A History of Jewish Stereotypes Within Shakespeare's World

A Short Conclusion of Questions

            Did Shakespeare know Emilia was a Jew?  Was she really the ‘Dark Lady’ in his Sonnets?  We may never find out.  Roger Prior wrote that identifying who the Sonnets were about, “Adds to our knowledge of Shakespeare and, like any good theory, justifies itself by its usefulness.”[19]  It gives us the idea of having a little more insight into a man we know mainly for his writing and not his lifestyle.  If he knew his lover was a Jew, did it bother him to use the Jewish stereotypes we find so frequently in his plays?  Did it bother his lover?  Did she even see herself as a Jew?  Revealing some answers just leads to more questions. 
            Maybe someone will find a journal of Emilia Bassano’s or even Shakespeare’s.  It might reveal him to be a callous racist, who loved the idea of dominating a dark complexioned woman.  Then what would we do with that knowledge?  Maybe nothing.  The likelihood of finding a journal written by Shakespeare is pretty close to a negative percentage.  The idea that he was a racist, who loved to dominate Moorish women, seems as unlikely.  What seems completely plausible: William Shakespeare was a smart man who had an intuitive finger on the pulse of his kingdom and he used that to write incredible Sonnets and plays that have been read and pondered for 400 years after his death. 
            We may never know why Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice and numerous lines that played off the stereotypes of Jews in many of his plays.  All we can do is research the historical events that led up to his days of writing and speculate on what his plays and Sonnets meant to him then within the historical contexts we know.  We know Jews were persecuted and killed with little justification.  We know there existed a woman named Emilia Bassano.  We know Shakespeare might have met her while performing.  We know he liked to manipulate words and play off their many meanings.  The more we read, the more we will eventually know.

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