Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  Hester Dowden succeeded in putting Allen in touch not only with Bacon but also with Shakespeare and Oxford. It soon emerged that Alfred Dodd had been misinformed, as Allen learned upon putting the question directly to Bacon himself (as usual, Hester Dowden transcribed the conversations, using automatic writing, assisted through her main ‘control’ with the beyond, an ancient Athenian named Johannes). The truth, Bacon told him, was that

  the Shakespeare plays and poems are principally the works of Lord Oxford. All the work of shaping them for the stage, and much of the comedy, are the work of Will of Stratford. You have to remember that reiteration again and again: We are two, Oxford and Shakespeare, with Bacon always behind, as a kind of critical and general advisor.

  This was a great relief to Percy Allen, who had suspected as much.

  Shakespeare, at first a bit shy, soon warmed up and communicated freely with Allen (and Allen’s estimation of him grew over time). Their conversations went so well that Allen, curious about his personal story, told him: ‘Look here; we know almost nothing about your earthlife. Will you dictate your autobiography for me?’ Shakespeare graciously agreed, and Allen provides a transcript of it, with occasional ‘interpolations’ by Oxford. Allen was assured by all three men of the truth of the Prince Tudor story – that Southampton ‘was really the Queen’s son’. Shakespeare and Oxford then went through the plays one by one, explaining to Allen in considerable detail who wrote which parts, which works were juvenilia, and so on.

  Eager to share his discoveries with the world, Allen asked his interlocutors from beyond for ‘more documentary proof’, and wondered whether the manuscripts of the plays had survived. After some initial hesitation, ‘Francis Bacon came through at last, and said: “They are in the tomb – the stone tomb.”’ At this point Shakespeare and Oxford chimed in, explaining that six manuscripts were hidden in Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford: Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Richard the Second, and Henry the Fifth ‘wrapped in parchment. Two at the head, two at the feet, and two at the breast’ including Hamlet. The Earl of Derby had placed them there. When Allen told them that he would visit the tomb, Oxford warned him ‘I will make your flesh creep!’ And so he did. When Allen travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon to review some plays in April 1945 he visited Shakespeare’s gravestone. Just as Oxford had predicted, he suddenly felt ‘a hot, pleasant tingling coming up my fingers to the elbows in both arms’. A few days later he returned to Mrs Dowden, who picked up her pen and resumed her automatic writing, whereupon Shakespeare immediately got in touch with Allen: ‘I want to thank you for coming. We were both there, and very glad to see you.’

  Allen rushed off to his publishers with this astounding news, but they ‘did not seem much impressed’ and wanted what they called ‘real evidence’: ‘Give us some poetry, if you can.’ So Allen returned to Mrs Dowden and put in the special request to Oxford through her. He waited three weeks and was rewarded with an envelope from Mrs Dowden containing the first of Oxford’s newly dictated sonnets. Four posthumous sonnets in all were composed and subsequently included in Allen’s Talks with Elizabethans. It had taken Mrs Dowden about forty minutes to transcribe each sonnet, as Oxford composed them line by line (‘if Oxford had known the verses by heart they would have taken only about three or four minutes to dictate’). The one prefacing Talks with Elizabethans doesn’t quite measure up to those collected in 1609, and ends as follows:

  The plays they played on Earth they play once more.

  E’er the cock crows, and from the earth they fly,

  Learn what you may – your patience they implore.

  Thus from the tomb its secret you may steal,

  Stirring no dust, no bones can you reveal.

  In retrospect, the outbreak of the Second World War derailed an Oxfordian movement that had already begun to lose its momentum, if not its bearings. With invasion feared, meetings of the British Shakespeare Fellowship were suspended. The baton was passed to the United States, where Eva Turner Clark formed an American branch in 1939, but that organisation folded shortly after her death in 1947. By then there wasn’t much left to the British wing of the Fellowship either. Looney was dead, along with such stalwarts as B. M. Ward and Canon Rendall. So too was the movement’s most famous recruit, Freud. Membership had dropped to seventy – roughly two members for every Oxfordian book that had been published.

  For the next forty years, the remnant of the once flourishing movement in both Britain and America hung on. In 1949 an American edition of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified came out, enabling a new generation of readers to get hold of Looney’s by now rare book. A brief flare of enthusiasm led to the establishment of a Shakespeare Oxford Society in America in 1957 – though it remained, according to the organisation’s newsletter, ‘almost dormant, as far as active members, until 1964’. Even then, prospects seemed dismal. As its newsletter acknowledged in 1968, ‘the missionary or evangelical spirit of most of our members seems to be at a low ebb, dormant, or non-existent’. The British Shakespeare Fellowship tried reinventing itself as the Shakespearean Authorship Society in 1959 and for a few years published a Shakespearean Authorship Review, but the organisation was a shadow of its former self. Oxfordians looked on jealously when the self-promoting Calvin Hoffman generated far more attention than they could muster with his claims for Christopher Marlowe’s authorship of the plays – first with the publication in 1955 of The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare’, then with his success in securing permission to open the grave of Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham in a failed attempt to unearth Marlowe’s long-hidden manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays. For a time it looked as if Marlowe might even supplant Oxford as the chief claimant to the plays.

  As the years slid by, expectations dwindled. Barrell’s claims in Scientific American about the Ashbourne portrait were exposed as an embarrassing case of wishful thinking: the overpainted figure wasn’t Oxford after all, and restoration work revealed that the date of the original portrait was 1612, eight years after Oxford’s death. Meanwhile, in the pages of their newsletter, American supporters of de Vere’s cause could only wring their hands: ‘What about the hopes of us Oxfordians? When can we reasonably expect to see light at the end of the tunnel? In 1969? Hardly; barring a miracle.’ While Oxfordians put on a cheerful public face, they privately admitted that they were on the verge of failure. The language was blunt: ‘We are talking to each other, converting the already converted,’ and they doubted whether there were ‘as many active propagandists, lecturers, and writers for the cause, as there were in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties’. The odds of having an Oxfordian book ‘accepted and published’ were put at ‘None’.

  While convinced that their case was the stronger one, they understood that the ‘general public, the uncommitted, are in millions, but the means to reach them are unavailable to us now, and bid fair to remain so, unless there is some dramatic “breakthrough”’. As the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Looney’s book approached, the Oxfordians conceded that the ‘rate of our progress in recent years toward gaining recognition of Lord Oxford as Shakespeare among the uncommitted and open-minded, can best be described as one small step forward, and two giant steps backwards’. Despite the attention generated by a sharp exchange with Harvard professors in the pages of the Harvard Magazine in 1974, the movement was on life-support. Membership in the Shakespeare Oxford Society now stood at eighty – and an attempt to generate new ideas and enthusiasm through a conference in 1976 drew only twenty members. Oxfordians would subsequently speak of this post-war period of decline and stagnation as their ‘Dark Ages’.

  Mainstream scholars could hardly wait for their adversaries to die off before publishing their obituaries. In 1959, Louis B. Wright, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, couldn’t resist a parting shot in ‘The Anti-Shakespeare Industry and the Growth of Cults’, in which he sneeringly described what it took to write a book that denied Shakespeare’s authorship: ‘the capacity to climb into a so
ap-bubble and soar away into Cuckoo-land’. And in 1970, the leading Shakespeare biographer, Samuel Schoenbaum, his patience sorely tested by having to slog through so many books that questioned Shakespeare’s authorship, administered what must have seemed a death-stroke in his Shakespeare’s Lives. The ‘sheer volume of heretical publication appals’, Schoenbaum writes, its ‘voluminousness … matched only by its intrinsic worthlessness’. It was ‘lunatic rubbish’, the product of ‘mania’.

  Imagine the disbelief that would have greeted a contributor to the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter in the early 1980s, who, rejecting all the hand-wringing, urged fellow Oxfordians to be patient and predicted that in twenty-five years their movement would be thriving:

  By 2010, universities in the US and UK will be offering advanced degrees in the authorship question. Stars of the stage and screen, including the likes of Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, will be standard-bearers for the Oxfordian cause. Books about Edward de Vere will once again find a place in publishers’ lists – at a time when mainstream scholars will be hard-pressed to publish monographs on Shakespeare. Children’s bookstores will stock Oxfordian titles suitable for impressionable young readers and high-school students will compete for prizes in an annual contest for the best Oxfordian essay. Prestigious magazines – including Harper’s and The Atlantic – will feature the Oxfordian cause and invite readers to choose sides in the authorship dispute. The New York Times will regularly run articles sympathetic to Oxford’s claim and eventually urge that ‘both sides’ of the authorship question be taught. National Public Radio will go a step further and devote a programme to promoting Oxford’s case. Supreme Court justices, several of whom will declare themselves committed Oxfordians – and their opposite numbers in Britain – will try the case of ‘Shakespeare v. Oxford’ in publicised moot courts (where even if we lose we’ll win, because henceforth we’ll be seen as the only viable alternative to the glover’s son from Stratford). Oxfordians will, like mainstream academics, have their own peer-reviewed literary journals, hold international conferences and be able to teach from an ‘Oxford’ edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Supporters around the world will be able to participate in discussion groups accessible to millions as well as contribute to encyclopaedia entries on the authorship question – entries compiled collectively rather than by so-called experts. And all this will come to pass without the discovery of a single new document experts would accept that confirms Oxford’s claim or undermines Shakespeare’s!

  No such letter was ever written, but everything described here, and more, has happened since 1985. The resurrection of the Oxfordian movement has been little short of miraculous – one of the most remarkable and least remarked episodes in the history of Shakespeare studies. What brought it about? Oxfordians usually point to the publication in 1984 of Charlton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare. It would be more accurate to say that Ogburn’s timely book rode the wave of some sweeping cultural changes.

  Charlton Ogburn was well connected in both the political and publishing worlds. He had seen his parents’ collaborative book on de Vere fail to generate much attention and had been disappointed once again when a follow-up book he co-authored with his mother – Shake-speare; The Man Behind the Name (1962) – met with similar neglect. The problem wasn’t with the message or the messenger; it was getting enough people, especially scholars, to listen. More aggressive measures were needed to combat what he saw as a ‘shoddy, tacit conspiracy’ on the part of the official orthodoxy.

  Ogburn elaborated on this after he was elected president of the Shakespeare Oxford Society in 1976: ‘English faculties, abetted by a generally subservient press, show how far entrenched authority can outlaw and silence dissent in a supposedly free society … We are dealing here with an intellectual Watergate, and it greatly behooves us to expose it.’ Ogburn fought back. He tried and failed to secure federal funding for Oxfordian research in England. He tried and failed to get Louis B. Wright to debate with him. He tried and failed to get the New Yorker to run an article sympathetic to the Oxfordian cause. And he tried and failed to get the Folger Library to publish his scholarship (they claimed a three-year backlog of submissions). Even as he fought for public recognition for Oxford’s candidacy, Ogburn began writing his nine-hundred-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare. The genius of his book was its interweaving de Vere’s travails with those of modern-day Oxfordians facing an ‘intellectual Watergate’ – yet one more instance of how authorities engage in conspiracy and cover-up, only, in the end, to be exposed.

  As Ogburn understood it, there were two sides to the authorship question and his side was being denied a fair hearing. He had come of age at a time in America when there was nothing one could do about that. That came to an end in the late 1940s, when a ‘fairness doctrine’ was made the law of the land – under the jurisdiction of the United States Federal Communications Commission – in order to ensure that media coverage was both fair and balanced. The doctrine was fiercely contested (for many, it ran counter to the freedoms assured by the First Amendment), and finally overturned by the mid-1980s, but by then, it had become habitual in the media to give both sides of any controversy an equal hearing. When Ogburn learned in the late 1970s that the National Geographic Society planned a television programme on Shakespeare – with Louis B. Wright, that scourge of the sceptics, involved, he appealed for equal time on the grounds of the fairness doctrine. His initial demands were ‘smiled off’, as he put it, but he persisted, since ‘under the law we had a right to time on the air to reply’. In the end, the project was shelved; but the Oxfordians were learning how to use the levers of democracy to fight back.

  Shakespeare on Trial

  Convinced that the best place to challenge academics was in court, Ogburn called for a ‘trial at law’ overseen by a ‘qualified judge’. But his opponents continued to stonewall. His strategy was not all that surprising; many of those who didn’t believe that Shakespeare was the author of the plays were lawyers and the courts had been one of the few places where sceptics had held their own. Three years after the publication of The Mysterious William Shakespeare, the Oxfordians finally had their day in court. On 25 September 1987, three United States Supreme Court Justices – William Brennan, Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens – heard their case, ‘In re Shakespeare: The Authorship of Shakespeare on Trial’, before a thousand spectators in Washington, DC. The moot court was major news, with the New York Times reporting in advance that ‘the ruling could go either way’, with the handicappers figuring that Brennan, the most liberal of the three, would lean toward Oxford, Blackmun ‘likely to be torn by the decision’ and the ruling of an ‘enigmatic’ Stevens difficult to predict. David Lloyd Kreeger had made it happen; member of the US Supreme Court Bar and Chairman of the Board of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, he was happy to bankroll the event.

  Brennan, serving as chief justice, surprised Blackmun and Stevens by declaring at the outset that the burden was on the Oxford side to prove its case – then overrode Blackmun’s objection that ‘you didn’t clear that with the rest of us’. The deck was now stacked in Shakespeare’s favour. Arguments were presented in the morning and the justices deliberated at midday. They handed down their decision that afternoon. Brennan spoke first, ruling that the Oxford side ‘did not prove that he was the author of the plays’. Blackmun, who spoke next, conceded that while he agreed that this was the ‘legal answer … whether it is the correct one causes me greater doubt than I think it does Justice Brennan’. Stevens also ruled for Shakespeare, making the judgement unanimous, but added a significant qualification: ‘If the author was not the man from Stratford, then there is a high probability that it was Edward de Vere … I think the evidence against the others is conclusive.’

  The Oxfordians had failed to convince them that de Vere, who died in 1604, could have been the author of plays written after that date. The justices also make clear that they believed that the case before them was essentially ‘a conspiracy theory’ – bu
t the various accounts of why this conspiracy took place were incoherent and unpersuasive. For some Oxfordians, it had been a private arrangement known only to de Vere and Shakespeare. For others, it was a far-ranging plot, beginning with the Queen and extending through the Earl of Derby and Ben Jonson’s active roles in maintaining the hoax. Still others were sure that it was common knowledge, with so many Elizabethans aware that de Vere was the true author of the plays that nobody even bothered commenting on it. And of course, there were those convinced of the politically motivated Prince Tudor theory. There was no consensus and little likelihood of arriving at one. The Oxfordians had nonetheless succeeded in raising serious doubts in the minds of the justices about Shakespeare’s authorship. Stevens in particular found the evidence in Shakespeare’s favour ‘somewhat ambiguous’, adding that ‘one would expect to find more references in people’s diaries or correspondence about having seen Shakespeare somewhere or talked to someone who had seen him’. He was left with a ‘sort of gnawing uncertainty’.

  At the end of the moot court, Stevens unexpectedly turned to the disappointed Oxfordians and offered them ‘a bit of advice’: ‘I would like to suggest that the Oxfordian case suffers from not having a single, coherent theory of the case.’ Stevens had a solution: ‘In my opinion, the strongest theory of the case requires an assumption for some reason we don’t understand, that the Queen and Prime Minister [sic] decided: “We want this man to be writing plays under a pseudonym.”’ If they wanted to prevail, the Oxfordians had best scrap their confusing and contradictory accounts of the conspiracy and stick to the defensible claim that de Vere’s secrecy was the result of an executive order, ‘a command from the monarch’.