The American scholar Delia Bacon went mad in Stratford-Upon-Avon while writing her dense 1857 magnum opus, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded.
See also:
- William Shakespeare and His Plays; an Inquiry Concerning Them
- A shorter, clearer version of Delia’s doubts, originally published in Putnam’s Monthly in 1856 and reprinted in her nephew’s biography, pages 98-155
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Recollections of a Gifted Woman” (1883)
- The author’s memory of a troubled friend
- Delia Bacon, A Biographical Sketch (1888)
- By Theodore Bacon (her nephew), whose idea of a “sketch” was a 300+ page book
- Delia Bacon (Wikipedia)
nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris.
Delia devoted her life’s work to her doubts about Shakespeare, but she was neither the first to doubt, nor the last. Her book made a doubter of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, among others.
Both of them believed that Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Other doubters have made other choices. Still others have simply registered a degree of doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays, without declaring allegiance to any other particular author.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Walt Whitman
- Charles Dickens
- Henry James
- Mark Twain
- Sigmund Freud
- David McCullough
- Harry Blackmun
- Lewis F. Powell, Jr.
- John Paul Stevens
- Antonin Scalia
- Sandra Day O’Connor
- Sir John Gielgud
- Sir Derek Jacobi
- Orson Welles
- Mark Rylance (the first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, London)
- Charlie Chaplin
- Lord Palmerston (Victorian Prime Minister)
- Admiral Paul Nitze, USN
- Malcolm X
- Prince Philip
For more, see “Past Doubters”, by The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition.
