Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- General introduction
- Part I Sceptics
- Part II Shakespeare as author
- Part III A cultural phenomenon: Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
- 14 ‘This palpable device’: Authorship and conspiracy in Shakespeare's life
- 15 Amateurs and professionals: Regendering Bacon
- 16 Fictional treatments of Shakespeare's authorship
- 17 The ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’
- 18 ‘There won't be puppets, will there?’: ‘Heroic’ authorship and the cultural politics of Anonymous
- 19 ‘The Shakespeare establishment’ and the Shakespeare authorship discussion
- Afterword
- A selected reading list
- Notes
- Index
15 - Amateurs and professionals: Regendering Bacon
from Part III - A cultural phenomenon: Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- General introduction
- Part I Sceptics
- Part II Shakespeare as author
- Part III A cultural phenomenon: Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
- 14 ‘This palpable device’: Authorship and conspiracy in Shakespeare's life
- 15 Amateurs and professionals: Regendering Bacon
- 16 Fictional treatments of Shakespeare's authorship
- 17 The ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’
- 18 ‘There won't be puppets, will there?’: ‘Heroic’ authorship and the cultural politics of Anonymous
- 19 ‘The Shakespeare establishment’ and the Shakespeare authorship discussion
- Afterword
- A selected reading list
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Foiled Traill's plan of naming a Committee on Degrees for Women out of the supporters of that scheme, + helped to get the other side well represented. It will come to nothing.
Edward Dowden…they are, of course, and must needs be, the strong-holds of the past – those ancient and venerable seats of learning.…[Their principle] is, of course, instinctively conservative. Their business is to know nothing of the new. The new intellectual movement must fight its battles through without, and come off conqueror there, or ever those old Gothic doors will creak on their reluctant hinges to give it ever so pinched an entrance.
Delia BaconPlease don't become a Baconian. I am pestered, in the obsolete sense, by the number of them, + some are so nice + amiable you can't well tell them that they are natural philosophers in Touchstone's sense of the words.
Edward DowdenIn 1855, John Kells Ingram, Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, extended his Chair of Oratory at the college to include a remit in English Literature. In London at the time Delia Bacon was living in Spring Street, Paddington, at the home of a greengrocer, Mr Walker. Over the next several years, Ingram lectured on various literary topics, including the plays of Shakespeare, before being succeeded in the Trinity Chair by Edward Dowden, who would publish, in 1875, the highly acclaimed Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art – one of the standard Victorian works on the poet's career and writings. Eighteen years prior to the appearance of Dowden's book Delia Bacon had, of course, as Samuel Schoenbaum nicely puts it, unleashed ‘a streak of crazed lightning’ across the literary sky by publishing a study claiming that Shakespeare had not actually written the plays attributed to him. Bacon gained – and continues, of course, if indirectly, to gain – many followers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare beyond DoubtEvidence, Argument, Controversy, pp. 178 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013