Note: this topic is from . Thanks Renfield.
Posted on 09/12/2013 4:21:40 AM PDT by Renfield
For hundreds of years, people have questioned whether William Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name. The mystery is fueled by the fact that his biography simply doesn't match the areas of knowledge and skill demonstrated in the plays. Nearly a hundred candidates have been suggested, but none of them fit much better. Now a new candidate named Amelia Bassano Lanier—the so-called 'Dark Lady' of the Sonnets and a member of an Italian/Jewish family—has been shown to be a perfect fit. Here are eight reasons that are sure to convince you:
1. The Most Musical Plays in the World
The plays contain nearly 2000 musical references, use 300 different musical terms, and refer to a 5th century manuscript on recorder playing. None of Mr. Shakespeare's friends or associates were professional musicians, so how could he have developed this practical musical knowledge? On the other hand, Amelia's family were the Court recorder troupe and around 15 of her closest relatives were professional musicians. In fact, one of them was the leading composer for the Shakespearean plays.
2. Spoken Hebrew
Although in late sixteenth century England about 30 scholars were studying written Hebrew, none of them actually spoke Hebrew. Spoken Hebrew was used only among European Jews, as a commercial language, to keep their information secure. How, then, was Mr. Shakespeare able to make the Hebrew puns or include examples of Hebrew transliteration identified by Israeli scholar Florence Amit? Or incorporate several quotations from The Talmud along with reference to Maimonides? Or integrate the examples of spoken Hebrew, seen, for instance, in All's Well That Ends Well?
Amelia's family was Jewish, living as Marranos with members of the Lupo family, who were imprisoned for their faith.
3. Feminism
The plays depict strong female characters who play music and read Ovid, but Mr. Shakespeare kept his daughters illiterate. Amelia, however, was educated at Court and raised in the household of the early English feminist Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and her daughter Susan Bertie, the Dowager Countess of Kent. This explains why Taming of the Shrew references a book that was the standard manual for training girls at Court in etiquette, and why other plays refer to Margaret of Navarre's Heptameron, the most popular book among court ladies. Finally Amelia's own poetry draws on the feminist Christine of Pisan, whose work is used in three of the plays and nowhere else in English literature of the period.
4. Italian
There would have been no way for Mr. Shakespeare to learn Italian in Stratford-upon-Avon, but the plays show that the author was fluent in Italian, made Italian puns, and read Dante, Tasso, Cinthio, Bandello, and others in the original language. The Bassano family came from Venice. As their surviving letters show, they spoke and wrote fluent Italian.
5. Major Poet
None of the other potential candidates who have been put forward is a major poet. But Amelia Bassano certainly is. She was a major experimental poet and the first woman to publish a book of original poetry in England. That poetry includes a 160 line poem that resembles a masque (a dramatic entertainment similar to opera, popular in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which masked performers represented mythological or allegorical characters) about the descent of the chariot of Juno. Bassano's masque-like poem resembles the masque about the descent of Juno's chariot in The Tempest. Her final poem includes unusual clusters of words that are also found in Midsummer Night's Dream.
6. Her Names
In the Plays One of the most popular names in the plays is Emilia (in various spellings). Why should Mr. Shakespeare have liked this name so much? In Titus Andronicus there are characters oddly called Emillius and Bassianus. Why are they there? But most importantly between 1622-1623, when Mr. Shakespeare was long dead, someone made changes to the Quarto of Othello to associate the standard image of the great poet—the swan who dies to music—with Emilia, and to give her the "willow" song to repeat. Moreover, the swan appears in King John associated with John's son, and in Merchant of Venice associated with Bassanio. The author of the plays thereby associates the great poet with her baptismal, mother's, adopted, and family names:
AMELIA
JOHNSON
WILLOUGH(BY)
BASSANO
This is over 99.999999% certain to be no coincidence, and only one person would have had a reason for leaving behind this complex literary signature!
7. Link to the Theater
Mr. Shakespeare was an actor, but actors had no training in rhetoric and only got cue scripts, not complete plays. They had no training in play analysis. Amelia however, not only came from a family of musicians who moonlighted as musicians for the two theaters opposite her home. For ten years she was also mistress to Lord Hunsdon—the man in charge of the English theater. He was patron to the company that performed the Shakespearean plays, and England's only work on play analysis was going on in his offices.
8. The Jewish Allegories
In the Plays Finally, many plays contain allegories about the Roman-Jewish War. In Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon represents Yahweh, who is fighting a war against Titania, who represents Titus Caesar. According to research by Professor Parker at Stanford, Peter Quince is St. Peter, who presides over the collapse of Christianity, in the parody of the deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe. When the Wall comes down it is Apocalypse, and the start of a new Jewish year marked, as in The Zohar, by the distribution of dew. In As You Like It, the forest is surrounded by a circle, everyone is starving, people are hung from trees, and deer are being slaughtered like men. All of this resembles the actual events of the Jewish War. We are told the Duke in charge is a “Roman conqueror” who is also identified with Satan—and his allegorical identity can thus be uncovered as Vespasian Caesar. As a believing Catholic, why would Mr. Shakespeare have created these complex Jewish allegories? Amelia however, wrote a collection of poetry that includes the long satirical feminist critique of Christianity known as Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), meaning "Hail God, King of the Jews." As a Jew she might well have wanted to create an allegory that took comic literary revenge upon the men who destroyed Jerusalem.
To get back to Shakespeare and Lanier, though: not all of Shakespeare's rich imagery comes from the field of music, does it? He drew from many fields, didn't he? And in some of those fields it would be hard for a woman to acquire first-hand knowledge in the 16th or 17th century.
I'm not saying a woman absolutely couldn't have written the plays, but it's at least as likely that "William Shakespeare" could have come to know something of music, farming, war, navigation and other fields as it is that Lanier could have. Also, the bawdy puns in the plays are, all things considered, less likely to come from a woman than from a man.
I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand. — Ben Jonson
http://www.bartleby.com/348/authors/291.html
Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson was known as a slow, meticulous writer. After Shakespeare’s death, Jonson wrote: “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand. [...] I loved the man and do honor his memory on this side of idolatry, as much as any: he was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.”
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/?date=2011/06/11
To the memory of my beloved,
The Author
MR. W I L L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E :
A N D
what he hath left us.
(Ben Jonson)
http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/folio1.htm#Beloved
Note: this topic is from . Thanks Renfield.
But how did she write them in Klingon?
We’ll know for sure when the boys finally reach the Oak Island vault.
How did this one come back to life
You remember the ghost scenes in Hamlet? Like that. ;^)
I have read scores of idiotic claims about who wrote Shakespeare. They are just fancy fabrications woven from stray strands of facts into a narrative that is ultimately unconvincing, if not preposterous. I put this one in the category of preposterous.
"To be or not to be? Wait, how do you say that in Klingon, or Klingonee as the Original Series Tribbles episode had it. :^)
The search for the imaginary treasure vault creeps in its petty pace from day to day.
Renfield hasn’t posted since 07/19/2014, btw.
I see what thee didst thither.
Bob and Doug McKenzie’s strange brew is some movie, Huh?!!!
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended.
That you have but slumbered here
while these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
no more yielding but a dream.
“You’ve not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsCVuO1yeJc
Lord Hunsdon, when he was in his early 50s, had an affair with Emilia who was in her 20s, and fathered a son by her. I wonder if her line has endured?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3065821/posts?page=33#33
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