Was Shakespeare Jewish?

In case you missed it, The Jewish Hall of Fame just got bigger. The latest addition is a superstar: Shakespeare.

Like other fringe beliefs, the theory that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by a Jew has been kicking around the Internet, but it just got a major print boost with a glitzy 3000-word cover story in Reform Judaism, a magazine claiming the widest Jewish circulation in the world.

Who's the Jew? A poet named Aemilia Bassano Lanyer, who's supposedly filled the plays with previously-ignored Jewish allegories and coded references to her own name. Now that's genius, fooling the whole world for four hundred years.

The driving force behind Lanyerism is John Hudson, a graduate of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham whose biography is hard to pin down since it's never described the same way when he's interviewed or profiled. He sounds like a cross between a social theorist and a media consultant and is currently a "scholar-in-residence" of a New York theater company dedicated to his take on Shakespeare. His John the Baptist seems to be Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Michael Posner, who covered Hudson twice before writing the Reform Judaism story.

Hudson's starting point is the same tired song about Shakespeare being a dumb hick who never went anywhere, so how could he write brilliant plays that changed the world. He must be a fake because we don't have his diary, his letters, his rough drafts, his library card, blah blah blah. We've been hearing different forms of this lament for about 150 years, as James Shapiro explains in the recently-published Contested Will. Dozens of candidates have been offered for our approval, from Marlowe to Bacon to less famous writers.

Which brings us to Aemilia Bassano Lanyer (1569-1645), best known outside academic circles as a candidate for the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Lanyer was one of the first English women to publish a book of poetry, described by one Lanyer scholar as arguing for "women's religious and social equality." The centerpiece is a long poem about The Crucifixion. No surprise, it paints Jews as "wolves" who bite Jesus and "use all meanes they can devise/To beate downe truth, and goe against all right."

Hudson is convinced that Lanyer was Jewish, claiming that Lanyer's father was a hidden Jew. He's ignoring that Jewishness has historically been transmitted by the mother. But whatever her father was, he died when she was seven anyway, and her mother was not Jewish. In fact, Aemilia Bassano Lanyer was baptized a Protestant and educated among Protestants.

Nevertheless, Hudson believes she spoke Hebrew, knew the Zohar, Pirke Avot and Talmud, even though there was only one copy of the Talmud in England at the time. Where her secret Jewish knowledge and commitment came from is anyone's guess.

What's Hudson's real proof of her authorship of the plays? There isn't any. It's all supposition and pseudo facts dressed up as stone certainties.

Like this one: Lanyer was the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain who later became patron of Shakespeare's acting company, so she had to know the theater intimately. Really? Unlike Shakespeare, she had no acting experience, wasn't a partial owner of an acting company and so couldn't have been as deeply involved with the craft as Shakespeare clearly was.

And this: Shakespeare set over a dozen of his plays in Italy- but class, he never went there! How is such a thing possible? It must be because Lanyer went to Italy herself. Oops--there's no record of that. Still, the plays have Italian in them, and "there would have been no way for Mr. Shakespeare to learn Italian in Stratford." That's a ridiculous point, since it assumes Shakespeare's education began and ended in his home town, but at least Hudson doesn't call him Little Willy.

Okay, what else? The plays are filled with musical references and we don't have any hard evidence that Shakespeare went to recorder concerts or even played air viol. But Lanyer's family included many Court musicians, so she's obviously the best candidate for having written the plays, and far more believable as an author than Shakespeare. Got it?

Then there's A Midsummer Night's Dream ending with a Jewish apocalypse. Truly. When Pyramus and Thisbe die in the play-within-a play and Oberon bids Puck and the fairies to bless the three newlywed couples in Theseus' palace, that's actually an apocalypse. For Hudson, the whole play is really about the Jewish War with the Romans.

Here's my favorite "proof": Among the hundreds of characters in Shakespeare's three dozen plays we find a Bassanio, an Emilia, and an Emillius--but wait, there's more! In the 1623 text of Othello published after Shakespeare died, Desdemona's maid Emilia now echoes a sad traditional English tune her mistress sang, though she didn't do that in a previous version. The song's refrain of "willow, willow, willow" has to be a reference to the Willoughby family that helped raise Lanyer, and Lanyer must have revised the text. Gadzooks!

Reading Hudson on Lanyer reminds me of Jimmy Durante's boast about his jokes: "I got a million of 'em." As you sort through Hudson's defenses of his fanciful theory at the social publishing site scribd.com, it's hard not to wonder if he's engaged in some profound kind of satirical performance art. Now that would be fascinating.

Unfortunately he's serious and gaining ground. Shakespeare scholar David Bevington recently told me he's now getting asked about the Lanyer theory when he does lectures, and readers of the Reform Judaism story have told me they were convinced Lanyer wrote the plays, or at least shaken in their belief that Shakespeare was their author.

Does it matter? Absolutely. Just as it matters if you believe Mossad blew up the Twin Towers or that President Obama was born in Kenya. Shakespeare Denial in its newest, Jewish incarnation is another example of the rise of conspiracy theory to a respectable forum where people treat it seriously, instead of saying: Are you for real?