SOURCE: "Deviations," in Shakespeare's Lives, New Edition, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 385-451.

[In the following excerpt, Schoenbaum deconstructs several anti-Stratfordian arguments, including those who believe that the plays were authored by a group of individuals; those who assert the Earl of Oxford as the true author; and those who put forth other claimants, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Derby, and Christopher Marlowe.]

Groupists

Delia [Bacon] was of course not a proper Baconian but a Groupist envisioning a secret association of high-born wits, Ralegh and Bacon chief among them, as the true progenitors of the Shakespeare canon. Others—many others, alas—followed her example and argued for multiple, or at least dual, authorship. In William D. O'Connor—friend of Walt Whitman, author of The Good Gray Poet (the title gave a phrase to the language), and librarian of the United States Treasury—she found her first convert. To him belongs the distinction of being the lone reader, alluded to by Hawthorne, of the whole of 'Delia Bacon's splendid sybyllic book on Shakespeare'. O'Connor discerned in her that species of madness to which great wits are near allied; more profitable, he thought, to be insane with Miss Bacon than rational with Dr Johnson. Her views find a spokesman in the hero of O'Connor's novel of the Fugitive Slave Law era, Harrington; a Story of True Love (1860). Long years afterwards he returned to the authorship controversy in a polemical tract in defence of Pott, Hamlet's Note-book (1886). Here, dismissing Shakespeare as 'a grotesque anomaly', he identified Mr W.H. as Walter RalegH, and the T.T. of the Sonnets dedication as Ralegh's companion, Thomas HarioT (O'Connor has forgotten that the poems were published by Thomas Thorpe). This evidence had eluded Delia Bacon.

The Groupists attracted a more learned advocate, although (like all the rest) an amateur, in Appleton Morgan. A lawyer who had written with authority on the principles of evidence, he was one of the founders of the Shakespeare Society of New York (odd springboard for deviationist expression) and the publisher of the Bankside Shakespeare. In The Shakespearen Myth: William Shakespeare and Circumstantial Evidence (1881) Morgan disposes, with insinuating dispassion, of the 'legal presumption' of Shakesperian authorship. Having distinguished between the 'junta' theory of Delia Bacon and the 'unitary' theory of Smith, Holmes, et al, he offers the New Theory, which is admittedly less novel than the designation suggests. According to this hypothesis, Shakespeare, stage-manager or stage-editor, touched up the plays of others to make them palatable to the groundlings. The natural wit, as the dramatist's contemporaries described him, becomes in Morgan's translation a Warwickshire clown. How cosy and plausible to suppose that

this funny Mr. Shakespeare—who happened to be employed in the theater where certain masterpieces were taken to be cut up into plays to copy out of them each actor's parts—that this waggish penman, as he wrote out the parts in big, round hand, improved on or interpolated a palpable hit, a merry speech, the last popular song, or sketched entire a role with a name familiar to his boyish ear—the village butt, or sot, or justice of the peace, may be; or, why not some fellow scapegrace of olden times by Avon banks? He did it with a swift touch and a mellow humor that relieved and refreshed the stately speeches, making the play all the more available and the copyist all the more valuable to the management. But, all the same, how this witty Mr. Shakespeare would have roared at a suggestion that the centuries after him should christen by his—the copyist's—name all the might and majesty and splendor, all the philosophy and pathos and poetry, every word that he wrote out, unblotting a line, for the players!⁷³

But who then contributed the philosophy and pathos and poetry? Confronted with the overwhelming question, Morgan retreats into vague conjecture. In an imagined scene Shakespeare is approached at the theatre by certain noblemen of the Court—maybe Southampton, Ralegh, Essex, Rutland, and Montgomery; perhaps also that 'needy and ambitious scholar named Bacon, who, with an eye to preferment, maintained their society by secret recourse to the Jews or to any thing that would put gold for the day in his purse'.⁷⁴ The name of a living man, their hireling, would protect their incognito better than a pseudonym. Shakespeare agreed and became rich. Morgan did not do too badly either, his book achieving sufficient celebrity to be translated into German in 1885 as Der Shakespeare-Mythus.

Similar theories are expounded, in much the same judicial tone, in John H. Stotsenburg's depressingly long An Impartial Study of the Shakespeare Title (1904). We encounter such sentences as, 'The true rule, both of law and reason, is that when direct evidence of facts can not be supplied, reasonable minds will necessarily form their judgment on circumstances and act upon the probabilities of the proposition under consideration.'⁷⁵ Such wearisome legalistic formulations need not surprise us, for Judge Stotsenburg sat on the Indiana bench, and the Impartial Study is the medlar fruit produced by his stolen hours. A sampling of the chapter headings will sufficiently indicate the operative assumptions that guide the learned jurist's argument:

Doubts Raised as to Shaksper's Ability and Learning
William Shaksper Has No Place in Henslowe's Diary
Shaksper Commended No Contemporary
Shaksper Left No Letters and Had No Library
Shaksper Gave His Children No Education
Shaksper's Utter Indifference to Literary Proprieties
Shaksper Not the Shakescene of Robert Greene
Lies Fabricated in Aid of the Shaksper Pretension
Shaksper's Real Name and Traditional Life
The Learning of the Author or Authors of the Poems and Plays.

Since the Groupists rarely agree on the constituents of the group, it is not surprising that the judge comes up with his own set of candidates. He concludes that Bacon wrote Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, that Sidney produced the Sonnets, that a consortium of professional dramatists—Drayton, Dekker, Munday, Chetile, Heywood, Webster, Middleton, and Porter—participated in the original composition of the plays, and that these plays (or some of them) were 'polished and reconstructed' by Bacon. Court adjourned.

Usually associated with the Baconian stalwarts, Sir George Greenwood (in his dauntingly voluminous writings) more than once denies membership in the club. 'It is no part of my plan or intention to defend that theory,' he insists in the preface to The Shakespeare Problem Restated, and indeed he remains comfortably agnostic, contenting himself with negative onslaughts against the orthodox citadel. These he manages with a curious mixture of suavity and abuse that makes him unique among the heretics. The illiterate peasant from squalid Stratford and his partisans, especially Lee and Churton Collins (Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham), elicit from Sir George the full gamut of patrician denigration. Serpents of cultivated malice lurk in the fine print of the footnotes; in one, Sir George, a Cambridge graduate, savours the fact that his two principal foes took second-class Oxford degrees, and he goes on to dispose of Lee thus:

In the Calendar of 1880 he is mentioned for the first time as Minor Exhibitioner of Balliol College. For the benefit of the puzzled investigator (and such, at first, was I) it may be mentioned that he there appears under a slightly different form of appelation to that by which he is now familiar to us, not having at that date discarded two Biblical praenomina in order to assume the more Saxon name of Sidney. I cannot help thinking, by the way, that Mr. Sidney Lee might be rather more tolerant of those who imagine that some great man in Elizabethan times might have seen advantages in the assumption of a pseudonym.⁷⁶

At first it might seem curious that Sir George's circle of friends included his fellow MP, J. M. Robertson, author of the prolix Baconian Heresy, to which Sir George replied with his own massive book. But the true irony in the association of the believer with the arch-heretic lies in the actual closeness of their stances. Prince of disintegrators, Robertson in Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus?, The Shakespeare Canon, and his other books, doles out great slabs of Shakespeare to Peele, Greene, Chapman, Marlowe, and other dramatists, the Stratfordian indeed stood, as Sir George observes, on 'the slippery slope of Infidelity'. Disintegration of Shakespeare's text furnished the Groupist with a starting-point, and conferred respectability upon pseudo-scholarly endeavour. 'That Shakespeare, whoever he was, did not write a very large portion of the thirty-six dramas which were published as his in the Folio of 1623 is now generally admitted,' Sir George observes. And so, at the time, it was.

If Sir George can pride himself on refusing to indulge in wild theorizing, other heretics did not submit to similar inhibitions. There is, for example, J.G.B., who answered his self-inflicted question, Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays? (1887), by postulating that the author was Cardinal Wolsey. The manuscripts of this prelate, deceased in 1530, came into the possession of Bacon; he prepared them for exhibition and capped the œuvre by writing his own play of Henry VIII with Wolsey a principal figure. An equally beguiling suggestion was made by Harold Johnson in Did the Jesuits Write 'Shakespeare'? (1910). Noting that the only English Pope, Adrian IV (1154-9) bore the name of Nicolas Breakspear, Johnson proposes that the pontiff inspired the pseudonym adopted by members of the Society of Jesus as they varied their devotions by busying themselves with Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra.

Sceptics unpersuaded of the existence of this popish plot may find other hypotheses more seductive. In The Five Authors of 'Shakespeares Sonnets ' (1923) H. T. S. Forrest of the Indian Civil Service fancies a sonnet tournament, with Shakespeare, Barnes, Warner, Donne, and Daniel fighting it out for a prize offered by the Earl of Southampton. Gilbert Slater, by profession an economist and social historian, does Forrest two better by offering Seven Shakespeares (1931). These claimants include Bacon, Ralegh, the Earls of Derby, Rutland, and Oxford; also Marlowe (returned from the dead in 1954 as Shakespeare). Imbibing Julius Caesar as connoisseurs sample wines to determine their origin, Slater detected a female bouquet. In Antony and Cleopatra too he found feminine rather than masculine intuition. The seventh Shakespeare is a woman, who in As You Like It (a markedly feminine play) portrays herself as Rosalind! No work inspires Slater to more piercing insight than King Lear; to the authoress 'it is due that we are made to see that there was something to be said for Goneril, and that Lear was a most undesirable visitor in the house, sure to upset any hostess's nerves'.⁷⁷ This Woman Shakespeare is Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and sister to Sir Philip Sidney (in an odd slip she is described as Sidney's brother). Surely the peerless lady of Wilton, rather than 'the money-lending maltster of Stratford', is addressed by the manly and gallant Jonson as 'My beloved' and 'sweet swan of Avon'.

This limited (but, one trusts, sufficient) sampling of Groupist heterodoxy may fittingly conclude with a more recent contribution. Like the others, it calls for no rebuttal; gossamer fancies, insubstantial as air, need not be broken upon the critic's wheel. Alden Brooks clears the ground for his own theory by deposing the poet in Will Shakespere Factotum and Agent (1937). 'In no sense was this fellow a man of literary genius,' he sums up. 'He was, instead, country wit, business man, theatrical factotum, play-broker, figure-head, agent.'⁷⁸ Behind the broker, behind the Southampton of the Sonnets and dedications, looms the Poet, whom Brooks does not yet care to name. In the seven hundred closely printed pages of Will Shakespere and the Dyer 's Hand, published by a reputable house (Charles Scribner's Sons) in 1943, Brooks has another, more violent, fling at Shakespeare. Everywhere in Elizabethan literature he sees unflattering allusions to the National Poet—this 'despicable trencher-slave, parasite, blood-sucker, pandar, and corrupter of young noblemen'; for so Marston had described 'fat-paunch'd Milo' (obviously Shakespeare) in his satirical Scourge of Villainy. Will sabotaged his company by selling plays on the sly to the printers. The wealth he hoarded was swollen from the proceeds of the Blackfriars Gate-house, converted by the whore-master poet into a brothel. Finally, outwardly honoured but gnawed by inward shame, he succumbed to the excesses with which he had taxed his obese body. This was Shakespeare. We learn without wonder that Brooks is a minor novelist.

But who is the Poet? For this post Brooks sets up fiftyfour requirements, some conventional ('The Poet was a courtier'), others peculiar ('The Poet died before the winter of 1608'). Only one candidate meets all the desiderata: Sir Edward Dyer. Patron of letters and close friend of Sidney, he is today best remembered for his elegy for Sidney, beginning 'Silence augmenteth grief, from The Phoenix Nest (1593). 'Shakespeare' glances at him in the 111th Sonnet:

Thence comes it that my name received a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

The recovery of the punning allusion—a recovery made possible by the wedding, for an instant, of fantastic speculation and prosaic literalism—marks the high point of Will Shakspere and the Dyer's Hand. Dyer, incidentally, did not write all the Sonnets, but had help from Nashe, Daniel, Barnes, Southampton, and other poets. The Earl also commissioned, supervised, and perhaps partly wrote Lucrece, a topical poem in which Tarquin the Ravisher is a skit on Ralegh the Proud.

The Brooks thesis seduced few readers; no Dyer Society followed upon the identification of the Poet's hand. Ignored by Gibson in The Shakespeare Claimants and savaged by Wads worth in The Poacher from Stratford, Brooks had the resilience to return to the fray in 1964 with This Side of Shakespeare. He stands firm for Dyer, and if Shakespeare inspires a mellow condescension rather than the old rage, he is factotum still:

He chose writers and plays, offered advice, acted as general supervisor. It was undoubtedly his natural wit, his 'facetious grace,' and showman's instinct, that gave to many of the Shakespearean plays that leaven few other plays of the time possessed. If his major role was the trafficking for their composition and sale, he became none the less their bondsman and sponsor.⁷⁹

Thus, in sentiments echoing those of Appleton Morgan almost a century earlier, does the Groupist pass judgement on Shakespeare on the four hundredth anniversary of his birth.

Looney and the Oxfordians

The month that saw an armistice bring to an end the Great War witnessed another event hardly less momentous, at least for members of the Shakespeare Fellowship. In November 1918 J. Thomas Looney, a Gateshead schoolmaster, deposited with the Librarian of the British Museum a sealed envelope containing an announcement of his discovery that the plays and poems of Shakespeare issued from the pen of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Before taking this unusual step the schoolmaster had submitted his work, the result of years of patient investigation, to a publisher; but the latter rejected it when Looney refused to adopt a nom de plume to forestall the hilarity of reviewers. Now, covetous of priority, he resorted to the device of the sealed letter with its overtones of mysterious significance so congenial to the anti-Stratfordian mentality.

The book, 'Shakespeare' Identified, appeared in 1920, and initiated the Oxford movement, which has given the Baconians a run for their madness. In his introduction Looney disclaims an expert's knowledge of literature (when he began he had read only Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney among the Elizabethans), nor does he pride himself on a critic's soundness of literary judgement. Instead he makes a virtue of amateurism. 'This is probably why the problem has not been solved before now,' Looney asserts. 'It has been left mainly in the hands of literary men.'⁸⁰ For years, however, he had been putting his young charges through their paces with The Merchant of Venice, prolonged intimacy with which persuaded Looney that the author knew Italy at first hand, and—more important—had an aristocrat's indifference to business methods and an aristocrat's casual regard for material possessions. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that snobbery led Looney, a gentle retiring soul, to seek a Shakespeare with blue blood in his veins. His own family, the pedagogue boasted, was descended from the Earl of Derby, once kings of the Isle of Man, whence came Looney's immediate forebears. He expresses the heretic's customary disdain for the 'coarse and illiterate circumstances' of Shakespeare's early life, and in an unconsciously revealing passage implies that a great writer must have lords and ladies in coaches driving up to his door.⁸¹

'My preparation for the work lay', Looney reflected in old age, ' .. . in a life spent in facing definite problems, attempting the solution by the methods of science, and accepting the necessary logical conclusions, however unpalatable & inconvenient these might prove.'⁸² His impartial science, derived from the Positivism of Comte, led Looney to seek nine 'general features' in the author of Shakespeare's works:

1. A matured man of recognized genius.
2. Apparently eccentric and mysterious.
3. Of intense sensibility—a man apart.
4. Unconventional.
5. Not adequately appreciated.
6. Of pronounced and known literary tastes.
7. An enthusiast in the world of drama.
8. A lyric poet of recognized talent.
9. Of superior education—classical—the habitual associate of educated people.⁸³

To these Looney added nine 'special characteristics':

1. A man with Feudal connections.
2. A member of the higher aristocracy.
3. Connected with Lancastrian supporters.
4. An enthusiast for Italy.
5. A follower of sport (including falconry)
6. A lover of music.
7. Loose and improvident in money matters.
8. Doubtful and somewhat conflicting in his attitude to woman.
9. Of probable Catholic leanings, but touched with scepticism.⁸⁴

Without the advantages of historical or literary training, Looney had now to find the candidate who met all the general and special requirements.

Plunging in, he selected Venus and Adonis and began to look for a poem with similar stanza and cadence in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, which alone constituted Looney's reference library of sixteenth-century verse. In 'Women', by Edward de Vere, he found the poem. He next had to learn something about the poet. After several false starts in history textbooks, Looney discovered with delight from the DNB that Oxford 'evinced a genuine taste in music and wrote verses of much lyric beauty'; also that 'Puttenham and Meres reckon him among the best for comedy in his day; but though he was a patron of players no specimens of his dramatic productions survive. ' (The italics in these misquoted passages are supplied by Looney.)

The de Veres traced their descent in an unbroken line from the Norman Conquest: higher aristocracy, there can be no question. Evidence of Lancastrian sympathies (Looney's third special criterion) may be found in the fact that the twelfth Earl lost his head in 1461 for loyalty to the Red Rose. Sidney Lee's DNB sketch describes Oxford as having had a thorough grounding in Latin and French, great prowess at the tilt, and an ambition for foreign travel gratified by a journey to Italy in 1575. As a youth, however, he also manifested 'a waywardness of temper which led him into every form of extravagance, and into violent quarrels with other members of his guardian's household'. At the age of seventeen he fatally wounded an under-cook at Cecil House. Report held that he threatened the ruin of his first wife in order to avenge himself on the fatherin-law who had incurred his displeasure. There were other indications of a volatile temper: Oxford grossly insulted Sidney on the tennis court at Whitehall—addressing him as a 'puppy', according to Sir Fulke Greville (Sidney's biographer)—and afterwards plotted his assassination; in 1586 he quarrelled with Thomas Knyvet, duelled with him, and entered into a subsequent vendetta. Irresponsible, he hired lodgings and left others, of humbler station, to foot the bill. The Earl's improvidence brought him into financial straits from which he tried to extricate himself by selling his ancestral estates at perversely low prices. Lee does not dwell on the Earl's seduction of one of the Queen's Maids of Honour, nor does he report Aubrey's presumably apocryphal anecdote: 'This Earl of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a fart, at which he was so ashamed that he went to travel, 7 years.'⁸⁵ In any event, Looney does not include flatulence as another of his hero's special attributes. Nor does he list cruelty, perversity, and profligacy as features of the author evident from a perusal of his work.

Looney properly relishes the contemporary evidence that Oxford wrote plays (after all it cannot be demonstrated that Bacon or most of the other chief claimants performed this necessary activity), and he attempts to bolster the testimony of Puttenham and Meres by the familiar tactic of converting Shakespeare's dramas into pièces à clef. Indeed the Earl can scarcely restrain himself from putting in appearances everywhere in the canon. In Love's Labour's Lost he is Berowne mocking Holofernes—Gabriel Harvey, the 'kissing traitor' who had circulated satirical verses about Oxford behind his back. Elizabeth's royal ward is Bertram in All's Well That Ends Well, the jealous husband is Othello, the Patron of Oxford's boys is the master of the revels at Elsinore. It follows that the rest of the dramatis personae must have historical identities; and so Laertes is Thomas Cecil; Polonius, Burleigh (to reappear in Venice as Brabantio); Ophelia, Lady Oxford (reincarnated after drowning only to be strangled as Desdemona); Horatio, the Earl's cousin Sir Horace de Vere—principally, it would seem, because of the partial congruence of Christian names. Such a view of drama implies that plays are secondarily intended for theatrical representation, being pre-eminently literary artifacts. To this reversal of priorities Looney freely subscribes: ' .. . if we must choose between the theory of their being literature converted into plays, or plays converted into literature, on a review of the work no competent judge would hesitate to pronounce in favour of the latter supposition',⁸⁶ Looney, one suspects, has not polled all the competent judges.

His subjective ruminations do little to strengthen an hypothesis which has certain inherent limitations. The attestation of Puttenham and Meres to Oxford's playwriting activities cuts two ways. Meres after all lists Shakespeare separately in Palladis Tamia and names twelve plays, as well as Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets: clearly he did not believe that the Earl wrote The Comedy of Errors; Romeo and Juliet, and the rest. And if people knew that Oxford graced the stage with plays, why had he need of employing Shakespeare as a mask? The only motive that Looney can suggest is self-effacement. 'We may, if we wish', he adds, 'question the sufficiency or reasonableness of the motive. That, however, is his business, not ours.'⁸⁷ But of course the man who sets out to convince the public of the validity of an eccentric theory must make the motivation his business. These considerations, however, pale into triviality alongside the principal drawback of the entire argument: Oxford, born in 1550, died in 1604. Thus he was forty-three when he offered the first heir of his invention to Southampton, and was buried before King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII appeared on the stage.

To get round this perplexity Looney must urge that the authorities have misdated King Lear and Macbeth, and that Oxford at the time of his death left unfinished manuscripts which inferior dramatists then completed. 'The people who were "finishing off these later plays took straightforward prose, either from the works of others, or from rough notes collected by "Shakespeare" in preparing his dramas, and chopped it up, along with a little dressing, to make it look in print something like blank verse."⁸⁸ Such a considered judgement emanates naturally from a sensibility to which the music of Shakespeare's final period is ragtime. The Tempest presents Looney with his greatest challenge, for topical references and other internal considerations lead him to accept the late date to which the commentators assign it. So he must deny it altogether to his candidate—at the same time admitting that 'but for the theory that Edward de Vere was the writer of Shakespeare's plays we might never have been led to suspect the authenticity of "The Tempest" '.⁸⁹ The task of denigration proceeds apace. Prospero's speech on the cloudcapped towers and gorgeous palaces becomes 'simple cosmic philosophy, and, as such, it is the most dreary negativism that was ever put into high-sounding words'.⁹⁰ (The disciple of Comte insists upon the positivism of his idol.) Elsewhere in the play Looney finds stolen thunder, muddled metaphysics, witlessness, and coarse fun. Above all, the verse is bad, which by Looney's standard merely means that it has irregular scansion syllables. This evaluation of The Tempest, needless to say, has met with a cool reception—even from fellow Oxfordians. Looney had at the outset confessed his lack of critical equipment; in the end, having constructed his elaborately rationalized fantasy, he becomes a casualty of that handicap.

Despite its intellectual naïveté—perhaps because of it—'Shakespeare ' Identified impressed the impressionable. In his introduction to the 1948 reprint (which drew some respectful journalistic notices) the maritime novelist William McFee compared the Looney book, for revolutionary significance, with The Origin of Species. He also described the Gateshead pedagogue as a sleuth 'methodically and relentessly closing in on the author, not of a crime, but of a mystery'. The mantle of Conan Doyle sits more comfortably on Looney than that of Darwin; Galsworthy pronounced 'Shakespeare ' Identified 'the best detective story' which ever came his way. Herein must lie much of the fundamental appeal of the work and of anti-Stratfordian demonstrations generally. Sober literary history is metamorphosed into a game of detection, in much the same manner as James Thurber's American lady in the Lake Country transformed Macbeth into a Hercule Poirot thriller ('"Oh Macduff did it all right," said the murder specialist.'). To such a game the cultivated amateur can give his leisure hours in hopes of toppling the supreme literary idol and confounding the professionals. Little wonder that one heretic, Claud W. Sykes, casts his investigation as an exercise in detection, with Sherlock Holmes tracking down the true perpetrator of the plays by means of Baker Street deduction!

Be that as it may, Looney founded a school. A tangible result of 'Shakespeare ' Identified was the formation in 1922 of the Shakespeare Fellowship, a society hospitable to all heretics but chiefly devoted to perpetuating the claims of Oxford. The Shakespeare Fellowship News-letter, issued by the association, performed a service analogous to that of Baconiana. In addition to schoolmasters and attorneys the group attracted military and naval types, the novelist Marjorie Bowen, and Christmas Humphreys, QC, an authority on Buddhism. It appealed to the young at heart: Canon Gerald H. Rendali, sometime Gladstone Professor of Greek at University College, Liverpool, read Looney and, at the age of eighty, experienced a conversion. He proceeded to advance the cause with a series of volumes: Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward De Vere (1930), Shakespeare: Handwriting and Spelling (1931), Personal Clues in Shakespeare Poems & Sonnets (1934), and Ben Jonson and the First Folio Edition of Shakespeare's Plays (1939). So prodigious was the display of energy that one admirer was prompted to exclaim in 1944 that Canon Rendali 'represents one of the biological reasons why the Germans, despite all their sound and fury, will never overcome the British'. After the outbreak of the Second World War the continuity of the Fellowship's work was assured by the formation of an American branch presided over by Dr Louis P. Bénézet of Dartmouth College. This true believer's own contributions include the suggestion, made in Shakspere, Shakespeare and De Vere (1937), that in the Sonnets the Earl addressed his elligitimate son, who acted in his father's company of players under the name of William Shakespeare.

The publications of the de Vere sect are too numerous for listing, much less evaluation, in these pages, but a few of the principal items may be mentioned. A member of the Fellowship, Captain Bernard Mordaunt Ward, produced in 1928 a massive biography from contemporary documents, The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604, aimed at rehabilitating the nobleman's somewhat tarnished reputation. While not overtly concerned with the authorship debate, Ward gives tacit support to the theory (suggested by Lefranc) that Oxford and the Earl of Derby were in some way connected with the composition of Shakespeare's plays. Others too favoured the idea of mixed authorship, for example, Slater's Seven Shakespeares mentioned above. In Lord Oxford and the Shakespeare Group (1952) Lieutenant-Colonel Montagu W. Douglas ingeniously proposed that the Queen charged the Earl with the control of a Propaganda Department for the issuance of patriotic pamphlets and plays, and that he satisfied this commission by putting together a syndicate which included Bacon, the Earl of Derby, Marlowe, Lyly, and Greene: a motley assortment by any standard. Still others sought to adjust the Shakespeare chronology to the facts of Shakespeare's life and thus get round the embarrassment of denying him The Tempest. Mrs Eva Turner Clark, in the 693 pages of Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare 's Plays (1931), arranges the works in a sequence beginning with Henry V and culminating with King Lear in 1590; for The Tempest she finds a snug niche half-way between. This novel arrangement is made possible by identifying Shakespeare's plays with the titles of lost Tudor interludes, and by correctly interpreting internal historical references which had escaped all other scholars. In King Lear, for example, the banishment of Kent parallels the banishment of Drake in 1589, while the play as a whole reflects Oxford's bitterness over 'the failure of the Queen to back him up in his patriotic endeavour to support the throne and country against the factions that were, as he saw them, disintegrating forces in the government, if not actively seditious'.⁹¹ Into such tracts for the times do the plays dwindle in Oxfordian hands.

In a note appended to the last page of 'Shakespeare ' Identified Looney had admitted to a belief that the Grafton portrait of Shakespeare really depicts the Earl. The Shakespeare iconography fascinates the Oxfordians. In the pages of Scientific American for January 1940, Charles Wisner Barrell, one of the brethren, revealed that X-ray and infra-red photography had detected underneath the Ashbourne portrait the pigment of another painting representing de Vere. This discovery was greeted with hoots of delight by the Fellowship, but how it materially aids the cause (even if we accept the doubtful findings of a partisan) is not clear, for the Ashbourne picture, like the Grafton, has no standing as a genuine likeness of Shakespeare.

Among those who applauded Barrell were Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn in This Star of England (1952), the most monumental contribution ever made to the literature of heresy. As one would expect from a volume running to 1297 pages, all the familiar Oxfordian arguments appear, and also some new ones. The quality of the Ogburn reasoning may be illustrated by a single example. They reproduce Touchstone's interrogation of William in As You Like It, with certain words and clauses italicized: 'Art thou learned? . . . all your writers do consent that ipse is he: now, you are not ipse, for I am he. . . . He, sir, that must marry this woman. Therefore, you clown, abandon' This straightfaced commentary follows:

How can a man speak more plainly than this? Oxford—or William Shakespeare—tells Shaksper, another William, to abandon all pretensions to the plays and clear out, forthwith. 'You are not ipse, for I am he.' All the 'writers'—Jonson, Marston, Dekker, Peele, et al.—know this, 'do consent' to it. What other possible interpretation can be put upon these candid lines?⁹²

The aggrandizing tendencies of the heretic surface: Oxford must be credited not only with all of Shakespeare, but also with the apocryphal plays, Marlowe's Edward II, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and Lyly's Endymion and other comedies. In such a context we learn without astonishment that the Earl of Southampton sprang from the loins of Oxford and the womb of Elizabeth, somehow legitimately mated; the Sonnets to the Fair Youth (pun: Vere Youth) therefore become a touching poetical testament of a father to his son. Without once referring to This Star of England the Ogburns—this time Dorothy and her son, Charlton Junior—warmed over their stew as Shakespeare: The Man behind the Name (1962), which has at least the merit of comparative brevity.

With The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality (New York, 1984) Charlton Ogburn goes once more unto the breach, to do battle for his own brand of Oxfordian reality, this time with a volume of almost 900 large pages—not the longest such exercise but very long indeed—which surely qualifies as one of the seven wonders of anti-Stratfordianism, although I would be hard pressed to name the other six. Most of the terrain Ogburn traverses will be familiar to initiates. He argues that de Vere is the Will Moxon of Thomas Nashe's Strange News; the same Will who partook of Rhenish wine and herrings with Nashe and Robert Greene a month before Greene's death: this Will is to be identified with another Will, the celebrated—if supposititious—playwright of the English stage. Elizabeth's grant of £1,000 a year to Oxford facilitated the writing and production of plays supportive of the throne. The author dwells upon parallels between Shakespeare's plays and Oxford's life, unmindful of the discommoding truth that literature and life are full of cunning parallels. Ogburn also ruefully recounts one unbeliever's encounters with the Shakespeare Establishment. The Mysterious William Shakespeare inspired Richmond Crinkley's sympathetic review article, 'New Perspectives on the Authorship Question', which mysteriously appeared in that Establishment bastion, Shakespeare Quarterly the next year (36, 515-22). 'Shakespeare scholarship', Crinkley concludes, 'owes an enormous debt to Charlton Ogburn.' Not everyone would agree.

Washington, DC, attorney, business executive, connoisseur of the arts, philanthropist, and Oxfordian enthusiast, David Lloyd Kreeger was the master spirit behind the moot-court debate sponsored by the American University in the nation's capital, and argued by two members of that university's law-school faculty (Peter Jaszi for the Oxfordian position and James Boyle for the man from Stratford) before a trio of Supreme Court justices in appropriate juridical garb: Harry A. Blackmun, William Brennan, and John Paul Stevens. The event took place on 25 September 1987, at the Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church in the presence of bus-loads of high-school students, contingents of Oxfordian and Stratfordian partisans, white-collar Washingtonians, and the youthful Charles Francis Topham de Vere Beauclerk, a collateral descendant of the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. All told, roughly a thousand—maybe more—jammed into the church that autumn morning. The lawyers presented their arguments, with occasional interjections from the bench, and the court recessed until afternoon when the justices returned to their seats to deliver their opinions. Justice Brennan, the acting chief, spoke first, concluding that the case for the Oxford side remained unproven. 'What business have I to be judging this?', Justice Blackmun could not help asking himself. He thought of Isabel in Measure for Measure ('Oh, it is excellent / To have a giant's strength but it is tyrannous / To use if like a giant'). He agreed, however, that Justice Brennan's conclusion was 'the legal answer'. Justice Stevens similarly arrived at a legal verdict for the Stratford man, although qualified by a degree of personal uncertainty. The event was chronicled in the Washington Post and—more conspicuously, as might be expected—in the New York Times. Months passed. The Authorship Question became the subject of a long essay by James Lardner in the 'Onward and Upward with the Arts' department of the New Yorker (11 April 1988), 87-106. In a retrospective contribution to the de Vere Society Newsletter, a new periodical (1988), Ogburn denounced the moot 'trial' as a 'miscarriage of justice' in which Justice Brennan acted for all practical purposes as a witness for the Stratfordian side.

A permanent record of the great Washington Shakespeare debate was eventually published in the American University Law Review, 37 [1988], 609-826. Included was a verbatim transcript of the Justices' opinion, as well as prefatory remarks by Kreeger and essays by Jaszi ('Who Cares Who Wrote "Shakespeare"?') and Boule ('The Search for an Author: Shakespeare and the Framers'). There the matter did not rest: a reprise with a different dramatis personae (Kreeger, Ogburn, and Shakespeare excepted), took place on 26 November 1988 at the Middle Temple—in the same (then new) 'large and stately' hall where a young lawyer, John Manningham, had the good fortune to see a special production of Twelfth Night performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men on 2 February 1602, and jotted down his impressions. On the occasion of the Middle Temple Moot this author was invited to testify as an expert witness, but, as circumstances worked out, the sponsors were unable to accommodate the expense of my journey. Nor was Ogburn able to take part, so Kreeger, Shakespeare, and the Earl of Oxford had to manage without us. The Oxfordians were represented by L. L. Ware, a founding member of the Mensa Society, and Gordon C. Cyr, former director of the Shakespeare Oxford Society; the Shakespearian side by Stanley Wells, director of the Shakespeare Institute, and Professor Honigmann. The presiding judge, Lord Archer, won applause by delivering the day's closing comments in blank verse. The three Law-Lords judging the Shakespeare Moot, as the mock trial was called, all found for the man from Stratford. Court adjourned.

To the Baconians it was not given to glory alone in a cipher. In Edward De Vere: A Great Elizabethan (1931) George Frisbee prints a multitude of ciphers based on the six letters of de Vere's name. Not surprisingly, he finds these characters everywhere: in Gascoigne's Supposes, in Marlowe, in Harington, Puttenham, Ralegh, Spenser, James I, above all in Shakespeare (most curiously in the contents page and dedication of the 1623 Folio). Even Canon Rendali gratifies us with a cipher:

Why write I still all one, E.VER the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That E.VERY word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?

The Canon takes a special pride in this bit of inanity, which, he modestly allows, rescues Sonnet 76 from inanity.⁹³

For the parallelism of the Oxfordians with the Baconians to be complete we need only the spirit from the grave and clues to the whereabouts of the Earl's lost manuscripts. No disappointment, alas, awaits us. In the autumn of 1942 Percy Allen, author of several Oxfordian treatises, consulted a London medium, Mrs Hester Dowden, daughter of the celebrated Dublin authority on Shakespeare. [Allen, Dowden's biographer informs us, was selected by Spirit People to be the final unraveller of the Shakespeare Mystery (Edmund Bentley, Far Horizon [London, 1951], 148).] The seances continued over an extended period, with one Johannes serving as control, and Hester Dowden herself taking down conversations in automatic writing, of which she was a most gifted practitioner. At these sessions Allen (through the good offices of his deceased brother) met Oxford, Bacon, and Shakespeare. They described their mode of collaboration with alacrity. 'I was quick at knowing what would be effective on the stage,' Shakespeare owned. 'I would find a plot (Hamlet was one), consult with Oxford, and form a skeleton edifice, which he would furnish and people, as befitted the subject.'⁹⁴ Often they took their efforts to Bacon, whose advice was requested but (the Viscount sadly reports) seldom accepted. All this Allen found extremely fascinating, as well he might, but a small difficulty troubled him. In 1943 one Alfred Dodd published a book, The Immortal Master, containing scripts by Hester Dowden reporting direct communication with Bacon, in the course of which the latter claimed for himself Shakespeare's writings. 'My friend, I can help you,' Bacon reassured Allen. 'I was acting through a Deputy in the case of Dodd—a Deputy who has never been personally in touch with me, and who questions nothing; for he is firmly convinced that I wrote the plays and sonnets, and took no trouble to have a direct message from me.'⁹⁵ Some spooks, it seems, are unreliable.

Where three centuries of scholarship had failed, Dowden's gatherings succeeded, clearing up disputed points in Shakespearian biography and producing fresh details. The poet indeed entered the world on St George's day, his mother invariably having her infants baptized three days after birth, The parents were Protestant (so much for John Shakespeare's Spiritual Last Will and Testament!). At the free school Will was considered a dull scholar. Although the deer-poaching legend had some basis in fact, the youth ran off to London not because of Lucy's wrath, but rather to escape becoming a butcher, the occupation selected for him by his father. At the as yet non-existent Globe in 1581 there was no stage, only a courtyard. 'My first duties', the shade recalled, 'were connected with preparation, cleaning the yard and seats, and putting them in order. . . . I was receiving so little from an unwilling father, that I had to increase my earnings; and so, being accustomed to horses, I held them while the spectators came.'⁹⁶ In 1583 Shakespeare met Oxford, who advised the young actor (as he then was) to set down on paper some of the stories rattling around in his brain. From these beginnings ensued the collaboration of the nobleman and the rustic. Will contributed the villains—Shylock and Iago and Edmund—and the scenes of great passion and simple English humour. To Oxford we owe the more lovable characters and most of the poetry.

All this and much more the séances brought to light. Perhaps the most exciting of the disclosures was the location of the priceless play manuscripts. They were buried in Shakespeare's tomb. (Surely the shade is confused—he must mean the grave; it happened so long ago.) One bundle served as the pillow for the corpse, another lay between the hands, a third at the feet; Hamlet reposed on the breast. Delia Bacon's intuition had been right after all.

Freud

In certain recurring features of anti-Stratfordian behaviour we may discern a pattern of psychopathology. The heretic's revulsion against the provincial and lowly; his exaltation of his hero (and, through identification, himself) by furnishing him with an aristocratic, even royal, pedigree; his paranoid structures of thought, embracing the classic paraphernalia of persecution: secrets, curses, conspiracies; the compulsion to dig in churches, castles, river beds, and tombs; the auto-hypnosis, spirit visitations, and other hallucinatory phenoma; the descent, in a few cases, into actual madness—all these manifestations of the uneasy psyche suggest that the movement calls not so much for the expertise of the literary historian as for the insight of the psychiatrist. Dr Freud beckons us.

Of his abiding interest in Shakespeare we have abundant evidence. Freud began reading the plays at the age of eight, and was always ready with a quotation from them. Shakespeare's pre-Freudian understanding of human nature filled the doctor with admiration; Shakespeare became, with Moses and Leonardo, one of the three extraordinary personalities in whom the founder of psychoanalysis took pre-eminent interest. That the authorship controversy stirred his analytical curiosity need not surprise us. It is, however, both surprising and sad that the schismatics were able to claim Freud as one of their own.

The instructor of his youth, the brain anatomist Meynert—revered by his celebrated pupil as the greatest genius he had ever encountered—was a professed Baconian. But Freud resisted this influence, although on disconcertingly Groupist grounds: if Bacon wrote Shakespeare, he 'would have been the most powerful brain the world has ever borne', 'whereas . . . there is more need to share Shakespeare's achievement among several rivals than to burden another important man with it'.⁹⁷ So Freud wrote in 1883; later his scepticism deepened when he discovered that the cult's founder bore the name of Bacon, so suspiciously suggestive of a personal motive. Nevertheless, the Baconians fascinated him, and, prior to the First World War, he urged his disciple Ernest Jones (the Shakespearian of the circle by virtue of his work on Hamlet) to study their methods and contrast them with the psychoanalytic approach. That way the theory would be disproved, and Freud's mind set at rest. But Jones shied away from the assignment.

Freud continued to toy with faddist ideas about Shakespeare. Was the National Poet, he wondered, really an Englishman? An Italian, Professor Gentilli of Nervi, had proposed that the name was a corruption of Jacques Pierre; indeed, Shakespeare's features looked more Latin than English. (One suspects that Freud accepted unquestioningly the genuineness of the Chandos portrait.) There the matter rested until around 1923, when Freud read the Looney book. It converted him to the Oxfordian faith. His intuition had found confirmation—if 'Shakespeare' was not actually a Frenchman, at least he had Norman forebears.

At a convivial gathering in celebration of his seventieth birthday in 1926, Freud expounded the de Vere theory at length. 'I remember my astonishment', Jones writes, 'at the enthusiasm he could display in the subject at two in the morning.'⁹⁸ The next year Freud reread Looney with no accessions of doubt. In 1928 he turned to Jones again, this time asking him to investigate what new psychoanalytic conclusions would follow from assigning the plays to Oxford. Again Jones prudently remained aloof.

His coolness did not, however, dampen his master's enthusiasm for the theory. 'I no longer believe in the man from Stratford,' he confided to Theodore Reik in 1930. That year, in a speech accepting the Goethe Prize, Freud made his views public: 'It is undeniably painful to all of us that even now we do not know who was the author of the Comedies, Tragedies and Sonnets of Shakespeare; whether it was in fact the untutored son of the provincial citizen of Stratford, who attained a modest position as an actor in London, or whether it was, rather, the nobly-born and highly cultivated, passionately wayward, to some extent déclassé aristocrat, Edward de Vere.'⁹⁹ He proceeded to revise his earlier pronouncements. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud had likened, tentatively, the repressed Oedipal strivings of Hamlet to the death of Shakespeare's father and of the playwright's son Hamnet; now, in a footnote to the eighth German edition, he included a disclaimer remarkable for the casualness of its phrasing: 'Incidentally, I have in the meantime ceased to believe that the author of Shakespeare's works was the man from Stratford.' Canon Rendali's Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward De Vere shored up Freud's conviction; not doubting the significance of the Sonnets as self-confession, he found that Oxfordian authorship made them more intelligible.

As regards the plays, the Oxford heresy opened new vistas of psychoanalytic speculation. Lear had three daughters; so too had de Vere. 'If Shakespeare was Lord Oxford', Freud wrote on 25 March 1934 to James S. H. Bransom,

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. A squanderer of his inheritance and a miserable manager of his affairs, oppressed by debts, he could not maintain his family, did not live with them, and left the education and care of his three daughters to their grandfather, Lord Burleigh. His marriage with Ann Cecil turned out very unhappily. If he was Shakespeare he had himself experienced Othello's torments.¹⁰⁰

Elsewhere Freud accepts the Oxfordian identification of Lord Derby, the Earl's first son-in-law, with Horatio in Hamlet and Albany in King Lear.

English-speaking readers did not yet know of Freud's conversion. For their benefit he composed a note for insertion in the 1935 edition of An Autobiographical Study. The translator, James Strachey—only too well aware of the contempt felt by orthodox scholars for the Oxfordians—threw up his hands. Patiently he explained to Freud the English connotation of the name Looney; a connotation which (in Jones's apt phrase) 'could only have the effect of adding risibility to derision'. Freud yielded—but in the American edition he stuck to his guns. 'The same sort of narcissistic defense need not be feared over there,' he snapped at Strachey. [The correspondence of Freud and Arnold Zweig, first published as recently as 1970 in an edition assembled by Ernst L. Freud, the master's son, reveals the strength of Freud's commitment to his heterodoxy. 'I do not know what still attracts you to the man of Stratford,' he expressed himself petulantly to Zweig on 2 April 1937. 'He seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything. It is quite inconceivable to me that Shakespeare should have got 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' (p. 140). As Peter Gay notes in Freud: A Life for our Time (New York, 1988), Freud twice read 'Shakespeare' Identified, for some years pursuing this 'chimera', and discussing it with—among others—Ernest Jones, who tried in vain to dissuade him. 'Jones', Gay observes, 'shrewdly connects this harmless mania with Freud's fascination with telepathy. Both, he suggests, support the view that things are not what they seem to be' (p. 643 n.).]

In London in 1938, a refugee from the Nazi occupation of Vienna, Freud received a letter of welcome from Looney. 'Dear Mr. Looney,' the great man replied, 'I have known you as the author of a remarkable book, to which I owe my conviction about Shakespeare's identity, as far as my judgment in this matter goes.'¹⁰¹ The next year he died, but not before making a final attestation of his faith. For his last revision of An Outline of Psychoanalysis, published in 1940, he added this note to his original remarks on Hamlet's Oedipus wish: 'The name "William Shakespeare" is very probably a pseudonym behind which a great unknown lies concealed. 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.'¹⁰² Thus he transferred from Shakespeare to Oxford his original insight into the psychogenesis of Hamlet. Long after Freud's passing, an English psychoanalyst, Victor Kanter, went through the library of the master's house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, and found there fourteen anti-Stratfordian works, most of them by Oxfordians, and only eight by orthodox scholars.

Inevitably some of Freud's followers stumbled after him into the Oxfordian bog; most notably Dr A. Bronson Feldman, who in a series of articles has explored the workings of de Vere's unconscious in The Comedy of Errors, Othello, and the Sonnets. [Freud's early disciple Wilhelm Stekel embraced a more orthodox unorthodoxy. From his Autobiography we learn that Stekel 'shared the belief of many that Bacon actually wrote certain of Shakespeare's plays' (p. 223), an opinion which led to his break with his friend Samuel Tannenbaum, psychiatrist and eccentric Shakespearian. Stekel had already seceded from Freud's circle, which was clearly schism-prone.] But mainly the Freudians have tried to account for their leader's aberration, a quest that may shed psychoanalytic light on the entire anti-Stratfordian syndrome. Certainly Freud's position cannot be understood on purely rational grounds: he knew from the example of Leonardo what a supremely creative mind could accomplish without formal training; he knew from his own triumphs the irrelevance of aristocratic blood to great endeavour. Something in Freud's mentality, Jones suggests, produced a fascination with the idea of men not being what they seemed. Thus Moses, universally reckoned a Jew, must have been a noble Egyptian.

Such obsessions reflect the operation of the Family Romance fantasy. The child, reacting against disappointment with the imperfections of his parents, compensates by replacing them with others of higher birth; he must be a stepchild, or adopted. In later life such fantasies of parental idealization are transposed to a Moses—or Oxford. To the psychoanalyst Dr Harry Trosman, 'the imputation of Shakespearean authorship to a historical figure is another example of the formation of a transference allowed to continue unresolved and continually buttressed by the discovery of "new historical evidence'". It is not surprising that the Family Romance should flourish in Freud's psyche. The household of his childhood included two half-brothers twenty and twenty-three years his senior; his mother—his father's second wife—was their contemporary. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud relates a slip of the tongue, involving the substitution of a name, to the fantasy of 'how different things would have been if I had been born the son not of my father but of my brother'.

Fantasies of this kind testify to feelings of ambivalence towards the father. According to Norman Holland, Freud's urge to dethrone Shakespeare stems from his view of 'the artist as a kind of totem whom he both resented and emulated'.¹⁰³ The psychoanalytically oriented will see manifestations of this filial ambivalence throughout the dreary pages of anti-Stratfordian discourse: on the one hand, denigration of the drunken, illiterate, usurious poacher from the provinces; on the other, ecstatic veneration of the substitute claimant, aristocrat and deity. The heretic's selection of de Vere, courtly amateur rather than professional man of letters, confirms his identification with his idealized choice, for the Oxfordians are, almost to a man, dilettante scholars. In Looney's case the tendency towards idealization finds early expression in his gift of Carlyle's Heroes to a youthful friend, with the advice that he read it before turning twenty. The British Library deposition shows Looney imagining in his own life a situation parallel to that in which (he believed) Oxford found himself:

Through some untoward event Looney's identity as the discoverer might not be revealed, while someone else was to be acknowledged as having solved the puzzle. By entrusting his deposition with the Librarian of the British Museum, Looney could well imagine that eventually his identity would be revealed as the original instigator of the Oxfordian position. In the same way that he states credit must be given 'to the great Englishman' who actually authored the plays, credit would then be given to him who had actually made the Oxfordian discovery first.¹⁰⁴

Looney's deliverance of his idol from depreciation and obscurity exemplifies the rescue fantasy, interpreted by Freud as the son's defiant wish to settle his account with his father for the gift of life. ('I want nothing from my father,' the boy in effect says. 'I will give him back all I have cost him.') In the rescue fantasy one sees again the operation of the Family Romance, dually functioning 'to mask the hostile impulses and preserve the lost omnipotent object'. In such a way does psychoanalytic theory explain the unconscious origins of anti-Stratfordian polemics.

Other Claimants

Those ummoved by Looney, Freud, and company can choose from other aristocrats. Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Anthony Sherley (a favourite of Essex), Anthony Bacon (qualified for the Sonnets by reason of lameness), and Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, have all found champions. The ingenuity of the arguments in favour of William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby (1561-1641), devised by Abel Lefranc (1863-1952), a professor of French at the Collège de France, won him a distinguished convert in the author of Aphrodite. In an unpublished letter dated 6 April 1919 (preserved in the Folger Shakespeare Library) Pierre Louys observed that 'le stratfordhomme' signed himself 'Wm' or 'William', whereas Derby preferred 'Will', a name or word which occurs often in the Sonnets and plays mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare. Moreover, just as in time the composer Wagner would call his children Eva and Siegfried, Will Derby christened his son Jacques, and married him to a Frenchwoman (Charlotte de la Trémolile) to ensure that he would not be called James but Jacques by his wife; and we all know that As You Like It features a Jacques. Voilá.

These candidacies have inherently no less rationality than that of Christopher Marlowe, the most recent to achieve wide notoriety. By now only the most innocent will suppose the Siberian expanses separating the literary personalities of the gentle Shakespeare and iconoclastic Marlowe (described by a contemporary as of a cruel and intemperate nature) sufficient to discourage heretical speculation. One fact, however, might: Marlowe's sudden death at the age of twenty-nine on 20 May 1593 at widow Eleanor Bull's place of public refreshment at Deptford, where he may have had lodgings, not far from the plague-stricken capital. The circumstances of the slaying are set forth in detail in the legal records; a jury of sixteen accepted the coroner's findings. But of such impossibilities the anti-Stratfordians make instruments to plague us.

In 1955 Calvin Hoffman of Long Island, described by Time magazine as a Broadway press agent and by a disciple as a poet and playwright, published the results of nineteen years of hard labour, The Murder of the Man Who Was 'Shakespeare'. The long quest began when he took to jotting down phraseological correspondences between Shakespeare and Marlowe. Then one night, as he tossed restlessly on his mattress counting parallelisms instead of sheep, a dark thought occurred to Hoffman: what if the report of Marlowe's assassination was a hoax? As time passed, the possibilities of a monstrous imposture (how Marlowe must have suffered!) became oppressive; like Delia Bacon, Dr Owen, and other schismatics, Hoffman found his pursuit occupying most of his waking hours and forcing him to sacrifice mundane interests. His researches carried him to England, Denmark, and Germany; he prowled in graveyards, inhaled the dust of tombs, wearied himself in ancient archives. At last a theory took shape.

Less than a fortnight before Marlowe's death, the Privy Council had issued a warrant for the poet's arrest on suspicion of blasphemy and atheism, but allowed him to remain at large when he posted bond and consented to attend daily upon the Council. The high-born Thomas Walsingham, involved with Marlowe in a homosexual liaison, feared for his protégé's life, and with the latter's assistance concocted a plot to save him: three sinister characters in Walsingham's service—Skeres, Poley, and Frizer—would pass off a corpse as Marlowe's. In some narrow alley of Deptford the trio selected their victim—a foreign sailor, maybe Italian or Spanish—lured him to Dame Eleanor Bull's house, plied him with drink, then stabbed him to death. Meanwhile, Marlowe, who had lain low at his lover's Scadbury estate, hoisted sail for France. ('The figure on the Channel ship watches the tender outlines of the French coast as they emerge out of the morning mist, purple and gold in the rising sun.'¹⁰⁵) Afterwards he lived in Italy, but eventually he returned in disguise to Scadbury and there dwelt in seclusion, roaming the woods that furnished him with the nature allusions for his plays. These and the poems were submitted to Marlowe's benefactor. Walsingham hired a professional scribe to copy them, hid the original manuscripts, and employed an obscure actor—an unimaginative but steady fellow—to lend these masterpieces his name. Hence it was that, four months after Marlowe's supposed death, Shakespeare made his literary début with Venus and Adonis. Later the Sonnets were published with their decication to Mr W.H.—Walsing-Ham, of course. The true date of Marlowe's demise has eluded even Hoffman's patient researches, but the poet must have died before 1623, when Walsingham sought to keep alive the memory of his beloved by publishing a folio edition of the plays. How Shakespeare's name on the title-page would have abetted this end Hoffman does not explain.

Needless to say, he produces not a single record to support this preposterous romance: rather a sad showing for nineteen years of steady work. Nor can he even properly claim priority for his theory. William Gleason Zeigler, a San Francisco lawyer, had put forward the Muses' darling in 1895 in his novel, It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries. Not until the project had haunted him for twelve years did Hoffman discover this anticipation, on which he tries to put as brave a face as possible, dismissing the Zeigler performance in a footnote as a 'cinematic "thriller"', and 'the purest fiction and fantasy'. Hoffman does not mention Zeigler's preface and notes, in which the suggestion that Marlowe lived on until 1598 is made with evident seriousness and in straightforward expository prose; nor does he allude to the crucial point that Zeigler credits Marlowe with all of Shakespeare's 'stronger plays'. Slater's Seven Shakespeares, cited in the same Hoffman note merely as a work proposing Marlowe as one of the seven, offers the theory that the death was faked, that Marlowe left England at the beginning of June 1593, and that he later contributed substantially 'to the main volume of the Shakespeare plays'. And Hoffman has missed altogether Mackay's theory (1884) about Marlowe's pen in Shakespeare's Sonnets. He does, however, offer ample homage to the Ohio professor Thomas Corwin Mendenhall who, employing a team of put-upon women to count millions of words and letters of words, was able to plot graphs of the vocabulary curves of various writers. The results, published in the hospitable pages of Popular Science Monthly (December 1901), demonstrated that the characteristic curve of Marlowe's plays 'agrees with Shakespeare about as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself.

This 'evidence' Hoffman supplements with his parallels, the value of which he modestly describes as 'enormous'. Many of these enormously valuable parallels are not parallel; thus Hoffman compares 'Some swore he was a maid in man's attire' (from Hero and Leander) with this line from Venus and Adonis: 'Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man'. Some of the correspondences are commonplace phrases that any writer might have used; others may be accounted for by the acknowledged influence of Marlowe on Shakespeare. The remainder involve direct quotation, such as Pistol's 'And hollow pampered jades of Asia, / Which cannot go but thirty mile a day'.

Shakespeare's famous tribute to Marlowe—

Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:
'Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight?'

—presents a special problem, for to ordinary readers it would seem clear that the author placed Marlowe among the departed. Hoffman gets round this awkwardness by proposing that the dead shepherd is Sidney; later he includes the quotation in As You Like It, along with the line from Hero and Leander, among his parallels. Such procedures are not calculated to satisfy the fastidious. Any confidence in Hoffman's scholarship is further undermined by his indifference to factual precision: names are misspelt, dates rendered inaccurately, and words silently omitted from inaccurate quotations.

These deficiencies did not escape responsible reviewers. The TLS (27 January 1956) described The Murder of the Man Who Was 'Shakespeare' with accuracy and commendable restraint as 'a tissue of twaddle'. But in the popular press Hoffman created a 'storm of controversy' (Time), no doubt in part provoked by the sweaty journalese of his prose style. This is one of those books that introduce readers to the brawling Elizabethan world, teeming with swarthy folk convulsed with Rabelaisian humour. Courts are corrupt, women fecund, and men sensual. When the plague strikes, Elizabethan London becomes 'a den of horror'. Gallants chase their ladies on soft summer nights illuminated by lascivious firefly lanterns. When Hoffman arrives at his high point, the Marlowe murder plot, he resorts to a 'fictionalized approximation'. Under the circumstances, one is not inclined to fault this strategy.

Hoffman's mission did not end with publication of his book. The compulsion to dig, endemic among anti-Stratfordians, had taken hold of him, and he summoned together his energies for an assault upon the Walsingham tomb in the Scadbury Chapel of St Nicholas's Church in Chislehurst. Manuscripts deposited there would, Hoffman hoped, prove to the world the existence of what he terms, rather unfortunately, 'the Marlowe-Shakespeare fraud'. The Walsingham family having died out early in the eighteenth century, Hoffman enlisted the co-operation of Major John Marsham-Townsend, who, as lord of the manor, had rights of exclusive use of the chapel. In January 1956 a consistory court granted consent for the opening of the monument; four months later stonemasons pried open the top of the tomb. Within lay no manuscripts, nor even human remains; only hardpacked yellow sand, serving as a damp course, from the Normandy shore. Workmen removed the sand, then cut a small hole in the floor, through which they could discern, about two feet below, a leaden coffin. Alas, the master of Scadbury Park resolutely refused to permit the dismantling of any Walsingham coffins.

The reader of this narrative will be prepared to learn that failure did not discourage Hoffman. 'It has not proved or disproved my theory,' he told a New York Times reporter: 'It was a 1,000 to one chance that we would find any manuscripts. I have other clues to follow up while I am in England.'

Inevitably the Marlowe cause, like the others, gained adherents. In 1956 a Scarsdale attorney, Sherwood E. Silliman—how innocently appropriate are some anti-Stratfordian names!—privately printed 'a fanciful play', The Laurel Bough, re-creating the slaying and substitution for the poet of a down-and-out actor, after which Marlowe is comforted by the love of Walsingham's wife and continues his playwriting career as Shakespeare's collaborator. This theory, the author announces, was formulated independently of Hoffman. In his preface, Silliman makes some telling points about Marlowe and Shakespeare: 'Each used poetic blank verse', 'Both dote on pomp and ceremony', etc. Surely, Silliman triumphantly concludes, 'no two human minds could have such striking similarities'. In the text to his sumptuous pictorial biography, In Search of Christopher Marlowe (1965), A. D. Wraight does not go so far as to endorse Hoffman's thesis, but the influence surfaces and the name Hoffman appears ominously among the credits. An avowed disciple is David Rhys Williams, author of Faith beyond Humanism, who in Shakespeare Thy Name is Marlowe (1966) thanks Hoffman for generous permission to write on the subject. While in England, Williams reports, he addressed the London chapter of the Marlowe Society at Hoffman's suggestion; mercifully there is as yet no Marlowe Society Newsletter. At Canterbury to visit the shrines sacred to Marlowe's memory, Williams glimpsed a carton containing over five hundred newly discovered documents, many of them identifying the poet as Shakespeare. As Dr Urry, the City archivist, has not yet got round to publishing his report on these intriguing papers, the public must endure suspense for a while longer before the final dispensation of the Marlowe claim.

Why not King James?, asks R. C. Churchill, and he backs up his proposal with a sporting offer: 'In fact, for ten guineas per thousand words, payable in advance, I will undertake to prove to all but the hopelessly prejudiced that King James—or, alternatively, Fulke Greville or Sir Thomas North—was the real author of the works erroneously attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon.'¹⁰⁶ The suggestion of James as potential author follows the concluding item in Churchill's historical survey, George Elliot Sweet's Shakespeare the Mystery (1956). Recommended for its 'persuasive logic' by Erle Stanley Gardner, who entertained his fellow sleuth on his ranch, Sweet's diligently researched book (it cites among other authorities the World Book Encyclopedia) presents the case for Queen Elizabeth, who alone possessed the Negative Capability which Keats so admired in Shakespeare; after all, she survived plenty of political uncertainty—a nice gloss on Keats. Sweet's trump card is the Epilogue to Henry VIII, which he interprets in novel fashion. "Tis ten to one this play can never please,' the Epilogue begins; Sweets reads: There are ten kings in Europe, I am the one queen. He continues in like manner with the rest of the speech, no doubt allaying the unease of some who might otherwise be troubled by a reshuffling of chronology that results in the assignment of The Tempest to 1582. The chief mystery about Shakespeare the Mystery is its printing (although not publication) by the Stanford University Press.

The effect of Churchill's whimsical proposal evaporates when one realizes that he is not the first to think of the wisest fool in Christendom in this context:

In the . . . debates I argued for the theory that King James himself was the real poet who used the nom de plume Shakespeare. King James was brilliant. He was the greatest king who ever sat on the British throne. Who else among royalty, in his time, would have had the giant talent to write Shakespeare's works?¹⁰⁷

The debates alluded to did not take place on the platform of some genteel anti-Stratfordian meeting, but, rather, in the Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts. In such a setting do we find expressed presumptions of royalty with respect to the author of Shakespeare's works. The claim of the first Stuart was urged by Malcolm Little, who is unusual among heretics in denying altogether the existence of the historical Shakespeare. Later Little would die violently on another platform. By then he had achieved notoriety as Malcolm X.

With the Black Muslim candidate our own survey comes to an end. Perhaps at this pause in the narrative the writer may be permitted to drop for a moment the historian's mask of impersonality and give vent to private emotion. This section has been the cruellest endeavour I have ever confronted. The sheer volume of heretical publication appals. In the 1840s Joseph S. Galland, a professor of Romance Languages at Northwestern University, compiled a typescript bibliography, Digesta Anti-Shakespeareana, that fills six large volumes and describes 4,509 items. A number of these are enormous, and many more have of course appeared since. The voluminousness of output is matched only by the intrinsic insubstantiality of most of it: two characteristics which together produce an overpowering effect. The lawyers were back at their game in a series of articles in the Journal of the American Bar Association in 1959 and 1960, afterwards reprinted as Shakespeare Cross-Examined; but just as one despairs of the legal profession, Milward W. Martin replies to his colleagues rationally in Was Shakespeare Shakespeare? A Lawyer Reviews the Evidence (1965). Thus the bibliography swells.

Many curious theories lie outside the ken of my selective history. I have not found space to deal with those who claim for Bacon Don Quixote (the English translation as well as the original Spanish version), the plays of Lope de Vega (all 2,200; why not?), the dramas of Calderón, Gray's Elegy, Gulliver's Travels, and Poe's Raven. Nor have I been able to savour the contribution of George M. Battey—another endearing name—whose application of 'the alphabetical numerical clock count' led to the inescapable conclusion that the plays were written by Daniel Defoe—or rather, as Battey prefers, Daniel Foe. I regret, however, not being able to consider the ingenious speculation of James Freeman Clarke, who contributed to the North American Review (February 1881) an article entitled 'Did Shakespeare Write Bacon's Works?'

A great many of the schismatics are (as we have seen) distinguished in fields other than literary scholarship, and their ignorance of fact and method is as dismaying as their non-specialist love of Shakespeare's plays is touching. One feels oppressed, moreover, by the presence of an irresistible passion in these men and women: the inexorable compulsion that usurps thought, courts ridicule, even (at times) unseats reason. Vanity presses have published some of these anti-Stratfordian diatribes at their authors' expense; others have been sponsored by well-esteemed commercial houses which would refuse, as a poor business risk, the scholar's sober monograph. It would be a nice question to determine which phenomenon has the more depressing implications.

If the well one day should run dry, it might be argued, we would be deprived of the harmless mirth occasionally provoked by heretical extravagance; but it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the gaiety of nations would be thereby eclipsed. In 1969 there appeared a novel, The Philosopher's Stone, by that voluble autodidact Colin Wilson, whose hero Newman, travelling in time through an effort of the will, discovers that Bacon not Shakespeare—both 'second rate minds'—wrote the plays. The continuous flow of publication, and the publicity given sensational theories by newspapers throughout the Western world, have understandably induced in laymen—even educated laymen—lingering doubts about the reality of Shakespeare and the true authorship of the canon. Away from the academy, whether in the lounge bar of a cruise ship or in the shadow of the Moorish wall in Gibraltar or on an Intourist bus on the road to Sevastapol, the professor of English (once his identity has been guessed by fellow-holiday-makers) will be asked, as certainly as day follows night, 'Did Shakespeare really write those plays?' He will do well to nod assent and avoid explanation, for nothing he says will erase suspicions fostered for over a century by amateurs who have yielded to the dark power of the anti-Stratfordian obsession. One thought perhaps offers a crumb of redeeming comfort: the energy absorbed by the mania might otherwise have gone into politics.

Notes

⁷³ . . . Appleton Morgan, The Shakespearean Myth: William Shakespeare and Circumstantial Evidence (Cincinnati!, 1881), 304-5.

⁷⁴ Ibid. 284.

⁷⁵ John H. Stotsenburg, An Impartial Study of the Shakespeare Title (Louisville, Ky., 1904), 510.

⁷⁶ George Greenwood, The Shakespeare Problem Restated (London, 1908), pref., p. x. My attention was drawn to this note by Frank W. Wadsworth (The Poacher from Stratford (Berkeley, 1958), 97-8).

⁷⁷ Gilbert Slater, Seven Shakespeares: A Discussion of the Evidence for Various Theories with Regard to Shakespeare's Identity (London, 1931), 220-1.

⁷⁸ Alden Brooks, Will Shakespeare Factotum and Agent (New York, 1937), 373.

⁷⁹ Alden Brooks, This Side of Shakespeare (New York, 1964), 129-30.

⁸⁰ J. Thomas Looney, 'Shakespeare ' Identified in Edward De Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (London, 1920), introd., 16.

⁸¹ Ibid. 57. I owe this insight to R. C. Churchill, Shakespeare and his Betters (London, 1958), 197.

⁸² Letter of J. Thomas Looney to Charles Wisner Barrell, dated 6 June 1937; printed in The Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly, 5 [1944], 21.

⁸³ Looney, 'Shakespeare' Identified, 118-19.

⁸⁴ Ibid. 131.

⁸⁵Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (London, 1949), 305. This episode, which has escaped the noses of the Oxfordians, is cited by Wadsworth (The Poacher from Stratford, 111).

⁸⁶ Looney, 'Shakespeare' Identified, 385.

⁸⁷ Ibid. 211.

⁸⁸ Ibid. 413.

⁸⁹ Ibid. 530.

⁹⁰ Ibid. 509.

⁹¹ Eva Turner Clark, Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare's Plays: A Study of the Oxford Theory Based on the Records of Early Court Revels and Personalities of the Times (New York, 1931), 603.

⁹² Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn, This Star of England: 'William Shakespeare' Man of the Renaissance (New York, 1952), 1004. This particular aberration is cited by Giles E. Dawson in a withering review; see Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 [1953], 165-70.

⁹³ Gerald H. Rendali, Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward De Vere (London, 1930), 210.

⁹⁴ Percy Allen, Talks with Elizabethans Revealing the Mystery of William Shakèspeare ' (London, n.d.), 40.

⁹⁵ Ibid. 32.

⁹⁶ Ibid. 72-3.

⁹⁷ Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London, 1953-7), i. 24.

⁹⁸ Ibid. iii. 460.

⁹⁹ 'Address Delivered in the Goethe House at Frankfort', The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London, 1953-), xxi. 211.

¹⁰⁰ Jones, Sigmund Freud, iii. 488.

¹⁰¹ Quoted by A. Bronson Feldman, 'The Confessions of William Shakespeare', American Imago, 10 [1953], 165.

¹⁰² Freud, Complete Psychological Works, xxiii. 192 n. 1.

¹⁰³ Norman N. Holland. Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York, 1966), 59.

¹⁰⁴ Harry Trosman, 'Freud and the Controversy over Shakespearean Authorship', Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 13 [1965], 492.

¹⁰⁵ Calvin Hoffman, The Man Who Was 'Shakespeare ' (London, 1955), 121. The title of the English edition, from which I quote, differs slightly from that of the American edition.

¹⁰⁶ R. C. Churchill, Shakespeare and His Betters (London, 1958), 117.

¹⁰⁷The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York, 1965), 187. The Autobiography was ghost-written by Alex Haley, who would go on to achieve celebrity as the author of Roots.