Contested Will (32 page)

But when Percy Allen spoke with the dead, the dead spoke back. His is a poignant story, perhaps the inevitable outcome of a man so deeply invested in a cause that he could not otherwise prove. It also replays many of the famous episodes of the authorship controversy, from William-Henry Ireland's announcement that he was in possession of Shakespeare's memoirs to Delia Bacon's conviction that the lost manuscripts could be found by prying up Shakespeare's gravestone. Allen had been drawn to psychic matters after hearing an acquaintance, Arthur Conan Doyle, speak on the subject in the 1920s. His interest intensified after seeing a play by Aldous Huxley on spiritualism. Years later, following the devastating news in 1939 of the death of his twin brother Ernest, Allen sought the help of one of the most celebrated mediums of the day, Hester Dowden. Her success in enabling Percy
Allen to reach his dead twin prompted him to seek her assistance in resolving the authorship controversy.

Hester Dowden was unusually well suited to the task. Her father was the Shakespeare biographer Professor Edward Dowden. Like Percy Allen, she was fully conversant with Shakespearean drama and had known, from her youth, many of the great performers of the day, including Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. There was one complicating factor: three or four years earlier, another student of the authorship controversy, Alfred Dodd, had sought her help and in 1943 published
The Immortal Master
, in which he described what he learned through her: that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's plays (unbeknownst to Dodd, his methods and conclusion had been anticipated by John Lobb in his 1910 book
Talks with the Dead
, where Shakespeare himself claimed from the grave full authorship of the works attributed to him).

Hester Dowden succeeded in putting Allen in touch not only with Bacon but also with Shakespeare and Oxford. It soon emerged that Alfred Dodd had been misinformed, as Allen learned upon putting the question directly to Bacon himself (as usual, Hester Dowden transcribed the conversations, using automatic writing, assisted through her main ‘control' with the beyond, an ancient Athenian named Johannes). The truth, Bacon told him, was that

This was a great relief to Percy Allen, who had suspected as much.

Shakespeare, at first a bit shy, soon warmed up and communicated freely with Allen (and Allen's estimation of him grew over time). Their conversations went so well that Allen, curious about his personal story, told him: ‘Look here; we know almost nothing
about your earthlife. Will you dictate your autobiography for me?' Shakespeare graciously agreed, and Allen provides a transcript of it, with occasional ‘interpolations' by Oxford. Allen was assured by all three men of the truth of the Prince Tudor story – that Southampton ‘was really the Queen's son'. Shakespeare and Oxford then went through the plays one by one, explaining to Allen in considerable detail who wrote which parts, which works were juvenilia, and so on.

Eager to share his discoveries with the world, Allen asked his interlocutors from beyond for ‘more documentary proof', and wondered whether the manuscripts of the plays had survived. After some initial hesitation, ‘Francis Bacon came through at last, and said: “They are in the tomb – the stone tomb.”' At this point Shakespeare and Oxford chimed in, explaining that six manuscripts were hidden in Shakespeare's grave in Stratford:
Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Richard the Second
, and
Henry the Fifth
‘wrapped in parchment. Two at the head, two at the feet, and two at the breast' including
Hamlet
. The Earl of Derby had placed them there. When Allen told them that he would visit the tomb, Oxford warned him ‘I will make your flesh creep!' And so he did. When Allen travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon to review some plays in April 1945 he visited Shakespeare's gravestone. Just as Oxford had predicted, he suddenly felt ‘a hot, pleasant tingling coming up my fingers to the elbows in both arms'. A few days later he returned to Mrs Dowden, who picked up her pen and resumed her automatic writing, whereupon Shakespeare immediately got in touch with Allen: ‘I want to thank you for coming. We were both there, and very glad to see you.'

Allen rushed off to his publishers with this astounding news, but they ‘did not seem much impressed' and wanted what they called ‘real evidence': ‘Give us some poetry, if you can.' So Allen returned to Mrs Dowden and put in the special request to Oxford through her. He waited three weeks and was rewarded with an envelope from Mrs Dowden containing the first of Oxford's newly dictated sonnets. Four posthumous sonnets in all were
composed and subsequently included in Allen's
Talks with
Elizabethans
. It had taken Mrs Dowden about forty minutes to transcribe each sonnet, as Oxford composed them line by line (‘if Oxford had known the verses by heart they would have taken only about three or four minutes to dictate'). The one prefacing
Talks with Elizabethans
doesn't quite measure up to those collected in 1609, and ends as follows:

In retrospect, the outbreak of the Second World War derailed an Oxfordian movement that had already begun to lose its momentum, if not its bearings. With invasion feared, meetings of the British Shakespeare Fellowship were suspended. The baton was passed to the United States, where Eva Turner Clark formed an American branch in 1939, but that organisation folded shortly after her death in 1947. By then there wasn't much left to the British wing of the Fellowship either. Looney was dead, along with such stalwarts as B. M. Ward and Canon Rendall. So too was the movement's most famous recruit, Freud. Membership had dropped to seventy – roughly two members for every Oxfordian book that had been published.

For the next forty years, the remnant of the once flourishing movement in both Britain and America hung on. In 1949 an American edition of ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
came out, enabling a new generation of readers to get hold of Looney's by now rare book. A brief flare of enthusiasm led to the establishment of a Shakespeare Oxford Society in America in 1957 – though it remained, according to the organisation's newsletter, ‘almost dormant, as far as active members, until 1964'. Even then, prospects seemed dismal. As its newsletter acknowledged in 1968, ‘the missionary or evangelical spirit of most of our members seems to be
at a low ebb, dormant, or non-existent'. The British Shakespeare Fellowship tried reinventing itself as the Shakespearean Authorship Society in 1959 and for a few years published a
Shakespearean Authorship Review
, but the organisation was a shadow of its former self. Oxfordians looked on jealously when the self-promoting Calvin Hoffman generated far more attention than they could muster with his claims for Christopher Marlowe's authorship of the plays – first with the publication in 1955 of
The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare
', then with his success in securing permission to open the grave of Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham in a failed attempt to unearth Marlowe's long-hidden manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays. For a time it looked as if Marlowe might even supplant Oxford as the chief claimant to the plays.

As the years slid by, expectations dwindled. Barrell's claims in
Scientific American
about the Ashbourne portrait were exposed as an embarrassing case of wishful thinking: the overpainted figure wasn't Oxford after all, and restoration work revealed that the date of the original portrait was 1612, eight years after Oxford's death. Meanwhile, in the pages of their newsletter, American supporters of de Vere's cause could only wring their hands: ‘What about the hopes of us Oxfordians? When can we reasonably expect to see light at the end of the tunnel? In 1969? Hardly; barring a miracle.' While Oxfordians put on a cheerful public face, they privately admitted that they were on the verge of failure. The language was blunt: ‘We are talking to each other, converting the already converted,' and they doubted whether there were ‘as many active propagandists, lecturers, and writers for the cause, as there were in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties'. The odds of having an Oxfordian book ‘accepted and published' were put at ‘None'.

While convinced that their case was the stronger one, they understood that the ‘general public, the uncommitted, are in millions, but the means to reach them are unavailable to us now, and bid fair to remain so, unless there is some dramatic “breakthrough”'. As the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of
Looney's book approached, the Oxfordians conceded that the ‘rate of our progress in recent years toward gaining recognition of Lord Oxford as Shakespeare among the uncommitted and open-minded, can best be described as one small step forward, and two giant steps backwards'. Despite the attention generated by a sharp exchange with Harvard professors in the pages of the
Harvard Magazine
in 1974, the movement was on life-support. Membership in the Shakespeare Oxford Society now stood at eighty – and an attempt to generate new ideas and enthusiasm through a conference in 1976 drew only twenty members. Oxfordians would subsequently speak of this post-war period of decline and stagnation as their ‘Dark Ages'.

Mainstream scholars could hardly wait for their adversaries to die off before publishing their obituaries. In 1959, Louis B. Wright, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, couldn't resist a parting shot in ‘The Anti-Shakespeare Industry and the Growth of Cults', in which he sneeringly described what it took to write a book that denied Shakespeare's authorship: ‘the capacity to climb into a soap-bubble and soar away into Cuckoo-land'. And in 1970, the leading Shakespeare biographer, Samuel Schoenbaum, his patience sorely tested by having to slog through so many books that questioned Shakespeare's authorship, administered what must have seemed a death-stroke in his
Shakespeare's Lives
. The ‘sheer volume of heretical publication appals', Schoenbaum writes, its ‘voluminousness … matched only by its intrinsic worthlessness'. It was ‘lunatic rubbish', the product of ‘mania'.

Imagine the disbelief that would have greeted a contributor to the
Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter
in the early 1980s, who, rejecting all the hand-wringing, urged fellow Oxfordians to be patient and predicted that in twenty-five years their movement would be thriving:

No such letter was ever written, but everything described here, and more, has happened since 1985. The resurrection of the Oxfordian movement has been little short of miraculous – one of the most remarkable and least remarked episodes in the history of Shakespeare studies. What brought it about? Oxfordians usually point to the publication in 1984 of Charlton Ogburn's
The Mysterious William Shakespeare
. It would be more accurate to say that Ogburn's timely book rode the wave of some sweeping cultural changes.

Charlton Ogburn was well connected in both the political and publishing worlds. He had seen his parents' collaborative book on
de Vere fail to generate much attention and had been disappointed once again when a follow-up book he co-authored with his mother –
Shake-speare; The Man Behind the Name
(1962) – met with similar neglect. The problem wasn't with the message or the messenger; it was getting enough people, especially scholars, to listen. More aggressive measures were needed to combat what he saw as a ‘shoddy, tacit conspiracy' on the part of the official orthodoxy.