The Jews' Tragedy

"The Jews' Tragedy" is an early Caroline era stage play by William Heminges. [Carol A. Morley, ed., "The Plays and Poems of William Heminge", Madison, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006.] Written in 1626 but apparently never acted in its own era, the drama was the most intensive and detailed attempt to portray Jews onstage in English Renaissance theatre.

Earlier plays — "The Three Ladies of London", "The Jew of Malta", "The Merchant of Venice" and others — had depicted Jews with varying degrees of antipathy or sympathy, though they featured a single Jewish character, or a few at most. No dramatist before Heminges attempted to present an full cast of Jewish characters or to depict Jewish society. The prevailing anti-Semitism in England at the time makes it unsurprising that the work was not staged — and somewhat surprising that it was ever written.

Though never produced before an audience, Heminges's drama was published in 1662, under the title "The Jewes Tragedy, or their fatal and final overthrow by Vespasian and Titus his son, agreeable to the authentick and famous History of Josephus".

Like Heminges's other surviving play "The Fatal Contract", "The Jews' Tragedy" was heavily influenced by the works of Shakespeare. "The Jews' Tragedy" is the earliest play to quote Hamlet's famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be." [Irving T. Richards, "The Meaning of Hamlet's Soliloquy," "Papers of the Modern Language Association", Vol. 48 No. 3 (September 1933), pp. 741-66.]

(During the Restoration, John Crowne wrote a two-part drama on the same subject, titled "The Destruction of Jerusalem", acted in 1677. Crowne's play satirized the Puritans as Pharisees; it was a popular success.)

"The Jews' Tragedy" was given a reading, a "performance with scripts," at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in 1998, directed by Graham Watts.

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