[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Make it POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

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In 1857, Delia Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded in which she expounded on her theory put forth in an essay in Putnam Magazine a year earlier: that William Shakespeare was the front man for a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen style collaboration that counted Walter Ralegh, Edmund Spenser, and Francis Bacon (no relation) among their number, and that the works attributed to him were in fact theirs. Why did these men, all public, all admired, and all published, decided to slip behind the arras and prop up a Stratford boy?

Delia thinks they hid subversive code in there; code filled with revolutionary philosophy and anti-tyrannical broadsides. Consider a couple of factors: Around the time she published her theory, academics were having a field day speculating about biblical authors and whether Homer was a composite or not; questions of authorship were in the air. She was friends with Samuel Morse. Throw into the mix that Delia was batty and ended her life in an asylum, and you have a recipe for a pre-internet internet conspiracy.

She was brilliant in addition to batty. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a fan. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wasn’t a believer in her Shakespeare conspiracy, per Wikipedia, “retrospectively remarked that America had only two ‘producers’ during the 1850s, ‘Our wild Whitman, with real inspiration but checked by [a] titanic abdomen; and Delia Bacon, with genius, but mad and clinging like a tortoise to English soil.’” Whitman himself called her, “the sweetest, eloquentist, grandest woman.” Harriet Beecher Stowe thought well of her.