Shakespeare’s Plays Were Written By A Jewish Woman

Jewcy.com ^ | 3-13-2008 | John Hudson

[Renfield]

For hundreds of years, people have questioned whether William Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name. The mystery is fueled by the fact that his biography simply doesn't match the areas of knowledge and skill demonstrated in the plays. Nearly a hundred candidates have been suggested, but none of them fit much better. Now a new candidate named Amelia Bassano Lanier—the so-called 'Dark Lady' of the Sonnets and a member of an Italian/Jewish family—has been shown to be a perfect fit. Here are eight reasons that are sure to convince you:

1. The Most Musical Plays in the World

The plays contain nearly 2000 musical references, use 300 different musical terms, and refer to a 5th century manuscript on recorder playing. None of Mr. Shakespeare's friends or associates were professional musicians, so how could he have developed this practical musical knowledge? On the other hand, Amelia's family were the Court recorder troupe and around 15 of her closest relatives were professional musicians. In fact, one of them was the leading composer for the Shakespearean plays.

2. Spoken Hebrew

Although in late sixteenth century England about 30 scholars were studying written Hebrew, none of them actually spoke Hebrew. Spoken Hebrew was used only among European Jews, as a commercial language, to keep their information secure. How, then, was Mr. Shakespeare able to make the Hebrew puns or include examples of Hebrew transliteration identified by Israeli scholar Florence Amit? Or incorporate several quotations from The Talmud along with reference to Maimonides? Or integrate the examples of spoken Hebrew, seen, for instance, in All's Well That Ends Well?

Amelia's family was Jewish, living as Marranos with members of the Lupo family, who were imprisoned for their faith.

3. Feminism

The plays depict strong female characters who play music and read Ovid, but Mr. Shakespeare kept his daughters illiterate. Amelia, however, was educated at Court and raised in the household of the early English feminist Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and her daughter Susan Bertie, the Dowager Countess of Kent. This explains why Taming of the Shrew references a book that was the standard manual for training girls at Court in etiquette, and why other plays refer to Margaret of Navarre's Heptameron, the most popular book among court ladies. Finally Amelia's own poetry draws on the feminist Christine of Pisan, whose work is used in three of the plays and nowhere else in English literature of the period.

4. Italian

There would have been no way for Mr. Shakespeare to learn Italian in Stratford-upon-Avon, but the plays show that the author was fluent in Italian, made Italian puns, and read Dante, Tasso, Cinthio, Bandello, and others in the original language. The Bassano family came from Venice. As their surviving letters show, they spoke and wrote fluent Italian.

5. Major Poet

None of the other potential candidates who have been put forward is a major poet. But Amelia Bassano certainly is. She was a major experimental poet and the first woman to publish a book of original poetry in England. That poetry includes a 160 line poem that resembles a masque (a dramatic entertainment similar to opera, popular in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which masked performers represented mythological or allegorical characters) about the descent of the chariot of Juno. Bassano's masque-like poem resembles the masque about the descent of Juno's chariot in The Tempest. Her final poem includes unusual clusters of words that are also found in Midsummer Night's Dream.

6. Her Names

In the Plays One of the most popular names in the plays is Emilia (in various spellings). Why should Mr. Shakespeare have liked this name so much? In Titus Andronicus there are characters oddly called Emillius and Bassianus. Why are they there? But most importantly between 1622-1623, when Mr. Shakespeare was long dead, someone made changes to the Quarto of Othello to associate the standard image of the great poet—the swan who dies to music—with Emilia, and to give her the "willow" song to repeat. Moreover, the swan appears in King John associated with John's son, and in Merchant of Venice associated with Bassanio. The author of the plays thereby associates the great poet with her baptismal, mother's, adopted, and family names:

AMELIA

JOHNSON

WILLOUGH(BY)

BASSANO

This is over 99.999999% certain to be no coincidence, and only one person would have had a reason for leaving behind this complex literary signature!

7. Link to the Theater

Mr. Shakespeare was an actor, but actors had no training in rhetoric and only got cue scripts, not complete plays. They had no training in play analysis. Amelia however, not only came from a family of musicians who moonlighted as musicians for the two theaters opposite her home. For ten years she was also mistress to Lord Hunsdon—the man in charge of the English theater. He was patron to the company that performed the Shakespearean plays, and England's only work on play analysis was going on in his offices.

8. The Jewish Allegories

In the Plays Finally, many plays contain allegories about the Roman-Jewish War. In Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon represents Yahweh, who is fighting a war against Titania, who represents Titus Caesar. According to research by Professor Parker at Stanford, Peter Quince is St. Peter, who presides over the collapse of Christianity, in the parody of the deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe. When the Wall comes down it is Apocalypse, and the start of a new Jewish year marked, as in The Zohar, by the distribution of dew. In As You Like It, the forest is surrounded by a circle, everyone is starving, people are hung from trees, and deer are being slaughtered like men. All of this resembles the actual events of the Jewish War. We are told the Duke in charge is a “Roman conqueror” who is also identified with Satan—and his allegorical identity can thus be uncovered as Vespasian Caesar. As a believing Catholic, why would Mr. Shakespeare have created these complex Jewish allegories? Amelia however, wrote a collection of poetry that includes the long satirical feminist critique of Christianity known as Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), meaning "Hail God, King of the Jews." As a Jew she might well have wanted to create an allegory that took comic literary revenge upon the men who destroyed Jerusalem.

[9YearLurker]

But the Jewish angle?

[Political Junkie Too]

When you geta group of motley 7th grade boys to, within 3 weeks, quote Shakespeare slinging slurs and insults from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the produce aisle

Yeah, that reminds me of the movie "Renaissance Man" with Danny DeVito. That was Hamlet and Henry V to army grunts.

Cute movie about teaching Shakespeare.

-PJ

[stanne]

I’ll have to see that.

[tomkat]

Link your REL comment over on one of the Civil War threads and prepare for heavy incoming !

[Mr Ramsbotham]

But the Jewish angle?

I don't think that would have been too difficult for him. He was well educated; held Bachelors' degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, in addition to a doctorate.

[9YearLurker]

And examples of his writing—poetry and plays?

[Mr Ramsbotham]

He wrote songs, although he also adapted songs, and it's difficult to say which of the songs are attributable to him. Here's one which some opine was authored by him (or John Donne, and adapted by him):

Sweet, stay a while; why will you rise?
The light you see comes from your eyes,
The day breaks not; it is my heart,
To think that you and I must part.
O stay, or else my joys must die,
And perish in their infancy.

Dear, let me die, in this fair breast,
Far sweeter than the Phoenix' nest.
Love, raise desire, by his sweet charms,
Within this circle of thine arms.
And let thy blissful kisses cherish,
Mine infant joys, that else must perish.

Do you notice something about this song? In fact, it seems to fit very well with the bedchamber scene in "Romeo and Juliet." Here's a rendition of the song on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnW7z3xTxNo

[La Lydia]

I know. He is my go-to guy when I am feeling low. One or two Mulliner tales and I am good as new.

[stanne]

I’ll have to remember that. It is so amusing to see the soap opera of Bertie running around trying to keep his friends from losing their trust funds.

[FrdmLvr]

I’d read the Lord Bacon theory as well. Made a good argument.

[a fool in paradise]

So this Shakespeare chap was really a beard for a woman writing plays for men dressed as women?

[yldstrk]

yeah who knows?

I had to write about something, only got a B

[AnAmericanMother]

Lots of ‘em in Lewis’ volume of the OHEL.

[stanne]

Tell me what that is. I assume its CS Lewis

[AnAmericanMother]

Yep - Oxford History of English Literature. He wrote the volume on "the sixteenth century, excluding drama". I read it because Lewis wrote it, it was interesting (he has a way with words - who else could make religious pamphlets from the 1540s interesting? or at least his comments about them are interesting). Do not recall a whole lot of literary ladies (nothing compared to the 17th c. even . . . ) but they were represented. And reading More and Ascham and others of that era, you can see that they are talking about educating the daughters of the gentry and the rising middle class, not perhaps as a matter of course but as something that was done frequently.

The feminists have not done us any favors. They have ignored the educated women of 16th and 17th c. England, probably in the interest of promoting their theory that the Industrial Revolution brought forth "heroic" anti-patriarchal wymyn. They seem to think that no females were writing before Austen and Bronte.

[stanne]

Very interesting

[x]

Some of that "sea imagery" is pretty standard stuff: “Memory sails out upon a murky sea,” “a menacing calm,” “against the current,” and “into the current.”

Proving anything is going to be tough. If Obama and Ayers were that close, Ayers's phrases may have entered Obama's conversation and rough drafts without Ayers actually writing the book.

[Political Junkie Too]

It may be standard stuff to a writer, but it may not be to a novice who can't even get past "um... ahh" when speaking extemporaneously.

It's hard to prove ghost-writing, but the circumstantial evidence is strong. Obama has no history of high-quality writing other than the books that he wrote when he met Ayers. Even though Obama came from an island state and an island nation where you might expect a high amount of water exposure and experience, Obama has not offered up any history as a youth of engaging in boating, fishing, surfing, or any interest in the sea at all.

If, with that background, I'm asked to believe that he's exceptional in the use of nautical metaphors strictly from research alone, it's a leap that I need more convincing to take.

-PJ

[Political Junkie Too]

And one more thing...

It goes back to what I hinted at earlier, the use of shibboleths.

Writing about something that is so ingrained in one's culture and being, that it is almost an identifying trait, is something that stands apart from a description as a result of research.

The author of this article is setting up his separate points as shibboleths, things about this particular woman that are ingrained in her culture, her family, and her upbringing, backed up with circumstantial evidence including immersion in music, theater, and access to both across the street from her home.

Again, I am not a scholar in Shakespeare in any sense. I guess that frees me to be more accepting of the arguments made in this article.

-PJ

[cothrige]

The mystery is fueled by the fact that his biography simply doesn't match the areas of knowledge and skill demonstrated in the plays.

Finally, some intelligence on this forum. This is so absolutely true. How could a country boy from Warwickshire write such intelligent things? Middle class boys from the country don't do that. How ridiculous. Only noble people can write that way or read so that they can know these things. I mean, Shakespeare never left England and so could never have written such intelligent things as that land-locked Bohemia, i.e. Czechoslovakia, had a coast, or that inland city Milan was a sea-port. Only a well-travelled person could have not-known these things properly.

And, as is well known, Shakespeare never owned any books. How could he be so smart without books, which we know because he left none in his will. Too bad he doesn't have the bona fides of such eminent scholars as Francis Bacon, who unfortunately also appears to have owned no books since he didn't leave any in his will. And Shakespeare couldn't even spell his own name, unlike such important people like Christopher Marlowe, who spelled his own name Marley. And there is no indication Shakespeare ever went to school, unlike the brilliant Marlowe who also cannot be proven to have gone to school. Thank goodness Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker, and not just the son of the city Mayor like Shakespeare. And, naturally, it is true that Shakespeare was only attested to as the author of the works numerous times throughout his life, and written of by others as such and as a poet. Marlowe, who nobody doubts, has the distinction of not having been recognized as the author of a single work during his life. Tamburlaine, the only of his plays printed during his life at all wasn't actually attributed to him until 80 years after he died. Now, that is evidence. If only Shakespeare could have left so much proof of his authorship.

But, we must agree that simple country folk cannot produce great things. Such lies are evident throughout history. For instance, that great fraud Abraham Lincoln is often given credit for having written the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. Talk about stupid. How could a poor country boy who spent a total of about a year with actual teachers have done such things? Hogwash. Impossible. His biography does not match the areas of knowledge and skill demonstrated in his writings. In reality it was a man of high education and social standing who produced such works. A man such as Jefferson Davis, who attended universities and West Point, is a perfect fit. He was also known to write speeches and have been active in political life. Yep, it is clear that Jefferson Davis actually wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address, among all the other works usually attributed to Lincoln. Thankfully, such eminent scholars as that which produced this article could appreciate the truth of such important facts as this.