Not long ago, I received an email asking me if I'd written a play about Delia Bacon. The person had heard about it through the website Academia.edu.
It turns out, an academic scholar had published a paper analyzing my play The True Author... Revealed. Natalia Vysotska, a professor at Kyiv National Linguistic University, wrote a paper called "'I Am Not a Freak!' Delia Bacon as a Dramatis Persona" that appeared in American and European Studies 2017, which is published by Minsk State Linguistic University.
The paper cites this blog, as well as my play, which appears in The Best American Short Plays: 2008-2010. Katherine Harte-DeCoux has appeared in the one-act play at a couple of different venues in New York, and the piece also had a student production in Ottawa. It portrays Delia Bacon giving an imagined lecture at the U.S. Consulate in Liverpool, arguing that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by Sir Francis Bacon.
Vysotska correctly writes that the aim of the play is "not to take part in the long-lasting authorship debate" concerning the plays of Shakespeare. Rather, the piece "urges us to see the Bacon phenomenon not merely as a historical curiosity, still another 'mad woman in the attic', but as a dramatic figure at the intersection of cultural, gender, and power relations in the mid-19th c. USA going through crucial transformations."
It's gratifying to see my play analyzed in an academic paper, particularly one that also cites Nathanial Hawthorne and the renowned Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro. If you'd like to read the play, you can order a copy of the collection it appears in here.
