For the composition of Is Shakespeare Dead? see Mark Twain, ‘Autobiographical Dictation, 11 January 1909’, Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library; Berret, Mark Twain and Shakespeare; Isabel Lyon, ‘Holograph notes on books by S. L. Clemens’; Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography; and Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography (New York, 1909). Twain complained to Macy that Booth made his case poorly. He wrote to him on 27 March 1909 that he himself had trouble with the acrostics, and, more damagingly,
[the] typical reader will puzzle over ten (10) acrostics, suffer defeat, and deliver his verdict to any that will listen: ‘The acrostics are not there’ – and he will not examine another one. It is too bad, too bad, too bad! With the acrostic letter indicated for him, the unconverted could be converted – but not by any other process.
(Helen Keller Archives, American Federation for the Blind, Box 50,
Folder 12).
Twain’s description of Tichborne’s background and upbringing, written in the margins of a blank page of Greenwood’s book, overlaps at many points with his sense of the background and attributes of the true author of Shakespeare’s plays; see Mark Twain’s copy of George Greenwood, The Shakespeare Problem Restated in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. His comments on the Tichborne trial appear in his Following the Equator (New York, 1897). For more on the case, see Rohan McWilliam, The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (London, 2007).
Fiedler is quoted in Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (Chicago, 1989). Twain’s view of Keller and Sullivan is found in Nella Braddy, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller (Garden City, New York, 1933). And see Leslie A. Fiedler, ‘Afterword’, in Mark Twain, 1601, and Is Shakespeare Dead? ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York, 1996), as well as Gillman, Dark Twins, for Twain on twins and impostures. Twain’s interest in whether Queen Elizabeth was a man is recounted in Henry W. Fisher, Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field: Tales They Told to a Fellow Correspondent (New York, 1922). And his sceptical remarks about Shakespeare’s authorship can be found littered throughout his copy of Greenwood’s The Shakespeare Problem Restated. Also of interest is Twain’s late claim, in an imaginary dialogue, that ‘Shakespeare created nothing,’ in ‘What Is Man?’ published by Twain in 1905, begun, he says, around 1880, reprinted in Mark Twain, Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1891–1910, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York, 1992).
Twain prefaced Pudd’nhead Wilson with a fascinating ‘A Whisper to the Reader’ that directly addresses the question of an author’s limited legal knowledge; see Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1893–4; New York, 1922). See too Daniel J. Kornstein, ‘Mark Twain’s Evidence: The Never-Ending Riverboat Debate’, from the ‘Symposium: Who Wrote Shakespeare? An Evidentiary Puzzle’, Tennessee Law Review 72 (2004). For more on Twain’s plagiarism, see A Bibliography of the Works of Mark Twain, by Merle Johnson (Folcroft, Pennsylvania, 1935). See too Twain’s letter to Macy on 25 February 1909, Helen Keller Archives, American Foundation for the Blind, Box 50, Folder 12, as well as Michael Bristol, ‘Sir George Greenwood’s Marginalia in the Folger Copy of Mark Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead?’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998), pp. 411–16.
On the publication and aftermath of Is Shakespeare Dead?, see Lyon’s ‘Holograph notes’; Hill, Mark Twain, God’s Fool; Fiedler, ‘Afterword’; Alan Gribben, ‘Autobiography as Property’; Justin Kaplan, Mark Twain and His World (New York, 1974); Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Louis J. Budd (Cambridge, 1999), and especially Eugene H. Angert’s withering review, ‘Is Mark Twain Dead?’ in The North American Review 190 (September 1909). I am grateful to William Sherman for sharing with me Macy’s letter about ‘Shake and Bake’: Macy to Walter Conrad Arensberg, 20 October 1926, Arensberg Francis Bacon Collection, Henry E. Huntingon Library. For the afterlife of the cipher hunters, see Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives; Virginia M. Fellows, The Shakespeare Code (Gardiner, Montana, 2006); Friedman and Friedman, The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined; and, for Friedman’s military work, Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination and Ronald Clark, The Man Who Broke Purple: A Life of the World’s Greatest Cryptographer (Boston, 1977). For Twain’s defence of Is Shakespeare Dead?, see his brief letter to M. B. Colcord in May 1909, Folger MS. Y.c.545.
HENRY JAMES
For James’s instructions to his literary executor, see Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York, 1985). The reference to Peyster is found in Churchill, Shakespeare and His Betters. William James’s letter to C. E. Norton, 4 May 1902, is quoted in Shakespeare Fellowship Newsletter (September 1953). For James’s notebook entry for the anecdote that was the basis of ‘The Birthplace’, see Tony Tanner, ‘The Birthplace’, in N. H. Reeves, Henry James, The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments (New York, 1997), pp. 77–94. For the published story, see Henry James, The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (New York, 1909).
For James’s correspondence on Shakespeare’s authorship, see Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); Henry James: Letters. Volume IV, 1895–1916, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); and The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920). I am grateful to Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, editors of The Complete Letters of Henry James, for their help in securing copies of original letters. For the book to which James is clearly referring, see Judge Thomas Ebenezer Webb, The Mystery of William Shakespeare: A Summary of Evidence (London, 1902).
Henry James was also aware of the cipher hunters and a character in his story ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ stops short of dismissing the possibility of a cryptic author out of hand: ‘He was like nothing, I told him, but the maniacs who embrace some bedlamatical theory of the cryptic character of Shakespeare. To this he replied that if we had had Shakespeare’s own word for his being cryptic he would immediately have accepted it’ (Henry James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, in vol. 2 of Henry James’ Shorter Masterpieces, ed. Peter Rawlings (Sussex, 1984). And for James’s visit to his own birthplace, see Henry James, The American Scene, in Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, ed. Richard Howard (New York, 1993). The source for many of my references here, as well as my argument, draws on Gordon McMullan’s illuminating discussion on Henry James and the ‘elusive late Shakespeare’ in Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (Cambridge, 2007). For Orcutt’s conversation with James, see William Dana Orcutt, ‘Celebrities Off Parade: Henry James’, the editorial page of The Christian Science Monitor, 23 August 1934. For James on The Tempest, see his Introduction to The Tempest in vol. 8 of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Sidney Lee (New York, 1907).
For readings of James on Shakespeare that I have found unusually helpful, see Nina Schwartz, ‘The Master Lesson: James Reading Shakespeare’, Henry James Review 12 (1991), pp. 69–83; William T. Stafford, ‘James Examines Shakespeare: Notes on the Nature of Genius’, PMLA 73 (1958), pp. 123–8; Neil Chilton, ‘Conceptions of a Beautiful Crisis: Henry James’s Reading of The Tempest’, in Henry James Review 26 (Fall 2005), pp. 218–28; Peter Rawlings, Henry James and the Abuse of the Past (New York, 2005); Lauren T. Cowdery, ‘Henry James and the “Transcendent Adventure”: The Search for the Self in the Introduction to The Tempest’, Henry James Review 3 (Winter 1982), pp. 145–53; and Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (Oxford, 1992). James was approached in November 1915 by members of the British Academy to lecture on the occasion of the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. But by then, James was far too ill – and wrote back that the ‘kind invitation … comes, alas, too late’. He would take to the grave his final thoughts on the subject (see Philip Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters [London, 1999]).
OXFORD
FREUD
See Smiley Blanton, Diary of My Analysis with Sigmund Freud, with biographical notes and comments by Margaret Gray Blanton (New York, 1971). For his correspondence with Freud, see the Margaret Gray Blanton
Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin, MSS 93, Box 13, Folder 2. See too, the Margaret Gray and Smiley Blanton Collection, MS-0739, University of Tennessee, Special Collections Library, Knoxville, Tennessee. Brunswick’s brief obituary appeared in Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly 7 (1946); for more about her, see Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (New York, 2000). The copy of Looney’s book that Brunswick gave Freud survives as part of the library Freud took with him to London when he fled Vienna. See Harry Trosman and Roger Dennis Simmons, ‘The Freud Library’, Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association 21 (1973), pp. 646–87.
For Freud and the authorship question, see Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols (New York, 1953–7) on which I rely heavily; see too, Peter Gay, Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments (New Haven, 1990), and Harry Trousman, ‘Freud and the Controversy over Shakespearean Authorship’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 13 (1965). For Freud’s views on Shakespeare, see The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, 24 vols (London, 1953–74); for his correspondence with Strachey, see Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–1925, ed. Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick (New York, 1985). Freud would have consulted the 1895–6 Munich edition of Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare; I quote from the English version, William Shakespeare, translated from the Danish by William Archer, Mary Morison and Diana White (New York, 1935). For Freud’s letters to Fliess – including the ones from 2 November 1896, 12 June 1897, and the crucial ones of 21 September 1897 and 15 October 1897 – see The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). Freud had seen the world through Hamlet’s eyes as early as 1872, writing to a friend about his inhibitions (when he was uncertain whether he was more attracted to a girl or to her mother) as ‘the nonsensical Hamlet in me, my diffidence’ (letter of 4 September 1872, in The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, ed. Walter Boehlich and trans. Arnold J. Pomerans [Cambridge, Mass, 1990]).
For Ernest Jones’s judgement, see his Hamlet and Oedipus (New York, 1954). Freud was more comfortable crediting the creative artists whose work both anticipated and confirmed his own: ‘Not I, but the poets discovered the unconscious’ (Norman N. Holland, ‘Freud on Shakespeare’, PMLA 75 [1960], pp. 163–73). It wasn’t until the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1908 that Freud belatedly acknowledged his trans-formative insight ‘revealed itself to me as a piece of my self-analysis, as my reaction to my father’s death; that is, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, in a man’s life’. As Jonathan Crewe has astutely argued, ‘Hamlet rather than Oedipus Rex [is] the crucial “Freudian” work, since it is in relation to it rather than the Greek play that the discovery of the oedipal structure of unconscious desire can be (re) effected’ – his unpublished insight (for a paper, ‘Naught so Damned’) is quoted in Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, New York, 1993). See too, Peter L. Rudnytsky, Freud and Oedipus (New York, 1987).
On the response to the theory by Freud’s disciples, see Ludwig Binswanger, Sigmund Freud: Reminiscences of a Friendship, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York, 1957). Binswanger was at first surprised to hear a fictional character treated as if he were a real person – but was reassured when he learned of the biographical foundations of this claim, for, he writes, ‘Freud later told me personally a short life story of Shakespeare, from which it is easy to see that Shakespeare – as whom, indeed, we must always see Hamlet – had a severe mother complex’ (Freud/Binswanger Correspondence, ed. Gerhard Fichtner and trans. Arnold J. Pomerans [London, 2003]).
For the basis of Brandes’s reversal, see Gabriel Harvey’s reference to Edmund Spenser (who died in January 1599) as well as to the Earl of Essex (executed in early 1601, before Shakespeare’s father died) as if they were both still alive. Freud also tells Jones about Brandes’s source, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913). Freud is here translating into English from Georg Brandes, Miniaturen, trans. Erich Holm [pseud.] (Berlin, 1919). For Freud’s correspondence with Jones, see The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). For more on the dating of Hamlet at the time, see the fourth edition of Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (London, 1928), and Leo Kirschenbaum, ‘The Date of Hamlet’, Studies in Philology 34 (1937).
Jones was also troubled by another, even messier Hamlet problem, precisely when the Oedipal dimensions were added to the story, for it now looked likely that they were already present in the version conventionally attributed to Thomas Kyd, written long before Shakespeare’s father – and for that matter his son Hamnet – had died (see Jones’s letter to Freud, 3 February 1921). For Freud and the Chandos portrait, see Michael Molnar, ‘Sigmund Freud’s Notes on Faces and Men: National Portrait Gallery, September 13, 1908’, in Freud: Conflict and Culture, ed. Michael S. Roth (New York, 1998). The full phrase reads: ‘Face is race, family, and constitutional predisposition.’ See Jones and their correspondence on Freud’s view of Shakespeare’s French origins. And for Freud on Bacon and authorship, see A. Bronson Feldman, ‘Confessions of William Shakespeare’, American Imago 10 (1953). The complicated wording of Freud’s remarks to Eitingon, prompted by the publication of a recent essay on the Bacon question, are ambiguous enough to justify quoting in the original: ‘Interessanter war mir ein vorstehender Aufsatz über Bacon-Shakespeare. Dies Thema und das Okkulte bringen mich immer etwas aus der Fassung. Meine Neigung geht durchaus auf die Verneinung. Ich glaube an ein paranoides Wahnsystem, ob bei den Autoren oder bei Bacon selbst?’ From the letter of 13 November 1922, in Sigmund Freud / Max Eitingon, Briefwechsel, 1906–1939, ed. Michael Schröter (Berlin, 2004).
LOONEY
I quote or draw upon the following documents on the Religion of Humanity in these opening paragraphs: Religion of Humanity (London: Church of Humanity, 1898); Malcolm Quin, A Final Circular Addressed to the Supporters of His Religious Action (Newcastle, 1910); Vernon Lushington, Shakespeare. An Address Delivered to the Positivist Society of London on the 2nd of August 1885 (18 Dante 97), at Stratford-upon-Avon (London, 1885); Frederic Harrison, ed., The New Calendar of Great Men: Biographies of the 558 Worthies of All Ages and Nations in the Positivist Calendar of Auguste Comte (London, 1892).
For background on Comte, I have drawn on Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Comte (New York, 1962); Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (London, 1954); Arline Reilein Standley, Auguste Comte (Boston, 1981); John Edwin McGee, A Crusade for Humanity: The History of Organized Positivism in England (London, 1931); and especially T. R. Wright’s illuminating The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 1986). See too, his ‘Positively Catholic: Malcolm Quin’s Church of Humanity in Newcastle on Tyne’, Durham University Journal 75 (1983), pp. 11–20.
For Looney’s destination to the priesthood, see British Library Add. 43844, fol. 62. For Quin on Looney, see Malcolm Quin, A Special Circular, Addressed to the Members and Supporters of the Positivist Church and Apostolate of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and to Other Adherents of the Religion of Humanity (Newcastle?, 10 October 1901/3 Descartes 47); Malcolm Quin, Religion of Humanity. Second Annual Circulate Addressed to Members and Supporters of the Positivist Church and Apostolate of Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the Year 46 (Newcastle?, 1900); and Malcolm Quin, Religion of Humanity. Third Annual Circulate Addressed to Members of the Positivist Church and Apostolate of Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the Year 47 (Newcastle?, 1901?). Quin’s Positivist writings on the Religion of Humanity, some of which – including those that mention Looney – are rare, can be found at Keele University. For more on Quin, in addition to McGee and Wright, see Quin, Memoirs of a Positivist
(London, 1924).
For Virginia Woolf ’s observation about 1910, see her essay ‘Character and Fiction’ which first appeared in Criterion in July 1924. For Oxfordian sketches of Looney, see Percy Allen, Shakespeare Fellowship News-letter (May 1944); Looney provides additional information in a letter to Charles Wisner Barrell, 6 June 1937, Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly (June 1944). Also helpful is the brief summary of Looney’s career in vol. 1 of the third edition of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified, ed. Ruth Lloyd Miller (Jennings, Louisiana, 1975). See too, Hope and Holston, The Shakespeare Controversy; and ‘Discoverer of the True Shakespeare Passes’, The Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly 5 (1944), pp. 18–23. Finally, see Looney’s letters to Congreve about his intellectual background: British Library Add. MSS 45,240, ff. 180–5, and British Library Add. 43,844, fol. 62. All this is in addition to what Looney says about himself in J. Thomas Looney, ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (London, 1920).
For Ogburn’s remark, see The Mysterious William Shakespeare (the italics are mine). For the appeal of portraying Looney as a teacher, see, for example, Eddi Jolly’s ‘An Introduction to the Oxfordian Case’, which begins: ‘Nearly one hundred years ago, a schoolteacher, who had taught the plays of Shakespeare for many years, became convinced that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, was not their author,’ in Great Oxford: Essays on the Life and Work of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford 1550–1604, ed. Richard Malim (Tunbridge Wells, 2004). In later years Looney had misgivings about the exaggerated role he had assigned to his teaching rather than his Positivist convictions in the formation of ‘Shakespeare’ Identified, and told his followers that he ‘would place professional studies and duties amongst the minor factors of my education and preparation for this particular piece of work’ (Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly 5 [June 1944]).
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