Bacon

Bacon, DELIA, American authoress, born 1811, died 1859. She was eminent in her day as a teacher, and wrote several stories, but is now remembered only as an eloquent advocate of the theory that the plays of Shakespeare were written by Lord Bacon. She herself did not originate the idea, but was the first to give it any currency, in her Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857). The book had the honour of a preface from the pen of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the theory has been accepted by not a few persons in England, America, and Germany, who have devoted ingenious reasoning to its advocacy. In Wyman's Bibliography of the Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy (Cincinnati, 1884), there were no less than 255 entries. Donnelly in The Great Cryptogram (1888) tried to show Bacon's cipher concealed in the plays of Shakespeare; Bormann, in Das Shakespeare-Geheimniss (Leipzig, 1894), sought in an elaborate study to prove that the gaps in the scheme of Bacon's acknowledged works were filled by the Shakespearean dramas. Delia Bacon, a Biographical Sketch (1889), gives the pathetic story of her life.