Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  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.’

  Delia Bacon had more to fear from William Smith, an English
man. Shortly after her Putnam’s piece appeared in 1856 Smith published a brief pamphlet, Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare’s Plays, in which he argued that the plays pointed to the life of Bacon, not Shakespeare: ‘The history of Bacon is just such as we should have drawn of Shakespeare, if we had been required to depict him from the internal evidence of his works.’ Smith elaborated on this a year later in a book, Bacon and Shakespeare, which claimed, among other things, that the plays were meant to be read, not staged; that the Sonnets were autobiographical (and pointed to Francis Bacon’s early life); that a comparison of the works of Bacon and Shakespeare showed striking similarities; and that the works were a product of an aristocrat whose ‘daily walk, letters, and conversation, constitute the beau ideal of such a man as we might suppose the author of the plays to have been’.

  Accusations flew that Smith had stolen Delia Bacon’s conclusions. Hawthorne, in introducing Bacon’s book in 1857, intimated as much. Smith wrote to Hawthorne protesting how wrong this was, and Hawthorne wrote back, apologising. But the Athenaeum, which had run a piece as early as March 1855 paraphrasing an account of Delia Bacon’s ideas that had recently appeared in Norton’s Literary Gazette of New York, asked incredulously, ‘Will Mr. Smith assert that up to September 1856 he was unacquainted with Miss Bacon’s theory? If so, we will make another assertion: namely, that Mr. Smith was the only man in England pretending to Shakespeare lore who enjoyed that amount of happy ignorance.’ Smith responded that he had been thinking along these lines for some years. He probably had. But it’s highly unlikely that Smith’s pamphlet or book would have generated anywhere near the kind of interest that Bacon’s article and book did – not only because Bacon had behind her some very powerful and visible literary figures, but also because her work (far more than his) was swept along on the powerful tide of the Higher Criticism.

  With Hawthorne’s quiet subvention The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, a rambling and almost unreadable book, was at last published in 1857, with five hundred copies for sale in England and another five hundred shipped over to America. The impossibly long title she had earlier proposed to her publishers was scrapped, though it more accurately conveys her argument: The Advancement of Learning to Its True Sphere as Propounded by Francis Bacon and Other Writers of the Globe School, including the Part of Sir Walter Ralegh. Hawthorne had been unable to prevail upon her to submit to editing (‘Miss Bacon’, he later wrote, ‘thrust the whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a lump; and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public’). It was the last thing Delia Bacon would ever publish and the first that bore her name. Her plans to remain in England for another year ‘to prosecute the subject in a very different manner from any that I have been able to adopt hitherto’ in ‘order to make my second volume sustain the promise of this’ were never realised. Her health, both mental and physical, had declined markedly during the previous year or so, much of it spent impoverished and in isolation. Shortly after the book came out she lost her wits, was briefly institutionalised in Warwickshire and then brought home to America, where she spent the last two years of her life in an asylum.

  While Bacon had Hawthorne to thank for seeing her book at last into print, it was Hawthorne who unfortunately shaped for posterity the unshakable image of Bacon as a madwoman in the attic, a gothic figure who might have stepped out of the pages of his fiction. In 1863 he published an essay about her, ‘Memories of a Gifted Woman’, that left readers with an indelible image of Delia Bacon haunting Shakespeare’s grave, eager to unearth the long sought-for evidence that would prove her theory once and for all, daring the warning carved on Shakespeare’s gravestone, ‘curst be he that moves my bones’:

  Groping her way up the aisle and towards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement above Shakespeare’s grave. If the divine poet really wrote the inscription there, and cared as much about the quiet of his bones as its deprecatory earnestness would imply, it was time for those crumbling relics to bestir themselves under her sacrilegious feet. But they were safe. She made no attempt to disturb them; though, I believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices between Shakespeare’s and the two adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied herself that her single strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of need. She threw the feeble ray of her lantern up towards the bust, but could not make it visible beneath the darkness of the vaulted roof. Had she been subject to superstitious terrors, it is impossible to conceive of a situation that could better entitle her to feel them, for if Shakespeare’s ghost would rise at any provocation, it must have shown itself then; but it is my sincere belief, that, if his figure appeared within the scope of her dark lantern, in his slashed doublet and gown, and with his eyes bent on her beneath the high, bald forehead, just as we see him in the bust, she would have met him fearlessly and controverted his claims to the authorship of the plays, to his very face.

  Hawthorne didn’t know it, but Bacon had designs not only on Shakespeare’s grave but also upon his monument. She would have taken that secret to the grave had she not confided in her brother, who then shared this bit of information with her physician: ‘her hallucination about Shakespeare has been, I believe, constant’. He adds:

  She believes then, I suppose, believes now that the old tomb in the Church at Stratford-on-Avon, if she could be persuaded to take it down, would give conclusive evidence that the authorship of those plays which have been the world’s admiration belong to Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Ralegh, and others, and withal a key to the hidden meaning of the Shakespearean Scriptures.

  In this respect, too, she would anticipate future tomb-raiders eager to prove that someone other than Shakespeare had written the plays.

  Shakespeare scholars have too often found it more convenient to invoke Hawthorne’s gothic vision than to take seriously Emerson’s posthumous verdict: ‘Our wild Whitman … and Delia Bacon, with genius, but mad … are the sole producers that America has yielded in ten years.’ It was easier to dismiss her as a madwoman (this ‘eccentric American spinster’ really ‘was mad’, Samuel Schoenbaum insisted), one who led MacWhorter on, and us too, than to admit that she had merely taken mainstream assumptions and biographical claims a step or two further – albeit a dangerously mistaken one – than the scholars themselves had been willing to go. The intensity of the personal attacks begs the question of what was so threatening about her. Schoenbaum called Delia Bacon the first of the deviants – a term rich in religious, psychological, even sexual connotations. Perhaps it wasn’t her difference that proved so unnerving, but rather the extent to which her theory built on shared, if unspoken, beliefs.

  One of these had to do with the extent to which the personality and temperament of the author of The Tempest closely resembled that of Francis Bacon. One of the last things Delia Bacon wrote was an unpublished ‘author’s apology and claim’, now, along with most of her surviving letters and papers, housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library. The long and rambling essay ends with Horatio’s words to a dying Hamlet and a hopeful declaration: ‘Rest Rest, perturbed spirit! Delia Bacon. Stratford-on-Avon. The Shakespeare Problem Solved.’ But it is The Tempest that powerfully holds her imagination in this, her own version of Prospero’s great speech on how ‘our revels now are ended’:

  The solving of these enigmas, the unraveling of this work, is going to make work and sport for us all; it is going to make a name – a scientific name, a common name, and a proper name, for us all. The name for us each, and the name for us all, scientifically defined, is at the bottom of it. We shall never solve the enigma, we shall never read these plays, till we come to that. ‘Untie the spell’ is the word. That is the word on the Isle of Prosper-O, that magic isle … This discovery was not made, could not have been made, by one impatient for the world’s acknowledgements, or by one who loved best, or prized most, the sympathy, the approbation, or – the wisdom of the living. It was made, it had to be, by one instr
ucted, not theoretically only, in the esoteric doctrine of the Elizabethan Age.

  Her words and Prospero’s – and, for her, Francis Bacon’s – merge, are one. Delia Bacon had concluded her great task. She had also touched upon something that deeply resonated with many Victorian readers, a sense that the personality of the author of this last great play was much like that of the serene, learned, bookish Francis Bacon.

  Hawthorne famously claimed of The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded that ‘it has been the fate the of this remarkable book never to have had more than a single reader’. He was wrong. Within a year of its publication and the dissemination of its argument in reviews and newspapers in England, Europe and the United States, the Baconian movement became international, with writers weighing in on the controversy in India, South Africa, France, Sweden, Serbia, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Holland, Russia and Egypt. Word spread as far as the Mississippi River, where a pair of riverboat pilots vigorously argued the merits of Delia Bacon’s case against Shakespeare. One of the pilots moved by her arguments was a young man named Samuel Clemens, soon to be known to the world by his pseudonym, Mark Twain.

  Mark Twain

  On a chilly Friday afternoon in early January 1909, Mark Twain awaited a trio of weekend guests at Stormfield, his home in Redding, Connecticut. Twain had recently turned seventy-three. Though still spry, he was not in the best of health. He was a widower, his wife and best critic, Livia, having died five years earlier. Isabel Lyon, his forty-five-year-old secretary, did her best to fill Livia’s place, while keeping Twain’s two surviving children, Clara and Jean, distant from their father and Stormfield. Instead of family, the ageing Twain was surrounded by a doting secretary, a business manager, a resident biographer, stenographers and housekeepers – a host of retainers who called him, with no hint of irony, ‘the King’. It cost a lot to maintain this entourage, which meant that Twain, who kept losing money on disastrous business ventures, then earning it back from books and lectures, had to keep writing.