The Dark Lady Players

The Dark Lady Players email; [email protected] The Dark Lady Players are a New York based Shakespeare company which performs the religious allegories in the Shakespearean plays. Elizabethan literature routinely used allegories to communicate hidden meanings. Thus contemporary literary critics advised that instead of feasting on the honeyed sweetness of the verse, those of stronger stomachs should look beneath the surface to "digest the allegory”. This was why Governments had State Decipherers sitting in audiences attempting to detect any hidden meanings in the plays being staged.

Foundation Scholars began detecting the religious allegories in the plays during the 1930s. Quotations from the Bible are used in 3,000 places as shown by Professor Naseeb Shaheen, and use 14 different translations. In a few places the playwright has made their own translation from the Book of Genesis using the original Hebrew. In addition, there are many other church and religious references. For example, in 1999 in his study of Julius Caesar, Professor Steve Sohmer argues that the playwright "set out to interrogate the truth of the Gospels" (pg 188), and asks the questions "How can a man become a god? Are his gospels reliable? can his priests (and writers) be trusted)?" (pg. 197). Similarly in 1988 Linda Hoff showed that

Hamlet is entirely a religious allegory. Others have researched particular pieces of the allegory, for instance King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Richard III, Henry VIII and others all include detailed Apocalypse allegories, according to the study by Peter Milward.

Allegory in Performance In 2007 the Dark Lady Players performed the world's first allegorical production of any Shakespearean play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The allegory was based on work by Professor Patricia Parker in her article 'Murals and Morals; A Midsummer Night's Dream' .

Parker had detected that Pyramus and Thisbe were an allegory for Jesus and the Church, the Wall is the Partition that comes down on the day of Apocalypse, Peter Quince is Saint Peter, and Puck is the Devil. In addition, the production used work by John Hudson, at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham to show the allegorical identity of all the other characters. The result was a consistent religious allegory-but one that was Jewish in nature rather than Christian-because it ends with a Jewish Apocalypse featuring a dew blessing, after the comic re-union in Quince's play-within-the-play ended in the deaths of both protagonists. This work is due to be restaged by professor Kelly Morgan in 2009.

In 2008 the Dark Lady Players performed two different versions of an allegorical As You Like It, which draws on the allegory first detected by Richard Knowles. A play which features two characters called Jaques or Jakes (after the toilet), as well as a contemporary allegory to Sir John Harington (the inventor of the flush toilet), turns out to contain another comic Jewish allegory.

Kirsta Peterson as Touchstone in a publicity photo with William as a cardboard head held by Jen Browne

The workshop production was directed by Greeman as part of the Shakespeare Symposium at ManhattanTheaterSource. The subsequent production in summer 2008 at the Midtown International Theater Festival was directed by the English Shakespeare director Stephen Wisker, former Shakespeare Director to the Atlantic/Tisch School at New York University, who is an expert in Shakespearean clowning. A Manhattan Spotlight Special made for Manhattan cable television on this production is available at http://blip.tv/file/1254195/ The work is due to be presented at Eastern Connecticut State University in November 2009.

Authorship Question The 2007 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Dark Lady

Players led the UK based Shakespearean Authorship Trust--- an organization established to evaluate the authorship question --- to support the possibility that the plays were written or co-authored by England's only Jewish poet, the so-called 'Dark Lady' Emilia Lanier. In summer 2008 Michael Posner, in a 15 page review of the theory in the Canadian arts journal The Queen's Quarterly, concluded that the case for Amelia Bassano Lanier was " as plausible as Shakespeareʼs and more plausible than many others" (Posner, 2008).

What's Next The Dark Lady Players are led by Jenny Greeman (Company Director), and by Dramaturge/Scholar-in-residence John Hudson. Different directors are invited according to the demands of particular plays. The Dark Lady Players are currently working on a performance piece provisionally titled Shakespeare's Three Virgin Marys, which will examine the allegorical Mary figures, identified in the academic literature by researchers such as Chris Hassel, Linda Hoff and Steve Sohmer; this piece will be produced towards the end of 2009.

References Mark L. Caldwell, 'Allegory: The Renaissance Mode', ELH, vol. 44, No. 4. (Winter, 1977), pp. 580-600. Rhodes Dunlap, 'The Allegorical Interpretation of Renaissance Literature', PMLA vol. 82, no.1 (1967) 39-43. Linda Kay Hoff, Hamlet's Choice; Hamlet A Reformation Allegory, Lewiston; E.Mellon Press (1988). John Hudson, A Midsummer Night's Dream; An Experiment in Allegorical Staging, University of Birmingham,The Shakespeare Institute (2008). http://www.pdfcoke.com/doc/15262132/A-Midsummer-Nights-Dream-AnExperiment-in-Allegorical-Staging

Richard Knowles, 'Myth and Type in As You Like It', ELH vol 33,no 1 (1966) 1-22. Ted Merwin,'The Dark Lady as a Bright Literary Light', The Jewish Week, 23 March, (2007) 56-7. Peter Milward, Shakespeare's Apocalypse, London; St Austin Press, (1999). Patricia Parker, 'Murals and Morals; A Midsummer Night's Dream', Aporemata;Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte (1998) 190-218. Michael Posner 'Rethinking Shakespeare' The Queen's Quarterly, vol. 115, no. 2 (2008) 1-15 Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays, University of Delaware Press (1999). Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare's Mystery Play;The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599, Manchester University Press (1999). Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, Columbia University Press (1958). Julia Wallace,'That's Miss Shakespeare To You', Village Voice, March 28April 3, (2007) 42.