The Woman Who Wrote Shakespeare; A Research Overview

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

THE DARK LADY By John Hudson

PART 1: AN INTRODUCTION This research makes an extraordinary claim, namely that the plays of Shakespeare were written by a Jewish woman of color; her name is Amelia Bassano Lanyer ...who has so far been known as the first woman in England to publish a book of original poetry in 1611, and as a candidate for the ‘dark lady’ of the Shakespearean Sonnets.

In Elizabethan London if a woman wanted to be a writer she could only write translations, religious verse and adaptations—or else publish anonymously. In this environment if any writers had anything to say that criticized the Government or religion, they had to do it covertly, by using secret messages or allegory – the common literary technique by which one thing is said explicitly, but it symbolizes something different. It was in this threatening climate that somebody wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. Questions about who the author was have a long history. As early as 1678 Edward Ravenscroft wrote that someone anciently connected with the stage told him that the play Titus Andronicus was “brought by a private author to be acted” and that Mr. Shagspere -- to give him his original name before he changed it – was merely the producer, who provided a cover story for the true “private author”.

1

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

The Revisions in the 1620’s The most powerful evidence why Mr. Shagspere could not have written the plays is that he died in 1616. However, subsequently someone undertook very extensive re-writing of certain plays before they were published in the First Folio. Most significantly, Othello which had just been printed in 1622, was amended between 1622 and 1623 with hundreds of minor changes and 163 extra lines. These lines are added especially in Act 4, expanding the character Aemelia and her death scene—and create the literary signatures described below, the so-called ‘swan signatures’. A reference to the circulation of the blood appeared in Coriolanus in 1623---although Harvey’s discovery was only announced to the College of Surgeons in April 1616, while Mr. Shakespeare was on his deathbed in Stratford. Newspaper reports published in October 1621 were used to make additions to Measure for Measure which are consistent with the underlying allegory in the play. They are therefore likely to have been made by the author if they were alive—which Amelia Bassano was, unlike either Mr Shagspere or the popular alternative candidate the Earl of Oxford. The Fool William In The Plays The character “William” appears twice in the plays as an uneducated fool who has to be given basic lessons. In The Merry Wives of Windsor a passage was added in to the quarto version to show William being given lessons in basic Latin, to make him into an educated ‘page’. In As You Like It, William has to be taught rhetoric. It looks as if the true author is giving us their satire on William Shagspere. This view is reinforced by the fact that one of the other Williams hinted at is the ancestor of Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, who is so much a drunken fool he confuses William with Richard the conqueror. However he does have relatives in the Stratford area, in precisely the same villages as Mr. Shagspere. The identification of Mr. Shagspere with this character is not new—it was first made in 1669. These three associations of a fool with the name William are not a co-incidence. PART 2: WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE AUTHOR The Author’s Social Contacts & Knowledge Rigorous textual analysis of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare suggests that whoever wrote them had social contacts and specialist knowledge of many fields that would have been beyond the life of the son of a glove manufacturer from rural Stratford, who had recently arrived in London and still spoke the Warwickshire dialect. From the evidence of the plays and poems, the author must have been a major poet who had;

2

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Friendship with Earl of Southampton Extensive contact and collaboration with the atheist Christopher Marlowe Contact with the Ambassador to Denmark, Lord Willoughby Contact with Earl of Oxford Contact with Sir John Salisburie who commissioned The Phoenix and the Turtle Good contacts with Lord Hunsdon and Sir George Carey who commissioned plays Familiarity with the household of Anne Clifford, referred to in Twelfth Night Contacts with the musicians for the plays such as Robert Johnson A musical knowledge more extensive than any other playwright Knowledge of Italy and Italian Knowledge of Hebrew, Judaism and the Talmud Technical knowledge of falconry Technical legal knowledge Military knowledge including generalship Knowledge of girls’ literature and early feminism Very extensive knowledge of the Bible in multiple translations None of these criteria match the man from Stratford. However they precisely match the social circles in which Amelia Bassano lived. The World’s Most Musical Plays The author uses 300 technical musical terms throughout the plays, referring both to music theory and to musical technique. Many take the form of musicians’ jokes that would be appreciated only by other musicians. Altogether there are nearly 2,000 musical references in the plays, including quotations from one hundred songs. But very oddly there are hardly any references to sacred religious music and settings of the mass by composers like Tallis or Byrd even though in these years such music was at its peak. The play that has most references is The Taming of the Shrew with 110 musical references, roughly one every minute, followed by Twelfth Night with 91 references. This is unusual since plays by educated gentlemen like Marlowe, Chapman, Lodge and Greene average only 18 such references per play. English literature’s most musical play up to this point had been by Lyly with 47 musical references and that had been composed to be acted by boys choristers. The average Shakespearean play contains 23% more musical references than that, and 300% more than the average play by other writers.

3

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

The Italian Connection The plays not only quote Italian in several places, they show a detailed knowledge of Italian geography, clothes, household objects, art and architecture, especially of Venice, Mantua and Padua. The author is aware of paintings that were located in the Ducal palace in Mantua. The author is familiar with the industries in certain towns and the transport systems linking them. The author is familiar with Venetian slang “Sound as a fish" and many obscure details of the towns like the unusual timing of church services and the landing points for the boats and what sort of trees grow on which side of town. The author knows the types of characters of the people in each town, they know what it feels like to travel in a gondola. They are familiar with the peculiar Venetian calendar as well as the city’s shoe styles. They also know obscure people like a lawyer in Padua who acted as a judge in Venice. They are familiar with unpublished teachings of professors in the medical school in Padua. Most important of all the author read Dante, Tasso and other sources in Italian. So we add to the author’s profile a strong Italian connection, especially to Venice, in which two plays were set but which, unusually, do not make use of standard English stereotypes of the Venetian people. The Plays use Spoken Hebrew The author knew Hebrew, which was very uncommon in Elizabethan England. Some scholars read Hebrew, but only Jewish merchants spoke it. The plays include certain passages in the plays composed directly in Hebrew, and secondly write some passages (mostly in The Merchant of Venice) that sound like English sentences, but also sound like Hebrew sentences with a very different meaning. For instance in All’s Well that Ends Well the interpreter says "Boskos vauvado. I understand thee, and can speak thy tongue. Kerely-bonto, sir, betake thee to thy faith..." (IV.i,75-77). What appear to an English speaker to be nonsense are actually Hebrew words, and the sentence can be translated as "In bravery like boldness, and in surety, I understand thee, and can speak thy tongue. I am aware of his deception sir, betake thee to thy faith...". The other kind of usage is transliteration—which requires a very high level fluency in Hebrew. Florence Amit has identified at least 50 different examples in The Merchant of Venice alone. The author also uses four quotations from the Talmud, an allusion to the Zohar, another to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, possibly drew upon one of de Sommi’s untranslated Hebrew plays, and made use of Lurianic kabbalah only available in Hebrew manuscript or in oral teaching in Jewish communities.

4

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

The Profile Just Doesn’t Fit Mr. Shagspere We know that Mr. Shagspere, after being taught at the local school in Stratford, in the local Warwickshire dialect, arrived in London probably in 1592. The legal records show his primary occupation as a money lender. A year or two later somebody published the poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus & Adonis (1593-4). Neither show any trace of Warwickshire dialect. Both are written in the kind of English found at the court and the universities. There is no evidence that Mr. Shagspere had any advanced musical training and expertise. As to Hebrew, there would have been no way for him to learn this in Stratford, yet in 1596 The Merchant of Venice would contain various transliterated Hebrew and knowledge of Judaism. He had no Italian relatives and there is no evidence he knew Italian. So if Mr. Shagspere wrote the plays, then he would have had to accomplish this implausible feat all the while maintaining his day job as a money lender, wiping out his native accent, and somehow developing close friendships with several courtiers and statesmen of high social rank with whom he had no previous connection. There is a similarity of name here--but no match of life and biography to the author. Does Any Single Social Circle Fit The Bill? But if we reject Mr. Shakespeare as the author, is there is single social circle in Elizabethan London which might provide such knowledge? One of the key social circles for music, and especially recorder music, was the Bassano family. They were the Queen’s recorder troupe. They were Italian, originally from Venice. They knew Hebrew because they were Jewish and they were Marrano Jews who therefore would not have been interested in Christian church music. So being a member of the Bassanos covers all of these. They lived in Spitalfields a few hundred yards from all the theatres. What's With All The Falcons? Although some knowledge of falconry was widespread among the nobility and gentry, and those involved in hunting, the plays show unusual expertise. They distinguish between 43 different sorts of birds including eagles, ospreys, falcons, hawks, kites, and buzzards. The plays show a detailed knowledge of falconry, using technical language about the way to raise and manage the birds, their health, their life expectancy, their flight patterns, the sorts of equipment needed, their slang names, and even how to repair a broken feather, a process known as ‘imping ‘. The author seems to have a special interest in falcons. They are the second most popular bird of prey mentioned sixteen times in the plays, coming behind eagles. This requires a deeper explanation than simply a layperson’s love of falconry.

5

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Spoken Like A Lawyer -- Or A General Although some knowledge of the law was important for every educated person in Elizabethan England, the author has more than this. They provide descriptions of 25 different trials, and refer to issues like summer’s leases having too short a date, or querying why a short lease should be so expensive. The author uses 200 different legal terms in 1600 different places. In addition to this legal vocabulary the author has been very close to soldiers and to generals planning military strategy, because they use 400 words of special military vocabulary such as about mustering an army. So we can add to the author’s profile, falconry, legal knowledge and knowledge of military campaigns and generalship. Lord Hunsdon; Royal Falconer, Judge & General London’s centre for falconry was based around Lord Hunsdon who for 30 years was master of the royal falcons at Court. The falconries were for many years in Charing Cross village next door to his palace of Somerset House on the Strand. One of the most powerful men at court, as cousin and possibly half brother to the Queen, he also held three judgeships and was a general in the army. So a strong association with Hunsdon and his circle would explain those three vocabularies. Around the age of 13 Amelia became Hunsdon’s mistress and moved into his palace, Somerset House. She stayed with him for the next ten years. That is how she could have become familiar with his language and expertise. Knowledge Of Denmark One of the odd pieces of knowledge in the plays is the description of the castle and port in Hamlet. These include the lay-out of the castle, the platforms where the guns were located (1,ii,213), the arrangement of the rooms including the ‘Queen’s Closet’, the ‘lobby’ (II,ii,161), which is reached by going up stairs(IV,iii,36-7), the floral garlands or ‘crants’ worn at Ophelia’s funeral, and the depictions of the 111 dead kings of Denmark that were on the tapestries hanging on the wall of the banqueting hall. Other knowledge included the way that dawn comes so early over the flat Danish landscape, the closeness of the castle to the sea, as well as the Danish drinking customs punctuated by cannon fire. If the author did not visit Denmark, then they had to have got these experiences from one of the relatively few people in England who had done so. Amelia’s step uncle Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby was Ambassador to Denmark. Teenage Girls' Reading & Dressing As A Man The author was also rather oddly familiar with girls’ literature. For The Taming of the Shrew the author used The Knight of La Tour-Landry and His Book for His Four Daughters (1484) which was in use at Court as a manual of deportment and good behavior for girls. They also used

6

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Penelope’s Web (1587) which “in a christal mirror of feminine perfection represents the virtues of women”. For The Winter’s Tale the author used Mamillia; A Mirror or Looking Glass for the Ladies of England (1583). The Winter’s Tale may also echo Christine de Pisan’s book City of Ladies (1521), whose other work is definitely used in As You Like it , A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in Henry VI. The author of the plays is also unique in using the theatrical conventions of the first woman playwright, the 10th century nun Roswitha. They are also one of a handful of writers to draw upon the Heptameron by Margaret of Navarre—the most popular book among the ladies at Court. They also oddly present what Melchiori calls “the first feminist manifesto” in Othello, in the voice of a character called Aemelia. So to our author’s profile we can add that they are familiar with and a supporter of women’s education -- which was then very rare. The author also shows many strong, highly educated women characters. They play music and learn languages and an unusually high number dress up in men’s clothes—they pretend to be a man--in order to get heard, even though this was shocking and illegal. Indeed the author shows more examples in their plays of women dressing up as men than had appeared, before their time, in the whole of the English theatre put together. PART 3: WHO WAS AMELIA BASSANO LANYER? Born in 1569, Amelia grew up in the Bassano household in Spitalfields Next door neighbors were the Vaughan family, her parents’ best friends. The Vaughan’s daughter Anne was the person who invented the Sonnet sequence that would be used in the Shakespearean sonnets. Their grandson Harry Lok would be the person who wrote the longest sonnet sequence before Wordsworth. At least one member of the Bassano family from this household—her maternal cousin Robert Johnson-- would work on the music for the plays. Two of them would be best friends with Ben Jonson, the probable editor of the First Folio. Adopted By A Countess At the age of 7 Amelia was adopted by Countess Susan Bertie, sister to Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, and moved half a mile down the road to Willoughby House. There her new step grandmother, the elderly matriarch Duchess Katherine Willoughby, was the former Regent of Lithuania. Erasmus—the founder of the English school system-- had dedicated a book to her. So had the Bible translator William Tyndale. Katherine Willoughby was a freethinker who challenged religious superstition. She had also been one of the first people to advocate the feminist case that women should be allowed to read the Bible for themselves. Her daughter, the Countess Susan who supervised Amelia’s

7

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

upbringing, had been privately tutored by yet another of the translators of the Bible, Miles Coverdale. Growing up in such a household helps explain Amelia’s deep familiarity with the Bible in many different translations, which is quoted 3,000 different times throughout the plays. The family brought many important connections. Among the Willoughby cousins were Sir John Salisburie, who commissioned the writing of the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, and Edward Blount, publisher of the First Folio. The Earl of Oxford—in whose house manuscripts of some early sonnets were left—was brother in law to Lord Willoughby. Amelia’s step-uncle Lord Willoughby—whose family name was Peregrine Bertie--fought for Henry of Navarre and he appears in Love’s Labour’s Lost, fighting for Henry of Navarre, as Armado a brave soldier who is “too peregrinate”, a standard court pun on his name. His campaign is used as a model for parts of Henry VI, and the unpublished writings of one of his staff are used in Henry V. Lord Willoughby was also Ambassador to Denmark and went there in June 1582. Amelia could easily have gone with him. She had just reached 13 and become an adult, her step-mother had left England to remarry, and Bertie had a contingent of 55 men plus women and servants. If she did go, it was on the trip to Denmark that she got personal experiences of the pirates and also of the tempest that appear in the plays Teenage Mistress To A Great Nobleman At the age of 13 or so Amelia left the Willoughby household and moved another half a mile down the road to Somerset House, to become the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, who was over 40 years older. She stayed with Lord Hunsdon for the next decade, in his palace Somerset House. He was the Lord Chamberlain in charge of the English theatre and after 1594 it would be his revitalized theatre company, The Chamberlain’s Men, which would perform all of the Shakespearean plays. His son Sir George Carey would commission three of the plays – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night. Her legal knowledge would have come through Lord Hunsdon, whose legal office-work for his various judge-ships would have been done in Somerset House where she lived. Her knowledge of military vocabulary would have come both from Hunsdon who was a general of the army protecting the Queen, and also from her step-uncle Lord Willoughby who was England’s most famous soldier. Her Love Affairs While she was living with Lord Hunsdon, she had at least two affairs. The first was with her next door-neighbor the Earl of Southampton who was living in Burghley House. It was to him that Venus & Adonis and The Rape

8

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

of Lucrece would be addressed, as well as the early sonnets. The Lucrece poem is addressed in very friendly terms which make sense if, as the Avisa poem suggests, they had been lovers but unable to take that love anywhere because of the class and color difference between them. They would still be in touch a decade later when the Earl would be giving her husband recommendations on dealing with the Government. The second person she had an affair with was Christopher Marlowe, which was why she wrote A Lover’s Complaint describing him as a theology student with long brown hair and silken words, who was breaking his vows. It was Marlowe who taught her playwriting, which is why the early plays show so much of his style. She was his pupil, and to some of the early plays he probably contributed directly. Marlowe acknowledges her in Doctor Faustus by giving Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, the same birthmark in the pit of her neck that her medical records reveal that Amelia had. But by the Autumn of 1592 she was pregnant by Lord Hunsdon and was married off to one of her cousins, a musician called Alphonso Lanyer. She had to leave Court. Her Poetic Ability So did she have the necessary poetic ability? Unquestionably. Amelia was the first woman writer in England to get a book published of her original writings (rather than a translation). Her collection of an epic poem, a country house poem, and multiple poems of dedication, was published in 1611 under her married name. It was written in English although it had a Latin title. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum uses multiple verse forms, has similarities to the Sonnets, makes multiple references to the plays and uses some of the same literary sources. It has been argued before that Salve Deus was of such high quality it must have been written by the same person as the plays. The Russian Shakespeare critic Ilya Gililov made this argument in his book The Shakespeare Game. But since he did not believe that a lower-class dark skinned foreign woman could write so well, he thought that they all had to have been written by a white English noble. Amelia’s other independent poem appeared in 1594, which would be the first in the world to refer to the Shakespearean tragic poem The Rape of Lucrece. It is 3000 lines long, and called Willobie, His Avisa. This title echoes her persona as an adopted member of the Willoughby family. Like many modern novelists who use two pseudonyms, it gave her the freedom to use an alternative, more popular style. Willobie, His Avisa is a kind of comic British version of Lucrece, written as a cross between a poem and a play, and set in England. The central character is a woman who is called a female ‘Avis’, the Latin for bird. We are told she has a

9

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

home in the theatre district, and an elderly lover who paid her 40 pounds a year as an allowance to live with him in his princely palace. Obviously Lord Hunsdon since that was indeed her allowance in Somerset House. The poem also describes her affair with the Earl of Southampton and mentions the player Mr. W.S. as a bad friend. The supposed writer of the 1594 poem Willobie, His Avisa was one of Amelia’s Willoughby relatives. This poem describes Avisa as a bird, an eagle, which is invisible since that is what a-visa means. It also describes Avisa as a hidden playwright. She will “draw great numbers to the field”, which in Elizabethan London meant only one thing—the theatres in Finsbury Fields which were known as “the playing places in the field”. The woman Avisa who is this hidden playwright biographically fits Amelia herself, and she is apparently the author of this poem. Because she is an adopted Willoughby, whose married name was Mrs Falcon, she describes herself as the unseen (a-visa) poetical bird (avis) of the Willoughbies. Shakespearean Literary Parallels to Salve Deus There are literary parallels between Willobie, His Avisa and the Salve Deus poems, and both of them have similarities to the Shakespearean works. The Salve Deus poems not only use the same Jewish literary satire and Biblical typology as the plays, they also use similar language and unusual content. For example the Salve Deus collection is the only book in the world— apart from one Shakespearean play—to use an abbreviated form of the name of the moon goddess Dictina/Dictima. Similarly, as Caroline Spurgeon noticed in her book Shakespeare’s Imagery, the Shakespearean plays are the only plays that pay attention to how frost damages plants-- for instance Titania’s speech about how “The seasons alter: hoaryheaded frosts”. Yet Amelia makes a very similar comment in her Cookham poem. It refers to a garden which is beautiful, then Christ and the apostles begin walking in the garden and the flowers die “their frozen tops like Ages hoarie-haires”. Furthermore the context is almost identical in both examples. Another area of literary evidence is similarity of language. Take for example the dialogue between Titania and Oberon. Oberon: Every elf and fairy sprite Hop as light as bird from brier; And this ditty, after me, Sing, and dance it trippingly. Titania. First, rehearse your song by rote To each word a warbling note: Hand in hand, with fairy grace,

10

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Although these common words ditty, warble and bird appear in the works of Spenser and Robert Greene, there they are chapters apart from each other. Other than A Midsummer Night’s Dream the only other place in English literature of the period where they all appear together is in Amelia’s Cookham poem. Those preety Birds that wonted were to sing, Now neither sing, nor chirp, nor vse their wing; But with their tender feet on some bare spray, Warble forth sorrow, and their owne dismay. Faire Philomela leaues her mournefull Ditty, Drownd in dead sleepe, yet can procure no pittie

Her Bassano Trademark; A Rabbit If Amelia was going to leave a trademark behind on the plays the most obvious one would be the Bassano family trademarks, of which they had two: a moth and a rabbit’s foot (which symbolized the layout of the Venetian Ghetto).The frontispiece of the Avisa poems shows two rabbits.

Rabbits appear on no other book published in 1594, yet another two rabbits in exactly the same situation appear in the frontispiece of the Sonnets.

The First Folio has a woodcut which again has two rabbits. The woodcut appears three times in prominent positions, on different pages. In addition to this visual trademark, Amelia left her literary signature, in several different forms, on many of the individual plays---possibly on all of them.

11

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Her Signature as Mrs. Falcon One of the things that any theory of Shakespeare has to explain is why around 1592-3 the author stopped writing plays set at Court, like King John, and instead started writing comedies about Italian married life. For Amelia the answer is simple. It was at the end of 1592 that she left the Court and married an Italian man called Alphonso Lanyer. A man whose name means ‘falcon’ in French. So when she got married her name literally became Amelia Falcon. The play that is most about a falcon is The Taming of the Shrew which describes Kate’s marriage as if she was a falcon who had to be tamed like a wild haggard and who pretends to conform. To some extent this is probably autobiographical. Amelia has spread her signature across this play as well as its predecessor The Taming of A Shrew (1594). To see it you have to look at both plays together. In one there is an Amelia, daughter of Alphonso (her husband’s name). In the other it has simply been changed to Baptista (her father’s name). Her Swan Signatures Amelia’s literary signatures have been found in several other plays as well, including Hamlet. But of all of them, the most striking signatures are the swan signatures. Renaissance poets were often compared to swans. In particular, there was the idea that a great poet would die a death like a swan, dying to music – a swan song. Given the strong association between the poet and the death of a swan it is highly significant that the only three cases in the plays which depict the death of a swan all remind us of Amelia under her various names: • Aemelia in Othello, • John’s son in King John, and • in The Merchant of Venice her original family name Bassanio as found in church records. Finally she even went further in Othello by having Aemelia sing a song that echoed her fourth name Willoughby, the famous willow song, willough, willough, willough. She has left us a quadruple signature so we would be sure to notice and rescue her name and put it up in the hall of fame. AMELIA JOHNSON BASSANO WILLOUGHBY--- her baptismal name, mother’s name, father’s name, and adopted name. It can be statistically shown that this is no co-incidence. The probability that the appearance of these four names is not a co-incidence is over 99.9999999999999999%.

12

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Her Fit with the Sonnets Whoever wrote the Sonnets, one thing is certain, they were not rich or titled. They claimed to be “poor” and “despised” (Sonnet 37),complaining that fortune “did not better for my life provide” (Sonnet 111), “outcast” and “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” (Sonnet 29). Amelia Bassano fits this profile exactly. Even in the late 1590’s she told her doctor that her husband was wasting her assets. He lost a large amount of money in bad land deals –spending 300 pounds in 1601 buying land that he could not sell again for 50 pounds. He also tried to create a military career for himself but failed to get any position. We also have the legal records of a court case that describes Amelia as being “in very poor estate” her husband “having spent a great part of his estate in serving of the late Queen in her wars in Ireland and other places”. As predicted in Sonnet 81, she lies buried in a common grave. PART 4; WHY DID SHE WRITE THE PLAYS? Strange references to Caesar In the last century Battenhouse, Chambers,Velz and Wentsdorf separately pointed out that running across all the plays there was a very strange pattern of imagery about cannibals and disparaging allusions to Caesar. Until now nobody has known what these meant. What they are part of is a pattern of over 1,000 different examples that cut across all the plays and reveal their true meaning. It appears that Amelia wrote the plays as religious satires to counter an ancient literary satire against the Jews that had been created by the Roman Emperors Titus and Vespasian, after they had won the Jewish war. Use of Allegory and Typology As Marlowe put it, scripture was “all of one man’s making” (C.B. Kuriyama Christopher Marlowe; A Renaissance Life p.159), Jesus was a “deceiver”, and was “n’er thought upon till Titus and Vespasian conquered us” as a Jewish voice complains in The Jew of Malta (II,3,10). This same non Christian theological perspective is depicted in the allegorical level of all of the Shakespearean plays, and it matches the latest developments in New Testament scholarship. Like many other works of the period, the ‘Shakespearean’ plays were written as applications of the literary technique known as Biblical typology. In this technique, characters in the narrative are created as allegories for figures from the world of first century Judea. Such typology underpins all the plays in a consistent fashion. G. Wilson Knight and others had detected parts of it before, but they never made sense in terms of orthodox Christian theology. They do however make sense in terms of the atheistic theological perspective held by Christopher

13

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

Marlowe. Strange as it may seem, the story told in the plays precisely matches the very latest radical discoveries that are now unfolding in the field of New Testament scholarship—which are beginning to show that Christopher Marlowe was right--namely that Titus Caesar (together with his father and brother) had the New Testament texts created after the Jewish war as a literary satire to deceive the Jews. This perspective appears in Marlowe’s plays, and after his murder was continued by Amelia in her own writings. In Titus Andronicus for instance, she depicts a character Titus, his father Vespasian (whose identity is specifically stated in an early touring version of the text), and an allegory of his fly-killing brother (the Emperor Domitian). And she takes allegorical revenge against the Romans by doing to them what they did to the Jews during the war, in which Titus amputated the limbs off the messiah and cannibalized the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the year 70CE. The allegories are most clear in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Scholars have long known that the character Puck or Robin Goodfellow in A Midsummer Night’s Dream carries the name of two traditional English devils. Over the last decade Professor Patricia Parker at Stanford University—the editor of the forthcoming Arden 3 edition--has also shown that the characters of Pyramus and Thisbe were an established medieval allegory for Jesus and the Church. Peter Quince whose names are Petros Quoin or Rocky Cornerstone, is St. Peter. The Wall is the Partition that was thought to divide Earth from Heaven, and separate Jesus from the Bride of Christ, with whom he longed to be united. These findings alone suggest that the play is a comic religious satire somehow involving characters from first century Judea. In addition the present work shows that Titania, who is made to fall in love with Bottom (the allegory for Jesus) in his guise as an ass, represents Titus Caesar, and that other key characters are also religious allegories ---similar to those found across all the plays. The same approach to Biblical typology and the same use of non Christian satire appears in Amelia’s long, ironical, and pro-feminist poem on the crucifixion Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Epilogue Amelia lived a long life. At one point she became a tutor or governess to Anne Clifford, whose household is referred to in Twelfth Night. Later, in an attempt to solve her financial problems for some years she became a schoolteacher---she was apparently the first woman in England to own and run a school. It was in a converted farmhouse off Drury Lane where she pursued legal battles against her landlord, and it failed after two years in 1620. She also had a twenty-year legal battle, which she took to the Privy Council, against her husband’s relatives to get the rights to his

14

Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved

income from a tax on hay. She died a natural death in 1645.Subsequently the development of Bardolatry, the cult of Mr. Shakespeare, suppressed any further inquiry. Amelia is buried in Clerkenwell, in London, where she has no monument and no memorial.

15