In Bill Bryson's "Shakespeare," he addresses the origin of the theory that
Francis Bacon authored works credited to Shakespeare. This was first taken
up by a Delia Bacon, whose escapades Bryson entertainly sets out below. Of
relevance to Andrew, note Delia's decent into madness and her state of mind
when she died. Bottom line: Andrew was Delia Bacon in a previous life.
So where did all the anti-Stratford sentiment come from?
The story begins, a little unexpectedly, with an odd and frankly
unlikely American woman named Delia Bacon. Bacon was
born in 1811 in the frontier country of Ohio, into a large family
and a small log cabin. The family was poor, and became more so
after her father died when Delia was young.
Delia was bright and apparently very pretty but not terribly
stable. As an adult, she taught school and wrote a little fiction,
but mostly she led a life of spinsterly anonymity in New Haven,
Connecticut, where she lived with her brother, a minister. The
one lively event in her secluded existence came in the 1840s
when she developed a passionate, seemingly obsessive, attachment
to a theological student some years her junior. The affair,
such as it was, ended in humiliation for her when she discovered
that the young man was in the habit of amusing his friends by
reading to them passages from her feverishly tender letters. It
was a cruelty from which she never recovered.
Gradually, for reasons that are not clear, she became
convinced that Francis Bacon, her distinguished namesake, was
the true author of the works of William Shakespeare. The
idea was not entirely original to Delia Bacon - one Reverend
James Wilmot, a provincial rector in Warwickshire, raised questions
about Shakespeare's authorship as early as 1785 but these
weren't known until 1932, so Delia's conviction was arrived at
independently. Though she had no known genealogical connection
to Francis Bacon, the correspondence of names was
almost certainly more than coincidental.
In 1852 she travelled to England and embarked on a long
and fixated quest to prove William Shakespeare a fraud. It is
easy to dismiss Delia as mildly demented and inconsequential,
but there was clearly something beguiling in her manner and
physical presence, for she succeeded in winning the assistance of
a number of influential people (though often, it must be said,
they came to regret it). Charles Butler, a wealthy businessman,
agreed to fund the costs of her trip to England - and must have
done so generously, for she stayed for almost four years. Ralph
Waldo Emerson gave her an introduction to Thomas Carlyle,
who in turn assisted her upon her arrival in London. Bacon's
research methods were singular to say the least. She spent ten
months in St Albans, Francis Bacon's home town, but claimed
not to have spoken to anyone during the whole of that time. She
sought no information from museums or archives, and politely
declined Carlyle's offers of introductions to the leading scholars.
Instead she sought out locations where Bacon had spent time
and silently 'absorbed atmospheres', refining her theories by a
kind of intellectual osmosis.
In 1857 she produced her magnum opus, The Philosophy of the
Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, published by Ticknor & Fields
of Boston. It was vast, unreadable and odd in almost every
way. For one thing, not once in its 675 densely printed pages
did it actually mention Francis Bacon; the reader had to deduce
that he was the person whom she had in mind as the author
of Shakespeare's plays. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was at the
time American Consul in Liverpool, provided a preface, then
almost instantly wished he hadn't for the book was universally
regarded by reviewers as preposterous hokum. Hawthorne,under
questioning, admitted that he hadn't actually read it. 'This
shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind
to anybody again as long as [i] live,' he vowed in a letter to a
friend. Exhausted by the strain of her labours, Delia returned to
her homeland and retreated into insanity. She died peacefully
but unhappily under institutional care in 1859, believing she was
the Holy Ghost.
Andrew is Delia Bacon reincarnated 
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