Shakespeare a Jewish Converso? Sort Of!

I’ve been blogging a lot about the “conversos”, those Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism in 15th century Spain. They were dispersed to the four corners of the earth. Many of them led a double life – outwardly Christian, inwardly Jewish. In the space between those two realities, however, many interesting things happened including, I think, the intellectual sparkplug for the Renaissance. Which brings us to Shakespeare. Michelangelo died the year Shakespeare was born, 1564. Despite the above title, I’m not really arguing that Shakespeare was a converso. He certainly wasn’t a Jewish “converso”. But in the peculiar world of England of his time, he may have shared the “converso” mentality. How so?

At the time, Protestantism was vying with Catholicism for rule of the kingdom. England had gone from a highly conservative Catholicism to Protestantism to a renewed and militant Catholicism to Protestantism, once again, under Elizabeth. In his New York Times bestseller “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” Professor Stephen Greenblatt writes; “each shift was accompanied by waves of conspiracy and persecution, rack and thumbscrew, axe and fire”. In the 1550’s, just prior to Shakespeare’s birth, they were burning Protestants in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford. But by the time Shakespeare was born into a Catholic family, the Protestants were in charge and, for their part, they were literally tearing Catholic leaders apart – disemboweling them in public. To save his family, it seems Shakespeare’s father switched to Protestantism. For his part, it may very well be that Shakespeare was neither Protestant nor Catholic – the classic converso mentality, born out of a desire to survive. When he first arrived in London, Shakespeare crossed the city’s famous London Bridge. At the time, it was decorated with dozens of Catholic heads on spikes. It seems that one of them was Shakespeare’s distant relative, on his mother’s side, Edward Arden.

Once he entered London, Shakespeare entered a world officially devoid of Jews. In 1290, 200 years before the expulsion of the Jews of Spain, England became the first nation to eject – by law – its entire Jewish population. Nonetheless, at the time of Shakespeare’s arrival, London had a small population of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese conversos. Some of these were certainly “maranos” i.e., conversos who continued to secretly maintain the Jewish rituals. It seems natural that the converso-like Catholic from Stratford would have gravitated to the Jewish conversos of the city. Irish poet Niall McDevitt believes that Emilia Lanier (1569-1645) is the mysterious “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Lanier is the first English woman to publish a book of poems under her own name! Although smoking gun evidence doesn’t exist – you could end up on a pike on London Bridge if you provided too much evidence – Lanier was most certainly of Jewish descent, perhaps a marano. Shakespeare expert John Hudson has argued that the incredible amount of musical references in Shakespeare’s plays can be traced back to Lanier, whose family included many court musicians. According to Hudson, Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italy can also be traced to Lanier since her family name “Bassano” was of Jewish Italian converso ancestry.

Whatever the influence of the “dark lady” on Shakespeare, what is beyond dispute is that on January 21, 1594, the queen’s personal physician, Portuguese born Rodrigo Lopez, was arrested on the charge of high treason. Lopez was convicted of conspiring to poison the queen. Though he professed to be a good Protestant, Lopez was born a Jew. Strangely, he was accused of conspiring with the Spanish crown – which persecuted the Jews – against his royal patron. Even the queen believed that the charges against her physician were without any basis. Nonetheless, under torture, Lopez confessed to everything. The prosecution called Lopez a “Jewish doctor, worse than Judas himself!” Historian William Camden records that as he mounted the scaffold, Lopez declared that he “loved the queen and Jesus Christ”. The witnesses to the hanging laughed at him. Greenblatt believes that Lopez’s execution, and the crowd’s laughter, may be the inspiration for one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, the “Merchant of Venice”. Although the play plays on anti-Semitic stereotypes that would have spoken to the audience that laughed at Lopez’s hanging, it’s in this very play that Shakespeare reveals his converso-like worldview. He does so by humanizing the leading character of the story, the Jewish money lender Shylock; “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?” But Shakespeare goes even further – he argues for the Jew’s right to defend himself; “and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?” (3.1.49-56).

I write this, as I’m fasting, on the 9th day of the Jewish month “Av”. It is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. The first Temple was destroyed on this day. The second Temple was destroyed on this day. And the Jews of Spain were forcibly converted and expelled on this day. And yet, as the Shakespeare/Lanier experience demonstrates marginalized people such as a Catholic Englishman and a marano Jewish woman can turn suffering into a victory of art and light over barbarism and darkness.