The Square Pegs (30 page)

Admitting that Shakespeare’s birth was lowly, that his formal education was limited, that his background lacked nobility were these facts enough to bar him from authorship of the plays? “This respect for the literary value of noble birth is impressive in its unanimity,” remarked Marchette Chute, “but a little hard to explain logically, since the most learned of Elizabethan dramatists was a bricklayer, and the most poetic, next to Shakespeare, was the son of a cobbler.” Too, had not Ben Jonson noted that Shakespeare knew at least “small Latin and less Greek”? If no English university recorded his attendance, neither did it record the attendance of Jonson himself, or Henry Chettle, or Thomas Kyd. If Shakespeare had no legal training to explain the knowledge of law displayed in his plays, neither did Jonson or George Chapman, who wrote several plays that exhibited far more knowledge of law.

In Shakespeare’s lifetime fifteen plays appeared bearing his name. For most authors this would have been sufficient evidence of authorship. Why not for Shakespeare? During his lifetime, Francis Meres, Jonson, and others acknowledged his existence and praised his output. For most authors this would have been sufficient evidence of fame. Why not for Shakespeare? And shortly after his death, the Folio was published containing an engraving of him made by Martin Droeshout, while the parish church in his home village erected a bust created by Gerard Janssen, the son of a tomb maker. For most authors these would have been sufficient evidences of honor and tribute paid by friends and admirers. Why not for Shakespeare?

Frank Ernest Hill has summarized the pro-Shakespeare position admirably in
To Meet Will Shakespeare
: “The Shakespeare case is supported by many facts and specific comments. The evidence for it is direct, and it is great both in volume and in variety. In contrast, all other cases are ‘if cases… . Not one clear statement from a seventeenth-century writer or other person in a position to know says ‘Oxford or Bacon or Derby or Rutland) wrote the works supposed to be William Shakespeare’s.”

But in April 1857 the forty-six-year-old Delia Bacon could not know the literary stir her volume would one day provoke. In fact, she knew little of the reception it was accorded in the British press, or how poorly it sold in her own time. Ill, exhausted, inert, she dwelt now with a friendly shoemaker and his family in Stratford, paying them seven shillings a week and trying them sorely with her recurring hallucinations. To her brother, Leonard, with whom she had become reconciled, she wrote: “Having fulfilled my work as I thought … I have not cared to know the result. Since the day I heard it was published I have made no inquiry on the subject … I am calm and happy. I do not want to come back to America.”

Two months after the publication of the book, Hawthorne received a short letter in Liverpool from David Rice, a physician who was also Mayor of Stratford. Rice wrote that he had attended Miss Bacon and was concerned. “She is in a very excited and unsatisfactory state, especially mentally, and I think there is much reason to fear that she will become decidedly insane.”

Though Hawthorne had not been in touch with Delia since the disagreement over the preface in almost her last letter to him she had said that he was “unworthy to meddle with her work” he immediately undertook responsibility for her welfare. He advised Rice to care for her and to charge all expenses to him. He wrote to the Reverend Leonard Bacon, informing him of her condition and asking his advice. Bacon replied: “The crisis at which my sister’s case has arrived, requires me to say, plainly, that in my opinion her mind has been ‘verging on insanity’ for the last six years… . My fear has been, all along, that whenever and wherever her book might be published, the disappointment of that long and confident expectation would be disastrous if not fatal to her.” He agreed that Delia must be returned to her family in America at once. Immediately Hawthorne went ahead with preparations for her transportation home and for adequate care.

But it was too late. Delia’s condition had worsened. She could not be moved. And Hawthorne, unfortunately, could no longer assist her. His consulship at Liverpool, which he had come to detest, was at an end by his own request, and soon he was off for a year and a half in the “poetic fairy precinct” of Italy. By December Delia’s insanity had become sufficiently acute to necessitate her removal to a private insane asylum at Henley in Arden, eight miles outside Stratford. There, in the forest of Arden, she remained confined for over three months.

In March 1857, twenty-one-year-old George Bacon, one of the Reverend Leonard Bacon’s sons, arrived in England on an American frigate after two years spent in and about China. He was hurrying back to America, but he remembered that he had an ailing aunt in Stratford and went to call upon her. When he learned that she had been removed to an insane asylum in Henley, he was shocked. Without consulting his elders, he determined to take Delia home, where she belonged. He delayed his passage one week, secured his aunt’s release from the asylum, packed her onto a vessel, and, on April 13, 1858, led her down the gangplank in New York.

Her family placed her in a sanitarium called The Retreat, in Hartford, Connecticut. Her two brothers and two sisters and their children were in constant attendance upon her. She sank deeper and deeper into the distorted regions of unreality. But in a few last lucid moments she recognized the members of her family and spoke to them happily and warmly. Not once did she mention William Shakespeare.

On September 2, 1859, wrote the Reverend Leonard Bacon, “she died, clearly and calmly trusting in Christ, and thankful to escape from tribulation and enter into rest.” She was buried in the old cemetery at New Haven, and over her grave was placed a brown cross inscribed with the words “So He bringeth them to their desired haven.” This was decent, and it was kind, but it was not enough. There was one more thing to be said, and four years later, in his autobiographical volume
Our Old Home
, Nathaniel Hawthorne said it:

“No author had ever hoped so confidently as she; none ever failed more utterly. A superstitious fancy might suggest that the anathema on Shakespeare’s tombstone had fallen heavily on her head, in requital of even the unaccomplished purpose of disturbing the dust beneath, and that the ‘Old Player’ had kept so quietly in his grave, on the night of her vigil, because he foresaw how soon and terribly he would be avenged. But if that benign spirit takes any care or cognizance of such things now, he has surely requited the injustice that she sought to do him the high justice that she really did by a tenderness of love and pity of which only he could be capable. What matters it though she called him by some other name? He had wrought a greater miracle on her than all the world besides. This bewildered enthusiast had recognized a depth in the man whom she decried, which scholars, critics, and learned societies devoted to the elucidation of his unrivalled scenes, had never imagined to exist there. She had paid him the loftiest honor that all these ages of renown have been able to accumulate upon his memory. And when, not many months after the outward failure of her lifelong object, she passed into the better world, I know not why we should hesitate to believe that the immortal poet may have met her on the threshold and led her in, reassuring her with friendly and comfortable words, and thanking her (yet with a smile of gentle humor in his eyes at the thought of certain mistaken speculations) for having interpreted him to mankind so well.”

VII

The Explorer of the Hollow Earth

“I declare that the earth is hollow, habitable within. … I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.”

JOHN CLEVES SYMMES

By early 1823 the United States Congress, which had so faithfully served Monroe’s second administration, was sorely in need of a rest. Problem after problem of national import had been met and successfully solved. A war against Algeria had been won. Florida had been purchased from Spain. A Missouri Compromise had been reached on the slavery question. The states of Mississippi, Illinois, and Alabama had been admitted to the Union. The newly established republics of Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile had been recognized, paving the way for what was to be Monroe’s famous Doctrine. With this activity behind it, Congress could reasonably expect few more difficult tasks during the duration of its term. Yet, quite suddenly, in January 1823, Representative Richard M. Johnson, of Kentucky, who was to become vice-president of the United States, rose in the House to present respectfully a petition requesting that Congress finance an expedition into the center of the earth and at once Congress was again in an uproar.

To be sure, there had been rumor of such a projected expedition for five years, ever since a retired veteran of the War of 1812, Captain John Cleves Symmes, of New Jersey, Missouri, and Ohio, had conceived the daring idea that “the earth is hollow, habitable within… .” Armed with a prolific pen and oratorical zeal, Symmes had convinced thousands of excited Americans that the interior of the earth could be entered and explored through an opening at the North Pole 4,000 miles in diameter and an opening at the South Pole 6,000 miles in diameter.

On March 7, 1822, Symmes had personally induced Representative Johnson to ask his fellow congressmen to “equip and fit out for the expedition two vessels of two hundred and fifty or three hundred tons’ burden.” Johnson had passed the suggestion along to the House of Representatives, and had spoken briefly on its behalf, but the project had been ignored as unsound.

Instead of withdrawing the idea, Symmes remained undiscouraged. Realizing that while Congress might not readily accede to the request of one individual, it might be more receptive to public pressure, Symmes devoted the next ten months to building that pressure. By January 1823 Representative Johnson again had a petition, not from Symmes but from hundreds who believed that “the national honor and public interest might be promoted by the equipping of an exploring expedition for the purpose of penetrating the Polar region, beyond the limits already known, with a view not only of making new discoveries in geography, natural history and geology, but of opening new sources of trade and commerce.” The man to lead this expedition, the petitioners further urged, was none other than “Captain John Cleves Symmes, late of the United States Army,” who, “with scientific assistants,” was prepared to descend into the earth’s interior. Because the petition bore “many respectable signatures,” Johnson felt obliged once again, more forcefully, to present it to his colleagues in the House of Representatives.

The exhausted congressmen, unprepared for lengthy and involved discussions of the earth’s lithosphere, reacted with vocal dismay. Representative Farelly, of Pennsylvania, made a motion to table the new petition. In the short debate that ensued, Johnson reminded his colleagues that “respectable” voters were behind it. Moreover, if Symmes was right, a new race might be discovered within the earth, a discovery which would give all Americans clinging to the exterior world “great profit and honor.” Johnson begged that the petition not be shelved. “Something useful might come of it,” he said. In the roll call that followed, Johnson won. The petition was not shelved. But the problem still remained: what to do with it?

There was general agreement that the petition should be referred to committee, any committee, for further study and recommendation. Representative Arden moved that the petition go to the Committee on Commerce, as “the object of the memorialists is to establish a commerce with the interior inhabitants.” The members of the House seemed confused by this motion, and when it was put to a roll call, it was voted down. In the days that followed, no further disposition could be agreed upon, and eventually, the petition to send Symmes into the bowels of the planet died of inertia.

Hearing the unhappy news on a lecture tour, Symmes still refused to give up hope. He doubled his efforts to bludgeon Congress into offering federal aid. A month later, the House of Representatives was swamped by new petitions and memorials demanding support of Symmes. The longest petitions came from Charleston, South Carolina, and from Greenville, Ohio. No sooner were these shelved than Representative Ross, of Ohio, wearily appeared on the floor waving three more from his constituents. In the Senate the volume of requests was smaller, but they persisted. The most impressive list of signatures was offered by Senator Benjamin Ruggles, of Ohio, but his fellow senators remained unmoved.

In December 1823, shortly after President Monroe had declared in his annual message that “the American continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers,” the bombardment by Symmes and his followers was resumed. The members of the House of Representatives, realizing they could no longer avoid the issue, testily put the financing of a Symmes expedition to a vote. There remains no record of how large a majority of congressmen decided against it. But we do know that there were “twenty-five affirmative votes.” In defeat Symmes won a triumph. If his government would not help him sail through a polar cavity into the earth’s inner shell, at least twenty-five congressmen had indicated approval of the plan. It was inspiration enough. Thereafter, Symmes was to make verification of his theory by private exploration his life’s goal.

The furor in Washington, if it did nothing else, served to introduce to the less scientific-minded population one of the most diverting and persistent burrowers in world history. John Cleves Symmes was born in Sussex County, New Jersey, on November 5, 1780. His forebears were among the early Puritans. Except for an uncle, Judge John Symmes, who had been a delegate to the Continental Congress and had helped found the city of Cincinnati, his relatives were undistinguished. Symmes had a “common school education” and devoted much of his youth to reading scientific books.

In 1802, at the age of twenty-two, having determined upon a military career, he enlisted in the United States Army. After serving at several crude forts in the Midwest, he was promoted to the rank of ensign and stationed at a garrison just outside Natchez, Mississippi. There a fellow officer who disliked his brusque individuality remarked to friends that Symmes was not a gentleman. When this insult was repeated to Symmes, he was much offended. He followed his fellow officer to the parade grounds, and in full view of all “tweaked his nose … publicly” and challenged him to a duel. The affair of honor was promptly staged, and resulted in a Pyrrhic victory for Symmes. While he wounded the affronting fellow officer seriously, though not fatally, he himself sustained an injury that “stiffened his left wrist for life.”