Freud in the National Portrait Gallery

There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face.

—Macbeth I.iv

During the afternoon of September 13, 1908 Freud visited the National Portrait Gallery in London and jotted down one and a half sides of unsystematic observations which he entitled Notes on Faces and Men. These notes have been published and discussed elsewhere (Molnar, 1998, pp. 41–2; Tögel, 2002, pp. 250–255). My intention here is to investigate their origin and context.

For good reason it is the first line of the notes that has attracted most attention:

Shakespeare looks completely exceptional, completely unenglish Jacques-Pierre

(Molnar, 1998, p. 41).

This is the earliest hint of Freud’s uncertainty about the authorship of Shakespeare, long before the 1920s and 30s when that theme would develop into something of an obsession. Though my interest here is not in following that development forward, but in looking backwards or sideways at its repercussions in terms of Freud’s life at that period, that future inevitably casts its shadow over this account.

The notes on the portraits were written on a single sheet of the large, approximately foolscap size paper that Freud favored. Since the sheet was not folded, he probably wrote them up later that day, perhaps that evening back in his room at Ford’s Hotel on Manchester Street. This conjecture is founded on entries in Freud’s small notebook for summer 1908, which, along with the rest of his notebooks for that period of his life, has only recently been transcribed and is now being prepared for publication (Fichtner and Hirschmüller, 2011 p. 142). It gives us the immediate record of his visit to the gallery, a short list of some of the portraits in the gallery, and last of all “Chandos Pt Shakesp” (Fichtner and Hirschmüller, Bl. 7.16r).

In the switch from notebook to manuscript this last entry has become the first, and in the process acquired its puzzling commentary. Thus it dominates, and sets the tone for, the other notes, on less obviously exceptional, more English portraits. Above all, this first entry implies that extraordinary facts or conjectures about a person may be read in their face. But these are telegraphic notes: there is no instruction how to read appearances, that is, no science of physiognomy. As it stands in these notes, Freud’s reading of the portraits comes across as intuitive, although clearly reinforced by previous and external knowledge of the sitter.

A year later, in a letter to Ernest Jones, Freud would explain “Jacques-Pierre” as a “derivation [ . . . ] given to me by a very erudite old gentleman, Prof. Gentilli, who now lives in Nervi” (Paskauskas, 1993, p. 32). That source is less an authority than a mystery in itself, for the old gentleman is so obscure as to be historically invisible. But the fact that Freud was corresponding on this question with Jones means that this was not just some casual etymological joke. Afterwards “Jacques-Pierre” disappears from view and it would be another decade before a better-documented contender for the authorship, Edward de Vere Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, appears. Though English, de Vere was a scion of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and thus also French by surname and origin. And that raises the question of nationality. What are the implications of a French rather than an Anglo-Saxon derivation? And were there any racial considerations behind Freud’s conjecture?

Obviously only a native English speaker could have written Shakespeare’s works. Hence the authorship question Freud raises is one of cultural influences. If his, and Gentilli’s, conjecture is valid, one must accept that the greatest work of English literature has foreign origins. Well then, and so what? If that alone were Freud’s point, he would be pushing an open door: textual scholarship reveals the numerous classical and European sources of Shakespeare’s work. But the point was the man, not the work. This is clearly a question of flesh and, vitally, of blood.

There is a second reference to Shakespeare near the end of the manuscript:

Shakespeare is...