Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  Not much is known about John Thomas Looney (whose family name, the subject of much unwarranted abuse, rhymes with ‘bony’). Though he gained many followers in the quarter-century between the publication of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in 1920 and his death in 1944, and many corresponded with him, none of them wrote a detailed account of his life – nor did any full biographical sketch appear when his book was posthumously reprinted with new introductory material, first in 1949 and then again in 1975. Looney seems to have been unusually private and only published on the subject of Oxford and the Shakespeare question: a book, an edition of Oxford’s poems and a handful of articles in minor journals. Most of what is now known of his life and his beliefs, aside from the few autobiographical hints in his published work, derives from what Looney wrote to Oxfordian disciples – letters that were selectively published after he died, with his blessings, in the pages of the obscure Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly.

  In them, Looney relates that his family came from the Isle of Man and traced his ancestry back to the Earls of Derby (though he didn’t want too much made of this aristocratic connection). He himself was born in northeast England in the coastal town of South Shields and raised in a ‘strongly evangelical’ Methodist household. At the age of sixteen he prepared to enter the ministry and subsequently attended Chester Diocesan College. Within a few years, however, he abandoned this calling and spent years in search of a ‘philosophy of life’. What he failed to discover in the traditional church he found in 1896, at age twenty-six, in the writings of Comte. Looking back upon this formative period, Looney was especially proud of his friendship with Richard Congreve, which put him but one step removed from Comte himself. He also writes of how Congreve had encouraged him to take ‘a leading place in the English Positivism movement’.

  This version of his upbringing is supplemented by a pair of Looney’s letters now housed in the British Library, written in response to Congreve’s questions about his intellectual preparation for the priesthood as well as the depth of his commitment to the Positivist cause. Looney reassured Congreve that he was ‘fully and earnestly’ committed, though painfully aware of ‘the disadvantages in my education and circumstances’, given the breadth of knowledge that a Comtean priest should have. In addition to mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and physiology, his strengths included both European and English history, especially ‘the Tudor and Stuart Periods’. Sufficiently assured, Congreve went ahead with the ceremony, in which Looney promised to ‘accept the obligation imposed on me by the Sacrament of Destination as an aspirant to the Priesthood of Humanity, my definitive choice of a destination’.

  Perhaps fearful of losing or alienating readers, Looney never acknowledged in ‘Shakespeare’ Identified how deeply his Positivist experience informed the book. Only years later would he finally confirm what he had withheld: ‘for forty years I have been a student of the works of Auguste Comte, and associated with the Positivist movement in England; and that this has determined more than any other single force, my attitude to every problem and interest of importance, not excepting the Shakespeare problem itself’. It was therefore as an exercise in applied Positivism that his book needed to be valued: ‘Positivism may be said to have contributed appreciably to the discovery of “Shakespeare”’ and it is ‘from this standpoint, that I should wish my Shakespeare researches to be judged’.

  ‘Shakespeare’ Identified was also a product of Looney’s profound distaste for modernity: ‘I have for very many years’, he explained, ‘had a settled sense of our own age as one of increasing social and moral disruption tending towards complete anarchy.’ On the eve of the Second World War, Looney reflected back upon how the chaos and destructiveness of the Great War had informed the writing of his book. Repelled by what he saw – as he understood both ‘Shakespeare’ and Comte had been before him – Looney also wanted to make a difference, combat these anarchic tendencies. The authorship controversy was a means to this larger end: ‘My great wish has been to make some kind of contribution towards the solving of a problem much vaster, and more serious in its incidence, than the “Shakespeare” or any merely literary problem, could possibly be.’ But, as he came to see it, ‘Destiny has honoured us with this particular task, and though it may not be the work we could have wished to do, we are glad to have been able to do so much.’ This, in turn, explains why he writes that those ‘who can read between the lines of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified will not have much difficulty in detecting the direction’ of his larger interests.

  Yet for all the praise and calumny heaped upon his landmark book, few have bothered to read between the lines or pursue Looney’s hints. Mainstream Shakespeareans couldn’t be bothered, refusing to take this formidable book seriously, preferring instead to poke fun at Looney’s name. His followers, for their own reasons, have also chosen not to probe too deeply, uncomfortable, perhaps, with what they already sensed. The founding myth of the Oxfordian movement – as one of the most ardent Oxfordians, Charlton Ogburn, put it – is that Looney, a scholarly school master, ‘approached the quest for the author systematically, and with a completely open mind’.

  Looney certainly sounds open-minded at the beginning of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified, where he explains that he became interested in the authorship question when he could no longer reconcile what he knew of the facts of Shakespeare’s life with the ethos of The Merchant of Venice, a play he taught regularly. Even if only half-true, the story of the curious schoolmaster who unravels the mystery of the plays still has tremendous appeal. Could someone who prosecuted others ‘for the recovery of petty sums’, Looney wondered, have written a play that condemned such avarice? Surely the play’s author more closely resembled Antonio than Shylock, and had himself ‘felt the grip of the moneylender’. Looney also found it ‘impossible’ to believe that Shakespeare could have quit the stage and ‘retired to Stratford to devote himself to houses, lands, orchards, money and malt, leaving no traces of a single intellectual or literary interest’. No writer of this stature could have cared that much about money. Shakespeare of Stratford was either a hypocrite or an impostor.

  His logic is unassailable – but only if you believe that great authors don’t write for money and that the plays are transparently autobiographical. Looney believed both unquestioningly. In support of his views he warmly quotes from the popular biographer Frank Harris, whose influential The Man Shakespeare treated Shakespeare’s protagonists as a series of self-portraits: in Brutus, for example, Shakespeare offers ‘an idealised portrait of himself’; it ‘can hardly be denied that Shakespeare identified himself as far as he could with Henry V’; and in Hamlet, Shakespeare goes furthest of all, having ‘revealed too much of himself’.

  Unlike those who had previously investigated the authorship question, Looney began his quest with no particular writer in mind. He frankly admitted that he was no literary expert, but didn’t see this as necessarily a hindrance, for the ‘solution required the application of methods of research which are not, strictly speaking, literary’. The great virtue of Looney’s work and the source of much of his book’s appeal is the modesty of his approach, as he takes us step by step through the process that inexorably led him to Oxford. While Looney didn’t begin with a particular candidate, he nonetheless brought to the problem a set of questionable assumptions about Elizabethan playwriting that sharply circumscribed his approach. Most of these were nineteenth-century commonplaces, and while they have had a long half-life, would not find support in scholarly circles today, when we know a lot more about early modern authorship and how Shakespeare worked than Looney and his contemporaries did.

  Like many in his day, Looney believed that so accomplished a writer as Shakespeare could never have stooped to collaborating with lesser playwrights. And there had long been a division between those who believed that Shakespeare mainly wrote for Elizabethan playgoers and those convinced he wrote for posterity; Looney fell into the latter camp, arguing that plays so dense with meaning and allusion had t
o have been thoroughly overhauled. Such complex works of art could never have been understood by ordinary Elizabethan theatregoers: ‘To pack with weighty significance each syllable of a work meant only to amuse or supply thrills for two or three hours would, moreover, defeat its own ends.’ So Looney felt ‘justified in claiming then that the best of the dramas passed through two distinct phases, being originally stage-plays – doubtless of a high literary quality – which were subsequently transformed into the supreme literature of the nation’. It was an inaccurate and anachronistic notion of Shakespeare’s craft, one more suited to Henry James’s revisions in his New York Edition than to a collaborative Jacobean playwright.

  Armed with such assumptions, Looney established a profile that everyone could agree defined the writer of such remarkable plays and sonnets: a recognised genius as well as a talented poet, a man who was also mysterious, eccentric and well educated. Building on this foundation, Looney appended a more controversial list of traits: whoever wrote the plays was necessarily a man with feudal connections, an aristocrat, a lover of falconry and music, an enthusiast about Italy, improvident in money matters and conflicted in his attitude toward women. The author also had Catholic sympathies and was fundamentally sceptical (here citing Comte as his authority, who had labelled Shakespeare ‘a sceptic’).

  Looney still insists – and it’s hard not to believe him – that he had as yet no specific candidate or slate of potential candidates in mind. So he began at the beginning, with what ‘Shakespeare’ himself had called ‘the first heir of my invention’: Venus and Adonis. With this poem in hand, he sought a match in the most popular poetry anthology of the day, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics. He soon found a poem written in the same stanzaic form. Its author was Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, of whom Looney knew next to nothing. He quickly set about making up for that ignorance, learning everything he could about Oxford’s life and work. Looney recalls his growing excitement as every biographical fact and casual reference he uncovered about Oxford – and there wasn’t much published material to go on at that time – confirmed not only that he perfectly fitted every established criterion with which he had begun his search, but also that Oxford’s life and outlook perfectly corresponded with what was in the plays.

  Only a churlish reader would stop to wonder why Looney didn’t cast his net further, compare Venus and Adonis to the works of other poets writing in similar stanzaic forms, look at Shakespeare’s early plays as well as poetry, or consider the possibility that the plays were written collaboratively. The remainder of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified is devoted to establishing Oxford’s claim, to illustrating how his discovery alters how we ought to read the plays and grasp their social, political and spiritual purpose, and, finally, to overcoming potential objections to the Oxfordian case.

  Looney’s approach was a tour de force. Rhetorically, it was the most compelling book on the authorship controversy to have appeared, and in this respect it has yet to be surpassed. A good deal of editorial credit for its literary quality has gone unacknowledged, part of the mythologising of Looney’s accomplishment. When his publisher Cecil Palmer insisted that the initial manuscript submitted to him be overhauled if he were to accept it, Looney told him to ‘do what he liked’ with it. Palmer did so, as he acknowledged some years after Looney’s death, making it ‘less like a schoolboy’s essay, and more resembling an undergraduate’s thesis’.

  Looney’s sleight of hand of insisting that he began with no particular candidate in mind distracts us from what he did start with: questionable assumptions about the nature of authorship and a deeply held conviction that whoever wrote the plays shared his Positivist worldview. His ‘Shakespeare’ would have been familiar to fellow members of the Church of Humanity: ‘essentially a medievalist’ who ‘has preserved for all time, in living human characters, much of what was best worth remembering and retaining in the social relationship of the Feudal order of the Middle Ages’. This Positivist argument for Shakespeare’s medievalism and his crucial role in the march of human progress goes hand in hand with Looney’s Comtean claims for Shakespeare’s anti-materialistic, anti-democratic and deeply reactionary social vision.

  Because the author of the plays was someone ‘whose sympathies, and probably his antecedents, linked him more closely to the old order than to the new’, he was ‘not the kind of man we should expect to rise from the lower middle-class population of the towns’. For Looney, the plays’ author could never have subscribed to middle-class values, especially the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. One could either worship Mammon or serve Humanity. To ‘represent him as a man who, having made a snug competency for himself, left dramatic pursuits behind him voluntarily … to devote himself more exclusively to houses, lands and business generally, is to suggest a miracle of self-stultification in himself and an equal miracle of credulity in us’.

  If further proof were needed, the plays themselves showed that their author ‘did not understand the middle classes’. His ordinary ‘citizens’ are like ‘automata walking woodenly on to the stage to speak for their class’ while his ‘“lower-orders” never display that virile dignity and largeness of character’. Looney doesn’t pause to consider the vividness and ‘largeness of character’ of the Fool in Lear, the loyal old servant Adam in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff ’s followers, and dozens of others from the lower or middling classes that populate the plays. And he is adamant that ‘Shakespeare’s’ greatest characters, and the ones for whom he shows the deepest sympathy, are kings and queens – which leads to the only ‘logical conclusion’ that the author of the plays was ‘an aristocrat … in close proximity to royalty itself’. Once the ‘theory’ that ‘Shakespeare’ wrote for money ‘is repudiated we are bound to look for an author who believed with his whole soul in the greatness of drama and the high humanising possibilities of the actor’s vocation’.

  Looney insists, time and again, that the author of the plays stood firmly against the forces of individualism and materialism, which threatened ‘the complete submergence of the soul of civilised man’. As he completed his book towards the end of the Great War, Looney saw his argument confirmed in what was going on around him: ‘“The fatness of these pursy times,”’ as ‘Shakespeare’ put it in Hamlet, ‘against which his whole career was a protest, has settled more than ever upon the life of mankind, and the culminating product of this modern materialism is the world war that was raging whilst the most of these pages were being penned.’ In arguing for the deep sympathies of the plays’ author with the ‘chivalries of feudalism’ and his ‘affection for these social relationships’, Looney closely follows the thinking of his mentor, Richard Congreve, who had written a book about Queen Elizabeth’s reign in order to challenge ‘individualism, the gospel of the literary classes of the present day’, and to praise Elizabeth’s top-down rule. Congreve hotly rejected the accusation that to do so was showing ‘sympathy with despotism’; Elizabeth was an absolute monarch, and England ‘was safer in the hands of one rather than of the few’, let alone the many. Her reign, from this perspective, was a model for the Church of Humanity. Looney also seems to have shared Congreve’s view that Elizabeth was England’s ‘last great hereditary governor’ and that her ‘reign closes one great epoch of English history’ – an end-point that conveniently corresponded with the death of the Earl of Oxford. Delia Bacon’s tyrant was Looney’s model ruler.

  Looney found the most unassailable evidence for the author’s embrace of authoritarian values in Ulysses’ great speech about the dangers of chaos in Act 1 of Troilus and Cressida. ‘No more terrible condemnation of revolutionary equality’, Looney concluded, ‘was ever uttered’:

  O, when degree is shaked,

  Which is the ladder to all high designs,

  The enterprise is sick. How could communities,

  Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

  Peaceful commerce from dividable
shores,

  The primogenity and due of birth,

  Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels

  But by degree, stand in authentic place?

  (1.3.101–8)

  Lifting these words out of context, and italicising the lines that highlight his hierarchical views, Looney ignores how wily Ulysses mouths these pieties to manipulate his superior, the buffoonish Agamemnon, who has ample reason to want to hear degree and ‘due of birth’ defended so aggressively. In the 1940s, E. M. W. Tillyard would make this speech the centrepiece of a nostalgic and influential Elizabethan World Picture. But not even the conservative Tillyard goes as far as Looney, who was convinced that the ‘scene as a whole is a discussion of state policy, from the standpoint of one strongly imbued with aristocratic conceptions, and conscious of the decline of the feudal order upon which social life had hitherto rested’. Looney knew that the clock could not be turned back, ‘that we cannot, of course, go back to “Shakespeare’s” medievalism, but we shall need to incorporate into modern life what was best in the social order and social spirit of the Middle Ages’.