From The New Atlantis, Fall 2022 edition:
One brilliant madwoman’s quest to show that the Bard’s works were secretly penned by the father of science, at war with his own creation
In 1844, a Nashville gentleman named Return Jonathan Meigs was placidly reading Francis Bacon in the evening when he suddenly slammed the book shut and, in the presence of his startled fourteen-year-old son, declared, “This man Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare.”
A few years later, the American writer Joseph C. Hart, in his book The Romance of Yachting and à propos of absolutely nothing — amidst ruminations on a voyage to Spain, and after a section about bullfighting — announced his belief that Shakespeare was just a copyist in a theater, a name assigned to the plays almost at random. “The enquiry will be, who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him?” Hart wrote.
What’s curious about the idea that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays is that, for over two hundred years after his death, there was barely a whiff of rumor that anyone other than Shakespeare had written them, and then, around 1850, there was something in the water, and several people, completely independently, came to the same novel conclusion: Francis Bacon, the statesman, man of letters, and founder of modern science, was the literary genius behind Hamlet and King Lear, The Tempest and Henry V, and all the rest.
Sometime around 1845, the idea got ahold of Delia Bacon, a writer and lecturer living at the time in New Haven, Connecticut. She was not related to Francis, though it is hard to believe that the coincidence of their names didn’t mean something to her. The “monomania” — her term — about Shakespeare actually being Francis Bacon consumed the rest of Delia’s life, much to the consternation of everybody around her. She died in a lunatic asylum, and from that day to this her theory has been considered crackpot. But for Delia it was irresistible, and for her more perceptive admirers there was a method behind the madness.
What her theory was really about was not just the narrow question of the plays’ authorship. It was a whole method of interpretation. On the one hand, she perceived in the plays a deeply embedded, subversive political message — an advocacy for republican, humanist values to combat the tyrannical regimes of Queen Elizabeth and King James I. If that seems extravagant, it anticipates a now well-established field of Shakespeare studies that interprets the plays in very much that light. And, on the other hand, she saw in the plays a stern warning from the 1600s to her own time, the plays admonishing against technocratic materialism, which she called a “‘broken science’ that has no end of ends.” That’s the scientific and technological trend often called “Baconianism,” but, in Delia’s interpretation, Francis Bacon was the avowed enemy of this trend, and the plays his means of transcending it.
As a writer, Delia could be her own worst enemy. She was prolix, self-contradictory, often incoherent — to grapple with her sometimes requires the same sort of imaginative leaps she applied to the texts she was studying. But a murderers’ row of great writers — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and others — saw in her wild vision a coruscating critique of the materialism that was ascendent by the mid-nineteenth century. And even if they often had trouble understanding her, and never took her authorship theory too literally, they seemed to recognize that she was on to something: the compelling idea that the engine of modern history had been set in motion sometime around 1600, that Francis Bacon’s scientific project was at the center of it, and that by a sort of deft intellectual reorientation it might be possible to move oneself out of the grip of a dehumanizing materialism and into a more humane mode of approaching the world.
Call It Not ‘Baconian’
The basics of Delia’s authorship theory are that Francis Bacon was the guiding spirit for the plays, presiding over a collective effort that included Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, and maybe also Sir Philip Sidney, Edward Earl of Oxford, Thomas Lord Buckhurst, and Henry Lord Paget — like an Elizabethan literary super-group.....
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