Sophocles’ play provided the theory with a name, but it was Hamlet that grounded it in the workings of the author’s mind:
Fleetingly, the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the bottom of Hamlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare’s conscious intention, but believe, rather, that a real event stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero.
This is an astonishing claim. Freud suggests that Shakespeare didn’t borrow or invent what Hamlet experiences, he lived it. A ‘real event’, the death of Shakespeare’s father shortly before he wrote the play, triggered the ambivalent, Oedipal experiences in Shakespeare that were akin to those that Freud himself had recently experienced following the death of his own father.
Self-analysis had enabled Freud, by extension, to analyse Shakespeare and identify in his play – much as he identified in the residue of his own dreams – traces of the deep Oedipal ambivalence Shakespeare experienced in the aftermath of his own father’s death. His psychic kinship with both Hamlet and Shakespeare gave Freud confidence that he had successfully diagnosed the hysteria each had experienced. For Ernest Jones, it was ‘but fitting that Freud should have solved the riddle of this Sphinx, as he has that of the Theban one’.
Freud was convinced that his Oedipal theory provided the long-sought explanation for Hamlet’s delay: ‘How better than through the torment he suffers from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother, and – “use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?”’ Other pieces of the Hamlet puzzle quickly fell into place:
His conscience is his unconscious sense of guilt. And is not his sexual alienation in his conversation with Ophelia typically hysterical? … And does he not in the end, in the same marvelous way as my hysterical patients, bring down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival?
Freud may have gone on to more famous case studies – Little Hans, Anna O., the Rat Man, Dora – but Shakespeare was in many ways his most consequential.
In our post-Freudian age all this may seem unremarkable, but Freud himself was keenly aware how bizarre this would sound to contemporaries, who were divided between two prevalent explanations for Hamlet’s delay. Either the prince was paralysed by excessive thought or he was ‘pathologically irresolute’. Freud believed that until he came along ‘people have remained completely in the dark as to the hero’s character’ – necessarily so, for none had ever undergone the kind of self-analysis he had just pioneered.
Freud insisted on an essential distinction between Oedipus and Hamlet: while the Oedipal complex may be timeless, it manifested itself differently in the modern world. So that while ‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex’, the ‘changed treatment of the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind’. In Sophocles’ play, ‘the child’s wishful fantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and – just as in the case of a neurosis – we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences.’ Oedipus Rex belongs to an older stage of civilisation. Hamlet, in contrast, is the product of a modern mind, and can therefore tell us much more about ourselves. But because of the ‘secular advance of repression’ in our psychic lives, only psychoanalysis allows us to get to the underlying causes of neurotic behaviour. Freud might have conceded that Shakespeare, and the early modern culture in which he lived and worked, stood somewhere between Sophocles’ world and our own. He couldn’t, though, if Shakespeare were to prove a star witness for his new theory. Freud’s Hamlet had to be a truly modern man – and Shakespeare our contemporary.
The insights that led Freud to reject the seduction theory and solve the problem of Hamlet are not easily untangled. Freud couldn’t readily abandon his view of Hamlet and what its author experienced following the death of his father without calling into question that which confirmed the rightness of his Oedipal theory. That was a lot to ask of a reading that stands or falls on whether Hamlet had been written after the death of John Shakespeare.
*
Years passed. Followers and patients flocked to Freud and psychoanalysis thrived. Hamlet became a canonical psychoanalytic text as well as a favourite subject of the Wednesday Psychological Society meetings, where Freud explored with his disciples how Shakespeare had written the play as ‘a reaction to the death of his father’. Ernest Jones, the only native English speaker in Freud’s inner circle, had committed himself to elaborating on this theory, first in a brief article in 1910 and eventually in his popular book, not published until 1949, Hamlet and Oedipus. He was at work on the subject in the early 1920s when he received an unwelcome letter. ‘By an “accident,”’ Freud wrote to him, ‘I was able to find out the notice of a new document about Hamlet, which must concern you as much as me.’ Freud had read Georg Brandes’s latest book, Miniaturen (1919), in which Brandes repudiated his earlier and for Freud crucial claim that Shakespeare had written Hamlet in 1601 in the wake of his father’s death. It now appeared that their dating of the play, on which Freud’s theory precariously rested, was wrong. Brandes had changed his mind following the discovery of marginal notes, scribbled by the Elizabethan writer Gabriel Harvey, which showed that Hamlet was written by early 1599 or at the very latest early 1601. Freud felt forced to concede that ‘Hamlet was enacted before the death of Spenser, in any case before the death of Essex, that is to say much earlier than was believed hitherto. Now, remember Shakespeare’s father died in the same year 1601! Will you think of defending our theory?’
Jones wrote back coolly, promising to ‘investigate and report’ on this development, which also threatened to undermine his own work. Before replying, he looked into what other literary scholars had made of this new evidence, especially Sidney Lee, the leading British Shakespearean of the day. Lee, for his own reasons, was also unwilling to abandon a late date for Hamlet, so came up with the ingenious if strained suggestion that it only seemed like Harvey was speaking about the deceased Spenser and Essex as if they were alive, because he was using ‘the present tense in the historic fashion’ – which allowed him to conclude that ‘No light is therefore thrown by Harvey on the precise date of the composition or of the first performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.’ This, perhaps, explains Jones’s confidence, and terminology, in reassuring Freud that ‘I do not find that the passages you quote absolutely prove the date, for they may be written in the historic present’.
Freud agreed that the evidence of Harvey’s marginalia remained ‘far too incomplete’ to ‘settle the matter’. But unlike Jones, Freud was unwilling to dig in his heels, knowing ‘that there is much slippery ground in many of our applications from psychoanalysis to biography and literature’. He had already been forced to retract some speculative biographical conclusions about Leonardo da Vinci, and recognised that he might have to do the same with Shakespeare: ‘It is the danger inherent in our method of concluding from faint traces, exploiting trifling signs.’
Freud’s conviction that the author of Hamlet had written the play in the aftermath of an Oedipal struggle remained unshaken; but the revised dating of the play now called Shakespeare of Stratford’s authorship into question. Perhaps some conspiracy had taken place after all, and ‘Shakespeare’ was a pseudonym. That might explain why he and his disciples had had so little success in psychoanalytic explorations of the rest of the canon: besides Hamlet, only Macbeth, Lear and The Merchant of Venice had yielded much, and these analyses were nowhere near as groundbreaking.
Freud’s doubts were exacerbated by his longstanding difficulties reconciling the facts of Shakespeare’s humble origins with the worldliness one expects of such a genius. As he admitted in Civilization and Its Discontents, his sens
e of the ‘cultural level’ of so accomplished an artist as Shakespeare was hard to reconcile with that of a man who grew up with ‘a tall dungheap in front of his father’s house in Stratford’. When Freud stood face to face with the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in England on a visit there in 1908 his doubts about the playwright’s Warwickshire roots only grew stronger, for he saw Latin rather than English features staring back at him. He recorded that ‘Shakespeare looks completely exceptional, completely un-English,’ and that ‘face is race’. Freud began to suspect that Shakespeare was of French descent, his name a corruption of ‘Jacques Pierre’. As Jones ruefully noted after Freud became an Oxfordian, the Earl of Oxford’s family name, de Vere, was a Norman name, which reinforced Freud’s belief that the writer of the plays was not, originally, of English extraction. It seems that Freud was never quite able to shake those doubts first raised by Meynert – though he could never reconcile himself to the possibility that Bacon wrote the plays. It was a mystery, still waiting to be solved. Not long after his exchange with Jones in 1921 over the dating of Hamlet, Freud confessed to his friend and disciple Max Eitingon that he had always been thrown by the authorship controversy, as he was by the occult. As badly as Freud, now aged sixty-five, wanted to resolve the authorship question, he just wasn’t sure. His words to Eitingon – half declaration, half question – capture this indecision: ‘I believe in a conspiracy then, whether concerning the authors or Bacon himself?’
Looney
John Thomas Looney
Many in the closing years of the nineteenth century admired Shakespeare (as Ben Jonson first put it) ‘this side idolatry’; a handful crossed over to the other side. Among them were the congregants of a small branch of the Religion of Humanity in Newcastle upon Tyne, who sang hymns in praise not of God but of Shakespeare and other ‘religious teachers of mankind’. Theirprayer-book included an ‘Act of Commemoration’ venerating those who ‘have raised Humanity from her original weakness to her actual power’ – with Homer, Dante and Shakespeare mentioned in the same breath as Moses and St Paul.
Shakespeare’s familiar visage could be seen among the Church of Humanity’s ‘customary … busts and symbols’ adorning their house of worship. In their revised calendar, they celebrated a month called Shakespeare, which fell, every autumn, between the months of Gutenberg and Descartes. Some years earlier, members of the Religion of Humanity who were based in London had even travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon ‘as pilgrims, to render homage to Shakespeare’. The entry on Shakespeare that appeared in the movement’s New Calendar of Great Men offers some insight into why they worshipped Shakespeare, who both anticipated and embodied their church’s precepts. Their Shakespeare was ‘born into a society still rich with the outward and inward beauty created by centuries of Catholic Feudalism’. Yet while he admired the conservative ethos of this ‘decaying’ medieval world, their Shakespeare was nonetheless ‘in small sympathy with any official Christianity which he knew, or with the intriguing politicians around the Tudor throne’. Though ‘no lover of war’, Shakespeare was ‘certainly a fervent lover of his country’s inward peace’. His plays, moreover, did ‘not pretend to be religious and no religion can claim them but the Religion of Humanity’, for ‘he took the Human Soul to be his province’.
Cut through the pious language and theirs was a post-Catholic, nationalistic, reactionary Shakespeare, deeply invested in degree, nostalgic for a world in which everyone knew his and her place. Shakespeare was a key transitional figure in their history of human progress, rooted in a traditional past yet capable of glimpsing the future; while he ‘could not reach the conception of social and moral science, he stretched out eager hands towards it’. What was true of Shakespeare held equally true of his greatest character. Like Shakespeare, who ‘lived sufficiently near to the moral order bequeathed by the Middle Ages to spontaneously submit himself to much of it’, Hamlet recognised the importance of submission. For what else could Hamlet have meant when reflecting on ‘What is a man?’ other than an acknowledgement that ‘selfish desires are unceasingly striving to prevail’ and ‘need control – not only individual control, they need social control; above all, religious control’.
The churchgoers in Newcastle and the pilgrims to Stratford were English Positivists, adherents of a newly formed Religion of Humanity modelled on the teachings of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Though Comte’s work goes largely unread today, in late nineteenth-century Europe, especially in Victorian England, his influence was extraordinary. The hallmark of Comte’s work was a commitment to progress and order. Having grown up in the wake of the French Revolution, Comte retained a lifelong aversion to anarchy. Early on, he had lost his faith in the Catholic Church as well as in a metaphysical God. Reconciling the principles of religion, science and morality for Comte came at a steep but acceptable price – one that John Stuart Mill (who corresponded with him) summed up in his essay On Liberty as ‘a despotism of society over the individual’. Comte’s late work took a religious turn – progress now took a back seat to order – as he conceived of a Religion of Humanity that would replace the worship of God. If Humanity was to be worshipped, a formal religion with sacraments, ceremony, secular saints, festivals, a religious calendar and a priesthood had to be invented, or rather cobbled together out of bits and pieces of traditional Christian practices (no wonder that Comte’s Positivist Church was mocked by T. H. Huxley as ‘Catholicism minus Christianity’).
Most of Comte’s English disciples were Oxford-trained intellectuals interested in promoting the philosophical and political principles systemised in his early writings; they steered clear of the spiritual drift of the late Comte. A smaller and less visible English faction focused its energies on establishing a church that would promote Comte’s Religion of Humanity. Despite their shared loyalty to Comte’s Positivist principles, by 1878 the differences between the two groups had become unbridgeable and they went their separate ways. It is the less influential and short-lived sect, led by Richard Congreve, that concerns us here.
Within a few short years, Congreve transformed what had been a ‘Positivist School’ into a ‘Church of Humanity’ and designated himself as the movement’s highest priest. Under his leadership, Sunday meetings became Sunday worship, and a liturgy, festivals and sacraments, based on Comte’s principles and calendar, were put in place. In an effort to win more converts, Congreve supported satellite churches in a half-dozen or so English cities. Conversions were few, especially among members of the working class, and expansion painfully slow. A small outpost was established in Newcastle in 1882, thanks to the efforts of Malcolm Quin, an energetic and ambitious convert who built up the congregation over the next two decades.
In 1899, Congreve suddenly died – and Quin soon after tried to wrest control of the national movement, based in London. He wasn’t going to leave his Newcastle flock leaderless, however, and announced in October 1901 that he had hand-picked as his successor the twenty-nine-year-old J. T. Looney, a congregant who had been ‘destined to the priesthood by Dr. Congreve’ himself. Indeed, Congreve’s final Sacramental Address had been delivered while presiding over Looney’s ‘Destination to the Priesthood’ on Easter Sunday 1899. Looney, Quin adds, has already provided ‘occasional assistance’ in his ‘Apostolic work’, and ‘is prepared to assume the charge of the Newcastle Church and Apostolate’. Quin also hoped that eventually enough money would be raised to support him, ‘for it would be to the advantage of our cause to free Mr. Looney for the prosecution of his studies, and the continuance of our northern propaganda’.
Quin’s attempted coup failed and he resumed his leadership role in Newcastle. Looney’s great moment, his promotion to priestly leader of the Newcastle congregation, had come and gone. Congreve’s death marked the beginning of the end of the movement. Over the new few years Looney helped Quin out with ‘public teaching’ and even tried to establish his own flock by undertaking what no English Positivist had done befor
e, ‘open-air preaching’ in the marketplace of the nearby town of Blyth. Looney was praised for his ‘courageous initiative in a new field and method of Positivist propaganda’. It was also reported that his preaching was ‘patiently and sympathetically listened to by large audiences’. But little or nothing came of his efforts to win converts.
The Church of Humanity never recovered from its succession crisis. In retaliation for Quin’s actions, the London membership cut off funding to the provincial churches and by 1904 these began to close down, with the Newcastle branch one of the last to fold. Alienated members had already begun drifting away from a movement in steep decline. In 1910 the doors finally shut on the Newcastle church and the site was ‘taken over by the Jews, who built a synagogue on it’. Shakespeare’s bust, along with most of the others, was donated to the Newcastle Grammar School.
Ordinarily the story of the rise and fall of a religious sect wouldn’t merit much attention, least of all in a book about Shakespearean authorship. Yet had Malcolm Quin taken over in London, enabling J. T. Looney to succeed him as leader of a still thriving Church of Humanity in Newcastle, the odds are that nowadays the Shakespeare authorship controversy would be little more than a historical footnote, a story of yet another Victorian enthusiasm – much like Lamarckism, phrenology, and the Religion of Humanity itself – that had outlived its moment.
Virginia Woolf may have been only half-serious when, reflecting on the social and political transformations that modern culture was then undergoing, she wrote that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, but for J. T. Looney, the closure in that year of a church he had been chosen to lead, a church committed to reversing the turn toward individualism and modernism that Woolf embodied, was a wrenching turn of events. Shortly after the Newcastle church was sold off, Looney began writing a book, one that he worked on through the course of the First World War, finished by 1918 and finally published in 1920. In it, he turned against his object of veneration, something it’s hard to imagine him doing had he retained a position of leadership in the Church of Humanity, toppling the idol whose bust had adorned his church and declaring Shakespeare of Stratford to be an impostor. It was the very book – ‘Shakespeare’ Identified – that Freud had asked Smiley Blanton to read, the book that had made a convert of Freud, one that to this day remains the bible of all those who subscribe to the belief that the Earl of Oxford was the true author of the plays.
Contested Will Page 20