“The most refined qualities of humankind are exhibited in the British way of life and British imperialism is required to its continuance… the history of the British Empire is the unfolding of a great moral idea – the idea of freedom. Only in adhering to that idea would it be possible to preserve the unity of the Empire.” [i]

There are deep cultural reasons for the whipsaw of vicious geopolitics to which the top diplomatic-military echelons of Britain exposed the Jewish people from 1920-48. These reasons surfaced in spectacular fashion in the first blood libel in Norwich and Lincoln in 1142; these claims that Jews used the blood of gentile children to make matzoth resulted in the round-up and burning alive of hundreds of Jews in England [ii] . England also was the first European nation to expel its Jewish population (1290) and to ban Jews, except for a few wealthy who could be squeezed for ‘loans’ from living in the damp, gray unwholesome island. Even the brilliant and eccentric epic poetry of William Blake, illustrated with engravings by Blake himself reflects this deep antipathy and shows its roots in covetous ideological envy. His culminating work, titled Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion concerns the re-integration by Albion (a synonym for England) of his alienated female emanation or bride, Jerusalem with all her hills, towns, famous sites as Albion “liberates” his imagination which to Blake, and other Romantic artist – philosophers was the “Redeemer” or “Poetic Genius” the “Savior” and “Eternal Divine Humanity”; Blake in several works depicts this “Redeemer,” naked, muscles rippling, strangling a weeping, white-bearded old man “jealously” clutching his “stone tablets” of law[iii]. Ironically, an influential scholarly analysis of Blake in the latter half of the 20^th century is titled, Blake, Prophet against Empire [iv] when the poet, as this one of many examples shows is a prophet of Empire, specifically the British Imperial idea of freedom to possess, in every sense, the inheritance and light of the Jewish people, body and soul in the ultimate auto da fe. There is deep cultural logic in the fact that British PM Tony Blair was the “envoy” or point-man for “the Quartet” of global powers (and their medium for internationalizing and ruling the world, the “UN”) or that Mr. Blair converted to Roman Catholicism and became head of a “Faith Foundation” to promote a world religion, re-writing and usurping the heritage of Abraham[v]. Indeed, a powerful affiliation with Yale University will provide educational (read, programming and indoctrination) support for this effort at imperial fusion and absorption of the unique and non-imperial heritage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Catholic means “universal” and the Roman Catholic Church considers itself “the New Israel” that, by its own dogma, ‘inherited’ the covenant of Israel. This is identity theft in which the West began and in which it is ending. Nothing is more appropriate than that a German Pope should re-consecrate a British Bishop who denies the holocaust totally. As Shakespeare made the arch-villain usurping brother say in Lear, before he returns the title to the brother he had vilified, slandered, degraded and sought to murder, “the wheel will come full circle…” [vi] Nor is it unusual, indeed, it the logic of culture that the primary proponent of the British imperial vision and its dominating “freedom” were two Catholics one of whom based his masterwork on Augustine’s De Civitate Dei[vii]

But the fundamental dispute is about freedom and the amazing fact is that the greatest of the many great dramas of William Shakespeare demonstrates the two kinds of freedom at odds in the world today, the imbalance of forces on the side of imperial manipulation and covetous malice and the way that the exiled, despised, and condemned to destruction can rise from poverty, mud, grief and loss to participate in miracles that reestablish the true inheritance that can repair a deeply injured world. This play is the great tragedy, King Lear or, as it first was fully titled, the True Chronicle History of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters (1606). Yet the most sublime of its heroes is in the sub-title and in his name and story hangs a tale and great lessons for individual lives and that of our entire civilization and what is to follow its massive, globally-federated rigor mortis of impoverishment and oppression.

The hero’s name is Edgar and an unlikelier hero could hardly be imagined from the good-natured, overly trusting youth we meet in the play’s second scene. From the first he is challenged in every way; that Etgar is Hebrew for “challenge” was clearly a choice by Shakespeare who changed the Latinate names – Leonatus and Plexirtus – he found in his source for the subplot to Edgar and Edmund from Edmon, a synonym of Edom who is Esau, Scripture states, inveterate enemy of Jacob and Israel[viii]. No, we do not suggest that Shakespeare was Jewish; this is not the concern of this essay and is very doubtful, though there is suggestive evidence that his paternal grandfather might have been a false convert [ix] and he clearly had knowledge of Hebrew sources beyond the Bible. What is clear in this and many texts, among them the Tempest, As You Like It, Winter’s Tale and more is that the basic story pattern of exile and return, of remembrance and of “measure for measure” (midah k’neged midah), a basic moral and metaphysical tenet of Judaism were central to Shakespeare’s thought and drama.

In the slander, condemnation to death, dispossession, impoverishment, pursuit, disguise as a degraded beggar, his feigned madness and moments of madness, his brilliantly allusive commentary on events, his rugged commitment to saving his own and his blinded father’s life, his seizing of the moments of redemption to regain his name and station, one sees the story of Israel invaded, expelled, living impoverished and despised and rising to share with “the most kind gods” as the play calls providence, in the miraculous work of redemption, miracle not magic, nothing is without cost; “nothing is forgotten before the throne of G-d” nor in a drama by Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s basis for Lear and the great play’s basis in Hebrew Scripture (Tanakh) begin in the source text he chose as the model of the main plot. The first sentence is starling in its declaration: “Leir the son of Baldud was admitted ruler over the Britons in the year of the world 3105 at what time Joash reigned in Judah.” Scholars ignore this tellingly straightforward, unself-conscious affirmation of Hebrew dating of human history. The West, however turbulent (and this is its nature) still was moored on its Hebrew basics when Raphael Holinshed compiled his Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland when Shakespeare was a boy and upon which he drew for many of his stories [x] Joash indeed ruled in Judah c. 3060 – 3100 according to Hebrew dating and his early life, near death by murder, subsequent long reign and eventual assassination – for giving away the consecrated sacred objects and gold of the kings of Judah since David to Hazael, the marauding king of Aram in exchange for “peace.” [xi]

But it is the flawed goodness and dilemma of Edgar that focuses this essay for its ability to reveal Shakespeare’s ideal of freedom and how it relates to the models for freedom presented by Judaism, the books of Moshe especially opposed by the British ideal of imperial federation held together by social welfare or socialism mediated by parliaments led by an enlightened Anglophone or anglophile elite professing an ecumenical churchly “love” that “would lead inexorably to a world commonwealth.” [xii]

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