Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,

  Self-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure,

  Didst walk on Earth unguess’d at. – Better so!

  All pains the immortal spirit must endure,

  All weakness that impairs, all griefs which bow,

  Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

  In such a climate, it was only a matter of time before someone would try to do to Shakespeare what Strauss had done to Jesus. The similarities were so striking that by 1854 some – like George Gilfillan – wondered why it hadn’t been attempted already:

  so deep are the uncertainties surrounding the history of Shakespeare, that I sometimes wonder that the process applied by Strauss to the Life of Our Saviour has not been extended to his. A Life of Shakespeare, on this worthy model, would be a capital exercise for some aspiring sprig of Straussism!

  Gilfillan didn’t know it, but in 1848, twenty-four-year-old Samuel Mosheim Schmucker, a fierce critic of Strauss and his fellow ‘Modern Infidels’, had already published just such a ‘capital exercise’, in which he demonstrated that the ‘historic doubts regarding Christ’ are ‘equally applicable to Shakespeare’: ‘the former existence of a distinguished man in the literary world, may be as easily disproved, as infidels have laboured to disprove the existence of an eminent person in the religious world’. But Schmucker (who in the course of his brief life would be a prolific biographer and historian as well as a Lutheran pastor) had done so not to extend Strauss’s method to Shakespeare but rather to mock and parody it. The result – Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare: Illustrating Infidel Objections against the Bible – is almost unknown, but it probably tells us more about the Shakespeare authorship controversy than any other book, though without setting out to. Remarkably, before that controversy even broke out, Schmucker, who never for a moment doubted that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, anticipated and carefully mapped out almost all the arguments subsequently used to question Shakespeare’s authorship.

  Schmucker wrote Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare out of a concern that Strauss’s ideas were making serious headway in America. He blamed writers like Emerson who were sympathetic to the Higher Criticism for encouraging the ‘spirit of learned doubt’ and for undermining ‘the simple Christianity which has prevailed here, ever since the Pilgrim fathers hallowed these Western climes with their presence and their principles’. Knowing how difficult it was to confront directly the force of Strauss’s claim that the life of Jesus as reported in the Gospels is a tissue of myths, Schmucker figured that he could undermine Strauss’s entire approach by asking the same questions of the life of Shakespeare, for ‘if any one is willing to doubt on their authority, the history and existence of Christ, he must, in order to be consistent, be willing to doubt on the same grounds, the history and existence of Shakespeare’.

  Schmucker has a great time of it, mostly because it never entered his head that his readers could seriously imagine that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare. It gave him the freedom to push his case hard: Where are the contemporary allusions? Why the muddled claims about the stability of the texts and even their authorship? How can we really trust what contemporaries said about him? How could someone be so great and yet there be so little recorded about him:

  If so much may be contrived and urged, to mystify the existing records concerning a person who is dead but several centuries, how much more may be contrived by a perverse ingenuity against the existing records respecting an individual [Jesus] who lived and acted in the world nearly two thousand years ago?

  Parodying Strauss’s line of attack, Schmucker takes the reader step by step through all the reasons that prove that Shakespeare authorship is suspect. For starters, there is almost no documentary evidence: ‘if no such authentic records of Shakespeare were written in his own day, all subsequent histories of him must be without any historical truth or authority. They are founded on supposition.’ Indeed, the entire biography is implausible: ‘What disinterested witnesses ever lived, whose testimony was sufficiently strong and undeniable, as to overbalance the extraordinary improbability of their story?’ What little evidence survives, he argues – stealing one of Strauss’s favourite terms – remains ‘contradictory’. Biographers of Shakespeare, like those of Jesus, not only dispute the facts of the life, they can’t even agree on what their subject accomplished: ‘They have contended, some for one play, and some for another as genuine. While one critic set up, another pulled down. What one affirmed, another denied.’

  Schmucker draws a sharp distinction between Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the poet, in what would soon be a favourite gambit of those who doubted his authorship: ‘Even if we grant the truth of the facts recorded concerning the man William Shakespeare, these personal facts have no weight in proving the history of the supposed author and poet.’ In fact, ‘all the incidents of his life as a man, are unfavourable to his character as a writer’. As for his lack of formal education: ‘Is it not strange that one individual, so ill prepared by previous education, and other indispensable requisites, should be the sole author of so many works, in all of which it is pretended that such extraordinary merit and rare excellence exist?’

  He also anticipates the conspiracy theories later used to explain the elevation of Shakespeare: ‘British national pride must needs have some great dramatist to uphold the nation’s honour … Greatness thus became associated with [Shakespeare’s] name. He became, in the progress of time, and from the influence of confirmed prejudice and ignorance and pride, supreme in the literary world,’ and ‘his power and his title have become consolidated in the hearts of an interested nation, and of an admiring and credulous world’. Shakespeare must have been a fraud, an ‘imposture which we have proved to be both possible and natural’.

  He then suggests how the mistaken belief in Shakespeare first took hold, in a Straussian argument that would soon be used by those who seriously denied his authorship of the plays: How ‘did this error … originate’? By taking things for granted and ‘listening to authority, by giving credence to the assertions of those were most interested in the delusion’. Why was it so ‘submissively tolerated’? Apathy, ignorance, and an unwillingness to admit error. And ‘how were these delusions exposed?’: ‘Proofs accumulated in power and in amount, as the investigation proceeded, until at the last, the whole truth was shown up to the astonished gaze of men.’ And after Shakespeare is shown to be an impostor, what then? Will true believers concede the point? Never. As a result, ‘men will continue to be the willing dupes of a fascinating imposition’ – a ‘melancholy spectacle of simplicity and weakness’.

  It’s an exhilarating performance, the last thing one would expect from a young Pennsylvanian writing in 1847, for whom invoking Shakespeare is merely a means to a larger theological end. After a hundred pages or so of this Schmucker suddenly worries that readers might get the wrong idea and perhaps not just doubt Shakespeare but in doing so, come to doubt Jesus as well, and so concludes: ‘If the failure of every attempt to invalidate Shakespeare’s history … only serves to confirm it; so the failure on every past assault on Christ’s extraordinary history much more serves to confirm and establish it, beyond all future peril.’ Schmucker died at age forty, having lived just long enough to see his farcical arguments taken literally, though he left no account of what he thought of those he would probably have described as Shakespeare infidels.

  Schmucker had drafted the sceptics’ playbook; but in truth, anybody at the time could have, and some were already thinking and writing in similar terms, for every scheme he proposed was lifted from well-worn arguments – familiar enough to parody – about biography, singularity and literary attribution, issues that had been fiercely contested for over half a century. There’s no evidence that any early doubters were influenced by or even knew of Schmucker’s strange book. They didn’t need to. His book confirms that the competition to identify who was the first to deny that Shakespeare wrote the pl
ays misses the point badly. It’s worth adding that those who first sought to topple Shakespeare (though not their successors or their critics) would be painfully aware of the theological source of their arguments – and, as we shall soon see, it’s no surprise that the most influential of them only turned to the authorship question after experiencing spiritual crises.

  TWO

  BACON

  Francis Bacon, by William Marshall, after Simon De Passe, 1641

  Delia Bacon, from Theodore Bacon, Delia Bacon:

  A Biographical Sketch (Boston, 1888)

  Delia Bacon

  The story is familiar: a young and ambitious writer with little formal schooling leaves family behind, moves to the metropolis, writes a tragedy and persuades a star of the London stage to play the lead. But the year is 1837, not 1587, and the writer is not Shakespeare of Stratford but an American named Delia Bacon.

  Born in a frontier log-cabin in 1811, Delia Bacon was the youngest daughter of a visionary Congregationalist minister who left New Haven, Connecticut to found a Puritan community in the wilds of Ohio. The venture collapsed, the impoverished family returned to New England and her father died soon after. While money was found to send her eldest brother Leonard to Yale, Delia’s formal education ended when she was fourteen, after a year at the Female Seminary in Hartford run by Catherine and Mary Beecher, who were impressed by her ‘fervid imagination’ and ‘rare gifts of eloquence’.

  At fifteen, to help support her family, Delia Bacon became a schoolteacher. She continued to read voraciously, added a bit ofGreek to her limited Latin, and began writing stories (which she justified to her brother Leonard, now a leading Congregationalist minister in New Haven, as ‘fiction only as the drapery to something better – truth’). At twenty she published, anonymously, Tales of the Puritans – three longish stories of colonial life. The following year she won a story-writing contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, beating rivals including Edgar Allan Poe for the $100 prize. Her entry, ‘Love’s Martyr’, retold a tragic incident of the Revolutionary War in which a colonist named Jane McCrea was murdered by Indians (in the service of the British General Burgoyne) on the way to meet her royalist lover at Fort Edward; McCrea’s death became a rallying cry for the colonial forces and, as tradition had it, helped turn the tide of the war.

  Delia Bacon cut an increasingly impressive figure; as one awestruck onlooker described her, ‘graceful and intellectual in appearance, eloquent in speech, marvelously wise, and full of inspiration, she looked and spoke the very muse of history’. As her reputation as a teacher grew, she progressed from instructing schoolgirls to teaching adult women, and eventually – something almost without precedent for a woman at the time – to lecturing publicly on world history to audiences of both men and women. Her delivery was especially impressive: an admirer recalled that ‘she wrote out nothing – not even notes’. Bacon was a gifted synthesiser. She drew comfortably on literature, art, archaeology, linguistics, science, theology and anything else that helped illustrate her account of how mankind, under Providence’s guiding hand, had developed spiritually and intellectually ‘from the dawn of history, through the shadowy glimmerings of faith and tradition in successive ages, to the broad daylight of the present era’.

  By her mid-twenties Bacon was on her way to cementing a career as a professional lecturer in New Haven, but she was restless, and in 1836, with Leonard’s reluctant blessing, moved to New York City. But even lecturing there failed to hold her interest. She sought out leading cultural figures, including James Gates Percival, Richard Henry Dana and the inventor Samuel Morse, and started going to the theatre. Her timing was fortunate, for one of the leading Shakespeare actors of the day, Ellen Tree, had recently begun performing in New York. Fresh from her successes as Beatrice, Rosalind and Romeo (to Fanny Kemble’s Juliet) on the London stage, Tree was appearing at the Park Theatre in lower Manhattan. Bacon met Tree in the winter of 1837 and convinced her to play the leading role in a tragedy she was writing – a theatrical remake of her prize-winning story ‘Love’s Martyr’, renamed The Bride of Fort Edward. It promised to be a path-breaking collaboration; like Bacon, Ellen Tree was unmarried and not dependent on any man for support, and, like Bacon, she managed to maintain a reputation as one who was ‘impeccably pure and decorous’, not all that easy at the time for women connected with the theatre. When Tree left New York for a three-month Southern tour to which she had committed, Bacon settled down to finish her play.

  Bacon was convinced that there was money to be made as a playwright; she had heard that another aspiring dramatist had recently won a $1,000 prize for a new play and Ellen Tree was already amassing a small fortune from her three-year American tour. Yet the possibility of wealth and fame as a playwright was not easily reconciled with Bacon’s puritanism and her uneasiness about working in the theatre. ‘I should be sorry’, she wrote to Leonard at the time, ‘to do anything unbecoming a lady or a Christian, even for the sake of a thousand pounds.’ Bacon also felt compelled to rationalise her work-in-progress to her brother, if not to herself, on moral grounds: ‘If the play has any effect at all, it will be an elevating one,’ since theatre was ‘a form better fitted to strike the common mind’ than other kinds of writing. She added, a little desperately, that ‘If I can get it introduced into so bad a place as the [Park] Theatre I should count it as great a triumph as if they should tear down the green room and the stage and put up a pulpit and send for you to preach to them.’

  In writing a political play about ‘a well-known crisis in our national history’, Bacon was breaking new ground as an American woman playwright, for her few antebellum predecessors had devoted themselves to comedy and melodrama. Her debt to Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories is hard to miss: there’s the mix of conversational prose and blank verse as well as the juxtaposition of tragic and comic scenes (including low-life American troops whose banter recalls that of Falstaff ’s companions). Her main character is modelled on Shakespeare’s heroines, which may account for Ellen Tree’s interest in the part: she’s a composite of Juliet (marrying her household’s enemy and dying right after her bridal day), Desdemona (in her intimate scene with a servant before her death as well as in her brief revival before she finally dies) and Ophelia (especially after her death, when her brother and her lover, like Laertes and Hamlet, compete over who can grieve more for her). Politically, the plot reads like an Americanised version of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, in which the death of the heroine leads to the creation of the Republic (just as, in Shakespeare’s poem, the sight of the dead Lucrece leads the Romans to repudiate monarchy). While keenly aware of her English literary roots – not many works about the Revolutionary War mention in passing both Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser – Bacon also saw herself as part of a new generation of American writers; even as colonial militia would vanquish the British, so, too, one day, would American authors.

  When Ellen Tree left New York to tour in February 1837, most of The Bride of Fort Edward was already drafted, and Bacon planned to submit the finished script to Edward Simpson (the formidable manager of the Park Theatre) in April. Then things unravelled. Bacon started getting headaches. She then decided that she’d need the summer to finish the play. After that, she became discouraged when a friend who read the script didn’t think it would succeed onstage. In the end, it seems pretty clear, she couldn’t reconcile her puritanism with her literary ambitions – so she put what she had written in a drawer. A year later, she retrieved it and sent a finished draft to her brother Leonard. By then, Ellen Tree had moved on. Leonard sat on the script for six months, then criticised it harshly.

  Hoping to salvage what she could, determined not to seek Leonard’s advice again, and resolved that plays were meant to be read and not seen, she touched up the script and published it anonymously in 1839. Bacon added a defensive preface to make clear that what she had written was ‘A dialogue … not a play’ – and ‘not intended for the stage’. This wasn’t entirely accurate, no
r was the distinction Bacon drew between Drama (which captured the ‘repose, the thought, and sentiment of actual life’) and Theatre (whose capacity to instruct was undermined by ‘hurried action, the crowded plot, the theatrical elevation which the Stage necessarily demands’). Bacon turned her back on the stage – including Shakespeare’s plays in performance. One of her students later recalled that ‘Miss Bacon not unfrequently spoke of having seen Shakespeare in theatrical representation’, but she ‘always spoke of her experience in theatre-going as a disappointment, and said that she did not care to go again’.

  Despite her misgivings, Delia Bacon’s first and only play had stage potential; with Ellen Tree in the lead and some skilled pruning it would have commanded attention. The published version was positively reviewed in the Saturday Courier, and, as it happened, Edgar Allan Poe wrote about it as well, noting that the anonymous author’s ‘imagination [is] of no common order’ and calling the play’s ‘design … excellent’. The published ‘Dialogue’ was a commercial failure – only 692 of fifteen hundred copies sold.