View source for Delia Bacon

{{Short description|American writer}}
{{Infobox writer
| name             = Delia Salter Bacon
| embed            = 
| honorific_prefix = 
| honorific_suffix = 
| image            = Delia-Bacon (1811-1859).jpg
| image_size       = 
| image_upright    = 
| alt              = 
| caption          = Delia Bacon, from a daguerreotype taken in 1853.
| native_name      = 
| native_name_lang = 
| pseudonym        = 
| birth_name       = 
| birth_date       = February 2, 1811
| birth_place      = [[Tallmadge, Ohio]], U.S.
| death_date       = {{dda|1859|9|2|1811|2|2}}
| death_place      = 
| resting_place    = [[Grove Street Cemetery]], [[New Haven, Connecticut]], U.S.
| occupation       = writer of plays and short stories; Shakespeare scholar
| language         = English
| education        = 
| alma_mater       = 
| period           = 
| genre            = 
| subject          = 
| movement         = 
| notableworks     = 
| spouse           = 
| relations        = 
| partner          = 
| children         = 
| years_active     = 
| module           = 
| website          = <!-- {{URL|example.org}} -->
| portaldisp       = <!-- "on", "yes", "true", etc; or omit -->
}}
'''Delia Salter Bacon''' (February 2, 1811 – September 2, 1859) was an American writer of plays and short stories and Shakespeare scholar. She is best known for her work on the [[Shakespeare authorship question|authorship of Shakespeare's plays]], which she attributed to social reformers including [[Francis Bacon (philosopher)|Francis Bacon]] (to whom she was unrelated),<ref>Shakespeare and the Lawyers, O. Hood Phillips, Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 1972 (2005 reprint), p. 185</ref><ref>{{cite web | url=https://blogs.harvard.edu/houghton/youve-got-mail-deciphering-shakespeare/ | title=You've Got Mail: Deciphering Shakespeare | date=14 December 2012 }}</ref> [[Walter Raleigh|Sir Walter Raleigh]] and others.

Bacon's research in Boston, New York, and London led to the publication of her major work on the subject, ''The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded.'' Her admirers included authors [[Harriet Beecher Stowe]], [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]] and [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], the last of whom called her "America's greatest literary producer of the past ten years" at the time of her death.<ref name="Schiff">{{cite magazine |last=Schiff |first=Judith Ann |title=A genius, but mad |magazine=Yale Alumni Magazine |date=November 2015 |url=https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4189/delia-bacon |access-date=19 December 2015}}</ref>

==Biography==
Bacon was born in a frontier [[log cabin]] in [[Tallmadge, Ohio|Tallmadge]], Ohio, the youngest daughter of  [[Congregationalism in the United States|Congregational]] [[Minister (Christianity)|minister]] [[David Bacon (missionary)|David Bacon]], who in pursuit of a vision, had abandoned [[New Haven, Connecticut|New Haven]] for the wilds of Ohio. The venture quickly collapsed, and the family returned to [[New England]], where her father died soon after. The impoverished state of their finances permitted only her elder brother [[Leonard Bacon|Leonard]] to receive a tertiary education, at [[Yale]], while her own formal education ended when she was fourteen.<ref>James Shapiro, ''Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?,'' faber and faber, 2010,p.93</ref> She became a teacher in schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, and then, until about 1852, became a distinguished professional lecturer, conducting, in various cities in the eastern United States, classes for women in history and literature by methods she devised. At age 20, in 1831, she published her first book, ''Tales of the Puritans'' anonymously, consisting of three long stories on colonial life. In 1832, she beat [[Edgar Allan Poe]] to win a short-story contest sponsored by the Philadelphia ''Saturday Courier''.<ref>Shapiro, 2010,94</ref>

In 1836, Bacon moved to New York, and became an avid theatre-goer. She met the leading Shakespearean actress [[Ellen Tree]] soon after, and persuaded her to take the lead role in a play she was writing, partly in [[blank verse]], entitled ''The Bride of Fort Edward'', based on her award-winning story, ''Love's Martyr,'' about [[Jane M'Crea]]. The play, however, was never performed, due in part to Bacon's health and the harsh criticisms of her brother. It was published anonymously in 1839 (with a note claiming it was "not a play"). The text was reviewed favorably by the ''Saturday Courier'' and Edgar Allan Poe, but proved to be a commercial flop.<ref>Shapiro, 2010, 95-97.</ref>

Returning to New Haven, Bacon met Yale-educated minister [[Alexander MacWhorter III|Alexander MacWhorter]] in 1846.<ref name="Schiff"/> Time in each other's company and a trip to [[Northampton]] convinced many of the impropriety of their relationship. MacWhorter was brought to [[Ecclesiastical court|ecclesiastical trial]] by Bacon's brother Leonard for "dishonorable conduct," but was acquitted in a 12–11 vote.<ref name="Schiff"/> Public opinion compelled Bacon to leave New Haven for Ohio, while [[Catharine Beecher]] wrote a book defending her conduct.<ref name="Schiff"/>

Bacon died in 1859, having in 1858 been placed by her family in the care of a [[lunatic asylum]] at Hartford, Connecticut. According to her nephew, Theodore Bacon, she had been seized by a "violent mania" while in England, and had been "removed to an excellent private asylum for a small number of insane persons" at [[Henley-in-Arden]], Warwickshire, before being brought back to America.<ref>Shakespeare and the American Nation, Kim C. Sturgess, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 179</ref><ref>William Shakespeare: A Literary Biography, Karl Elze, George Bell & Sons, 1888, p. 269</ref><ref>Delia Bacon, Theodore Bacon, pp. 311-314</ref>

==Shakespeare authorship theory==
Delia Bacon withdrew from public life and lecturing in early 1845, and began to research intensively a theory she was developing over the authorship of Shakespeare's works, which she mapped out by October of that year. However a decade was to pass before her book ''The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded'' (1857) was to see print. During these years she was befriended by  [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]] and [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], and, after securing sponsorship to travel for research to England, in May 1853, met [[Thomas Carlyle]], who though intrigued, shrieked loudly as he heard her exposition.<ref>Shapiro, 2010, 113-114</ref>

This was the heyday of [[higher criticism]], which was claiming to have uncovered the [[Documentary hypothesis|multiple authorship]] of the Bible and positing [[Homeric scholarship#The 18th and 19th centuries|the composite nature]] of masterpieces like those attributed to [[Homer]]. It was also a period of rising [[bardolatry]], the deification of Shakespeare's genius, and a widespread, almost hyperbolic veneration for the philosophical genius of [[Francis Bacon]].<ref>Shapiro, 100-101</ref>  Delia Bacon was influenced by these currents.<ref>Shapiro, 2010 p98-99</ref> Like many of her time, she approached Shakespearean drama as philosophical masterpieces written for a closed aristocratic society of courtiers and monarchs, and found it difficult to believe they were written either with commercial intent or for a popular audience.<ref>Shapiro, 2010, p.99.</ref> Puzzled by the gap between the bare facts of [[William Shakespeare]]'s life and his vast literary output, she intended to prove that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written by a coterie of men, including [[Francis Bacon (philosopher)|Francis Bacon]], Sir [[Walter Raleigh]] and [[Edmund Spenser]], for the purpose of inculcating a philosophic system, for which they felt that they themselves could not afford to assume the responsibility. This system she set out to discover beneath the superficial text of the plays. From her friendship with [[Samuel Morse]], an authority on codes, and [[encryption]] for the telegraph, she learned of Bacon's interest in secret [[ciphers]], and this prompted her own approach to the authorship question.<ref>Shapiro, 2010 p.102</ref>

Her theory proposed that the missing fourth part of Francis Bacon's unfinished [[Masterpiece|magnum opus]], the ''[[Instauratio Magna]]'' had in fact survived in the form of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.<ref>Shapiro, 2010, p.102</ref> Delia Bacon argued that the great plays were the collective effort of a:
<blockquote>little clique of disappointed and defeated politicians who undertook to head and organize popular opposition against the government, and were compelled to retreat from that enterprise.. .Driven from one field, they showed themselves in another. Driven from the open field, they fought in secret.<ref name="Shapiro, 2010, 107">Shapiro, 2010, 107</ref></blockquote>
The cenacle opposing the '[[despotism]]' of Queen [[Elizabeth I]] and [[James VI and I|King James]], like the knights of [[King Arthur]]'s [[Round Table]] consisted of Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, and perhaps Edmund Spenser, [[Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset|Lord Buckhurst]] and the [[Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford|Earl of Oxford]],<ref name="Shapiro, 2010, 107"/> all putatively employing playwriting to speak to both rulers and the ruled as committed [[republicanism|republican]]s vindicating that cause against tyranny. She had, in [[James S. Shapiro]]'s reading, a "revolutionary agenda" that consisted in upturning the myths of America's founding fathers and the Puritan heritage.<ref>Shapiro, 2010, 109-110</ref>

Bacon's skeptical attitude towards the orthodox view of Shakespearean authorship invoked contempt of many, such as [[Richard Grant White]].<ref>Shapiro, 2010, 118-119</ref> However, Emerson assisted her in publishing her first essay on the Shakespearean question in the January 1856 issue of ''[[Putnam's Magazine]]'':

<blockquote> How can we undertake to account for the literary miracles of antiquity, while this great myth of the modern ages still lies at our own door, unquestioned? This vast, magical, unexplained phenomenon which our own times have proceed under our own eyes, appears to be, indeed, the only thing which our modern rationalism is not to be permitted to meddle with. For, here the critics themselves still veil their faces, filling the air with mystic utterances which seem to say, that to this shrine at least, for the footstep of the common reason and the common sense, there is yet no admittance.<ref>Delia Bacon, "William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them", ''Putnam’s Monthly'', VII: XXXVII (January 1856): 1-19.</ref></blockquote>	
	
Emerson, who greatly admired Bacon, and who was skeptical of her claim, wrote that she would need "enchanted instruments, nay alchemy itself, to melt into one identity these two reputations",<ref>Shapiro,2010, 111</ref> and retrospectively remarked that America had only two "producers" during the 1850s, "Our wild Whitman, with real inspiration but checked by [a] titanic abdomen; and Delia Bacon, with genius, but mad and clinging like a tortoise to English soil."<ref>Ralph Leslie Rusk, ''The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson'', New York: Columbia University Press, 1966  Vol. V, 86-87.</ref> Though he was intrigued by her insights into the plays, he grew skeptical of the 'magical cipher' of which Bacon wrote without ever producing evidence for it.<ref>Shapiro, 2010, 112-113</ref>

According to [[Walt Whitman]], himself among the most outspoken of 19th century anti-Stratfordians, she was "the sweetest, eloquentist, grandest woman…that America has so far produced….and, of course, very unworldly, just in all ways such a woman as was calculated to bring the whole literary pack down on her, the orthodox, cruel, stately, dainty, over-fed literary pack – worshipping tradition, unconscious of this day’s honest sunlight."<ref>Cited in Paul A. Nelson, “Walt Whitman on Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Oxford Society Newsletter, Fall 1992 (28: 4A), 2.</ref>

James Shapiro interprets her theory both in terms of the cultural tensions of her historical milieu, and as consequential on an intellectual and emotional crisis that unfolded as she both broke with her Puritan upbringing and developed a deep confidential relationship with a fellow lodger, [[Alexander MacWhorter III|Alexander MacWhorter]], a young theology graduate from Yale, which was subsequently interrupted by her brother. MacWhorter was absolved of culpability in a subsequent ecclesiastical trial, whose verdict led to a rift between Delia and her fellow congregationalists.<ref>Shapiro 2010, 103-106.</ref>

==Legacy==

One recent assessment echoes the favorable view of Bacon held by Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman: 
<blockquote>
For too long critics have depicted [her] as a tragicomic  figure, blindly pursuing a fantastic mission in obscurity and isolation, only to end in silence and madness….this is not to say that the stereotype is without basis. On the contrary, her sad story established an archetype for the story of the Shakespeare authorship at large – or at least one element of it: an otherworldly pursuit of truth that produces gifts for a world that is indifferent or hostile to them.<ref>Warren Hope and Kim Holston, ''The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Claimants to Authorship, and Their Champions and Detractors''.  Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 1992, 1.</ref> </blockquote>

James S. Shapiro argues that her political reading of the plays, and her insistence on [[collaborative authorship]], anticipated modern approaches by a century and a half.
<blockquote>Had she limited her argument to these points instead of conjoining it to an argument about how Shakespeare couldn't have written them, there is little doubt that, instead of being dismissed as a crank and a madwoman, she would be hailed today as the precursor of the [[New Historicism|New Historicists]], and the first to argue that the plays anticipated the political upheavals England experienced in the mid-seventeenth century. But Delia Bacon couldn't stop at that point. Nor could she concede that the republican ideas she located in the plays circulated widely at the time and were as available to William Shakespeare as they were to Walter Raleigh or Francis Bacon.<ref>Shapiro, 2010,109</ref></blockquote>

Her nephew, Theodore Bacon, wrote a biography of her entitled ''Delia Bacon: A Sketch'' (Boston, 1888), and Nathaniel Hawthorne included an appreciative chapter, "Recollections of a Gifted Woman", in his book ''Our Old Home'' (Boston, 1863).  

She died in [[Hartford, Connecticut|Hartford]], Connecticut. She is interred in [[Grove Street Cemetery]] in [[New Haven, Connecticut]].

Bacon and her theories are featured heavily in [[Jennifer Lee Carrell]]'s novel ''[[Interred with Their Bones]]''.

==Notes==
{{Reflist|30em}}

==Further reading==

* {{cite book |last=Bacon |first=Theodore |title=Delia Bacon, A Biographical Sketch |year=1888 |publisher=Houghton, Mifflin and Co. |location=Boston and New York |url=https://archive.org/details/deliabaconbiogra00baco}}
* {{cite BDA1906 |wstitle= Bacon, Delia |volume= 1 |page=177 |short=}}
*{{cite journal |last=Glazener |first=Nancy |date=2007 |title=Print Culture as an Archive of Dissent: Or, Delia Bacon and the Case of the Missing Hamlet |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/215813/pdf |journal=American Literary History |volume=19 |issue=2 |pages=329–349|doi=10.1093/alh/ajm009 |url-access=subscription }}
* {{cite book |last=Hopkins |first=Viviane Constance |title=Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon |date=1959 |publisher=Harvard University Press |location=Cambridge, MA |isbn= 9780674498631}}
* [http://findingaids.folger.edu/dfodelia.xml Papers of Delia Salter Bacon] can be found at the Folger Shakespeare Library: 323 items (2 boxes), Folger MS Y.c.2599 (1-323)

==External links==
{{Commons category}}
* {{Gutenberg author |id=2389}}
* {{Internet Archive author |sname=Delia Bacon}}
* [https://archive.org/details/philosophyofpla00baco ''The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded''] at Archive.org.
* {{Find a Grave|6652291}}

{{Shakespeare authorship question}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bacon, Delia}}
[[Category:1811 births]]
[[Category:1859 deaths]]
[[Category:Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship]]
[[Category:Burials at Grove Street Cemetery]]
[[Category:Shakespearean scholars]]
[[Category:Shakespeare authorship theorists]]
[[Category:19th-century American women writers]]
[[Category:American women short story writers]]
[[Category:Writers from New Haven, Connecticut]]
[[Category:19th-century American short story writers]]
[[Category:Dramatists and playwrights from Connecticut]]