I first began studying the authorship question in 1990, and from the start, one of my first interests was the history of doubt about Shakespeare. Early on I realized that the Shakespeare establishment had for decades, if not centuries, been fighting to suppress the history of doubts about their own cherished illusions.

Led on by Ogburn, and after him by Warren Hope and Kim Holston, with my dear neighbor and friend Isabel Holden always available for tea and strategy sessions, I dug deeper.

One can get a pseudo-clinical study of the post-Stratfordian as afflicted by a mental illness in Schoenbaum’s 1972 Shakespeare’s Lives.

For the record, it is worth noting that after actually holding a conversation (c. 1990) with Oxfordian Charlton Ogburn (c. 1990), Schoenbaum, while not entirely scrubbing his offensive speculations, tacked away from his most extreme statements. Ogburn had jump started my interest in the authorship question through his 1987 Frontline interiew and his 1984 The Mysterious William Shakespeare. Schoenbaum’s 1991 edition of Shakespeare’s Lives (Whalen, 1994) removed some (not all) of the more offensive and irrational of Schoenbaum’s amateur foray into psychoanalysis.


But from the start, Freud was a problem for Schoenbaum et al. In many ways, he remains the biggest problem, a thorn in the side of the Stratfordian establishment to this day.

Schoenbaum, a literary scholar, purported to be using Freud’s insights into the human psyche to shine a spotlight on the pseudo-pathology of doubting Shakespeare, yet Freud himself was and long remained — over many years, and in the face of staunchly uninformed criticism from such followers as Ernest Jones — a committed post-Stratfordian and, in fact, an Oxfordian.

When Freud was forced to flee Nazi Germany to London, John Thomas Looney wrote him a letter of greetings reflecting his huge respect for Freud and gratitude for Freud’s frequent endorsements, both to his immediate associates and in public, for Looney’s theory.

The above summarizes evidence that has long been available in publications such as Hope and Holston, various writings by Richard Waugaman, and before Waugaman, in a series of articles by Abraham Bronson Feldman.

Orthodox Shakespearean persisted at least up until Norman Holland’s widely-cited Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis to conceal from themselves the truth of Freud’s commitment to helping to develop the Oxfordian canon of evidence.

Freud’s involvement in the authorship question was a tongue-twister for me too. My first published academic paper was one in which I took Freud to task and proposed to “stand him on his head” (and, incidentally, Levi-Strauss) regarding the incest taboo, with the help of anthropology and ancient history.

Now, suddenly, Freud had already seen the things I was only beginning to see. This certainly hasn’t made me a “Freudian” in any strict sense, but it has given me a stronger respect for Freud.

I saw that even he had faced the slings and arrows of Shakespeare orthodoxy and therefore there was no way to undertake my study of authorship without undergoing a serious amount of personal pain and being willing to bear up under it.

Soon, of course, I began to discover so many other ancestors and allies — poets like Walt Whitman, masters of suspense like Henry James, scholars like Mortimer J. Adler, or actors like Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles or Sir John Gielgud.

Especially inspiring to me was when Charles Boyle introduced me to the Leslie Howard story. Howard was in therapy with Freud after the psychoanalyst came to London.

Howard’s 1941 Pimpernel Smith features an exchange in which Looney’s book first appears on film.

The Oxfrauds like to argue that Howard wasn’t really an Oxfordian. The character he’s playing in the film is a “fool”; his eccentric views on Shakespeare, however confidently delivered by the film’s star actor, producer, and (I have heard) financier, are supposed to illustrate his intellectual folly while he frees people from death camps.

Personally I find such an argument to be superficial, willfully ignorant, and likely offensive to the people Howard’s film was designed to help save by holding up Professor Smith as role model who risked his own life to free people from certain death at the hands of mad butcher. Such moral obtusity seems to be a feature, not a bug, of the internet Oxfrauds.

By 1941 Freud — whom Howard knew — had long been an Oxfordian, and books and articles by B.R. Ward (1922-1940), B.M. Ward (1923-1939), Eva Turner Clarke (1926-1940), Canon Gerald Rendall (1930-1940), Charles Wisner Barrell (1937-1940) and many others were already developing fruitful corroborations for Looney’s hypothesis, so there would be nothing odd about Howard, knowing the plays as well as he did, coming to the conclusion that Freud and these other writers on the authorship question had got it right in identifying Oxford as the real author of the plays.


The flip-book covers forty-three famous Shakespeare skeptics. The list includes some of the most respected figures over the last two hundred years of intellectual culture — actors, directors, novelists, judges, scholars, diplomats, and psychologists. They all looked at the evidence of the traditional Shakespeare and saw the Stratfordian biography for the profitable charade it has become.

This is a work in progress. More names deserve to be added and will be as time permits.