Contested Will (29 page)

Any residual doubts about the core beliefs held by Looney – and shared and anticipated by ‘Shakespeare' – are put to rest by his response to an American admirer, Flodden W. Heron, who in July 1941 wrote a letter of solidarity expressing kinship between their two democracies in that dark hour when it looked as if England faced destruction at the hands of the Nazis. It was the wrong
thing to say to Looney and provoked this sharp response:

Looney, who had to leave his home because of massive German air-raids in the Gateshead-on-Tyne area, whose unsold copies of ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
were destroyed by German bombs in London, and who was disgusted by Hitler and the Nazis, nonetheless preferred to ‘think of our two nations as being united in a struggle for the preservation of spiritual liberty rather than the maintenance of what is called “democratic government”'. He remained – as his book and his ‘Shakespeare' remain – dead set against the forces of democracy and modernity to the very end.

Looney's Oxfordianism was a package deal. You couldn't easily accept the candidate but reject his method. You also had to accept a portrait of the artist concocted largely of fantasy and projection, one wildly at odds with the facts of Edward de Vere's life. Looney had concluded that the story of the plays' authorship and the feudal, anti-democratic and deeply authoritarian values of those plays were inseparable; to accept his solution to the authorship controversy meant subscribing to this troubling assumption as well.

Freud celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1926 in the company of his old friends Max Eitingon, Sándor Ferenczi and Ernest Jones. They talked late into the night, with Freud holding forth on whether the Earl of Oxford was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Jones later recalled his ‘astonishment at the enthusiasm he could display on the subject at two in the morning'. It soon
became a sore point between them. They had been drifting apart in recent years, when, in early March 1928, Jones wrote an anguished letter informing Freud that his beloved child had just died. His letter ends with a plea for some comforting thoughts – ‘a word from you might help us'. Rather than offering consolation, Freud thought it better to ‘do something to distract' the grief-stricken Jones. Acknowledging that his disciple was ‘closest to the Shakespeare problem', Freud, who had been rereading ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
, urged Jones to get his mind off his loss by investigating Looney's claims – ‘It would surely repay an analyst's interest to look into the matter.' Warming to the subject, he added that he was especially curious about the reception of Looney's book in England. He himself was ‘very impressed by Looney's investigations, almost convinced'.

Jones waited over a month before replying, and, given the circumstances, handled Freud's callous response surprisingly well, though he admits to having expected a bit more sympathy. He reminded Freud that he well remembers ‘your telling us all about Looney in May 1926', and is willing to concede that ‘Shakespeare was probably interested in de Vere and well informed about him.' But Jones drew the line there: he found Looney's argument unpersuasive and assured Freud that ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
‘had made no impression in London', where the ‘only literary man I spoke to about it was disparaging'. ‘So many books', Jones added, ‘consist in the first half of excited promises to reveal and prove something, and in the second half of triumph at what they think they have proved.'

Freud wrote back, stung. It would be the last of their exchanges about Shakespeare: ‘I was dissatisfied with your information about Looney. I recently read his book again and this time I was even more impressed by it.' Jones's remark that exciting theories don't always achieve all they promise had struck a nerve: ‘I believe it is unfair', Freud replied, ‘to say that he only triumphs after making promises, like so many other riddle solvers.' Freud insisted on having the final word, reminding Jones of the untapped vein of
Shakespeare analysis that was now made available through an Oxfordian perspective:

Why did Freud, who had lived with ambivalence about the authorship question for so long, commit in his final years so fully to Oxford's cause? He had read Looney's book closely enough to have found its nostalgia for a repressive and authoritarian medieval past dangerously naïve. For there's no question he saw the thrust of Looney's argument. When he wrote to Lytton Strachey, author of
Elizabeth and Essex
, advocating Looney's cause, he noted that Oxford, like Essex, ‘embodied … the type of the tyrannical nobleman'. Freud, if anyone, was in a position to read between the lines and knew enough about Comte's ideas (one of his earliest teachers in the 1870s, Ernst Brücke, had been a committed Positivist). Freud's own view of the cost of repression in human society – especially that imposed by religion – was clear, and it was at just this time, after all, that he was wrestling in The Future of An Illusion (1927) with many of the social issues raised by Looney, concluding that it ‘is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held unrestricted sway; more moral they certainly were not'. Freud had also thought long and hard about the irresolvable tension between individual desire and societal will, searching in
Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930) for some sort of accommodation between the two, one that offered the best prospects for human happiness.

Freud's rejection of Shakespeare could not have been easy. It disturbed him, as his letter to Theodor Reik in March 1930 indicates: ‘I have been troubled by a change in me which was brought
about under the influence of Looney's book, ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
. I no longer believe in the man from Stratford.' Yet Freud stopped short of sharing with Reik any deeper, psychic explanations for the troubling change – so that they must remain inaccessible to us, if they were even accessible to him.

What is even more puzzling about his embrace of Looney's cause is that forty years earlier Freud had reinvented Hamlet (and Shakespeare too) in the image of neurotic and cosmopolitan modern man. Yet the only way he could sustain this view was by relying on an argument that turned Shakespeare, and by extension Hamlet, into a pro-feudal reactionary. It's hard to avoid concluding that Freud's decision to embrace the Oxfordian cause was, at best, self-deceiving. While until the end of his life he continued to modify and elaborate on Oedipal dynamics and would even alter his thinking about aspects of the seduction theory, in the end, his core belief in the Oedipal theory was never shaken. It must have proved deeply reassuring that Looney's book independently corroborated his solution to the
Hamlet
problem, confirming that the play had been written following the death of the author's father. For if Looney was right, and Freud apparently needed to believe so, it now made no difference whether
Hamlet
was written as early as 1598 or even 1588, for Oxford had lost his father back in 1562 and then saw his mother, like Gertrude, remarry.

Other aspects of Looney's reading of
Hamlet
were easily assimilated into Freud's. One can only imagine Freud's growing excitement when reading in ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
how Hamlet's ‘loss of such a father, with the complete upsetting of his young life that it immediately involved, must have been a great grief to one so sensitively constituted'. Looney, like Freud, also saw Hamlet as ‘the dramatic self-revelation of the author, if such a revelation exists anywhere'. In other ways, too, Freud found Looney's argument rich in possibilities. Looney had concluded, after all, that Oxford's mother's remarriage bore directly ‘upon questions of Shakespearean interpretation'. Looney's Oxfordian reading of
Hamlet
– which for him was about both ‘the love and admiration
of a son for a dead father' and the ‘grief and disappointment at his mother's conduct' which ‘lie at the root of all the tragedy of his life' – allowed, at last, for a fuller exploration of both the maternal
and
paternal aspects of the Oedipal scheme, one long denied to Freud. He made much of this argument in a note that appeared in the next edition of his
Outline of Psychoanalysis
, where he declared that ‘Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a man who has been thought to be identifiable with the author of Shakespeare's works, lost a beloved and admired father while he was still a boy and completely repudiated his mother, who contracted a new marriage very soon after her husband's death.'

Even as he grew increasingly excited by the psychoanalytic potential of Looney's arguments, the ageing Freud became more and more impatient with those in his circle he had tried and failed to convert, including Hanns Sachs, upon whom he pressed a copy of ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
. Freud tried even harder with the novelist Arnold Zweig. After failing to win Zweig over to Oxford's cause, Freud asked him to return his book: ‘You must bring Looney back with you. I must try him on others, for obviously with you I have had no success.' But he wasn't finished with Zweig yet and months later was still chastising him: ‘I do not know what still attracts you to the man of Stratford,' Freud writes: ‘He seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything secondhand – Hamlet's neurosis, Lear's madness, Macbeth's defiance and the character of Lady Macbeth, Othello's jealousy, etc. It almost irritates me that you should support the notion.'

After reading Looney's book Freud was also convinced that the Sonnets – works that he had never seriously considered – could prove especially fertile ground for future psychoanalytic research. He was sufficiently persuaded by Looney's account of their autobiographical nature to believe that these compact lyrics were like recorded dreams or confessions that offered access to the author's thoughts and through them to his otherwise unrecorded experiences. When the Austrian Shakespeare scholar Richard Flatter
sent Freud his German translation of the Sonnets, Freud wrote back, correcting Flatter's ‘obsolete' views and assuring him that ‘there are no doubts any longer about their serious nature and their value as self-confessions'. The evidence for this was obvious, for the poems ‘were published without the author's co-operation and handed on after his death to a public for whom they had not been meant'. Freud urged Flatter to get hold of the latest Oxfordian scholarship, which he was himself reading: ‘
Shakespeare's Sonnets and Edward de Vere
by Gerald H. Rendall'.

Lear
too now seemed much more open to psychoanalytic explanation. Freud wrote excitedly to James S. H. Branson that ‘the figure of the father who gave all he had to his children must have had for him a special compensatory attraction, since Edward de Vere was the exact opposite, an inadequate father who never did his duty by his children'; so even when de Vere's life took the opposite course of what happens in the plays, it confirmed for Freud his authorship of them. Freud also tried to persuade Bramson that the play was written by Oxford during his late years – before the date scholars usually assigned the play – and was narrowly based on Oxford's two elder and married daughters, Elizabeth and Bridget, as well as their younger, unmarried sister, Susan (‘our Cordelia'). Freud saw confirmation of Oxford's authorship in the fact that in the sources all three of Lear's daughters were unmarried – and that Oxford altered this so that Lear's relationships more closely resembled his own.
Othello
could now also be explained in psychoanalytic and familial terms: Oxford's ‘marriage with Anne Cecil turned out very unhappily. If he was Shakespeare he had himself experienced Othello's torments.' All told, Oxford turned out to be a far richer subject – in terms of psychopathology – than Shakespeare ever had been, which may explain, as Freud wrote to Smiley Blanton, why he was so ‘strongly prejudiced' in favour of Looney's theory, though acknowledging that it doesn't totally resolve the authorship ‘mystery'.