CULTURE

Shakespeare's Plays Were Written By A Jewish Woman

Here's eight kinds of proof Amelia Bassano was the real Bard

by John Hudson, March 13, 2008

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TA GS : shakes peare john hudson dark lady amelia bassano

Shakespeare: looks worried
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.

Who's That Girl?: oh, just the artist formerly known as Shakespeare

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.

This article originally appeared in Jewcy.com

http://www.jewcy.com/post/shakespeares_plays_were_written_jewish_wom
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