Rastas

Amelia Bassano the real Shakespare

September 7, 2015 Don Jaide 6 Comments

One of the most prestigious academic journals devoted to Shakespearean authorship

studies has just added a new candidate to the centuries-old debate about who else
plausibly might have written the works we associate with the little-educated
merchant and actor from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

The nominee is a complete shocker: Amelia Bassano Lanier, a converso (clandestine

Jew) and the illegitimate daughter of an Italian-born, Elizabethan court musician.

Dozens of luminaries (Sigmund Freud, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain among them)
over the years have joined the so-called anti-Stratfordian camp, convinced, as
Henry James put it, that the divine William is the biggest and most successful
fraud ever practised on a patient world.

Until now, most of the proposed alternatives have been aristocrats such as William
Stanley, the sixth earl of Derby, and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford
championed by the New York-based Oxford Society, publishers of the annual journal
The Oxfordian.

When you look at the plays without preconceptions of the author, observes the
journals newly appointed editor, Michael Egan, wed have to say this is a highly
educated person, well travelled, with intricate knowledge of the courts and
aristocratic life. Where did an obscure provincial boy gain all this information?

The Oxfordians current issue profiles Stanley and de Vere along with another
perennial choice, playwright Christopher Marlowe. But its the addition of the
female, Jewish contender a pioneering woman poet that will turn heads.

The principal proponent of this theory is 55-year-old John Hudson, a British

Shakespeare scholar and director of the New York theatre ensemble the Dark Lady
Players. In The Oxfordian, Mr. Hudson argues that if Bassano (Lanier was her
married name) did not write all of the plays, she was certainly a major
collaborator.

Her name is not new to Shakespeare studies. In 1979, British historian A.L. Rowse
suggested that Bassano, with her familys Mediterranean skin colouring, was the
famous dark lady of the sonnets, Shakespeares mistress. Ridiculed at the time,
that view is now commonplace among scholars.

Mr. Hudson goes further: He maintains that Bassano wrote the sonnets about herself;
as with the plays, Shakespeare was simply a front used to hide her identity.

Immigrants, intrigues and instruments

While Mr. Hudsons scenario has met with skepticism, it would help to explain some
enduring mysteries, including the prevalence of musical and northern Italian
references in the plays, and even possible smatterings of Hebrew.

Amelia Bassano was born in 1569 of the union between Margaret Johnson, a Christian,
and Baptista Bassano, one of a group of Jewish musicians brought from Venice by
Henry VIII. On her fathers death, she was sent to live with English feminist
Catherine Willoughby, duchess of Suffolk, where she was educated in Greek, Latin
and the Bible.

In her teens, she became the mistress of a cousin of Queen Elizabeth I named Henry
Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the son of Mary Boleyn. Hunsdon wore many hats: He was the
patron of the Lord Chamberlains Men, the ensemble that mounted Shakespeares
works; warden of the Scottish Marches, with a castle at Berwick; and the Queens
royal falconer.

Mr. Hudson points out that the plays contain about 50 references to that sport
far more than in the works of any of the Bards contemporaries a rich mans
preserve, generally unavailable to commoners such as Shakespeare.

Bassano became pregnant, probably by Hunsdon, in 1592, later giving birth to a son,
Henry. To avoid scandal Hunsdon and his wife already had 12 other children
Amelia was married off to her cousin Alfonso Lanier, a musician.

Mr. Hudson notes here that the Shakespeare plays contain 2,000 musical references
three times more than other typical plays of the period. Why? If the Stratfordian
wrote them, theres no obvious answer. But Amelia Bassanos 15 closest relatives
father, husband, uncles, brothers-in-law were all court musicians.

In The Taming of the Shrew and an early version that would have been written just
after her marriage to Lanier there are characters named Emelia, Alfonso (her
husbands name) and Baptista (her late fathers name).

Shrew was part of a series of Italian marriage comedies that Shakespeare suddenly
started writing around 1592. Those plays arent merely set in Italy; whoever wrote
them seems to have read Dante and other Italian literature in the original. The
Bassanos, surviving letters indicate, spoke and wrote fluent Italian, which may
well have been Amelias mother tongue.

Belfast University professor Roger Prior noted in a recent article that one speech
Iago makes in Othello even seems to match, image for image, a fresco in the Italian
town of Bassano, north of Venice. Perhaps Shakespeare himself visited this small
town off the typical Italian tourist trail. But Mr. Hudson argues that it makes
more sense to believe that Amelia Bassano made a return visit to her familys
hometown.

Similarly, it makes no obvious sense that there should be spoken Hebrew in

Shakespeares plays. No Jews lived openly in Elizabethan England even
clandestinely, the community did not number more than 200. Only a small fraction of
those could read the language. The likelihood that Shakespeare himself knew it is
nil. Yet Mr. Hudson says that scholars have identified dozens of transliterations
of Hebrew words in the Shakespearean canon, as well as quotations from the Talmud
and allusions to the Mishnah.

Finally, he asks, why would a man whose works portray well-educated, proto-feminist
women raise his own daughters as illiterates, as Shakespeare did? Bassano, on the
other hand, made feminist history when she became the first English woman to
publish a book of original poetry the 3,000-line Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail
God, King of the Jews), a satire sometimes known as Eves Apology, published in
1611.

Mr. Hudson has found connections between that book and the plays, in their biblical
allusions and, he argues, their common references to the late medieval writings of
French lawyer Christine de Pisan. He also contends that both the poem and the plays
contain vengeful parodies of Christian thought.

A black swan among theories?

Not surprisingly, many academics reject the Bassano theory. Johns evidence is
entirely circumstantial, or depends on quasi-allegorical readings of the texts,
says Kate McLuskie, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of
Birmingham. It is elegant and ingenious, but has no documentary foundation a
beautiful story that is not less beautiful for being entirely false.

Mr. Egan of The Oxfordian allows that Bassano was a remarkable woman with strong
literary and court connections. But its a big step from that to Shakespeare.
Unfortunately, Hudsons evidence, such as [the]detailed knowledge of northern
Italy, also supports other candidates. My view is that the Shakespeare mystery
remains unsolved.

Indeed, recently some researchers have questioned whether the immigrant court-
musician Bassano family was Jewish after all.

It is a beautiful story that is not less beautiful for being entirely false. Kate
McLuskie, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham

But Mr. Hudson is undaunted. He fondly believes that Amelia Bassano went to great
lengths to encode her authorial claim for posterity, by amending several of the
plays when they were published in the First Folio in 1623 (seven years after
Shakespeares death). He says the lines she inserted include a classic Renaissance
trope, derived from Ovid the poet as a swan that dies to music.

In Othello , the figure is evoked by Desdemonas maid Emilia, who then sings,
Willough, willough, willough. The same analogy is used in King John , associated
with Johns son, and in Merchant of Venice , in which Portia says of her suitor,
Bassanio: Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end, fading in music.

Emilia, willough (Willoughby), Johns son (Johnson) and Bassanio these could be
allusions to Bassanos baptismal name, adopted name, mothers name and family name.
Here, Mr. Hudson finds the poet leaving her signature.

The majority view remains deeply entrenched that Stratfords Shakespeare really
did write Shakespeare. But with the 400th anniversary of Amelia Bassanos Salve
Deus in prospect, Mr. Hudson 800-page manuscript, making her full case, in hand
aims to lay siege to the redoubt.

Michael Posner is a Globe and Mail reporter.

CONTENDERS

In about 1785, a retired Warwickshire cleric named James Wilmot started visiting
libraries around Stratford-upon-Avon, looking for evidence that a local lad had
written the single greatest canon of Western literature. He found nothing no
books, no correspondence, no records.

He became the first in a long line of skeptics persuaded that, whatever else
William Shakespeare might have been glove-makers son, grain merchant,
moneylender, actor he was incapable of having produced those transcendent plays
and sonnets.

Two years ago, the distinguished British actors Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance
issued their Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, asking how a boy with a Grade 6
education acquired the knowledge displayed in the plays including foreign
languages, law, heraldry, medicine, horticulture and astronomy. It has been signed
online by more than 1,700 people, including 200 academics, actors Jeremy Irons and
Michael York and two U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Mainstream critics say both historical documents and computerized style analysis
provide no justification but snobbery for doubting the Stratford case. But if the
doubters are right, who wrote the plays? Here are some of the leading alternatives.

Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford

A well-connected nobleman, de Vere received a Cambridge education and travelled

widely on the continent. He was both a patron of writers and actors and an
accomplished poet and playwright in his own right. His backers in the Shakespeare
debate say his wide classical learning and easy knowledge of Italian culture and
the many high-quality works under his name support their case. They say he kept his
authorship of the plays secret because they were critical of court life, and that
all the greatest Shakespearean dramas were completed by 1604 the year de Vere
died.

Christopher Marlowe

Not only one of the great Elizabethan playwrights but also a reputed spy, the
Cambridge-educated Marlowe was a friend and some-time collaborator of Shakespeare.
The Marlowe-as-Shakespeare camp say Marlowes use of imagery, words and phrasing
can be indistinguishable from that of the Bard. They suggest that his supposed
murder in 1593 was in fact a ruse to avoid arrest and torture, and that he
afterward lived incognito in Italy, writing plays under cover of Shakespeares
identity.

Francis Bacon

The Cambridge-educated lawyer, philosopher and essayist capped his career as

statesman with the key position of Lord Chancellor. The Baconians who champion
him as the real Shakespeare point to his learning, life experiences, wit,
prodigious vocabulary and especially his contemporary reputation as a concealed
poet to make their case. They note various facts of his life with parallels in the
Shakespeare canon, and suggest that he hid self-identifying ciphers within the
plays.

William Stanley, the sixth Earl of Derby

Another cosmopolitan aristocrat, Stanley was a son-in-law of that other would-be

Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford, with whom he is said to have collaborated on
writing projects. Though no literary works survive under Stanleys name, a 1599
intelligence report noted that he was penning comedies for the common players. In
the late 1590s and until about 1620, he had his own acting troupe, known as Derbys
Men

Sources: The Shakespearean Authorship Trust; www.bardweb.net.

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