes so
early over the flat Danish landscape, the closeness of the castle to the
sea, as well as the Danish drinking customs punctuated by cannon fire. If
the author did not visit Denmark, then they had to have got these
experiences from one of the relatively few people in England who had
done so. Amelia’s step uncle Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby was
Ambassador to Denmark.

Teenage Girls' Reading & Dressing As A Man

The author was also rather oddly familiar with girls’ literature. For The
Taming of the Shrew the author used The Knight of La Tour-Landry and
His Book for His Four Daughters (1484) which was in use at Court as a
manual of deportment and good behavior for girls. They also used

6
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Penelope’s Web (1587) which “in a christal mirror of feminine perfection

represents the virtues of women”. For The Winter’s Tale the author used
Mamillia; A Mirror or Looking Glass for the Ladies of England (1583). The
Winter’s Tale may also echo Christine de Pisan’s book City of Ladies
(1521), whose other work is definitely used in As You Like it , A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and in Henry VI. The author of the plays is
also unique in using the theatrical conventions of the first woman
playwright, the 10th century nun Roswitha. They are also one of a handful
of writers to draw upon the Heptameron by Margaret of Navarre—the
most popular book among the ladies at Court. They also oddly present
what Melchiori calls “the first feminist manifesto” in Othello, in the voice
of a character called Aemelia.

So to our author’s profile we can add that they are familiar with and a
supporter of women’s education -- which was then very rare. The author
also shows many strong, highly educated women characters. They play
music and learn languages and an unusually high number dress up in
men’s clothes—they pretend to be a man--in order to get heard, even
though this was shocking and illegal. Indeed the author shows more
examples in their plays of women dressing up as men than had appeared,
before their time, in the whole of the English theatre put together.

PART 3: WHO WAS AMELIA BASSANO LANYER?

Born in 1569, Amelia grew up in the Bassano household in Spitalfields
Next door neighbors were the Vaughan family, her parents’ best friends.
The Vaughan’s daughter Anne was the person who invented the Sonnet
sequence that would be used in the Shakespearean sonnets. Their
grandson Harry Lok would be the person who wrote the longest sonnet
sequence before Wordsworth. At least one member of the Bassano family
from this household—her maternal cousin Robert Johnson-- would work
on the music for the plays. Two of them would be best friends with Ben
Jonson, the probable editor of the First Folio.

Adopted By A Countess
At the age of 7 Amelia was adopted by Countess Susan Bertie, sister to
Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, and moved half a mile down the road
to Willoughby House. There her new step grandmother, the elderly
matriarch Duchess Katherine Willoughby, was the former Regent of
Lithuania. Erasmus—the founder of the English school system-- had
dedicated a book to her. So had the Bible translator William Tyndale.
Katherine Willoughby was a freethinker who challenged religious
superstition. She had also been one of the first people to advocate the
feminist case that women should be allowed to read the Bible for
themselves. Her daughter, the Countess Susan who supervised Amelia’s

7
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

upbringing, had been privately tutored by yet another of the translators

of the Bible, Miles Coverdale.

Growing up in such a household helps explain Amelia’s deep familiarity

with the Bible in many different translations, which is quoted 3,000
different times throughout the plays. The family brought many important
connections. Among the Willoughby cousins were Sir John Salisburie, who
commissioned the writing of the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, and
Edward Blount, publisher of the First Folio. The Earl of Oxford—in whose
house manuscripts of some early sonnets were left—was brother in law to
Lord Willoughby. Amelia’s step-uncle Lord Willoughby—whose family
name was Peregrine Bertie--fought for Henry of Navarre and he appears
in Love’s Labour’s Lost, fighting for Henry of Navarre, as Armado a brave
soldier who is “too peregrinate”, a standard court pun on his name. His
campaign is used as a model for parts of Henry VI, and the unpublished
writings of one of his staff are used in Henry V.

Lord Willoughby was also Ambassador to Denmark and went there in June
1582. Amelia could easily have gone with him. She had just reached 13
and become an adult, her step-mother had left England to remarry, and
Bertie had a contingent of 55 men plus women and servants. If she did
go, it was on the trip to Denmark that she got personal experiences of
the pirates and also of the tempest that appear in the plays

Teenage Mistress To A Great Nobleman

At the age of 13 or so Amelia left the Willoughby household and moved
another half a mile down the road to Somerset House, to become the
mistress of Lord Hunsdon, who was over 40 years older. She stayed with
Lord Hunsdon for the next decade, in his palace Somerset House. He was
the Lord Chamberlain in charge of the English theatre and after 1594 it
would be his revitalized theatre company, The Chamberlain’s Men, which
would perform all of the Shakespearean plays. His son Sir George Carey
would commission three of the plays – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The
Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night. Her legal knowledge would
have come through Lord Hunsdon, whose legal office-work for his
various judge-ships would have been done in Somerset House where she
lived. Her knowledge of military vocabulary would have come both from
Hunsdon who was a general of the army protecting the Queen, and also
from her step-uncle Lord Willoughby who was England’s most famous
soldier.

Her Love Affairs

While she was living with Lord Hunsdon, she had at least two affairs. The
first was with her next door-neighbor the Earl of Southampton who was
living in Burghley House. It was to him that Venus & Adonis and The Rape

8
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

of Lucrece would be addressed, as well as the early sonnets. The Lucrece

poem is addressed in very friendly terms which make sense if, as the
Avisa poem suggests, they had been lovers but unable to take that love
anywhere because of the class and color difference between them. They
would still be in touch a decade later when the Earl would be giving her
husband recommendations on dealing with the Government.

The second person she had an affair with was Christopher Marlowe,
which was why she wrote A Lover’s Complaint describing him as a
theology student with long brown hair and silken words, who was
breaking his vows. It was Marlowe who taught her playwriting, which is
why the early plays show so much of his style. She was his pupil, and to
some of the early plays he probably contributed directly. Marlowe
acknowledges her in Doctor Faustus by giving Helen, the most beautiful
woman in the world, the same birthmark in the pit of her neck that her
medical records reveal that Amelia had. But by the Autumn of 1592 she
was pregnant by Lord Hunsdon and was married off to one of her
cousins, a musician called Alphonso Lanyer. She had to leave Court.

Her Poetic Ability

So did she have the necessary poetic ability? Unquestionably. Amelia was
the first woman writer in England to get a book published of her original
writings (rather than a translation). Her collection of an epic poem, a
country house poem, and multiple poems of dedication, was published in
1611 under her married name. It was written in English although it had a
Latin title. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum uses multiple verse forms, has
similarities to the Sonnets, makes multiple references to the plays and
uses some of the same literary sources.

It has been argued before that Salve Deus was of such high quality it
must have been written by the same person as the plays. The Russian
Shakespeare critic Ilya Gililov made this argument in his book The
Shakespeare Game. But since he did not believe that a lower-class dark
skinned foreign woman could write so well, he thought that they all had
to have been written by a white English noble.

Amelia’s other independent poem appeared in 1594, which would be the

first in the world to refer to the Shakespearean tragic poem The Rape of
Lucrece. It is 3000 lines long, and called Willobie, His Avisa. This title
echoes her persona as an adopted member of the Willoughby family. Like
many modern novelists who use two pseudonyms, it gave her the
freedom to use an alternative, more popular style. Willobie, His Avisa is a
kind of comic British version of Lucrece, written as a cross between a
poem and a play, and set in England. The central character is a woman
who is called a female ‘Avis’, the Latin for bird. We are told she has a

9
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

home in the theatre district, and an elderly lover who paid her 40 pounds
a year as an allowance to live with him in his princely palace. Obviously
Lord Hunsdon since that was indeed her allowance in Somerset House.
The poem also describes her affair with the Earl of Southampton and
mentions the player Mr. W.S. as a bad friend.

The supposed writer of the 1594 poem Willobie, His Avisa was one of
Amelia’s Willoughby relatives. This poem describes Avisa as a bird, an
eagle, which is invisible since that is what a-visa means. It also describes
Avisa as a hidden playwright. She will “draw great numbers to the field”,
which in Elizabethan London meant only one thing—the theatres in
Finsbury Fields which were known as “the playing places in the field”. The
woman Avisa who is this hidden playwright biographically fits Amelia
herself, and she is apparently the author of this poem. Because she is an
adopted Willoughby, whose married name was Mrs Falcon, she describes
herself as the unseen (a-visa) poetical bird (avis) of the Willoughbies.

Shakespearean Literary Parallels to Salve Deus

There are literary parallels between Willobie, His Avisa and the Salve Deus
poems, and both of them have similarities to the Shakespearean works.
The Salve Deus poems not only use the same Jewish literary satire and
Biblical typology as the plays, they also use similar language and unusual
content.

For example the Salve Deus collection is the only book in the world—
apart from one Shakespearean play—to use an abbreviated form of the
name of the moon goddess Dictina/Dictima. Similarly, as Caroline
Spurgeon noticed in her book Shakespeare’s Imagery, the Shakespearean
plays are the only plays that pay attention to how frost damages plants--
- for instance Titania’s speech about how “The seasons alter: hoary-
headed frosts”. Yet Amelia makes a very similar comment in her
Cookham poem. It refers to a garden which is beautiful, then Christ and
the apostles begin walking in the garden and the flowers die “their frozen
tops like Ages hoarie-haires”. Furthermore the context is almost identical
in both examples.

Another area of literary evidence is similarity of language. Take for

example the dialogue between Titania and Oberon.
Oberon: Every elf and fairy sprite
Hop as light as bird from brier;
And this ditty, after me,
Sing, and dance it trippingly.
Titania. First, rehearse your song by rote
To each word a warbling note:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,

10
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Although these common words ditty, warble and bird appear in the works
of Spenser and Robert Greene, there they are chapters apart from each
other. Other than A Midsummer Night’s Dream the only other place in
English literature of the period where they all appear together is in
Amelia’s Cookham poem.
Those preety Birds that wonted were to sing,
Now neither sing, nor chirp, nor vse their wing;
But with their tender feet on some bare spray,
Warble forth sorrow, and their owne dismay.
Faire Philomela leaues her mournefull Ditty,
Drownd in dead sleepe, yet can procure no pittie

Her Bassano Trademark; A Rabbit

If Amelia was going to leave a trademark behind on the plays the most
obvious one would be the Bassano family trademarks, of which they had
two: a moth and a rabbit’s foot (which symbolized the layout of the
Venetian Ghetto).The frontispiece of the Avisa poems shows two rabbits.

Rabbits appear on no other book published in 1594, yet another two

rabbits in exactly the same situation appear in the frontispiece of the
Sonnets.

The First Folio has a woodcut which again has two rabbits. The woodcut
appears three times in prominent positions, on different pages. In
addition to this visual trademark, Amelia left her literary signature, in
several different forms, on many of the individual plays---possibly on all
of them.

11
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Her Signature as Mrs. Falcon

One of the things that any theory of Shakespeare has to explain is why
around 1592-3 the author stopped writing plays set at Court, like King
John, and instead started writing comedies about Italian married life. For
Amelia the answer is simple. It was at the end of 1592 that she left the
Court and married an Italian man called Alphonso Lanyer. A man whose
name means ‘falcon’ in French.

So when she got married her name literally became Amelia Falcon. The
play that is most about a falcon is The Taming of the Shrew which
describes Kate’s marriage as if she was a falcon who had to be tamed like
a wild haggard and who pretends to conform. To some extent this is
probably autobiographical. Amelia has spread her signature across this
play as well as its predecessor The Taming of A Shrew (1594). To see it
you have to look at both plays together. In one there is an Amelia,
daughter of Alphonso (her husband’s name). In the other it has simply
been changed to Baptista (her father’s name).

Her Swan Signatures

Amelia’s literary signatures have been found in several other plays as
well, including Hamlet. But of all of them, the most striking signatures
are the swan signatures. Renaissance poets were often compared to
swans. In particular, there was the idea that a great poet would die a
death like a swan, dying to music – a swan song. Given the strong
association between the poet and the death of a swan it is highly
significant that the only three cases in the plays which depict the death of
a swan all remind us of Amelia under her various names:
• Aemelia in Othello,
• John’s son in King John, and
• in The Merchant of Venice her original family name Bassanio as found
in church records.

Finally she even went further in Othello by having Aemelia sing a song
that echoed her fourth name Willoughby, the famous willow song,
willough, willough, willough. She has left us a quadruple signature so we
would be sure to notice and rescue her name and put it up in the hall of
fame. AMELIA JOHNSON BASSANO WILLOUGHBY--- her baptismal name,
mother’s name, father’s name, and adopted name.

It can be statistically shown that this is no co-incidence. The probability

that the appearance of these four names is not a co-incidence is over
99.9999999999999999%.

12
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Her Fit with the Sonnets

Whoever wrote the Sonnets, one thing is certain, they were not rich or
titled. They claimed to be “poor” and “despised” (Sonnet 37),complaining
that fortune “did not better for my life provide” (Sonnet 111), “outcast”
and “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” (Sonnet 29). Amelia
Bassano fits this profile exactly. Even in the late 1590’s she told her
doctor that her husband was wasting her assets. He lost a large amount
of money in bad land deals –spending 300 pounds in 1601 buying land
that he could not sell again for 50 pounds. He also tried to create a
military career for himself but failed to get any position. We also have the
legal records of a court case that describes Amelia as being “in very poor
estate” her husband “having spent a great part of his estate in serving of
the late Queen in her wars in Ireland and other places”. As predicted in
Sonnet 81, she lies buried in a common grave.

PART 4; WHY DID SHE WRITE THE PLAYS?

Strange references to Caesar

In the last century Battenhouse, Chambers,Velz and Wentsdorf separately
pointed out that running across all the plays there was a very strange
pattern of imagery about cannibals and disparaging allusions to Caesar.
Until now nobody has known what these meant. What they are part of is a
pattern of over 1,000 different examples that cut across all the plays and
reveal their true meaning. It appears that Amelia wrote the plays as
religious satires to counter an ancient literary satire against the Jews that
had been created by the Roman Emperors Titus and Vespasian, after they
had won the Jewish war.

Use of Allegory and Typology

As Marlowe put it, scripture was “all of one man’s making” (C.B. Kuriyama
Christopher Marlowe; A Renaissance Life p.159), Jesus was a “deceiver”,
and was “n’er thought upon till Titus and Vespasian conquered us” as a
Jewish voice complains in The Jew of Malta (II,3,10). This same non
Christian theological perspective is depicted in the allegorical level of all
of the Shakespearean plays, and it matches the latest developments in
New Testament scholarship.

Like many other works of the period, the ‘Shakespearean’ plays were
written as applications of the literary technique known as Biblical
typology. In this technique, characters in the narrative are created as
allegories for figures from the world of first century Judea. Such typology
underpins all the plays in a consistent fashion. G. Wilson Knight and
others had detected parts of it before, but they never made sense in
terms of orthodox Christian theology. They do however make sense in
terms of the atheistic theological perspective held by Christopher

13
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Marlowe. Strange as it may seem, the story told in the plays precisely
matches the very latest radical discoveries that are now unfolding in the
field of New Testament scholarship—which are beginning to show that
Christopher Marlowe was right--namely that Titus Caesar (together with
his father and brother) had the New Testament texts created after the
Jewish war as a literary satire to deceive the Jews. This perspective
appears in Marlowe’s plays, and after his murder was continued by
Amelia in her own writings.

In Titus Andronicus for instance, she depicts a character Titus, his father
Vespasian (whose identity is specifically stated in an early touring version
of the text), and an allegory of his fly-killing brother (the Emperor
Domitian). And she takes allegorical revenge against the Romans by
doing to them what they did to the Jews during the war, in which Titus
amputated the limbs off the messiah and cannibalized the inhabitants of
Jerusalem in the year 70CE.

The allegories are most clear in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Scholars have
long known that the character Puck or Robin Goodfellow in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream carries the name of two traditional English devils. Over the
last decade Professor Patricia Parker at Stanford University—the editor of
the forthcoming Arden 3 edition--has also shown that the characters of
Pyramus and Thisbe were an established medieval allegory for Jesus and
the Church. Peter Quince whose names are Petros Quoin or Rocky
Cornerstone, is St. Peter. The Wall is the Partition that was thought to
divide Earth from Heaven, and separate Jesus from the Bride of Christ,
with whom he longed to be united. These findings alone suggest that the
play is a comic religious satire somehow involving characters from first
century Judea. In addition the present work shows that Titania, who is
made to fall in love with Bottom (the allegory for Jesus) in his guise as an
ass, represents Titus Caesar, and that other key characters are also
religious allegories ---similar to those found across all the plays. The
same approach to Biblical typology and the same use of non Christian
satire appears in Amelia’s long, ironical, and pro-feminist poem on the
crucifixion Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.

Epilogue
Amelia lived a long life. At one point she became a tutor or governess to
Anne Clifford, whose household is referred to in Twelfth Night. Later, in
an attempt to solve her financial problems for some years she became a
schoolteacher---she was apparently the first woman in England to own
and run a school. It was in a converted farmhouse off Drury Lane where
she pursued legal battles against her landlord, and it failed after two
years in 1620. She also had a twenty-year legal battle, which she took to
the Privy Council, against her husband’s relatives to get the rights to his

14
 Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

income from a tax on hay. She died a natural death in 1645.Subsequently

the development of Bardolatry, the cult of Mr. Shakespeare, suppressed
any further inquiry. Amelia is buried in Clerkenwell, in London, where she
has no monument and no memorial.

15