Why are there Jewish allegories in Shakespeare’s Plays?

By John Hudson

At the Elizabethan Court, solving allegorical puzzles was a major pastime. As theQueen’s cousin Sir John Harington observed, allegory was used in literature inorder to communicate hidden meanings. Allegory was also used in English stageplays including the mystery plays. The use of allegory and personified charactersin the Shakespearean plays has attracted some recent attention. For instance,Linda Hoff has shown that

Hamlet

is an allegorical parody of the Christian

Book of Revelation

, an Apocalypse which all goes wrong, and mocks the most sacredChristian theology. In November 2010 the Dark Lady Players will be doing aproduction called

Hamlet’s Apocalypse

to demonstrate this in New York Cityhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/26623778/Hamlet-s-Apocalypseat ManhattanTheatre Source in Greenwich Village.

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Similarly Steve Sohmer identified

Julius Caesar

as containing an “impiousparody”, while

Othello’s

allegorical sub-plot contains a parody of the Virgin Mary(Desdemona), presumably pregnant by the Holy Ghost, being smothered inrevenge by an allegorical Joseph (Othello) on the night before Easter, therebyechoing the body of Jesus in the tomb with its face covered by a handkerchief.The Dark Lady Players demonstrated the

Othello

allegory in our production lastyear of

Shakespeare’s Three Virgin Marys

The last time these allegories received much attention was in the 1930s. Variousscholars tried to show how the religious references in the plays created aconsistent Christological allegory, but they failed. It is now clear why. The playsdo not reflect conventional Christian doctrine. Rather these allegories reflect aJewish theological perspective. Some of them parody Christianity and otherscomment on the Roman-Jewish war fought by Vespasian and Titus Caesar 66-73CE.The existence of these Jewish allegories in the plays makes it very likely that theperson who put them there was England’s only Jewish poet, Amelia BassanoLanier. Let us look at a couple of examples.

The Merchant of Venice

Of all the plays,

The Merchant of Venice

is richest in Jewish material and inHebrew puns. For instance as Schoenfeld has shown,

Portia says “I am lock’d”(3,2,40) and “I am contain’d” (2,8,5) in one of the caskets. These are strangestatements because it is her portrait that is inside the casket and not Portiaherself. But a Hebrew speaker would know that PoRTia’s name in Hebrew isspelt PRT. They would see the lead casket, know that the word ‘lead’ in Hebrewis YPRT (

oepheret

--the first letter is a soundless letter the

ayin

), and realize thatthe Hebrew pun shows that Portia (PRT) is contained inside the lead. Naturallythis is the casket chosen by the suitor Bassanio, whose name is the originalspelling of the name of the Bassano family who, as Marrano Jews wouldrecognize a Hebrew pun.The play also contains a comic parody of the Christian Eucharist, the so-called‘last supper’ in which Messiah Jesus supposedly gave his body and blood to bedevoured by his followers. The name Shylock is derived from Shiloh, a name for the Messiah that “was a name current among the Jews” at the turn of the 16thcentury, as the most scholarly New Variorum edition of the play notes. In theBabylonian Talmud, Rabbi Johanan said: "The world was created for the sake of the Messiah, what is this Messiah's name? The school of Rabbi Shila said 'hisname is Shiloh, for it is written; until Shiloh come.'" (Sanhedrin 98b). Also 'UntilShiloh shall come; He is called by the name of Shiloh because all the nations aredestined to bring gifts to Israel and to King Messiah, as it is written, 'In that dayshall the present be brought to the Lord of hosts

' (Yalkut 160).In the play the Duke initially says that half of Shylock’s wealth goes to Antonio,the other half to the State. Antonio modifies that in lines 376-385, so that insteadof owning outright half of Shylock’s goods, Antonio will have them in use, and onShylock’s death they will go to Lorenzo and Jessica. For this favor Shylock has tobecome a Christian. Shylock then disappears from the play.What happens to him? There are only two possibilities.(a) Shylock becomes a Christian and on his death half his goods go to

Lorenzo and Jessica.(b) Alternatively, Shylock does not become a Christian, in which case athis death he owns nothing. He does not even have the value of a rope to hanghimself (4,1,362). That raises the question of what exactly he leaves to Jessicaand Lorenzo “After his death, of all he dies possess’d of” (5,1, 292-3). Since hewould not own even his clothes, all that he could be said to own was his nakedbody. It is that which would be implicitly given to the “starved people” (5,1,294). Itis significant that they refer to the gift as “manna” (line 293), meaning of course“what is it?” (JPS Torah Commentary/Shemot 16;15), and this is a key questionto answer.The reader is then left with making a decision about the strength of Shylock’sfaith. It seems to me that he would not convert to Christianity, in which case whathe leaves Jessica is his corpse. The reason is that this is an allegory. The onlyother Messiah figure, who left his body to be eaten and who also was put through3 trials is Jesus. The play is a very simple and elegant parody of the ChristianEucharist. This is confirmed by the reference towards the end of the play togolden ‘patens’, the plate that was used in Christian churches to serve up thebody of Christ in the Eucharist. The purpose of the allegory is to show that it isnot Jews, but Christians, who should be accused of eating human flesh.

A Midsummer Night’s

Dream

The world’s expert on

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

is Professor Patricia Parker at Stanford University. In 1998 she demonstrated that the play contains anallegory set in first century Judea in which Thisbe is an allegory for the churchand Peter Quince is an allegory for Saint Peter. Bottom/Pyramus is aconventional medieval allegory for Jesus. The Wall, the “wittiestpartition”(5,1,165), is an allegory for the Partition between Earth and Heavenwhich comes down on the Last Day. So in the play-within-the-play, Peter Quincepresides over the Last Day, Apocalypse, in which Jesus comes again to be re-united with the Church. But it all goes wrong and both die, with Bottom/Pyramusdying in another comic parody of the Gospels’ “passion” story. This is allstandard scholarship, though known only to a few Shakespeare experts.To confirm that Parker is correct, the death of Bottom/Pyramus uses a rhetorical‘envelope’ structure to open and close with a reference to the ‘passion’ (5,1,277and 303). In between, the light disappears, there is a stabbing in the side, areference to dice-playing (5,1,296-7), and a death. All of which echo thedescriptions of the crucifixion given in the gospels, including the men who castlots at the foot of the cross (shown on stage in the mystery plays as dice-playing). In 2007 I wrote my thesis at the Shakespeare Institute on the allegoriesin this play, and the Dark Lady Players demonstrated them onstage at theWashington Shakespeare Festival and in a production at the Abingdon Theater in New York City.