Contested Will (30 page)

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:

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 submission 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?

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.

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 Douglas 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'.

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:

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.