Contested Will (26 page)

Freud's conviction that the author of
Hamlet
had written the play in the aftermath of an Oedipal struggle remained unshaken; but the revised dating of the play now called Shakespeare of Stratford's authorship into question. Perhaps some conspiracy had taken place after all, and ‘Shakespeare' was a pseudonym. That might explain why he and his disciples had had so little success in psychoanalytic explorations of the rest of the canon: besides
Hamlet
, only
Macbeth, Lear
and
The Merchant of Venice
had yielded much, and these analyses were nowhere near as groundbreaking.

Freud's doubts were exacerbated by his longstanding difficulties reconciling the facts of Shakespeare's humble origins with the worldliness one expects of such a genius. As he admitted in
Civilization and Its Discontents
, his sense of the ‘cultural level' of so accomplished an artist as Shakespeare was hard to reconcile with that of a man who grew up with ‘a tall dungheap in front of his father's house in Stratford'. When Freud stood face to face with the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in England on a visit there in 1908 his doubts about the playwright's Warwickshire roots only grew stronger, for he saw Latin rather than English features staring back at him. He recorded that ‘Shakespeare looks completely exceptional, completely un-English,' and that ‘face is race'. Freud began to suspect that Shakespeare was of French descent, his name a corruption of ‘Jacques Pierre'. As Jones ruefully noted after Freud became an Oxfordian, the Earl of Oxford's family name, de Vere, was a
Norman name, which reinforced Freud's belief that the writer of the plays was not, originally, of English extraction. It seems that Freud was never quite able to shake those doubts first raised by Meynert – though he could never reconcile himself to the possibility that Bacon wrote the plays. It was a mystery, still waiting to be solved. Not long after his exchange with Jones in 1921 over the dating of
Hamlet
, Freud confessed to his friend and disciple Max Eitingon that he had always been thrown by the authorship controversy, as he was by the occult. As badly as Freud, now aged sixty-five, wanted to resolve the authorship question, he just wasn't sure. His words to Eitingon – half declaration, half question – capture this indecision: ‘I believe in a conspiracy then, whether concerning the authors or Bacon himself?'

John Thomas Looney

Many in the closing years of the nineteenth century admired Shakespeare (as Ben Jonson first put it) ‘this side idolatry'; a handful crossed over to the other side. Among them were the congregants of a small branch of the Religion of Humanity in Newcastle upon Tyne, who sang hymns in praise not of God but of Shakespeare and other ‘religious teachers of mankind'. Their
prayer-book included an ‘Act of Commemoration' venerating those who ‘have raised Humanity from her original weakness to her actual power' – with Homer, Dante and Shakespeare mentioned in the same breath as Moses and St Paul.

Shakespeare's familiar visage could be seen among the Church of Humanity's ‘customary … busts and symbols' adorning their house of worship. In their revised calendar, they celebrated a month called Shakespeare, which fell, every autumn, between the months of Gutenberg and Descartes. Some years earlier, members of the Religion of Humanity who were based in London had even travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon ‘as pilgrims, to render homage to Shakespeare'. The entry on Shakespeare that appeared in the movement's
New Calendar of Great Men
offers some insight into why they worshipped Shakespeare, who both anticipated and embodied their church's precepts. Their Shakespeare was ‘born into a society still rich with the outward and inward beauty created by centuries of Catholic Feudalism'. Yet while he admired the conservative ethos of this ‘decaying' medieval world, their Shakespeare was nonetheless ‘in small sympathy with any official Christianity which he knew, or with the intriguing politicians around the Tudor throne'. Though ‘no lover of war', Shakespeare was ‘certainly a fervent lover of his country's inward peace'. His plays, moreover, did ‘not pretend to be religious and no religion can claim them but the Religion of Humanity', for ‘he took the Human Soul to be his province'.

Cut through the pious language and theirs was a post-Catholic, nationalistic, reactionary Shakespeare, deeply invested in degree, nostalgic for a world in which everyone knew his and her place. Shakespeare was a key transitional figure in their history of human progress, rooted in a traditional past yet capable of glimpsing the future; while he ‘could not reach the conception of social and moral science, he stretched out eager hands towards it'. What was true of Shakespeare held equally true of his greatest character. Like Shakespeare, who ‘lived sufficiently near to the moral order bequeathed by the Middle Ages to spontaneously submit himself
to much of it', Hamlet recognised the importance of submission. For what else could Hamlet have meant when reflecting on ‘What is a man?' other than an acknowledgement that ‘selfish desires are unceasingly striving to prevail' and ‘need control – not only individual control, they need social control; above all, religious control'.

The churchgoers in Newcastle and the pilgrims to Stratford were English Positivists, adherents of a newly formed Religion of Humanity modelled on the teachings of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Though Comte's work goes largely unread today, in late nineteenth-century Europe, especially in Victorian England, his influence was extraordinary. The hallmark of Comte's work was a commitment to progress and order. Having grown up in the wake of the French Revolution, Comte retained a lifelong aversion to anarchy. Early on, he had lost his faith in the Catholic Church as well as in a metaphysical God. Reconciling the principles of religion, science and morality for Comte came at a steep but acceptable price – one that John Stuart Mill (who corresponded with him) summed up in his essay
On Liberty
as ‘a despotism of society over the individual'. Comte's late work took a religious turn – progress now took a back seat to order – as he conceived of a Religion of Humanity that would replace the worship of God. If Humanity was to be worshipped, a formal religion with sacraments, ceremony, secular saints, festivals, a religious calendar and a priesthood had to be invented, or rather cobbled together out of bits and pieces of traditional Christian practices (no wonder that Comte's Positivist Church was mocked by T. H. Huxley as ‘Catholicism
minus
Christianity').

Most of Comte's English disciples were Oxford-trained intellectuals interested in promoting the philosophical and political principles systemised in his early writings; they steered clear of the spiritual drift of the late Comte. A smaller and less visible English faction focused its energies on establishing a church that would promote Comte's Religion of Humanity. Despite their shared loyalty to Comte's Positivist principles, by 1878 the differences between the two groups had become unbridgeable and they went
their separate ways. It is the less influential and short-lived sect, led by Richard Congreve, that concerns us here.

Within a few short years, Congreve transformed what had been a ‘Positivist School' into a ‘Church of Humanity' and designated himself as the movement's highest priest. Under his leadership, Sunday meetings became Sunday worship, and a liturgy, festivals and sacraments, based on Comte's principles and calendar, were put in place. In an effort to win more converts, Congreve supported satellite churches in a half-dozen or so English cities. Conversions were few, especially among members of the working class, and expansion painfully slow. A small outpost was established in Newcastle in 1882, thanks to the efforts of Malcolm Quin, an energetic and ambitious convert who built up the congregation over the next two decades.

In 1899, Congreve suddenly died – and Quin soon after tried to wrest control of the national movement, based in London. He wasn't going to leave his Newcastle flock leaderless, however, and announced in October 1901 that he had hand-picked as his successor the twenty-nine-year-old J. T. Looney, a congregant who had been ‘destined to the priesthood by Dr. Congreve' himself. Indeed, Congreve's final Sacramental Address had been delivered while presiding over Looney's ‘Destination to the Priesthood' on Easter Sunday 1899. Looney, Quin adds, has already provided ‘occasional assistance' in his ‘Apostolic work', and ‘is prepared to assume the charge of the Newcastle Church and Apostolate'. Quin also hoped that eventually enough money would be raised to support him, ‘for it would be to the advantage of our cause to free Mr. Looney for the prosecution of his studies, and the continuance of our northern propaganda'.

Quin's attempted coup failed and he resumed his leadership role in Newcastle. Looney's great moment, his promotion to priestly leader of the Newcastle congregation, had come and gone. Congreve's death marked the beginning of the end of the movement. Over the new few years Looney helped Quin out with ‘public teaching' and even tried to establish his own flock by
undertaking what no English Positivist had done before, ‘open-air preaching' in the marketplace of the nearby town of Blyth. Looney was praised for his ‘courageous initiative in a new field and method of Positivist propaganda'. It was also reported that his preaching was ‘patiently and sympathetically listened to by large audiences'. But little or nothing came of his efforts to win converts.

The Church of Humanity never recovered from its succession crisis. In retaliation for Quin's actions, the London membership cut off funding to the provincial churches and by 1904 these began to close down, with the Newcastle branch one of the last to fold. Alienated members had already begun drifting away from a movement in steep decline. In 1910 the doors finally shut on the Newcastle church and the site was ‘taken over by the Jews, who built a synagogue on it'. Shakespeare's bust, along with most of the others, was donated to the Newcastle Grammar School.

Ordinarily the story of the rise and fall of a religious sect wouldn't merit much attention, least of all in a book about Shakespearean authorship. Yet had Malcolm Quin taken over in London, enabling J. T. Looney to succeed him as leader of a still thriving Church of Humanity in Newcastle, the odds are that nowadays the Shakespeare authorship controversy would be little more than a historical footnote, a story of yet another Victorian enthusiasm – much like Lamarckism, phrenology, and the Religion of Humanity itself – that had outlived its moment.

Virginia Woolf may have been only half-serious when, reflecting on the social and political transformations that modern culture was then undergoing, she wrote that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed', but for J. T. Looney, the closure in that year of a church he had been chosen to lead, a church committed to reversing the turn toward individualism and modernism that Woolf embodied, was a wrenching turn of events. Shortly after the Newcastle church was sold off, Looney began writing a book, one that he worked on through the course of the First World War, finished by 1918 and finally published in 1920. In it, he turned against his object of veneration, something it's hard to
imagine him doing had he retained a position of leadership in the Church of Humanity, toppling the idol whose bust had adorned his church and declaring Shakespeare of Stratford to be an impostor. It was the very book – ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
– that Freud had asked Smiley Blanton to read, the book that had made a convert of Freud, one that to this day remains the bible of all those who subscribe to the belief that the Earl of Oxford was the true author of the plays.

Not much is known about John Thomas Looney (whose family name, the subject of much unwarranted abuse, rhymes with ‘bony'). Though he gained many followers in the quarter-century between the publication of ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
in 1920 and his death in 1944, and many corresponded with him, none of them wrote a detailed account of his life – nor did any full biographical sketch appear when his book was posthumously reprinted with new introductory material, first in 1949 and then again in 1975. Looney seems to have been unusually private and only published on the subject of Oxford and the Shakespeare question: a book, an edition of Oxford's poems and a handful of articles in minor journals. Most of what is now known of his life and his beliefs, aside from the few autobiographical hints in his published work, derives from what Looney wrote to Oxfordian disciples – letters that were selectively published after he died, with his blessings, in the pages of the obscure
Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly
.

In them, Looney relates that his family came from the Isle of Man and traced his ancestry back to the Earls of Derby (though he didn't want too much made of this aristocratic connection). He himself was born in northeast England in the coastal town of South Shields and raised in a ‘strongly evangelical' Methodist household. At the age of sixteen he prepared to enter the ministry and subsequently attended Chester Diocesan College. Within a few years, however, he abandoned this calling and spent years in search of a ‘philosophy of life'. What he failed to discover in the traditional church he found in 1896, at age twenty-six, in the writings of Comte. Looking back upon this formative period, Looney
was especially proud of his friendship with Richard Congreve, which put him but one step removed from Comte himself. He also writes of how Congreve had encouraged him to take ‘a leading place in the English Positivism movement'.