The Dark Lady Players are a New York based Shakespeare company which aims to perform what they believe to be the religious allegories in the Shakespearean plays. Elizabethan literature routinely used allegories to communicate hidden meanings. Thus contemporary literary critics advised that instead of feasting on the verse, readers should look beneath the surface to "digest the allegory”, as Sir John Harington put it in his introduction to his translation of Orlando Furioso. This was why Governments had State Decipherers sitting in audiences attempting to detect any hidden meanings in the plays being staged, as recorded by Ben Jonson.

Foundation

Scholars began detecting the religious allegories in the plays during the 1930s. Quotations from the Bible are used in 3,000 places as shown by Professor Naseeb Shaheen, and 14 different translations are used. In a few places the playwright has translated the Book of Genesis using the original Hebrew. In addition, there are many other church and religious references. For example, in 1999 in his study of Julius Caesar, Professor Steve Sohmer argues that the playwright "set out to interrogate the truth of the Gospels". Similarly in 1988 Linda Hoff posited that Hamlet is entirely a religious allegory. For instance, according to the study by Peter Milward

Peter Milward

Peter Milward is a Jesuit priest and literary scholar. He is emeritus professor of English Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo and a leading figure in scholarship on English Renaissance literature. He has been chair of the Renaissance Institute at Sophia University since its inception in 1974...

, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Richard III, Henry VIII all include detailed Apocalypse allegories,.

Allegory in Performance

In 2007 the Dark Lady Players performed the world's first allegorical production of any Shakespearean play, ''A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Abingdon Theater in New York. The allegory was based on work by Professor Patricia Parker in her article 'Murals and Morals; A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1998). She believes that Pyramus and Thisbe were an allegory for Jesus and the Church, the Wall is the Partition that comes down on the day of Apocalypse, Peter Quince is Saint Peter, and Puck is the Devil. In addition, the production used work by John Hudson, in his 2008 thesis at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, to show the allegorical identity of all the other characters. The result was a consistent religious allegory-but one that was Jewish in nature rather than Christian-because it ends with a Jewish Apocalypse featuring a dew blessing, after the comic re-union in Quince's play-within-the-play ended in the deaths of both protagonists.

In 2008 the Dark Lady Players performed two different versions of an allegorical As You Like It, which draws on the allegory first hypothesized by Richard Knowles ('Myth and Type in AYLI' ELH vol 33. no 1, 1966, 1-22 ) } A play which features two characters called Jaques or Jakes (which he says is after the toilet), as well as a contemporary allegory to Sir John Harington (the inventor of the flush toilet), turns out to contain another comic Jewish allegory. The workshop production was directed by Greeman as part of the Shakespeare Symposium at ManhattanTheaterSource. The subsequent production in summer 2008 at the Midtown International Theater Festival was directed by the English Shakespeare director Stephen Wisker. A Manhattan Spotlight Special was made for Manhattan cable television on the production.http://blip.tv/file/1254195/ The work was presented at Eastern Connecticut State University on 11 November 2009, and their lecture Who Wrote Shakespeare? is available at the University website. On December 15th 2009 at Manhattan Theater Source they produced a festival of short plays written about Amelia Lanier by nine New York City Playwrights.

Authorship Question

The Dark Lady Players production of A Midsummer Night's Dream led the UK based 'Shakespearean Authorship Trust- an organization established to evaluate the authorship question - to entertain the possibility that the plays were written or co-authored by England's only Jewish poet, the so-called 'Dark Lady' Emilia Lanier. In summer 2008 Michael Posner, in a 15 page review of the theory in the Canadian arts journal The Queen's Quarterly, concluded that the case for Amelia Bassano Lanier was " as plausible as Shakespeare’s and more plausible than many others". Posner's subsequent articles appeared in The Globe and Mail on January 15/16, 2010, and an article titled 'Unmasking Shakespeare' in Reform Judaism magazine in Summer 2010. A major article 'Amelia Bassano Lanier; A New Paradigm' by John Hudson appeared in the November 2009 issue of The Oxfordian.

Current activities

The Dark Lady Players are led by Resident Director, Jenny Greeman, and Dramaturge/Scholar-in-residence John Hudson, Guest directors are invited according to the demands of particular plays. In September 2009 the Dark Lady Players produced a piece titled Shakespeare's Three Virgin Marys, which examined the allegorical Mary figures identified in the academic literature by researchers such as Chris Hassel, Linda Hoff and Steve Sohmer. Extracts from the production were featured in a tv news feature on the Dark Lady Players that was broadcast on The Jewish Channe l on September 11, 2009 and available on You Tube, in the source indicated in the references. The Dark Lady Players produced Hamlet's Apocalypse, an allegorical version of Hamlet in November 2010 at Manhattan Theatre Source in Greenwich Village, and are currently working on a site specific Titus Andronicus for 2011.

Reading List

Mark L. Caldwell, 'Allegory: The Renaissance Mode', ELH, vol. 44, No. 4. (Winter, 1977), pp. 580-600.

Rhodes Dunlap, 'The Allegorical Interpretation of Renaissance Literature', PMLA vol. 82, no.1 (1967) 39-43.

Linda Kay Hoff, Hamlet's Choice; Hamlet A Reformation Allegory, Lewiston; E.Mellon Press (1988).

John Hudson, A Midsummer Night's Dream; An Experiment in Allegorical Staging, University of Birmingham,The Shakespeare Institute (2008).
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15262132/A-Midsummer-Nights-Dream-An-Experiment-in-Allegorical-Staging

John Hudson "Amelia Bassano Lanier; A New Paradigm for the Shakespearean Authorship" The Oxfordian, Summer/Fall, (2009)
draft available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/15488374/New-Shakespeare-Theory
John Hudson and Jenny Greeman 'The Shakespeare Show', broadcast on New York Talk Radio July 7, 2009
http://tribecaradio.net/wpradioblog/podcasts/stealthisradio/

Richard Knowles, 'Myth and Type in As You Like It', ELH vol 33,no 1 (1966) 1-22.

Ted Merwin,'The Dark Lady as a Bright Literary Light', The Jewish Week, 23 March, (2007) 56-7.

Peter Milward, Shakespeare's Apocalypse, London; St Austin Press, (1999).

Patricia Parker, 'Murals and Morals; A Midsummer Night's Dream', Aporemata;Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte (1998) 190-218.

Michael Posner 'Rethinking Shakespeare' The Queen's Quarterly, vol. 115, no. 2 (2008) 1-15

Michael Posner 'Was Shakespeare a Woman?' The Globe and Mail 15/16 January 2010

Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays, University of Delaware Press (1999).

Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare's Mystery Play;The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599, Manchester University Press (1999).

Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, Columbia University Press (1958).

The Jewish Channel/Rebecca H. Friedman The Dark Lady Players (September, 2009) http://www.scribd.com/doc/19815504/TV-News-story-on-New-Approach-to-Shakespeare

Julia Wallace,'That's Miss Shakespeare To You', Village Voice March 28-April 3, (2007) 42.