The fantasy of extending the canon, a dream that had led young William-Henry Ireland to forge Vortigern, had at last been legitimately realised. Five long-buried tragedies, all drawn from the author’s circle – Mary Queen of Scots, Robert the Earl of Essex, Robert, Earl of Leicester, The Death of Marlowe and Anne Boleyn – confirmed that embedded within Shakespeare’s art was a personal story as well as a necessarily suppressed history of his times. Unfortunately, Gallup only provides plot summaries and the occasional extract of these encoded works. But based on her findings she was able to conclude that Bacon had used these works as ‘a receptacle of his plaints’ and ‘the escape valve of his momentary passions’. Collectively, they provided a rich biographical record of ‘his lost hopes, and the expression of those which he still cherished for the future’.
The discoveries did not end there, nor could they, for there was still the matter of the lost manuscripts. Here, too, Gallup got ahead of Owen, after decoding Bacon’s message that the hidden manuscripts could be found in ‘certain old panels in the double work of Canonbury Tower’ in Islington. To find their exact location, Bacon instructed: ‘take panel five in B’s tower room, slide it under fifty with such force as to gird a spring. Follow A, B, C, therein. Soon will the Mss. so much vaunted theme of F’s many books be your own.’ In sole possession of this revelation, Gallup set sail for England in 1907 and made her way directly to Islington.
She soon faced renewed competition from Owen, who had temporarily returned to his medical practice but was drawn back into the fray when forwarded a copy of a decoded transcription that Kate Prescott and her husband had made of a 1638 edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (it’s not entirely clear how or why Bacon embedded this message in a book published long after he was dead and buried). Owen wrote back excitedly with ‘“an astounding message” that he had decoded their material and he now knew “where the manuscripts are!”’ What enabled his discovery was a new kind of decoding, the ‘King’s Move Cipher’, by which Owen began at one letter and moved from there in any direction, one space, much as a king moves in chess. This cipher soon revealed where Bacon had hid his literary treasures: ‘two and a half miles above where the Wye River joins the Severn’ near the Welsh border. There the decoder would find a ‘pretty dell’ near ‘Wasp Hill’, a cave and a castle. With the financial backing of the Prescotts, Owen sailed to England to oversee the final stage of his great find – the unearthing of Bacon’s books and manuscripts. His great Cipher Wheel was nothing compared with the dredging machinery rented by Owen to search the bottom of the Severn River for the buried manuscripts, sealed in waterproof lead containers. His search was international news, and stories and photos of his venture appeared in the British and American press. It was an exhilarating time for Baconians. It remained to be seen who would be the first to strike gold – he near Wales, or she in Islington.
*
Helen Keller chose this promising moment to add her voice to the growing chorus of sceptics. Five weeks after her visit to Twain in January 1909, she wrote to her long-time publisher at Century Magazine, Richard Watson Gilder, explaining that for ‘months I have been interested in a subject of great moment, it seems to me, in the history of the literary world, and I write to ask if you would care to publish an article on Shakespeare and Baconian authorship’. She had been won over, she wrote, by Booth’s string cipher, and hoped to be in print by the time his book would appear in April: the ‘signatures are perfect, unmistakable, obvious acrostics. I have some right under my fingers in braille. I have traced and checked them, and I know that there is no accident, no imposture, no conjecture about them. No evidence given and sworn to in court could be more overwhelming than this.’ She put it even more vividly in the article she was now drafting:
It was the experience of tracing out the acrostic signatures with the ten eyes of my fingers that opened this subject to me. When I found Francis Bacon’s name clear and secure, I felt like a swimmer who, with no sense of danger, stands suddenly upright on a rock, and then sees in what a treacherous current he has been floating.
Keller was sure, she wrote to Gilder, that Booth’s book ‘will be the talk and the wonder of the literary world. It will surely make the ears of men tingle! My fingers tingle indeed at the mere thought of it. The beloved poet of Avon is dissolving in a mist.’ Keller was not ignorant of the resistance she faced:
I realize that, like most of our poets and literary men, you belong to the ‘true’ faith; you worship Shakespeare of Stratford. I know that at first blush you will think I have deviated into a windy heresy. But believe me, I am telling you plain matters of fact which you can verify yourself. You will be among the first to admit the evidence of Bacon’s authorship of the plays when you see it.
Gilder’s response to the article she forwarded to him was disheartening: ‘The whole subject is one which grieves me beyond words’, he wrote, ‘to think of your devoting your beautiful mind to.’ The last thing he wanted was for Keller to take such a stance: ‘For you to come out with a partisan article on the subject will not be impressive to the public mind and only involves you in controversy which alienates you for the time being from a true literary career.’ Gilder, in his patronising way, was trying to protect a very successful product, the steady and profitable supply of autobiographical works from Helen Keller, which the reading public couldn’t get enough of.
But Keller was fed up with churning out autobiographical chapters and with being ‘utterly confined to one subject – myself’, and felt that she had already ‘exhausted it’. The previous summer, in the preface to her latest book, The World I Live In, she had confessed as much to her readers: ‘Every book is in a sense autobiographical. But while other self-recording creatures are permitted at least to seem to change the subject, apparently nobody cares what I think of the tariff, the conservation of natural resources, or the … Dreyfus’ case. Her ‘editorial friends’ had met her every attempt to reach beyond memoir with the words, ‘“That is interesting. But will you please tell us what idea you had of goodness and beauty when you were six years old.”’
Keller was also irked by Gilder’s insinuation that her interest in Bacon had been foisted on her by others. It was the same old story: those who didn’t really know her or what she was capable of assumed that because she couldn’t see or hear for herself, she couldn’t think for herself either. She already had to deal with reviewers who claimed that the works published under her name were ghosted, could never have been written by someone who hadn’t seen or heard what she described. Keller was uncharacteristically sharp with Gilder: ‘Evidently you think I have been unhappily misled into this controversy. I do wish editors and friends could realize that I have a mind of my own.’ She added, for good measure, that if ‘there is anything to be troubled about, it is the ignorance of the public at large concerning the genuine data of Shakespeare’s life, and this ignorance can be dispelled if an editor and teacher will examine the matter’.
Ironically, in her desire to move beyond autobiography, Keller joined a movement committed to the belief that literature was ultimately confessional. Yet Keller was living evidence that a great writer didn’t need to see or hear things herself to write about them. Though she knew this, she remained unable to accept that it was Shakespeare’s ability to imagine things that mattered – and that what he found in books, as much as or more than what he experienced first-hand, stimulated his imagination, as it had hers. In late May, Keller wrote to Booth, who had sent her a copy of his new book, apologising for having been unable to help get it ‘the fair, unbiased consideration which it deserves’. Twain wrote to Keller a month later, urging her to give over ‘the expectation of convincing anybody that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare’. But if Gilder wouldn’t run her piece, he added, somebody else would.
‘Is Shakespeare Dead?’
Recalling her visit to Stormfield, Helen Keller writes that Twain ‘was at first skeptical’ about Booth’s cipher ‘and inclined to be facetious at
our expense’. That facetiousness was either a pose or quickly vanished. Lyon remembered how Twain was galvanised by what he saw and ‘seized upon it with a destroying zeal. He is as keen about it as Macy is; and you’d think that both men had Shakespeare by the throat righteously strangling him for some hideous crime.’ Twain paced ‘the long living room with his light quick step, flushed and excited’, while Macy, seeing his obvious enthusiasm, ‘promised to send to England’ for a copy of the book that Keller had recently reviewed, Greenwood’s The Shakespeare Problem Restated. For the rest of the weekend Twain held ‘long searching enthusiastic talks’ with Macy who was ‘egging him on to write his own book “which will be timely”’.
Ordinarily, Twain didn’t have the energy to write after seeing off house guests. Lyon recalled that this day ‘was different. There was silence in his room all morning.’ We have Twain’s own words for what he excitedly confided that day to posterity in his auto biographical dictation:
Two or three weeks from now a bombshell [will fall upon us] which may possibly woundily astonish the human race! For there is secretly and privately a book in press in Boston, by an English clergyman, which may unhorse Shakespeare permanently and put Bacon in the saddle. Once more the acrostic will be in the ascendant, and this time [it may be that] some people will think twice before they laugh at it. That wonder of wonders, Helen Keller, has been here on a three day’s visit [sic] with her devoted teachers and protectors Mr. and Mrs. John Macy, and Macy has told me about the clergyman’s book and bound me to secrecy. I am divulging the secret to my autobiography for distant future revealment, but shall keep the matter to myself in conversation.
‘Distant future revealment’ is a lovely notion, precisely what he thought Bacon had in mind by the acrostic. Twain could barely contain his excitement:
I am to have proof-sheets as fast as they issue from the galleys, and am to behave myself and keep still. I shall live in a heaven of excited anticipation for a while now. I have allowed myself for so many years the offensive privilege of laughing at people who believed in Shakespeare that I shall perish with shame if the clergyman’s book fails to unseat that grossly commercial wool-stapler.
This was no parlour game for Twain, nor was his interest in Shakespeare and the authorship question a passing fancy. Quite the contrary; no writer of his day had wrestled longer with both. He was a regular theatregoer (as well as a dramatist in his own right) and familiar with Shakespeare’s plays in performance – from Edwin Booth’s Hamlet and Edwin Forrest’s Othello to the rough-and-tumble frontier productions he had witnessed growing up and so brilliantly recaptures in Huck Finn. Twain not only reread Shakespeare’s plays as preparation for The Prince and the Pauper, but also echoed and quoted Shakespeare in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and even tried his hand in 1876 at Elizabethan prose in the bawdy 1601, set at Queen Elizabeth’s fireside, in which Shakespeare himself figures as a character.
When Twain visited Shakespeare’s birthplace during a trip to England in 1872, he was already sceptical that the man from Stratford could have written these plays: ‘It is curious there is not a scrap of manuscript in the shape of a letter or note of Shakespeare in the present day except the letter of someone trying to [borrow] £30 from him.’ Twain’s doubts in fact stretched back even further than that, to a time before he became a writer. His scepticism was less a deathbed conversion by an ageing writer obsessed with his legacy (though that too is part of it) than the confirmation of what he had half-suspected for over fifty years.
The heady days following the visit of Helen Keller and the Macys led Twain to admit what he had long left unspoken: from ‘away back towards the very beginnings of the Shakespeare–Bacon controversy I have been on the Bacon side, and have wanted to see our majestic Shakespeare unhorsed’. When Twain asked himself what led him to side with Bacon, he couldn’t quite say: ‘My reasons for this attitude may have been good, they may have been bad, but such as they were, they strongly influenced me.’
Twain began working feverishly on a new project – part autobiography, part authorship polemic – and his reflections on Shakespeare’s authorship took him back to the publication of ‘Delia Bacon’s book – away back in that ancient day – 1857, or 1856’ when he was an apprentice steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River under the tutelage of George Ealer. Ealer, Twain recalls, was ‘an idolator of Shakespeare’ and would often recite Shakespeare, ‘not just casually, but by the hour, when it was his watch, and I was steering’. Ealer didn’t just take pleasure in reciting Shakespeare; he enjoyed arguing about him too. He had strong opinions about the controversy stirred up by ‘Delia Bacon’s book’ and shared them with Twain. Ealer even ‘bought the literature of the dispute as fast as it appeared’, Twain recalled, ‘and we discussed it all through thirteen hundred miles of river’.
Ealer ‘was fiercely loyal to Shakespeare and cordially scornful of Bacon and all the pretensions of the Baconians’, and so was Twain – ‘at first’. But Twain got fed up with Ealer’s arguments and went over to the other, Baconian, side. He recognised from the start ‘how curiously theological’ the controversy was – and soon became ‘welded to my faith’ and ‘looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody’s else’s faith that didn’t tally with mine’. Twain admits that he got the better of his formidable pilot-master only once, when he wrote out a passage from Shakespeare, then ‘riddled it with his wild steamboatful interlardings’ – capturing what he actually heard as Ealer both steered and recited while guiding the steamboat downriver. He handed the passage to Ealer to read aloud and, as Twain expected, Ealer made the ‘thunderous interlardings … seem a part of the text’, made ‘them sound as if they were bursting from Shakespeare’s own soul’.
Twain then sprang his trap, insisting that ‘Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws and the law courts.’ Ealer replied that Shakespeare could have learned about the law from books, at which point Twain ‘got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the interlardings’. Ealer was forced to concede that ‘books couldn’t teach a student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover’. Twain thought his argument irrefutable: ‘A man can’t handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he had not personally served.’
It’s hard to know how much of this account is true. Ealer had indeed been Twain’s instructor on the Mississippi in November 1857 and then again from February to June 1858, when news about Delia Bacon’s book, and the book itself, were already in circulation. If Twain’s recollections are to be trusted, he and Ealer were probably familiar with Delia Bacon’s argument from an article that had run in June 1857 in a newspaper they read, the New Orleans Daily Picayune. The ‘interlarding’ passage sounds fictional, a re-creation, based on the burlesques of Hamlet, Macbeth and other plays that Twain in later years would perfect; yet there is a ring of truth in Lyon’s account of how ‘the King told how … Ealer used to read Shakespeare aloud, all interrupted with river talk, and piloting orders’, and how ‘splendid’ it was ‘to hear and see’ Twain ‘read it, for he acted it, and threw in plenty of river profanity’.
It’s extremely unlikely, though, that Twain had argued back in 1857 that only a lawyer could have written the plays; some years had to pass before a procession of lawyers would pick up on Malone’s hint and strongly urge that case. But what does sound like authentic Twain is the argument that you can only write convincingly about what you know about and have experienced first-hand. There’s no substitute for that, he was convinced, no way to learn from books alone. Anyone who tries ‘will make mistakes’ and ‘will not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right’; ‘the reader who has served that trade will know the writer hasn’t.’
In
what sounds like another apocryphal episode that would be recycled in his book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy, Twain tells the story of how, as a seven-year-old boy, he had tried to write a biographical account of Satan’s life, and ran into all sorts of trouble with his schoolmaster, given how little factual evidence there was about the devil. The moral: Shakespeare and Satan ‘are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet’. More likely he had Jesus, not Satan, in mind, though it would have been near heretical to say so publicly. But he confessed as much to Paine at this time, who writes that Twain’s ‘Shakespeare interest had diverging by-paths. One evening, when we were alone at dinner, he said: “There is only one other illustrious man in history about whom there is so little known,” and he added, “Jesus Christ.”’ Twain ‘reviewed the statements of the Gospels concerning Christ, though he declared them to be mainly traditional and of no value’. Paine adds that Twain ‘did not admit that there had been a Christ with the character and mission related by the Gospels. “It is all a myth,” he said, tellingly. “There have been Saviours in every age of the world. It is all just a fairy tale.”’ Once again, the Higher Criticism had left its mark.
After dredging up these memories from his childhood and time as a cub pilot in his autobiographical dictations, Twain briefly lost interest in the project. But he was re-energised a month later when the long-promised copy of Greenwood’s The Shakespeare Problem Restated finally arrived. It ‘so fired the King’, Isabel Lyon recalled, ‘that he has started again at his article, which he had dropped, on the Life of Shakespeare’. Twain wrote to his daughter Jean that ‘I am having a good time … dictating to the stenographer (Autobiography) a long day-after-day scoff at everybody who is ignorant enough and stupid enough to go on believing Shakespeare ever wrote a play or a poem in his life.’ And his copy of Greenwood’s book was soon ‘splattered’ with notes and fresh ideas.
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