Contested Will (46 page)

Bacon's remarks about the subject of her play are quoted from her Preface to
The Bride of Fort Edward, Founded on an Incident of the Revolution
(New York, 1839). For more on early American women dramatists, see
Plays by
Early American Women
, 1775–1850, ed. Amelia Howe Kritzer (Ann Arbor, 1995) and
The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights
, ed. Brenda Murphy (Cambridge, 1999). Bacon's disappointment in seeing Shakespeare staged is recorded by Henshaw, who remembers Bacon saying that it ‘is impossible to put Shakespeare on the stage in a way to satisfy one's expectations … Nothing can equal the imagination.' For Poe on Bacon, see
Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
, ed. Burton R. Pollin, 2 vols (New York, 1985). Bacon may have been thinking about the Shakespeare authorship problem for considerably longer, if her letter of 1854 to her patron, Charles Butler, does not exaggerate: ‘It is more than ten years since I have had' the ‘whole business thrust upon me'.

Gary Taylor notes in his
Reinventing Shakespeare
that it wasn't until 1865 that the Harvard finally added a curriculum requirement of ‘reading English aloud'; another decade would pass before there would be a composition requirement on set literary texts, including Shakespeare's. Bacon's unique approach to teaching Shakespeare is described both by Henshaw and another of her students, Rebecca Taylor Hatch,
Personal Reminiscences and
Memorials
(New York, 1905). Bacon's view of the ‘ignorant masses' is quoted from her
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded
(London and Boston, 1857). The only time she ever expressed the idea that Francis Bacon might somehow have been related to her was in October 1857, after she had published her last word on the authorship controversy and was quite ill. See the letter described by Hopkins, from Maria Mitchell, a scientist who visited the ailing Bacon in Stratford, and in the course of urging her family to come to England and bring her home, mentioned Delia's ‘claim of descent from Francis Bacon'.

For Francis Bacon's reputation, see Graham Rees, ‘
Novum Organum
and the Texts of 1620: Fluctuating Fortunes', in
The Instauratio Magna Part II:
Novum Organum and Associated Text
, ed. Rees and Maria Wakely,
The
Oxford Francis Bacon
, vol. 11 (Oxford, 2004); Charles Webster, ‘The Origins of the Royal Society',
History of Science
6 (1967); and Richard Yeo's excellent ‘An Idol of the Market-Place: Baconianism in Nineteenth Century Britain',
History of Science
23 (1985). For Emerson on Francis Bacon, see Vivian C. Hopkins, ‘Emerson and Bacon,'
American Literature
29 (1958), as well as
The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). For Bacon's reception in antebellum America, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman,
Protestants in an Age of Science:
The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought
(Chapel Hill, 1977), as well as George H. Daniels,
American Science in the Age of Jackson
(New York, 1968). And on the lost sections of Francis Bacon's work, see for
example, Byron Steel [pseud. for Francis Steegmüller],
Sir Francis Bacon:
The First Modern Mind
(Garden City, New York, 1930).

MacWhorter's book was reviewed in The Christian Examiner 52 (March 1857), where his argument was dismissed as a ‘cobweb'. For details of the MacWhorter affair, see Catherine E. Beecher, Truth Stranger than Fiction (Boston, 1850). For more about this period in Bacon's life, see, in addition to Hopkins: Eliza Ware Rotch Farrar,
Recollections of Seventy Years
(Boston, 1866); Caroline Dall,
What We Really Know about Shakespeare
(Boston, 1886); Bruce A. Rhonda, ed.,
Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
(Middletown, Connecticut, 1984); and the groundbreaking work of Helen R. Deese, ‘A New England Woman's Network: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Healey Dall, and Delia S. Bacon', Legacy 8 (1992), pp. 77–91; as well as Deese, ed.,
Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-
Century Woman, Caroline Healey Dall
(Boston, 2005). See, too: Nancy Glazener, ‘Print Culture as an Archive of Dissent: Or, Delia Bacon and the Case of the Missing Hamlet',
American Literary History
19 (2007), pp. 329–49, and Zachary Lesser, ‘Mystic Ciphers: Shakespeare and Intelligent Design: A Response to Nancy Glazener',
American Literary History
19 (2007), pp. 350–6.

Hawthorne's
Notebooks
are a valuable source of information about Delia Bacon and the authorship question; see
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English
Notebooks, 1856–1860
, ed. Thomas Woodson and Bill Ellis (Columbus, Ohio, 1997). So too are his letters: Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Letters, 1853–1856
and
The Letters, 1857–1864
, both volumes edited by Thomas Woodson, James A. Rubino, L. Neal Smith and Norman Holmes Pearson (Columbus, Ohio, 1987). See too Hawthorne's ‘Preface' to Bacon's
The Philosophy of the Plays of
Shakspere Unfolded
.

I quote Leonard Bacon's view of America's political roots from his
A
Discourse on the Early Constitutional History of Connecticut
(Hartford, Conn., 1843). Also see his essay, ‘The Proper Character and Functions of American Literature',
American Biblical Repository
, n.s. 3 (January 1840), as well as Hugh Davis,
Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery
Moderate
(Baton Rouge, 1998). I am indebted to Nina Baym's argument that ‘Bacon's find, displacing republicanism from bourgeois Puritans to Church of England aristocrats, deprived New England Calvinism of its originary historical claim, and, indeed, struck more generally at American exceptionalism' (‘Delia Bacon: Hawthorne's Last Heroine',
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Review
20 [1994], pp. 1–9).

For Emerson's interest in Delia Bacon, see, in addition to Hopkins, Theodore Bacon's
Delia Bacon: A Biographical Sketch
. Emerson's high praise for Delia Bacon is quoted in Helen R. Deese, ‘Two Unpublished Emerson Letters: To George P. Putnam on Delia Bacon and to George B. Loring', in
Essex Institute Historical Collections
122 (1986). For Emerson on Shakespeare, see Sanford E. Marovitz, ‘Emerson's Shakespeare: From Scorn to Apotheosis', in
Emerson Centenary Essays
, ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale, Illinois, 1982), pp. 122–55, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Shakspeare, or the Poet', in
Representative Men: Seven Lectures
, in
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, vol. 4, introduction and notes by Wallace E. Williams, ed. Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), and
The
Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).

For Delia Bacon's time in England see Hopkins's biography. Carlyle's response is quoted in Laporte's essay and Whitman from
November Boughs
, in
The Works of Walt Whitman
, ed. Malcolm Cowley, 2 vols (New York, 1948). Theodore Bacon quotes Carlyle's letter to Emerson on 8 April 1854 that ‘Miss Bacon has fled away to St. Albans (the
Great
Bacon's place) five or six months ago; and is there working out her Shakespeare Problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of all
evidence
from museums or archives'. Hawthorne recorded, after visiting Delia Bacon in England, that her working library was restricted to books that ‘had some reference to her Shakespearian theory': ‘Ralegh's
History of the World
, a volume of Bacon's letters, a volume of Montaigne, and a volume of Shakespeare's plays' (see his
English Notebooks
).

For Bacon's anonymous and landmark essay, see ‘William Shakespeare and His Plays; An Enquiry Concerning Them',
Putnam's Monthly
7 (1856), reprinted in
Americans on Shakespeare, 1776–1914
, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot, 1999). For Richard Grant White, see his ‘The Bacon-Shakespeare Craze',
The Atlantic Monthly
51 (April 1883), and his
Memoirs of the Life of William Shakespeare
(Boston, 1865).

The story about Meigs appears in
Baconiana
6, 3rd series (1908), pp. 193–4. For William Henry Smith, see his
Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays: A Letter to Lord Ellesmere
(London, 1856) as well as his
Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry, Touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-
writers in the Days of Elizabeth
(London, 1857). William Henry Smith was still at it in 1884, when he published a slight pamphlet,
Bacon and
Shakespeare. William Shakespeare: His Position as Regards the Plays, etc
. (London, 1884).

Nathaniel Hawthorne tried to allay her fears about rivals in his letter of 12 May 1856. For more on this, see: John Alden, ‘Hawthorne and William Henry Smith',
Book Collector
5 (1956). Hawthorne, even more than Emerson and Carlyle before him, was fascinated by Delia Bacon; though he too didn't believe her theory, he did more to help her see her book into print than anyone else (finding her a publisher, covering the cost of publication out of his own pocket, and even acceding to the publisher's demand to write a preface to her book). Bacon had much to thank Hawthorne for, though in her increasing paranoia and mental instability, she eventually turned against him as well. See Robert Cantwell, ‘Hawthorne and Delia Bacon',
American Quarterly
1 (1949), pp. 343–60, and James Wallace, ‘Hawthorne and the Scribbling Woman Reconsidered',
American Literature
62 (1990), pp. 201–22.

For Delia Bacon's alternative titles, see her letter from London of 5 July 1855 to the American publishers, Phillips and Sampson (Folger MS Y.c.64). Hawthorne's essay, ‘Recollections of a Gifted Woman', first appeared in
Atlantic Monthly
11 (1863) and is reprinted in
Americans on Shakespeare
. Theodore Bacon quotes Delia Bacon's letter to Hawthorne in October 1856 that ‘the archives of this secret philosophical society are buried somewhere, perhaps in more places than one. The evidence points very strongly this way, it points to a tomb – Lord Bacon's tomb would throw some light on it I think.'

We know about Delia's plans for opening Shakespeare's tomb from Leonard Bacon's letter to Dr George Fayrer, 8 January 1858 (Folger MS Y.c.2599, number 119). Emerson's posthumous praise for Delia Bacon appears in a letter to Caroline Sturgis Tappan on 13 October 1857, quoted in Hopkins, who also quotes a letter that Emerson wrote not long after to Caroline Healey Dall:

For Schoenbaum's harsh judgement, see especially the 1970 edition of
Shakespeare's Lives
. And for Delia Bacon, ‘The author's apology and claim', quoted here, see Folger MS Y. c.2599, number 311. For the international appeal of the Baconian movement, see R. W. Churchill,
Shakespeare and His
Betters
.

My account of Twain's final years draws on Hamlin Hill,
Mark Twain, God's
Fool
(New York, 1973); William R. Macnaughton,
Mark Twain's Last Years as
a Writer
(Columbia, Missouri, 1979); and Karen Lystra,
Dangerous Intimacy:
The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years
(Berkeley, 2004). See too,
Mark
Twain's Autobiography
, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols (New York, 1924);
Mark Twain's Own Autobiography
, ed. Michael J. Kiskis (Madison, 1990); John Lauber, The Making of Mark Twain (New York, 1985);
The
Autobiography of Mark Twain
, ed. Charles Neider (New York, 1959), and Justin Kaplan,
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography
(New York, 1966).

On the rise of autobiography, see
Mark Twain–Howells Letters: The
Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872–1910
, ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1960); Robert Folkenflik, ‘Introduction: The Institution of Autobiography', in
The Culture of Autobiography
, ed. Folkenflik (Stanford, 1993); Loren Glass, ‘Trademark Twain', in
American Literary History
13 (2001), pp. 671–93; and Loren Glass,
Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States,
1880–1980
(New York, 2004). Louis Kaplan, who first tried to tabulate them in
A Bibliography of American Autobiographies
(Madison, 1961), counted over 6,300 of them up to 1945. Also see
American Autobiography 1945–1980
, ed. Mary Louise Briscoe, Barbara Tobias and Lynn Z. Bloom (Madison, 1982), and Robert F. Sayre, ‘The Proper Study: Autobiographies in American Studies', in
American Quarterly
29 (1977), pp. 241–62. See too, Allon White,
The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism
(London, 1981). I quote Conrad from
Some Reminiscences
(London, 1912). As for Twain on autobiographical elements in his own fiction, see Michael Kiskis's
Mark Twain's
Own Autobiography
, which cites a letter Twain wrote to Kate Staples in 1886. Twain said as much two years later in a headnote to
Mark Twain's Library of
Humor
, where he observed (in the third person) that his ‘earliest book,
The
Innocents Abroad
, was the result of his experience and observation' and that his ‘succeeding books continue the story of his own life, with more or less fullness and exactness', as cited in Alan Gribben's essay, to which I am much indebted, ‘Autobiography as Property: Mark Twain and His Legend', in
The
Mythologizing of Mark Twain
, ed. Sara deSaussure Davis and Philip D. Beidler (University, Alabama, 1984). See too Twain's letter to an unidentified correspondent in 1891, where he writes: ‘As the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well equipped for that trade,'
Mark Twain's Letters
, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York, 1917).