Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  Oxford’s loss of Anne, who died of fever in 1588, when the outpouring of drama began, turned out to be our gain, for her untimely death inspired a succession of the plays’ remarkable heroines: ‘After the death of Lady Oxford he went into retirement, during which came the great “Shakespearean” outburst, involving plays in which, as we have just seen, the most private affairs of his youth and early manhood were represented.’ The ‘sweet little Countess of Oxford’ lives on ‘as Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, and Anne Page’ – and ‘what Beatrice was to Dante, such, under widely different circumstances, did Anne Cecil become to our great English “Shakespeare”’. It was a romantic story of inspiration that both anticipated and surpassed the one enacted in Shakespeare in Love.

  Looney knew well that Oxford was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Augustine, Hackney – which meant that those who worshipped his work had no proper shrine to visit, nothing like that which continued to lure pilgrims to Stratford-upon-Avon. But Anne was buried in Westminster Abbey, and the deification of Oxford could be realised if, as Looney proposed, her grave became the couple’s shared shrine:

  It is a great thing for us, then, that she lies in Westminster Abbey, and one day, when the world has done justice to Edward de Vere, her monumental tomb there will doubtless become a shrine, where, binding in one the memory of both, fit public honours will be paid to him who has become the glory of England.

  With this, Looney’s argument to supplant Shakespeare with Oxford was complete. He may have been unaware when he proposed it that – as the new Dictionary of National Biography entry bluntly puts it – de Vere’s marriage to the fourteen-year-old Anne had been ‘a disaster’. Oxford’s father-in-law, Burghley, was soon muttering ‘that Oxford had been “enticed by certain lewd persons to be a stranger to his wife”’ after learning that Oxford had dodged ‘the sweet little Countess’ on his return from foreign travels. The couple was estranged for years. Even after they were reunited – and this Looney knew – Oxford impregnated Anne Vavasour, one of the queen’s maids of honour. Four years after Anne’s death, Oxford remarried. Looney’s fantasy of Edward de Vere and Anne Cecil as England’s Dante and Beatrice was a bit of a stretch.

  Recognising the need for a central organisation to promote ‘research and propaganda’, a Shakespeare Fellowship was founded in 1922, with Sir George Greenwood (whose work had so influenced Twain and other sceptics) as its first president. Founding vice-presidents included Professor Abel Lefranc and Looney himself. Greenwood leaned toward Oxford as the mastermind of a group of writers, while Lefranc was an advocate of the Earl of Derby, so at least at the outset, the organisation hoped to unite ‘in one brotherhood all lovers of Shakespeare who are dissatisfied with the prevailing Stratfordian orthodoxy’. Its ends were to ‘encourage and to organise research among parish registers, wills, and other documents likely to throw light on the subject’. By year’s end over forty individuals had joined the organisation. With scholarly energies redirected toward candidates other than the man from Stratford, there was great confidence that the archives would soon yield unassailable evidence of who had actually written the plays.

  At some now forgotten moment over the next two decades – after support for Rutland, Derby and others had faded – the organisation’s mandate was quietly rewritten to give ‘special consideration of the claims that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, in sympathetic association with others personally connected with him, was the poet Shakespeare’. Books published by commercial presses, especially that of the sympathetic publisher Cecil Palmer, remained the coin of the Oxfordian realm, and it was only in the mid-1930s that it was thought necessary to publish a newsletter to get the word out. The first twenty years of the movement were so successful and Oxfordians so prolific that the circumstantial case was fairly complete.

  The intense interest of Freud and his circle is but one indication that Oxford’s cause was alive and well on the Continent; word also spread to the United States, where in 1937 Louis Bénézet, an English professor at Dartmouth College, published the first of his many Oxfordian volumes, Shakspere, Shakespeare and de Vere. That same year Charles Wisner Barrell popularised Looney’s theory in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. Soon after, Barrell created a sensation when he published an article in Scientific American arguing that the Ashbourne portrait – discovered in the nineteenth century, later purchased by the Folger Library, and believed by some to be of Shakespeare – had been tampered with, and that X-ray and infrared photography revealed that the figure painted over was Edward de Vere. While Oxfordians worked to bolster their circumstantial case for de Vere, considerable energy was also devoted to undermining the case for Shakespeare.

  By the early 1940s, the Oxfordian movement had achieved a surprising degree of visibility, most famously in the 1941 British war movie Pimpernel Smith (released in the United States as Mister V), which starred Leslie Howard, who also produced and directed the film, in the role of an archaeologist who foils the Nazis. When Shakespeare’s name comes up in conversation, Leslie Howard casually mentions that he had ‘been doing a little research work … on the identity of Shakespeare’ which ‘proves conclusively that Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare at all … He was the Earl of Oxford.’ Later in the film, holding up a skull at an excavation site, Howard recites the famous ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ speech from Hamlet, then adds – ‘The Earl of Oxford wrote that, you know.’ The Oxfordian cause had clearly arrived.

  Yet for all the smoke, Oxfordian research had produced little fire. The Shakespeare Fellowship’s goal of uncovering a paper trail linking Oxford to the plays had failed to turn up a single relevant document in English archives and great houses. Back in 1921 Looney had written that ‘circumstantial evidence cannot accumulate for ever without at some point issuing in proof’. Yet proof remained elusive – as did widespread acceptance. While Oxfordians were fully persuaded by what they saw as overwhelming circumstantial evidence, others remained stubbornly unmoved. As their books repeated the same claims again and again, publishers lost money, then interest. Looney admitted to a supporter in 1927 that ‘Naturally, I expected a more rapid spreading of the new theory than has taken place.’

  With archival digging a failure and circumstantial claims linking de Vere’s life to events in the plays and Sonnets at the saturation point, Oxfordian scholars in search of fresh areas of investigation found themselves at a loss. Constrained by the need to confirm rather than qualify Looney’s great discovery, they began making increasingly implausible claims. The first was greatly extending the range of Oxford’s literary achievement. If authorship was masked, and Oxford’s genius unrivalled, it stood to reason that he not only wrote Shakespeare’s plays but also the works of other great Elizabethan writers. The Baconians had gone down this slippery path; now it was their turn. They were partly driven to it by the need to show that de Vere must have written something between his acknowledged lyric poetry of 1570s and the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare that began to appear a decade or so later. But what? Looney himself led the way in his edition of de Vere’s poetry, accepting as axiomatic that ‘Oxford is the key to Elizabethan literature’, the ‘personal thread which unifies all’. Looney revisited the poetry and drama of writers as various as Arthur Golding, Anthony Munday and John Lyly, then turned on mainstream scholars for having ‘failed to perceive that what was linking all together was the person of Edward de Vere, the relative and pupil of Golding, and the employer in turn of both Anthony Munday and John Lyly’. Oxford, clearly, was responsible for all of their literary output. Lyly’s court drama of the 1580s was, for Looney, the missing link, the ‘bridge between Oxford’s early lyrics and the Shakespeare work’.

  It wasn’t long before disciples began to hail Edward de Vere as the author of everything from Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet and the plays of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd to the poetic works of Edmund Spenser and George Gascoigne. Some went even further, speculating that de Vere had also found tim
e to compose such monumental works as Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Over time, the list would expand to include the Marprelate tracts, Leicester’s Commonwealth, the works of Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, and a good many others.

  Given the fundamental premises of all those who doubt that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays – that the true author was hidden, his genius unmatched, and his role central in creating the golden age of Elizabethan literature – expanding the boundaries of the canon was perhaps inevitable. But just as the Baconians had made exaggerated claims for their man, the hands of Shakespeare’s defenders weren’t exactly clean either, with mainstream scholars attributing to Shakespeare such works as The Second Maid’s Tragedy, Edward the Third, Edmund Ironside and other plays and lyrics of contested authorship. Indeed, in the early nineteenth century, well before anyone thought to claim the works of Shakespeare for Marlowe, the very opposite – that Shakespeare had actually written all of Marlowe’s works – had been suggested. Nonetheless, the recklessness with which Oxfordians set about looting Elizabethan literature in search of new works to add to de Vere’s hoard was startling.

  When Cecil Palmer marketed ‘Shakespeare’ Identified, one of his main selling points was that Looney’s book contains ‘no cipher, cryptography, or hidden message connected with his reason or his discovery’. But the urge to emulate the Baconian cipher hunters proved too great for some Oxfordians, who turned to codes and ciphers in order to link de Vere to Shakespeare’s works. After all, even to the casual eye, anagrams of Edward de Vere’s name – ‘E. Vere’ – were scattered everywhere in Shakespeare’s works, from the ‘ever writer to the never reader’ of Troilus and Cressida to the word ‘ever’ that recurs with such frequency throughout the canon. Conveniently, ‘never’ occurs over eleven hundred times in Shakespeare’s works; ‘ever’ and ‘every’ over six hundred times each. Once alert to this barely-veiled signature, it’s readily identified in works others had independently reassigned to de Vere. It wasn’t long before George Frisbee found this coded signature – clear evidence of Oxford’s authorship – in the poetry of Christopher Marlowe, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harrington, Edmund Spenser, George Puttenham and even King James.

  The argument that Oxford sought anonymity because of the usual aristocratic misgivings about print only went so far. There had to be a better explanation for why the greatest of poets suppressed his identity. The answer was soon found: Oxford was Queen Elizabeth’s secret lover and their union produced an illegitimate son, the Earl of Southampton. The argument, first advanced by Percy Allen in 1933, came to be known in Oxfordian circles as the ‘Prince Tudor’ theory and proved deeply appealing to sceptics already convinced that conspiracy and concealment had defined Oxford’s literary life. Looney, while valuing Percy Allen’s loyalty, loathed his Prince Tudor theory and feared that it would ‘bring the whole cause into ridicule’. Freud hated it too, and even sent a chastising letter to Allen. To this day it has deeply divided Oxfordians.

  Despite objections, the Prince Tudor theory gained adherents, especially in America. It was perhaps inevitable that the theory gave way to an even bolder one, known in Oxfordian circles as ‘Prince Tudor, Part II’. According to its proponents, Oxford was not only Elizabeth’s lover but her son as well. The man who impregnated the fourteen-year-old future queen was probably her own stepfather, Thomas Seymour. So it was incest, and incest upon incest when Oxford later slept with his royal mother and conceived Southampton. There is more: Southampton was only the last of the Virgin Queen’s children; by then she had already given birth to the Earl of Essex as well as Mary Sidney and Robert Cecil.

  Nowadays, Oxfordians tend to steer clear of such loaded terms as ‘conspiracy’ and ‘cover-up’, but it’s impossible to avoid them when discussing the Prince Tudor theories. As Roger Stritmatter, one of the leading advocates of Oxford at work today, puts it: ‘Stratfordianism is little different … than the original “conspiracy” of the Tudor Crown to place Oxford in the dark,’ so that ‘the Stratfordian ideology is an extension of Tudor policy under another name, an extension inspired by motives that become more and more prosaic, comical and unconscious as the controversy proceeds towards the inevitable denouement of the Tudor lie’. Oxfordianism was thus a reaction to an initial lie about Oxford’s connection to the crown that spawned others, all to the detriment of de Vere – the lie that Elizabeth was a virgin queen led inevitably, though indirectly, to the lie that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays. An unbroken sequence of cover-ups on the part of those in authority could be traced from the Tudor court down through modern academic scholarship, which remained no less committed to keeping Oxford hidden, denying him his rightful place and recognition.

  The Prince Tudor theories help explain both what motivated Oxford and what motivates Oxfordians, whose efforts and marginalisation recapitulate Oxford’s own compensatory, creative struggle. We are left then, with a great ‘What if?’ If Oxford had been given his due in his own day, and his son Southampton had ascended the throne upon their mother’s death in 1603, perhaps Britain might have avoided an irreversible breakdown of hierarchy and order that led to a wrenching civil war, and subsequently to the rise of modernity, imperialism and capitalism (the bugbears of the Positivists). In lieu of such a utopian world, we are bequeathed some remarkable and compensatory plays. For as Stritmatter eloquently puts it, Oxford recreated ‘a kingdom of the imagination in which the complexes and traumas of his life’s experience and reading could be represented, bequeathing it to an unknowing and often vulgarly ungrateful world – a world that still does not want to acknowledge the psychological price Oxford paid for what he represents dramatically’. A theory so deeply rooted in political suppression and modern notions of psychic trauma makes it hard, almost impossible, to learn just how much was concealed or repressed. The Prince Tudor theories underscore the extent to which there is, at the heart of the Oxfordian movement, a wish to rewrite through the story of a traumatic life, as revealed in the plays, both the political and literary histories of England.

  The intense desire to resolve the authorship controversy once and for all led one of Looney’s most devoted followers to even more extreme measures. In 1946, Percy Allen, who had recently been elected President of the Shakespeare Fellowship, called for a vote of confidence on his leadership, after declaring that he would now seek ‘a solution of the mystery of the authorship by psychic means’. Allen’s advocacy of the Prince Tudor theory was barely tolerable; his speaking with the dead was beyond the pale. All but one of those in attendance immediately accepted his resignation. Allen then announced that as ‘the result of communication made to him directly and personally at many spiritual séances, he was sure of being in possession of the full solution of the question’. A year later Allen published his finding in Talks with Elizabethans, a detailed account of his conversations with Oxford, Bacon and Shakespeare.

  It’s easy to mock Allen’s approach, but in truth, communicating with the dead is what we all do, or try to do, every time we pick up a volume of Milton or Virgil or Dickens – all of whom achieve a kind of immortality by speaking to us from beyond the grave. Every literature professor is in the business of speaking with the dead – though few have been as honest about it as Stephen Greenblatt, whose influential Shakespearean Negotiations opens with the famous confession: ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead,’ then argues for the universality of this desire, ‘a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, a motive organized, professionalized, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum: literature professors are salaried, middle-class shamans’. While brilliantly anatomising this desire to speak with the dead, Greenblatt acknowledges that the conversation is necessarily one way (as he puts it, ‘all I could hear was my own voice’).

  But when Percy Allen spoke with the dead, the dead spoke back. His is a poignant story, perhaps the inevitable outcome of a man so deeply invested in a cause that he cou
ld not otherwise prove. It also replays many of the famous episodes of the authorship controversy, from William-Henry Ireland’s announcement that he was in possession of Shakespeare’s memoirs to Delia Bacon’s conviction that the lost manuscripts could be found by prying up Shakespeare’s gravestone. Allen had been drawn to psychic matters after hearing an acquaintance, Arthur Conan Doyle, speak on the subject in the 1920s. His interest intensified after seeing a play by Aldous Huxley on spiritualism. Years later, following the devastating news in 1939 of the death of his twin brother Ernest, Allen sought the help of one of the most celebrated mediums of the day, Hester Dowden. Her success in enabling Percy Allen to reach his dead twin prompted him to seek her assistance in resolving the authorship controversy.

  Hester Dowden was unusually well suited to the task. Her father was the Shakespeare biographer Professor Edward Dowden. Like Percy Allen, she was fully conversant with Shakespearean drama and had known, from her youth, many of the great performers of the day, including Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. There was one complicating factor: three or four years earlier, another student of the authorship controversy, Alfred Dodd, had sought her help and in 1943 published The Immortal Master, in which he described what he learned through her: that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays (unbeknownst to Dodd, his methods and conclusion had been anticipated by John Lobb in his 1910 book Talks with the Dead, where Shakespeare himself claimed from the grave full authorship of the works attributed to him).