The Square Pegs (23 page)

VI

The Lady Who Moved Shakespeare’s Bones

“Condemned to refer the origin of these works to the vulgar, illiterate man who kept the theatre where they were first exhibited … how could any one dare to see what is really in them?”

DELIA BACON

On April 25, 1616, an entry was made in the Stratford on Avon parish register of the burial of “will Shakspere gent.” Across the flagstone placed over his wooden coffin, within the chancel of the church, was engraved a verse which, according to local tradition, had come from the pen of the deceased:

Good frend for Jesus’ sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Bleste be the man that spares these stones

And curst be he that moves my bones.

Seven years after the actor-playwright had been laid to rest, there appeared in London a volume entitled
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies
. This folio, edited and sponsored by Edward Blount, John Smithweeke, and William Aspley, and printed by William and Isaac Jaggard, was dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke and his brother the Earl of Montgomery and “To the great Variety of Readers.” The dedication, composed by two actors who had known Shakespeare well, explained that the book had been published “onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our SHAKESPEARE… .”

This was the first collected publication of all but one of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays. Eighteen had never been printed before. The other eighteen had appeared individually in earlier authorized or pirated quarto editions, seventeen of them having been published during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

With the distribution of the First Folio, the playwright’s genius was at last on full display for his time and all posterity. For more than a century after Shakespeare’s burial and his resurrection in the Jaggard volume, his authorship of the immortal works was accepted without question or doubt. No one disturbed Shakespeare’s bones, literally or literarily, and no one directly disputed his authorship of the plays attributed to him in the First Folio. Then, gradually, the rumblings of surmise and suspicion began, instigated by scholars, critics, ordinary readers, and eccentrics who could not relate the brilliance and variety of Shakespeare’s output to the few prosaic facts known of his middle-class life.

The first dissent was heard in 1771, when Herbert Lawrence, a surgeon and friend of David Garrick, issued a book entitled
The Life and Adventures of Common Sense: an Historical Allegory
. Lawrence contended that Shakespeare had plagiarized much of his best writing from a certain
Commonplace Book
. The extremely “pleasant and entertaining” composition in the
Commonplace Book
had been audaciously appropriated by “a Person belonging to the Playhouse; this Man was a profligate in his Youth, and, as some say, had been a deer-stealer… . With these Materials, and with good Parts of his own, he commenced Play-Writing, how he succeeded is needless to say, when I tell the Reader that his name was Shakespeare.” Though Lawrence’s effort went into two English editions, and was translated and published in France and Switzerland, his caustic remarks on the Bard caused little sensation.

The first half of the nineteenth century provided two mild doubters and one vigorous dissenter. In 1811 Samuel Taylor Coleridge delivered a series of lectures on Milton and Shakespeare (with an admitted preference for Milton) at the Philosophical Society in London. Discussing the plays of Shakespeare, he was incredulous that “works of such character should have proceeded from a man whose life was like that attributed to Shakespeare… . Are we to have miracles in sport? Does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to men?” Coleridge was more willing to accept Shakespeare as thespian than as creator. “It is worth having died two hundred years ago to have heard Shakespeare deliver a single line. He must have been a great actor.”

Twenty-six years later, a future prime minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli, announced his misgivings more indirectly. In his eighth novel,
Venetia
, brought out the year he finally won a Parliamentary seat, he had a fictional character remark: “And who is Shakespeare? We know as much of him as Homer. Did he write half the plays attributed to him? Did he ever write a single whole play? I doubt it.”

However, the liveliest assault on Shakespeare’s authorship occurred in New York during 1848. A book bearing the unlikely title of
The Romance of Yachting
, by Joseph C. Hart, belabored the Bard mercilessly. Hart’s narrative cheerfully recounted his own adventures while on a sailing voyage to Spain. The sea change apparently worked wonders on his contemplative processes. En route he thought deeply, and when he came to record the physical highlights of his journey, he recorded also his varied meditations on the wrongs of civilization. One of his meditations, to which he devoted thirty-five pages, reflected his suspicions that Shakespeare as author was an impostor. “He was not the mate of the literary characters of the day,” Hart wrote, “and none knew it better than himself. It is a fraud upon the world to thrust his surreptitious fame upon us. He had none that was worthy of being transmitted. The inquiry will be,
who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him
?”

These isolated voices were heard by very few. But the few who heard them had a question of their own: if William Shakespeare had not written the thirty-six plays in the First Folio, who had written them? Lawrence had named a little known book as their source. Coleridge and Disraeli had credited no one. Hart had, in passing, suggested Sir Francis Bacon. No real case had been made for any claimant to Shakespeare’s place. From 1771 to 1852 the doubters had their nagging doubts and little else. But in 1852, with the emergence of a neurotic New England spinster named Delia Salter Bacon, the doubters suddenly had not one claimant, but several to Shakespeare’s place.

Miss Bacon’s livelihood came from teaching and lecturing to women on history and literature. For years she had been deeply immersed in the writings of the Elizabethan period, and her specialty was Shakespeare. The more she read of Shakespeare, the more she was troubled. “There was no man, dead or alive, that really on the whole gave me so much cause of offense with his contradictions,” she once confessed in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne. “He appeared to be such a standing disgrace to genius and learning, that I had not the heart to ask anybody to study anything.”

She came to think of Shakespeare, and eventually speak of him and write of him, as “Will the Jester” and “that Player” and “that booby” and “Lord Leicester’s groom.” She could not reconcile the deep philosophy and daring statesmanship she found in his plays with the “vulgar, illiterate … deer poacher” who had been advertised as their author. With growing certainty she began to feel that Shakespeare had not written the plays credited to him, that his name had been borrowed to mask the identity of another. But what other? And why the elaborate masquerade?

She scanned the giants of the era, their activities, their writings, and suddenly, blindingly, the truth stood revealed. The plays that bore Shakespeare’s name had been written in secret by a syndicate of creative men with a common purpose. The syndicate, she decided, consisted of Sir Francis Bacon (no ancestor of hers), Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and several other “highborn wits and poets.” These men were idealists and revolutionists. They possessed dangerous democratic ideas in a day when the divine right of kings and queens went unchallenged. Eager to promote liberty, equality, and justice, these men sought to propagandize their progressive views through popular plays performed for the masses.

This was Miss Bacon’s startling, highly imaginative proposition. She did not announce it to the world at once. The news would be delayed four years while she reinforced her argument. But by 1852 it had become definite in her mind, and she could not resist circulating it among her students, her friends, and private audiences.

In that crucial year she was on the genteel lecture-circuit, addressing groups of ladies and their daughters in the better homes of New Haven, Boston, and Cambridge. The first recorded instance of her obsession with her new non-Shakespearean authorship theory dates from her Cambridge talks. A group of fine ladies had purchased tickets to attend Miss Bacon’s lectures, first in the Brattle house and then in the parlor of the Farrar residence. Mrs. Eliza Farrar, married to a professor of mathematics at Harvard, and author of juvenile “books, was responsible for Miss Bacon’s appearance, and would later recall the impression it made.

Speaking without notes, Miss Bacon dwelt on ancient history and dramatized her account by means of pictures and maps. “In these she brought down her history to the time of the birth of Christ,” wrote Mrs. Farrar in
Recollections of Seventy Years
, “and I can never forget how clear she made it to us that the world was only then made fit for the advent of Jesus. She ended with a fine climax that was quite thrilling.”

At the conclusion of one such lecture, Mrs. Farrar remembered, several ladies lingered behind to have tea with Miss Bacon and to chat informally. During the conversation. Miss Bacon mentioned a desire to visit England to search for proofs of her theory. Someone asked, with innocent curiosity, what theory Miss Bacon wished to substantiate. And immediately Miss Bacon was off in a bitter harangue against the ” vulgar, illiterate” Shakespeare. Her listeners recoiled at the blasphemy, and Mrs. Farrar refused to encourage her protegee to discuss the subject further. Nevertheless, at every opportunity Miss Bacon continued to discuss it, until mention of Shakespeare became taboo among her friends. According to Mrs. Farrar, even Miss Bacon’s hostess was forced to “put her copy of his works out of sight, and never allowed her to converse with her on this, her favorite subject.”

One person, however, who met her in Cambridge and heard her discuss Shakespeare did not change the subject, but rather encouraged her and drew her out. Ralph Waldo Emerson in his forty-ninth year was much absorbed by the antislavery movement and occupied with speaking against the Fugitive Slave Law. But only four years before, in England, he had given some lectures entitled “Shakespeare,” and he could still be interested by any academic debate on the Bard, In his journal for Wednesday, May 19, 1852, he wrote:

“I saw Miss Delia Bacon, at Cambridge, at the house of Mrs. Becker, and conversed with her on the subject of Shakspeare. Miss Bacon thinks that a key will yet be found to Shakspeare’s interior sense; that some key to his secret may yet be discovered at Stratford, and I fancy, thinks the famous epitaph, ‘Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear,’ protects some explanation of it. Her skepticism in regard to the authorship goes beyond the skepticism of Wolf in regard to Homer, or Niebuhr to Latin history.”

Apparently Emerson had shown sufficient sympathy for Miss Bacon’s ideas to invite her to expound them further. Three weeks after their meeting, when Emerson had returned to Concord and while Miss Bacon remained in Cambridge, she sent him what she called a “voluminous note … on this subject.” Her outline stressed Sir Francis Bacon rather than a syndicate of writers as really Shakespeare, and she suggested publicizing her theory in print. Emerson was impressed. On June 12, 1852, he replied at some length: “I am deeply gratified to observe the power of statement and the adequateness to the problem, which this sketch of your argument evinces. Indeed, I value these fine weapons far above any special use they may be put to. And you will have need of enchanted instruments, nay, alchemy itself, to melt into one identity these two
reputations
(shall I call them?) the poet and the statesman, both hitherto solid historical figures.”

Emerson thought that a magazine article, followed by a book, would best bring Miss Bacon’s ideas before the public. He offered to assist her in securing publication. Miss Bacon was delighted and grateful, and she told Emerson: “Confirmations of my theory, which I did not expect to find on this side of the water, have turned up since my last communication to you. … Be assured, dear sir, there is no possibility of a doubt as to the main points of my theory… .”

Yet there must have been some tiny doubt. For the English trip had crystallized in Miss Bacon’s mind as the necessary climax to her researches. She did not wish to set her ideas down on paper or publish them until she had visited St. Alban’s, where Sir Francis Bacon had once lived, or until she had examined the Shakespeare collections in the British Museum, or until she had personally lifted the flagstone off Shakespeare’s grave in the Stratford on Avon church and searched about his coffin for documents that might fully substantiate her case. She told Emerson that she must go to England for a year, no more, and at once he rallied to her cause.

She required contacts and money. Emerson was instrumental in helping her to obtain both. He supplied her with letters of introduction, notably one to his old friend Thomas Carlyle. As to the financing of the English expedition, Emerson wrote to Hawthorne’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, and asked that prominent educator if she could assist in obtaining magazine serialization of Miss Bacon’s projected book. “I can really think of nothing that could give such eclat to a magazine as this brilliant paradox.” In short order the pages of
Putnam’s Magazine
were opened to Miss Bacon for a series of articles to be drawn from her book. This gave promise of considerable income, but still it was not enough.

Emerson had one more idea. Miss Bacon would soon be in New York for a series of lectures. He suggested that she call upon an old friend of his, Charles Butler, who was wealthy, well-read, and fascinated by anything bizarre. Emerson arranged the meeting, and Miss Bacon called upon Butler. Like Emerson, Butler was won over. He would be her patron. If she must go to England, he would gladly finance the passage and support her for half a year.

On May 14, 1853, Delia Bacon boarded the steamer Pacific in New York harbor, and ten days later she docked in Liverpool, ready for the showdown with “that Player” who had, so long ago, warned such as she that they would be “curst” if they moved his bones.