SHAKESPEARE’S BIBLE: A PERSONAL ODYSSEY Richard M. Waugaman, M.D. From American Academy of Psychoanalysis Forum 54:16-18, 2010 What was I doing here in the library on a beautiful Saturday morning? Why wasn’t I out on the golf course? Because I couldn’t tear myself away from Shakespeare’s Bible. Let me explain. It all started in 2002, when I read in the New York Times that this Bible—originally owned by the man now thought to have concealed his authorship behind the man from Stratford-- was in a library only 20 miles from my home. I had to see it! Who could resist the chance to hold the Bible that might have been Shakespeare’s? I learned that Roger Stritmatter was the first person in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. in literature for a dissertation arguing that Shakespeare’s works were actually written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. And Roger’s dissertation focussed on connections between passages that de Vere marked in his Bible, and biblical passages that are echoed in Shakespeare. Lots of other evidence linking de Vere and Shakespeare has accumulated since 1920. But de Vere’s Bible is the smoking gun. With letters of recommendation from two universities where I teach, the Folger Shakespeare Library generously granted me unrestricted access to their rare materials. They have the largest Shakespeare collection in the world. The first rare book I requested, of course, was de Vere’s Bible. I have spent many Saturdays with it during the past few years. You may be wondering why this story should be of any interest to you. We all share a devotion to psychoanalysis and psychodynamic treatment. Did you know that Freud was the first famous person who endorsed the 1920 theory that de Vere was Shakespeare? He tried unsuccessfully to persuade his colleagues to explore the implications of de Vere’s authorship for our understanding of Shakespeare’s works. When Freud died, half of his books on English literature were devoted to this authorship question.

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You may be thinking, “So Freud was wrong!” That’s just what I used to think. Until I heard about the new evidence in de Vere’s Bible. Roger Stritmatter’s findings are overwhelmingly convincing. But the vastness of his data can be intimidatingly complex. So I reanalyzed it in a way he told me was original. What I found was that both de Vere and “Shakespeare” showed the same increasing interest in the very same biblical passages. Here’s the data—de Vere marked only 13% of Bible verses that Shakespeare quotes only once; but 27% of verses Shakespeare quotes four times; and 47% of verses he quotes five times. In fact, de Vere marked 88% of those verses that Shakespeare quotes six times. You can nearly draw a straight line that points to de Vere through these correlations. And that’s not all. De Vere, like many of his contemporaries, had the Elizabethan equivalent of a hymnal bound at the end of his Bible. This was a version of the Psalms, translated in a fixed meter by Sternhold and Hopkins (“SH”). As congregations started joining in with the choir in hymn-singing, these psalms could be sung to popular tunes (unlike the Coverdale translation of the Psalms that were in the Book of Common Prayer, since they did not have a regular meter). And they were wildly popular—the SH Psalms went through some 1,000 early editions. But, from the get-go, critics ridiculed the clumsy wording of this translation. C.S. Lewis mistakenly thought the SH psalms had no literary influence (which he considered a good thing, since he thought they were lousy). The scholarly literature only gives four possible minor allusions in Shakespeare to this translation. Back to de Vere’s Bible. In the SH Psalms, I noticed sixteen ornate, distinctive, hand-drawn “manicules,” or pointing hands, in the margins next to some of the Psalms. Some early readers drew manicules the way we might draw a star in the margin next to a passage we like. De Vere’s are the most elaborate I have found in 16th century books. They are artistic—many of them even have cuffs added. Once, in the inner margin, he didn’t have enough room to draw his usual pointing index finger, so he instead drew a fist with a pointing thumb! [to Psalm 51] In 2008, I noticed a similarity between the wording in one of these marked Psalms, and the wording of a Shakespeare Sonnet-Psalm 12:4 states “Our tongues are ours, we ought to speak./ What Lord shall us control?” Sonnet 66 includes the line “And art made 2

tongue-tied by authority.” The latter is thus the antithesis of the former. Coincidence? I didn’t know. But I kept looking. What I found has aroused the interest of mainstream English literature journals. Dozens of times, passages in Shakespeare echo the wording from those Psalms that de Vere marked. In many cases, knowing he was alluding to specific Psalms is crucial for a fuller understanding of his text. The Sonnets echo the Psalms so frequently that we have to conclude he was comparing the Fair Youth to God, praising him just as extravagantly as the Psalmist praised God. For example, once I found that Sonnet 21 is structured as a reply to Psalm 8, I realized “that Muse” in this Sonnet is not some contemporary rival poet (as scholars have assumed), but King David himself. What about the plays? Especially in the history plays, de Vere uses both isolated and also overarching Psalm allusions to add further depth and complexity. In Lady Macbeth’s “Out damned spot” speech, she keeps echoing the “chief penitential psalm,” Psalm 51. In Henry VI, Part One, we are not sure if Joan of Arc is a saint or a witch. She alludes to Psalms not only when she initially appears saint-like, but also near the end of the play, when she is invoking her demons—a scene some critics dislike so much that they deny Shakespeare wrote it. Henry VI, Part Three is about the chaos of a bloody civil war, when various enemies of the king united against him. It repeatedly echoes Psalm 83, which describes the many foes of the Israelites uniting against them. Richard II, in which several characters get exiled, repeatedly echoes Psalm 137, which is about the Israelities’ exile in Babylon. In Titus Andronicus, revenge runs amok; it alludes again and again to Psalm 6, which tells us we should leave revenge to God alone. We already knew that the Psalms were the book of the Bible that most influenced Shakespeare. It is my impression that the SH Psalms will prove to be far more influential in understanding those works than the other early translations that scholars have been studying. Naturally, I hope that my findings will do more than illuminate the meaning of Shakespeare’s works. The fact that it was an amateur Shakespeare scholar who made this discovery should lead the experts to wonder what brought me this good luck. I hope they will then ponder the fact that it was de Vere himself who “pointed” me to these discoveries, thanks to his marginal manicules. 3

The experts’ mistaken authorship hypothesis has created a massive blind spot that has prevented a needed paradigm shift, that will surely lead to many more crucial discoveries. I still often hear the dismissive reaction, “What difference does it make who wrote Shakespeare’s works??” That has been called the second stage of reactions to a valid new paradigm. The first stage is “That’s ridiculous,” while the final stage is “Of course! I said that all along.”

Why Would de Vere Use a Pseudonym? One of the biggest stumbling blocks to accepting de Vere as Shakespeare is that we cannot believe he would have hidden his authorship. So I’ve explored the psychology of anonymity (and its close relative, pseudonymity). I’ve learned that the first problem is our failure to step outside the unexamined confines of our own familiar culture. The 20th century had far less anonymous authorship than did de Vere’s times. Most Elizabethan plays were published without the author’s real name. When the name “Shakespeare” began appearing, it was hyphenated. “Sure,” you say, “don’t you know that’s a typical British naming convention?” Yes, but only since the 19th century. A new inheritance law led wealthy men who had no son to insist their prospective son-in-law incorporate their wife’s last name into a hyphenated last name, if they wanted to inherit the father-in-law’s estate. In Elizabethan times, though, a hyphenated last name in the form of Verb-noun was a transparent pseudonym (for example, Smell-knave, Tell-troth, and Mar-prelate). Censorship was rampant in the Elizabethan era, and even Ben Jonson was maimed when his pen offended those in power. Anonymity protected authors whose writings might be deemed blasphemous or politically offensive. Did Shakespeare blaspheme? Is the Pope Catholic? One disgusted early reader of Shakespeare’s 1609 Sonnets wrote at the end of the Sonnets, “What a heap of wretched infidel stuff!” If we don’t notice the blasphemy, we’re not reading Shakespeare carefully enough. For example, I suspect that early reader did catch all the Psalm allusions, and found them offensively out of place. Anonymous authorship can help universalize the particulars of an author’s experiences. The reformed slave trader who wrote the words of “Amazing Grace” published his memoirs anonymously, because his feelings of guilt would not allow him to win any 4

personal renown for his book. And de Vere had plenty to feel guilty about. (For starters, he treated his first wife abominably.) Tennyson published “In Memoriam” anonymously, possibly because it hinted at the homoerotic nature of his feelings for Arthur Hallam, its subject. Shakespeare’s first 126 Sonnets are patently homoerotic, though for the next century the only editions in print changed pronouns to make them heterosexual love poems, creating confusion that persists to this day. Anonymity has liberated many authors from the self-censorship caused by shame or guilt. The facilitating role of pseudonymity is likely to be especially salient when the content of the literary work is highly autobiographical in origin, and addresses issues about which the author is in significant conflict. Anonymity may help the author enact an unconscious fantasy of temporarily leaving behind her usual sense of self, and merging instead with her fictive narrator. The resulting distance from her familiar identity may open up a creative space that frees the author from psychological constraints that would otherwise silence her. For example, Reverend C.L. Dodgson said of his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, “For 30 years I have managed to keep the 2 personalities distinct, and to avoid all communication, in propria persona, with the outer world, about my books.”

Conclusions Great writers create fictional characters who come to life. It should not surprise us if writers such as de Vere also create a fictive authorial identity who, in turn, creates these literary characters. Such a pseudonym may facilitate the author’s entry into the world of his imagination, the wellspring of her creativity. The psychoanalyst George Moraitis has devoted many years to studying the psychological reactions of the biographer to his subject. He concluded that the biographer often has a “blueprint” for his biography, even before learning the facts of his subject’s life. This insight is most illuminating for a range of Shakespeare scholarship, such as the debate over the question of autobiography in the obviously bisexual Sonnets. Gerald Martin’s recent biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez draws attention to the inevitable connections between works of literature and the formative life experiences of their author. A detail as small as a peripatetic blind accordionist in Marquez’s fiction turns out to have its roots in an 5

actual peripatetic blind accordionist from Marquez’s childhood. Yet Marquez, like other great writers, also transmuted crucial autobiographical events into a disguised form in his fiction, such as the less than honorable circumstances in which his grandfather actually killed another man, over one of the grandfather’s extramarital affairs. The implicit “blueprint” for the biography of Shakespeare, by contrast, maintains that his literary works sprung fully formed from his extraordinary imagination, untethered to his life experiences. If we are puzzled by this, experts tell us we simply do not understand the nature of genius. Freud concluded that no one wants to hear de Vere wrote Shakespeare’s works because we have all projected an idealized image of a perfect man onto the blank screen that is the man from Stratford. De Vere was an all-too-real human being, except that both his faults as well as his genius were far more extreme. He killed a servant when he was 17. I suspect he played a role in the murder of his arch-rival, Christopher Marlowe. His literary works reveal his extraordinary capacity for ruthlessly truthful introspection. He was so aware of the many contradictory facets of his own personality that he could develop what John Keats famously called his “negative capability,” which allowed him to create innumerable fictional characters that seem more real than real people sometimes do. He could also tolerate the anonymity of not receiving credit for the greatest works of literature in history. I hope I have sparked your curiosity about this endlessly fascinating subject. I would welcome your help in fulfilling Freud’s dream of a new era in psychoanalytic studies of Shakespeare. Richard M. Waugaman, M.D. is Reader at the Folger Shakespeare Library; Training and Supervising Analyst Emeritus, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute; and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Georgetown University School of Medicine. His email is [email protected].

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