RBIS November 16, 1999: Shakespear and Noahide Law

From a Noachide perspective it can be useful to trace the influence of Shakespeare's works since they were written in relation to Torah developments during his time. Shakespeare wrote for a theater genre that no longer exists, and it is likely that the collected works that we have, which are often described as unperformable, are a 'book version' compiled for publication by the author and his associates to meet a different demand.

It is, however, on this version that Shakespeare's legacy depends, and the controversy over morals and philosophy which has attended Shakespeare's writings since their publication has always been related to Jews, and to Torah in relation to non-Jews.

The South Bank theaters which performed Shakespeare's plays during the Elizabethan period were placed there along with gambling dens, cockfighting parlors and houses of ill-repute, because the City aldermen would not allow them within London itself. All three establishments had the lowest repute, not least because an evening would be spent going from one to the others.

The clientele was drawn mostly from the upper and the lower classes, the former arriving by water from outside the City itself, while the regular townsmen were more likely to abstain. The plays that they saw were filled with licentious content, both the comedies and the tragedies, and the political intrigues were depicted in a Royalist way. The philosophy had a 'throwaway' tone, distorting or obscuring key elements in the deepest insights to distance them from truth and sincerity.

Kings and princes were portrayed as far from ideas of running the country according to the rule of law, depressive and drunken for time of evening when the party began to flag, brooding on the sinfulness of mankind in general while despairing of ever doing anything about it: "out, out, brief candle!".

'Julius Caesar' had no sexual content, but its politics and leadership relations were those of the Greco-Roman homosexual ethos, with plenty of witty allusions to attract the hoots and whistles of the audience for the 'season's gay extravaganza'.

There was also the tendency to encourage the audience to see themselves as actors, and their affairs as stagey, as if it made no difference what they did. The ambiguous morals of the Sonnet series formed its main attraction.

All this evoked the hostility of the rising Puritan movement, based in the middle classes. When the Puritans came to power in the interval after Shakespeare's death they determined to abandon the lazy solution of exiling the theaters across London Bridge, and banned them entirely.
Thus during and after the Civil War the concepts of the previous theater life went out of existence. The Royalist restoration permitted performances again, but they were curtailed by comparison with their predecessors, more inclined to comedy than serious depiction, subject to censorship, and not working in continuity with the Shakespearean tradition.

There had only been Marrano Jews in England in Shakespeare's time. The depth of Shakespeare's hostility to them can be seen from the merest glance into the 'Merchant of Venice'. The play is a handbook manual of how to cheat out Jews by misusing the letter of legal provisions enacted formally to protect them, while calling them straitlaced barrack-room lawyers into the bargain.

As the momentum for Jewish admission to England gathered during the early seventeenth century, in alliance with the Protestant movement for its closeness to Noachide concepts, Jewish displeasure with the anti-Jewish trends in Shakespeare's writings became included in the general reaction.

Shakespeare's fame had been known during his lifetime on the Continent, where many considered him to be the the island's only claim to distinction. The high level of his insights was in any case known well enough, but the Cromwellian side also had many writers, such as Milton, whose criticisms of Shakespeare could never be ascribed to a low intellectual level.

While Shakespeare's plays were nearly forgotten in England itself, they began to attract interest in Germany towards the middle of the 18th century with the emergence of the Romantic movement. People in Germany took up Shakespear almost as a cult, for reasons similar to the free-fun/wordly-despair dichotomy in their original English following.
They were translated into German by the poet Schiller, in one of the greatest literary translations ever made, acquiring a wide currency among the cultivated middle classes, and a fashion grew for 'learning' the texts as if they were a kind of Torah, giving authoritative interpretations, finding interrelations within the text and even numerical relationships.

England began to be chided somewhat snobbishly for neglecting its 'greatest son', and this soon produced a reaction, led by the actor-manager David Garrick, who brought the plays into production on the London stage to enormous success, himself playing most of the leading roles. Garrick personally made the dramatist's home town of Stratford-on-Avon into a fashionable resort, where visitors could imbibe culture by merely watching the swans.

This was all taking place on Jewish territory in Germany, with the Reform movement a rising star, and German Jews, especially the romantic youth, soon began to see this form of 'learning' as more attractive than the Torah of their forefathers. It inspired a whole style of life among them in the years leading up to the French Revolution, and when German Jews began emigrating to America they found themselves on the linguistic territory of the original.

Seeing the plays in this way, German Jews became convinced that they were looking at the root concept of the society they were now trying to join, and their educators took Shakespeare into the system as essential knowledge for their rising American-born generation.
In America itself the plays had no great following in the North, which had other forms of expression and was not so literary in any case, but the South, with few cities or universities, seeking closer contacts with Britain, made the possession of 'a Shakespeare' the sign of culture in the home. Men with little formal education could acquire the appearance of polish by quoting from the Bard, and it fitted in well with the arrogant 'cotton is king' attitudes prevailing. This reinforced Southern anti-Semitism, also by giving the appearance of a 'Torah' originating from a non-Jewish source.

By contrast, the dramatist found one of his greatest adversaries in the Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoy, an exponent of pro-Jewish morality so great as to render Tolstoy almost a pre-emergent Ben Noach, who attacked Shakespeare bitterly as a 'phrase-maker', and 'fundamentally insincere'.

The surprising twist to this was that when observant Jews arrived in America in large numbers and set up their own education system, they took Shakespeare into their secular curriculum, not taking it in any serious way as the Reform had done, but still regarding it as a form of expression worth studying on literary merit, as well as as a guide to English-speaking society. It also seemed politic to them at that time, before the emergence of Noachide ways of relating to non-Jews, to award non-Jews this compliment of praising their intellectual contribution.

If this had been apparent to the pupils it might have been easier, but under school conditions most considered it a waste of time, repelled by the archaisms and the ridiculous forced postures of the dramatization. Very few gained any affection for it, and there was questioning of the sense behind learning anything written by the author of the 'Merchant of Venice'.

In recent years there has been controversy in Britain along much the same lines, as to whether the plays should any longer be included in the compulsory school curriculum. There were strong objections to the content itself, very similar to those voiced at the time it was written. The defenders were joined by Prince Charles, true to his royal position, who spoke out in person from many platforms, arguing that this was an essential portion of 'our island heritage' and must be maintained for the very survival of cultural standards. Charles' opinion was not favored, even though Establishment figures still make similar pronouncements.

Today, therefore, the Noachide movement is still encountering styles and prejudices which originate with one stage or another elements of Shakespeare's popularity. Since the plays themselves are so archaic and hard to understand, their actual currency is diminishing, and it would be too much to suggest that B'nei Noach have a struggle with them. Nevertheless it is still useful to discern the origin of many present-day attitudes in Shakespearean pronouncements, so that Torah should more readily find its ways for true currency.

Shalom from Jerusalem,
Rabbi Yirmeyahu Bindman