University
of Nebraska Press
Shofar
- Books Received
Shofar
- Advertising &
Mailing List Info
Shofar
- Book Reviews |
Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage, by Michelle Ephraim. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series. Burlington, VT and Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008. 180 pp. $99.95.
Michelle Ephraim combines the figure of Queen Elizabeth as bearer of the Protestant Bible with that of the deceptive woman responsible for much early modern male anxiety in a provocative study centered on reading the Jewish woman in Elizabethan drama. Her twofold thesis argues that the character of the Jewish woman offered Elizabeth a guise through which she could represent herself as the bearer of the truth of the Old Testament, as interpreted by its original Jewish readers. At the same time, however, that Jewish female figure is a deceptive one who continually deceives her readers, illustrating the impossibility for Christians of truly decoding the Hebrew Scriptures.
The book’s “central contention” is that Elizabethan playwrights “imagined the Jewish woman as a figure of the scripture itself” (p. 5). The playwrights use the biblical Jewish female figures of Deborah, Queen Esther, Bethsabe, and Jephtha’s daughter, among others, as well as fictional Jewish characters including Marlowe’s Abigail and Shakespeare’s Jessica to embody Elizabeth and the cultural desire to take possession of the scripture from its original Jewish interpreters and from the Catholic church. These women, on stage, become “key symbolic figures whose bodies disclose and deny the Christian truths readers imagined as embedded in the Old Testament” (p. 6).
Ephraim’s work does a remarkable job of deciphering the complex and vexed relationship between early modern English Protestant scholars and clerics and Rabbinical Jewish authorities who represented the original readers of the ancient Hebrew text. The plays Ephraim analyzes, each in its own way, use the figure of the Jewish woman to understand and grapple with Early Modern England’s desire to acquire the Hebrew truth of the Old Testament, while, at the same time, to denigrate the Jewish faith and people who possess that “truth.” The Jewish woman is ideal for such a representation because, unlike the Jewish male, she is not implicated in Christ’s murder, and her body does not bear the sign of her Jewishness, as does the circumcised male body. Thus, the Jewish woman’s body can conceal or reveal its Jewishness, serving as an ideal conduit between an old and new order.
The study moves from academic and private plays based on Old Testament narratives to plays written for the public stage, before concluding with a brief epilogue dedicated to the plays of women writers, all the while demonstrating the power of the Jewish female figure both to symbolically embody the truth of the Old Testament text and to withhold that truth from Christian readers. In the first chapter, Ephraim examines the figure of the female monarch in the 1561 interlude, The Godly Queene Hester. She compares the Biblical story of Esther with the interlude in order to emphasize the early modern version’s focus on the character of Hester as the “hidden Jew.” The chapter argues that “Hester with her concealed interior faith is the very embodiment of both religious counterfeit and spiritual authenticity” (p. 42). Hester promises to reveal an inner truth, yet her devotion to her Jewish nation makes her ultimately unreadable to a Christian audience. In the second chapter, Ephraim turns to the academic interlude The Historie of Jacob and Esau (1557-8) and imagines Elizabeth, not as a queen, but as a maternal figure whose womb becomes the site of truth and trickery. The figures of Rebecca (mother) and Deborra (midwife) are central in “constructing and disclosing prophetic interpretations of Jacob and Esau” (p. 52).
The third chapter turns the figure of the Christian reader of the Old Testament text into that of a male voyeur through Thomas Garter’s 1578 comedy, The Commody of the moste virtuous and godlye Susanna and George Peele’s 1599 biblical history The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (with the Tragedie of Absolon). In these plays, the Jewish female body (or Old Testament Text) is an object of desire for men to sexually and textually penetrate. In David and Bethsabe, the sexualized female figure turns into spiritual leader and guide; Peele plays out a fantasy here, Ephraim argues, in which the Hebrew Scripture is accessed and readily understood by the Christian reader.
This fantasy is further complicated when the study turns from images of husbands and wives to Jewish fathers and their sacrificed Jewish daughters in the book’s final three chapters. In George Buchanan’s Jephthes Sive Votum Tragoedia (1554), Ephraim argues, lies the “metaphoric promise of Marlowe and Shakespeare’s Abigail and Jessica” (p. 90). In Jephthes, the sacrificial daughter becomes the Christ-like figure who moves from darkness into light, from old to new order, but at the same time she blocks the door to her father’s house, obscuring the Christian reader’s access. For Ephraim, The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice are plays where Jewish fathers contend with Christian suitors in a symbolic shift from old to new order, from Jewish interpretation to Protestant. Both fathers fantasize about keeping their daughters locked up, while using them to entice Christian suitors. However, both daughters ultimately leave their father’s houses, Abigail to the nunnery (before she is killed), and Jessica to the arms of her beloved. While both characters appear to be ideal symbols of transformation from Jew to Christian, Ephraim characterizes Abigail’s conversion as “bogus,” as the Catholic nunnery was often considered more of a brothel than a religious house, and Jessica’s final silence promotes her possible alienation from her new Christian family, and a longing for her ties with her Jewish mother. In this way, Ephraim insists that the Jewish women in these plays, like Jephthah’s daughter of Judges 11, represent a scripture, which “functioned as a contested space that resisted fixed meanings” (p. 151).
Ephraim plays with traditional early modern images and symbols in new ways in this groundbreaking study of the figure of the Jewish woman on the Elizabethan Stage. The Jewish female, as the symbol for the Hebrew Scriptural text, is a body that can be penetrated, but that ultimately hides its true inner core, the contents of its hidden womb or interior self. The early modern stage is a place where disguise is crucial in revealing the difference between outward appearance and inner truth. The Jewish female figures in these plays use disguise to gain access to a Christian world and promise textual clarity, yet the disguise itself underscores the impossibility of such clarity. The study concludes by briefly considering the plays of Elizabeth Cary and Aemilia Lanyer and how they use their gender to claim authority as “interpreters of the scripture, challenging male interpretations of these figures and, ultimately, forging an exclusive bond between female writer, subject, and reader”(p. 153). It is only regrettable that a work so interested in female agency and authority would relegate the works of women writers to a brief, five-page epilogue. Ultimately, Ephraim is to be commended for opening the door to some fascinating connections and observations about the complex role of the Jewish woman on the early modern stage.
Ronit Berger
Independent Scholar
|
