[Illustration: 9180]
HERE is a legal maxim to the effect that he who destroys should be able
to build up. The anti-Shakespeareans have not neglected to observe it.
The days when William Shakespeare first appeared in London, happened
to be the days when the Renaissance had reached England, and the drama
which began then for the first time to be produced, was the English
Renaissant Drama--just throwing off the crudities of the old miracle and
mystery plays borrowed from the continent, and beginning to be English
and original. Moreover, letters and learning, so long exclusively
confined to the rich and gentle, began to find expressions in other
ranks. "The mob of gentlemen who write with ease" were, one and all,
beginning to use their pens. There were no village newspapers with their
"Poet's Corners," and these writers sent their manuscripts through the
only channel at hand--the green-room door.
As these scores of manuscripts came in, William Shakespeare, of
Stratford, now Mr. Manager Shakespeare of the Blackfriars, read them
over; took out a scene here and an act there; scissored them as he
pleased; made this "heavy" for the low comedian, and that for the "first
old man;" adjusted the "love business," made "practical" for his boards
all the {175}nature and humor, and cut out all that came flat, stale,
and unprofitable from the amateur's hand; even took a little of each to
make a new one, if necessary, (thus retaining the indicia that _this_
was written by a lawyer, _that_ by a physician, _this_ by a soldier,
_that_ by a chemist, etc., etc.). He did what Dumas, Boucicault and Daly
do to-day; he was, in other words, the stage editor, not the author, of
the Shakespearean drama; though, that it should be called by his name,
is, perhaps, the least unusual thing about it.
Besides the gentlemen who used their pens, the very recent dissolution
of the monasteries had thrown multitudes of "learned clerks," (the
"clerical" profession then including lawyers and physicians, and indeed
all book-learned men) upon their own resources for daily bread, and
there was only one depot for their work. Not three, but three thousand
men there were, other things being equal, more competent by education
at least, than William Shakespeare to write the Shakespearean drama. But
other things, as we shall see, were not equal. It is suggested, on the
one hand, that William Shakespeare wrote the plays; on the other hand,
that Francis Bacon wrote them; and, again, that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote
them. So far as mere dates go, any one of the three might have written
them. They were all three in London, and on the ground when the plays
appeared. The truth is perhaps somewhere among the three. Francis Bacon
was the most learned man of his time. He could and did read Greek in the
original, and he did have access to untranslated manuscripts, such as
the "Menæclnni" of Plautus. He was a philosopher, and he _did_ come
nearer to a prescience of the philosophy of ages to be, than any man
who {176}ever lived--as witness his own acknowledged works. Sir Walter
Raleigh was a wit and a poet, a gentleman, a man of elegant nonchalance,
a very Mercutio, to the day of his execution. He was liberally educated,
cultured, and would have been all this in a more cultivated day than his
own; moreover, he was idle and a scribbler of belles-lettres. Perhaps he
killed time by writing speeches for the obsequious manager to put into
plays for his stage. Anonymous or pseudonymic authorship has ever been
a penchant of the gentle and idle. Shakespeare, let us say, was a shrewd
man of business, who kept up with his times, as do managers of theaters
to-day; he was quick to perceive where a point might be made in his
plays, and moreover he employed--or perhaps was fortunate enough to
secure by way of friendship--a poet to turn his ideas into speech
for the mouths of his players. That he used his pen to prepare the
prompter's manuscript of the pieces performed at his theater, we have
already seen there is reason to believe. That he ever composed, on his
own account, we have only a sort of innuendo of certain of his brother
actors and playwrights, and a Stratford tradition, which we can trace to
no other source than the source of the belief outside--that is to say,
to the fact that the plays were produced under his management in London.
The innuendo dubs him a poet; the Stratford tradition makes him to have
written doggerel verses. But some have ventured to disbelieve both the
innuendo and the tradition.
Still, writing his life, as we do, from imagination, it is much easier
to imagine the three men--Bacon, Raleigh, and Shakespeare--producing
between them "Hamlet,"
"Othello," or the "Comedy of Errors," {177}than to imagine William
Shakespeare alone doing it. Especially since, apart from the internal
evidence of the plays, he "had his hands full" of work besides--the work
in which he earned his competency. It can not be too clearly borne in
mind that Shakespeare, in a space of ten or twelve years, actually made
what is a fair fortune to-day. That Bacon and Raleigh, whose ambitions
did not lead them to seek renown as playwrights, should have contributed
their share to the plays--the first for gold which he needed, and
the second for pastime which he craved--is not remarkable; we can
see hundreds of young lawyers scribbling for gold while waiting for
practice, or young "swells" trying their hand at comedies for the sport
of the thing, by opening our eyes to-day. That the shrewd and successful
manager should carefully pick into presentable and playable shape for
his stage, these productions of his young friends, is, likewise, the
easiest thing in the world to conceive of, or to see managers doing
to-day. Possibly, William Shakespeare, or some other skilled playwright,
took the dialogues--let us say, for example--of Bacon and Raleigh, put
them into the form of plays, introduced a clown here or a jade there,
interpolated saws and localisms, gave the characters their names, looked
out for the "business," arranged the tableaux--in short, did what Mr.
Wal-lack, or Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault would have to do to-day to fit
a play for the stage. It is thought that Shakespeare himself did it,
because the plays are said to have been seen in his handwriting, and
because, from that fact or otherwise, they went by his name in the days
when they were first produced in London.
This sort of joint authorship would not only explain {178}away the
antagonism which grew up between the evidence of the man Shakespeare
and the evidence of the Shakespearean plays, but account for the
difficulties of accepting any anti-Shakespearean theory. This would
explain the parallel passages in Bacon's writings and in the plays which
Judge Holmes has so painstakingly sorted out; the little inaccuracies
of law and of grammar, of geography and of history, in the plays
themselves; Mr. Greene's "sea-coast of Bohemia," or the introduction
of gunpowder at the seige of Troy--absurdities which it is morally
impossible to suppose of the portrayer of antiquity who wrote "Julius
Cæsar," or the knowledge that framed the historical plays. If, however,
we consider them as the interpolations of a stage-wright * aiming at
stage effect, they are easily enough accounted for.
* It is nothing less than marvelous that this simple
explanation should not have occurred to the wise men who
have been knocking their heads against "the sea-coast of
Bohemia" for the last hundred years. That this error is a
part of the "business" and not of the play, is very evident
from a casual reading of Act III., Scene III. The stage
direction for that scene is simply, "Scene--a desert
country near the sea," to be sure there is no stage
direction of any sort in the "first folio" but we may be
sure that this was the proper stage setting of the piece.
And to fit it, Antigonus, the first speaker, says to the
mariner: "Art thou perfect, then? Our ship hath touched the
deserts of Bohemia." Bobert Green makes the same mistake in
his "Dorastus and Faunia." It was, if any thing, a vulgar
error of the time. There is no further allusion to the
troublesome geography in the play. So, too, the gunpowder
used at the seige of Troy is a part of the "business," and
should be assigned where it belongs--to the playwright and
not to the dramatist. Not only did the stage editor put it
in, but he took it out of Green's "Dorastus and Faunia."
The stagewright saw an opportunity for the introduction of a stage ship
or shipwreck, hence {179}he puts in the borrowed "sea-coast." He needs
an alarum of guns to impress his audience on the coming evening with the
fact that a tight is in progress. And even if it should occur to him to
doubt if there were any guns at the siege of Ilium, he is pretty certain
that it will not occur to the groundlings or the penny seats, from whose
pocket all is grist that comes to his mill, if he makes the guns and the
cannon a part of the "business." So, again, we have only to understand
this, and the characters of Hym and Bardolph--supposed to have puzzled
the critics since critics first began to busy themselves with these
dramas--is explained. Bardolph is the walking comedian, inserted by the
experienced manager to tickle the frieti ciceris et nucis emptor, with
his fiery nose, and corporal Nym to break in with his "There's the humor
of it," just as rip Van Winkle dwells upon his favorite toast, and Solon
Shingle upon his ancestor who "fitted into the Revolution." And to many
minds this accounts for the little dashes of obscene display, the lewd
innuendo, which came never from the same pen as the masterstrokes, but
which they prefer to conceive of an actor or manager interpolating to
the delight of Monsieur Taine's audience, and for the stolen delectation
of the maids of honor and city dames who went, in men's clothes, to
mingle with them.
This, too, might account for the poems dedicated to Southampton. In the
lax court and reign of the Virgin Queen, there was at least one man bold
and reckless enough to stand patron to the "Venus and Adonis" and "The
Rape of Lucrece"--the noble young libertine of nineteen, Southampton.
Similarly, there may have been but one man available upon {180}whom to
father them, and so the joint or several productions of certain young
men about town, "curled darlings" who affected Shakespeare's green-room,
were sworn upon the complacent manager, who doubtless saw his profit in
it. We have rumor, indeed, that his profit was no less a sum than one
thousand pounds. But, as we have seen, and shall see further, this
thousand pounds story is not only without authority, but incredible:
that Southampton's means did not justify him in giving away any such
sum--that Shakespeare did not need it, and that none of Southampton's
coterie ever heard of it.
Whether Bacon wrote these works or not (and we may say the same of
Raleigh), and whether the audiences before whom these Shakespearean
dramas were first presented could have estimated them as what we of this
age recognize them to be or not; we may be sure that, had he chanced to
light upon them, Lord Bacon could have appraised them, and the genius
that created them, at their true worth. But while Lord Bacon's writings
teem with mention of his own contemporaries (Mr. W. II. Smith points out
the fact that we owe about all we know of Raleigh's skill in repartee
to Bacon's "Apothegms"), he nowhere alludes to such a man as William
Shakespeare!--to William Shakespeare--who, if popular belief is true,
was his lordship's most immortal contemporary, the one mind mightier
than Bacon's, and yet not a rival or a superior in his own particular
sphere, of whom he could have been jealous. The truth which makes this
strange riddle plain is, according to the Baconian theory, that (to use
Sir Tobie Matthew's words in his famous letter to his patron) "the most
{181}prodigious wit that ever I knew, of my nation, and of this side of
the sea, is of your lordship's name, though he be known by another," in
other words, that Bacon was "Shakespeare." And, indeed, Sir Tobie was
fonder of nothing than of indulging in sly allusions to Lord Bacon's
secret, of which he had become possessed. In another letter than that
just quoted, he says again to his lordship: "I will not promise to
return you weight for weight, but _measure for measure_....and there is
a certain judge in the world, who, in the midst of his popularity toward
the meaner sort of men, would fain deprive the better sort of that
happiness which was generally done in that time." * **
* Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," second edition, p.
175.
** "Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 96.
Such considerations as these, as they came one by one to light, began to
suggest to thinking minds that perhaps William Shakespeare was enjoying,
by default, estates belonging to somebody else. But it is curious to see
how gradually. In 1783, Theobald, a competent and painstaking scholar of
the text, declares that there were "portions of the plays which proved
beyond a doubt that more than one hand had produced them." More than
fifty years after came Dr. Richard Banner (who wrote his famous letter
on "The Learning of Shakespeare," in or about 1789), and appears to
have been the first actual anti-Shakespearean and unbeliever. Dr. Farmer
sought--by demonstrating that much of the learning of the plays could
have been, by sufficient research, procured at second-hand--to account
for (what he could not overlook) the utter inadequacy of the historical
man to the immortal work {182}assigned him; just as if it were not, if
any thing, an increase (or say a substitution) of marvels to suppose a
busy actor and manager rummaging England for forgotten manuscripts in
the days when no public libraries existed, and when students lived in
cloisters; or (let us say) that he knew precisely where to lay his
hand on every obscure tract, letter, or memorandum ever drawn from a
classical source! And just as if the encyclopaedic learning required was
lessened by the fact that the plot of the perfected play was borrowed or
rewritten from an older drama of the same name!
For example of Farmer's argument, take the following. In the play of
that name, Timon says:=
```"The sun's a thief, and with his great attention
```Robs the vast sea. The moon's an arrant thief,
```And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.
```The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves
```The moon into salt tears. The earth's a thief
```That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
```From general excrement: each thing's a thief."=
Now, exclaim the men who upho'd the stage manager's ability to read
Greek, the idea of this is from Anacreon, and they give the ode in which
William Shakespeare found it. Not so fast, says Dr. Farmer. He might
have taken it from the French of Ronsard, a French poet: because one
Puttenham, in his "Arte of English Poesie," published in 1589, speaks of
some one--of a "reasonable good facilitie in translation, who, finding
certain of Anacreon's odes very well translated by Ronsard, the
French poet--comes a minion and translates the same out of French into
English," and "on looking into Ronsard I find this very ode of Anacreon
among the rest!" {183}Letting pass the far-fetched conjecture which aims
to prove that William Shakespeare could not read Greek by showing that
he could reach French--or the observation, that the sum of Dr. Farmer's
arguments (for the above is a sample of each and all of them) amounts
simply to this, that: though the manager knew no Greek--he knew where
every thing contained in Greek was to be obtained in translation: the
question for us is simply, Why should the stage-manager have recourse
to either Anacreon or Ronsard for a meteorological episode? This, and
a thousand like passages, are nothing but digressions, with nothing
whatever to do with the action or by-play of the comedy or tragedy in
which they occur, and not apposite to anything else in the part of the
speakers who pronounced them. A scholar might be unable to keep them
out; but why should a stage-manager--fitting a spectacle to the acting
necessities of his boards or to the humor of his audience--put them in?
Whereas, if a scholar did write the manuscript play and sell it to a
stage-manager, it is useless to ask why the stage-manager did not cut
out the digression or why he left it in, for that was a mere matter of
whim or circumstance, not worth our while to speculate over. Dr. Farmer
went just far enough to see that, if the William Shakespeare of history
wrote the Book, something must be done to account for his access to the
material he wrought with. If the Doctor had kept on a little further,
the truth would have dawned upon him. But, as it was, he (without
looking for them) observed traces of what he believed to be two hands
in the Plays, and so followed Theobald. He says of Hamlet, that he
considered it "extremely probable that the French ribaldry in the
{184}last scene of Hamlet was the work of another than the author of the
body of the work"--but the hint was altogether lost on him. He looked no
further, and so lived and died unsuspicious of the truth--namely, that
it was only the fair-copied manuscript that was William Shakespeare's.
The "without blotting a line" of Ben Jonson--not a mere form of speech,
but a fact, confirmed by Heminges and Condell, the editors of the "first
folio" of 1623, who say in their preface, "we have scarce received from
him a blot in his papers"--as we shall see further on, ought to have
itself awakened suspicion. Lope de Vega, the Spaniard, who supplied
his native stage with upward of two thousand original dramas--who is
computed to have written upward of 21,300,000 verses, and who wrote so
hurriedly that he never had time to unravel his intrigues, but cut them
all open "with a knife" in the last act--probably did write "without
blotting a line." At least so Mr. Hallam thinks, adding that, "nature
would have overstepped her bounds, and have produced the miraculous,
had Lope de Vega, along with this rapidity and invention, attained
perfection in any department of literature." * But in the case of these
marvelous Shakespeare plays, it was preferred to believe that nature
_had_ "produced the marvelous," rather than accept the simple truth that
what Hem-inges and Condell and Ben Jonson saw, were the engrossed
parts written out for each actor, and not the first drafts of the poet,
improvising as he wrote.
* Literature of Europe, part ii., ch. vi., § 8.
Except that Mr. Spedding, in the "Gentleman's Magazine" for February,
1852, printed a paper "Who wrote {184}Shakespeare's Henry VIII?"--in
which he claimed to have found startling traces of two hands in that
play, (and possibly some other floating papers which have escaped our
search)--prior to the year 1852 it had occurred to nobody (except
Kitty, in "High Life Below Stairs") to ask the question, "Who Wrote
Shakespeare?" But, in August of that year an anonymous writer, in
Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal," distinctly and for the first time
discussed the question, "Who wrote Shakespeare?"--when, after going
overmuch of the ground we have already traversed, arrived, to his own
"extreme dissatisfaction," (as he says, at the conclusion), that William
Shakespeare "kept a poet." It is curious to find this anonymous writer
dealing, as airily as Lady Bab herself, with the question: and (while
unconscious of the elaborate network of evidence he might have summoned,
and suggesting no probable author by name) actually foreshadowing
the laborious conviction which, four years later, Delia Bacon was to
announce. He surmises, indeed, that William Shakespeare was a sort
of showman, whose interest in the immortal plays was a purchased
interest--precisely what the law at present understands by "proprietary
copyright."
"The plays apparently arise... as the series goes on; all at once
Shakespeare, with a fortune, leaves London, and the supply ceases. Is
this compatible with a genius thus culminating, on any other supposition
than the death of the poet and the survival of the employer?" Of this
supposititious hack-author, who dies, and leaves to William Shakespeare
the halo of his genius as well as the profit of his toil, this anonymous
writer draws a picture {186}that has something familiar in its coloring.
"May not William Shakespeare," he asks, "the cautious, calculating man,
careless of fame, and intent only on money-making, have found, in some
farthest garret over-looking the 'silent highway of the Thames,' some
pale, wasted student... who, with eyes of genius gleaming through
despair, was about, like Chatterton, to spend his last copper coin
upon some cheap and speedy means of death? What was to hinder William
Shakespeare from reading, appreciating, and purchasing these dramas, and
thereafter 'keeping his poet,' like Mrs. Packwood?
With this view the disputed passages--those in which critics have agreed
that the genius is found wanting--the meretricious ornaments sometimes
crowded in--the occasional bad taste--in short, all the imperfections
discernible and disputable in these mighty dramas, are reconcilable
with their being the interpolations of Shakespeare himself on his
poet's works. * Miss Delia Bacon, a remarkable lady, followed in a paper
printed in "Putnam's Magazine," in its issue of January, 1856, (and
therefore must have written it in 1855), and was supposed therein
to distinctly announce and maintain that Lord Bacon--her namesake by
coincidence--was the "Shakespeare" wanted--a supposition which, as we
shall see, was erroneous.
* Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal,"'August 7, 1852, p. 88.
The audacity of the assertion, by a young woman, a school-teacher, in no
way distinguished or anywise eminent, that the idol of these centuries,
and of the English-speaking race, was a mere effigy of straw--a mere
dummy for an unknown immortal, was too tremendous! Men {187}stood
aghast. Was it a chimera of a mind diseased! Sneered at in her own
country, she went to England, but found that--while at home she was
treading only on adverse sentiment--_there_ she was openly tampering
with vested rights, almost with the unwritten constitution of England.
She made a few personal friends, and found some sympathizers, but all
England was arrayed against her. She came back, heart-broken, and died
eight months later. Mr. William Henry Smith, of London, in September,
1856, appeared with his "Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's
Plays? A Letter to Lord Ellesmere," in which the Baconian theory was
very plainly and circumspectly laid down and admirably maintained. *
The presumption once disturbed, inquiry began to be diverted from the
well-worn track of the commentators, and the result has been, we think,
a candid, rational, and patient attempt to study the Shakespearean
writings by the aid of contemporary history rather than by mere
conjecture, and by the record rather than by fancy, guess-work, and
gossip.
* This "Letter," which was reprinted in "Littell's Living
Age," (No. 56), for November, 1856, was, the following year
(1857) elaborated into the valuable work on which we have so
unsparingly drawn in these pages, and to which we
acknowledge our exceeding obligation ("Bacon and
Shakespeare: An Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and
Play writers in the days of Elizabeth. By William Henry
Smith. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857"). In this work Mr.
Smith (in his preface) asserts that at the date of his
letter to Lord Ellesmere, he had never seen Miss Bacon's
article in "Putnam's," but, it is to be observed, no where
claims to have been the originator of the "Baconian Theory."
It is too early in the day--the time has been too short--for the
reaction to have proved equal to the action, and verified the physical
rule; but three well {188}defined anti-Stratfordian theories have
offered themselves already, as substitutes for the mossy and venerable
fossil remains of the commentators. These theories are:
1. The Delia Bacon Theory;
2. The Baconian Theory; and
3. The New Theory (as we are compelled, for want of a better name, to
call it).
THE DELIA BACON THEORY.
It was across no dethroned and shattered intellect that there first
flashed the truth it has been the essay of these papers to rehearse.
That Delia Bacon--who, earliest in point of time, announced to the world
that "Shakespeare" was the name of a _book_, and not the name of its
author; and who, contenting herself with the bare announcement, soon
passed on to the theory we are now about to notice--was pelted with
a storm of derision, abuse, and merciless malice, until in poverty,
sickness, and distress, but still in a grand silence, she passed out of
sight for ever, is true enough. That in the midst of it all she still
struggled on in what she believed to be "the world's work"--bearing more
than it was ever intended a woman should bear--is not to overweigh any
merit her scheme of the Shakespearean plays may have possessed, however
it may have eventuated in the "madness" so inseparably connected with
her name. Wherever Delia Bacon _died,_ she lived and moved in the
conviction that she was a worker in the world's workshop. What to us is
a mere cold, historical formulary, seems, however, we may smile at the
absurdity, to have seized upon her whole life and being; and, as in
a great crusade {189}against a universal error, she seems to have
struggled in loneliness and wretchedness, with a crusader's faith and a
martyr's reward.
In all her tragic life, Delia Bacon appears never to have paused to
formulate the theory, for ever to be associated with her name, as to the
actual authorship of the plays. The paper "William Shakespeare and
his Plays," which appeared in "Putnam's Magazine" (and inaugurated the
controversy, never thereafter to "down" at anybody's bidding), seems to
treat the matter as already settled. It is rather sarcasm at the expense
of those who rejected the theory of a non-Shakespearean authorship than
a formulation of the theory itself. That the sarcasm, as a sustained
effort, has rarely if ever been equaled, there certainly can be no
question. Her indignation at the idea that the magnificent plays sprang
from the brain of "the Stratford poacher--now that the deer-stealing
fire has gone out of him; now that this youthful impulse has been taught
its conventional mental limits, sobered into the mild, sagacious,
witty Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe," is intense. "What is to hinder
Mr. Shakespeare, the man who keeps the theater on the bank-side,
from working himself into a frenzy when he likes, and scribbling out,
unconsciously, Lears, and Macbeths and Hamlets, merely as the necessary
dialogues to the spectacle he professionally exhibits!" Her allusion
to Bacon is equally impassioned: "We should have found, ere this,
_one_ with learning broad enough and deep enough and subtle enough
and comprehensive enough; one with nobility of aim and philosophic
and poetic genius enough to be able to claim his own, his own immortal
progeny, unwarped, un{190}blinded, undeprived of one ray or dimple of
that all-pervading reason that informs them--one who is able to reclaim
them, even now, 'cured and perfected in their limbs, and absolute in
full numbers as he conceived them!'" Long before its appearance, as we
shall proceed to narrate; and still longer before the world had well
opened its eyes to the fact that a formidable anti-Shakespearean
proposition had been asserted, its author had left the proposition
itself leagues behind, and was well along on her route to the
fountain-head of its inspiration. The problem she proposed to herself
was not, "Did Bacon and others write the plays?" but "Why did Bacon and
others write the plays under the name of William Shakespeare?"
As the fruit of laborious study of the system and structure of the
plays, she reached the answer--as she believed, and lived and died
believing--hidden and embalmed in the masterpiece of them all, the
tragedy of "Hamlet."
"Hamlet," she maintained, was the master-key that unlocked the whole
magnificent system. They were not plays, but chapters in a great
Treatise--links in a great chain of philosophy--a new philosophy of
politics and of life; and, just as the Lord Hamlet caused certain
strolling players, with the set speech he put into their mouths, to
"catch the conscience of the king," so had the greatest mind of all the
golden age put into the mouths of the vagabond Shakespeare and his crew
the truth which should, in the fullness of time, catch the conscience
of the whole world. But why should these great minds have chosen to
put their philosophy into enigmas and ciphers? Miss Bacon's answer
was convincing: "It was the time when the cipher, in which one could
{191}write 'omnia per omnia,' was in request; when even 'wheel ciphers'
and 'doubles' were thought not unworthy of philosophic notice. It was
a time, too, when the phonographic art was cultivated and put to other
uses than at present, and when a nomme de plume was required for other
purposes than to serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, or vanity,
or caprice. It was a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and
anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles were not mere sport
and child's play; when they had need to be close and solvable only
to those _who should_ solve them. It was a time when all the latent
capacities of the English language were put in requisition, and it was
flashing and crackling through all its length and breadth, with puns and
quips and conceits and jokes and satires, and inlined with philosophic
secrets that opened down into the bottom of a tomb, that opened into the
Tower, that opened on the scaffold and the block." * This was the
"Delia Bacon theory." This was the "madness" forever associated with her
plaintive story, and _not_ the proposition that the author of the plays
(whoever he might be--or they, if more than one) and William Shakespeare
were persons--as distinctly two as were the noble Hamlet and the poor
player who played "Gonzago" in the "Mousetrap" that day before the
majesty of Denmark. But, madness or not, Miss Bacon never wavered in
her conviction that the appointed time to read the oracles had come, and
that _she_, Delia Bacon, a namesake, possibly, of the real Hamlet of the
plays, had been raised in her appointed place to be the reader. Alas for
her!
* "Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded," p. x.
{192}Like Cassandra, she announced her message only to be
scorned and flouted in return!
By what whim of fortune or fancy the great plays had grown to be known
as "Shakespeare's works," any more than Burbage's works, or Jonson's
works, she never troubled herself to inquire; but with the details of
lier mission she was careful to possess herself. She held that "the
material evidence of her dogma as to the authorship, together with
the key of the new philosophy, would be found buried in Shakespeare's
grave." * She claims to have discovered, by careful study of Lord
Bacon's letters, not only the key and clew to the whole mystery, but to
an entire Baconian cipher In these letters--there were over five hundred
of them extant, and others have been discovered, we believe, since Miss
Bacon's day--however, it still remains, for the secret of Miss Bacon's
clew died with her. But she stoutly maintained that in these letters
were "definite and minute directions how to find a will and other
documents relating to the conclave of Elizabethan philosophers, which
were concealed in a hollow space in the under surface of Shakespeare's
gravestone.... The directions, she intimated, were completely and
precisely to the point, obviating all difficulties in the way of
coming to the treasure, and so contrived as to ward off any troublesome
consequences likely to arise from the interference of the parish
officers.... There was the precious secret protected by a curse, as
pirates used to bury their gold in the guardianship of a fiend." **
* Hawthorne.
** Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven, in 1811, and
early devoted herself to literature, writing two works "The
Tales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." She
soon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted
the profession of a student and teacher of history, and
began her career as a lecturer on history in the city of
Boston. Her method was original with herself. She had
models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her
subject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections of
Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, being
of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was
successful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar says,
"She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like.
** Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven, in 1811, and
early devoted herself to literature, writing two works "The
Tales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." She
soon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted
the profession of a student and teacher of history, and
began her career as a lecturer on history in the city of
Boston. Her method was original with herself. She had
models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her
subject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections of
Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, being
of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was
successful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar says,
"She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like an
angel."
The original manu{193}scripts of the plays she did not expect to find
there. These she believed the ignorant Shakespeare to have scattered,
after the blotless copies for the players had been taken; to have
devoted to domestic purposes, or to have never concerned himself about
farther. This was the gravamen of the charge she brought against "Lord
Leicester's groom," the co-manager, late of Stratford, and this the
vandalism for which she never could forgive him. "This fellow," she
cried, "never cared a farthing for them, but only for his gains at
their hands.... What is to hinder his boiling his kettle with
the manuscripts... after he had done with them? He had those
manuscripts--the original Hamlet, with its last finish;... the
original Lear, with his own fine readings... he had them all--pointed,
emphasized, corrected, as they came from the gods! And he has left us
to wear out our youth and squander our life in poring over and setting
right the old garbled copies of the play-house!... For is he not a
private, economical, practical man, this Shakespeare of ours, with no
stuff and nonsense about him; a plain, true-blooded Englishman,
who minds his own {194}business, and leaves others to take care of
theirs?... What did he do with them? He gave them to his cook, or Dr.
Hall put up potions in them, or Judith--poor Judith, who signified her
relation to the author of Lear and the Tempest, and her right to the
glory of the name he left her, by the very extraordinary kind of 'mark'
which she affixed to legal instruments--poor Judith may have curled her
hair with them to the day of her death.... What did you do with them?
You have skulked this question long enough; you will have to account
for them! The awakening ages will put you on the stand, and you will not
leave it until you answer the question, what did you do with them?" *
This chain of dramas, so blindly perpetuated by William Shakespeare,
became, through Miss Bacon's unlocking process, a great system of
political philosophy, dictated by the thoughtful Bacon and his compeers,
and locked up for the nineteenth century, against the blindness of the
centuries between.
But, of so startling a proposition, Miss Bacon confesses that the
world would require something more than her own conviction. So she
deliberately set out to _prove_, from the very crypt and silence of the
grave itself, its truth. To St. Albans, whence the mysterious letters
were dated, to the lonesome tomb at old Verulam and the vault in
Stratford chancel, she proposed a pilgrimage--thence to probe the
secret, and lay it open to a doubting world. Her friends regarded her
theory as a delusion, and Miss Bacon as a monomaniac....
* "Putnam's Magazine," January, 1856. {195} "to her
conversations on the subject, and peremptorily refused
contributions to assist in her expedition. But, by her
lectures, and the friend she enlisted in her project in New
York City, she gathered together enough money to get to
London."
It was while in London, in abject poverty and
friendlessness, that Thomas Carlyle, "upon whom she had
called and whom she had impressed with respect for herself
if not for her theory," says Hawthorne, advised Miss Bacon
to put her thoughts upon paper first, before proceeding to
the overt act of proof she contemplated--namely, the opening
of William Shakespeare's grave. It was upon his advice that
this most remarkable woman--sitting in bed in a garret to
keep warm without a fire, without sufficient or wholesome
food, "looking back," to use her own words, "on the joys and
sorrows of a world in which I have no longer any place, like
a departed spirit," and yet, doing "the world's work," and
knowing "that I had a right to demand aid for it"--undertook
to unfold out of the Shakespearean plays their hidden system
of philosophy." Meanwhile, under a contract obtained for her
by Mr. P. W. Emerson (though, it is presumed, more for
temporary supply of funds than as rider to her great work),
she furnished to "Putnam's Magazine" eighty pages of
manuscript, which became the famous paper "William
Shakespeare and his Plays," first announcing to the world
the first anti-Shakespearean theory of which it had ever
heard. **
* Mrs. Farrar.
** This was contracted to be the first of a series of
papers, but the arrangement for some reason, probably
because Miss Bacon found it necessary to devote herself to
the work to which she was to give her life, fell through,
and no successive papers appeared in the magazine.
They put their Shakespeares out of sight when she approached, declined
to listen{196}Under such circumstances, and with such surroundings, this
heroic woman accomplished the first half of the work she had marked
out for herself--the reading of the sealed book, the unfolding of the
philosophy of the Shakespearean plays. Her book was written, printed,
published, and--damned! *
* "The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded. By Delia
Bacon." London: Sampson, Low & Co.; and Boston: Ticknor &
Fields, 1857. The book lies before us, and certainly is the
most difficult reading we ever attempted. Even so competent
and partial a critic as Hawthorne says of it: "Without
prejudice to her literary ability, it must be allowed that
Miss Bacon was wholly unfit to prepare her own work for
publication, because, among other reasons, she was too
thoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out. Every leaf
and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep
a conviction of truth, as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect
of inspiration. A practiced book-maker, with entire control
of her material, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume,
full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation--criticisms
which quite take the color and pungency out of other
people's critical remarks on Shakespeare.... There was a
great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would
have shoveled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the
whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a
lump, and there tumbled out a 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.... I believe that it has been
the faith of this remarkable book never to have had more
than a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only in
isolated 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. It belongs to him, therefore, and not to me,
whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her,
she declared unworthy to meddle with her work--it belongs
surely to this one individual, who has done her so much
justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in
her due position before the public." ("Our Old Home.") The
volume is obtained to-day, only by chance, in old bookshops
and at such prices as the bookseller may choose to demand.
It failed so utterly {197}and miserably that nobody opened it, though
that fact deterred nobody, of course, from laughing at it and its author
to the utmost of their endeavor in ridicule and abuse. "Our American
journalists," says Hawthorne, "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, and they never have known it to this day, and
never will." But none the less did Delia Bacon persevere to the end.
The philosophy was unfolded. If the world declined to receive the
truth--"the truth," as she claimed, "that is neither yours nor mine,
but yours _and_ mine"--it was not on her head, at least, that the
consequences would fall. The second half of her work remained. She
proceeded to Stratford to crown her labors, by opening the vault in the
chancel of the parish church, and exposing the secret she had already
guessed, to the doubting Thomasses who clamored for the tactual evidence
so long entombed there.
Although on a mission so likely to be regarded as predatory--as even
coming under police prohibition, Miss Bacon seems to have lived in open
avowal of her purpose, under the very shadows of the church she meant
to despoil, and to have made nothing but friends. The regard was mutual,
and, says Hawthorne, {198}"she loved the slumberous town, and awarded
the only praise that I ever knew her to bestow on Shakespeare, the
individual man, by acknowledging that his taste in selecting a residence
was good, and that he knew how to choose a suitable retirement for a
person of shy but genial temperament." She laid her plans before the
vicar, who, so far as Miss Bacon ever was permitted to learn, never
opposed them. * At least he did not hand her over to the first Dogberry
at hand--a most un-English omission on his part. He did, however,
ask Miss Bacon's leave to consult a friend, "who proved to be legal
counsel," and who, doubtless, advised inaction, for the matter was
allowed, so far as the lady was concerned, to retain the form of a
pending negotiation with the parish, never, as a matter of fact, broken
off on its part. The rest is best told in Mr. Hawthorne's dramatic
narrative: "The affair looked certainly very hopeful. However
erroneously, Miss Bacon had understood from the vicar that no obstacle
would be interposed to the investigation, and that he himself would
sanction it with his presence. It was to take place after nightfall;
and, all preliminary arrangements being made, the vicar and the clerk
professed to wait only her word, in order to set about lifting the awful
stone from its sepulchre...
* I cannot help fancying, however, that her familiarity
with the events of Shakespeare's life, and of his death and
burial (of which she would speak as if she had been present
at the the edge of the grave), and all the history,
literature, and personalities of the Elizabethan age,
together with the prevailing power of her own belief, had
really gone some little way toward making a convert of the
good clergyman.--Hawthorne.
She examined the surface of the gravestone, and en{199}deavored, without
stirring it, to estimate whether it were of such thickness as to be
capable of containing the archives of the Elizabethan Club. She went
over anew the proofs, the clews, the enigmas, the pregnant sentences,
which she had discovered in Bacon's letters and elsewhere.... She
continued to hover around the church, and seems to have had full freedom
of entrance in the day-time, and special license, on one occasion at
least, at a late hour at night. She went thither with a dark lantern,
which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the volume of obscurity
that filled the great, dusky edifice. Groping her way up the aisle, and
toward the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement
above Shakespeare's grave. She made no attempt to disturb the grave,
though, I believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices between
Shakespeare's and the two adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied
herself that her single strength would suffice to lift the former, in
case of need. She threw the feeble rays of her lantern up toward the
bust, but could not make it visible beneath the darkness of the
vaulted roof.... Several times she heard a low movement in the aisle; a
stealthy, dubious footfall prowling about in the darkness, now here,
now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some restless
inhabitant of the latter had crept forth to peep at the intruder. By
and by the clerk made his appearance, and confessed that he had been
watching her ever since she entered the church. This was the nearest
she came to the overt act, all thought of which was finally abandoned;
for, meanwhile, worn out with the absorbing mental activity of these
last years, and her physical privations (she had only ar{200}rived in
Stratford in a condition so feeble and prostrated as to have believed
herself beyond any necessity of providing any further earthly
sustenance; the failure of her book and the miscarriage of her plans
did the rest), she finally consented to be borne back to her home to
die peacefully at the last, among friends. Her life and her "theory" are
only to be discussed together, and both with tenderness. "Was there
ever a more wonderful phenomenon?" exclaims Hawthorne--"a system of
philosophy, growing up in this woman's mind, without her volition,
contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her volition, and
substituting itself in the place of everything that originally
grew there! To have based such a system on fancy, and unconsciously
elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have
found it in the plays... it certainly came from no inconsiderable depth
somewhere."
This was, so far as she herself put it on paper, Miss Delia Bacon's
theory. It is to be carefully noticed, however, that it is a theory,
not of a unitary but of a joint authorship. There is one passage in the
"Putnam's Magazine" article (which at that time was announced by the
publishers as the first of a series of papers, and was so intended by
Miss Bacon) which points to Bacon as the supposed sole author of the
plays. But, in the book which followed it, these plays are repeatedly
assigned to a conclave or junta of Elizabethan courtiers and scholars,
and such was the faith, we believe, in which Miss Bacon labored and
died.
The unitary theory, we believe not unfairly, may be assigned to Messrs.
Smith and Holmes; the latter of whom, in the preface to his work, most
distinctly {201}rejects Miss Bacon's "junta" authorship, and undertakes
to maintain the proposition that Bacon, and Bacon alone, was the author
of the whole canon of "Shakespeare." According to Judge Holmes, Bacon
had reasons in plenty for concealing his authorship, and for "loving
better to be a poet than to be accounted one." Not only his personal
safety:--Dr. Heywood was already in the tower for having incensed the
Queen by an unlucky pamphlet dedicated to Essex; and "not long after
this," says Holmes, "and while Essex is under arrest, and Bacon in
sundry interviews with the Queen, is still interceding in his behalf,
her Majesty brings up against him this affair of Dr. Hoywood's book,
and also, as it would seem, distinctly flings at Bacon himself about 'a
matter which grew from him, but went after about in other's names
(in fact no other than the play Richard II. we have to-day)." But
the development of his plans made concealment particularly desirable.
Political rivals were watching jealously his every utterance. He is
known to be a "concealed poet," so he prepares a masque or two for the
queen's own eye and audience; but he alone, according to Judge Holmes,
writes "Shakespeare."
"Had the plays (says Mr. Furness) come down to us anonymously--had the
labor of discovering the author been imposed upon future generations, we
could have found no one of that day but Francis Bacon to whom to assign
the crown. In this case it would have been resting now upon his head
by almost common consent." It is well that this essential difference
between the "Delia Bacon" and the "Baconian" theories should be
emphasized here.
{202}