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Since 1953 Dr. Bronson Feldman has been developing and presenting evidence to support Freud's unfortunate opinion that the Earl of Oxford may have been the author of Shakespeare's works.1 I say “unfortunate” because Jones reports in his biography2 that he and others attempted without success to dissuade Freud from this opinion, against which there is such a mass of 16th and 17th century evidence and for which there is only weak inference, dubious logic, and irrelevant circumstantiality.
At this point I do not expect to dissuade Dr. Feldman: he has undoubtedly already been exposed to and has successfully withstood all that evidence. Instead, I'd rather point out to uncommitted persons interested in psychoanalytic approaches to literature that unless types of non-psychoanalytical evidence are taken into consideration, an interpretation may go ludicrously awry.
For example, we may take Dr. Feldman's most recent article. His initial thesis is that the Comedy of Errors (circa 1592), first published in the Shakespeare folio of 1623, is a later version of the lost anonymous play, History of Error, presented by the Children of Paul's at court on New Year's Day, 1577. This idea was advanced many years ago and is discussed in Chambers.3 Dr. Feldman grants that nothing whatever is known of either author or plot of this early play, but he then goes on to say, “On the assumption that the original of Shakespeare's Errors was composed not long before it was selected for the New Year's night entertainment at Hampton Court, we may confidently go hunting for the factors of its creation in the records of the year 1576.”4 (Italics mine.) For my part, I cannot share his confidence. I cannot hunt confidently upon assumptions, and where there