The Shakespearean Myth: William Shakespeare and Circumstantial Evidence

by Appleton Morgan

THE DELIA BACON THEORY.

It was across no dethroned and shattered intellect that there first flashed the truth it has been the essay of these papers to rehearse. That Delia Bacon—who, earliest in point of time, announced to the world that "Shakespeare" was the name of a book, and not the name of its author; and who, contenting herself with the bare announcement, soon passed on to the theory we are now about to notice—was pelted with a storm of derision, abuse, and merciless malice, until in poverty, sickness, and distress, but still in a grand silence, she passed out of sight for ever, is true enough. That in the midst of it all she still struggled on in what she believed to be "the world's work"—bearing more than it was ever intended a woman should bear—is not to overweigh any merit her scheme of the Shakespearean plays may have possessed, however it may have eventuated in the "madness" so inseparably connected with her name. Wherever Delia Bacon died, she lived and moved in the conviction that she was a worker in the world's workshop. What to us is a mere cold, historical formulary, seems, however, we may smile at the absurdity, to have seized upon her whole life and being; and, as in a great crusade against a universal error, she seems to have struggled in loneliness and wretchedness, with a crusader's faith and a martyr's reward.

In all her tragic life, Delia Bacon appears never to have paused to formulate the theory, for ever to be associated with her name, as to the actual authorship of the plays. The paper "William Shakespeare and his Plays," which appeared in "Putnam's Magazine" (and inaugurated the controversy, never thereafter to "down" at anybody's bidding), seems to treat the matter as already settled. It is rather sarcasm at the expense of those who rejected the theory of a non-Shakespearean authorship than a formulation of the theory itself. That the sarcasm, as a sustained effort, has rarely if ever been equaled, there certainly can be no question. Her indignation at the idea that the magnificent plays sprang from the brain of "the Stratford poacher—now that the deer-stealing fire has gone out of him; now that this youthful impulse has been taught its conventional mental limits, sobered into the mild, sagacious, witty Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe," is intense. "What is to hinder Mr. Shakespeare, the man who keeps the theater on the bank-side, from working himself into a frenzy when he likes, and scribbling out, unconsciously, Lears, and Macbeths and Hamlets, merely as the necessary dialogues to the spectacle he professionally exhibits!" Her allusion to Bacon is equally impassioned: "We should have found, ere this, one with learning broad enough and deep enough and subtle enough and comprehensive enough; one with nobility of aim and philosophic and poetic genius enough to be able to claim his own, his own immortal progeny, unwarped, unblinded, undeprived of one ray or dimple of that all-pervading reason that informs them—one who is able to reclaim them, even now, 'cured and perfected in their limbs, and absolute in full numbers as he conceived them!'" Long before its appearance, as we shall proceed to narrate; and still longer before the world had well opened its eyes to the fact that a formidable anti-Shakespearean proposition had been asserted, its author had left the proposition itself leagues behind, and was well along on her route to the fountain-head of its inspiration. The problem she proposed to herself was not, "Did Bacon and others write the plays?" but "Why did Bacon and others write the plays under the name of William Shakespeare?"

As the fruit of laborious study of the system and structure of the plays, she reached the answer—as she believed, and lived and died believing—hidden and embalmed in the masterpiece of them all, the tragedy of "Hamlet."

"Hamlet," she maintained, was the master-key that unlocked the whole magnificent system. They were not plays, but chapters in a great Treatise—links in a great chain of philosophy—a new philosophy of politics and of life; and, just as the Lord Hamlet caused certain strolling players, with the set speech he put into their mouths, to "catch the conscience of the king," so had the greatest mind of all the golden age put into the mouths of the vagabond Shakespeare and his crew the truth which should, in the fullness of time, catch the conscience of the whole world. But why should these great minds have chosen to put their philosophy into enigmas and ciphers? Miss Bacon's answer was convincing: "It was the time when the cipher, in which one could write 'omnia per omnia,' was in request; when even 'wheel ciphers' and 'doubles' were thought not unworthy of philosophic notice. It was a time, too, when the phonographic art was cultivated and put to other uses than at present, and when a nomme de plume was required for other purposes than to serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, or vanity, or caprice. It was a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles were not mere sport and child's play; when they had need to be close and solvable only to those who should solve them. It was a time when all the latent capacities of the English language were put in requisition, and it was flashing and crackling through all its length and breadth, with puns and quips and conceits and jokes and satires, and inlined with philosophic secrets that opened down into the bottom of a tomb, that opened into the Tower, that opened on the scaffold and the block." * This was the "Delia Bacon theory." This was the "madness" forever associated with her plaintive story, and not the proposition that the author of the plays (whoever he might be—or they, if more than one) and William Shakespeare were persons—as distinctly two as were the noble Hamlet and the poor player who played "Gonzago" in the "Mousetrap" that day before the majesty of Denmark. But, madness or not, Miss Bacon never wavered in her conviction that the appointed time to read the oracles had come, and that she, Delia Bacon, a namesake, possibly, of the real Hamlet of the plays, had been raised in her appointed place to be the reader. Alas for her!

* "Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded," p. x.
Like Cassandra, she announced her message only to be
scorned and flouted in return!

By what whim of fortune or fancy the great plays had grown to be known as "Shakespeare's works," any more than Burbage's works, or Jonson's works, she never troubled herself to inquire; but with the details of lier mission she was careful to possess herself. She held that "the material evidence of her dogma as to the authorship, together with the key of the new philosophy, would be found buried in Shakespeare's grave." * She claims to have discovered, by careful study of Lord Bacon's letters, not only the key and clew to the whole mystery, but to an entire Baconian cipher In these letters—there were over five hundred of them extant, and others have been discovered, we believe, since Miss Bacon's day—however, it still remains, for the secret of Miss Bacon's clew died with her. But she stoutly maintained that in these letters were "definite and minute directions how to find a will and other documents relating to the conclave of Elizabethan philosophers, which were concealed in a hollow space in the under surface of Shakespeare's gravestone.... The directions, she intimated, were completely and precisely to the point, obviating all difficulties in the way of coming to the treasure, and so contrived as to ward off any troublesome consequences likely to arise from the interference of the parish officers.... There was the precious secret protected by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold in the guardianship of a fiend." **

* Hawthorne.
** Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven, in 1811, and
early devoted herself to literature, writing two works "The
Tales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." She
soon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted
the profession of a student and teacher of history, and
began her career as a lecturer on history in the city of
Boston. Her method was original with herself. She had
models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her
subject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections of
Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, being
of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was
successful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar says,
"She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like.
** Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven, in 1811, and
early devoted herself to literature, writing two works "The
Tales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." She
soon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted
the profession of a student and teacher of history, and
began her career as a lecturer on history in the city of
Boston. Her method was original with herself. She had
models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her
subject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections of
Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, being
of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was
successful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar says,
"She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like an
angel."

The original manuscripts of the plays she did not expect to find there. These she believed the ignorant Shakespeare to have scattered, after the blotless copies for the players had been taken; to have devoted to domestic purposes, or to have never concerned himself about farther. This was the gravamen of the charge she brought against "Lord Leicester's groom," the co-manager, late of Stratford, and this the vandalism for which she never could forgive him. "This fellow," she cried, "never cared a farthing for them, but only for his gains at their hands.... What is to hinder his boiling his kettle with the manuscripts... after he had done with them? He had those manuscripts—the original Hamlet, with its last finish;... the original Lear, with his own fine readings... he had them all—pointed, emphasized, corrected, as they came from the gods! And he has left us to wear out our youth and squander our life in poring over and setting right the old garbled copies of the play-house!... For is he not a private, economical, practical man, this Shakespeare of ours, with no stuff and nonsense about him; a plain, true-blooded Englishman, who minds his own business, and leaves others to take care of theirs?... What did he do with them? He gave them to his cook, or Dr. Hall put up potions in them, or Judith—poor Judith, who signified her relation to the author of Lear and the Tempest, and her right to the glory of the name he left her, by the very extraordinary kind of 'mark' which she affixed to legal instruments—poor Judith may have curled her hair with them to the day of her death.... What did you do with them? You have skulked this question long enough; you will have to account for them! The awakening ages will put you on the stand, and you will not leave it until you answer the question, what did you do with them?" * This chain of dramas, so blindly perpetuated by William Shakespeare, became, through Miss Bacon's unlocking process, a great system of political philosophy, dictated by the thoughtful Bacon and his compeers, and locked up for the nineteenth century, against the blindness of the centuries between.

But, of so startling a proposition, Miss Bacon confesses that the world would require something more than her own conviction. So she deliberately set out to prove, from the very crypt and silence of the grave itself, its truth. To St. Albans, whence the mysterious letters were dated, to the lonesome tomb at old Verulam and the vault in Stratford chancel, she proposed a pilgrimage—thence to probe the secret, and lay it open to a doubting world. Her friends regarded her theory as a delusion, and Miss Bacon as a monomaniac....

* "Putnam's Magazine," January, 1856. "to her
conversations on the subject, and peremptorily refused
contributions to assist in her expedition. But, by her
lectures, and the friend she enlisted in her project in New
York City, she gathered together enough money to get to
London."
It was while in London, in abject poverty and
friendlessness, that Thomas Carlyle, "upon whom she had
called and whom she had impressed with respect for herself
if not for her theory," says Hawthorne, advised Miss Bacon
to put her thoughts upon paper first, before proceeding to
the overt act of proof she contemplated—namely, the opening
of William Shakespeare's grave. It was upon his advice that
this most remarkable woman—sitting in bed in a garret to
keep warm without a fire, without sufficient or wholesome
food, "looking back," to use her own words, "on the joys and
sorrows of a world in which I have no longer any place, like
a departed spirit," and yet, doing "the world's work," and
knowing "that I had a right to demand aid for it"—undertook
to unfold out of the Shakespearean plays their hidden system
of philosophy." Meanwhile, under a contract obtained for her
by Mr. P. W. Emerson (though, it is presumed, more for
temporary supply of funds than as rider to her great work),
she furnished to "Putnam's Magazine" eighty pages of
manuscript, which became the famous paper "William
Shakespeare and his Plays," first announcing to the world
the first anti-Shakespearean theory of which it had ever
heard. **
* Mrs. Farrar.
** This was contracted to be the first of a series of
papers, but the arrangement for some reason, probably
because Miss Bacon found it necessary to devote herself to
the work to which she was to give her life, fell through,
and no successive papers appeared in the magazine.

They put their Shakespeares out of sight when she approached, declined to listenUnder such circumstances, and with such surroundings, this heroic woman accomplished the first half of the work she had marked out for herself—the reading of the sealed book, the unfolding of the philosophy of the Shakespearean plays. Her book was written, printed, published, and—damned! *

* "The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded. By Delia
Bacon." London: Sampson, Low & Co.; and Boston: Ticknor &
Fields, 1857. The book lies before us, and certainly is the
most difficult reading we ever attempted. Even so competent
and partial a critic as Hawthorne says of it: "Without
prejudice to her literary ability, it must be allowed that
Miss Bacon was wholly unfit to prepare her own work for
publication, because, among other reasons, she was too
thoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out. Every leaf
and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep
a conviction of truth, as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect
of inspiration. A practiced book-maker, with entire control
of her material, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume,
full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation—criticisms
which quite take the color and pungency out of other
people's critical remarks on Shakespeare.... There was a
great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would
have shoveled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the
whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a
lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which
fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has
never been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two
of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the
volume deeper into the mud.... I believe that it has been
the faith of this remarkable book never to have had more
than a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only in
isolated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. But
since my return to America, a young man of genius and
enthusiasm has assured me that he has positively read the
book from beginning to end, and is completely a convert to
its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and not to me,
whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her,
she declared unworthy to meddle with her work—it belongs
surely to this one individual, who has done her so much
justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in
her due position before the public." ("Our Old Home.") The
volume is obtained to-day, only by chance, in old bookshops
and at such prices as the bookseller may choose to demand.

It failed so utterly and miserably that nobody opened it, though that fact deterred nobody, of course, from laughing at it and its author to the utmost of their endeavor in ridicule and abuse. "Our American journalists," says Hawthorne, "at once republished some of the most brutal vituperations of the English press, thus pelting their poor countrywoman with stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was deserved, and they never have known it to this day, and never will." But none the less did Delia Bacon persevere to the end. The philosophy was unfolded. If the world declined to receive the truth—"the truth," as she claimed, "that is neither yours nor mine, but yours and mine"—it was not on her head, at least, that the consequences would fall. The second half of her work remained. She proceeded to Stratford to crown her labors, by opening the vault in the chancel of the parish church, and exposing the secret she had already guessed, to the doubting Thomasses who clamored for the tactual evidence so long entombed there.

Although on a mission so likely to be regarded as predatory—as even coming under police prohibition, Miss Bacon seems to have lived in open avowal of her purpose, under the very shadows of the church she meant to despoil, and to have made nothing but friends. The regard was mutual, and, says Hawthorne, "she loved the slumberous town, and awarded the only praise that I ever knew her to bestow on Shakespeare, the individual man, by acknowledging that his taste in selecting a residence was good, and that he knew how to choose a suitable retirement for a person of shy but genial temperament." She laid her plans before the vicar, who, so far as Miss Bacon ever was permitted to learn, never opposed them. * At least he did not hand her over to the first Dogberry at hand—a most un-English omission on his part. He did, however, ask Miss Bacon's leave to consult a friend, "who proved to be legal counsel," and who, doubtless, advised inaction, for the matter was allowed, so far as the lady was concerned, to retain the form of a pending negotiation with the parish, never, as a matter of fact, broken off on its part. The rest is best told in Mr. Hawthorne's dramatic narrative: "The affair looked certainly very hopeful. However erroneously, Miss Bacon had understood from the vicar that no obstacle would be interposed to the investigation, and that he himself would sanction it with his presence. It was to take place after nightfall; and, all preliminary arrangements being made, the vicar and the clerk professed to wait only her word, in order to set about lifting the awful stone from its sepulchre...

* I cannot help fancying, however, that her familiarity
with the events of Shakespeare's life, and of his death and
burial (of which she would speak as if she had been present
at the the edge of the grave), and all the history,
literature, and personalities of the Elizabethan age,
together with the prevailing power of her own belief, had
really gone some little way toward making a convert of the
good clergyman.—Hawthorne.

She examined the surface of the gravestone, and endeavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether it were of such thickness as to be capable of containing the archives of the Elizabethan Club. She went over anew the proofs, the clews, the enigmas, the pregnant sentences, which she had discovered in Bacon's letters and elsewhere.... She continued to hover around the church, and seems to have had full freedom of entrance in the day-time, and special license, on one occasion at least, at a late hour at night. She went thither with a dark lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the volume of obscurity that filled the great, dusky edifice. Groping her way up the aisle, and toward the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement above Shakespeare's grave. She made no attempt to disturb the grave, though, I believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices between Shakespeare's and the two adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied herself that her single strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of need. She threw the feeble rays of her lantern up toward the bust, but could not make it visible beneath the darkness of the vaulted roof.... Several times she heard a low movement in the aisle; a stealthy, dubious footfall prowling about in the darkness, now here, now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth to peep at the intruder. By and by the clerk made his appearance, and confessed that he had been watching her ever since she entered the church. This was the nearest she came to the overt act, all thought of which was finally abandoned; for, meanwhile, worn out with the absorbing mental activity of these last years, and her physical privations (she had only arrived in Stratford in a condition so feeble and prostrated as to have believed herself beyond any necessity of providing any further earthly sustenance; the failure of her book and the miscarriage of her plans did the rest), she finally consented to be borne back to her home to die peacefully at the last, among friends. Her life and her "theory" are only to be discussed together, and both with tenderness. "Was there ever a more wonderful phenomenon?" exclaims Hawthorne—"a system of philosophy, growing up in this woman's mind, without her volition, contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her volition, and substituting itself in the place of everything that originally grew there! To have based such a system on fancy, and unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays... it certainly came from no inconsiderable depth somewhere."

This was, so far as she herself put it on paper, Miss Delia Bacon's theory. It is to be carefully noticed, however, that it is a theory, not of a unitary but of a joint authorship. There is one passage in the "Putnam's Magazine" article (which at that time was announced by the publishers as the first of a series of papers, and was so intended by Miss Bacon) which points to Bacon as the supposed sole author of the plays. But, in the book which followed it, these plays are repeatedly assigned to a conclave or junta of Elizabethan courtiers and scholars, and such was the faith, we believe, in which Miss Bacon labored and died.

The unitary theory, we believe not unfairly, may be assigned to Messrs. Smith and Holmes; the latter of whom, in the preface to his work, most distinctly rejects Miss Bacon's "junta" authorship, and undertakes to maintain the proposition that Bacon, and Bacon alone, was the author of the whole canon of "Shakespeare." According to Judge Holmes, Bacon had reasons in plenty for concealing his authorship, and for "loving better to be a poet than to be accounted one." Not only his personal safety:—Dr. Heywood was already in the tower for having incensed the Queen by an unlucky pamphlet dedicated to Essex; and "not long after this," says Holmes, "and while Essex is under arrest, and Bacon in sundry interviews with the Queen, is still interceding in his behalf, her Majesty brings up against him this affair of Dr. Hoywood's book, and also, as it would seem, distinctly flings at Bacon himself about 'a matter which grew from him, but went after about in other's names (in fact no other than the play Richard II. we have to-day)." But the development of his plans made concealment particularly desirable. Political rivals were watching jealously his every utterance. He is known to be a "concealed poet," so he prepares a masque or two for the queen's own eye and audience; but he alone, according to Judge Holmes, writes "Shakespeare."

"Had the plays (says Mr. Furness) come down to us anonymously—had the labor of discovering the author been imposed upon future generations, we could have found no one of that day but Francis Bacon to whom to assign the crown. In this case it would have been resting now upon his head by almost common consent." It is well that this essential difference between the "Delia Bacon" and the "Baconian" theories should be emphasized here.

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