Eventually he became so well-versed in Shakespeare’s works that he found he had committed the entire 1623 First Folio to memory, and as a party trick could pinpoint the exact play, act, and scene from which any line given to him was taken. Owen was a hugely successful physician based in Detroit who had a habit of reading and memorizing passages of Shakespeare as a way of clearing his mind between patients. (Even Joseph Hart’s original quibble over Bohemia being landlocked was easily explained by the fact that Shakespeare had based The Winter’s Tale on Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, an earlier work by Robert Greene that made the same mistake.) Still, the authorship question rumbled on-until finally, in the late 1880s, it attracted the attention of Dr.
By the turn of the century, dozens of books and essays had been written on the subject, societies had been established to promote the so-called “anti-Stratfordian” theory, and several high profile figures-such as Walt Whitman and, later, Sigmund Freud-had signed on to the idea.įor every advocate of the anti-Stratfordian viewpoint, however, there was a pro-Stratfordian only too happy to point out the holes in their arguments. They, she believed, had left encrypted messages and descriptions of an entirely new philosophical system hidden deep in the wording of Shakespeare’s plays, which they could not be seen to advocate publicly.Īlthough they didn’t agree with her theory, Bacon’s friendships with several high-profile literary figures of the day (including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson) helped her notion of a secret cabal of writers gain ground in 19th-century literary circles. Bacon theorized that the works were the result of a collaboration between a number of high-society Elizabethan writers and figures, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser and, most notably of all, Sir Francis Bacon. In 1857, writer Delia Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, a work-more than a decade in the making-now credited with providing the earliest fully-formed theory that Shakespeare was not the author of his work. Shakespeare’s contribution, he suggested, was probably limited to providing the plays’ dirty jokes.įollowing the publication of Hart’s memoir, other 19th century writers soon started to break cover and began to question the authorship of Shakespeare’s work themselves. To Hart, such a basic geographical error didn’t sit well with the impossibly high standard of Shakespeare’s writing, which led him to suggest that Shakespeare- dismissed as a “mere factotum of a theatre,” “ a copyist for the prompter,” and a “vulgar and unlettered man”-was not the author of the works attributed to him. Hart was traveling in Europe when he began to ponder an apparent error in the plot to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: Act 3, scene 3 of the play opens in “Bohemia, a desert country near the sea,” despite the fact that Bohemia-a region of central Europe roughly equivalent to the modern-day Czech Republic-is entirely landlocked. Hart wrote an essay in his travel memoir The Romance of Yachting in which he expressly questioned, for the first time, the true authorship of Shakespeare’s work. But what little we do know paints a fairly humble picture-and it’s precisely that that some Victorian scholars and writers just couldn’t square up with the quality of Shakespeare’s writing. We know relatively little of Shakespeare’s life, and only the barest bones about his background and upbringing. By the late Victorian era, Shakespeare was being hailed as a literary genius, the author of perhaps the greatest works of English literature that had ever been written-but the sheer quality of his work soon began to stir up discontent. But as literary styles and tastes changed, Shakespeare’s work began to be appreciated more and more, so that by the mid-19th century, appetite and acclaim for his writing had reached near fanatical levels. In the years immediately after his death in 1616, Shakespeare was merely remembered as a good, though not necessarily brilliant, writer.