Contested Will (24 page)

James would have understood why Delia Bacon invoked Prospero and
The Tempest
in her own farewell essay, for, like her and many others, he read the play as Shakespeare's great leave-taking. But this, for James, was the most troubling thing about
The Tempest
: how could the genius who wrote it renounce his art at the age of forty-eight and retire to rural Stratford to ‘spend what remained to him of life in walking about a small, squalid country-town with his hand in his pockets and ear for no music but the chink of the coin they might turn over there'? He poses this central question in an unusually tortured way: ‘By what inscrutable process was the extinguisher applied and, when once applied, kept in its place to the end? What became of the checked torrent, as a latent, bewildering presence and energy, in the life across which the dam was constructed?'

James had dutifully read the Shakespeare biographies of Georg Brandes and Halliwell-Phillipps yet refused to accept their popular if ‘arbitrary' distinction between the author's ‘genius' and ‘the rest of his identity', which they reduce to a ‘a man of exemplary business-method'. Shakespeare's biographers have perversely maintained, as James puts it, that ‘The Poet is there, and the Man is outside.' It's an ‘admirable' view, he trenchantly concludes, ‘if you can get your mind to consent to it'. James could not. He found the recorded facts of Shakespeare of Stratford's life ‘supremely vulgar' and ill-suited to the artist who wrote
The Tempest
. While he would not go as far as Twain's reductive views about the necessarily autobiographical nature of great writing, James nonetheless dismisses the possibility that a split between
man and poet was possible: the two parts of the artist were necessarily ‘one', for the ‘genius is a part of the mind, and the mind a part of the behaviour'.

This rift between the received biography and the poetic genius James had encountered over the course of a lifetime of reading the works attributed to Shakespeare was clearly unbridgeable, the most ‘insoluble' mystery ‘that ever was'. Either something was terribly wrong about the biography of the author of
The Tempest
or James misunderstood something fundamental about literary genius. The stakes here couldn't be higher, for as many distinguished Henry James scholars have shown, the essay is as much about James's own genius and legacy as about Shakespeare's, and in that sense can usefully be read alongside the prefaces to the New York Edition he was writing at the time about how he himself should be read and valued by posterity.

It's a subtle essay by a critic at the height of his analytic and rhetorical powers. One of the most fascinating things about it is watching Shakespeare slowly recede from view. He is named only a half-dozen times or so in the twenty-three-page essay – no mean feat, since the essay concerns the authorship of his play. By the closing pages Shakespeare's name has disappeared completely, replaced by the deliberately ambiguous ‘he', ‘our hero' and ‘the author of
Hamlet
and
The Tempest
'. The sordid biographical facts of Shakespeare's life that have no observable bearing on the works are jettisoned as well.

The essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery will one day be resolved by ‘the criticism of the future': ‘The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there … May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is James hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are ‘one'? If so, his choice of metaphor – recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene – is unfortunate.
Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man?

In the end, any post-mortem of the Baconian movement must acknowledge that the failure to find a cipher and the subsequent ridicule directed at the decoders and gravediggers hastened its demise. So too, did the failure, despite strenuous efforts, to show that Bacon's style resembled Shakespeare's. But given the erosion of Francis Bacon's cultural significance, the demise of the movement was probably inevitable.

In retrospect, the Baconians also lost support because they had erred in identifying their hero with the wrong authorial self-portrait, though, again, it was one that they had borrowed from mainstream scholars. That great image of authority, Prospero as Shakespeare – or as they saw it, Prospero as Bacon – had outlived its moment. Too aloof, bookish and a bit cold, he was hardly a Shakespeare for the twentieth century. A new biographical stand-in was needed, and Hamlet was waiting in the wings – for those who believed that Shakespeare wrote the plays as well as for those who didn't. Philosophy and politics were out, Oedipal desires and mourning for dead fathers in. It would still be a story of failure; but rather than Delia Bacon's account of how the plays emerged in response to political isolation and blunted republican dreams, the failure would now be more personal, and the plays an outlet for the anguish of being undervalued and overlooked. A new search was on, one that depended more than ever on finding the life in the work. It was just a different life. Whoever wrote the plays had to be someone less forbidding than a Prospero or a Bacon, someone more suited to the times: introspective, nostalgic for a lost past, psychologically complex, misunderstood, someone, like Hamlet, with ‘a wounded name'.

Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, by Joseph Brown,
after George Perfect Harding, 1848

Sigmund Freud with Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Ernest Jones,
Hanns Sachs, and Sándor Ferenczi, 1922

In December 1929, in the course of psychoanalysing an American doctor named Smiley Blanton, Sigmund Freud asked Blanton whether he thought ‘that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?' The question rattled Blanton, who, not quite believing what he was hearing, answered Freud's question with one of his own: ‘Do you mean the man born at Stratford-upon-Avon – did he write the plays attributed to him?' When Freud said ‘Yes,' Blanton, who idolized Freud but also knew his Shakespeare, did his best to explain that he ‘had specialized in English and drama for twelve years' before he became a doctor, ‘had been on the stage for a year or so, and had memorized a half dozen of Shakespeare's dramas'. Given all this, he ‘could see no reason to doubt that the Stratford man had written the plays'. This was not the answer Freud wanted to hear. ‘Here's a book I would like you to read,' he told Blanton; ‘this man believes someone else wrote the plays.'

Poor Smiley Blanton. Four months into analysis – with Sigmund Freud, no less – he is urged to explore his therapist's obsessions. In a diary of his analysis with Freud, Blanton records
that he ‘was very much upset': ‘I thought to myself that if Freud believes Bacon or Ben Jonson or anyone else wrote Shakespeare's plays, I would not have any confidence in his judgment and could not go on with my analysis.' When the session ended, Blanton took with him the book that Freud had handed over – ‘
Shakespeare' Identified in Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
– and joined his wife Margaret in the Viennese cafe where they customarily met after he saw Freud. She later recalled that he seemed ‘depressed and spoke of his qualms about continuing with Freud'.

Unable to bring himself to read the book, Blanton asked his wife if she would do so for him. She agreed to, and after finishing it reassured him that it was ‘obviously a book to command respectful attention'. Margaret Blanton was enjoying her time in Vienna, writing regularly for the
Saturday Review of Literature and the New York Herald Tribune
, and had little interest in breaking off and sailing home. Moreover, she was in analysis herself with a young disciple and close associate of Freud, Ruth Brunswick. Brunswick, an Oxfordian, had recently given Freud an inscribed copy of ‘
Shakespeare' Identified
as a birthday present. We don't know whether this was the very copy that Freud had shared with Smiley Blanton. If it was, we end up with a scenario in which Margaret Blanton was handed the inscribed copy of the book that her analyst had given to Freud who in turn gave it to her husband – shades of the spotted handkerchief that passes through so many hands in
Othello
. Perhaps Freud knew just what he was doing.

Smiley Blanton finally read the book himself, and while ‘he remained unconvinced by its argument', was pleased to see that it wasn't ‘just another Baconian exercise in secret ciphers and codes'. He was getting a lot out of his sessions and was relieved that he didn't have to consider his therapist a crackpot. Within a few months Blanton was having dreams identifying Freud with Shakespeare. Their initial exchange over the authorship of the plays stayed with him, long enough for him to consider including it in a lecture he planned some years later. In the end, it became something that bonded the Blantons and Freud: ‘Thereafter,'
Margaret Blanton writes, ‘we sent the professor new books on this subject whenever they were published in the United States. Freud always wrote to thank us for the books.'

The Blantons met Freud for the last time in London in 1938, not long after Freud arrived there after fleeing Vienna and Nazi persecution. Smiley's sessions ended sooner than expected when Freud had to undergo an operation on his jaw. Margaret spoke briefly with Freud then as well, and he apologised to her for bringing Smiley ‘all the way across the Atlantic and then having to cut short the work with him'. Freud asked Margaret about their plans. She told him that before returning to New York they ‘would spend a few days in Stratford-upon-Avon' so that her husband might ‘poke around a bit and add to his Shakespeare lore'. Freud responded to this news with ‘sudden and uncharacteristic sharpness': ‘Does Smiley really still believe those plays were written by that fellow at Stratford?' Reading
‘Shakespeare' Identified
had not had the desired effect. While it was clear to Margaret that Freud ‘really knew and loved the plays as much as we could possibly have', he did not believe in ‘that fellow at Stratford'. She was sorely tempted, she writes, to tell Freud about her husband's ‘trial by fire' eight years earlier, when Freud had first tried to make an Oxfordian of him, but ‘suddenly realized that if the professor had a sense of humor' she had ‘never seen it', and decided that it was best not to bring it up now: ‘I think he would not have been amused.' She held her tongue.

Freud died in September 1939, promoting Oxford's cause to the very end. His admirers, when they haven't quietly suppressed what they take to be an embarrassment, have struggled to explain why in his late years he became so ardent an Oxfordian. Ernest Jones, his authorised biographer, believed that something ‘in Freud's mentality led him to take a special interest in people not being what they seemed to be'. There's no denying that Freud, who embraced Lamarckism and claimed that Moses was an Egyptian, was drawn to unconventional views. What he said about Moses applies equally well to Shakespeare: ‘To deprive a people of the
man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken.'

But surely there's more at stake here than thinking counter-intuitively, a habit of mind that accounted for Freud's intellectual breakthroughs as well as the occasional dead end. Jones concedes as much, though the furthest he ventures is that Freud's rejection of Shakespeare was ‘some derivative of the Family Romance', a ‘wish that certain parts of reality could be changed' – that we might not be who we think we are. Peter Gay, another of Freud's major biographers, dismisses Jones's explanation in favour of an alternative psychoanalytic one, that at the bottom of it all was mother love: Freud's attempts at riddle solving, which included his interest in Shakespeare's identity, were ‘necessary exercises through which he could reiterate his claim to paternal and, even more, maternal love'. For Gay, the ‘move from the indistinct figure of the man from Stratford to the presumed solidity of the Earl of Oxford was part of a lifelong quest' – one he associates with the ‘erotic element in Freud's greed for knowledge'. This seems rather desperate to me and says more about the seductiveness of psychobiographical explanations than it does about why one of the great modern minds turned against Shakespeare. The answer might well lie elsewhere: Freud's devotion to Oxford's cause was no psychic riddle but a response to a threat to his Oedipal theory, the cornerstone of psychoanalysis – which in turn rested in no small way upon a biographical reading of Shakespeare's life and work. From this perspective, Freud's rejection of Shakespeare of Stratford seems both inevitable and necessary – though, like the claims of many others, it reveals more about the sceptic than it does about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

Freud was born in 1856, the year Delia Bacon's article in
Putnam's
kindled a debate over Shakespeare's authorship that quickly swept through Britain, America and the Continent. He was born into a world in which Shakespeare was celebrated as the greatest of modern writers, yet also one in which many questioned whether a glover's son could have created such towering works of
art. This unresolved tension would play out in Freud's lifelong ambivalence about Shakespeare's identity. By the age of eight, Freud was reading and soon quoting from Shakespeare's plays and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. He was well read in English literature (for a decade he ‘read nothing but English books') and ranked
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
among the ‘ten most magnificent works of world literature'.

It wasn't easy remaining neutral about whether Francis Bacon had written those plays. One of Freud's mentors, the distinguished brain anatomist Theodor Meynert, was convinced that Bacon was the plays' true author and apparently tried to win Freud over. Freud was not persuaded (in later years he would tell Lytton Strachey that he ‘always laughed at the Bacon hypothesis') but felt compelled to justify his reluctance to share Meynert's enthusiasm.

Much of what we know about what Freud was thinking at this time comes from his letters to Wilhelm Fleiss, the closest friend he would ever have, as well as the letters Freud exchanged with his fiancée Martha Bernays over the course of the three and a half years that they were separated (her mother had moved her from Vienna to Hamburg in an attempt to keep them apart). His letters to Fleiss have been published. Those to and from Martha Bernays are in the Freud Archives in the Library of Congress, but are sealed for many years to come. A handful of people, including Ernest Jones, have been permitted to read them and a few of the letters have been excerpted or published.

In one of these excerpts (from a letter written to Martha Bernays in June 1883), Freud mentions Meynert's conviction that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. Freud disagrees, but rather than acknowledging Shakespeare's authorship argues instead that the plays were the product of several hands: ‘there is more need to share Shakespeare's achievement among several rivals'. No single intelligence could have encompassed such a literary and philosophical range; if Bacon had written the plays along with his great philosophical works, he ‘would have been the most powerful brain the world has ever produced'. Unfortunately, we have no context
for these remarks, no clue as to how Martha Bernays responded, and, because their letters remain off-limits, don't know to what extent they reveal a young and ambitious Freud struggling with the limits of his own powerful brain and prodigious creative gifts. His attraction to group authorship may say more about his own creative anxieties at this time – as well as the cultural bias that made it hard for the urbane and highly educated Freud to believe that a man from rural Stratford, lacking much formal education, could have accomplished so much alone.

The Baconian claims of Meynert and others long gnawed at Freud. In an effort to resolve the authorship question once and for all, shortly before the First World War he invited his disciple Ernest Jones to make ‘a thorough study of the methods of interpretation employed by the Baconians, contrasting them with psychoanalytic methods. Then the matter would be disproved' and his mind ‘would be at rest'. Jones, who steadfastly believed that Shakespeare alone wrote the plays, and who would have put at risk his own work on
Hamlet
and Oedipus, refused. It would be helpful to know exactly when and why Freud eventually abandoned his belief in the collective authorship of the plays, and whether this development coincided with his growing interest in individual psychology, how unconscious forces shaped creativity, and the kinship between artists and analysts.