Contested Will (49 page)

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]).

Surveying the field of Shakespeare studies in the early pages of
‘Shakespeare' Identified
, Looney approves of the growing ‘tendency to put aside the old conception of a writer creating everything by the vigour of his imagination, and to regard the writings as reflecting the personality and experiences of the author'. Cecil Palmer's comments about the state of Looney's submitted manuscript appear in
Shakespeare Fellowship Newsletter
(March 1952). For Congreve's influence on Looney's view of Elizabethan politics, see Richard Congreve,
Elizabeth of England
(London, 1862), and his
Historical Lectures
(London, 1900). Strachey's remarks about
The Tempest
are quoted from Lytton Strachey, ‘Shakespeare's Final Period',
Books and
Characters
(New York, 1922), pp. 64–9; the essay first appeared in
The
Independent Review
in 1906.

For the destruction of unsold copies of Looney's book during the war, see Hope and Holston,
The Shakespeare Controversy
. For more on Looney's vision of the Second World War, see his letter to Eva Turner Clark, quoted in the
Shakespeare Fellowship News-letter
1 (1940): ‘To me, however, it does not appear to be a struggle between democracy and dictatorship so much as between material force and spiritual interests.' On 10 June 1939 Looney had made clear his explicit disgust with the Nazis: ‘In the centuries that lie ahead, when the words Nazi and Hitler are remembered only with feelings of disgust and aversion and as synonyms for cruelty and bad faith, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson & Shelly [sic] will continue to be honoured as expressions of what is most enduring and characteristic of Humanity' (as quoted in vol. 1 of the third edition of Looney,
‘Shakespeare' Identified
). See Looney's letter to Flodden W. Heron of San Francisco, of 5 July 1941, which is partially reprinted in ‘A Great Pioneer's Ideas on Intellectual Freedom',
Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly
6 (1945).

See vol. 3 of Jones,
Life and Work
as well as the
Correspondence of Freud and
Jones
, especially the letters of 7 March 1928, 11 March 1928, 29 April 1928 and 3 May 1928. It's uncertain when Freud first read Looney's book; Jones says ‘some ten years' after 1913, or roughly 1923 (
Life and Works
, vol. 3); Peter Gay, who seems to have overlooked this passage in Jones, argues for a later date, perhaps 1926 (
Reading Freud
). And see Strachey,
Bloomsbury/Freud
, for the letter of 25 December 1928. And yet in the next sentence Freud, who apparently wants to have it both ways, is unwilling to relinquish his notion, which Looney would have sharply challenged, that Oxford ‘certainly emerges in Hamlet as the first modern neurotic'. Peter Gay,
Freud: A Life for Our Time
(New York, 1998), provides information about Ernst Brücke and Positivism. For Freud's correspondence with Reik, see Theodor Reik,
The Search Within:
The Inner Experiences of a Psychoanalyst
(New York, 1956).

For Freud's later thoughts on the seduction theory (including his belief that the fantasies were connected not with the father but with the mother, and that actual ‘seducers turned out as a rule to have been older children') see Freud's 1924 ‘An Autobiographical Study' as well as his paper on ‘Female Sexuality' (1931). For his further exploration of the workings of the Oedipal theory, see, especially ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipal Complex' (1924), all of which can be found in the standard edition of his works. For a more qualified view of Freud's rejection of the seduction theory in favour of an Oedipal one, see Paul Robinson,
Freud and his Critics
(Berkeley, 1993).

For the exchange with Sachs, see Hanns Sachs,
Freud: Master and Friend
(Cambridge, Mass., 1944), and with Zweig, see
The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig
, ed. Ernest L. Freud and trans. Elaine and William Robson-Scott (New York, 1970). See too Richard Flatter, ‘Sigmund Freud on Shakespeare',
Shakespeare Quarterly
2 (1951), pp. 368–9; H. R. Woudhuysen, ‘A Freudian Oxfordian',
Times Literary Supplement
20–26 April 1990; and Freud's letter to James S. H. Branson, 25 March 1934, reproduced in ‘Appendix A' of Jones,
Life and Works
.

Freud's letter in English to Smiley Blanton of 20 December 1937 can be found in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society, The Margaret Gray Blanton Papers, MSS 93, Box 13, Folder 2. Freud would amend his long-held views on
Hamlet
and advocate Oxford's authorship first in a footnote added in 1930 to
The Interpretation of Dreams
; then in a footnote to
Moses and Monotheism
(1939); and, finally, in a posthumous 1940 edition of his
Outline of Psychoanalysis
.

Freud added a footnote to
An Autobiographical Study
in 1935 in which he writes:

His translator James Strachey was ‘taken aback' at this and asked Freud to ‘reconsider' in part because of Looney's ‘unfortunate name'. Freud wrote back sharply on 29 August 1935, saying ‘I cannot understand the English attitude to this question: Edward de Vere was as good an Englishman as Will Shakspere.' While willing to accede to Strachey's request for the English edition, he asks that the note be included in the American edition, where the ‘same sort of narcissistic defence need not be feared'.

I quote from Freud's account of ‘the ideals of Hitlerism' from his letter to Marie Bonaparte, quoted in Giovanni Costigan,
Sigmund Freud: A Short
Biography
(New York, 1965). See too his letter of 7 April 1933 to Ernest Jones in their
Correspondence
. Freud's description of himself as Looney's ‘follower' is quoted from A. Bronson Feldman, ‘Confessions of William Shakespeare'. Looney's daughter's account appears in Percy Allen, ‘John Thomas Looney (1870–1944)',
Shakespeare Fellowship Newsletter
(May 1944). For Looney's letter to Freud of 15 July 1938, see J. Thomas Looney to Sigmund Freud, Container number 36, Sigmund Freud Papers, Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

For the rise of various aristocratic candidates, see Churchill,
Shakespeare and
His Betters
; Gibson,
Shakespeare Claimants
; Michell,
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
; and Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare's Lives
. For Sherlock Holmes, see Claud W. Sykes,
Alias William Shakespeare?
(London, 1947). The first to develop the argument for Derby was James Greenstreet, ‘A Hitherto Unknown Noble Author of Elizabethan Comedies' (July 1891), ‘Further Notices of William Stanley' (January 1892), and ‘Testimonies against the Accepted Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays' (May 1892), all published in
The Genealogist
. But it wasn't until 1915 that the case for Derby was fully articulated. Latham Davis made the case for Essex in
Shake-speare: England's Ulysses
(Seaford, Delaware, 1905); J. C. Nicol argued for Southampton's solo authorship in
The Real Shakespeare
(London, 1905). For the Derbyites, see especially: Robert Frazer,
The Silent Shakespeare
(Philadelphia, 1915) and Abel Lefranc,
Sous le masque de William Shakespeare: William Stanley, Vie Comte de Derby
, 2 vols (Paris, 1919). Burkhard Hermann (writing under the name Peter Alvor)
first proposed in 1906 that Rutland wrote the comedies, Southampton the tragedies and histories. Rutland's solo authorship was then urged in the introduction to the German play
Der wahre Shakespeare
, by Carl Bleibtreu, who followed that up two years later with
Die Lösung der Shakespearefrage
in 1909 and again with
Shakespeares Geheimnis
(Berne, 1923). Rutland's greatest advocate was Célestin Demblon, who in 1912 published
Lord Rutland est
Shakespeare
and two years later
L'Auteur d'Hamlet et son monde
(Paris, 1914). For the earliest claim about Marlowe's role in writing Shakespeare's plays, see Wilbur G. Zeigler,
It Was Marlowe
(Chicago, 1895).

For Freud's high regard for Turner's scholarship, see his letter of 20 December 1937 to Smiley Blanton in the Wisconsin Historical Society, The Margaret Gray Blanton Papers, MSS 93, Box 13, Folder 2. For Looney's essay on
The Merry Wives
, see J. Thomas Looney, ‘The Earl of Oxford as “Shakespeare”: New Evidence',
The Golden Hind
(1922), pp. 23–30. For biographical facts about de Vere's life, see Alan H. Nelson's entry in the
Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography
, as well as his biography,
Monstrous
Adversary: the Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
(Liverpool, 2003). David Chandler is one of the few critics to consider Oxfordian methodology; see his ‘Historicizing Difference: Anti-Stratfordians and the Academy',
Elizabethan Review
(1991). That electronic journal is now defunct, but his important article can be found at: web.archive.org/web/20060506133739/ http://www.jmucci.com/ER/articles/chandler.htm.

For the founding of the Shakespeare Fellowship, see B. R. Ward,
The
Mystery of ‘Mr. W. H
.' (London, 1923);
Shakespeare Authorship Review
1 (1959); as well as the archives of Brunel University, which includes the original Shakespeare Fellowship list of members, ‘Shakespeare Fellowship Library' (SAT-0067, Brunel University). For Charles Wisner Barrell, see ‘Identifying “Shakespeare”',
Scientific American
(January 1940), as well as Ogburn,
The Mysterious William Shakespeare
. For Leslie Howard, see Hope and Holston,
The Shakespeare Controversy
. Looney's words about circumstantial evidence, as well as his views of Oxford's links to other poets, appear in his edition of
The Poems of Edward De Vere
(London, 1921); his letter of 1927 to Mr Hadder is reprinted in the
Shakespeare Fellowship Newsletter
(September 1952). For an extended list of works of other writers reattributed by various supporters to Oxford, see, for example, Paul Streitz,
Oxford: Son
of Queen Elizabeth I
(Darien, Connecticut, 2001); see too The Oxford Authorship Site, www.oxford-shakespeare.com; and more recently,
Oxfordian
editor Stephanie Hughes's claims in ‘Beyond the Authorship Question: Was Shakespeare Only the Beginning?',
Shakespeare Matters
4 (Spring 2005).

For the episode in which Marlowe's works were attributed to Shakespeare in the early nineteenth century, see David Chandler, ‘Marlowe: A Hoax by William Taylor',
Notes and Queries
239 (June 1994), 220–2. For the claim that Looney's work eschewed ciphers, see the advertisement in Looney's edition of the
Poems of Edward de Vere
. For George Frisbee's findings, see his
Edward de Vere: A Great Elizabethan
(London, 1931). Looney's remarks about Allen are recorded in his letter to Joan Violet Robinson, 3 September 1933, published in Christopher Paul, ‘A New Letter by J. T. Looney Brought to Light',
Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter
43 (Summer 2007). For Freud on Allen, see Woudhuysen, ‘A Freudian Oxfordian'.

For more on the Prince Tudor theories, see Ogburn,
The Mysterious
William Shakespeare
; Ogburn's letter to the editor of
The Elizabethan
Review
, 5.1 (Spring 1997); and Paul H. Altrocchi, ‘A Royal Shame: The Origins and History of the Prince Tudor Theory',
Shakespeare Matters
4 (Summer, 2005). For the origins of the theory, see Percy Allen,
Lord Oxford
and Shakespeare: A Reply to John Drinkwater
(London, 1933) and Allen's collaboration with B. M. Ward,
An Enquiry into the Relations between Lord
Oxford as ‘Shakespeare,' Queen Elizabeth and the Fair Youth of Shakespeare's
Sonnets
(London, 1936).

For Prince Tudor, Part II, see Paul Streitz,
Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth
I
. As incestuous as these relationships are, Streitz drew a firm line when it comes to any homoerotic affection on Oxford's part toward his son and half-brother Southampton. Streitz provides a useful lineage extending from the union of Elizabeth and Seymour, then Elizabeth and Oxford, down through Southampton, leading in a direct line to Princess Diana. For an Oxfordian critique of the theory, see Christopher Paul, ‘The Prince Tudor Dilemma: Hip Thesis, Hypothesis or Old Wives' Tale?',
Oxfordian
5 (2002), pp. 47–69. For Roger Stritmatter's remarks, see
The Oxfordian
2 (1999).