Delia Bacon - Bacon's Legacy

Bacon's Legacy

Although Delia Bacon is still regarded by many literary scholars as a quintessential Hester Prynne madwoman, one recent reassessment challenges this, restoring the favorable view of Bacon held by Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman:

For too long critics have depicted 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.

James Shapiro argues that her political reading of the plays, and her insistence on collaborative authorship, anticipated modern approaches by a century and a half.

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 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 Ralegh or Francis Bacon.

There is a biography by her nephew, Theodore Bacon, Delia Bacon: A Sketch (Boston, 1888), and an appreciative chapter, "Recollections of a Gifted Woman," in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Our Old Home (Boston, 1863). She died in Hartford, Connecticut.

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

She is interred in Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut.