The Secret Jewish History of William Shakespeare

450 Years Later, Bard Remains a Man of Infinite Jewishness

By Seth Rogovoy for The Jewish Daily Forward

Had William Shakespeare never died, he would be turning 450 years old this month, which would put him in biblical territory for longevity. As it turns out, that’s not necessarily such an unusual place for him to be. While little is known about the historical Shakespeare, there is much to suggest in his work and in what we know of his life and times that he just may well have been familiar with the Torah — and perhaps even engaged with Jewish thought.

The search for Shakespeare’s true identity has long fueled a cottage industry of books, doctoral theses and crazy theories. Wikipedia lists no fewer than 84 possible “Shakespeare authorship candidates” — historical figures whom scholars have proposed are the actual authors of the Bard’s plays and poetry. Among the better-known candidates, including Francis Bacon and playwright Christopher Marlowe, is Amelia Bassano Lanier, a crypto-Jew born in 1569 into a family of Venetian Jews who were court musicians to Queen Elizabeth I. A creative and independent figure on the cultural scene who had an affair with Marlowe, Lanier was the first woman to publish a book of original poetry. In his new book, “Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier — The Woman Behind Shakespeare’s Plays?” author John Hudson proposed that it was Lanier herself who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. Hudson points to Lanier’s cosmopolitan upbringing and familiarity with the many literary, geographic, religious and factual touchstones in Shakespeare’s work, to which a country bumpkin from Stratford-on-Avon would presumably not have had access. (In fact, an entire theater company in Manhattan called The Dark Lady Players is devoted to performing Shakespeare’s works as the biblical allegories its members believe Lanier embedded in them, as religious parodies that were then brought to the public by a theater owner and impresario named William Shakespeare.)

It doesn’t end there. Author Ghislain Muller has suggested that Shakespeare himself was a crypto-Jew with a grandfather named Shapiro in “Was Shakespeare a Jew?: Uncovering the Marrano Influences in His Life and Writing.” And in “Shylock Is Shakespeare,” author Kenneth Gross argues that the key to understanding the character of Shakespeare’s most notorious Jewish character is to view him as the voice of the playwright himself.

One of the key characters in Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” is named Ariel, a spirit rescued, controlled and eventually freed by the play’s hero, the magician Prospero. Ariel serves as Prospero’s eyes and ears throughout the play, using his own supernatural powers to cause the tempest of the title and to fend off plots to bring down Prospero. Ariel, of course, is a Hebrew name meaning lion of God, which poetically suggests that Ariel was a defender of righteousness.

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