Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  Freud’s rejection of Shakespeare could not have been easy. It disturbed him, as his letter to Theodor Reik in March 1930 indicates: ‘I have been troubled by a change in me which was brought about under the influence of Looney’s book, ‘Shakespeare’ Identified. I no longer believe in the man from Stratford.’ Yet Freud stopped short of sharing with Reik any deeper, psychic explanations for the troubling change – so that they must remain inaccessible to us, if they were even accessible to him.

  What is even more puzzling about his embrace of Looney’s cause is that forty years earlier Freud had reinvented Hamlet (and Shakespeare too) in the image of neurotic and cosmopolitan modern man. Yet the only way he could sustain this view was by relying on an argument that turned Shakespeare, and by extension Hamlet, into a pro-feudal reactionary. It’s hard to avoid concluding that Freud’s decision to embrace the Oxfordian cause was, at best, self-deceiving. While until the end of his life he continued to modify and elaborate on Oedipal dynamics and would even alter his thinking about aspects of the seduction theory, in the end, his core belief in the Oedipal theory was never shaken. It must have proved deeply reassuring that Looney’s book independently corroborated his solution to the Hamlet problem, confirming that the play had been written following the death of the author’s father. For if Looney was right, and Freud apparently needed to believe so, it now made no difference whether Hamlet was written as early as 1598 or even 1588, for Oxford had lost his father back in 1562 and then saw his mother, like Gertrude, remarry.

  Other aspects of Looney’s reading of Hamlet were easily assimilated into Freud’s. One can only imagine Freud’s growing excitement when reading in ‘Shakespeare’ Identified how Hamlet’s ‘loss of such a father, with the complete upsetting of his young life that it immediately involved, must have been a great grief to one so sensitively constituted’. Looney, like Freud, also saw Hamlet as ‘the dramatic self-revelation of the author, if such a revelation exists anywhere’. In other ways, too, Freud found Looney’s argument rich in possibilities. Looney had concluded, after all, that Oxford’s mother’s remarriage bore directly ‘upon questions of Shakespearean interpretation’. Looney’s Oxfordian reading of Hamlet – which for him was about both ‘the love and admiration of a son for a dead father’ and the ‘grief and disappointment at his mother’s conduct’ which ‘lie at the root of all the tragedy of his life’ – allowed, at last, for a fuller exploration of both the maternal and paternal aspects of the Oedipal scheme, one long denied to Freud. He made much of this argument in a note that appeared in the next edition of his Outline of Psychoanalysis, where he declared that ‘Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a man who has been thought to be identifiable with the author of Shakespeare’s works, lost a beloved and admired father while he was still a boy and completely repudiated his mother, who contracted a new marriage very soon after her husband’s death.’

  Even as he grew increasingly excited by the psychoanalytic potential of Looney’s arguments, the ageing Freud became more and more impatient with those in his circle he had tried and failed to convert, including Hanns Sachs, upon whom he pressed a copy of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified. Freud tried even harder with the novelist Arnold Zweig. After failing to win Zweig over to Oxford’s cause, Freud asked him to return his book: ‘You must bring Looney back with you. I must try him on others, for obviously with you I have had no success.’ But he wasn’t finished with Zweig yet and months later was still chastising him: ‘I do not know what still attracts you to the man of Stratford,’ Freud writes: ‘He seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything secondhand – Hamlet’s neurosis, Lear’s madness, Macbeth’s defiance and the character of Lady Macbeth, Othello’s jealousy, etc. It almost irritates me that you should support the notion.’

  After reading Looney’s book Freud was also convinced that the Sonnets – works that he had never seriously considered – could prove especially fertile ground for future psychoanalytic research. He was sufficiently persuaded by Looney’s account of their autobiographical nature to believe that these compact lyrics were like recorded dreams or confessions that offered access to the author’s thoughts and through them to his otherwise unrecorded experiences. When the Austrian Shakespeare scholar Richard Flatter sent Freud his German translation of the Sonnets, Freud wrote back, correcting Flatter’s ‘obsolete’ views and assuring him that ‘there are no doubts any longer about their serious nature and their value as self-confessions’. The evidence for this was obvious, for the poems ‘were published without the author’s co-operation and handed on after his death to a public for whom they had not been meant’. Freud urged Flatter to get hold of the latest Oxfordian scholarship, which he was himself reading: ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Edward de Vere by Gerald H. Rendall’.

  Lear too now seemed much more open to psychoanalytic explanation. Freud wrote excitedly to James S. H. Branson that ‘the figure of the father who gave all he had to his children must have had for him a special compensatory attraction, since Edward de Vere was the exact opposite, an inadequate father who never did his duty by his children’; so even when de Vere’s life took the opposite course of what happens in the plays, it confirmed for Freud his authorship of them. Freud also tried to persuade Bramson that the play was written by Oxford during his late years – before the date scholars usually assigned the play – and was narrowly based on Oxford’s two elder and married daughters, Elizabeth and Bridget, as well as their younger, unmarried sister, Susan (‘our Cordelia’). Freud saw confirmation of Oxford’s authorship in the fact that in the sources all three of Lear’s daughters were unmarried – and that Oxford altered this so that Lear’s relationships more closely resembled his own. Othello could now also be explained in psychoanalytic and familial terms: Oxford’s ‘marriage with Anne Cecil turned out very unhappily. If he was Shakespeare he had himself experienced Othello’s torments.’ All told, Oxford turned out to be a far richer subject – in terms of psychopathology – than Shakespeare ever had been, which may explain, as Freud wrote to Smiley Blanton, why he was so ‘strongly prejudiced’ in favour of Looney’s theory, though acknowledging that it doesn’t totally resolve the authorship ‘mystery’.

  Freud wrote an acceptance speech when he was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930. He was too frail to attend the award ceremony himself; his daughter Anna delivered his remarks in his stead. Freud took this opportunity to expand on his views of literary biography in general and on Oxford’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays in particular – his first public declaration of this view (other than an aside in the 1927 American edition of An Autobiographical Study, where he writes that after ‘reading ‘Shakespeare’ Identified by J. T. Looney, I am almost convinced that the assumed name conceals the personality of Edward de Vere’). As far as literary biography was concerned, ‘two questions which alone seem worth knowing about’ any author are ‘the riddle of the miraculous gift that makes an artist’ and how that helps us ‘comprehend any better the value and effects of his works’. Freud acknowledges that these are things we badly want to know, and that we feel this ‘powerful need’ most when its satisfaction is denied to us – as ‘in the case of Shakespeare’. He shifts smoothly here to the authorship question:

  It is undeniably painful to all of us that even now we do not know who was the author of the Comedies, Tragedies and Sonnets of Shakespeare, whether it was in fact the untutored son of the provincial citizen of Stratford, who attained a modest position as an actor in London, or whether it was, rather, the nobly-born and highly cultivated, passionately wayward, to some extent déclassé aristocrat Edward de Vere.

  Put this way, it’s not much of a choice.

  In exile in London a few years later, witnessing so much that he had struggled to build threatened by the rise of an ideology concocted of a heady mixture of the cult of personality, a romanticising of a distant past, the vilification of a materialism associated with Jews, and an insistence on discipline and the subordination and submiss
ion of the masses to dictatorial will, did Freud ever stop to reflect upon how much of Looney’s social vision overlapped with that which had driven him from Vienna?

  More than ever in the coming years shall we need the spirit of ‘Shakespeare’ to assist in the work of holding the ‘politician’ and the materialist, ever manoeuvring for ascendancy in human affairs, to their secondary position in subordination to, and under the discipline of, the spiritual elements of society. We cannot, of course, go back to ‘Shakespeare’s’ mediaevalism, but we shall need to incorporate into modern life what was best in the social order and social spirit of the Middle Ages.

  Looney’s retrograde vision comes too close for comfort to Freud’s account of the Nazi rise to power in 1933, when he described ‘the ideal of Hitlerism’ as ‘purely medieval and reactionary’. That year Freud had also written to Ernest Jones that ‘We are in a transition toward a rightist dictatorship, which means the suppression of social democracy. That will not be an agreeable state of affairs and will not make life pleasant for us Jews.’ It may be unfair on my part, but I cannot help but feel that Freud, who confessed himself to be Looney’s ‘follower’, seems to have turned a blind eye to the broader implications of what Looney advocated.

  Looney’s daughter, Mrs Evelyn Bodell, reported that a few days before he died on 17 January 1944, her father confided that ‘My great aim in life has been to work for the religious and moral unity of mankind; and along with this, in later years, there has been my desire to see Edward de Vere established as the author of the Shakespearean plays – and the Jewish problem settled.’ That last phrase can be easily misread, especially in 1944 when it was becoming clearer what horrors the Nazis had inflicted on the Jews (among the victims were four of Freud’s five sisters, who died in extermination camps). What Looney meant by this is clarified in a letter he sent to Freud in July 1938, shortly after he had fled Vienna and arrived in London. Rather than discussing the Shakespeare problem, Looney wanted to enlist Freud’s support in resolving the Jewish one. He explains that he writes as a Positivist, as a nationalist and as someone with no quarrel with dictatorship. While highly critical of the Nazis, he is also impatient with the Jews’ refusal to abandon their racial distinctiveness and assimilate fully into the nation-states in which they lived – the ultimate source, for Looney, of their persecution. He rejects the possibility of a Jewish homeland as impractical; the only solution, from his Positivist perspective, is their ‘fusion’, which, sooner or later, ‘must come’. Looney might have added that Oxford had foreseen as much in having both Shylock and Jessica ‘fuse’ through conversion with the dominant Venetian society by the end of The Merchant of Venice.

  Looney was consistent to the end. He had begun his authorship quest decades earlier after equating Shakespeare of Stratford’s ‘acquisitive disposition’ and habitual ‘petty money transactions’ with Shylock’s. For Looney, the idea that a money-hungry author had written the great plays was impossible. His originality, then, was in suggesting that while Shakespeare of Stratford was portrayed in Shylock, the play’s true author, the Earl of Oxford, had painted his self-portrait in Antonio. Looney’s solution to the authorship problem, like the resolution of the play’s ‘Jewish problem’, and indeed, ‘the religious and moral unity of mankind’, was of a piece.

  Oxfordians

  Almost overnight, the publication of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in 1920 established Oxford as a leading candidate for the authorship of the plays. With Bacon in decline, de Vere’s main competitors were now other aristocrats; the case for other professional playwrights or poets, including Marlowe, never really got off the ground. In 1905 the Earls of Southampton and Essex had each been proposed, but neither generated much interest. There was considerably more enthusiasm two years later for the candidacy of Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rutland. He had strong literary connections, having married Sir Philip Sidney’s daughter, had travelled widely and had served as an ambassador to the Danish court at Elsinore, giving him intimate knowledge of Hamlet’s world. While on the young side (he would have published Venus and Adonis at age seventeen) his death in 1612 roughly corresponded to the end of Shakespeare’s playwriting career. Rutland’s advocates, who soon included Germans, Swiss, Belgians, Russians, Americans and Argentinians, also believed that the experiences of some of the plays’ most memorable characters – especially Romeo, Jaques, Hamlet and Prospero – were closely modelled upon Rutland’s tumultuous life. When Sherlock Holmes was brought out of retirement to solve the mystery of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, the famous detective concluded that it was Rutland who did it.

  Before Looney’s book appeared, Rutland’s chief aristocratic rival had been the Earl of Oxford’s son-in-law, William Stanley, Earl of Derby. During the heyday of the Baconians in the 1890s, it had come to light that a Jesuit spy had reported in June 1599 that Derby was ‘busied only in penning comedies for the common players’. A couple of decades later, in the wake of renewed interest in aristocratic candidates, researchers began to follow up on this tantalising information and by 1919 Derby’s candidacy had attracted an international and even academic following. Besides this report, there were many points in his favour: Derby shared Shakespeare’s first name and initials (so could easily have written those punning ‘Will’ sonnets), and his dates fit well enough, for he was born three years before Shakespeare and died the year the theatres closed, in 1642. Derby too was well travelled, especially in France, and there was considerable internal evidence in the plays that suggested they were based on what Derby had seen and done.

  It’s not entirely clear why Oxford emerged as the most plausible of these aristocratic contenders. Some at the time were convinced that had the case for Derby been established a few years earlier a consensus would have gathered around his candidacy. In retrospect, Looney proved to be a more effective advocate than those supporting rival claimants, his book more heartfelt, his disciples more prominent and committed, and the autobiographical connections established between Oxford’s life and Shakespeare’s plays more persuasive. What ultimately tipped the scales in de Vere’s favour was that he alone among these earls had been recognised in his own day as an accomplished writer and praised by contemporaries for both his poetry and comedies. Though few poems and no plays that Oxford had written under his own name were extant, it was still possible to compare what survived with that attributed to Shakespeare, and argue (as the Baconians had long done) for stylistic and thematic parallels between the two bodies of work.

  In order to capitalise on Looney’s groundbreaking study, a proper biography as well as a scholarly edition of Oxford’s acknowledged verse were needed. Looney took it upon himself to edit The Poems of Edward de Vere, while B. M. Ward devoted himself to completing The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, the first full-length account of de Vere’s life. A torrent of scholarship followed: thirty or so Oxfordian volumes poured from presses over the next two decades.

  H. H. Holland led the way in 1923 with Shakespeare through Oxford Glasses, connecting plays previously dated to the early seventeenth century to topical events in the 1570s and 1580s. A trio of enthusiastic Oxfordians, each one a small publishing industry, soon followed. Eva Turner Clark, one of the few Americans to join the movement this early on, published four Oxfordian books. Building on Holland’s work, and seeking to do for Oxford what Edmond Malone had done for Shakespeare, Clark mapped out an alternative chronology of Oxford’s plays, placing their initial composition decades earlier. Her work was highly influential and Freud, who read it closely, was especially impressed. In Britain, drama critic Percy Allen was even more prolific, with five titles to his credit. He also had privately printed My Confession of Faith (1929), affirming how akin to a religious conversion his embrace of Oxford had been. Not to be outdone, Canon Gerald H. Rendall, a professor of Greek at University College Liverpool and already eighty years old when he became an Oxfordian, turned out four Oxfordian titles. Others, including Gilbert Slater in Seven Shakespeares (1931) and Montagu William D
ouglas in The Earl of Oxford as ‘Shakespeare’ (1931), proposed that Oxford was actually the mastermind of a group of writers responsible for Shakespeare’s works. Douglas also suggested that Queen Elizabeth had entrusted Oxford to oversee a propaganda department that would produce patriotic plays and pamphlets. All told, it was a rich harvest, and mainstream Shakespeareans, who refused – as did the Baconians – to acknowledge the early success of the Oxford movement, had to scramble to compete with the sheer volume of this scholarship.

  Though he lived until 1944, Looney never wrote another book. He nevertheless corresponded with his followers and contributed a few Oxfordian articles, including one that appeared in the lavish quarterly The Golden Hind, in which he shared a new reading of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Once again, characters were understood to be barely concealed historical figures: the play’s dashing young lover, Fenton, was another of Oxford’s self-portraits, while the woman he woos, Anne Page, was an obvious stand-in for the young woman Oxford married, Anne Cecil. The doltish Slender, whom Fenton outmanoeuvres, is Oxford’s rival Sir Philip Sidney, who had unsuccessfully sought Anne Cecil’s hand in marriage. Even the setting in Windsor corresponded exactly with where the events on which the play was based had taken place three decades earlier. The stories matched so perfectly that Looney doubted ‘whether another case could be cited in which a dramatist so closely followed facts of this nature and placed an identification so entirely outside the range of reasonable dispute’.