THREE
OXFORD
Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, by Joseph Brown,
after George Perfect Harding, 1848
Sigmund Freud with Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Ernest Jones,
Hanns Sachs, and Sándor Ferenczi, 1922
Freud
In December 1929, in the course of psychoanalysing an American doctor named Smiley Blanton, Sigmund Freud asked Blanton whether he thought ‘that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?’ The question rattled Blanton, who, not quite believing what he was hearing, answered Freud’s question with one of his own: ‘Do you mean the man born at Stratford-upon-Avon – did he write the plays attributed to him?’ When Freud said ‘Yes,’ Blanton, who idolized Freud but also knew his Shakespeare, did his best to explain that he ‘had specialized in English and drama for twelve years’ before he became a doctor, ‘had been on the stage for a year or so, and had memorized a half dozen of Shakespeare’s dramas’. Given all this, he ‘could see no reason to doubt that the Stratford man had written the plays’. This was not the answer Freud wanted to hear. ‘Here’s a book I would like you to read,’ he told Blanton; ‘this man believes someone else wrote the plays.’
Poor Smiley Blanton. Four months into analysis – with Sigmund Freud, no less – he is urged to explore his therapist’s obsessions. In a diary of his analysis with Freud, Blanton recordsthat he ‘was very much upset’: ‘I thought to myself that if Freud believes Bacon or Ben Jonson or anyone else wrote Shakespeare’s plays, I would not have any confidence in his judgment and could not go on with my analysis.’ When the session ended, Blanton took with him the book that Freud had handed over – ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford – and joined his wife Margaret in the Viennese cafe where they customarily met after he saw Freud. She later recalled that he seemed ‘depressed and spoke of his qualms about continuing with Freud’.
Unable to bring himself to read the book, Blanton asked his wife if she would do so for him. She agreed to, and after finishing it reassured him that it was ‘obviously a book to command respectful attention’. Margaret Blanton was enjoying her time in Vienna, writing regularly for the Saturday Review of Literature and the New York Herald Tribune, and had little interest in breaking off and sailing home. Moreover, she was in analysis herself with a young disciple and close associate of Freud, Ruth Brunswick. Brunswick, an Oxfordian, had recently given Freud an inscribed copy of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified as a birthday present. We don’t know whether this was the very copy that Freud had shared with Smiley Blanton. If it was, we end up with a scenario in which Margaret Blanton was handed the inscribed copy of the book that her analyst had given to Freud who in turn gave it to her husband – shades of the spotted handkerchief that passes through so many hands in Othello. Perhaps Freud knew just what he was doing.
Smiley Blanton finally read the book himself, and while ‘he remained unconvinced by its argument’, was pleased to see that it wasn’t ‘just another Baconian exercise in secret ciphers and codes’. He was getting a lot out of his sessions and was relieved that he didn’t have to consider his therapist a crackpot. Within a few months Blanton was having dreams identifying Freud with Shakespeare. Their initial exchange over the authorship of the plays stayed with him, long enough for him to consider including it in a lecture he planned some years later. In the end, it became something that bonded the Blantons and Freud: ‘Thereafter,’ Margaret Blanton writes, ‘we sent the professor new books on this subject whenever they were published in the United States. Freud always wrote to thank us for the books.’
The Blantons met Freud for the last time in London in 1938, not long after Freud arrived there after fleeing Vienna and Nazi persecution. Smiley’s sessions ended sooner than expected when Freud had to undergo an operation on his jaw. Margaret spoke briefly with Freud then as well, and he apologised to her for bringing Smiley ‘all the way across the Atlantic and then having to cut short the work with him’. Freud asked Margaret about their plans. She told him that before returning to New York they ‘would spend a few days in Stratford-upon-Avon’ so that her husband might ‘poke around a bit and add to his Shakespeare lore’. Freud responded to this news with ‘sudden and uncharacteristic sharpness’: ‘Does Smiley really still believe those plays were written by that fellow at Stratford?’ Reading ‘Shakespeare’ Identified had not had the desired effect. While it was clear to Margaret that Freud ‘really knew and loved the plays as much as we could possibly have’, he did not believe in ‘that fellow at Stratford’. She was sorely tempted, she writes, to tell Freud about her husband’s ‘trial by fire’ eight years earlier, when Freud had first tried to make an Oxfordian of him, but ‘suddenly realized that if the professor had a sense of humor’ she had ‘never seen it’, and decided that it was best not to bring it up now: ‘I think he would not have been amused.’ She held her tongue.
Freud died in September 1939, promoting Oxford’s cause to the very end. His admirers, when they haven’t quietly suppressed what they take to be an embarrassment, have struggled to explain why in his late years he became so ardent an Oxfordian. Ernest Jones, his authorised biographer, believed that something ‘in Freud’s mentality led him to take a special interest in people not being what they seemed to be’. There’s no denying that Freud, who embraced Lamarckism and claimed that Moses was an Egyptian, was drawn to unconventional views. What he said about Moses applies equally well to Shakespeare: ‘To deprive a people of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken.’
But surely there’s more at stake here than thinking counter-intuitively, a habit of mind that accounted for Freud’s intellectual breakthroughs as well as the occasional dead end. Jones concedes as much, though the furthest he ventures is that Freud’s rejection of Shakespeare was ‘some derivative of the Family Romance’, a ‘wish that certain parts of reality could be changed’ – that we might not be who we think we are. Peter Gay, another of Freud’s major biographers, dismisses Jones’s explanation in favour of an alternative psychoanalytic one, that at the bottom of it all was mother love: Freud’s attempts at riddle solving, which included his interest in Shakespeare’s identity, were ‘necessary exercises through which he could reiterate his claim to paternal and, even more, maternal love’. For Gay, the ‘move from the indistinct figure of the man from Stratford to the presumed solidity of the Earl of Oxford was part of a lifelong quest’ – one he associates with the ‘erotic element in Freud’s greed for knowledge’. This seems rather desperate to me and says more about the seductiveness of psychobiographical explanations than it does about why one of the great modern minds turned against Shakespeare. The answer might well lie elsewhere: Freud’s devotion to Oxford’s cause was no psychic riddle but a response to a threat to his Oedipal theory, the cornerstone of psychoanalysis – which in turn rested in no small way upon a biographical reading of Shakespeare’s life and work. From this perspective, Freud’s rejection of Shakespeare of Stratford seems both inevitable and necessary – though, like the claims of many others, it reveals more about the sceptic than it does about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.
Freud was born in 1856, the year Delia Bacon’s article in Putnam’s kindled a debate over Shakespeare’s authorship that quickly swept through Britain, America and the Continent. He was born into a world in which Shakespeare was celebrated as the greatest of modern writers, yet also one in which many questioned whether a glover’s son could have created such towering works of art. This unresolved tension would play out in Freud’s lifelong ambivalence about Shakespeare’s identity. By the age of eight, Freud was reading and soon quoting from Shakespeare’s plays and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. He was well read in English literature (for a decade he ‘read nothing but English books’) and ranked Hamlet and Macbeth among the ‘ten most magnificent works of world literature’.
It wasn’t easy remaining neutral about whe
ther Francis Bacon had written those plays. One of Freud’s mentors, the distinguished brain anatomist Theodor Meynert, was convinced that Bacon was the plays’ true author and apparently tried to win Freud over. Freud was not persuaded (in later years he would tell Lytton Strachey that he ‘always laughed at the Bacon hypothesis’) but felt compelled to justify his reluctance to share Meynert’s enthusiasm.
Much of what we know about what Freud was thinking at this time comes from his letters to Wilhelm Fleiss, the closest friend he would ever have, as well as the letters Freud exchanged with his fiancée Martha Bernays over the course of the three and a half years that they were separated (her mother had moved her from Vienna to Hamburg in an attempt to keep them apart). His letters to Fleiss have been published. Those to and from Martha Bernays are in the Freud Archives in the Library of Congress, but are sealed for many years to come. A handful of people, including Ernest Jones, have been permitted to read them and a few of the letters have been excerpted or published.
In one of these excerpts (from a letter written to Martha Bernays in June 1883), Freud mentions Meynert’s conviction that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Freud disagrees, but rather than acknowledging Shakespeare’s authorship argues instead that the plays were the product of several hands: ‘there is more need to share Shakespeare’s achievement among several rivals’. No single intelligence could have encompassed such a literary and philosophical range; if Bacon had written the plays along with his great philosophical works, he ‘would have been the most powerful brain the world has ever produced’. Unfortunately, we have no context for these remarks, no clue as to how Martha Bernays responded, and, because their letters remain off-limits, don’t know to what extent they reveal a young and ambitious Freud struggling with the limits of his own powerful brain and prodigious creative gifts. His attraction to group authorship may say more about his own creative anxieties at this time – as well as the cultural bias that made it hard for the urbane and highly educated Freud to believe that a man from rural Stratford, lacking much formal education, could have accomplished so much alone.
The Baconian claims of Meynert and others long gnawed at Freud. In an effort to resolve the authorship question once and for all, shortly before the First World War he invited his disciple Ernest Jones to make ‘a thorough study of the methods of interpretation employed by the Baconians, contrasting them with psychoanalytic methods. Then the matter would be disproved’ and his mind ‘would be at rest’. Jones, who steadfastly believed that Shakespeare alone wrote the plays, and who would have put at risk his own work on Hamlet and Oedipus, refused. It would be helpful to know exactly when and why Freud eventually abandoned his belief in the collective authorship of the plays, and whether this development coincided with his growing interest in individual psychology, how unconscious forces shaped creativity, and the kinship between artists and analysts.
Freud’s letters to Fleiss convey the turbulence in his life following his father’s death in 1896, a decisive year in the development of psychoanalysis, for it was at just this time that Freud abandoned his seduction theory in favour of an Oedipal one in accounting for his patients’ hysteria and claims of sexual abuse. Freud’s reflections during these months about Shakespeare and Hamlet are usually mentioned as a by-product of this theoretical shift, but the question of cause and effect turns out to be more complicated than that.
At this time Freud was strongly influenced by Georg Brandes’s just published William Shakespeare (a book that meant so much to Freud that he brought it with him, decades later, when he had to flee Austria). The connections that Brandes drew between Shakespeare’s life and his art offer the fullest flowering of the approach popularised by the German and English Romantics: ‘In giving expression to Hamlet’s spiritual life’, Brandes writes, Shakespeare
was enabled quite naturally to pour forth all that during the recent years had filled his heart and seethed in his brain. He could let this creation drink his inmost heart’s blood; he could transfer to it the throbbing of his own pulses … It is true that Hamlet’s outward fortunes were different enough from his. He had not lost his father by assassination; his mother had not degraded herself. But all these details were only outward signs and symbols. He had lived through all of Hamlet’s experience – all.
Brandes’s very chapter headings – ‘The Psychology of Hamlet’ and ‘The Personal Element in Hamlet’ – spoke directly to Freud’s interests. And Freud was won over by Brandes’s account of Shakespeare’s psychological state as he began writing Hamlet: ‘Many and various emotions crowded upon Shakespeare’s mind in the year 1601,’ Brandes writes, most of all John Shakespeare’s death: ‘All the years of his youth, spent at his father’s side, revived in Shakespeare’s mind, memories flocked in upon him, and the fundamental relation between son and father preoccupied his thoughts, and he fell to brooding over filial love and filial reverence.’ For Brandes, the death of Shakespeare’s father led directly to the birth of Hamlet: ‘He lost his father, his earliest friend and protector, whose honor and repute were so close to his heart. In the same year, Hamlet began to form in Shakespeare’s imagination.’
When in 1900 Freud described in The Interpretation of Dreams how he had arrived at his insights into the Oedipal complex and the workings of the unconscious, he acknowledged a debt:
it can of course only be the poet’s own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. I observe in a book on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) a statement that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father (in 1601), that is, under the immediate impact of his bereavement and, as we may well assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived. It is known, too, that Shakespeare’s own son who died at an early age bore the name of ‘Hamnet,’ which is identical with ‘Hamlet.’
While there’s no evidence to support Brandes’s assertion that Shakespeare was deeply affected by his father’s death, the same cannot be said of Freud’s reaction to a similar loss. In early November 1896, two weeks after burying his father, Freud confessed to Fleiss that by ‘one of these dark pathways behind the official consciousness the old man’s death has affected me deeply … By the time he died, his life had long been over, but in [my] inner self the whole past has been reawakened by this event. I now feel quite uprooted.’
In the ensuing months Freud wrestled with conflicted feelings about his dead father, even as he undertook a sustained and unprecedented self-analysis. His ruthlessly honest letters to Fleiss from this time – letters that he never dreamed would see the light of day, and the replies to which he destroyed – record his creative leaps and stumbles as he moved toward a new theory of the unconscious. By the summer of 1897, Freud was experiencing what he might have described as Hamlet-like symptoms:
I have never yet imagined anything like my present spell of intellectual paralysis. Every line I write is torture … I have been through some kind of neurotic experience, with odd states of mind not intelligible to consciousness – cloudy thoughts and vague doubts, with barely here and there a ray of light.
By August 1897, after visiting his father’s grave, Freud was feeling more paralysed than ever. He was haunted by a dream about his father in which a sign appeared which read: ‘You are requested to close the eyes.’ Freud interpreted these words as an act of self-reproach, having to do with his ‘duty to the dead’. Freud was in mourning, wrestling with intellectual paralysis, trying to determine whether he had badly misunderstood himself, his father and how the mind worked.
The following month Freud abandoned the seduction theory. He confided his ‘great secret’ to Fleiss: ‘I no longer believe in my neurotica,’ for to accept it, Freud realised, meant implicating his own father in sexual abuse: ‘In all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.’ Having rejected this as the cause of his own ‘little hysteria’ – and that of his patients as well – Freud found himself once again at sea: ‘I have no idea of where I stand because I have not succe
eded in gaining a theoretical understanding of repression and its interplay of forces.’ He recognised his affinities with Hamlet at this moment, quoting to Fleiss the Prince’s words about being ‘in readiness’. October would at last bring clarity, a new theory enabled and confirmed by the literary examples of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Freud writes excitedly to Fleiss that
[a] single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood … If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex. [The] Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he senses its existence within himself. Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality.
Contested Will Page 19