A private $1.75 million bequest to the defunct Victorian State Opera has prompted a huge legal case, with allegations that Opera Australia has squandered $587million on lawyers' fees. The ripping read is here. Maybe somebody will turn it into an opera!

Bayreuth Opera's production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been streamed online. Is this the future of opera? UK Telegraph writer Rupert Christiansen approves of the innovation, but notes:

But streamings and screenings must not be used as an excuse for the BBC to renege on its responsibility to broadcast opera on terrestrial as well as digital channels - nor can they ever be a substitute for the crackling excitement of attending a real live performance.

I asked John Hudson, who suggests the plays of Shakespeare were really written by a Jewish woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier Bassano, the following question:
How does the character of Shylock in Merchant of Venice - surely the father of all negative Jewish stereotypes - fit into your theory?
Here's John Hudson's response:

Good question. Like much other Elizabethan literature, the Shakespearean plays were all written using allegory. Solving allegories was one of the top two past-times at Court, the other was the interpretation of dreams. Queen Elizabeth prided herself at solving allegories and people would try to outsmart her.

So in Merchant of Venice, the surface meanings come from established sources like Il Pecorone (1558) and an English ballad The Northern Lord. So the question to ask is who or what does Shylock represent allegorically? Why is his trial structured the way it is? What happens to him, and what exactly does he leave to Jessica at the end of the play. At the time the Caleb Shilocke was claiming to be the messiah, and the term shai loch means "a present to you”, and is a name of the messiah in the Talmud. The threefold structure of his trial can be compared to that of Jesus in the gospels and Shylock repeats “my deeds upon my head” (IV,1,203) repeating the classic words that the Gospels associated with the mob calling for the death of Jesus. Since it is unlikely he will convert to Christianity, at the end of the play he leaves all that he dies of possessed -- namely his corpse -- to his heirs who wait, hungrily, to the music of the Te Deum (5,i,63) under a ceiling decorated with patens or communion plates. In other words it is a comic Jewish parody of the Christian Eucharist!

The character of Adam (sometimes imagined as the first messiah) in As You Like It is similar, he also disappears halfway through the play, in circumstances where everyone is very hungry, in a situation where the language comes from the Eucharistic liturgy and the Homily on Faithful Receiving -- in other words he gets eaten. This gives meaning to the seven ages of man speech given by Jaques. This banquet is the climax of the first half of the play in our production at the end of July.

For more information on John Hudson's Dark Lady Players, click here.