Shakespiritualism: Shakespeare and the Occult, 1850–1950 by Jeffrey Kahan (review)

Appearing on the PBS NewsHour to discuss her novel Luminaries, Eleanor Catton was asked to describe her 2013 book, which had recently won the Man Booker Prize. Numerous reviewers had been troubled by the book’s “mass confabulation” of genres, as well as its multiple and mysterious plot lines. Catton responded simply that the novel reflected “two hemispheres, much in the same way the brain has two hemispheres.”¹ While not a novelistic work of fiction, nor one meant to be, Jeffrey Kahan’s book seems to benefit and befuddle by embracing two hemispheres: one focusing on the world of Shakespeare studies, the other on the global Spiritualist movement from 1850 to 1950. Although readers will certainly come away from this book with more information about both spheres, the question of whether this duality works depends on one’s response to the impressive research provided by Kahan.

Kahan begins the book by attempting to integrate the two distinct areas of interest and inquiry: Shakespeare and Spiritualism. Rightly reminding us that visitations from Shakespeare to assembled groups of believers were common at the turn of the century, Kahan also notes how these appearances were “terrifically affirming” to the members of this “new religious movement” that was estimated to be close to one hundred million globally, eleven million in the United States (2). Using Shakespeare to gain cultural capital in nascent enterprises is almost a critical given these days, so the reader feels fairly secure in this sphere of argument. But when Kahan attempts to prove that Spiritualistic events anticipate Stephen Greenblatt’s desire to “speak with the dead” or Roland Barthes’s and Michael Foucault’s notions about the death of the author, the grounds for the argument seem somewhat suspect.

Kahan also considers the relation of Spiritualism to bardolatry by introducing us to a number of mediums who channeled Shakespeare during their performances. One of these mediums, Charles Henry Foster, even had a set schedule so one could plan a visit in advance by knowing which ghostly specter would appear. Monday nights, for example, Foster’s body hosted “the Spirits of two theologian-mystics,” Emmanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer (creator of Mesmerism), but on Tuesday and Friday nights, Foster was possessed by William Shakespeare, who had come not “to entertain the Spiritualists” gathered around the table but instead to “remind them that death is but the beginning of a new phase of life” (18). Whether or not one remains skeptical about such acts, it makes perfect sense that “Shakespeare was the natural focal point of the new religion,” as Kahan argues, “because he was both a poet of the impossible and an apotheosized man of the theater” (37). This movement was nothing if not theatrical, and it included séances, hypnotism, automatic writing, and similar feats of supernaturalism.

These liminal religious experiences lead quite naturally into the next section of the book that takes up the Shakespeare authorship controversy. First, Kahan details a number of well-known anti-Stratfordians, such as Delia Bacon, who sought to prove that Shakespeare’s plays were encoded with messages by the real author—Francis Bacon. Kahan then attempts to separate their “eccentric and often-tragic lives” from the thrust of their theories, particularly those related to cryptograms and deciphered texts, which Kahan seems to find somewhat plausible (56). The example given here to prove the distinction between untidy personal lives and clearly profound genius is more interesting than discriminating: “Albert Einstein’s hair is ridiculous; his theory of relativity is not” (56). A plot to dig up Bacon’s grave to prove he authored Shakespeare’s plays seems to me a bit more extreme than proper hair grooming. Perhaps anticipating pushback against such tenuous connections, Kahan admits that Baconian deciphering may also seem “ridiculous” to “many readers,” but he counters that much work in the academy is equally focused on teasing out meanings from complex combinations of words, and he ponders...