VN's remarks about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets ( in Bend Sinister) gave me the impression that he has strong opinions against idle conjectures related to the cotidian life of a "real historical" person, inspite of his delight in playing with expelled gargoyles, imaginary identities in his fiction or his commentary that in the long run, however, it is only the author's private satisfaction that counts[...] the wayside murmur of this or that hidden theme....

In Bend Sinister he writes on Bacon & Shakespeare, following a sequence of three engravings:
Number one represents a sixteenth-century gentleman in the act of handing a book to a humble fellow who holds a spear and a bay-crowned hat in his left hand [...] Note also the legend: 'Ink, a Drug.' Somebody's idle pencil (Ember highly treasures this scholium) has numbered the letters so as to spell Grudinka which means 'bacon' in several Slavic languages. Number two shows the rustic (now clad in the clothes of the gentleman)... Scribbled underneath in the same hand: 'Ham-let, or Homelette au Lard. Finally, number three has a road, a traveller on foot (wearing the stolen shapska) and a road sign 'To High Wycombe.' [...] His name [ Shakespeare's] is protean. He begets doubles at every corner. His penmanship is unconsciously faked by lawyers who happen to write a similar hand. On the wet morning of 27 November 1582, he is Shaxpere and she is a Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagspere and she is a Hathway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X, cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it. However, the fact that the Warwickshire fellow wrote the plays is most satisfactorily proved on the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose.

Freud himself also had opinions about the "real" Shakespeare. He wrote: " 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 "declassé" aristocrat , Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England."

In other articles he returned to this idea because " Since the publication of J.T.Looney's volume.." he was able to expand on the hypothesis that the disreputable Earl of Oxford did the authoring Shakespeare's works.

Freud's conjectures were first presented in his Address in his " 1930 Goethe Prize" acceptance. In the corpus of his text he discusses the importance of good biographies and his final words are closer to my heart than most of the arguments he inserted in the address itself*:

"Goethe was not only, as a poet, a great self-revealer, but also, in spite of true abundance of autobiographical records, a careful concealer" since, using the words of Mephistopheles, "The best of what you know may not, after all, be told to boys".. (Faust, Part I, Scene 4):

Nabokov's constant dismissal of the "Viennese delegation" and his insistence on "Freudian's, keep out..." makes sense when we apply it to the writing of biographies. If, as Freud states, a biography implies in a "degradation" - when it aims at bringing a great artist closer to the common reader - should this "degradation" be avoided, the end-result becomes an idealized biography, a new fiction. The truth about an artist is, quoting VN again, most satisfactorily proved on the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose.

Freud expands on the need to obtain knowledge of the circumstances of a man's life [...] "People generally say that it is our desire to bring ourselves nearer to such a man in a human way as well [...] the need to acquire affective relations with such men, to add them to the fathers, teachers, exemplars whom we have known [...] The biographer's justification also contains a confession:[...by ]reducing the distance that separates [the great poet] from us it still tends in effect towards degradation[...] Our attitude to fathers and teachers is, after all, an ambivalent one since our reverence for them regularly conceals a component of hostile rebellion [...] Psychoanalysis can supply some information which cannot be arrived at by other means, and can thus demonstrate new connecting threads in the 'weaver's masterpiece'[...] When it is applied to a great man, it contributes to the understanding of his great achievement..."

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