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PART 1: AN INTRODUCTION
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Copyright © (2007) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved
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None of these criteria match the man from Stratford. However they
precisely match the social circles in which Amelia Bassano lived.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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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
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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.
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.
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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.
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: hoary-
headed 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.
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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
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.
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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).
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.
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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
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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
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