Sir Walter. . . William Stanley;
Oxford, redoubted Pembroke . . .
And many moe of noble fame and worth.
SHAKESPEARE: King Richard the Third.

The Group Theory, with which can be considered the various
Dual Theories which have been advanced, ¹ has always proved the
most popular of all the arguments which hold that Shakespeare
either did not write his own plays at all or that he wrote only certain
parts of them. Its history covers now a complete century, with the
publication in 1956 of A. J. Evans Shakespeare's Magic Circle.

Its genesis is in Delia Bacon The Philosophy of Shakespeare's
Plays Unfolded, which was published in London in 1857, a small
part of it having appeared the previous year in an article in
Putnam's Magazine, New York. Delia Bacon was unfortunate in
her life and has been doubly unfortunate in her reputation. It has
already been mentioned that she has been credited with the found-
ing of the Baconian Theory, whereas what she really founded (on
perhaps the original impulse of Hart) was the Group Theory;
more serious, she has been dismissed as 'more than half-crazed' ²
because she was unfortunate enough to end her days in a lunatic
asylum. Now this period of insanity no more affects her Group
Theory than the insanity of Collins affects the Ode to Evening or
than the fact that George Townsend committed suicide affects
the value of his answer to Smith. Theories, whether we agree with
them or not, must be considered strictly on their merits, without
regard to the personalities of their creators.

It is safe to say that a woman whose ideas and conversation were
found stimulating by so great a novelist as Hawthorne was not of
unsound mind. I would certainly call her an eccentric, but no
more so than Ignatius Donnelly or Mrs. Pott or than that other
American enthusiast, Orville Owen, who searched the bed of the

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