Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

Michelle Ephraim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317071013
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first book-length examination of Jewish women in Renaissance drama, this study explores fictional representations of the female Jew in academic, private and public stage performances during Queen Elizabeth I's reign; it links lesser-known dramatic adaptations of the biblical Rebecca, Deborah, and Esther with the Jewish daughters made famous by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare on the popular stage. Drawing upon original research on early modern sermons and biblical commentaries, Michelle Ephraim here shows the cultural significance of biblical plays that have received scant critical attention and offers a new context with which to understand Shakespeare's and Marlowe's fascination with the Jewish daughter. Protestant playwrights often figured Elizabeth through Jewish women from the Hebrew scripture in order to legitimate her religious authenticity. Ephraim argues that through the figure of the Jewess, playwrights not only stake a claim to the Old Testament but call attention to the process of reading and interpreting the Jewish bible; their typological interpretations challenge and appropriate Catholic and Jewish exegeses. The plays convey the Reformists' desire for propriety over the Hebrew scripture as a "prisca veritas," the pure word of God as opposed to that of corrupt Church authority. Yet these literary representations of the Jewess, which draw from multiple and conflicting exegetical traditions, also demonstrate the elusive quality of the Hebrew text. This book establishes the relationship between Elizabeth and dramatic representations of the Jewish woman: to "play" the Jewess is to engage in an interpretive "play" that both celebrates and interrogates the religious ideology of Elizabeth's emerging Protestant nation. Ephraim approaches the relationship between scripture and drama from a historicist perspective, complicating our understanding of the specific intersections between the Jewess in Elizabethan drama, biblical commentaries, political discourse, and popular culture. This study expands the growing field of Jewish studies in the Renaissance and contributes also to critical work on Elizabeth herself, whose influence on literary texts many scholars have established.

Chapter 1

The Emerging Female Monarch in The Godly Queene Hester

In a grandiose pageant that took place over the course of two days in August 1392, the citizens of London celebrated King Richard II’s return from a self-imposed exile in York: after failing to extort money from city officials and wealthy merchants, Richard finally annulled the fines he had issued against them.1 Although the pageant stages a public reconciliation with the king, his subjects no doubt continued to suffer the court’s financial demands—including the responsibility of funding the pageant itself. The details of the event as narrated in the most reliable extant account, the Carmelite Friar Richard Maydiston’s Latin verse Concordia: Facta inter Regem Riccardum II et Civitatem Londonie, reveal the performers’ ambivalence towards their monarch. Outside of Westminster, amidst an elaborate pageant tableau constructed to look like a forest, a performer in the guise of an angel presented a tablet to King Richard and Queen Anne engraved with symbolic allusions to the scripture. For the king’s benefit, there was a reference to Christ on the Cross, encouraging the merciful treatment of his subjects; for the queen, a hopeful and praiseworthy comparison to the biblical Queen Esther who successfully challenges her husband’s decree for the mass execution of the kingdom’s Jews:

The queen will be able to speak in behalf of her grateful people: What a man does not dare, the woman alone can. As Esther stood fearfully before the judgement seat of Ahasuerus, she made void the proclamations which he himself first ordained. There is no doubt that the Almighty gave you as the companion of this kingdom for this: may you be like Esther for your people.2

The moment to which Anne’s subjects refer in the Book of Esther is Esther’s revelation of her Jewish identity to her husband: Esther, by way of her wifely virtue and obedience, disproves the corrupt advisor Haman’s charge of the Jews’ rampant treachery. Richard’s subjects thus offer a provocative contradiction: while they intimate their betrayal of the king, they also claim to be the righteous victims who, under the queen’s leadership, are divinely authorized to overrule their reigning monarch.

In Elizabethan civic pageantry, Esther and Judith were popular images of subjects emancipated from monarchical tyranny.3 Glynne Wickham notes that biblical characters in sixteenth-century pageants signified “the conception of Divine Providence taking an active part in the nation’s affairs; ready to look kindly on any new beginning or promise of future good, but equally prompt to intervene directly or indirectly where privilege was abused or responsibility shirked.”4 As we will see, allusions to Esther during Elizabeth’s reign also imagine such a providential intervention in the English monarchy, elevating the Jewish queen from “companion” to an exemplary monarch who delivers her subjects from Catholic oppression.

Just as the citizens of London reference Esther to encourage Queen Anne’s intervention should her husband mistreat his subjects, sixteenth-century writers also cite the Jewish wife of King Ahasuerus to promote the influence of two of their female monarchs in court: Catherine of Aragon, possibly the intended subject of the anonymous sixteenth-century interlude The Godly Queene Hester, and Elizabeth, during whose reign Hester made its debut in print and, potentially, on stage. Although this dramatic adaptation of the Book of Esther was likely written between 1525-9, it was first published in 1561, and as such we may examine it in the context of contemporary associations between Esther and Elizabeth. David Bevington, Ruth Blackburn and other critics have argued that The Godly Queene Hester was originally conceived as an allegorical attempt to discourage Henry VIII from divorcing Catherine, idealized in Hester as a spiritual figurehead and agent of political unity under the Catholic Church.5 C.C. Stopes makes the tempting argument that Hester was written by William Hunnis, the author of Jacob and Esau—the subject of the following chapter and a play, I argue, fueled by Protestant and pro-Elizabethan polemic—but her theory remains speculative.6

Undoubtedly, the persona of the “godly queene Hester” emerged prominently in literary and political discourse during Elizabeth’s reign. Elizabethan exegetes embraced the theme of legitimate spiritual rebellion within the Book of Esther, and Esther’s salvation of the Jews powerfully evokes Elizabeth’s own protection of her Protestant subjects. Moreover, the motif of a “godly” queen of uncertain parentage would certainly have resonated with Elizabeth, who had been vilified as a bastard by her Catholic opponents. Bevington suggests that the interlude may have originally been intended “to encourage and console [Queen Catherine] with a scriptural vindication of her [Catholic] cause.”7 A similar desire to legitimate Elizabeth through scriptural example very likely inspired the publication of the play in 1561. The possible re-contextualization of the interlude as a performance that honors the Protestant queen as part of a continuum of divinely authorized female rulers can also be considered a proprietary move over the scripture itself, and thus another theatrical moment in which the queen’s body, by way of the Jewish woman’s, enacts the Protestants’ claim to interpretive mastery.

As we will see, the aggressive female monarch of The Godly Queene Hester departs significantly from her prototype in the Book of Esther. The scriptural Esther’s role as submissive wife and reluctant savior perhaps served as a powerful blueprint with which to imagine the parameters of Elizabeth’s authority, yet the interlude’s “Hester” affirms instead Elizabeth’s role as a formidable head of church and state whose loyalty to her subjects would take precedence over any union with a foreign husband. By celebrating Hester’s skill at coercion and deceit, however, the interlude reminds its audience of the paradoxical conception of Jews in early modern England as both traitorous and the chosen people of the Old Testament. Hester’s emphasis on the queen’s exclusive bonds with her fellow Jews takes further the issue of Jewish nationalism in the Book of Esther; ultimately, the interlude suggests a type of racial and religious selfhood at odds with the spiritual community of the Protestant church. The concept of Jewish blood kinship may have struck an Elizabethan audience as a comfortable analogue to Elizabeth’s own blood claims to her frequently contested throne, yet as Janet Adelman argues, the notion of Jewish biblical ancestry and bloodlines was problematic, troubling English conceptions of their land-based “sacred nation” that was free of foreign blood.8 Hester’s effectively concealed Judaic loyalties play out cultural fears about England’s vulnerability to foreign threat: political treachery (a long-standing accusation against the Jews, famously directed at Elizabeth’s doctor, Rodrigo Lopez) as well as blood miscegenation. Hester’s benign appearance as a “fayre” virgin raises the possibility that Jewish blood can covertly permeate other unsuspecting bodies; in a symbolic sense, her ability to share the king’s bed as a disguised Jew intimately imperils the body of the Christian subject.9

My central contention in this chapter, however, is that Esther’s Jewish identity, which she wields as a commanding political weapon, also plays out contemporary concerns about scriptural interpretation. The interlude’s revised portrait of the biblical Esther as a proactive and exemplary monarch foregrounds the implicit tension between the “Hebraic” (the Old Testament scripture that can be appropriated to Christian sensibilities in a general sense) and the “Judaic” (pertaining only to the Jews and their history) in the Book of Esther. My interest in the convergence of Elizabeth and the character Hester in 1561 lies in the interlude’s characterization of Hester as a veracious political advisor and fledgling monarch who garners respect through her “playne” speech: in these roles, I argue, Hester also becomes a figure of the Old Testament scripture that promises and, potentially, denies scriptural veritas to the Christian reader. In Hester, an Elizabethan audience could imagine their queen as righteous monarch as well as a body that can “unclaspe” meaning. In one sense, Hester suggests a deceptive exterior that must be penetrated to discern a hidden Christian truth, but the interlude also inverts this traditional hermeneutic mode. In The Godly Queene Hester, Hester’s hidden Jewishness offers the essence of scriptural clarity and yet ultimately delivers a Judaic and nationalistic meaning that excludes her Christian audience.

The biblical Esther

In order to give emphasis to Hester’s revisions of the biblical story, I must first consider the Book of Esther and notable Jewish responses to the text, most significantly the ancient Greek translation, known as the LXX or the Septuagint. Richard II’s performers highlight Esther’s bravado, but early rabbinical writings recognize the biblical Esther more as a paragon of female obedience. As Leila Leah Bronner observes, the scripture lauds her “dual role [as] savior of her people and tiptoeing wife.”10 The Book of Esther begins with the expulsion of the rebellious Queen Vashti by her husband, the Persian King Ahasuerus, after she has refused his orders to appear before the country’s princes who are assembled for a banquet dinner. Following the suggestions of his advisors, the king issues a decree that will banish his wife from the kingdom—a document that also warns women throughout the kingdom of the consequences of disobeying their husbands:

For he sent letters into all the provinces of the King, into everie province according to the writing thereof, & to everie people after their language, that everie man shulde beare rule in his owne house, and that he shulde publish it in the language of that same people. (1:21)

Ahasuerus’s severe response to Vashti’s disobedience reveals the king’s anxiety about civic insurrection more broadly; his concerns, easily fomented by his advisors, foreshadow his hasty reaction to Haman’s story of Jewish insubordination. Ironically, Esther is initially welcomed as a preventive strike against such unruly wives. Under the auspices of her cousin Mordecai (who has advised her to hide her Jewish identity) Esther wins Ahasuerus’s hand during a countrywide search for a second wife, a victory cinched by her demure qualities as well as her beauty.

Provoked by Mordecai’s refusal to prostrate himself at his feet, Haman fabricates a charge of widespread Jewish treason and easily convinces the gullible Ahasuerus of the need for a defensive strike. Esther does not disclose her Jewish identity until Mordecai informs her of this planned genocide. As we will see, The Godly Queene Hester imagines Esther as the Jews’ protector who proactively comes to their defense; in the scripture, however, it is Mordecai who insures the Jews’ salvation after he convinces Esther to petition the king by appealing to Esther’s fears for her own safety: “Thinke not with thy self that thou shalt escape in the King’s house, more then all the Jewes. For if thou holdest thy peace at this time, comfort and deliverance shal appeare to the Jewes out of another place, but thou and thy fathers house shal perish” (4:13-4). If initially hesitant, Esther ultimately chooses to approach the king without formal invitation despite the potentially fatal consequences of doing so.11 Instead of political savvy, it is Esther’s lack of rebellious qualities—her obedience to both her husband and cousin—that allows her to expose herself as a Jew and advocate for her people: “If it please the King,” she modestly appeals to Ahasuerus, “and if I have founde favour in his sight, and the thing be acceptable before the King, and I please him, let it be written, that the letters of the devise of Haman … may be called againe. … For how can I suffer and se the evil, that shal come unto my people? Or how can I suffer and se the destruction of my kinred?” (8:5-6). Esther fades to the background of the story as Mordecai rises to heroic status: Ahasuerus ultimately rewards Mordecai’s discovery of two rebels in the court by appointing him to the highest position in his court.

Esther deserves commendation, the Midrashic writers emphasize, for obeying Mordecai’s instructions to live with the king as a hidden Jew and, ultimately, for demonstrating her loyalty to her fellow Jews: “[S]he put a ban of silence on herself like her ancestress Rachel who also put a ban of silence on herself. All the greatest of her descendents forced themselves to be silent.”12 Like Rachel, who allowed her beloved Jacob to unknowingly marry her disguised older sister Leah, Esther does not disclose her identity. Yet the comparison also intimates Leah’s deception of her husband—a ruse in which Rachel presumably participates. Esther’s situation, no doubt, recalls this incident of sexual trickery and mistaken identity: Leah shares a bed with her husband by pretending to be her sister, taking advantage of Jacob’s ignorance of their bodies to successfully consummate the marriage.

The analogy between Rachel and Esther also gets at what will be Esther’s more subversive and paradoxical role in Christian exegesis as writers allude to or incorporate rabbinical writings that portray Esther’s “godliness” and transform her into a divinely-appointed monarch, a pious woman whose marriage to a non-Jew is justified by Mordecai’s understanding of her role as a savior of the Jewish people. The supplements to the Book of Esther in the Greek Septuagint (composed between the third and second centuries BC), which clearly influenced the writing of The Godly Queene Hester, aggrandize Esther’s unique religious authority as a Jew. Like other early Jewish commentators, the authors of the Greek text were troubled by the omission of God in the Hebrew scripture and actively amended the secular narrative, creating the “godly” Esther in six additional passages that would inspire the author of The Godly Queene Hester as well, who also incorporates spelling variants particular to the Septuagint.13 Commentaries explain that Esther’s actions should be understood as necessary events within a narrative of Jewish salvation rather than as violence of her own initiative.14 Although Rachel does sincerely desire marriage to Jacob, the allusion is consistent with a larger exegetical emphasis on Esther and Mordecai’s manipulation of Ahasuerus to protect the Jews, to ensure Jewish control over the land, and to reveal Judaism as the religion of the chosen. In this respect, Jewish exegetes prioritize Esther and Mordecai’s relationship over her marital bond. Indeed, the Talmud proposes that Esther is Mordecai’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Text
• Introduction: Elizabeth and the Jewish Woman on Stage
• 1 The Emerging Female Monarch in The Godly Queene Hester
• 2 Maternal Authority in The Historie of Jacob and Esau
• 3 The Reader as Voyeur: Thomas Garter’s The Virtuous and Godly Susanna and George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe
• 4 Reading the Sacrificed Daughter in George Buchanan’s Jephthes Sive Votum Tragoedia
• 5 “I’ll sacrifice her on a pile of wood”: Abigail’s Roles in The Jew of Malta
• 6 Her “flesh and blood”?: Jessica’s Mother in The Merchant of Venice
• Epilogue: Jewish Women, Women Writers, and Elizabeth’s Legacy
• Works Cited
• Index