My interview with John Hudson, Kirsta Peterson and Alexandra Cohen-Spiegler on MESS-tv

AN ALLEGORICAL PRODUCTION OF AS YOU LIKE IT : BY THE DARK LADY PLAYERS (AUGUST 2008)

The latest alternative Shakespeare research claims that the plays were not written by the man from Stratford, nor by any of the other 65 candidates---but by someone else. Overlooked for 400 years, because of her gender and skin color, her name is Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645). She was a major experimental poet, the first woman to publish a book of original poetry, and also was mistress to the man in charge of the English theater. She was a member of the Bassano family, dark skinned Venetian Jews, of Moorish ancestry, who had moved to England to be the Court Recorder troupe. She has long been known as the so-called 'dark lady' of the Sonnets—which it now appears she wrote in the third person. Not only does this explain the plays' unusual interest in Venice and Moors and recorder music—it also explains their Hebrew puns and the author's familiarity with Maimonides, the Talmud, and the original Hebrew text of Genesis.

Amelia's authorship would also explain the recent startling discovery that many of the plays contain hidden Jewish allegories—several of them about the Roman-Jewish war. The allegory in A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed in 2007 by the experimental New York Shakespeare company, the Dark Lady Players and was reviewed in NJJN in the February 28, 2008 article titled 'Kosher Bard'. In summer 2008, the Dark Lady Players put on another production, at the Midtown International Theatre Festival, showing that an allegory about the Roman-Jewish war also underlies As You Like It.

The classically trained cast of the Dark Lady Players, comprising 10 women actors, faced the unique challenge of playing not only the 24 normal characters, but a dozen allegorical characters as well, in an adaptation that was squeezed into 90 minutes. It was a credit to them and to Shakespeare director Stephen Wisker, that the production managed to demonstrate the underlying allegory on stage through clowning, costuming, physical movement and other framing devices which made the hidden literary structures in the play concrete and visible, so they could be untangled from the surface plot. It was, as John Chatterton, the Festival founder, and publisher of the Off Off Broadway Review (OOBR) puts it "an enjoyable romp through some of the more impenetrable thickets of Shakespeare scholarship."

The work being done by the Dark Lady Players changes the meaning of the plays and how they are to be understood and performed. For instance in As You Like It, the character Touchstone has a pocket watch and is a fool, indicating that he represents the informal Court fool Sir John Harrington, the inventor of the flush toilet, which ends up becoming an important underlying theme of the play. But in addition, Touchstone is a brilliant poet whose work is not understood, who has been expelled from Court, who hates the clown William (Shakespeare), and whose name in Greek is basanos. All this suggests he is also an allegory for Amelia Bassano —who wrote herself into some of the plays. So the actress playing Touchstone, Kirsta Peterson, needed all her training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) for the unusual challenge of playing the surface character and two allegorical characters all at once. She also had to depict Bassano on stage as the author, for the first time ever, and she rose to the challenge. "It is exciting to take the text and turn it on its head" said Peterson, "after two years working with the Dark Lady Players, I absolutely believe that Amelia wrote these plays."

As You Like It: A Biblical allegory

Superficially As You Like It is a pastoral, a genre of literature designed to deceive, to say one thing on the surface, and mean something quite different underneath. So allegorically the play is not about romantic love at all, but a Biblical story which starts in paradise, then covers the Fall from paradise, the wicked fallen world, and finishes with Noah's Flood.

In the Hebrew Bible, paradise was the Garden of Eden, while the equivalent in Classical mythology was the Garden of the Hesperides. The identity as Eden is clear from the orchard and the character called Adam. Alexandra Cohen-Spiegler, who brings to the role her training at RADA and the LeCoq theater school in Paris—plays him comically as an old, wheezing man, wearing a fig leaf, shown here talking to Orlando/ Hercules. The Classical identity of the Garden as the Hesperides is indicated by the existence of the character Hisperia who was one of the guardians of the Hesperides. So the play begins in a converged Hebrew and Classical paradise.

Then, almost immediately, it turns into a Nativity scene. We know Orlando represents not just Hercules in his lion's skin, but also the Hebrew messiah, because we are told he is growing up in a stable in between an ox and a horse—as in typical Nativity scenes. In order to communicate his identity to the audience, in this production all the cast form a stylized tableau to greet him. Two of the youngest cast members, Lindsay Tanner and Sarah Jadin, who are recent RADA and LAMDA graduates, make their first appearance as an animal and the baby in the manger. The use of such innovative techniques throughout the play led Philip Langner, director of the Theatre Guild, to call this production "the best piece of creative theatre I have seen in many years."

Then, after a brilliantly executed "wrestling match" introduces the idea of a fall from grace, Rosalind and Celia are thrown out, in a version of the Fall from Paradise. We see them crawling on-stage, at Touchstone's feet, encountering the thorns and thistles on the paths outside paradise in the working day world. They have been preceded by Rosalind's father Duke Senior, who was the first person to be expelled from Paradise, and therefore represents Satan. This is why he appears in a freezing wind, which is one of the traditional depictions of Satan being carried out of Paradise.

The fallen world was associated with original sin and hunting, the latter being a typical Elizabethan metaphor for battle. We are also told that the forest, originally a temple, has been surrounded by a circle, and turned into a desert where people are hung on trees, are starving, and the greasy citizens and native burghers of the city are being massacred—like deer—by tyrants and usurpers. The hidden story here is that the outlaw satanic Duke is like a "Roman Conqueror" as he is described. These events fit only one historic situation-- the Roman-Jewish war. The Roman conqueror Vespasian Caesar, surrounded Jerusalem and the temple with a circular wall, starved and slaughtered the Jewish citizens, and illegally cut down all the trees for crosses, turning the country into a desert. So we start to comprehend that the hunting is an allegory for the Roman-Jewish war, and the deer are the Jews, who wear tallits and are slaughtered onstage.

If Duke Senior's two allegorical identities are Satan and Vespasian, then Rosalind and Celia are allegories for his children Titus and Domitian Caesar. This is why Julius Caesar's maxim "I came, I saw, I conquered" is used to describe how Celia eventually conquers 'Oliver'—the olive tree being a traditional Jewish symbol. So in this production Duke Senior wears a pair of horns like Satan but also wears a purple toga like those worn by Rosalind and Celia (played respectively by Kate Murray and Emily Moment) who give Roman salutes as they ascend to heaven like Jesus, and as they die in the flood.

After various comic satires about hanging on trees and counterfeit resurrection, Rosalind and Celia oddly ascend to heaven. Touchstone begins a dynamic monologue exemplifying the Partition between Earth and Heaven which comes down on the Last Day. The moment he finishes, the Partition—namely the curtain--opens and Rosalind and Celia descend from heaven, in a parody of the Last Day.

But the dances and marriages keep being interrupted, because we are told Noah’s Flood is coming. The two Jaques or ‘Jakes’ characters (representing two toilets and both played by Jen Browne)—come on stage to interrupt the festivities by reciting an ironic and distracting announcement of ‘fair tidings’ or good news. Meanwhile their inventor, Touchstone, steals the girlfriend away from William (Shakespeare)---shown as a cardboard cutout of the First Folio engraving-- and goes off to the Ark with her for a "loving voyage". The Jakes hide in a cave—like the Jews do in the New Testament on the Last Day—while Touchstone and Audrey sail off, as the flood or "flush" wipes away the corrupted world. In the final scene in this production Touchstone recites the little known alternative Epilogue from the Ark, above a sea of floating heads, to the loud background noise of a flushing Jakes.

As dramaturge to the Dark Lady Players it took nine months of research to create this adaptation. It was then passed on to Shakespeare director Stephen Wisker and the cast to take on stage. Sitting watching their performance at the Midtown International Theater Festival this summer, I think Amelia Bassano would have been proud of how they were at last able to reveal the underlying play-within-the-play, a Jewish comedy, that has remained concealed for the last 400 years.

JOHN HUDSON has an MA in Shakespeare from the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-Upon-Avon

His two academic articles on the allegory in AYLI are available on request

from www.darkladyplayers.com