Contested Will (16 page)

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

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

Others were subsequently drawn to the same impulse in the Baconian movement, including Walt Whitman, who would write:

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 of 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'.

The shift from Homer to Shakespeare is deftly handled, and it takes a minute before readers are sure that she is talking about
Hamlet
and
Lear
, not the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
: ‘The popular and traditional theory of the origin of these works was received and transmitted after the extraordinary circumstances which led to its
first imposition had ceased to exist, because in fact, no one had any motive for taking the trouble to call it in question.' What then of Shakespeare? ‘Two hundred and fifty years ago,
our
poet – our Homer – was alive in the world,' yet as far as his works are concerned, ‘to this hour, we know of their origin hardly so much as we knew of the Homeric epics'. How much longer, she wonders, in ‘a period of historical inquiry and criticism like this', shall ‘we be able to accept … the story of the Stratford poacher?'

Throughout, her essay is suffused with the language of the debates over the Higher Criticism and the life of Jesus – though strangely, this feature of her argument has passed almost without notice by critics. It begins to feel like Shakespeare becomes a surrogate for her doubts about her own faith: ‘If you dissolve him do you not dissolve with him? If you take him to pieces, do you not undo us also?' Despite surface similarities there remained a significant difference between the Higher Critics and Bacon: they were willing to do the close philological work that showed how Homer's epics and Scripture were the products of different hands and different historical moments. But Bacon wanted to reach a similar conclusion without doing the painstaking philological analysis at the heart of this critical endeavour. She was content to insist, rather than demonstrate, that Shakespeare was as much a myth as Homer or Jesus. When that didn't suffice, she turned to invective.

Anyone still in Shakespeare's corner, she argued, would have to defend a ‘pet horse-boy at Blackfriars', an ‘old tradesman', an ‘old showman and hawker of plays', and an all-round ‘stupid, illiterate, third-rate play-actor'. It's bad enough that he couldn't read and was little more than a money-hungry actor; what really disqualifies him is his utter lack of ‘the highest Elizabethan breeding, the very loftiest tone of that peculiar court culture'. Authorship could be determined through a process of elimination: whoever wrote the plays had to have had an ‘acquaintance with life, practical knowledge of affairs, foreign travel and accomplishments, and above all, the last refinements, of the highest Parisian breeding'.
The real author ‘carries the court perfume with him, unconsciously, wherever he goes' and ‘looks into Arden and into Eastcheap from the court stand-point, not from these into the court'. Others would fine-tune this taxonomy, but Delia Bacon was the first to propose it: pure motives, good breeding, foreign travel, the best of educations and the scent of the court were necessary criteria for an author of works of ‘superhuman genius'. The biographical record confirms that Shakespeare of Stratford fell well short of all these benchmarks. It defied ‘common sense' and was ‘too gross to be endured' to persist in the false belief that such a sad excuse for a man could have written the plays.

Bacon is relentless, cross-examining the hapless Shakespeare, as she herself had once been cross-examined, and thereby establishing a now venerable tradition of putting Shakespeare on trial for a host of offences so deeply appealing to the judges and lawyers who have swollen the ranks of the sceptics, beginning with Shakespeare's refusal to preserve his manuscripts. Turning to us, as jurors, she asks: ‘He had those manuscripts … What did he do with them? He gave them to his cook' or perhaps ‘poor Judith may have curled her hair to the day of her death with them'. She then turns on Shakespeare himself and demands: ‘You will have to tell us what you did with 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?”' His silence tells us all we need to know. The paltry claim that might be offered in his defence – that he wrote for the stage, not for posterity – is handily dismissed: ‘Who is it that writes, unconsciously, no doubt, and without it ever occurring to him that it was going to be printed, or to be read by any one?' Yet this is the man, she reminds us, whose ‘bones are canonized', whose ‘tomb is a shrine'.

By the time her relentless assault on Shakespeare's character ends, there's only room left for a paragraph or two to limn the real man, or men, behind the mask. Yet Bacon pulls up short at the very moment we expect to learn who in fact wrote the plays. The most she is willing to offer is some vague hints about the actual,
unnamed authors having been men ‘exercised in the control and administration of public affairs, men clothed even with imperial sway': ‘men who knew what kind of crisis in human history that was which they were born to occupy', and who had to work under ‘the censorship of a capricious and timorous despotism', so repressive that anyone speaking one's mind ran the risk of ‘cruel maimings and tortures old and new, life-long imprisonment, and death itself'. These were also men who stooped to conquer, who knew that ‘in the master's hand' the ‘degraded playhouse' might ‘yet be made to yield, even then, and under those conditions, better music than any which those old Greek sons of song had known how to wake in it'. All of this makes sense in light of what she argues in her book; but the book was not yet published and I suspect that this part of her argument simply bewildered readers.

While the true author or authors remain unnamed, in the mid-nineteenth century there could be no mistaking who is hinted at by ‘the Philosopher who is only the Poet in disguise – the philosopher who calls himself the New Magician – the poet who was toiling and plotting to fill the globe with his arts'. And in case
that
was not obvious enough, she quotes from Bacon's
Advancement of Learning
. But she never elaborates here on the great story of how the band of frustrated republicans wrote the plays to counter Tudor and Stuart despotism. Perhaps she planned to turn to that in later instalments.

Her snide tone and reductive logic infuriated Shakespeare's supporters. By the time that Delia Bacon published this essay, the first American Shakespeare expert, Richard Grant White, had arrived on the scene. A quarter-century later White confessed that the editors at Putnam's had sent him Bacon's next article – the second of four she had submitted, and which was already in type – and invited him to write an introduction to it. He not only refused, he denigrated both essay and author, insisting that ‘she must be insane; not a maniac, but what boys call “looney”'. White was working on his own Shakespeare book at the time and rather than engage Bacon's ideas found it easier to have her silenced.
Bacon never knew this, but it would probably have confirmed her own notions about the censorship of radical ideas. Even after her death White found it easier to vilify than refute her work, unfairly calling it a product of a disturbed mind, ‘a mental aberration which soon after consigned her to the asylum in which she died'. White's intervention persuaded Putnam's to renege on its agreement with Delia Bacon. Before the three unpublished and now rejected instalments made it safely back to her, they were lost. Emerson was at fault – they had been entrusted to him – and his assistance was at an end. She had not made copies so the loss proved irreparable, and no record of their content survives. Bacon was devastated and beginning to worry that others, drawing on her published essay, would claim precedence for her discovery.

What she couldn't understand was that others were independently arriving at similar conclusions. Take, for example, the wonderful anecdote recorded in the journal
Baconiana
, in which R. A. Smith describes how back ‘in 1844, at his home in Nashville Tennessee, Mr. Return Jonathan Meigs was reading Bacon's
Instauratio
in the original Latin. He suddenly closed the book and exclaimed: “This man Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare.”' Smith adds, ‘Mr. Meigs's son, then a lad of 14 years, who was sitting in the same room with his father, heard his father's remark, and has never forgotten it. In later years they frequently conversed on the subject of Bacon and his writings, and the son became a firm believer in the statement that his father made that day.'