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.

[Revolting cat!]

Were she signed under those plays or Lord (Turkey) Bacon, or somebody else, Shakespeare’s name would then be listed by one of these “scholars” as the author. The shoe must go on!

[MoochPooch]

To quote Mark Twain:

“Shakespeare didn’t write any of his plays. It was someone with the same name.”

[Robwin]

If this new theory is true it blows my belief that Obama wrote those plays clean out of the water.

Damn.

[stanne]

Having taught and read Shakespeare, and having learned about him in on study abroad, in England, from Shakesperean scholars and being Catholic, having read Joseph Pearce’s study on the subject, and knowing, being Catholic, that the Bard was well educated, well connected and informed about his contemporary society, politics, war policies and tactics and, without a doubt, about Roman history, behavior, as well as masculinity, he certainly was not a Jewish woman, who, in those times, would not have known all the aspects of life, politics, behaviors, religion and so forth, as women were simply NOT educated in that time.

Not to say a Jewish woman could not be as intelligent, or superior, by any means, but that, no...

This smacks of the rewriting of history, which, as an English and humanities teacher, I can assure does and really does exist.

[stanne]

Sigh. He is delightful, Wodehouse.

Now THAT’S Hugh Laurie, at his finest, come to think of it, Wooster.

[stanne]

Oh, please don’t compare!

No, he was no ordinary person.

If it had been more than one person his works would not have the cohesion, nor could they likely have rounded up so many geniuses at one time, in one generation.

[stanne]

Perfect timing. How do some Freepers do that.

Very funny

[Political Junkie Too]

...as women were simply NOT educated in that time.

Are you stating this as absolute fact? Because the article says that this specific woman was educated at the Court.

I'm curious to know why many characters were named after this woman or her associates.

Why would Shakespeare (or Dowland) do that. Coincidence?

Let me add that I'm not a scholar on this topic, and am going only by what I read in this article. The article points out specific people, specific locations, specific events. Not generalizations.

-PJ

[Billthedrill]

i give this thread a one in three chance of erupting into a flame war ..

We're just not trying hard enough.

Shakespeare was a gay Mormon African-American peace activist who was Robert E. Lee's lover and believed that the Earth is only 7000 years old.

Now THAT ought to do it.

[AnAmericanMother]

Usual looniness by somebody with an axe to grind.

"Everybody great in history was Jewish" is just the mirror image of the nutty Scots who try to prove that the Highlanders are one of the Ten Lost Tribes . . . looking for greatness in your particular ethnic group.

There wasn't any doubt that Shakespeare wrote his plays at the time. Many of his contemporaries acknowledged that he wrote them (and praised them - particularly Ben Jonson, who should have known, bec. he was a playwright himself). His publisher and everybody connected with his theater knew he wrote them . . . and if he hadn't there would have been an outcry. Too many people knew.

Here's the deal: you can't think in terms of Shakespeare sitting down to a desk and writing these. He was a professional actor/director/ theater owner with an audience to entertain and a payroll to make.

What probably happened is that he sat down with his core regular cast, which included some very good actors and musicians like Will Kempe, Richard Burbage, Richard Tarleton, and so forth, and brainstormed parts suitable for their talents. He would write it up, they would rehearse it, he would change it, they would perform it a couple of nights, make more changes, and eventually they would settle on a repertory version.

Eventually the repertory versions got collected in the First Folio, and there you are.

The idea that Shakespeare didn't know this, didn't know that, etc. is nonsense. He was living in London, after all, which fancied itself then (and now) as the center of the universe, and full of highly educated men (and women). He learned Latin as a child, and that's the key to any romance language. Italian was VERY much in vogue as Italian madrigals took England by storm. Moderns with their DVDs and iPods don't understand that music was something that everyone did after dinner around the table . . . as you can see from the art:

And anything that he did not know, like any good writer, he would research.

[Little Bill]

Didn’t Cromwell let the Jews return to England after being exiled by Edward 3, something don’t ring right.

[stanne]

I can’t say it’s not possible, But I will say that when one is even slightly in the realm of Shakespeare, one is bombarded, and now by students who google, as was not the case when I started, with deterrents from his mastery.

I don’t read this stuff. I will when someone comes out with something completely undeniable.

I am saying that, and anyone familiar with his works knows this, if there were a group of people alive at one time who could put this all together, it would be a miracle.

And that any woman of that time may have been educated at court, but she would have to have had an extensive knowledge of society, humanity, behavior, vice, virtue as well as a genius in the language, the French language, latin, Greek, Catholicism, the struggles of Catholicism against the British anti Catholic culture, a grasp of comedy and tragedy and how to put that forth, military tactics, the ways of men, just to start.

This screams, ‘alter Western Civilization history so the kids can feel even worse about themselves’ as is so common

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

This screams, ‘alter Western Civilization history so the kids can feel even worse about themselves’ as is so common

Yup.

Reminds me of something Karl Keating said about people who were skeptical of Homer's authorship of "The Odyssey."

"Well, if it wasn't Homer, it was somebody else going by that name."

[AnAmericanMother]

I beg to differ. Women not educated? Ask St. Thomas More's ladies - fluent in Latin AND Greek.

Some noble men AND women were extremely well educated, if that was their desire (you didn't have to if you didn't want to -- the uneducated Upper Class Twit goes all the way back to the Norman Conquest). Many middle class/townsfolk/ smallholders were also very well educated, as they saw it as a passport to success, and they did tend to educate their daughters as well.

Nobody else was, too busy trying to scratch a living.

[x]

The plays contain nearly 2000 musical references, use 300 different musical terms, and refer to a 5th century manuscript on recorder playing.

Presumably, being in show biz, Mr. Shakespeare did have opportunities to consort with musicians.

I'm reminded of the "sea metaphors" that are supposed to mark Bill Ayers contribution to Ogama's memoir -- as though Obama or some other ghost writer couldn't have come across nautical imagery on their own.

Whether or not Shakespeare read Dante is a question that's been much discussed. I wonder if it's not a little like the case of Shakespeare and ourselves -- even if we never actually read Shakespeare we use phrases that he (or she or them or it) created. Possibly a few Dante phrases made their way from Italian to English usage and ended up in Shakespeare's plays.

[stanne]

and I don’t mean to say that Jewish women don’t or haven’t contributed to Western or basic civilization, as the Good Lord and I know they do, it’s to say that there is a faction constantly attempting to denigrate.

Shakespeare’s works are magnificent, but not so because, as in the case of, say, Oprah’s book club, or something academic, even, people tell you you’re cool if you say you like them and even more so if you know a little, but because they are truly magnificent.

And to say that just anyone or a group of writers or a woman who was taught a lot within the confines of a castle under duress could have written them is one in many attempts to tell people to look the other way regarding the greatness of the Western World.

My colleague and dear friend, the middle school history teacher at our school says ‘you know everyone hates Shakespeare’ I say, come to my class at 7th period and see.

She NEVER obliges.

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 on the way home with their very busy and astonished mother; when you have a group of 30 9th graders glued to the screen after having read, analyzed, acted out and read,
‘Taming of the Shrew’, hanging onto every middle English word from Taylor and Burton, that’s when I can say, not just any schmo, nor lovely and driven woman of the time could have written this 500 year old stuff.

[stanne]

No sale.

[Martin Tell]

Oh, please. Not another "Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare" fad.

"Fill-in-the-Blank obviously did 'cause Shakespeare was a dolt while Fill-in-the-Blank was a friggin' genius. So there!"

I must hand it to whoever concocted this latest fad. Selecting a Jewish British Princess (JBP) hits a number of PC buttons.

Sorry, but the truth is that there is a lot of contemporary documentation that Shakespeare existed, and yes, actually wrote Shakespeare!

To paraphrase the Bard, cursed be the man who doubts these bones.

[stanne]

It brings back memories of when I allowed my High schoolers to do author bios via google and Wiki.

they were all gay, controversial etc. and there were some laughs as I tried in vain to steer them away from the scandalous stuff.

They really cracked me up.

I knew the media/culture was attempting to pervert them.

I’d say, hey, are you guys reading the bios on the authors of the entertainment lit you’re reading?

No.

They did not even know the NAMES of authors they were reading.

No matter that one voluminous writer was a witch, publishing true sorcery (jkr) nor that they had just non admirable lifestyles which they were putting forth in their literature.

Nor that the private lives of the classic authors were not put into their works as an attempt to brainwash with an attempt to gain acceptance, as is the case now

[Political Junkie Too]

I'm reminded of the "sea metaphors" that are supposed to mark Bill Ayers contribution to Ogama's memoir -- as though Obama or some other ghost writer couldn't have come across nautical imagery on their own.

I remember that discussion well. It wasn't that Obama couldn't come up with it on his own, it's that he had shown no evidence of using it, either before or after. Ayers did use nautical references throughout his writings, and was a merchant seaman for awhile after college.

That's Occam's Razor territory.

That's what is so intriguing about this article. There are many things that were written about that this author implies needed special knowledge by the author (shibboleths), such as fluency in Hebrew. And then there are the names...

-PJ