The audacity of the assertion, by a young woman, a school-teacher, in no way distinguished or anywise eminent, that the idol of these centuries, and of the English-speaking race, was a mere effigy of straw—a mere dummy for an unknown immortal, was too tremendous! Men stood aghast. Was it a chimera of a mind diseased! Sneered at in her own country, she went to England, but found that—while at home she was treading only on adverse sentiment—there she was openly tampering with vested rights, almost with the unwritten constitution of England. She made a few personal friends, and found some sympathizers, but all England was arrayed against her. She came back, heart-broken, and died eight months later. Mr. William Henry Smith, of London, in September, 1856, appeared with his "Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays? A Letter to Lord Ellesmere," in which the Baconian theory was very plainly and circumspectly laid down and admirably maintained. * The presumption once disturbed, inquiry began to be diverted from the well-worn track of the commentators, and the result has been, we think, a candid, rational, and patient attempt to study the Shakespearean writings by the aid of contemporary history rather than by mere conjecture, and by the record rather than by fancy, guess-work, and gossip.
* This "Letter," which was reprinted in "Littell's Living
Age," (No. 56), for November, 1856, was, the following year
(1857) elaborated into the valuable work on which we have so
unsparingly drawn in these pages, and to which we
acknowledge our exceeding obligation ("Bacon and
Shakespeare: An Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and
Play writers in the days of Elizabeth. By William Henry
Smith. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857"). In this work Mr.
Smith (in his preface) asserts that at the date of his
letter to Lord Ellesmere, he had never seen Miss Bacon's
article in "Putnam's," but, it is to be observed, no where
claims to have been the originator of the "Baconian Theory."
It is too early in the day—the time has been too short—for the reaction to have proved equal to the action, and verified the physical rule; but three well defined anti-Stratfordian theories have offered themselves already, as substitutes for the mossy and venerable fossil remains of the commentators. These theories are:
1. The Delia Bacon Theory;
2. The Baconian Theory; and
3. The New Theory (as we are compelled, for want of a better name, to call it).
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."