The Square Pegs (28 page)

As to an introduction by Hawthorne, Delia had hoped for one in the beginning and Parker had insisted upon it, but now suddenly, she determined to stand alone. She had read Hawthorne’s generous foreword, and she disapproved. She would gladly dedicate the book to him, but she would not accept his patronage in print. Bennoch and Parker pleaded with her. Hawthorne, exasperated, wrote: “I utterly despair of being able to satisfy you with a preface.” He wanted no dedication. The foreword was a condition of publication. The foreword was favorable in every way. He told her that he had “merely refrained from expressing a full conviction of the truth of your theory. But the book will be in the hands of the public. Let the public judge; as it must. Nothing that I could say, beforehand, could influence its judgment; and I do not agree with your opinion that I have said anything likely to prevent your cause being heard.” He suggested arbitration by Carlyle. Delia turned a deaf ear to his entreaties. Though the book was already set in type, Parker would not proceed unless Delia approved of the introduction. She refused and Parker, enraged, withdrew from the project entirely.

Suddenly, her book was adrift again, and Delia was brought sharply to her senses. Terrified, she informed Bennoch that she had changed her mind. Hawthorne’s preface would be acceptable. But Parker wanted no more to do with Miss Bacon. The weary Bennoch, undoubtedly encouraged by the incredibly patient Hawthorne, turned elsewhere for a publisher. Soon enough, and by rare good fortune, he found one in the smaller firm of Groombridge and Sons, who promptly took over the final printing and binding of the book.

Meanwhile, assured that her theory would soon be given the waiting world, Delia busied herself in Stratford with her last great enterprise. If she could now verify her writings with documentary evidence taken from Shakespeare’s grave, her book would be a sensation and her life’s work would be crowned with immortality. She began her “experiment” by making a preliminary visit to the Holy Trinity Church, hastily surveying Shakespeare’s burial place in the chancel, and then asking a clerk of the church when fewest visitors and tourists were present. He advised her as to the best day, and a week later she returned at eight o’clock in the morning and hovered near the grave of the Bard, awaiting a moment when she might be alone to examine the flagstone over the coffin more closely. But there were at least twenty visitors during the day, and Delia had no time alone. She asked the clerk if she could return one evening after hours. The clerk had no objection.

At seven o’clock one evening, accompanied by Mrs. Terrett, in whom she had confided her daring purpose, Delia went back to the church. The clerk was waiting with key and candle. Delia and Mrs. Terrett went inside, though the elderly landlady was much frightened. “I told her I was not in the least afraid,” Delia related to Hawthorne. “I only wanted her to help me a little. So I groped my way to the chancel, and she waited till the light was struck. I had a dark lantern like Guy Fawkes, and some other articles which might have been considered suspicious if the police had come upon us. The clerk was getting uneasy, and I found he had followed us… .” Delia persuaded the clerk to take Mrs. Terrett with him and to leave her alone. She was left alone only after she promised not to disturb the grave or do anything that might cost the clerk his job.

Now, for the first time, Delia was able to examine the flagstone over Shakespeare’s coffin. She had been directed, by Lord Bacon, to search beneath “stones.” She was worried lest there be another stone under the top lid. If so, there would be room for little else beyond the wooden coffin. She was alone for three hours, poking about in the crevices of the flagstone, judging its weight, peering up at Shakespeare’s bust lost in the darkness. A creak of the floor told her that she was being watched. The worried clerk had reappeared. At last she confessed to this bewildered person what her real purpose was and he, troubled, begged her to consult the church vicar.

The vicar proved most considerate. He did not blanch when he heard Delia’s request. Solemnly, he heard her out. When she was done he did not say No. “I cannot help fancying,” said Hawthorne, “that her familiarity with the events of Shakspeare’s life, and of his death and burial (of which she would speak as if she had been present at 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, and the eloquence with which she knew how to enforce it, had really gone some little way toward making a convert of the good clergyman.” The vicar replied that he could not, under any circumstances, permit Delia to undertake the removal of the flagstone alone. However, it might be permitted in his presence, if she vowed not to touch the coffin itself. At any rate, he wanted time to think about it and to consult a Stratford lawyer who was a personal friend.

In a few days the vicar reported his decision to Delia. While he doubted that her experiment would prove successful, he saw no reason to prevent it. She could go ahead at once, and search beneath the flagstone in his presence if she guaranteed to leave no “trace of harm.” Whether the vicar was merely humoring her, hoping she would withdraw her request, or whether he sincerely meant to give her the chance to prove her theory, we shall never know. For at the brink of discovery, at the moment of scholarly truth, she hesitated. Had Bacon’s cryptic message meant that she would find her confirmation in this actor’s tomb or in his own? Or had he really meant that she look in Spenser’s last resting-place?

“A doubt stole into her mind whether she might not have mistaken the depository and mode of concealment of those historic treasures,” Hawthorne wrote. “And after once admitting the doubt, she was afraid to hazard the shock of uplifting the stone and finding nothing. 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 clues, the enigmas, the pregnant sentences, which she had discovered in Bacon’s letters and elsewhere, and now was frightened to perceive that they did not point so definitely to Shakspeare’s tomb as she had heretofore supposed… .”

She did not go to the vicar again. Instead, she began to haunt the church by night. Lantern in hand, she would make her way down the aisle to the tomb and sit there staring. The age-worn curse leered up at her, and challenged her, but she did not accept its dare. She was afraid. And she was weary beyond all human weariness. Her mind was made up. Her frail hands need not move Shakespeare’s bones. Her book would accomplish the task far better.

In the first week of April 1857 the book, the product of years of privation, obsession, and hope, appeared at last. It was entitled
The Philosophy of The Plays Of Shakspere Unfolded
By Delia Bacon …
with A Preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Author of
“
The Scarlet Letter
,”
Etc
. The title page carried quotations credited to Lord Bacon,
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, and Prospero (the last reading: “Untie the spell”). One thousand copies of the huge volume Delia devoted 100 pages to a statement of her general proposition and 582 pages to her text were printed. Half bore the imprint of Groombridge and Sons, Paternoster Row, London, and the other half, at Hawthorne’s suggestion, the imprint of his American publisher, Ticknor and Fields, Boston, to be delivered for sale in the United States.

The preface by Hawthorne, to which Delia had so strenuously objected, was devoted largely to quotations from Delia’s earlier writings. For the rest, Hawthorne’s pen treated his charge with consideration and courtliness. “My object,” he wrote, “has been merely to speak a few words, which might, perhaps, serve the purpose of placing my countrywoman upon a ground of amicable understanding with the public. She has a vast preliminary difficulty to encounter. The first feeling of every reader must be one of absolute repugnance towards a person who seeks to tear out of the Anglo-Saxon heart the name which for ages it has held dearest… . After listening to the author’s interpretation of the Plays, and seeing how wide a scope she assigns to them, how high a purpose, and what richness of inner meaning, the thoughtful reader will hardly return again not wholly, at all events to the common view of them and of their author. It is for the public to say whether my countrywoman has proved her theory. In the worst event, if she has failed, her failure will be more honorable than most people’s triumphs; since it must fling upon the old tombstone, at Stratford-on-Avon, the noblest tributary wreath that has ever lain there.”

There followed then, in almost 700 labored pages, the unfolding of a theory that might have better been told in 100 pages. As Sophia Hawthorne remarked privately: “Miss Bacon cannot speak out fairly though there is neither the Tower, the scaffold, nor the pile of fagots to deter her.” The first chapter was called “The Proposition,” and in its opening lines Delia revealed her true purpose. “This work is designed to propose to the consideration not of the learned world only, but of all ingenuous and practical minds, a new development of that system of practical philosophy from which THE SCIENTIFIC ARTS of the Modern Ages proceed… .“In short, she was more concerned with the hidden meaning underlying Shakespeare’s plays than with their actual authorship. “The question of the authorship of the great philosophic poems which are the legacy of the Elizabethan Age to us, is an incidental question in this inquiry, and is incidentally treated here.” The secret philosophy beneath the surface of the so-called Shakespearean plays did not come of “unconscious spontaneity,” but rather was the clever product of a “reflective deliberative, eminently deliberative, eminently conscious, designing mind.” The mind was really several minds “under whose patronage and in whose service ‘Will the Jester’ first showed himself.”

The round table of radicals concerned with the common welfare was led by Bacon and Raleigh, and included also Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Buckhurst, Lord Paget, and the Earl of Oxford. Edmund Spenser, though not highborn, was much admired by the others for
The Shepheardes Calender
, brought out in 1579, and was invited to join the group. According to Delia, one critic of the time, unnamed, who praised Spenser as well as Sidney and Raleigh, hinted at this “courtly company” and added mysteriously: “They have writ excellently well, if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest.” It was Bacon who had the idea of employing popular plays as a medium of propagandizing the masses. “The Method of Progression, as set forth by Lord Bacon, requires that the new scientific truth shall be, not nakedly and flatly, but artistically exhibited; because, as he tells us, ‘the great labour is with the people, and this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.’ He will not have it exhibited in bare propositions, but translated into the people’s dialect.” Yes, the plays would be the medium, but their real meaning must not be too apparent and their authorship must not be known. “It was a time … when a ‘
nom 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 good for sport and child’s play merely… .” And when the plays were ready it was Ben Jonson who introduced the actor and theater-manager Shakespeare to this “courtly company” of authors.

In chapter after chapter, Delia reiterated and expanded her proposition, analyzing various Shakespeare plays and exposing the secrets they hid and yet propounded. Her dissection of
King Lear
was typical “It is all one picture of social ignorance, and misery, and
frantic
misrule. It is a faithful exhibition of the degree of personal security which a man of honourable sentiments, and humane and noble intentions, could promise himself in such a time… To appreciate fully the incidental and immediate political application of the piece, however, it is necessary to observe that notwithstanding that studious exhibition of lawless and outrageous power, which it involves, it is, after all, we are given to understand, by a quiet intimation here and there, a
limited monarch
y which is put upon the stage here. … It is a government which professes to be one of law, under which the atrocities of this piece are sheltered. And one may even note, in passing, that that high Judicial Court, in which poor Lear undertakes to get his cause tried, appears to have, somehow, an extremely modern air… .” This play, and all the plays, were part of a “great scientific enterprise,” and “this enterprise was not the product of a single individual mind.”