Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  Defeated, Bacon returned to New Haven and resumed teaching and lecturing, knowing that she wasn’t cut out to be a novelist or a playwright and that she would have to find a different outlet for her intellectual gifts and driving ambition. In the spring of 1845, her winter classes over, Bacon withdrew from society, moved into New Haven’s Tontine Hotel and buried herself in her books, on the verge, she was sure, of a revelation about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. Six months later Bacon had at last mapped out her findings, though more likely in her mind than on paper. She shared the news with Leonard, who recorded in October 1845 that Delia ‘has about concluded to publish her new theory of Shakespeare in one or more volumes, to find a place in Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Authors’. In fact, over a decade would pass before she published a word of her theory – first in an anonymous article in Putnam’s Magazine in 1856, and then, a year later, in a strange and rambling book, published simultaneously in England and America, which told a somewhat different story, or at least a different part of the story. Bacon died two years later, following a descent into insanity.

  Since Delia Bacon, more than anyone before or after, was responsible for triggering what would come to be known as the Shakespeare authorship controversy, it’s helpful to know what drew her to it, how her views changed over time, and what was ultimately at stake for her. Unfortunately, little evidence that might illuminate any of this survives – no manuscript drafts, no diary or journal, not even a record of what books or editions she consulted. Her family disapproved of this project (and blamed her drift into insanity on it), and may have destroyed what evidence once existed. It’s no small irony that anyone investigating the development of Delia Bacon’s ideas confronts much the same problems as Shakespeare’s biographers. In her case, too, critics have been quick to reach conclusions about the work based on anecdotal evidence drawn from the life.

  Delia Bacon saw herself living in an age of discoveries, and not just scientific ones. She could see in Biblical and Homeric textual scholarship the extent to which questions of authorship were overturning centuries of conventional wisdom. Perhaps Shakespeare’s works deserved a closer look too. Yet at the time there were no departments of English literature, let alone Shakespeare professors, to do so, at either American or British universities. This was her opening, for very few Americans could rival her knowledge of Shakespeare’s works. She was familiar with the major criticism, had spent years reading and teaching the plays and had the kind of intimate knowledge of them that could only be acquired from emulating Shakespeare in one’s own plays and stories.

  The young women under her tutelage in New Haven received a rich grounding in Shakespeare denied their brothers enrolled across town at Yale. Bacon led her charges through repeated close readings of such plays as Hamlet and Julius Caesar, devoting a good deal of attention to questions of character and searching relentlessly for each play’s deeper philosophical meaning – a by-product, no doubt, of her longstanding view that writers hid a deeper ‘truth’ under fictional ‘drapery’. One of her students recalled how Bacon

  seemed to saturate herself with the play, as it were; to live in it, to call into imaginative consciousness the loves, hopes, fears, ambition, disappointment, and despair of the characters, and under this intense realization to divine, as it were, the meaning of the play – ‘its unity’ as she said – its motif.

  Bacon showed them how to discover ‘intimations in obscure passages, in unimportant utterances, apparently void of significance’, and taught them that there ‘“is nothing superfluous … in any of these plays, the greatest product of the human mind; nothing which could have been dispensed with. Every character is necessary; every word is full of meaning.”’

  While her search for the plays’ hidden meaning was unusual for the time, Bacon’s approach to Shakespearean drama was otherwise typical of the age. She had a hard time believing that these nobly philosophical works were written with popular performance and commercial potential in mind. And thanks to the influence of contemporary biographies of Shakespeare, she found the gap between the facts of his life and his remarkable literary output inexplicable.

  The framework within which she imagined the world of the English Renaissance, also typical of her day, was limited to monarchs, courtiers and writers. The rest were written off as ignorant masses (‘masses … still unlettered, callous with wrongs, manacled with blind traditions, or swaying hither and thither, with the breath of a common prejudice’). It was history from the top down and limited geographically to London and the court. Her Shakespeare canon was no less restricted and also typical of nineteenth-century readers: at the centre of it were Hamlet and The Tempest, and it extended to the plays meatiest in philosophical and political content – Othello, Julius Caesar, Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Richard the Second, and, unusually, Coriolanus – but not much further. While she had surely read the other thirty or so plays, as well as the poetry, they didn’t serve her purpose, and for the most part she passed over them in silence.

  Nobody before Delia Bacon who had doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship had been willing to take the crucial next step and explain, in print, the reasons that the plays should be reattributed to an alternative candidate. Rather than ransack the archives for proof she sought it in the plays themselves, and concluded that the evidence had been there all along. Others had just not read the plays with sufficient attention to obscure and seemingly irrelevant passages. It was no great leap for her to assume that Francis Bacon was somehow behind the plays (and it’s not, as many have assumed, because she believed herself to be distantly related).

  Francis Bacon was widely celebrated as one of the great men of the Renaissance, the father of modern scientific method, a worldly courtier, a talented writer, a learned jurist and a brilliant philosopher. Born in 1561, he studied at Cambridge and at the Inns of Court, and travelled on the Continent. His long career as a writer and public servant began in the 1580s, and in 1594 Queen Elizabeth appointed Bacon as one of her learned counsel. His literary range was exceptional and included parliamentary speeches, Christmas entertainment, political reports, translations of the Psalms, letters of advice, political tracts, a History of King Henry the Seventh, as well as his famous Essays and his great philosophical works: The Advancement of Learning, the utopian New Atlantis, Instauratio Magna and Novum Organum. About the only thing Bacon didn’t try his hand at were plays or narrative poems. He remained deeply involved in politics throughout his life, and, after much jockeying, finally attained the positions of Attorney General and Lord Chancellor under King James, before falling out of favour in 1621 on dubious charges of corruption. He was briefly committed to the Tower of London. After his release, Bacon chose, as he put it, ‘to retire from the stage of civil action and betake myself to letters’. He died in 1626. Bacon was unquestionably one of the great minds of his age. For the next two centuries his reputation was secure and the French philosophes did much to promote Bacon as a philosopher dedicated to social reform, his works implicitly an ‘attack on the systems and dogmas of traditional institutions’. It is this legacy that most powerfully informs Delia Bacon’s conception of him.

  While Francis Bacon’s stock has declined precipitously in the last hundred years or so, he was still revered in early nineteenth-century Britain and America, his reputation peaking at just the moment that Delia Bacon turned to the authorship question. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s audiences in the 1830s would have taken for granted his claim that Francis Bacon, not ‘less than Shakespeare, though in a different way … may claim the praise of universality’. Emerson also spoke for many at the time when he said that ‘no man reads the works of Bacon without imbibing an affectionate veneration for their author … We come to regard him as an Archangel to whom the high office was committed of opening the doors and palaces of knowledge to many generations.’

  Emerson’s hyperbolic praise was comparatively tame in its day. Francis Bacon’s works, William Wirt writes in 1803, were ‘filled with pure a
nd solid golden bullion’ and ‘redeemed the world from all … darkness, jargon, perplexity and error’. For John Playfair in 1820, Bacon ‘has no rival in the times which are past, so is he likely to have none in those which are to come’. Francis Bacon proved equally popular among those eager to resolve the growing tensions between science and religion: Bacon College was founded by the Disciples of Christ in Kentucky in 1836, and a contributor to a religious magazine would claim, in all seriousness, that Baconian philosophy was ‘ultimately responsible’ for ‘the sacredness of the marriage tie, the purity of private life, the sincerity of friendship, charity toward the poor, and general love of mankind’. Not to be outdone, the American Agriculturalist hailed Francis Bacon as ‘the patron of progress in American farming’.

  By the time she had begun to question Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays, Delia Bacon was familiar with Francis Bacon’s writings, had been reading and taking notes in Leonard’s copy of his works and had befriended one of the leading American advocates of Bacon, Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale. Her interest had also been piqued by her conversations with her old friend from New York, Samuel Morse. Morse, who was experimenting with codes for encrypting messages for the telegraph he had recently invented, told her about Francis Bacon’s creation of a secret cipher, something she hadn’t known about and which would contribute to her thinking about Bacon’s masked authorship of Shakespeare’s works.

  The pieces started falling into place. Resolving two longstanding literary mysteries at once, she could now explain why the fourth part of Francis Bacon’s magnum opus, Instauratio Magna, was incomplete, the promised sections on ‘the New Philosophy’ unpublished and presumed lost. Her close reading of Shakespeare’s plays revealed that Francis Bacon’s missing work had in fact survived under a different name, as the greatest dramatic works of the Elizabethan era. It made far better sense to accept the likelihood that one mind was behind both great bodies of work than to concede the odds-defying possibility that two geniuses, among the greatest ever, had lived at the exact same time and place and produced work that had so much in common philosophically. The challenge she set herself was to figure out why Francis Bacon (and, as her theory developed, others in his extended intellectual circle) had resorted to writing under such a guise.

  *

  Delia Bacon could not have foreseen it, but a break with her religious upbringing and Puritan roots was in the offing, one that would profoundly shape her authorship project and delay its publication for many years. But it also enabled her project by fraying the ties that tightly bound her to her family, church and nation. It was the most humiliating thing that ever happened to her and it changed her, making her deeply suspicious of others and more desperate than ever to achieve renown. Her theory can’t be easily untangled from this crisis, though questions of cause and effect – as in the case of her later insanity – are impossible to resolve. The following, based on a surprising amount of documentary evidence, remains speculative – as must all claims about the ways in which life experiences shape a writer’s work – even that of a modern writer like Delia Bacon.

  One of the few people in whom she confided during the months in which she was first working out her Shakespeare theory was a fellow lodger at New Haven’s Tontine Hotel, Alexander MacWhorter, a recent theology graduate of Yale. The two spent more and more time together, which soon raised eyebrows, not only because it pressed the bounds of what upstanding unmarried men and women might be seen doing together, but also because of the difference in their ages: she was thirty-four, he twenty-three. Both believed themselves to be on the verge of great discoveries (MacWhorter was engaged in Biblical textual scholarship and was convinced that he had found that the Hebrew Bible’s use of the tetragrammaton ‘Yahveh’ anticipated and signified the Coming of Christ). For a year or so, the two were inseparable. Delia Bacon’s family and friends began to worry, as no engagement had been announced.

  None would be. People began to gossip. When Leonard encountered MacWhorter in New Haven and demanded to know whether his intentions toward his sister were honourable, MacWhorter replied that he had no idea what Leonard was talking about. Furious, Leonard told his sister never to write to MacWhorter again, and made her, Ophelia-like, return his love tokens. She asked for hers in return, and MacWhorter, who had been much more guarded than Bacon in writing about what he professed to feel, refused to return her love letters and began reading choice bits from them aloud to amused friends. There was no question that she had agreed to marry him; but had he actually proposed? Outsiders were left to wonder whose account of the affair was true. It was beginning to resemble one of those Shakespearean problem comedies, where everything turned on the grammatical fault lines of marital promises.

  The gossip and insinuations became intolerable; not just Delia Bacon’s reputation was threatened, but her family’s as well. Leonard, outraged, had MacWhorter brought up on charges of ‘calumny, falsehood, and disgraceful conduct, as a man, a Christian, and especially as a candidate for the Christian ministry’. In the summer of 1847 an ecclesiastical trial of MacWhorter was held. The trial, in which Delia Bacon had to testify, went on for weeks; then, in a 12–11 decision, the ministers ruled in favour of MacWhorter, reprimanding him only for his imprudence. The Bacons continued their appeals through the spring of 1848, to no avail. It left a deep rift among New Haven’s Congregationalists and was unbearably humiliating for Delia Bacon, whose faith in her church was badly shaken.

  The scandal went national. Catherine Beecher recalled that she was asked about it everywhere she went – ‘Not only through New England and the eastern cities, but in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa the same topic constantly recurred as a matter of curious inquiry or accidental remark. There was no escape from it.’ Outraged by the verdict and hoping to right the wrong, Beecher decided to retell the story in a book – Truth Stranger than Fiction – but her intentions backfired. Delia Bacon had begged her not to publish it, to no avail, and after it appeared in 1850 there were few who hadn’t read or heard the story, in mortifying detail.

  Bacon moved to Boston, conducted her Shakespeare research in libraries there, started a new co-educational lecture series, and quickly acquired a following of some of the most influential women in Boston and Cambridge, including Caroline Healey Dall, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Eliza Farrar. But Boston wasn’t far enough away and her latest research efforts, while confirming her suspicions about the true authorship of the plays, convinced her that further proofs could only be found in England. While she spoke to friends about lecturing overseas, they quickly saw through the pretence. Eliza Farrar believed that Bacon

  had no notion of going to England to teach history; all she wanted to go for was to obtain proof of her theory, that Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him, but that Lord Bacon did. This was sufficient to prevent my ever again encouraging her going to England, or talking with her about Shakespeare.

  Elizabeth Peabody lent a more sympathetic ear. Bacon eagerly discussed with her the life and works of Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and Walter Ralegh. But Bacon soon became anxious to the point of paranoia about how much Peabody knew about her as-yet-unpublished theory and asked her to swear that she ‘would never anticipate her, by even suggesting the discovery, but allow to her the whole glory of this remarkable piece of historical criticism which really belonged to her’. When even that promise failed to placate Bacon, Peabody backed off completely: ‘In order not to worry her,’ she later wrote, ‘I gave the whole thing up and promised her I would – as far as in me lay – not think of it until after she had given it to the public.’

  To her credit, Peabody ‘was never in the least offended by her jealousy’ and saw ‘this morbid sensitiveness’ as an understandable reaction to Bacon’s ‘cruel experience’ at MacWhorter’s hands. Caroline Healey Dall also thought that Delia had never recovered from the crisis of faith, personal and religious, precipitated by the MacWhorter affair: ‘a terrible personal
experience warped her mind soon after she entered upon her historical studies’, and the ‘warp was shown when a nature essentially of the noblest turned mean and suspicious’. Yet Dall, who later wrote a book in defence of Shakespeare’s authorship, couldn’t understand why Bacon was so secretive about ‘a theory she nonetheless talked of incessantly’: having ‘perfected her theory’, Bacon ‘never communicated it fully to any one; she seemed to fear that her laurels would be stolen if she did’. Bacon had begun trying out parts of her new theory in her lectures and with acquaintances – with decidedly mixed results. Eliza Farrar recalled that Sarah Becker, in whose house Bacon was lodging, put her copy of Shakespeare’s works ‘out of sight, and never allowed her to converse with her on this, her favorite subject. We considered it dangerous for Miss Bacon to dwell on this fancy, and thought that, if indulged, it might become a monomania, which it subsequently did.’

  Delia Bacon was now set on showing the world the difference between surface and deeper meaning. It’s a distinction she knew all too well. She had been wrong, after all, about MacWhorter, mistaking his surface expressions for deeper intentions; and in the ensuing scandal she had been profoundly disappointed in her church, which had relied on the surface meaning of the words the two had exchanged in reaching a verdict. It was her mission now, to reveal how everyone had been mistaken, had misread the greatest of literary works – had not recognised, as she had, how they were the product of failure and frustration. The pursuit of the authorship question, for Delia Bacon, was both a product of, and illuminated by, personal and religious crisis. But she had not yet abandoned her belief in the workings of Providence, though she remained uncertain whether this would help or hinder her life’s work, telling a supporter that ‘she feels sure that she has a great object to accomplish, and that Providence is specially busy, not only in what promotes her progress, but in what seems to impede it’.