Abstract
T he date is A pril 3, 1921. M idtown Manhattan. John Armstrong Chaloner takes the stage of the popular Cort Theatre and reports to the audience that in the last month he has been “conjuring up spirits of the great departed.” He claims that Shakespeare in his astral self appeared and presented him with a divine revision of Hamlet, in which “Ophelia will not [sic] longer be mad; there won’t be any grave scene, Ophelia will drink poison when Hamlet and Laertes go about spitting each other on their swords, and the royal lovers will die happily together.” Hamlet’s last lines are now said while locking eyes with his soul mate:
And now, my darling, may I turn to thee
And bid thee farewell, ere we take our flight.
Kiss me, my sweetheart, ere we leave the world[;]
Alas. Too faint am I to salute thee.
The new dialogue continues:
Ophelia—Now die I—happy—for—I—die with—thee.
Hamlet—Together we ascend—to Realms—of—Bliss.
The rest is silence. [Dies.]1
This revision stresses and expands upon Hamlet’s intuition of an afterlife and confirms that, unlike his father, Hamlet will not suffer for his sins. Instead, he and Ophelia, despite his murders and her suicide, will now drift happily in “Realms of Bliss.”
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Notes
An account of this incident appeared in the March 17, 1909 Meridian, CT, Journal; see the facsimile of this article appended to John Armstrong Chaloner, Robbery Under Law or, The Battle of the Millionaires: A Play in Three Acts and Three Scenes, 2nd ed. (Roanoke Rapids, NC: Palmetto Press, 1915), 248.
Lizzie Doten, Poems From the Inner Life, 17th ed. (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1863), 86.
Henry Kiddle, ed., Spiritual Communications (New York: Authors’ Publishing, 1879), 66. That Shakespeare was not religious or moral enough is an old bugbear. Samuel Johnson (1765) expressed similar qualms: “He [Shakespeare] seems to write without any moral purpose … he makes no just distribution of good or evil”
(Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Selected and Set Forth with an Introduction, ed. Walter Raleigh (London: Henry Frowde, 1908), 20–21.
Sarah Taylor Shatford, Shakespeare’s Revelations by Shakespeare’s Spirit (New York: Torch Press, 1919), 45.
Hudson Tuttle and J. M. Peebles, The Year-Book of Spiritualism for 1871 (Boston: William White, 1871), 156. Balfour was also president of the Society of Psychical Research.
See John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 2.
Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record (New York: self-published, 1870), 13, 273; R. Laurence Moore also counts the number of American Spiritualists at 11 million—in an America with a total population of 35 million, that seems absurdly high
(R. Laurence Moore, “Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of Spirit Rappings,” American Quarterly 24, no. 4 [1972]: 474–500; 481).
Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger believed that American Spiritualists numbered “over two millions [sic]” (Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, Addresses on Historical and Literary Subjects, trans. Margaret Warre [London: John Murray, 1894], 293). Frederic Marvin, a Spiritualist debunker, puts the number of American practitioners at around 4 million. For an overview of the numerical debate,
see Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 3. As late as 1941, there were over 300 Spiritualist Churches in England alone.
See Rene Kollar, Searching for Raymond: Anglicanism, Spiritualism, and Bereavement between the Two World Wars (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 140. Kollar puts the number of British worshipers at just over 10,000. However, the registered numbers do not tell the entire story. As Alex Owen points out, British Spiritualists often paid dues. Subscriptions to Spiritualist societies and newsletters might cost as much as a full guinea a year, the equivalent of about 110 pounds in 2009 funds. (Conversion based on Bank of England Inflation Calculator; updates for 2010–13 not yet, as of this writing, available). Counting paid subscribers, members, and one-time fee-payers (i.e., those who hired a medium on a payas-you-go basis), the number of adherents in England was probably around 100,000. The number of casual adherents, or believers who did not practice, was likely significantly higher.
See Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 25.
On the worldwide figure, see Molly McGarry, “The Quick, the Dead, and the Yet Unborn’: Untimely Sexualities and Secular Hauntings,” in Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 247–79; 253.
Quoted in Ilya Vinitsky, Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Reason (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 61.
On historical studies, see, for example, Janet Oppenhiem, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994);
and Jack Monroe, “Making the Séance ‘Serious’: Tables Tournantes and the Second Empire Bourgeois Culture, 1853–1861,” History of Religions 38, no. 3 (February 1999): 219–46. Martin Rudoy Scherzinger links Spiritualism to Romanticism, especially the latter’s common trope of a Muse-like agency
(Martin Rudoy Scherzinger, “Music, Spirit Possession and the Copyright Law: Cross-Cultural Comparisons and Strategic Speculations,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 31 [1999]: 102–25, esp. 106–7). On the continued growth of Spiritualism between the First and Second World Wars,
see Jenny Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British Society Between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), passim; Kollar, Searching for Raymond, passim;
Jerusha Hull McCormack, “Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” American Quarterly 55, no. 4 (December 2003): 569–601;
Daniel Herman, “Whose Knocking? Spiritualism as Entertainment and Therapy in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco,” American Nineteenth Century History 7, no. 3 (September 2006): 417–42;
John Harvey, “The Photographic Medium: Representation, Reconstitution, Consciousness, and Collaboration in Early-Twentieth-Century Spiritualism,” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 2, no. 2 (2004): 109–23;
John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008);
Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009);
Amy Lehman, Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance: Mediums, Spiritualists and Mesmerists in Performance (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009);
Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Gray, The Immortalization Commission.
Ewan Fernie, ed., introduction to Spiritual Shakespeares (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–27; 8. On the uses of theological language, Jacques Derrida observes, “there has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being (‘to be or not to be,’ in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity”
(Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Routledge, 1994], 11).
Even Courtney Lehmann is reluctant to use religiously-tinged language. Instead of writing the word “ghost,” she prefers “signifying void” (Courtney Lehmann, Shakespeare’s Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002], xiv, 2).
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 142–48; 146; and
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 101–20; 118–19. A fuller treatment of Foucault and Barthes is found in Chapter 4 of the present study.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, in The Collected Works of P.A.M. Dirac, 1924–1948, ed. R. H. Dalitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 456.
Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1993): 255–83; 256, 283.
Michael D. Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1996), 11.
Charles H. Frey, Making Sense of Shakespeare (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 21.
Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, Accents on Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2002), 141.
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 53.
Eric S. Mallin, Godless Shakespeare, Shakespeare Now (London: Continuum, 2007), 22, 23.
Slavoj Žižek, reviewing Derrida’s use of occult language, concludes that the specter represents “the ultimate horizon of ethics” (Slavoj Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999], 53–86; 74, 79, 77). Freud defines the “uncanny” as something that is identical with its opposite, something which is “secretly familiar” but has undergone a “repression and then returned from it”
(quoted in Antony Easthope, “Freud’s Spectres,” in Evil Spirits: Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity, ed. Gary Banham and Charlie Blake [New York: Manchester University Press, 2000], 146–64; 155). Historians have explored the polysemies of Spiritualism and literary criticism. Logie Barrow writes, “Elitist epistemologies … derive further power from their confusion about their own naturalness and inevitability”—i.e., by creating liturgy or jargon
(Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910 [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986], 148). On the debunking of literary terms by a literary critic, see
Stanley Stewart, “Renaissance” Talk: Ordinary Language and the Mystique of Critical Problems (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1997), esp. 103.
Harold Boom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (New York: Warner Books, 2002), xviii, 12. He also refers to Shakespeare’s “miraculous rendering of reality” (4). Bloom professes that his own interest in all canonical literature is fueled by a “desire for the transcendental” (7).
Ibid., 7. Bloom also traces the word “influence” to an “occult and astral sense” (Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism [New York: Continuum, 1993], 52).
Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6;
Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1992), 141–53; and Bristol, Big Time Shakespeare, 4.
On bardolatry, see F. E. Halliday, The Cult of Shakespeare (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1957);
Martha Winburn England, Garrick’s Jubilee (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1964);
Howard Felperin, “Bardolatry Then and Now,” in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works of the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 129–44;
Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), passim;
Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, new ed. (1991; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
Jeffrey Kahan, “Shakespeare and the Forging of Belief,” Critical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2001): 19–33;
and Jack Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard (New York: Walker, 2007). For the purposes of this study, the most pertinent critic is probably Charles Laporte (2007), who argues that bardolatry often centered on Shakespeare as an inspired author. His basic argument is that bardolatry—the worship of Shakespeare—stemmed from an inability to believe that an ordinary mortal, particularly one from such humble origins, could have composed the works ascribed to him. He notes, for example, a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics and poets who compared Shakespeare’s “divine” authoring to the inspired writings of Homer or to the biblical prophets.
See Charles Laporte, “The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question,” ELH74 no.3 (2007): 609–28. Laporte’s study enhances our understanding of bardolatry, and certainly his thoughts on the difficulties of connecting Shakespeare’s bucolic upbringing to his dramatic and poetic sophistication help explain some of the reasons Bacon and others have been proposed as the “true” author(s) of Shakespeare’s work. We will turn to the so-called authorship question in Chapters 2 and 3 of this study.
William F. Friedman and Elizabeth S. Friedman, The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined: An Analysis of Cryptographic Systems Used as Evidence that Some Author Other Than William Shakespeare Wrote the Plays Commonly Attributed to Him (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 282.
G. Wilson Knight, Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 323.
G. Wilson Knight, The Christian Renaissance (London: Methuen, 1962), 329; and G. Wilson Knight, Starlit Dome, 319.
Margaret J. Somerville, “Editorial: ‘Waiting in the Chaotic Place of Unknowing’: Articulating Postmodern Emergence,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 21, no. 3 (May–June 2008), 209–20; 209.
John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 37.
Percy Allen, Talks with Elizabethans (New York: Rider, 1947), 45.
R. S. White, “Where is Shakespeare’s Autobiography?,” in Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, ed. Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2006), 174–88; 178.
On Spiritualism during the First World War, see Michael Snape, “Civilians, Soldiers and Perceptions of the Afterlife in Britain during the First World War,” in The Church, the Afterlife, and the Fate of the Soul, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2009), 371–403. Shakespeare, however, is not mentioned.
On Louis Benjamin, see Albert Durrant Watson, The Twentieth Plane: A Psychic Revelation (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1919), 98.
Daisy O. Roberts and Collin E. Woolcock, Elizabethan Episode Incorporating Shakespeare and Co., Unlimited (London: Regency Press, [1961]), 33. The first time Olivier came into view, Shakespeare lamented “not like that—he was sleeker, much sleeker”; when Jean Simmons’s Ophelia occupied the screen, the voice said, “not just a child like this. But she acts well, it serves for the play” (33). Over time, Roberts learned to speak to the voice and to allow her body to become a seismic needle, recording Shakespeare’s “wavelength” through automatic writing (9). On “wavelength,” see “Spirit Wavelength” in the Glossary of Spiritualist Terms and Techniques appended to this study.
James Merrill, Changing Light at Sandover (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 164.
See J. M. E. McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17 (1908): 456–73; Dunne’s other books offer a variety of mathematical formulae and vector diagrams validating this idea. The novelist Andrew Crumey, who also holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Imperial College, London, recently looked at Dunne’s math and labeled it multiply as “speculation, pseudo-science or crank theory, depending on your point of view” (“An Experiment with Time,” Picador [blog], March 2008, http://www.crumey.toucansurf.com/an_experiment_with_time.html). In his study of McTaggart, Gerald Rochelle argues for a higher reality that is “substantial but non-material”; J. R. Lucas states that the differences between past and present are an “illusion.”
See Gerald Rochelle, Behind Time: The Incoherence of Time and McTaggart’s Atemporal Replacement (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 15;
and J. R. Lucas, The Future: An Essay on God, Temporality, and Truth (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 4, and his Space, Time and Causality: An Essay in Natural Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), in which he suggests that science needs to adopt an “opaque contingency in our encounters with the external world” (12).
G. Wilson Knight, “Spirit-Writing,” 1950–71, Manuscript Collection of the University of Exeter, 57; see also G. Wilson Knight, “Caroline: Life after Death,” circa 1952; last revised 1985 Manuscript Collection of the University of Exeter, 385–86. In Shakespearian Dimensions (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), Knight argues that Shakespeare received his plays via his spiritual “inspirers” (109).
John Sullivan Dwight, Dwights Journal of Music: A Paper of Art and Literature 23–24 (1863–64): 354.
Hugh Junor Browne, The Holy Truth, or, the Coming Reformation (London: A. Hall, 1876), 106.
Gerald Massey, Shakspeare’s Sonnets Never Before Interpreted: His Private Friends Identified. Together with a Recorded Likeness of Himself (London: Longmans, Green, 1866), 145. In 1872, Massey explained that his own occult investigations had revealed that Christopher Marlowe had not translated Pharsalia; he had merely recorded the dictation of a spirit (Gerald Massey, Concerning Spiritualism [London: J. Burns, 1872], 95). Sixteen years later, Massey argued that Marlowe was a Faustus-like figure, who, were he alive today, would have been regarded as a “phenomenal spiritualist” (Gerald Massey, The Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets [N.p.: Richard Clay, 1888], 170).
James Hervey Hyslop, Contact with the Other World: The Latest Evidence as to Communication with the Dead (New York: Century, 1919), 266.
Benjamin De Casseres, Forty Immortals (New York: Seven Arts, 1926), 363.
Alfred Dodd, The Immortal Master (London: Rider, [1943]), 74.
William Bliss, The Real Shakespeare: A Counterblast to Commentators (London: Sidwick and Jackson, 1947), 301–2.
Browne, The Holy Truth, or, the Coming Reformation, 206; James Hervey Hyslop, Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research: A Further Record of Mediumistic Experiments 19 (1925): 80–81.
G. Wilson Knight, This Sceptered Isle: Shakespeare’s Message for England at War (1950; repr., Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1969), 18, 16. To his credit, Knight openly questions his own logic; perhaps he has gone too far in merging the poetry of Shakespeare to reality: “Is this really the England of Shakespeare’s day? Does such a Great Britain exist? Can it exist?” (31–32). Still, Knight’s belief in spiritual communication cannot be questioned. See Chapter 5 of this study.
Harriet M. Shelton, Abraham Lincoln Returns (New York: Evans, 1957), passim, 30, 36–37, 97;
E. Lee Howard, My Adventure into Spiritualism (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 111;
Gerald Massey was the author of Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (London: T. F. Unwin, 1907);
Ignatius Donnelly was author of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (New York: Harper, 1882). A last bit of evidence: while not mentioning Shakespeare, W. G. Langworthy Taylor compared the messages Kate Fox received from the Spirit Realm to the “hieroglyphics, on excavated pottery, on reopened tombs, [and] on papyri unrolled from mummies”
(W. G. Langworthy Taylor, preface to Fox-Taylor Automatic Writing 1869–1892 Unabridged Record, by Kate Fox, ed. Sarah E. L. Taylor [Minneapolis, MN: Tribune-Great West self-published, 1932], ii).
On Emerson, see the review of Musle-Huddeen Sheik Saadi’s The Gulistan, or Rose Garden, in The North American Review 102 (1866): 260–64; 261.
See “An Easter Address by Rev. M. J. Savage,” Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research 9 (May 25, 1889): 251–54, esp. 253. On Buddhism and Spiritualist parallels and links, see Lynn L. Sharp, who connects the rise of Spiritualism to the “newly discovered” religions of the east, including Hinduism and Buddhism (Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth-Century France [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006], xi);
see also J. Jeffrey Franklin, The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 55, 59;
and David R. Loy, Awareness Bound and Unbound: Buddhist Essays (Albany: State University of New York, 2009), 109. On British Spiritualism and/or its links to Indian-influenced Theosophy, see Oppenhiem, The Other World, 20, 163–70, 173, 180–82;
Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Theosophy: A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), 33–35;
and Rudolf Steiner, Spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky, and Theosophy: An Eye Witness View of Occult History, ed. Christopher Bamford (Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2001), 67–82. G. Wilson Knight linked Spiritualism to Buddhism in
G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (1931; London: Methuen, 1965), 358;
in G. Wilson Knight and W. F. Jackson Knight, Elysion: On Ancient Greek and Roman Beliefs Concerning a Life after Death (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 10;
in G. Wilson Knight, Christian Renaissance (London: Methuen, 1962), 327;
and in G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Challenge: On the Rise of Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1977), 146.
Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia: Conservator, 1894), 311.
William Stanley, The Case of The Fox: Being His Prophecies, Under Hypnotism, of the Period Ending A.D. 1950: A Political Utopia (London: Truslove and Hanson, 1903), 107.
Stan McMullin argues that the accommodating nature of Spiritualism allowed for a “core institution common to the various marginalized groups committed to spiritualist communication regardless of their individual beliefs” (Stan McMullin, Anatomy of a Seance: A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004], 224).
Tyatafia soon put him in touch with Shakespeare, who spoke to Hugo in perfect French. See John Chambers, Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius’s Hidden Life (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1998), 217.
The same device automatically updated Shakespeare’s thoughts into “ordinary language for ordinary people” (Daisy O. Roberts, Why in the World? [London: Linden Press, 1961], 169). On Shakespeare’s surprisingly modern language, see also Browne, The Holy Truth, or, the Coming Reformation, 209, and Bliss, The Real Shakespeare, 296–97. On a related note, Donald W. Foster, reading the “Shakespeare” poems and writings transcribed by Sarah Taylor Shatford, comments, “it is hard to reconcile the Shakespeare whose voice I think I know with the Shakespeare responsible for Miss Shatford’s book of Revelations”
(Donald W. Foster, “Commentary: In the Name of the Author,” New Literary History 33, no. 2 [Spring 2002]: 375–96; 391).
James M. Frederick and Olga A. Tildes, The Silver Cord: Life Here and Hereafter (N.p.: self-published, 1946), 261;
Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, Transcendental Physics, trans. Charles Carleton Massey (New York: W. H. Harrison, 1880), 7, 29; and Bliss, The Real Shakespeare, 295. Spiritualists of the Gilded Age began to refer to an “X-Faculty” or an “‘X’ consciousness”; others wrote of “some general inter-atomic repulsive force”; the Spiritualist L. Kelway Bamber (1919) explained that souls “vibrate at a higher rate than our reality,” but that mediums could apprehend their existence in the “Etheric” sphere by making the right harmonic sounds.
See Donna M. Lucey, Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 202, 248;
L. Kelway Bamber, Claude’s Book (London: Methuen, 1918), 68; see also her followup, Claude’s Second Book (New York: H. Holt, 1919), ix, 72.
R. G. Pressing, Rappings That Startled the World: Facts About the Fox Sisters (Lily Dale, NY: Dale News, [1940?]), 47. See the terms “clairgustance,” “lampadomancy,” and “pyroscopy” in the Appendix of this study.
On feminist Spiritualism, see Nina Auerbach, Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 154;
Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 82;
and Marlene Tromp, Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 22. On the physical charms of many young female mediums, see Oppenhiem, The Other World, 19–21. On the “sexy” séance: Jack Monroe argues that the séance “fostered the lifting of social restraint,” both on a personal and political level (Monroe, “Making the Séance ‘Serious,’” esp. 226, 228).
In 1856, one New Yorker suggested that he and friends should see Kate Fox perform a séance because it was a “good show” and “cheap” (Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers: The Victorians and the Occult [1972; repr., Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2004], 65). On theatrical fun: Janet Oppenhiem suggests that séances were “jolly good shows” (Oppenhiem, The Other World, 25); John Monroe argues that many in France saw séances as pure amusement (Monroe, “Making the Séance ‘Serious,’” 221).
John Worth Edmonds, George T. Dexter, and Nathaniel Pitcher Tallmadge, Spiritualism (New York: Partridge and Brittan, 1853–55), 1:158. Writes John Gray, “The dead were given the task of saving the living; the posthumously designed messiah would save humanity from itself” (Gray, The Immortalization Commission, 4).
On chariots and sailing, see “Owen Says Heaven Needs Active Men: Sailing One of the Pastimes,” New York Times, February 5, 1923; on novels and theatre, see Hester Dowden’s interviews with Oscar Wilde (Chapter 3, this study); on universities and time travel, see Dodd, The Immortal Master, 97; on cities, see Lehman, Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance, 102–14, esp. 111–14 and Jean-Baptiste Delacour, Glimpses of the Beyond: The Extraordinary Experiences of People Who Have Crossed the Brink of Death and Returned, trans. E. B. Garside (New York: Delacorte Press, 1974), 168; on fruits and vegetables, see John Worth Edmonds, George T. Dexter, and Nathaniel Pitcher Tallmadge, Spiritualism, 1:157; on cigars and whiskey sodas,
see Edward Clodd, The Question: “If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again?”: Job XIV 14. A Brief History and Examination of Modern Spiritualism (New York: E. J. Clode, 1918), 227–28; on flowers, trees, and so on, see G. Wilson Knight’s mother’s report in Chapter 5 of this study.
Henry J. Triezenberg, Spiritualism: Asking the Dead (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1939), 45.
Richard S. Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 117. These and other like theories prompted the modern economist John Maynard Keynes, a keen collector of Newtonia, to opine that “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians” (quoted in Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer [New York: Basic Books, 1999], 3).
Elliott O’Donnell, The Menace of Spiritualism (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1920), 52. As the title suggests, O’Donnell was not a Spiritualist, though he was far from a rationalist. Wrote O’Donnell: “I believe in ghosts but am not a spiritualist” (quoted in Leslie Shepard, Lewis Spence, and Nandor Fodor, eds., Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, 3rd ed., s.v. “O’Donnell, Elliott [1872–1965]” [Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1991], 2:1211).
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Kahan, J. (2013). Introduction. In: Shakespiritualism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313553_1
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