Contested Will (28 page)

Looney found the most unassailable evidence for the author's embrace of authoritarian values in Ulysses' great speech about the dangers of chaos in Act 1 of
Troilus and Cressida
. ‘No more terrible condemnation of revolutionary equality', Looney concluded, ‘was ever uttered':

Lifting these words out of context, and italicising the lines that highlight his hierarchical views, Looney ignores how wily Ulysses mouths these pieties to manipulate his superior, the buffoonish Agamemnon, who has ample reason to want to hear degree and ‘due of birth' defended so aggressively. In the 1940s, E. M. W. Tillyard would make this speech the centrepiece of a nostalgic and influential
Elizabethan World Picture
. But not even the conservative Tillyard goes as far as Looney, who was convinced that the ‘scene as a whole is a discussion of state policy, from the standpoint of one strongly imbued with aristocratic conceptions, and conscious of the decline of the feudal order upon which social life had hitherto rested'. Looney knew that the clock could not be turned back, ‘that we cannot, of course, go back to “Shakespeare's” medievalism, but we shall need to incorporate into modern life what was best in the social order and social spirit of the Middle Ages'.

It wasn't enough for Looney that the author of the plays held such views; he had to advocate them, use his plays to promote an explicit political agenda. This is where Oxford's candidacy made so much sense and why Looney couldn't just write a book arguing that a socially conservative Shakespeare of Stratford had written the plays. The true author had to be a man whose aristocratic lineage made him a natural leader, one who – if he had been properly recognised in his time – could have changed the world. Like Comte's great teachings, ‘Shakespeare's' collected works were a textbook for both social and political reform: ‘How differently
might the whole course of European history have unfolded,' Looney laments, ‘if the policy of “Shakespeare” had prevailed instead of that of the politicians of his time.'

In pursuing this idea, Looney had to argue that the plays that Oxford wrote were sophisticated political allegories (he interpreted
Henry the Fifth
, for example, as Oxford's attempt to urge a conciliatory rather than imperialist course in Elizabethan foreign policy). Underlying such claims are far-fetched assumptions about how and why the playwright went about creating his characters. For Looney, these
dramatis personae
weren't creations of the writer's fertile imagination; they were rather ‘living men and women, artistically modified and adjusted to fit them for the part they had to perform'. And many of them turn out to be well-known courtiers or privy councillors in the dramatist's immediate orbit. Here, too, Looney was simply appropriating a topical methodology occasionally employed by mainstream Shakespeare scholars from Malone on down, though he took it to new extremes.

Enough incidents in Oxford's life uncannily corresponded to events in the plays to support Looney's claims that the plays were barely veiled autobiography. Like Hamlet, Oxford's father died young and his mother remarried. Like Lear, he had three daughters – and his first wife was the same age as Juliet when they married. Oxford also didn't refrain from recycling in his plays appalling events from his own life, from having been deceived by a bed-trick into sleeping with his wife (like Bertram in
All's Well
) to stabbing to death an unarmed man (as Hamlet did to Polonius).

Until now, critics had failed to identify these ‘cunning disguises' because they had the wrong man. Oxford's authorship, Looney was convinced, made everything clear.
Hamlet
offered the best example and Looney matches its cast of characters with those in Oxford's courtly circle: Polonius is Lord Burghley, Laertes, his son Thomas Cecil, Hamlet is Oxford himself and Ophelia is Oxford's wife Anne. But such claims about representing on the public stage
some of the most powerful figures in the realm betray a shallow grasp of Elizabethan dramatic censorship. Looney didn't understand that Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, whose job it was to read and approve all dramatic scripts before they were publicly performed, would have lost his job – and most likely his nose and ears, if not his head – had he approved a play that so transparently ridiculed privy councillors, past and present. Looney's scheme also defies common sense, for Lord Burghley was dead by the time
Hamlet
was written, and nothing could have been in poorer taste, or more dangerous, than mocking Elizabeth's most beloved councillor soon after his death, on stage or in print.

Yet there were things in favour of Oxford's candidacy. He had been praised in his lifetime as both poet and playwright, and his verse was widely anthologised. Since relatively little was known about Oxford's life when Looney undertook his research, he can hardly be faulted for not knowing more about him. Looney relied heavily on the romantic portrait of Oxford in the late nineteenth-century
Dictionary of National Biography
, written, as it happens, by the Shakespeare scholar Sidney Lee. He learned there that Oxford was born in 1550, briefly studied at Cambridge, succeeded his father as Earl of Oxford in 1562, was a ward under the guardianship of William Cecil and married Cecil's eldest daughter Anne in 1571 (remarrying after her death in 1588), and subsequently found himself in and mostly out of Elizabeth's favour at court. According to Lee, from 1592 or so until his death in 1604, Oxford's life ‘was spent mainly in retirement'. Looney also discovered from Lee's account that Oxford wrote poetry ‘of much lyric beauty', ‘squandered some part of his fortune upon men of letters whose bohemian mode of life attracted him', and was the patron of a playing company.

A century later, much more information about Oxford had been unearthed, and can be found in the updated
Dictionary of National Biography
entry written by Alan Nelson, as well in as Nelson's authoritative and harsh documentary biography of de Vere,
Monstrous Adversary
. Nelson's Oxford is a far less attractive
figure than Lee's, and by extension, Looney's. It had become much clearer that Oxford was ‘notorious in his own time' for ‘his irregular life, and for squandering virtually his entire patrimony on personal extravagance'. ‘Eternally short of funds, he did not scruple to burden lesser men with his debts.' His ‘eccentricities and irregularities of temper grew with his years'. Oxford had stabbed a servant to death, but was exonerated when the authorities decided that it wasn't murder but suicide: the servant had willingly impaled himself on Oxford's sword's point.

Where Looney imagines what Lee calls Oxford's ‘retirement' spent reworking theatrical drafts into high art, Nelson documents instead how ‘Oxford devoted his declining years to the endless pursuit of supplementary income, petitioning for the monopoly on fruit, oils, and wool; for the gauging of beer; for the preemption of tin in Cornwall and Devon' as well as ‘for the governorship of Jersey' and ‘the presidency of Wales'. Oxford's surviving letters ‘reflect his endless disappointments. Bitter to the end, he plotted against the royal succession by a Scot.' Nelson's portrait of Oxford is close to that painted by Gabriel Harvey in 1580 in his
Speculum Tuscanismi
: ‘delicate in speech, quaint in array, conceited in all points', he was ‘a passing singular odd man'. As far as Positivist values were concerned, Oxford turned out to be a very poor choice – though again, given the paucity of information available about Oxford at the time, Looney could not have known that. And the seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey hadn't helped de Vere's legacy by retailing an embarrassing and probably apocryphal anecdote about him: ‘This Earl of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to travel seven years. On his return the Queen welcomed him home, and said, “My lord, I had forgot the fart.”'

The greatest challenge Looney had to meet was the problem of Oxford's death in 1604, since so many of Shakespeare's great Jacobean plays were not yet written, including
Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, Pericles
,
The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline
and
Henry the Eighth
. Looney concluded that these plays were either written before Oxford died (and posthumously released one by one to the playgoing public) or left incomplete and touched up by lesser writers (which explains why they contain allusions to sources or events that took place after Oxford had died). It was a canny two-part strategy, one that could refute almost any counter-claim.

Looney also concluded that
The Tempest
– a play that scholars confidently date to well after 1604 – didn't belong in the canon and was entirely the work of another hand. In rejecting ‘Shakespeare's' authorship of
The Tempest
he was also repudiating the widespread nineteenth-century biographical tradition which held that it was Shakespeare's last play and when Prospero breaks his staff and abandons his ‘rough magic' it's really Shakespeare giving up his art. Looney's grounds were again Positivist: ‘Shakespeare' could never have expressed such metaphysical nonsense as can be found in Prospero's speech, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.' And although
The Tempest
contains a king and a duke, ‘no one can feel in reading it that he is in touch with the social structure of a medieval feudalism'.

Surely, Looney writes, ‘Shakespeare' believed that ‘human life is the one great objective reality' and ‘his world is peopled by real men; not
dreamy stuff'
. His argument here echoes that made a few years earlier by Lytton Strachey, who in an influential and reprinted essay signalled a turn against the Romantic reading of the play: ‘In
The Tempest
, unreality has reached its apotheosis. Two of the principal characters are frankly not human beings at all.' Looney's timing was perfect, for he was able to ride the tide of opinion turning against
The Tempest
and of Prospero as its autobiographical hero. Prospero, Strachey notes, ‘is the central figure of
The Tempest
; and it has often been wildly asserted that he is a portrait of the author – an embodiment of that spirit of wise benevolence which is supposed to have thrown a halo over Shakespeare's life'. But ‘if Prospero is wise, he is also self-opinionated and sour … his
gravity is often another name for pedantic severity … and there is no character in the play to whom, during some part of it, he is not studiously disagreeable.'

Where influential Victorian biographers such as Edward Dowden had seen in Shakespeare-as-Prospero the very image of a serene and benign artist, a man who had achieved self-mastery and with that a ‘remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world', Strachey can only find a boring protagonist and a writer who was himself ‘getting bored' – ‘bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama'. By the early twentieth century the great reign of
The Tempest
as the crowning achievement of the career, and of the wise and patriarchal Prospero as the way people wanted to imagine Shakespeare, had lost much of its appeal. So too did the image of Shakespeare as a man of books, of magic, and as a repository of political wisdom. Looney's great achievement was proposing an alternative candidate to Bacon-as-Shakespeare while at the same time offering a portrait of Shakespeare that perfectly satisfied the desires of the new century: Shakespeare as Prince Hamlet. A hundred years later Hamlet still holds that autobiographical pride of place – thanks in no small part to Looney's early devotee, Freud. Where Oxford's death in 1604 had once been an almost insuperable obstacle to Looney's theory of authorship, it now proved to be providential, insofar as
Hamlet
, rather than
The Tempest
, Looney imagined, proved to be ‘Shakespeare's' final play. For Looney, Hamlet's last words speak directly to the disgraced Oxford's own situation, and ‘may almost be accepted as Oxford's dying words': ‘what a wounded name / Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!' Looney's peroration captures his vision of the dying artist at work:

It's difficult to resist the temptation to read between the lines here and see signs of the dismay Comte's disciples felt as the Religion of Humanity slipped from public view, leaving no name behind but a discredited one.

Looney didn't begin with a candidate; he began with a call to arms, in which he enlists ‘Shakespeare' – or rather imagines ‘Shakespeare' enlisting us – in this cause. Only at the end of the book does Looney drop his guard and admit to this agenda, to how he saw ‘Shakespeare' playing a crucial role in the restoration of the socially and politically repressive ‘new order' in which superiors rule over their inferiors, and one over all, while a spirit of
noblesse oblige
prevails. It's a sobering vision of what Looney thought the Oxfordian cause was ultimately about, and as such, worth quoting at length: