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.

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

The Dark Lady Players Perform: A Midsummer Night's Dream8. 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.

To learn more, the Dark Lady Players invite you to attend our free workshop productions of As You Like It, on Sunday March 16 & 23, at ManhattanTheaterSource, 177 MacDougal Street, NYC. A full production is expected in summer 2008. If you are unable to attend please take a look at the Dark Lady Players website and join our mailing list by writing to us so we can keep you informed of future productions.

Shakespeare: Jewess, hated by Jewesses, or both?The girls at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School in Hackney, East London, seem to have missed our post last week about how Shakespeare was a British Jewess. If they’d studied up on John Hudson’s theory that the work attributed to William Shakespeare was really written by Amelia Bassano Lanyer--a Jewish poetess from a family of Italian court musicians--they might not have refused to take a mandatory English exam on the work of Shakespeare.

Nine spirited students at Yesodey Hatorah left an entire exam on The Tempest blank in protest against what they feel is an Anti-Semitic portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. They’re supported by their parents and the school’s principal, Rabbi Abraham Pinter, even though their actions have caused the school to drop drastically in British school ratings, from a top-tier position to 274th.

Rabbi Pinter apparently thinks this is all very positive and has said that he's "really proud that our kids are prepared to take the consequences of their convictions and I think it is something that needs to be encouraged."

If the girls’ convictions had inspired them to wear pants instead of long skirts, Rabbi Pinter might be less proud. And if falling in school ratings causes a decrease in funding for future students, one has to wonder if the girls’ convictions are so great.

Related: Shakespeare Was a Jew. No, Really.

Victor/Victoria: or shakespeare/amelia?Was Merchant of Venice written by a female British Jew? John Hudson thinks so. The 54-year-old social theorist is convinced that much of the work attributed to Shakespeare was actually written by Amelia Bassano Lanyer, known for being one of the first women to publish her own poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in 1611. Lanyer was part of a family of Semitic Italian court musicians who lived as clandestine Jews.

After spending most of his adult life helping big companies market effectively, John Hudson enrolled in a postgraduate program at the Shakespeare Institute and spent four years studying the Bard's plays. The result was an authorship theory that attributes much of Shakespeare’s work to Amelia Bassano Lanyer. Lanyer was mistress to Lord Henry Hudson, the man in charge of the English theater and patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—the company that performed Shakespeare’s works.

Paying close attention to all of the musical references and knowledge of plants, law, military life, and falconry in the plays, John Hudson found that they matched the kind of education Lanyer would have had. Not only that: Hudson also found “literary signatures” where he thinks Lanyer left intentional clues about her name in a number of plays. His hypothesis was recently recognized by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust as one of their top eight authorship theories.

Eventually, Hudson started a theater group, which he named the Dark Lady Players, to stage a production based on his findings. Their performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream was described as showing that:

Oberon is the figure of Yahweh (God of the Jews), who is embroiled in the Jewish-Roman war against Titus Caesar (embodied by Titania) over the abduction of the true Jewish Messiah (the Iudean or ‘Indian’ boy); the “flower, love in idleness” (a pun on idolatry), represents the Gospels; and the end of the play is a Jewish apocalypse characterized by the distribution of dew — as in the Zohar.

The staging was never heavy-handed and there were some uproariously funny moments, punctuated by scenes of violent carnage and deep, spiritual pathos. The overall tone was of a promising marriage between strict comedy and strict tragedy.

Can’t wait to see what they do with Merchant of Venice…

With all due respect to Robert Pinsky, it's not often that Shakespeare's glorious sequence to "W.H." is credited with lesbian overtones. Here's one example of suspected girle-on-girle action, at least according to the excellent Stephen Booth's annotated Sonnets.

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is, by evil still made better;
And ruin’d love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuk’d to my content,
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.

The hell with "bed death." Limbecks foul as hell within is apparently code for cooter, which at least goes a small distance towards complicating that notorious marriage of two minds.

Middleton and Rowley read this sonnet and said, "How you doin'."

Great poems about sex. - By Robert Pinsky - Slate Magazine

Theater for a New Audience Director Jeffrey Horowitz decided to shake things up this season when he paired two Elizabethan plays, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, each featuring contemptible Jewish villains that play up the long-standing Jewish stereotype of the "murderous Jew." The inspiration for the bold move? Horowitz told The Village Voice:

I didn't set out to make my version of Rachel Corrie," Horowitz told me recently, referring to the one-woman show about the American activist killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza, which arrived in New York following months of controversy. "But I suspected there would be sensitivities to the plays," he continued. "Are they anti-Semitic or are they about anti-Semitism? We wanted to open up that discussion."

Horowitz, who started planning this season's theme of "Jew as outsider" over two years ago will also be showcasing Oliver Twist later this season. As for the debate of Shakespeare as antisemite, that's an argument that will sustain as long as the stereotype of Jewish villain flourishes.