Abstract
T he year is 1913. E dinburgh . We are at the deathbed of Edward Dowden, author of Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), Shakespeare Primer (1877), and a study of The Sonnets (1881). It should have been a moment of Shakespearean serenity and supinity. As Gordon McMullan’s recent Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (2010) documents, throughout much of the nineteenth century, critics and biographers generally linked Shakespeare’s work to his life and invariably did so with one aim in mind: to demonstrate that Shakespeare himself progressed morally and spiritually, that he was a “genius standing at the brink of heaven.”1 What was so of Shakespeare was equally true, at least in theory, of those who spent a lifetime studying his works. It certainly should have been true of Dowden, who so often claimed a penetrative understanding of Shakespeare’s artistic and spiritual coalescence. In Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) he famously conflated the wizard Prospero with Shakespeare: “we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakspere himself … If I were to allow my fancy to run out in play after such an attempted interpretation, I should describe Prospero [i.e., Shakespeare] as the man of genius, the great artist, lacking at first in practical gifts which lead to material success, and set adrift on the perilous sea of life in which he finds his enchanted island, where he may achieve his works of wonder.”2
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Notes
Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157. Dowden’s narrative had, perhaps even has, remarkable staying power. A. C. Bradley (1904) thinks it likely that Shakespeare’s plays reflected his emotional life, though he doubts if Shakespeare was ever “overwhelmed by such feelings.” Nonetheless, he espies in Prospero “the whole mind of Shakespeare in his last years”
(A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992], 238ff, 288). In Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938), E. M. W. Tillyard argues that Shakespeare wanted to complete the final phase of a tragic pattern—but here, too, we have Dowden in another key, for how would Shakespeare know he had to complete the final phase of his work unless he anticipated his quick exit from this world into the next? Thus, Shakespeare’s last plays demonstrate the playwright’s new turn for contemplation and his immediate and acute awareness of the “different planes of reality”—a phrase Tillyard used on three separate occasions (68, 76, 81). Even Lytton Strachey’s (1922) famous contention that Shakespeare’s late plays represent a writer “bored with people, bored with real life, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams” suggests someone who is looking beyond the material veil of this world (Lytton Strachey, “Shakespeare’s Final Period,” in Books and Characters [New York Harcourt, Brace, 1922], 49–69; 64). Northrope Frye (1986) sees some “self-identification” between Shakespeare and his character Prospero
(Northrope Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare [Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1986], 171). David Bevington (1988) insists that the “themes that dominate Shakespeare’s later romances suggest retirement—from the responsibilities of parenthood, from art, from the theater, from life itself”
(David Bevington, “The Late Romances,” in Shakespeare: The Late Romances [Toronto: New York: Bantam Books, 1988], xxv—xxxiii; xxvii). More recent studies continue to situate Shakespeare’s late plays in relation to the playwright’s life. Simon Palfrey (1997), for example, insists that Shakespeare was increasingly consumed by “self-reflection,” which paradoxically transcended any sense of the self in favor of “things diffuse, accelerating, polysemous”
(Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], 265).
Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Henry S. King, 1875), 417, 425–26.
Edward Dowden, Shakespeare Primer (London: Macmillan, 1877), 60. In the same text, he suggests that The Winter’s Tale is Shakespeare’s last play (57).
Edward Dowden, Introduction to Shakespeare (1907; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 85.
Edward Dowden, The Sonnets (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1881), 11; and Dowden, Shakespeare Primer, 60.
Edward Dowden, “The Interpretation of Literature,” in Transcripts and Studies (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896), 237–68; 264–65.
Edward Dowden, “Shakespeare as Man of Science (Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy),” in Essays Modern and Elizabethan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), 282–307; 282.
See Geraldine Cummins’s memoir, Unseen Adventures (London: Rider, 1951), 21. Years later, Hester would tell her clients and guests that her first psychic intuition was the death of her father, a telling detail, though not too great a prediction, since Dowden’s health had been deteriorating for a number of years; he finally succumbed to heart failure in 1913. See Kathryn R. Ludwigson, Edward Dowden (New York: Twayne, 1973), 47, 52.
Alfred Dodd, The Immortal Master (London: Rider, [1943]), 76.
E. C. Bentley, Far Horizon (London: Rider, 1951), 21.
Edward Dowden, Letters of Edward Dowden and His Correspondents, ed. Elizabeth D. Dowden and Hilda M. Dowden (London: J. M. Dent, 1914), 92–94.
Ludwigson, Edward Dowden, 19; and Terence Brown, Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), 34.
The official separation came legally in 1916, but the war began in 1914 and lasted to 1918, so, likely, he granted the separation in absentia. He was serving as a surgeon in the First World War. Further, Hester traded on her father’s fame. A young Geraldine Dorothy Cummins was thrilled to meet Hester because she was the “daughter of an internationally famous scholar” (Geraldine Cummins, Swan on a Black Sea: A Study in Automatic Writing: The Cummins-Willett Scripts, ed. Signe Toksvig, foreword by C. D. Broad, rev. ed. [New York: S. Weiser, 1970], 151).
Bentley, Far Horizon, 87. In The Gospel of Philip the Deacon (1932), we learn that Johnannes is the spirit of a “Jewish rabbinical doctor, who habitually controls the hand and mind of the automatist” (Frederick Bligh Bond and Hester Dowden, The Gospel of Philip the Deacon 1932 [New York: Macoy, 1932], 209). This same Johannes reveals that Shakespeare was an anti-Semite: Shylock would have been “a hateful figure,” but Shakespeare was overruled by Oxford, who “would fain have excited the pity of the public for the Jew”
(Percy Allen, Talks with Elizabethans (New York: Rider, 1947), 44). Hester Dowden was Irish, and anti-Semitism was common among the Irish of this era. In 1904, the year in which Ulysses takes place, a priest-led pogrom against the Jews occurred in Limerick-but Hester Dowden’s spiritual communiqué took place in 1946, just after the Nuremberg Trials. It is plausible that Allen and Dowden were merely branding Shakespeare as anti-Semitic as a way of weakening our positive associations with him.
Roger Nyle Parisious, “Occultist Influence on the Authorship Controversy,” The Elizabethan Review 6, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 9–43; 22. Bond worked as Hester Dowden’s assistant, a point to which we will return. On William Lyon MacKenzie King,
see Stan McMullin, Anatomy of a Seance: A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 215, 217.
Alfred Dodd, Francis Bacon’s Personal Life-Story (London: Rider, 1949), 96.
Alfred Dodd, The Martyrdom of Francis Bacon (London: Rider and Company, [1945?]), 11; and Dodd, The Immortal Master, 9, 39, 9.
Alfred Dodd, Who Was Shake-Speare? Was He Francis Bacon, The Earl of Oxford or William Shaksper? (London: George Lapworth, 1947), 3–4. The particular value of the number 33 is discussed in Chapter 2 of the present study.
Percy Allen, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Wilkins as Borrowers (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928), xvii.
David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 39, 33, 38.
Percy Allen, The Oxford-Shakespeare Case Corroborated (London: Cecil Palmer, 1931), 235–37, 305.
Percy Allen, The Life Story of Edward de Vere as William Shakespeare (London: Cecil Palmer, 1932), 234. Allen was also elected president of the Shakespeare Fellowship in 1945. The Fellowship (founded in 1922) had hitherto searched in vain to identify “the personality of the one creative genius that our race produced, whose works appear to have been published under the pen-name of ‘William Shakespeare.’” See the Mission Statement cited in
Flodden W. Heron, Who Wrote Shakespeare? Recent Discoveries by Members of the Shakespeare Fellowship (San Francisco: Literary Anniversary Club, 1943), 3. Note “one creative genius.” The effect of the one-artist approach was to pit one camp against another: followers of Francis Bacon versus the followers of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, versus the admirers of Christopher Marlowe, and so forth. Allen’s collaborative theory was, therefore, a compromise likely to attract a wide following.
Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, new ed. (1991; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 439.
David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1993), 472;
and Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography, trans. Sarah Wykes (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 39, 253–54. While family may have had a role to play in these arrangements, neither critic specified in their wills that they did not wish to have traditional religious burials.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 142–48; 142.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2002), 221.
On this point, see also Clare O’Farrell, Michel Foucault (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 72.
Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvre Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 1997), 45.
J. Joyce Schuld, Foucault and Augustine: Reconsidering Power and Love (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 8.
Ibid., 14–15. On Foucault and Augustine, see also David Galston, Archives and the Event of God: The Impact of Michel Foucault on Philosophical Theology (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 107–10. In Foucault and Theology (New York: Continuum, 2011), Jonathan Tran refers to Foucault’s “quasi-metaphysical philosophy” (42).
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978), 96; emphases my own.
Rux Martin, “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault October 25, 1982,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 9–15; 9; emphasis my own.
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 101–20; 119. On this point, Barthes agrees. Authorship, he contends, is the “culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author” (Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 143).
Michel Foucault, L’Order du discourse [The Order of Discourse] (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), translation as found in
Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (New York: Routledge, 1992), 120; emphases my own.
On neutralization, see Foucault, “What is an Author?,” 105. On the subject of fixed versus unfixed power relations, Foucault himself admits that paradigms that are too rigid (one assumes he includes those of his own creation) are subject to rapid reappraisal and overthrow: “There is always a possibility, in a given game of truth, to discover something else and to more or less change such and such a rule and sometimes even the totality of the game of truth.” See Foucault’s interview in James William Bernauer and David M. Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 17.
Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9. All these forms, he writes, are “channeled through the author into a work” (9). We may note that channeling is an occult term relating to mediumistic reception of Spirits, though, in this case Stillinger may have in mind something synonymous with the free-flow or circulation that so rivets Foucault’s imagination.
Ibid., 26. Likewise, in his Sir Francis Bacon’s Diary, Alfred Dodd suggests that Hester Dowden was unimportant to the process of revelation: “I found the True Order-or, rather, the True Order Found me” (Alfred Dodd, Sir Francis Bacon’s Diary [London: George Lapworth and Co., 1947], 21).
Michael Schrage, “Writing to Collaborate: Collaborating to Write,” in Authority and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing, ed. James S. Leonard, Christine E. Wharton, Robert Murray Davis, and Jeanette Harris (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hull Press, 1994), 17–22; 21.
Jill R. Ehnenn, Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 3.
Hester Travers Smith, Oscar Wilde from Purgatory, new ed. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 11, 18.
Hester Dowden, “How I Received Oscar Wilde’s ‘Spirit Play,’” The Graphic, 10 March 1928, 401. Wilde was particularly loquacious in death. In 1928, someone else, the pseudonymous “Lazar,” published The Ghost Epigrams of Oscar Wilde as Taken Down through Automatic Writing (New York: Covici Friede, 1928). A sample: “Genius has limitations; stupidity is boundless” (xxxv).
See Leah Price, “From Ghostwriter to Typewriter: Delegating Authority at Fin de Siècle,” in The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert J. Griffin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 211–31. Christine Ferguson argues that mediums occupied a similar position to that of secretary (Christine Ferguson, “Zola in Ghostland: Spiritualist Literary Criticism and Naturalist Supernaturalism,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 50, no. 4 [2010]: 877–94; 888). Sarah Edwards asserts that automatic writing is essentially female
(Sarah Edwards, “Co-Operation and Co-Authorship: Automatic Writing, Socialism and Gender in Late Victorian and Edwardian Birmingham,” Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 15, no. 3 [2008]: 371–89; 372).
Eleanor Touhey Smith, Psychic People (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 66.
Hester Dowden, Oscar Wilde from Purgatory: Psychic Messages, new ed. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 37. For more on Wilde’s ghost, see Smith, Psychic People, 66.
Allen, Talks with Elizabethans, 116–17. On the function of Mr. V., for example, Eleanor Sidgwick pointed out that Hester Dowden guided the planchette of at least three different automatic writers. Since she was literally the guiding hand, we can assume that Hester was the author. On the other hand, Sidgwick noted that in some instances Mr. V. communicated with Wilde independent of Hester, just as Hester communicated with Wilde independent of Mr. V. See Bette London, Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 175.
Lewis C. Roberts suggests that collaborative writing undermines any sense of originality; each writer becomes merely a “cog in the publishing machine” (Lewis C. Roberts, “‘The Production of a Female Hand’: Professional Writing and the Career of Geraldine Jewsbury,” Women’s Writing 12, no. 3 [2005]: 399–418; 400). See also Jane Donawerth, who argues for two models: (1) hierarchical— wherein each writer has a designated role—and (2) dialogical—wherein the writing duties and activities are more fluid (Jane Donawerth, “Authorial Ethos, Collaborative Voice, and Rhetorical Theory by Women,” in Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations, ed. Hildy Miller and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles [Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005], 107–24; 119). Mediums and their copyists seem to merge both models.
Frederick Bligh Bond, The Return of Johannes (London: J. O. Hartes, 1925).
For more on this case, see Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 25; and London, Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships, 165–68. Despite having penned and published a variety of (traditionally-deemed) literary works, including The Land they Loved (1919) and Fires of Beltane (1936), as well as collaborating on three plays with Suzanne R. Day—Out of a Deep Shadow (1912), Toilers (1912), and Broken Faith (1913), all professionally produced at Abbey Theatre, Dublin-literary distinction often eluded Cummins. The afterword to another of her Spiritualist dictations refers to her as an “amateur trance-writer” (Geraldine Cummins, The Fate of Colonel Fawcett: A Narrative of His Last Expedition [London: Aquarian Press, 1955], 144). Still, Cummins described herself as an author and playwright; her presumed psychic gifts merely aided in her literary production or “transmission” (Cummins, Swan on a Black Sea, 147). On Cummins’s traditional literary efforts, see Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer, and Elaine Showalter, eds., The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175. See also Edwards, who points out that literary collaboration, especially among women, was often dismissed as amateur (Edwards, “Co-Operation and Co-Authorship,” 382).
Peter Fripp and the spirit Carneades (“Johannes”) through the mediumship of Hester Dowden, The Book of Johannes (New York: Rider, [1945?]), 11. Fripp later put aside Spiritualism and wrote a book on the Sant Mat movement, an esoteric philosophy combining aspects of Sikhism and Hinduism. See his The Mystic Philosophy of Sant Mat (London: Neville Spearman, 1964).
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© 2013 Jeffrey Kahan
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Kahan, J. (2013). The Afterlives of the Authors. In: Shakespiritualism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313553_4
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