The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  Out of these tragic materials, Delia spun her romantic play. It was rejected everywhere for its verbosity, improbability, and amateurish pretentions. Undeterred, yet with some misgivings (for she warned in her foreword that her work was “not a Play … not intended for the stage” but was merely a “DIALOGUE”), she submitted the theatrical effort for publication.

  The so-called dialogue, two hundred pages of wordy prose in blank verse, was served up to America’s readers in 1839 as The Bride of Fort Edward: A Dramatic Story, by Delia Bacon. “It was a failure, every way,” Delia’s nephew recorded. “It brought debt instead of money, and no renown; but it did the great service of ending, for a time, her attempts at literary work, and turning her back to study and instruction.”

  After this debacle Delia embarked upon the most successful undertaking of her brief career that of lady lecturer. It is more than likely she got the idea from observing the success of Margaret Fuller, feminist, critic, and gadfly. In this new endeavor Delia seemed to find herself at last. Her knowledge of literature and history, her eloquence and wit, supplemented by a small reputation gained with her first book and by contacts acquired through years of teaching and through her clergyman brother’s high station, helped to increase the attendance at her lectures. She might have had a long and prosperous career and “will Shakspere gent” might have rested undisturbed through all eternity had not scandal and shame entered her life in the malevolent shape of Reverend Alexander McWhorter, student of divinity and cad.

  It is difficult, at best, to reconcile the stiff image left us by her subsequent literary reputation, of a studious, single-minded Delia Bacon, with the softer, shimmering vision, which existed before her retreat into monomania, of a warm, womanly Delia Bacon enraptured by love, sacred and profane. But as all existing evidence confirms, Delia was a woman. Beneath the prim aspect of teacher and speaker, behind the sterility of her scholarship, lay hidden the normal passions, the hungers, the longings for a man’s love.

  She was not, by any means, unattractive. During her lecturing phase, as Mrs. Eliza Farrar recalled, she “was tall and commanding, her finely shaped head was well set on her shoulders, her face was handsome and full of expression, and she moved with grace and dignity.” A friend of Delia’s, Mrs. Sarah Henshaw, remembered her as “graceful, fair, and slight. Her habitual black dress set off to advantage the radiant face, whose fair complexion was that uncommon one which can only be described as pale yet brilliant.” A daguerreotype of Delia taken in May 1853, when she was forty-two years of age, still exists. She sits reposefully, staring into the camera. She wears a bonnet, and a shawl is thrown over her black-satin dress. Her hair is black and flattened by a severe part in the middle. Her brow is high, her deep-set eyes seem darker than the blue-gray described by her friends, her nose is long and classically Grecian, and her generous mouth is drawn in a tight, amused smile. If the face seems more forbidding, more worn, than the description of it left by her friends, it must be remembered that the portrait was taken six years after the sitter had suffered deeply at the hands of McWhorter.

  With a nice sense of respect and a poor sense of history, Theodore Bacon does not mention McWhorter by name in his biography of his aunt. His only comment is provocatively enigmatic. “When she was mature in age, she underwent a most cruel ordeal, and suffered a grievous and humiliating disappointment.”

  The ordeal began in 1846 when Delia was lecturing in New Haven, where her brother Leonard had replaced his friend and mentor, Dr. Nathaniel W. Taylor, as pastor of the First Church. At the hotel where Delia took her room and board she found herself often dining at the same table with another occupant of the hotel, a young man named Alexander McWhorter. She learned that McWhorter came from a wealthy New Jersey family and was a resident licentiate of Yale, studying under Dr. Nathaniel Taylor. Though there was a mutual attraction between Delia and McWhorter, she remained briefly aloof. Perhaps it was because they had not been formally introduced. More likely, it was because Delia was then thirty-five years old, and McWhorter twenty-three.

  After a short time, Delia could no longer ignore McWhorter’s formal attentions. Nor, as it turned out, did she any longer wish to. Learning that her fellow boarder was a student under her brother’s respected friend Dr. Taylor, she felt free to respond to McWhorter’s overtures. It was her custom to give nightly receptions in her parlor. To these she invited friends and acquaintances, and to one such affair she invited McWhorter. He attended and made it clear that his interest in his hostess was romantic rather than intellectual.

  “His first visit was not his last,” the Philadelphia Times reported rather sternly in 1886. “He was more than pleased with Delia Bacon’s intellectual attainments he was interested in her personal attractions. He called upon her frequently. He showed her marked attention. He acted as her escort in public. He professed for her a profound and lasting affection, and would not take ‘no’ for an answer. He even followed her to a watering-place, with no other excuse than to be near her. These two … were lovers… . Then, when he tired of the flirtation, as all men do who fall in love with women older than themselves, he turned viciously upon his uncomplaining victim and contemptuously characterized an affair, that had begun with baseness on his part, a literary intimacy.”

  Delia’s flight to the hydropathic establishment the “watering-place” in Northampton, Massachusetts, had been made necessary by a bad case of nerves brought on by her family’s cynicism toward young McWhorter’s motives. At first troubled by the disparity in their ages, she had removed herself from the hotel and McWhorter’s gaze by taking residence at her brother’s house. McWhorter insisted upon visiting her. It was then, upset beyond endurance, that she escaped to Northampton. Again the gallant McWhorter followed. At last, assured of his devotion, Delia gave herself to the divinity student.

  Their romance became the talk of New Haven. Relatives and friends alike were fearful lest their beloved Delia become a fallen woman. To rescue her reputation they let the word be spread about that Delia was engaged to marry McWhorter. When the news of his betrothal reached the philandering young licentiate, he was amazed. At once his heart, so recently warm, began to chill In a panic, he publicly denied the engagement. To make sure he was understood, he ridiculed Delia, exhibited her passionate letters of love, and insisted that though she had proposed marriage to him no less than five times, he had never agreed to anything beyond friendship. Delia, immersed in a bad attack of vapors, could not believe that her beloved was acting so badly. But when her most private letters were quoted back to her, the scales fell from her eyes.

  Delia’s camp, led by brother Leonard, called McWhorter a practiced seducer, a brazen liar, and a disgrace to the cloth. McWhorter’s camp, led by Dr. Taylor, called Delia the seducer, called her Phryne, Theodora, Messalina, or at the very least a sex-starved spinster who had attempted to entrap an artless and defenseless young Yale student. With the pastor of the First Church and its ex-pastor engaged in battle, all of New England’s clergy felt called to arms. Men of God took opposite sides and gossip ran wild.

  In defense of virtue, Leonard Bacon determined to have justice done. Young McWhorter had obtained a license to preach in the vicinity. Leonard Bacon demanded that the Congregational Ministerial Association revoke that license. His sister’s seducer, he implied, was Satan incarnate. He would prove that McWhorter was guilty of “slander, falsehood, and conduct dishonorable to the Christian ministry.”

  The charges came to trial before a jury of twenty-three ministers. McWhorter put up a stout defense. His view, as Miss Beecher reported it, was that an older woman had ensnared “his unsophisticated affections.” He swore that he “had never made a declaration of affection.” In refutation Leonard Bacon revealed that he had seen “a real love letter” from McWhorter to Delia in which the divinity student had declared: “I have loved you purely, fervently.” As his sister’s keeper, Leonard Bacon regarded her suitor as anything but unsophisticated (rather, as a “clerical Lothario,” th
e press reported in clarification). McWhorter had misled Delia and tampered with her affections, all with dishonorable intent. When he had attained his objective he had retreated, and then had attempted to protect his reputation by maligning a good and decent lady. By the time Delia took the stand there was little left to say. Usually eloquent, she was tongue-tied and soon in tears.

  The twenty-three jurors consulted and voted their verdict. Twelve ministers found McWhorter not guilty. Eleven found him guilty as charged. By a narrow margin McWhorter had been vindicated, but he was admonished to practice what he preached. Delia’s admirers, and there were many, never vindicated him or forgave him. Catharine Beecher published a book on the scandal sympathetic to Delia. And as recently as 1888, a disciple of Delia’s, the Minnesota congressman and reformer Ignatius Donnelly had only contempt for “the base wretch who could thus, for the amusement of his friends, trifle with the affections of a great and noble-hearted woman.”

  After the trial Delia went to Ohio to recover and to bury herself in the books of another, and happier, age. When she returned to New England and her lectures, she was a new woman and she had a mission. For she had found in history a man she disliked even more than the faithless McWhorter. This man, she would soon announce, was William Shakespeare, pretender and mountebank.

  An omnivorous reader, she knew the plays credited to Shakespeare almost as well as any Elizabethan scholar. Curious about the genius who had created these magnificent and varied works, she began to study Shakespeare’s life. At once she was dismayed at how little was known of a writer so prolific and so great.

  Delia learned that there was no contemporary record of Shakespeare’s birth, schooling, or social life. There was evidence that his father had been a butcher, farmer, wool-dealer, and glover. A bond dated November 28, 1582, gave proof of Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway. An assortment of documents indicated that he had performed as an actor at Court, had purchased a fine house in Stratford, and had been involved in many land investments. A hasty will, filled with erasures and interlineations, and made out three months before his death, bequeathed his biographers information on his family, friends, real estate, and “second-best bed,” which last he left to his wife. This there was, and little more.

  Delia found that most other information on Shakespeare came later and was secondhand. John Aubrey had mentioned some early education, but he mentioned it sixty-five years after Shakespeare’s death. That Shakespeare had held the horses for the actors in the Earl of Leicester’s company, and had later become one of the company, was not a fact, but a tradition. So was the story that he had been forced to depart Stratford after being caught deer-poaching on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy. The deer-poaching episode was not published until ninety-two years after Shakespeare had died.

  Delia was anything but satisfied. Question after question came to her mind about Shakespeare as human being and artist. The works were there for all to see, and they were the product of genius. But could this man have been that genius? If so, where was a record that he had ever attended school? Or owned a book? Or traveled abroad? How could he, whose parents were ignorant and whose station was low, have had so much knowledge of ancient history and of untranslated Greek and Latin classics? Where could he have learned of court manners and chivalric sports? How could he have acquired so technical a background in law, medicine, and military affairs? An actor and property holder, when did he find the time to pen two plays a year? And if he found the time, why did neither he nor his contemporaries ever mention or discuss his writing in personal letters? Where was one single bit of correspondence from Shakespeare to a publisher, fellow writer, critic, patron, or actor? Above all, why did no manuscript from his pen, no scrap of manuscript even, survive his time?

  As Delia questioned and questioned, and probed and researched into the Elizabethan and Jacobean past, the certainty took hold of her that Shakespeare had not written the plays attributed to him. He had been used by someone more cultured, more talented, perhaps by several people, which would logically account for the incredible variety of plays. But who were the real authors and why had they used “that Player”?

  Delia searched the writings of Shakespeare’s contemporaries for clues. Then she returned to the plays. At once it all came clear. She found “underlying the superficial and ostensible text” of the plays a daring and liberal “system of philosophy.” Later she would explain her next step to Hawthorne, and he would tell the world that “as she penetrated more and more deeply into the plays, and became aware of those inner readings, she found herself compelled to turn back to the ‘Advancement of Learning’ for information as to their plan and purport; and Lord Bacon’s Treatise failed not to give her what she sought. …”

  In short, Sir Francis Bacon had written the plays. To his name she quickly added names of collaborators Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser. And, as minor fellow conspirators in this playwriting syndicate, she included the “courtly company” of Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Buckhurst, Lord Paget, and the Earl of Oxford.

  To Delia it seemed that Sir Francis Bacon was everything that the great plays suggested Shakespeare should have been. The plays required in one man the knowledge of aristocracy, politics, poetry, law, diplomacy, sport, travel, and philosophy. Bacon alone had such knowledge. His birth had preceded Shakespeare’s by three years, and he had lived ten years after Shakespeare was dead. His father had been Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He had studied at Cambridge before he was thirteen, and had prepared for the bar at Gray’s Inn. He had visited France, had served as a member of Parliament, and had been appointed James I’s Lord Chancellor in 1619. He had lived extravagantly, and this, perhaps, more than anything else had forced him to accept bribes from litigants. Once exposed, he confessed to twenty-three acts of corruption, for which he was banished from the court, fined, and sentenced to the Tower of London for two days. He was probably, as Pope remarked, “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.” His philosophical ideas were far in advance of his time. And his reputation as a writer was secure with the publication of The Advancement of Learning and fifty-eight brilliant essays.

  But for all of Bacon’s erudition and energy, Delia would not credit him with the entire output enclosed in the First Folio. Part of the authorship belonged, she was certain, to Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser. Raleigh had antedated Shakespeare by a dozen years and survived him by two. The son of a gentleman, Raleigh had been to Oxford, to war, and to far-off Virginia. From his prolific pen flowed books of travel, history, and verse, and Jonson regarded him as the father of English literature. One of Raleigh’s closest friends was Edmund Spenser, who also preceded Shakespeare by twelve years, and who died a full seventeen years before “that Player.” Spenser, a Cambridge graduate, was widely read, scholarly, and religious. He had been a member of the Earl of Leicester’s circle and a frequent visitor to Elizabeth’s court. His poetry showed familiarity with Greek, Latin, and English argot. And, of course, he had written The Faerie Queene.

  These three, then, and their friends, had promoted a mediocre actor named Shakespeare to immortality for their own ends. In an era when royalty was throttling free speech, these men had decided that the play was the thing, the only means by which they might safely disguise their ideas and incite the masses. “It was a vehicle of expression,” said Delia, “which offered incalculable facilities for evading these restrictions.” For example, why not a modern tirade against tyranny cloaked in the toga of Julius Cæsar? “If a Roman Play were to be brought out at all … how could one object to that which, by the supposition, was involved in it?”

  By 1852 Delia had interested Emerson in her radical theory, and a year later, with the financial backing of his New York friend, she had gone to England to complete her researches firsthand and to announce her shocking find to the literary world.

  Within four weeks of her arrival in London she had reached Thomas Carlyle by means of Emerson’s letter of introduction. Carlyle, at fifty-eight,
was at the height of his fame as a historian. His French Revolution, published sixteen years before, was already a classic, and he had just returned from Germany, where he had done research on a projected biography of Frederick the Great. Though dyspeptic, and often crabbed and uncivil, this crusty idealist was astonishingly kind to Delia and her obsessive theory. Perhaps his affection for Emerson, whom he had met twenty years before and whose friendship he cherished or perhaps his curiosity over the fact that, as he would write, “there is an understanding manifested in the construction of Shakspere’s Plays equal to that in Bacon’s Novum Organum”—inspired his kindness. At any rate, he informed Delia: “Will you kindly dispense with the ceremony of being called on (by sickly people, in this hot weather), and come to us on Friday evening to tea at 7 … and we will deliberate what is to be done in your Shakspere affair.”

  Carlyle, his wife Jane, and a learned family-friend were on hand in the Chelsea house to greet their strange American visitor. Carlyle liked Delia at once for her “modest shy dignity” and her “solid character.” Delia was delighted with the historian, though startled by his booming laughter. “Once or twice I thought he would have taken the roof of the house off.” The tea proceeded nicely until, at last, Carlyle asked his guest to explain her Shakespeare theory. Delia explained. At once there was a tempest amid the teacups. Carlyle may have had reservations about Shakespeare and respect for Sir Francis Bacon, but nothing so heretical as this had he expected or, indeed, ever heard before.

  “They were perfectly stunned,” Delia wrote her sister. “They turned black in the face at my presumption. ‘Do you mean to say,’ so and so, said Mr. Carlyle, with his strong emphasis; and I said that I did; and they both looked at me with staring eyes, speechless for want of words in which to convey their sense of my audacity. At length Mr. Carlyle came down on me with such a volley … I told him 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.”