Although I have just published on my own BLOG and on EEJH a longish
essay on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of
Venice, I am drawn back to the topic for a few more comments by a piece
composed by Lev Raphael for the online Huffington
Post.[1] Raphael is himself commenting on a certain
scholar named John Hudson whose bona
fides are apparently somewhat vague and whose argument in Reform Judaism that all of some of
Shakespeare was written by Aemelia Bassano Lanyar.[2] As much as Raphael treats Hudson in a rather
mocking tone, treating this suggestion of female authorship of the Great Bard’s
work as rather cranky, to say the least, and dismissing out of hand her claim
to Jewish identity because scholars have emphasised her father as a secret Jew.
Since I don’t know this John Hudson nor for that matter Lev Raphael, I
will try to avoid the temptation to speak of them in the same way as
dilettantes, and rather look at some of the points raised in a more serious
way. In so doing, I will attempt
something else, honouring the memory of Florence Amit, an Israeli artist and
amateur student of Shakespeare, who died a couple of years ago. Though we never met in Be’er Sheva, where she
lived and produced her art, I did have many years of contact through emails,
and on several occasions published her essays on The Merchant of Venice with its argument that Shakespeare, if not a
Jew himself, had learned about Judaism—Italian traditions—through his
friendship with the Italian musicians who had come to Henry VIII’s court and
remained in England for many years after.[3] That Aemelia Bassano Lanyar grew up in that
environment of Crypto-Jews and secretly practicing Jews is a theory I learned
about first from Germaine Greer’s studies of women poets in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century. It is now much more
than idle speculation than Lanyar was the Dark Lady of the Shakespearian
sonnets. What Florence Amit did was to
extend this line of thought to see what would happen if we started to read all
of Shakespeare as though he knew quite a bit about Jewish traditions through
those Italian connections, and even at times as if some of the key speeches in
plays like The Merchant made more
sense if it was assumed that they had been composed in Hebrew.[4]
While I can’t go as far as seeing that Shakespeare himself was a Jew or
a child or grandchild of conversos at
any time since the Expulsions of the 1290s, I don’t find the suggestion that he
could have learned some Hebrew on the pillow, as one says, and a fair bit about
Jewish customs and practices from conversations, dinner parties and other
visits amongst the not all-that-hidden Italian Jewish musicians and
later-comers from silk-merchant families.
The reason scholars have backed off such a picture of the Bard’s
involvement with the Jews of London derives, if not strictly by their snobbish
rejection of any ideas proposed by non-academic scholars and especially those
who don’t toe the line of post-modernist ideology, but their unquestioned
assumption that since Shylock is a figure of foul, demonic wickedness, then
Shakespeare must have been an anti-Semite, at least as rabid as his young rival
Christopher Marlowe who Jew of Malta
shows definite animus towards the Hebrew people and their religious
traditions. To merely hint that William
Shakespeare may have been taunted into writing an answer to Kit Marlow’s
horrible ranting piece of anti-Jewish smut seems to receive no
encouragement. As good a reason as any,
let us venture, is that Shakespeare had a Jewish mistress and a lot of Jewish
friends. Of course, as he had done with
a Moor in Venice, Shakespeare was interested in exploring cultural and racial
difference itself as motif for tragedy, so that one need not wonder whether the
author were a secret African to understand how he came to write Othello.
Another stumbling block for critics approaching the presence of Jews in
Elizabethan and other pre-modern literatures is that they tend on the whole not
to understand what they are supposed to be looking for when they talk about
Jews. It is not that they are
anti-Semites (though all too often many are, such as T.S. Eliot), but that they
assume either, if they were good Christians that Judaism is a religion of the
Old Testament and its adherents are hide-bound literalists—taking the letter of
the Law rather than the spirit as the essence of Scriptures—or, if they are
would-be cultural anthropologists, that all Jews always were what they see when
they look down the hallway at their colleagues: Americans with a background in
Ashkenazi East European Yiddishkeit.
Even too many contemporary Jews who specialize in English Literature
have so far left their ancestral home that they know about their grandparents
and further back from comic shticks
on television and old movies.
To me, it seems that we come close to understanding Shakespeare’s
imagination best when we see it, first, and properly in terms of the conceits,
ingenious emblems, and Baroque distortions of the seventeenth century artists
and poets, but also when we pay attention to modern Sephardic authors who
express themselves in terms quite different to those of anxiety-ridden Yiddish
writers and their followers. Here, for
instance, are the words of Haim Sabato in his “Agnon Memorial Lecture” given at
Beit Agnon in Jerusalem:
I followed in Agnon’s
footsteps in immersing my stories out in the traditional sources…but I felt a
few layers were completely missing from his language. I wondered, where are the wordplays of the
Sephardic kabbalists, what about the homiletics of the Aleppo scholars, the
halachic terminology of Moroccan rabbis, the Aramaic translations of Yemenite
Jews, and the Ladino scholars of Jerusalem who mix Midrash and Bible, dip it in
Rashi, and create Ladino idioms. I was
zealous for them, so their language not be forsaken and lost. [5]
That is not to say that Shakespeare—or his poetic girl friend Aemelia Bassano Lanyar—deliberately steeped himself in Sephardic culture and sought to be a part of its ocean of wisdom, as a true chacham would do. But if the Bard did become familiar with Judaism through his London-based Italian connections, he would come out more on the side of Haim Sabato than S.Y. Agnon, the great Yiddish-Hebrew author and winner of an early Novel Prize in Literature. What the Sephardic writer of short stories claims as his goal, a recapturing and modernization of Jewish norms of thinking, feeling, remembering and articulating his imaginary experiences, certainly sounds familiar to those who study Shakespeare’s plays and those who see them performed well.
An approach to the Jewishness that someone like Shakespeare might have experienced in London during the last half of the sixteenth century means knowing about Italian Jews, Sephardi and Mediterranean culture, and the history of the small illegal clusters of families and communities of Jews who either lived under the radar of ecclesiastical courts after the 1290s or who came to England under various disguises thereafter, many escaping the Inquisitions of Spain and Portugal and their various European and colonial territories. It may be too much to say that that no Jews were able to live on the Scepter’d Isle until Oliver Cromwell sort of let them back in around 1660—there was no formal repeal of the Expulsion orders, only a tacit understanding to turn a blind eye to the presence of Jewish merchants in the City of London. It is also overly nice to say that if Judaism and its rabbinical institutions were illegal in England anyone who thought of him or herself as Jew was a hypocrite, a heretic or a self-deluded fool.
Surely it would be better to have someone like Shakespeare on our side than to cast him off as an enemy because theatrical and critical history continue to misinterpret him in the reflection of their own prejudices. d lost.[5]
NOTES
[1] Lev Raphael, “Was
Shakespeare Jewish?” Huffington Post
at (28 February 2010) http://huffingtonpost.com/
lev-raphael/was-shakespeare-jewish_b_662765. But
see also Jennifer Lipman, “Shakespeare ‘hid his Jewish toors’ – or He would
have been Bard” The JC.com (02/09/2012) http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/63337/
shakespeare-hid-his jewish-roots-or-he-would
have-been-bard (you may groan at the bad pun) and also http://www.yetnews.com/articles/ 0,7340,L-3309633.00.
[2] With a movie out making
the rounds recently to say that the Shakespearean canon of plays and poems had
to be by someone like Roger Bacon or Sir Philip Sydney or another well-educated
bigwig of the time and not a simple, barely educated actor like the Shake-a-spear
or –lance from Stratford-on-Avon, it is again fashionable to turn to women
authorship (as Virginia Woolfe did back in the twenties when she called on
Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway to claim the honours: but she only got the
second best bed in Will’s will for her efforts) or others who think Kit Marlow
wrote them, only pretending to have died in a duel so as to closet himself in
anonymity and reap the honors by proxy).
Ben Jonson, in one of his rare priggish and snobbish moods, wrote about
his popular rival as having “only small Latin and less Greek,” meaning he
didn’t go to university himself where he could have learned a lot of Latin and
some Greek and, even, as it was fashionable to to know how to read the Old
Testament in the original, some Hebrew.
The only satisfactory answer to all this mad speculation is to say that
if Shakespeare didn’t write his plays as everyone in his time assumed he did;
it must have been someone else with the same name, no matter where he came
from.
[3] Norman Simms, “William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; or, The Jew of Venice” on East European
Jewish History (Part 1, 26 July; Part 2,
28 July; Part 3, 28 July; Part 4, 29 July;
Part 5, 31 July ; Part 6, 31 July ; Part 7, 1 August; Part 8, 2 August; Part
9, 12 August) online ateejh@yahoogroups
.com; and posted on the blog site “Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations.” References to Amit’s essays that appeared in Mentalities/Mentalités are given in that
nine-part essay.
[4] Her family had her
monograph produced as an electronic book and it is now available as Three Caskets of Interpretation
(AuthorHouse 2012).
[5] Cited by Daniel Bouskila,
“A Sephardic S.Y. Agnon,” JewishJournal.com
(18 April 2013) online at
http://www.jewishjournal.com/articles/print/a_sephardic_s.y._agnon.
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