"Who Brings Home the Bacon? Shakespeare and Turn-of-the-Century American Authorship (original) (raw)

1996, American Periodicals

In 1856, Delia Bacon published an article in Putnam's Monthly simply titled "William Shakespeare and his Plays: An Inquiry ConcerningThem." A ruckus ensued in both scholarly and popular circles, with repercussions on a wide scale. Delia Bacon argued that William Shakespeare, the Stratford actor, could not possibly be the author of the works attributed to him.Instead, she suggested not only Francis Bacon as a possible author, but also a group of unnamed collaborators creating the Shakespeare opus as a collective work. Other murmurs of dissent about William Shakespeare's claims to authorship had surfaced over the years but Delia Bacon's article, championed by Nathaniel Hawthorne, incited a frenzied controversy peaking in the 1880s and 1890s, at which point it became known as one of the most prevalent, pressing, and exasperating issues dominating the American magazine scene. Delia Bacon envisioned her opponents as fearful of all that a challenge to Shakespeare's integrity would represent."If you dissolve him, do you not dissolve us with him?" she imagines them crying:"If you take him to pieces, do you not undo us, also?" While slightly histrionic, Delia Bacon's constructions of what might really be behind the Stratfordian fears had some basis in reality. The various defensive and counter-offensive maneuvers employed by her critics didmostcertainlyillustrateaprofoundfearofwhatauthorialdisplacementanddissolutionmightrepresent.The debate was formulated as the supreme case study of authorship and ultimately reflected more upon the success of the Baconians' rhetorical strategies and upon theories of realist art than it did upon the popularity of FrancisBacon, claimant. Challenging Shakespeare's authorial power was tantamount to challenging authorial integrity itself, or at least it was so constructed in nineteenth-century discourse. And yet, unlike the formulations of authorship dissected in legal discussions of copyright or analyzed by magazine editors eager to codify new... American Periodicals Vol.6,1996 This content downloaded from 131.247.201.89 on Sun, 25 May 2014 08:27:39 AMAll use subject toJSTOR Terms and Conditions