* It is nothing less than marvelous that this simpleexplanation should not have occurred to the wise men whohave been knocking their heads against "the sea-coast ofBohemia" for the last hundred years. That this error is apart of the "business" and not of the play, is very evidentfrom a casual reading of Act III., Scene III. The stagedirection for that scene is simply, "Scene—a desertcountry near the sea," to be sure there is no stagedirection of any sort in the "first folio" but we may besure that this was the proper stage setting of the piece.And to fit it, Antigonus, the first speaker, says to themariner: "Art thou perfect, then? Our ship hath touched thedeserts of Bohemia." Bobert Green makes the same mistake inhis "Dorastus and Faunia." It was, if any thing, a vulgarerror of the time. There is no further allusion to thetroublesome geography in the play. So, too, the gunpowderused at the seige of Troy is a part of the "business," andshould be assigned where it belongs—to the playwright andnot to the dramatist. Not only did the stage editor put itin, 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, hencehe 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 uponwhom 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 mostprodigious 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, butmeasure 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 workassigned 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!"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 thelast 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 naturehad"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 wroteShakespeare'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 picturethat 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! Menstood 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—thereshe 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 LivingAge," (No. 56), for November, 1856, was, the following year(1857) elaborated into the valuable work on which we have sounsparingly drawn in these pages, and to which weacknowledge our exceeding obligation ("Bacon andShakespeare: An Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, andPlay writers in the days of Elizabeth. By William HenrySmith. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857"). In this work Mr.Smith (in his preface) asserts that at the date of hisletter to Lord Ellesmere, he had never seen Miss Bacon'sarticle in "Putnam's," but, it is to be observed, no whereclaims 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 welldefined 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).
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 abook, 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 Bacondied,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 crusadeagainst 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,onewith 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, unblinded, 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 couldwrite '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 thosewho shouldsolve 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, andnotthe 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 thatshe, 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.Like Cassandra, she announced her message only to bescorned 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, andearly devoted herself to literature, writing two works "TheTales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." Shesoon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adoptedthe profession of a student and teacher of history, andbegan her career as a lecturer on history in the city ofBoston. Her method was original with herself. She hadmodels, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate hersubject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections ofSeventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, beingof a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she wassuccessful 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, andearly devoted herself to literature, writing two works "TheTales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." Shesoon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adoptedthe profession of a student and teacher of history, andbegan her career as a lecturer on history in the city ofBoston. Her method was original with herself. She hadmodels, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate hersubject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections ofSeventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, beingof a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she wassuccessful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar says,"She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like anangel."
The original manuscripts 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 ownbusiness, 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 toprove, 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."to herconversations on the subject, and peremptorily refusedcontributions to assist in her expedition. But, by herlectures, and the friend she enlisted in her project in NewYork City, she gathered together enough money to get toLondon."It was while in London, in abject poverty andfriendlessness, that Thomas Carlyle, "upon whom she hadcalled and whom she had impressed with respect for herselfif not for her theory," says Hawthorne, advised Miss Baconto put her thoughts upon paper first, before proceeding tothe overt act of proof she contemplated—namely, the openingof William Shakespeare's grave. It was upon his advice thatthis most remarkable woman—sitting in bed in a garret tokeep warm without a fire, without sufficient or wholesomefood, "looking back," to use her own words, "on the joys andsorrows of a world in which I have no longer any place, likea departed spirit," and yet, doing "the world's work," andknowing "that I had a right to demand aid for it"—undertookto unfold out of the Shakespearean plays their hidden systemof philosophy." Meanwhile, under a contract obtained for herby Mr. P. W. Emerson (though, it is presumed, more fortemporary supply of funds than as rider to her great work),she furnished to "Putnam's Magazine" eighty pages ofmanuscript, which became the famous paper "WilliamShakespeare and his Plays," first announcing to the worldthe first anti-Shakespearean theory of which it had everheard. *** Mrs. Farrar.** This was contracted to be the first of a series ofpapers, but the arrangement for some reason, probablybecause Miss Bacon found it necessary to devote herself tothe 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 listenUnder 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 DeliaBacon." London: Sampson, Low & Co.; and Boston: Ticknor &Fields, 1857. The book lies before us, and certainly is themost difficult reading we ever attempted. Even so competentand partial a critic as Hawthorne says of it: "Withoutprejudice to her literary ability, it must be allowed thatMiss Bacon was wholly unfit to prepare her own work forpublication, because, among other reasons, she was toothoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out. Every leafand line was sacred, for all had been written under so deepa conviction of truth, as to assume, in her eyes, the aspectof inspiration. A practiced book-maker, with entire controlof her material, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume,full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation—criticismswhich quite take the color and pungency out of otherpeople's critical remarks on Shakespeare.... There was agreat amount of rubbish, which any competent editor wouldhave shoveled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust thewhole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in alump, and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, whichfell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and hasnever been picked up. A few persons turned over one or twoof the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick thevolume deeper into the mud.... I believe that it has beenthe faith of this remarkable book never to have had morethan a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only inisolated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. Butsince my return to America, a young man of genius andenthusiasm has assured me that he has positively read thebook from beginning to end, and is completely a convert toits 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 belongssurely to this one individual, who has done her so muchjustice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon inher due position before the public." ("Our Old Home.") Thevolume is obtained to-day, only by chance, in old bookshopsand at such prices as the bookseller may choose to demand.
It failed so utterlyand 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 yoursandmine"—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,"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 familiaritywith the events of Shakespeare's life, and of his death andburial (of which she would speak as if she had been presentat 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, hadreally gone some little way toward making a convert of thegood clergyman.—Hawthorne.
She examined the surface of the gravestone, and endeavored, 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 arrived 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 distinctlyrejects 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.