The ‘Dark Lady’ As A Bright Literary Light

The sonnets penned by a Marrano woman? ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ as a Jewish send-up of the Christian Gospels? A new production makes some bold claims about The Bard.

Ted Merwin - Special To The Jewish Week

Could the plays of Shakespeare have been written by a Jewish woman? In “Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Comic Jewish Satire,” which will be performed next week by the Dark Lady Players, the Bard’s most performed comedy is treated as a Jewish lampoon of the Christian Gospels.

This unusual production, directed by Mahayana Lansdowne, is based on the voluminous research of literary scholar John Hudson, who makes the extraordinary claim that a Marrano woman, Amelia Bassano Lanyer, was the true author of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Music will be provided by Vortex, a group that has created computerized versions of Elizabethan tunes, including some written by Amelia’s cousin, Augustine Bassano.

Hudson, 53, is a British-born scientist and son of a Holocaust survivor who studied dramaturgy and sociology at Exeter University before going on to earn a graduate degree in organizational change from the London School of Economics. He spent three decades working in the technology and communications industries, where he developed new methods of integrating the engineering, marketing, financial and legal operations of multinational corporations like British Telecom and America Online. Only in recent years has Hudson returned to his real passion, which is the analysis of literary texts, especially the Bible.

After completing a new method of analyzing the Book of Matthew, Hudson turned his attention to the works of Shakespeare, whose authorship has been questioned for at least the last two centuries, with many noted scholars insisting that Shakespeare lacked the general education, specialized knowledge, travel experience and intimate familiarity with the life of the court to have possibly penned the three dozen or so plays and more than 150 sonnets that are attributed to him. Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon and many others have been variously proposed as the true author.

A.L. Rowse, an eminent British historian, first claimed in 1973 that Amelia Bassano Lanyer was the enigmatic “dark lady” often assumed to be of African descent who is mentioned in a number of Shakespearean sonnets. Hudson takes this idea much farther to argue that the “dark lady” actually wrote the sonnets, along with the plays, despite the fact that they were composed at a time when Jews had been expelled from England and women were legally barred from publishing their own works.

To prove his case in his 800-page, as-yet-unpublished book, Hudson insists that the “dark lady” possessed exactly the kind of wide-ranging knowledge — of such diverse fields as the Bible, law, music, Italian, falconry and the geography of Denmark — that he is certain Shakespeare lacked. Hudson also depends on the research of Florence Amit, an American-born scholar now living in Israel, who claims to have found hundreds of Hebrew words and phrases in Shakespeare’s works.

Bassano Lanyer, who was born in 1569 into an Italian Jewish family in the Spitalfields section of London, was adopted into a royal family at the age of 7; her new family was presided over by an elderly duchess who brought up her daughters to be able to read and translate the Bible. At 13, Bassano Lanyer became the mistress of the middle-aged Lord Hunsdon, who happened to serve as Lord Chamberlain, the authority in charge of the English stage. She subsequently had affairs with both the Earl of Southampton and with Marlowe.

With the publication in 1611 of “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” (Hail God, King of the Jews), Bassano Lanyer became the first published female writer in England. Hudson sees parallels between “Salve Deus,” which he considers to be a satire of the Christian Bible — it is generally read simply as a feminist treatment of the Passion—and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which he views as an allegory of the Romans’ suppression of Judaism through the crucifixion.

In Hudson’s version of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Oberon the fairy king (Morganne Davies) is Yahweh; the war that he fights is the one that the Maccabees waged against Titus, otherwise known as Titania, the fairy queen (Stephen Squibb). But it is the comic play-within-a-play in the last act that becomes crucial for his theory. The character of Pyramus (Kirsta Peterson), who dies for love of Thisbe, is depicted as a stand-in for Jesus and his love of the Church. The little Indian prince who is crowned with thorny flowers is used to symbolize the Jewish messiah. Finally, the return of Bottom (Peterson) wearing the head of an ass is performed as the Resurrection.

Lansdowne, the play’s director, has Jewish roots on her father’s side and Quaker roots on her mother’s. She has directed many Shakespearean productions in New York, but she first directed a Jewish-themed work with “Carcass,” a translation of a little-known play by Yiddish writer Peretz Hirshbein that was staged in 2005 as the inaugural production of the Diaspora Drama Group, an offshoot of the Folksbiene. Her aim in staging this new Shakespearean production, she said, is to “support and shape” Hudson’s iconoclastic vision.

“You can say almost anything with Shakespeare,” she pointed out. In order to bring out Hudson’s emphasis on literary interpretation, Landsdowne will use various Brechtian — or, as she points out, Monty Python-esque — techniques, including a large sign reading “Passion” when Pyramus is executed. The set will feature a giant Torah, moon and archway; at the end of the play, the whole cast will enter a tomb in order to be symbolically reborn. Landsdowne calls the whole production a mix of the “gory and graphic with the funny and light.”

Hudson has some supporters. “Controversial and provocative, this well-researched and wide-ranging book establishes a legitimate new area for scholarship,” writes C.M.S. Alexander, editor of the Cambridge Shakespeare Library, according to materials provided by Hudson.

Not everyone agrees. Robert Brustein, the founding director of both the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre (ART) at Harvard, unveiled his own play about Shakespeare and the “dark lady” at a reading on Martha’s Vineyard late last summer. In Brustein’s play, “The English Channel,” he also suggests that the “dark lady” was Amelia Bassano. But he told The Jewish Week in an e-mail that he finds the suggestion that she wrote the plays “absurd.” While Brustein conceded that Bassano Lanyer was the “first feminist poet in England,” he called her a “very weak writer” who could not possibly have written Shakespeare’s works.

Hudson, however, is determined to prove his thesis.

“My mother was a hidden child during the war,” he said. “I care about this hidden story. These are the works upon which Western culture was based. I don’t want this to be covered up.” n

“Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Comic Jewish Satire” will be performed from March 28 - April 1 at the Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex, 312 W. 36th St. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., with matinees on Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. For tickets, $16, call SmartTix at (212) 868-4444 or visit www.smarttix.com.