Delia Bacon

Well restated and closely reasoned, and my fifty years' interest in that matter, asleep for the last three years, is excited once more.

It is an interest which was born of Delia Bacon's book, away back in that ancient day, 1857, or maybe 1856.

About a year later, my pilot master, Bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the Pennsylvania and placed me under the orders and instructions of George Ealer, dead now these many, many years.

I steered for him a good many months, as was the humble duty of the pilot apprentice, stood a daylight watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and correction of the master.

He did not use the book and did not need to.

He knew his Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication table.

Did he have something to say, this Shakespeare-adoring Mississippi pilot, unned Delia Bacon's book? Yes.

And he said it, said it all the time, for months, in the morning watch, the middle watch, the dog watch, and probably kept it going in his sleep.

I'm talking about the beliefs about her violent death, which started actually during her reign and continued throughout the centuries since.

And some are very, very funny, and, um, some combine with the Shakespeare controversy because, uh, starting in the 19th century, uh, and starting actually with Delia Bacon, uh, was the belief that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays.

Hmm.

And, uh, there are many, many in the years since of potential authors, but the two I find most fascinating are, uh, Francis Bacon, who of course Delia toward the end for- claimed as an ancestor, and there was no relation, and, uh, De Vere, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

In social science, Inca kippis, the knotted cords used as tax records, and video game design, how reward schedules keep people playing.

In Humanities, Delia Bacon, and the theory that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, and Galileo's Trial.

Now, here's what holds those back.

The January 2026 ones are the right age, but nothing from that test has come back yet.

As the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate has pointed out, virtually no one in Shakespeare's lifetime or for the first 200 years after his death expressed the slightest doubt about his authorship.

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.

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.