The Shakespeare Problem Resolved
A radical theory was emerging from Delia Bacon’s reflections on the plays, more far-reaching than simply a matter of authorship. But because she never seems to have arrived at a final, definitive account and never managed to fit all the parts together seamlessly, the best that can be reconstructed is a version drawn primarily from details offered in the opening and closing pages of her book, which, in focusing on extended close readings of three plays (Julius Caesar, Lear and Coriolanus) offered what she believed to be decisive internal evidence, amounting to proof, of her theory.
Delia Bacon saw the plays long attributed to Shakespeare as the product of failure. These great works of literature, she writes, were the collective effort of a ‘little clique of disappointed and defeated politicians who undertook to head and organize a popular opposition against the government, and were compelled to retreat from that enterprise’. It was a story of tactical defeat and withdrawal: ‘Driven from one field, they showed themselves in another. Driven from the open field, they fought in secret.’ Having failed in the political realm, these men turned to drama to effect change, if not in the present, then at least in the future. She cast them as romantic heroes, gathered around a ‘new Round Table’, like King Arthur and his knights of yore. At the centre of this cohort was Francis Bacon. Aligned with him were Walter Ralegh, perhaps Edmund Spenser, Lord Buckhurst and the Earl of Oxford, and maybe others as well – it’s hard to know for sure, because she was maddeningly vague on who was involved and her account of membership in the group kept changing. Sometimes it seemed that Francis Bacon was primarily responsible; at other times, the enterprise appeared much more collaborative. Such details seem almost a nuisance for her, distracting from the larger and more compelling story of how a handful of remarkable and frustrated men, led by Bacon, began collaborating, through great drama, to oppose the ‘despotism’ of Queen Elizabeth and King James.
Reminding us that both Francis Bacon and Walter Ralegh were cast aside and imprisoned by their monarchs, she then exaggerates the brutality of the Tudor and Stuart regimes in order to explain away what would otherwise be seen as cowardice in her heroes: ‘Does not all the world know that scholars, men of reverence, men of world-wide renown, men of every accomplishment, were tortured, and mutilated, and hung, and beheaded, in both these two reigns, for writing wherein Caesar’s ambition was infinitely more obscurely hinted at – writings unspeakably less offensive to majesty’ than a play like Julius Caesar? So these ‘disappointed and defeated’ visionaries were forced to turn from direct political intervention to subversive and pseudonymous writing. They also felt it ‘necessary’ to ‘conceal their lives as well as their works’, to ‘veil’ their ‘true worth and nobility’ and to ‘play this great game in secret’. And, in a passage that feels uncomfortably autobiographical, she imagines that in ‘one way or another, directly or indirectly, they were determined to make their influence felt in that age, in spite of the want of encouragement which the conditions of that time offered to such an enterprise’.
They found in playwriting a perfect form, because at the time plays were staged both at court and in the public theatres, then published, which enabled them to speak to rulers and ruled as well as to posterity: they ‘wanted some organ of communication with these so potent and resistless rulers – some “chair” from which they could repeat to them in their own tongue the story of their lost institutions, and revive in them the memory of the kings their ancestors’. The closet-dramatist-turned-lecturer Delia Bacon (who, as one observer noted, relied in her lectures on ‘maps, charts, models, pictures, and everything she needed to illustrate her subject’) can’t seem to help recreating this coterie in her own pedagogical image: ‘They wanted a school in which they could tell them stories … they wanted a school in which they could teach the common people History (and not English history only), with illustrations, large as life, and a magic lantern to aid them, – “visible history”.’
There could be no mistaking their radical political agenda: these men were committed republicans whose plays were vindications against tyranny by another name, works ‘produced for the ostensible purpose of illustrating and adorning the tyrannies which the men, under whose countenance and protection they are produced, were vainly attempting, or had vainly attempted to set bounds to or overthrow’. The only time that their work was actually put to the test was when the Earl of Essex’s followers asked for their play Richard the Second to be performed on the eve of their revolt in 1601, but this uprising proved a failure. Had that revolutionary effort – inspired by this radical literary enterprise – succeeded, imagine how profoundly the course of Anglo-American history would have been altered: the end of tyrannical monarchy in England would have precluded an English revolution in the 1640s and made that fracture of 1776 that sundered the American colonies from England unnecessary. They had come that close.
Delia Bacon’s claim that the plays were politically radical was a century and a half ahead of its time. So, too, was her insistence that some of the plays should be read as collaborative. Had she limited her argument to these points instead of conjoining it to an argument about how Shakespeare couldn’t have written them, there is little doubt that, instead of being dismissed as a crank and a madwoman, she would be hailed today as the precursor of the New Historicists, and the first to argue that the plays anticipated the political upheavals England experienced in the mid-seventeenth century. But Delia Bacon couldn’t stop at that point. Nor could she concede that the republican ideas she located in the plays circulated widely at the time and were as available to William Shakespeare as they were to Walter Ralegh or Francis Bacon. Offering a new reading of Shakespeare’s plays might bring praise but not the fame she clearly craved. The reign of Shakespeare had to be brought to an end.
In making this argument Delia Bacon had an even more revolutionary agenda: overturning the myths of America’s founding fathers. Here, for example, is what her brother Leonard, a major proponent of these Puritan traditions, was espousing at the time:
The settlement of New England took place at a time when great changes were obviously impending over the parent country … A party had arisen in England, to whom liberty, an ample and well fortified liberty, was indispensable, and of whom some were blindly yearning after, and others were intelligently devising and manfully endeavoring, a large and sweeping reform in the structure of society. But where and how should that reform be realized? Some – the boldest, the most large-hearted, the most enterprising and unflinching of their party – the master spirits of that age, turned their eyes to New England, and after long deliberation, they determined on leaving behind them all the antiquated institutions of the old world, the accumulation of ages of darkness and of tyranny … and they hoped to realize under this western sky, the prophet’s vision of ‘new heavens and a new earth,’ in which dwelleth righteousness.
Delia Bacon’s theory called all this into question, for if the ‘party’ of Elizabethan courtiers and aristocrats – the true ‘master spirits of that age’ led by Francis Bacon – were the proto-republicans she made them out to be, it was they (and not the Puritans who sailed for Plymouth Rock and helped to found the American colonies) who were the original source of the anti-monarchical and anti-tyrannical platform on which America was founded. It was also, then, not Congregationalist preachers like her father and brother (or those who had sided with MacWhorter) who had paved the way, but creative writers like herself, with a deeply pedagogical bent. And who was better placed – as an American, a Congregationalist with Puritan ancestry, a writer and public lecturer – to see it? Her authorship theory was at once heretical and unpatriotic.
It was no wonder she had such difficulty putting these ideas on paper, let alone committing them to print. The great discovery both exhilarated and unnerved her. The best glimpse we have of its psychic toll comes from her conversations with Nathaniel Hawthorne. When they spoke, Hawthorne noted in his journal, Bacon ‘was very communi
cative about her theory, and would have been more so had I desired it; but I thought it best to repress, rather than draw her out. Unquestionably, she is a monomaniac; this great idea has completely thrown her off her balance.’ But Hawthorne, formed by the same New England culture, soon recognised that what had thrown her was not the obsession itself, but how it had overturned everything that Delia Bacon had once believed in: ‘From her own account, it appears she did at one time lose her reason; it was on finding that the philosophy, which she found under the surface of the plays, was running counter to the religious doctrines in which she had been educated.’ Hawthorne, who knew exactly how far her work departed from the evangelical Puritan narrative in which she was raised, didn’t know quite what to make of someone advocating a theory so ‘at variance with her pre-conceived opinions, whether ethical, religious, or political’.
Delia Bacon’s last great obstacle was finding patrons and publishers who might help secure funds for her English research and the publication of her discovery. Brilliant and charismatic in person, she persuaded Charles Butler (a lawyer and banker who had helped found the New York University Law School and the Union Theological Seminary) to cover the cost of her English research. And Elizabeth Peabody, well connected and eager to help, got in touch with Ralph Waldo Emerson on Delia Bacon’s behalf and arranged for Bacon to send him a letter and a prospectus. These friendships, late in Bacon’s life, confirm how impressive some of the greatest literary minds of the day on both sides of the Atlantic found her. But it wasn’t just her intelligence that attracted them: they also saw the extent to which her work was in the radical tradition of the Higher Criticism, to which they were sympathetic.
Emerson, who had just published what remains one of the most influential American essays on Shakespeare in his Representative Men, responded graciously, if guardedly, to her claim that the author of Shakespeare’s plays was really Francis Bacon: ‘You will have need of enchanted instruments, nay alchemy itself,’ he replied, ‘to melt into one identity these two reputations.’ As for the clincher to the argument (the Baconian cipher she spoke of but refused to share): ‘If the cipher approve itself so real and consonant to you, it will to all, and is not only material but indispensable.’ In many ways, Emerson was, for Delia Bacon, the ideal reader, and not simply because he considered Francis Bacon, no less than Shakespeare, a universal genius, or because he understood that implicit in her argument was that Americans, whose culture was so shaped by republican values, were likely to be better readers of Shakespeare than Englishmen. Emerson also felt that this ‘best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement’. And he thought that Shakespeare’s proximity to men like Bacon, Ralegh, Essex, Drake and Spenser shaped the plays (‘It was impossible’, Emerson wrote, ‘that such an observer as Shakespeare could walk in the same city from year to year with this renowned group without gathering some fruit from their accomplishments and learning’).
Over the course of many years of lecturing and reflecting on Shakespeare, Emerson had read nearly every important work of scholarship about him. Yet all that had done was reinforce for him, as it did for so many others, an insuperable divide between what he knew of the man and the works. There simply was no adequate explanation: Shakespeare ‘was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man in wide contrast.’ Emerson was left to conclude that despite all the research into his life, ‘our poet’s mask was impenetrable’. Delia Bacon’s theory promised to lift that mask, explain the seeming contradiction between transcendent poet and ‘jovial actor and manager’, show exactly how life and thought dovetailed. Emerson, while reconciled to the seeming paradox that was Shakespeare, was nonetheless willing to entertain a theory that helped resolve it. But he demanded evidence, the kinds of documentary proof (what Delia Bacon dismissively called ‘direct historical testimony’) that her account annoyingly failed to provide. Bacon, for her part, kept Emerson’s interest in her work alive by reporting new and corroborative finds, alluding to the mysterious cipher and arguing that decisive evidence was only to be had in England.
Emerson remained sufficiently intrigued to bear with these evasions. He even visited her in Cambridge, recognising how much was at stake in her work: ‘Her discovery, if it really be one, is of the first import not only in English, but in all literature.’ Emerson later grew sceptical of the existence of that magical cipher – ‘a certain key or method, which she professed to have found’. But he rightly judged the force and originality of her insights into the plays, and in a compliment that meant the world to Delia Bacon, wrote that ‘I have seen nothing in America in the way of literary criticism, which I thought so good’. He volunteered to serve as her literary agent and provided her with letters of introduction to leading British scholars, including Thomas Carlyle, James Spedding (the leading Bacon scholar of the day) and Sir Henry Ellis, head librarian at the British Museum. She sailed for England on 14 May 1853.
Delia Bacon never found corroborative evidence for her theory there, nor did she use the letters of introduction that would have given her access to the British Museum or other archives. She did meet with Thomas Carlyle, who shrieked, she wrote to her sister Julia, when first hearing her theory of authorship: ‘I wish you could have heard him laugh. Once or twice I thought he would have taken the roof of the house off. At first they were perfectly stunned’ and
they looked at me with staring eyes, speechless for want of words in which to convey my sense of audacity. At length Mr Carlyle came down on me with such a volley. I did not mind in the least. I told him that he did not know what was in the plays if he said that, and no one could know who believed that that booby wrote them. It was then that he began to shriek. You could have heard him a mile. I told him too that I should not think of questioning his authority in such a case if it were not with me a matter of knowledge. I did not advance it as an opinion.
Bacon left a copy of her ‘introductory statement’ with Carlyle, who with her permission began showing her paper around to those in the literary and publishing worlds.
It’s clear from Carlyle’s correspondence that, much like Emerson, he was fascinated by Delia Bacon’s effort to show that the life of Shakespeare was (in Strauss’s sense of the word) as mythic as the life of Jesus. He wrote to his brother of the visit of the
[…] Yankee Lady, sent by Emerson, who has discovered that the ‘Man Shakespear’ is a Myth, and did not write those plays that bear his name, which were on the contrary written by a ‘Secret Associate’ (names unknown): she has actually come to England for the purposes of examining that, and if possible, proving it … Ach Gott!
Others were subsequently drawn to the same impulse in the Baconian movement, including Walt Whitman, who would write:
We all know how much mythus there is in the Shakespeare question as it stands to-day. Beneath a few foundations of proved facts are certainly engulfed far more dim and elusive ones, of deepest importance – tantalizing and half suspected – suggesting explanations that one dare not put in plain statement.
Because of Bacon’s lack of evidence, Carlyle remained highly sceptical, though he strongly encouraged her to consult manuscripts in the British Library, where ‘if you can find in that mass of English records … any document tending to confirm your Shakespeare theory, it will be worth all the reasoning in the world’. She decamped instead to St Albans, ‘the great Bacon’s place’, where, Carlyle reported to Emerson, ‘Miss Bacon’ is ‘working out her Shakespeare Problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of all evidence from museums or archives’. Neither man would have been amused to learn that while at St Albans she tried and failed to persuade the caretaker to open Francis Bacon’s tomb so that she could unearth the manuscripts hidden there that confirmed her theory.
Delia Bacon was torn between publishing proofs drawn from internal evidence (her close readings o
f the plays) and offering historical evidence (to substantiate her story of the great collaboration). She never seemed to consider combining the two, and rebuffed repeated suggestions to address counter-evidence in favour of Shakespeare’s authorship. When Emerson, for example, asked her about Ben Jonson’s explicit praise of his fellow dramatist, she brushed him off: ‘I know all about Ben Jonson. He had two patrons besides “Shakespeare.” One was Ralegh, the other was Bacon.’ The conspiracy was so transparent it didn’t merit an explanation. She also couldn’t decide whether to publish first in America or in England, or in serialised form or as a finished book. The indecision cost her some excellent opportunities that Emerson had secured. She also didn’t understand the book world and considered it outrageous that publishers should make so much profit from her discovery. Her big break finally came in late 1855 when the publishers Dix and Edwards, at Emerson’s urging, agreed to the serialising of the work in Putnam’s Monthly – a leading American periodical that published Longfellow, Lowell and Melville – before bringing it out as a book.
She chose, again, to publish anonymously. Her essay’s title was understated: ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays; An Enquiry Concerning Them’. The opening cleverly situates the Shakespeare question squarely in the tradition of the authorship challenges to the great works of the past, Homeric and Biblical: ‘How can we undertake to account for the literary miracles of antiquity, while this great myth of the modern ages still lies at our door, unquestioned?’ We were wrong about these inspired works, why not about Shakespeare’s as well? Bacon places blame squarely on those deifying high priests, ‘the critics’ who ‘still veil their faces, filling the air with mystic utterances which seem to say, that to this shrine at least, for the footstep of the common reason and the common sense, there is yet no admittance’. She reminds readers that classical scholarship has come a long way, as critics now ‘take … to pieces before our eyes this venerable Homer; and tell us how many old forgotten poets’ ashes went to his formation’.
Contested Will Page 12
