The Square Pegs (29 page)

Delia’s book was before the public. For even the most hearty reader it was a formidable package. Though it contained colorful writing, and wit, and sound literary criticism, the best of it was lost in a swamp of garrulous redundancy. The style was agitated and insistent. To be trapped in mid-page was like being caught in an armed riot. The reader, cudgeled and bloodied by repetitive argument and phrase, staggered into long passages leading on and on into nowhere. The evaluation of Elizabethan writings was often profound, but the theory of joint authorship was lost in a maze of verbosity. The theory was there in print, nevertheless, and Shakespeare-scholars were outraged. They termed the book the product of a deranged mind, referring, of course, to its author’s eventual lapse into insanity. To this, the indignant Ignatius Donnelly would reply that advocates of Shakespeare were as susceptible to lunacy as confirmed Baconians. Donnelly cited the example of George H. Townsend, who was the first to come to the defense of Shakespeare after the publication of Delia’s book. Townsend, too, lost his mind, and eventually died by his own hand.

The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded
had been “the world’s work,” and it was now before the world for judgment. Hawthorne recorded the reaction to that “ponderous octavo volume, which fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the mud; for they were the hack critics of the minor periodical press in London… . From the scholars and critics of her own country, indeed, Miss Bacon might have looked for a worthier appreciation… . But they are not a courageous body of men; they dare not think a truth that has an odor of absurdity, lest they should feel themselves bound to speak it out. If any American ever wrote a word in her behalf, Miss Bacon never knew it, nor did I. Our journalists at once republished some of the most brutal vituperations of the English press, thus pelting their poor countrywoman with stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was deserved.”

The book had this distinction: it was the first of its kind. Even that celebrity was quickly challenged. In 1856, while Delia’s book was still on press, a cheerful, forty-four-year-old Englishman, William Henry Smith, offered to read to his debating society a paper advocating Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Fellow members objected, but John Stuart Mill supported his right to be heard. Smith read his paper, which emphasized the parallel writings in Bacon and Shakespeare and argued that Bacon’s known cultural background and creative talent made him a more likely candidate for authorship of the plays. Smith had this paper printed, and a copy sent to Lord Ellesmere, head of England’s Shakespearean Society. A year later Smith expanded his paper into a modestly priced booklet entitled
Bacon and Shakespeare: An Enquiry Touching Players, Playhouses and Play-Writers in the Days of Elizabeth
. While this publication made a convert of Lord Palmerston, it made an enemy of Delia Bacon. She screamed plagiarism. She insisted that Smith had pirated her article in
Putnam’s Monthly
. Hawthorne wrote Smith on Delia’s behalf. Smith proved that his advocacy of Bacon was not plagiarism, but coincidence, and all hands were satisfied that Delia had been the first in the field.

Today, after a century, most American literary sources bestow upon Delia the title of pioneer.
American Authors
calls her the first Baconian. Van Wyck Brooks refers to her as “the originator of the ‘Shakespeare-Bacon’ movement.” And the
Dictionary of American Biography
concludes: “To its author remains the credit, or discredit, of having first inaugurated the most absurd, and, in other hands, the most popular, of literary heresies.”

Upon its publication, however, it seemed doubtful that it would pioneer anything, for it seemed doubtful that anyone had read it through. “I believe that it has been the fate of this remarkable book never to have had more than a single reader,” said Hawthorne. “I myself am acquainted with it only in insulated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. But since my return to America a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured me that he has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is completely a convert to its doctrines.”

Of course, Hawthorne was being facetious. He knew the book had more than “a single reader,” for his own wife, Sophia, had read it through before publication. The “single reader” referred to by Hawthorne, the “young man of genius and enthusiasm” who became Delia’s first convert, was William Douglas O’Connor of Boston. O’Connor was a clever young journalist who was discharged by the
Saturday Evening Post
for too staunchly defending John Brown in print. He held several government jobs, notably with the Light House Board and the Life Saving Service. He was the first to champion Walt Whitman and to call him “the good gray poet,” and in 1860 he was the first to champion Delia Bacon. In his novel,
Harrington: A Story of True Love
—a “fiery and eloquent novel,” Whitman called it—O’Connor’s abolitionist hero believed in Delia’s theory. And at the end of the book O’Connor paid tribute to Delia’s brilliance. Two more books, these devoted to factual arguments in favor of the Baconian theory, followed in the next nine years.

O’Connor was not the only person of note to read Delia’s book and become converted to her views. The most famous of the others were Ignatius Donnelly and Mark Twain. When Donnelly was preparing his 998-page
The Great Cryptogram
, he wanted to include a portrait of Delia in it. Her family refused to submit a picture because, said Donnelly, “They do not ‘
want her identified with the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespeare plays
!” Yet, Donnelly added, the entire Bacon family would be remembered in history only because of Delia’s theory. Mark Twain admitted that he had read Delia’s book the year after its publication while he was an apprentice pilot on the Mississippi, and he had become a convert at once. His pilot, George Ealer, worshipped Shakespeare and regarded Delia as a demon. “Did he have something to say this Shakespeare-adoring Mississippi pilot anent Delia Bacon’s book?” asked Twain. “Yes. And he said it; said it all the time, for months in the morning watch, the middle watch, the dog watch; and probably kept it going in his sleep.”

If only a few read the book, they were enough. They read it and they argued about it, and the controversy grew and spread. One hundred years later Delia’s heresy continued to persist, to fascinate, to excite, to anger, to amuse. Dozens who followed in her footsteps writers, scholars, eccentrics were unaware of her existence. Many others knew to whom they owed their ideas, but preferred to ignore that pioneer. Because she had died insane, Delia’s memory became an embarrassment to the movement she inspired. But there can be little doubt that in the decades since Delia’s death almost every new theory on the authorship of the Shakespeare plays has had its inception, directly or indirectly, in her sturdy, unreadable book.

Most who have challenged Shakespeare since 1856 have begun by following Delia’s method of attacking the unworthiness of the “Old Player.” Thus, in 1909, Mark Twain, still under Delia’s spell, would point an accusing finger at Shakespeare’s last will. “It was eminently and conspicuously a business man’s will, not a poet’s. It mentioned not a single book. Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned one he gave it a high place in his will. The will mentioned
not a play, not a poem, not an unfinished literary work, not a scrap of manuscript of any kind
. Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that has died
this
poor… .” Thus, in 1931, Bertram G. Theobald would ask readers in
Exit Shakspere
, as Delia had asked before him, many pointed questions about the Bard. If, as most Shakespeare scholars agree, he was little educated when he arrived in London at the age of twenty-three, when did he acquire the learning to write the poems and plays? Why did the theater-owner Philip Henslowe, whose diary alluded to most of the great dramatists of the day, never refer to Shakespeare? Why did Richard Burbage, the great actor, never mention Shakespeare as an author? How could Shakespeare have acquired so vast a legal background?

But to destroy Shakespeare was not enough, as Delia foresaw. It was necessary, by all logic, to discover the real author or authors. Only a few theorists supported her idea of group authorship. Of these the most prominent was Gilbert Slater who in 1931 published his
Seven Shakespeares
. This book contended that Bacon, Raleigh, Paget, Buckhurst, Marlowe, and the Countess of Pembroke, with Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as their leader, had collaborated on the plays for which Shakespeare took credit. Slater based his case on the fact that the Earl of Oxford had received an annual pension of 1,000 pounds from a secret fund set up by Queen Elizabeth. This sum, he speculated, was used to pay the syndicate for creating propaganda favorable to the Queen quite the reverse of Delia Bacon’s contention that a similar syndicate had toiled, instead, to undermine the Queen.

The great majority of theorists, however, favored one pretender and among all pretenders they most favored Sir Francis Bacon. Delia had, of course, made her strongest case for Bacon, and William Henry Smith had been right behind her. Now came the deluge. Few Baconians confined their assaults on Shakespeare to deduction and the laws of logic. One who did was Theobald, who in 1932 put forth Bacon as his choice on the grounds that the man was a genius who liked to call himself “a concealed poet.” Further, Shakespeare was dead (and Bacon very much alive) when the First Folio came out with six absolutely new plays and with 193 lines in faultless style added to
Richard III
. Also, Bacon’s private notebook of jottings 1,600 of them in all was not published until long after Shakespeare’s death, though the man who was Shakespeare used many of these jottings in the plays.

Most Baconians were less restrained. They chose to arm themselves with every freakish literary weapon available. Delia had scorned such weapons. “She never devoted herself to whims or fancies about capital letters,” her nephew said, “or irregular pagination, or acrostics, or anagrams, as concealing yet expressing the great philosophy which the plays inclosed.”

In 1888, just six years after having published a novel supporting Plato’s story of the sunken Atlantis, the irrepressible Ignatius Donnelly, who was to be known as the “Apostle of Protest,” brought out
The Great Cryptogram
. After a study of the First Folio, in which he found pages irregularly numbered, words unnaturally hyphenated, and abnormal columns of print, Donnelly became convinced that Bacon had been the true author of the plays. By tracking down key words like “volume” and “maske” in the Second Part of
Henry IV
, and by an ingenious method of word counting, Donnelly felt that he had proved the hidden authorship.

Six years later, a Detroit physician named Orville W. Owen carried the cipher method to an even greater extreme. By construction of a ponderous wooden deciphering machine, consisting of two wheels mounted five feet apart, to which were attached 1,000 feet of canvas bearing pages cut from Shakespeare’s plays, Owen hunted out all occurrences of four guide-words:
honour, fortune, reputation, and nature
. By examining dialogue constructed around these four words, Owen discovered not only that Bacon had written Shakespeare but also that he had written the complete works of Marlowe, Spenser, Burton, and several others. Furthermore, Owen’s remarkable contraption ground out titillating historic gossip: that Queen Elizabeth had secretly married Dudley, that Bacon was their son, that Bacon had murdered Shakespeare to put an end to the Bard’s attempts at blackmail.

While the dazzling ingenuity of the Baconians was often much admired, industrious and outspoken skeptics were always ready to defend Jonson’s “Star of Poets.” On one occasion George Bernard Shaw took the time to invent a cipher by which he proved to the world that
he
had written all of Shakespeare’s plays. On another occasion, when Albert Boni, the American publisher, was about to underwrite a Baconian cipher system that miraculously revealed the true authorship of the Shakespearean plays, an office boy in the firm applied the cipher to the
Daily Racing Form
and proved that Bacon had written that too.

However, Delia had offered claimants other than Bacon, and seven decades after the publication of her book many anti-Shakespeare theorists began to emulate her. Except for the strong support thrown behind the Earl of Oxford, whom Delia had included in her syndicate, most theorists backed Elizabethans whom Delia had ignored or overlooked. In 1912 Professor Celestin Demblon, of Belgium, suggested Roger Manners, fifteenth Earl of Rutland, for whom Shakespeare had a shield painted in 1613. In 1919 Professor Abel Lefranc, of France, suggested William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby, who lived a quarter of a century after Shakespeare’s death. In 1920 J. Thomas Looney, a schoolteacher, suggested Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who entered Cambridge before he was nine years old, helped fight the Spanish Armada, acted in plays at court, and published twenty-four lyric poems. In 1943 Alden Brooks suggested Sir Edward Dyer, who was a Rosicrucian, an alchemist, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, and “our only Inglishe poett,” according to Spenser. In 1955 Calvin Hoffman suggested though his candidacy had been proposed before) Christopher Marlowe.

Against this continuing dissidence the true believers fought back with faith and logic. From the moment of Delia’s original attack the defenders of the Bard rallied to preserve his name and credit. Most defenders felt that Delia and her converts persisted in overlooking Shakespeare’s one major asset his genius. As John Mackinnon Robertson wrote of the Baconians: “A kind of thesis which finds its motive in the assumed improbability of the possession of abnormal literary genius by an actor who had left school at 14, has accumulated through all its variants a mass of improbabilities not to be matched in speculative research on any other field.”