Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  It wasn’t enough for Looney that the author of the plays held such views; he had to advocate them, use his plays to promote an explicit political agenda. This is where Oxford’s candidacy made so much sense and why Looney couldn’t just write a book arguing that a socially conservative Shakespeare of Stratford had written the plays. The true author had to be a man whose aristocratic lineage made him a natural leader, one who – if he had been properly recognised in his time – could have changed the world. Like Comte’s great teachings, ‘Shakespeare’s’ collected works were a textbook for both social and political reform: ‘How differently might the whole course of European history have unfolded,’ Looney laments, ‘if the policy of “Shakespeare” had prevailed instead of that of the politicians of his time.’

  In pursuing this idea, Looney had to argue that the plays that Oxford wrote were sophisticated political allegories (he interpreted Henry the Fifth, for example, as Oxford’s attempt to urge a conciliatory rather than imperialist course in Elizabethan foreign policy). Underlying such claims are far-fetched assumptions about how and why the playwright went about creating his characters. For Looney, these dramatis personae weren’t creations of the writer’s fertile imagination; they were rather ‘living men and women, artistically modified and adjusted to fit them for the part they had to perform’. And many of them turn out to be well-known courtiers or privy councillors in the dramatist’s immediate orbit. Here, too, Looney was simply appropriating a topical methodology occasionally employed by mainstream Shakespeare scholars from Malone on down, though he took it to new extremes.

  Enough incidents in Oxford’s life uncannily corresponded to events in the plays to support Looney’s claims that the plays were barely veiled autobiography. Like Hamlet, Oxford’s father died young and his mother remarried. Like Lear, he had three daughters – and his first wife was the same age as Juliet when they married. Oxford also didn’t refrain from recycling in his plays appalling events from his own life, from having been deceived by a bed-trick into sleeping with his wife (like Bertram in All’s Well) to stabbing to death an unarmed man (as Hamlet did to Polonius).

  Until now, critics had failed to identify these ‘cunning disguises’ because they had the wrong man. Oxford’s authorship, Looney was convinced, made everything clear. Hamlet offered the best example and Looney matches its cast of characters with those in Oxford’s courtly circle: Polonius is Lord Burghley, Laertes, his son Thomas Cecil, Hamlet is Oxford himself and Ophelia is Oxford’s wife Anne. But such claims about representing on the public stage some of the most powerful figures in the realm betray a shallow grasp of Elizabethan dramatic censorship. Looney didn’t understand that Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, whose job it was to read and approve all dramatic scripts before they were publicly performed, would have lost his job – and most likely his nose and ears, if not his head – had he approved a play that so transparently ridiculed privy councillors, past and present. Looney’s scheme also defies common sense, for Lord Burghley was dead by the time Hamlet was written, and nothing could have been in poorer taste, or more dangerous, than mocking Elizabeth’s most beloved councillor soon after his death, on stage or in print.

  Yet there were things in favour of Oxford’s candidacy. He had been praised in his lifetime as both poet and playwright, and his verse was widely anthologised. Since relatively little was known about Oxford’s life when Looney undertook his research, he can hardly be faulted for not knowing more about him. Looney relied heavily on the romantic portrait of Oxford in the late nineteenth-century Dictionary of National Biography, written, as it happens, by the Shakespeare scholar Sidney Lee. He learned there that Oxford was born in 1550, briefly studied at Cambridge, succeeded his father as Earl of Oxford in 1562, was a ward under the guardianship of William Cecil and married Cecil’s eldest daughter Anne in 1571 (remarrying after her death in 1588), and subsequently found himself in and mostly out of Elizabeth’s favour at court. According to Lee, from 1592 or so until his death in 1604, Oxford’s life ‘was spent mainly in retirement’. Looney also discovered from Lee’s account that Oxford wrote poetry ‘of much lyric beauty’, ‘squandered some part of his fortune upon men of letters whose bohemian mode of life attracted him’, and was the patron of a playing company.

  A century later, much more information about Oxford had been unearthed, and can be found in the updated Dictionary of National Biography entry written by Alan Nelson, as well in as Nelson’s authoritative and harsh documentary biography of de Vere, Monstrous Adversary. Nelson’s Oxford is a far less attractive figure than Lee’s, and by extension, Looney’s. It had become much clearer that Oxford was ‘notorious in his own time’ for ‘his irregular life, and for squandering virtually his entire patrimony on personal extravagance’. ‘Eternally short of funds, he did not scruple to burden lesser men with his debts.’ His ‘eccentricities and irregularities of temper grew with his years’. Oxford had stabbed a servant to death, but was exonerated when the authorities decided that it wasn’t murder but suicide: the servant had willingly impaled himself on Oxford’s sword’s point.

  Where Looney imagines what Lee calls Oxford’s ‘retirement’ spent reworking theatrical drafts into high art, Nelson documents instead how ‘Oxford devoted his declining years to the endless pursuit of supplementary income, petitioning for the monopoly on fruit, oils, and wool; for the gauging of beer; for the preemption of tin in Cornwall and Devon’ as well as ‘for the governorship of Jersey’ and ‘the presidency of Wales’. Oxford’s surviving letters ‘reflect his endless disappointments. Bitter to the end, he plotted against the royal succession by a Scot.’ Nelson’s portrait of Oxford is close to that painted by Gabriel Harvey in 1580 in his Speculum Tuscanismi: ‘delicate in speech, quaint in array, conceited in all points’, he was ‘a passing singular odd man’. As far as Positivist values were concerned, Oxford turned out to be a very poor choice – though again, given the paucity of information available about Oxford at the time, Looney could not have known that. And the seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey hadn’t helped de Vere’s legacy by retailing an embarrassing and probably apocryphal anecdote about him: ‘This Earl of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to travel seven years. On his return the Queen welcomed him home, and said, “My lord, I had forgot the fart.”’

  The greatest challenge Looney had to meet was the problem of Oxford’s death in 1604, since so many of Shakespeare’s great Jacobean plays were not yet written, including Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and Henry the Eighth. Looney concluded that these plays were either written before Oxford died (and posthumously released one by one to the playgoing public) or left incomplete and touched up by lesser writers (which explains why they contain allusions to sources or events that took place after Oxford had died). It was a canny two-part strategy, one that could refute almost any counter-claim.

  Looney also concluded that The Tempest – a play that scholars confidently date to well after 1604 – didn’t belong in the canon and was entirely the work of another hand. In rejecting ‘Shakespeare’s’ authorship of The Tempest he was also repudiating the widespread nineteenth-century biographical tradition which held that it was Shakespeare’s last play and when Prospero breaks his staff and abandons his ‘rough magic’ it’s really Shakespeare giving up his art. Looney’s grounds were again Positivist: ‘Shakespeare’ could never have expressed such metaphysical nonsense as can be found in Prospero’s speech, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ And although The Tempest contains a king and a duke, ‘no one can feel in reading it that he is in touch with the social structure of a medieval feudalism’.

  Surely, Looney writes, ‘Shakespeare’ believed that ‘human life is the one great objective reality’ and ‘his world is peopled by real men; not dreamy stuff’. His argument here echoes t
hat made a few years earlier by Lytton Strachey, who in an influential and reprinted essay signalled a turn against the Romantic reading of the play: ‘In The Tempest, unreality has reached its apotheosis. Two of the principal characters are frankly not human beings at all.’ Looney’s timing was perfect, for he was able to ride the tide of opinion turning against The Tempest and of Prospero as its autobiographical hero. Prospero, Strachey notes, ‘is the central figure of The Tempest; and it has often been wildly asserted that he is a portrait of the author – an embodiment of that spirit of wise benevolence which is supposed to have thrown a halo over Shakespeare’s life’. But ‘if Prospero is wise, he is also self-opinionated and sour … his gravity is often another name for pedantic severity … and there is no character in the play to whom, during some part of it, he is not studiously disagreeable.’

  Where influential Victorian biographers such as Edward Dowden had seen in Shakespeare-as-Prospero the very image of a serene and benign artist, a man who had achieved self-mastery and with that a ‘remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world’, Strachey can only find a boring protagonist and a writer who was himself ‘getting bored’ – ‘bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama’. By the early twentieth century the great reign of The Tempest as the crowning achievement of the career, and of the wise and patriarchal Prospero as the way people wanted to imagine Shakespeare, had lost much of its appeal. So too did the image of Shakespeare as a man of books, of magic, and as a repository of political wisdom. Looney’s great achievement was proposing an alternative candidate to Bacon-as-Shakespeare while at the same time offering a portrait of Shakespeare that perfectly satisfied the desires of the new century: Shakespeare as Prince Hamlet. A hundred years later Hamlet still holds that autobiographical pride of place – thanks in no small part to Looney’s early devotee, Freud. Where Oxford’s death in 1604 had once been an almost insuperable obstacle to Looney’s theory of authorship, it now proved to be providential, insofar as Hamlet, rather than The Tempest, Looney imagined, proved to be ‘Shakespeare’s’ final play. For Looney, Hamlet’s last words speak directly to the disgraced Oxford’s own situation, and ‘may almost be accepted as Oxford’s dying words’: ‘what a wounded name / Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!’ Looney’s peroration captures his vision of the dying artist at work:

  The picture of a great soul, misunderstood, almost an outcast from his own social sphere, with defects of nature, to all appearances one of life’s colossal failures, toiling on incessantly at his great tasks, yet willing to pass from life’s stage leaving no name behind him but a discredited one: at last dying, as it would seem, almost with the pen between his fingers, immense things accomplished, but not all he had set out to do.

  It’s difficult to resist the temptation to read between the lines here and see signs of the dismay Comte’s disciples felt as the Religion of Humanity slipped from public view, leaving no name behind but a discredited one.

  Looney didn’t begin with a candidate; he began with a call to arms, in which he enlists ‘Shakespeare’ – or rather imagines ‘Shakespeare’ enlisting us – in this cause. Only at the end of the book does Looney drop his guard and admit to this agenda, to how he saw ‘Shakespeare’ playing a crucial role in the restoration of the socially and politically repressive ‘new order’ in which superiors rule over their inferiors, and one over all, while a spirit of noblesse oblige prevails. It’s a sobering vision of what Looney thought the Oxfordian cause was ultimately about, and as such, worth quoting at length:

  If the new order for which the ‘prophetic soul’ of ‘Shakespeare’ looked is to arise at last through a reinterpretation and application to modern problems, of social principles which existed in germ in medievalism, then ‘Shakespeare’, in helping to preserve the best ideals of feudalism, will have been a most potent factor in the solution of those social problems which in our day are assuming threatening proportions throughout the civilised world. The feudal ideal which we once more emphasise is that of noblesse oblige; the devotion of the strong to the weak; the principle that all power of one man over his fellows, whether it rests upon a political or industrial basis, can only possess an enduring sanction so long as superiors discharge faithfully their duties to inferiors. In this task of ‘putting right’, Hamlet or ‘Shakespeare’, who we believe was Edward de Vere, through the silent spiritual influences which have spread from his dramas, will probably have contributed as much as any other single force.

  Any residual doubts about the core beliefs held by Looney – and shared and anticipated by ‘Shakespeare’ – are put to rest by his response to an American admirer, Flodden W. Heron, who in July 1941 wrote a letter of solidarity expressing kinship between their two democracies in that dark hour when it looked as if England faced destruction at the hands of the Nazis. It was the wrong thing to say to Looney and provoked this sharp response:

  I often regret therefore that the war is represented as a struggle between dictatorship and democracy. At the bottom it is one between the human soul and elemental brute force; it just happens that the present dictatorships stand for brutal domination and spiritual tyranny, and that to the democracies has fallen the defence of the soul’s freedom. The opposite is, however, quite conceivable. ‘Majority rule’ might be as tyrannically repressive of spiritual liberty as any other form of government.

  Looney, who had to leave his home because of massive German air-raids in the Gateshead-on-Tyne area, whose unsold copies of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified were destroyed by German bombs in London, and who was disgusted by Hitler and the Nazis, nonetheless preferred to ‘think of our two nations as being united in a struggle for the preservation of spiritual liberty rather than the maintenance of what is called “democratic government”’. He remained – as his book and his ‘Shakespeare’ remain – dead set against the forces of democracy and modernity to the very end.

  Looney’s Oxfordianism was a package deal. You couldn’t easily accept the candidate but reject his method. You also had to accept a portrait of the artist concocted largely of fantasy and projection, one wildly at odds with the facts of Edward de Vere’s life. Looney had concluded that the story of the plays’ authorship and the feudal, anti-democratic and deeply authoritarian values of those plays were inseparable; to accept his solution to the authorship controversy meant subscribing to this troubling assumption as well.

  Freud, Again

  Freud celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1926 in the company of his old friends Max Eitingon, Sándor Ferenczi and Ernest Jones. They talked late into the night, with Freud holding forth on whether the Earl of Oxford was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. Jones later recalled his ‘astonishment at the enthusiasm he could display on the subject at two in the morning’. It soon became a sore point between them. They had been drifting apart in recent years, when, in early March 1928, Jones wrote an anguished letter informing Freud that his beloved child had just died. His letter ends with a plea for some comforting thoughts – ‘a word from you might help us’. Rather than offering consolation, Freud thought it better to ‘do something to distract’ the grief-stricken Jones. Acknowledging that his disciple was ‘closest to the Shakespeare problem’, Freud, who had been rereading ‘Shakespeare’ Identified, urged Jones to get his mind off his loss by investigating Looney’s claims – ‘It would surely repay an analyst’s interest to look into the matter.’ Warming to the subject, he added that he was especially curious about the reception of Looney’s book in England. He himself was ‘very impressed by Looney’s investigations, almost convinced’.

  Jones waited over a month before replying, and, given the circumstances, handled Freud’s callous response surprisingly well, though he admits to having expected a bit more sympathy. He reminded Freud that he well remembers ‘your telling us all about Looney in May 1926’, and is willing to concede that ‘Shakespeare was probably interested in de Vere and well informed about him.’ But Jones drew the line there: he found Looney’s ar
gument unpersuasive and assured Freud that ‘Shakespeare’ Identified ‘had made no impression in London’, where the ‘only literary man I spoke to about it was disparaging’. ‘So many books’, Jones added, ‘consist in the first half of excited promises to reveal and prove something, and in the second half of triumph at what they think they have proved.’

  Freud wrote back, stung. It would be the last of their exchanges about Shakespeare: ‘I was dissatisfied with your information about Looney. I recently read his book again and this time I was even more impressed by it.’ Jones’s remark that exciting theories don’t always achieve all they promise had struck a nerve: ‘I believe it is unfair’, Freud replied, ‘to say that he only triumphs after making promises, like so many other riddle solvers.’ Freud insisted on having the final word, reminding Jones of the untapped vein of Shakespeare analysis that was now made available through an Oxfordian perspective:

  The explanation of the sonnets and the contributions to the analysis of Hamlet seem to me – besides others – to justify his conviction well … The existence of de Vere provides material for new investigations which can yield interesting positive and negative results. We know Lady Oxford remarried after her husband’s death, but do not know the date. What would our position be if this justified the reproach of unseemly haste which Hamlet makes to his mother?

  Why did Freud, who had lived with ambivalence about the authorship question for so long, commit in his final years so fully to Oxford’s cause? He had read Looney’s book closely enough to have found its nostalgia for a repressive and authoritarian medieval past dangerously naïve. For there’s no question he saw the thrust of Looney’s argument. When he wrote to Lytton Strachey, author of Elizabeth and Essex, advocating Looney’s cause, he noted that Oxford, like Essex, ‘embodied … the type of the tyrannical nobleman’. Freud, if anyone, was in a position to read between the lines and knew enough about Comte’s ideas (one of his earliest teachers in the 1870s, Ernst Brücke, had been a committed Positivist). Freud’s own view of the cost of repression in human society – especially that imposed by religion – was clear, and it was at just this time, after all, that he was wrestling in The Future of An Illusion (1927) with many of the social issues raised by Looney, concluding that it ‘is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held unrestricted sway; more moral they certainly were not’. Freud had also thought long and hard about the irresolvable tension between individual desire and societal will, searching in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) for some sort of accommodation between the two, one that offered the best prospects for human happiness.