The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  These isolated voices were heard by very few. But the few who heard them had a question of their own: if William Shakespeare had not written the thirty-six plays in the First Folio, who had written them? Lawrence had named a little known book as their source. Coleridge and Disraeli had credited no one. Hart had, in passing, suggested Sir Francis Bacon. No real case had been made for any claimant to Shakespeare’s place. From 1771 to 1852 the doubters had their nagging doubts and little else. But in 1852, with the emergence of a neurotic New England spinster named Delia Salter Bacon, the doubters suddenly had not one claimant, but several to Shakespeare’s place.

  Miss Bacon’s livelihood came from teaching and lecturing to women on history and literature. For years she had been deeply immersed in the writings of the Elizabethan period, and her specialty was Shakespeare. The more she read of Shakespeare, the more she was troubled. “There was no man, dead or alive, that really on the whole gave me so much cause of offense with his contradictions,” she once confessed in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne. “He appeared to be such a standing disgrace to genius and learning, that I had not the heart to ask anybody to study anything.”

  She came to think of Shakespeare, and eventually speak of him and write of him, as “Will the Jester” and “that Player” and “that booby” and “Lord Leicester’s groom.” She could not reconcile the deep philosophy and daring statesmanship she found in his plays with the “vulgar, illiterate … deer poacher” who had been advertised as their author. With growing certainty she began to feel that Shakespeare had not written the plays credited to him, that his name had been borrowed to mask the identity of another. But what other? And why the elaborate masquerade?

  She scanned the giants of the era, their activities, their writings, and suddenly, blindingly, the truth stood revealed. The plays that bore Shakespeare’s name had been written in secret by a syndicate of creative men with a common purpose. The syndicate, she decided, consisted of Sir Francis Bacon (no ancestor of hers), Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and several other “highborn wits and poets.” These men were idealists and revolutionists. They possessed dangerous democratic ideas in a day when the divine right of kings and queens went unchallenged. Eager to promote liberty, equality, and justice, these men sought to propagandize their progressive views through popular plays performed for the masses.

  This was Miss Bacon’s startling, highly imaginative proposition. She did not announce it to the world at once. The news would be delayed four years while she reinforced her argument. But by 1852 it had become definite in her mind, and she could not resist circulating it among her students, her friends, and private audiences.

  In that crucial year she was on the genteel lecture-circuit, addressing groups of ladies and their daughters in the better homes of New Haven, Boston, and Cambridge. The first recorded instance of her obsession with her new non-Shakespearean authorship theory dates from her Cambridge talks. A group of fine ladies had purchased tickets to attend Miss Bacon’s lectures, first in the Brattle house and then in the parlor of the Farrar residence. Mrs. Eliza Farrar, married to a professor of mathematics at Harvard, and author of juvenile “books, was responsible for Miss Bacon’s appearance, and would later recall the impression it made.

  Speaking without notes, Miss Bacon dwelt on ancient history and dramatized her account by means of pictures and maps. “In these she brought down her history to the time of the birth of Christ,” wrote Mrs. Farrar in Recollections of Seventy Years, “and I can never forget how clear she made it to us that the world was only then made fit for the advent of Jesus. She ended with a fine climax that was quite thrilling.”

  At the conclusion of one such lecture, Mrs. Farrar remembered, several ladies lingered behind to have tea with Miss Bacon and to chat informally. During the conversation. Miss Bacon mentioned a desire to visit England to search for proofs of her theory. Someone asked, with innocent curiosity, what theory Miss Bacon wished to substantiate. And immediately Miss Bacon was off in a bitter harangue against the ” vulgar, illiterate” Shakespeare. Her listeners recoiled at the blasphemy, and Mrs. Farrar refused to encourage her protegee to discuss the subject further. Nevertheless, at every opportunity Miss Bacon continued to discuss it, until mention of Shakespeare became taboo among her friends. According to Mrs. Farrar, even Miss Bacon’s hostess was forced to “put her copy of his works out of sight, and never allowed her to converse with her on this, her favorite subject.”

  One person, however, who met her in Cambridge and heard her discuss Shakespeare did not change the subject, but rather encouraged her and drew her out. Ralph Waldo Emerson in his forty-ninth year was much absorbed by the antislavery movement and occupied with speaking against the Fugitive Slave Law. But only four years before, in England, he had given some lectures entitled “Shakespeare,” and he could still be interested by any academic debate on the Bard, In his journal for Wednesday, May 19, 1852, he wrote:

  “I saw Miss Delia Bacon, at Cambridge, at the house of Mrs. Becker, and conversed with her on the subject of Shakspeare. Miss Bacon thinks that a key will yet be found to Shakspeare’s interior sense; that some key to his secret may yet be discovered at Stratford, and I fancy, thinks the famous epitaph, ‘Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear,’ protects some explanation of it. Her skepticism in regard to the authorship goes beyond the skepticism of Wolf in regard to Homer, or Niebuhr to Latin history.”

  Apparently Emerson had shown sufficient sympathy for Miss Bacon’s ideas to invite her to expound them further. Three weeks after their meeting, when Emerson had returned to Concord and while Miss Bacon remained in Cambridge, she sent him what she called a “voluminous note … on this subject.” Her outline stressed Sir Francis Bacon rather than a syndicate of writers as really Shakespeare, and she suggested publicizing her theory in print. Emerson was impressed. On June 12, 1852, he replied at some length: “I am deeply gratified to observe the power of statement and the adequateness to the problem, which this sketch of your argument evinces. Indeed, I value these fine weapons far above any special use they may be put to. And you will have need of enchanted instruments, nay, alchemy itself, to melt into one identity these two reputations (shall I call them?) the poet and the statesman, both hitherto solid historical figures.”

  Emerson thought that a magazine article, followed by a book, would best bring Miss Bacon’s ideas before the public. He offered to assist her in securing publication. Miss Bacon was delighted and grateful, and she told Emerson: “Confirmations of my theory, which I did not expect to find on this side of the water, have turned up since my last communication to you. … Be assured, dear sir, there is no possibility of a doubt as to the main points of my theory… .”

  Yet there must have been some tiny doubt. For the English trip had crystallized in Miss Bacon’s mind as the necessary climax to her researches. She did not wish to set her ideas down on paper or publish them until she had visited St. Alban’s, where Sir Francis Bacon had once lived, or until she had examined the Shakespeare collections in the British Museum, or until she had personally lifted the flagstone off Shakespeare’s grave in the Stratford on Avon church and searched about his coffin for documents that might fully substantiate her case. She told Emerson that she must go to England for a year, no more, and at once he rallied to her cause.

  She required contacts and money. Emerson was instrumental in helping her to obtain both. He supplied her with letters of introduction, notably one to his old friend Thomas Carlyle. As to the financing of the English expedition, Emerson wrote to Hawthorne’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, and asked that prominent educator if she could assist in obtaining magazine serialization of Miss Bacon’s projected book. “I can really think of nothing that could give such eclat to a magazine as this brilliant paradox.” In short order the pages of Putnam’s Magazine were opened to Miss Bacon for a series of articles to be drawn from her book. This gave promise of considerable income, but still it was not enough.

  Emerson had one more idea. Miss
Bacon would soon be in New York for a series of lectures. He suggested that she call upon an old friend of his, Charles Butler, who was wealthy, well-read, and fascinated by anything bizarre. Emerson arranged the meeting, and Miss Bacon called upon Butler. Like Emerson, Butler was won over. He would be her patron. If she must go to England, he would gladly finance the passage and support her for half a year.

  On May 14, 1853, Delia Bacon boarded the steamer Pacific in New York harbor, and ten days later she docked in Liverpool, ready for the showdown with “that Player” who had, so long ago, warned such as she that they would be “curst” if they moved his bones.

  How well she would move those bones, even she could not know. For by the time she was forced to leave England four years later, she had initiated a heresy in literature, a controversy in academic circles that would persist generation after generation, that persists even today after more than a century.

  When she disembarked from her steamer at Liverpool on May 24, 1853, she had little realization of the din her visit would create in future years. She knew only the gnawing immediacy of her mission: to regain for honorable and brilliant men Bacon, Raleigh, Spenser, and their associates the acclaim that was rightfully theirs, but had been usurped, albeit unwittingly, by an unlettered actor who lay at rest beneath the floor of a village church, but who soon enough would rest no more.

  Delia Salter Bacon’s monomania was cast in the first fifteen years of her life. Her father, the Reverend David Bacon, was a descendant of an early Puritan who had once held military rank in England. He himself was made of the same sturdy stuff. Raised on a Connecticut farm, he became a fanatical Congregationalist clergyman. Turning his eyes westward, he saw his life’s work. Accompanied by his adoring, delicate eighteen-year-old bride, Alice Parks Bacon, he headed into the wilderness and for five years preached to uninterested redskins in Detroit, Mackinac, and settlements in the back country.

  His lack of success in converting savages to Christ brought on a crisis. Church funds were withheld, and he was left stranded. He found himself in the area of Ohio’s Western Reserve, and there, faced with need to make a decision, he was divinely inspired. He realized his real mission: to establish a holy community where Eastern immigrants might support themselves in an atmosphere both devout and pure.

  The word from on high was enough. He promptly purchased 12,000 acres of the richest forest land in the vicinity. Having no cash, he bought on credit. As he busied himself in constructing his own log cabin and subdividing his acres into smaller farm tracts, he corresponded with Congregationalist families in the East who wanted to move to Ohio and dwell in piety with their Reverend.

  He called his religious Utopia Tallmadge, and in this holy town, in the confines of the log cabin he had built, a girl whom he christened Delia Salter Bacon was born on February 2, 1811. There had been four children before her, and there would be one after her, but Delia alone would be infected by her father’s fanaticism.

  The burden of his growing family weighed heavily on David Bacon as he awaited the settlers who would relieve him of his indebtedness and fulfill his dream of a heaven on earth. But in short months his dream was shattered by a Congressional embargo on foreign goods which finally culminated in the War of 1812. The Connecticut parishioners who had planned to leave for Ohio changed their minds. And in the Western Reserve David Bacon had his promised land to himself.

  When he could not meet his obligations, his creditors quickly foreclosed and repossessed his 12,000 acres, his skeleton town of Tallmadge, and his very residence. Crushed in spirit and deprived of livelihood, David Bacon led his large family on the weary 600-mile trek back to New England. There he dragged out six more years of defeat selling Bibles, occasionally teaching, sometimes delivering sermons. He was forty-six when he died in August 1817, when the girl child upon whom he had left the deepest impression was only six.

  Without inheritance, and with a half-dozen mouths to feed, the widow Bacon distributed as many of her brood as she could among relatives and friends and moved to New York City to work as a milliner. Of the entire family it was thought that six-year-old Delia fared the best. She was accepted in a Hartford home that offered her, at least materially, such comforts as she had never known before. Her guardian, Mrs. Delia Williams, was the wife of a prominent attorney.

  Delia Bacon lived with the Williamses for nine years. In many respects she found them generous. For one thing, they provided her with the best education then available for an unemancipated American young lady. In 1824 the clever Catharine Beecher, seeking occupation after the death of her fiance, Professor Alexander M. Fisher, established a small school for women in Hartford. Though it never attained an enrollment of more than 150 students, it was to become nationally respected. One of its first pupils was the founder’s younger sister, Harriet, who would become world famous as Harriet Beecher Stowe. Another was Delia Bacon. Many years later, Catharine Beecher would remember that Delia possessed one “of the most gifted minds” she had ever encountered in male or female society, and that “she was preeminently one who would be pointed out as a genius… .”

  Her three years under Catharine Beecher and dutiful support until she reached maturity were the best Delia could hope for as a ward of the Williamses. She was lonely for love and companionship. These her guardians could not supply. They were well intentioned, but they were childless, and their regime was austere. “There can be no doubt of the calm and constant kindness of patronage which the fatherless child received here,” Delia’s nephew, Theodore Bacon, wrote later. “But its calmness may have been somewhat stern and grim.”

  In 1826 Delia Bacon left the Williamses to make her own way. She was fifteen years old, without capital and without connections, and possessed only of the learning imparted by Catharine Beecher. She had no choice but to exploit her single asset. She would emulate Miss Beecher. She would found her own academy for women and teach others.

  It took Delia four heartbreaking years to learn that she was no Catharine Beecher. Aided by an older sister, she opened girls’ schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, and everywhere she failed. In the end her eldest brother, Leonard Bacon, the successful pastor of New Haven’s First Congregationalist Church, rescued her from debt and urged her to concentrate on instruction to the exclusion of business.

  For the next decade and more Delia Bacon devoted herself to teaching. She returned to Hartford to accept employment as a pedagogue, then restlessly moved on to two other similar positions in New York State. She taught with only half a mind for her work. Its better half was given over to authorship. “From her childhood,” noted brother Leonard, “she has had a passion for literature, and perhaps I should say a longing, more or less distinct, for literary celebrity.”

  When she was twenty years old, Delia began her struggle for “literary celebrity,” responding to what Catharine Beecher had characterized in her as “the desire of human estimation, especially in the form of literary ambition.” Early in 1831 the firm of A. H. Maltby in New Haven published a collection of three melodramatic, historical novelettes entitled Tales of the Puritans. The title page credited no writer, as the author had insisted upon anonymity. But when the imaginative if incongruous stories met with no adverse criticism, Delia stepped forward to acknowledge authorship. Under her pen the Puritans unbent, and were made to indulge in protracted love scenes and dashing swordplay. The book had a brief vogue among lady readers, and Delia was more than satisfied, admitting that it had been “written without experience, without knowledge of the subjects of which it treated, with scarcely a book to refer to beyond the works made use of in school.”

  Later the same year, with less trepidation and no anonymity, Delia submitted a short story, “Love’s Martyr,” in competition for a first prize of $100 being offered by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. Perhaps it surprised her not at all that she was soon announced as the winner. But it may surprise many, reading of her victory more than a century later, to know the caliber of opposition she ove
rcame. For among those Delia had defeated in the contest was an impoverished former West Point cadet, two years her senior, named Edgar Allan Poe. Though Delia’s fiction was awarded the $100, one of Poe’s several submissions, “Metzengerstein,” was given the secondary honor of publication during January 1832 at space rates. With this appearance in print, Poe, who had already brought out three volumes of verse, made his debut as a writer of short stories.

  Next, Delia decided to become a playwright. Her first offering, long planned, would be based on a dramatic episode that had occurred during the Revolutionary War. Delia had once read of an American girl, Jane McCrea, who had fallen in love with a British officer under General Burgoyne’s command. Taken captive by a party of Indians, Jane McCrea offered them a sizable reward if they would release her to the British. The proffered reward provoked a violent disagreement among the redskins. Each Indian claimed to deserve the full ransom. In the heat of the argument one savage turned upon the source of the trouble, the captive girl, killed her, scalped her, and made off. When the murder became public it did much to arouse and inflame patriotic opinion against the British and their Indian allies.