Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage (review)

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 (1557–58) 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...