The Books: The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ‘Is Shakespeare Dead?’

On the essays shelf:

The Complete Essays Of Mark Twain

Whatever you may think of the Shakespeare author controversy, it sure is interesting. I don’t follow along with all the scholarship (that would be a full-time job and I am quite busy already), but I’m aware of the main pillars of it all. There was even a very bad movie made, called Anonymous, which put forth the Earl of Oxford theory (badly). I reviewed the thing here, and that is really my only contribution to the “Shakespeare Authorial Wars”. But I made my point there, and I stand by it!

Historians and scholars pick through the little information we have about Shakespeare (and, really, we have almost nothing), and then erect gigantic biographies around … nothing. I have never read a biography of Shakespeare, and I never will – for that reason. I don’t know if I could bear reading an entire biography filled with language like “might have”, “it can be assumed that”, “it seems likely that”. But it would have to have language like that, because with Shakespeare, who can say for sure? Anyone who does say “for sure” is a charlatan! And any assumption one makes about the few facts we have in regards to Shakespeare – could also be twisted around to reflect entirely the opposite. You know, the whole “second best bed” brouhaha. Has there ever been a piece of furniture more obsessed over in the history of furniture? I am not saying it’s not a tasty and interesting mystery, but honestly: if we can’t know the truth, then stop pretending we can! Have fun with the mystery. Stop trying to smash the mystery out of existence!

Also, I beg of you: do not try to explain his life through the works of art. That’s a backwards kind of analysis and it never ends well. “He wrote this in the plays. Therefore, he must have actually experienced it.” Biographers make this error all the time, and it is super-annoying. If you’re going to take that route, then I implore you to just ADMIT that you are GUESSING.

Oh well. The Shakespeare Author Controversy is big business, at least in the world of academia, and nobody’s listening to my pleas to let the mystery stand, so why even bother? Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is the only book I’ve read which makes some educated guesses about who Shakespeare was. I babbled about it here years ago. He does make some pretty far-fetched leaps, and again, who can know for sure? But there were some compelling arguments there, the main one being that Shakespeare was a Catholic, in a time that Catholics were being hounded and persecuted. Greenblatt is still clearly guessing, but he didn’t hide that fact. The main contribution of that book was its analysis of John Falstaff, a fascinating chapter. It’s been years since I’ve read the book, so some of the details are lost. But the Falstaff bit is what I really remember. At least Greenblatt admits that what he is talking about cannot, actually, be known. Unlike some other scholars who say that “Shakespeare knew so much about the law, because his plays are filled with legal language: Therefore, he was probably a law clerk at some point.” But if he WERE a law clerk, then there would be some record of him being so, and there is no record.

The flip-side of all of this is the theory that because we have so little information about Shakespeare, and the information we have is not all that persuasive, then he couldn’t have written those plays. Where would he get his obvious legal expertise? (There is barely a scene in ANY of the plays that does not use legal language and concepts, which check out, in terms of accuracy.) Where would he get his obvious expertise in all things monarchical and royal? Was he a courtier or diplomat? Of course he wasn’t. But others were, and maybe THEY wrote the plays. And so the carousel turns. People get tenured positions and book deals and the business continues.

I suppose my point of view is this: I don’t really care who wrote the damn things. I am just glad they exist.

Now: would I be excited if a manuscript of one of the plays, written in Shakespeare’s actual hand, was ever uncovered? Are you kidding me?

But ultimately, I don’t really CARE. I am fine with the mystery.

But I am swayed to the viewpoint that a man named Will Shakespeare wrote those plays – not because he was probably a law clerk at some point, or a diplomat, or any of the other ridiculous airy-fairy theories based on nothing. I believe he wrote them, as opposed to the other candidates, because he was a man of the theatre. And only a man of the theatre would write such masterpieces. Only an actor and a theatre manager and, basically, Show Trash, would understand the dramatic needs of that medium to such a genius degree. This is the viewpoint which is most scorned, of course, because actors are still scorned, and actors are not seen as intelligent. Well, that’s a stupid viewpoint which I don’t credit and try not to even acknowledge. I made the point about Shakespeare being an actor in my review of Anonymous, a film which seemed interested in the histories and the tragedies mostly: that Shakespeare wrote these to bring about political change in England. Sure, great, whatever, but how, then, do you explain Twelfth Night or Much Ado? Or anything as wacky as Midsummer Night’s Dream? Your theory falls apart. If Shakespeare was humorless, then obviously the comedies don’t make sense. Maybe one man wrote the histories and another man wrote the comedies then? Please, enlighten us with your scholarship to explain that away. For me, the only thing that makes sense is also one of the only things that we can KNOW about Shakespeare the actual man, without a shadow of a doubt: The man was an actor.

And that’s good enough for me.

Now. To Twain’s essay. He was introduced to Shakespeare by one of the steam-boat captains he worked under in his earliest days. The captain could recite Shakespeare off by heart, as they trawled up and down the Mississippi, and Twain gives a beautiful portrait of that experience. However, he has since read books about Shakespeare, where the guess-work about his biography reaches absurd levels, and in this essay he sets about dismantling all of the myths. It is his viewpoint that Shakespeare, the man we know so little about, could not have written the plays – mainly because of all of the legal jargon coursing through the plays. That, for Twain, is the “tell”. Scholars have been “worried” about the legal jargon for centuries: how can it be explained? How would Shakespeare get his expertise? Twain says, basically: “That’s easy. He DIDN’T. Therefore, someone else who HAD legal expertise is CLEARLY the author.”

In classic Twain style, he destroys the arguments of his opponents, making them seem totally absurd. I suppose if you have some vested interest in Shakespeare being the one who wrote the plays, you may not find this essay funny. But, like I said, I do think Shakespeare wrote the plays, due to his being an actor and man of the theatre, but I’m not going to fall on my sword defending that viewpoint. I’m just glad we have the plays, whatever assclown wrote them. So my ass doesn’t clench up defensively when I read such an entertaining takedown as Twain’s here. This essay makes me laugh out loud. It’s Twain at his best. He is sarcastic, logical, and contemptuous. I have contempt for some of the same things, the scholars who use words like “might have”, and “it must be assumed that” … I distrust biographers who fall back on those phrases. Twain looks at all of the different theories, the ones that insist that Shakespeare must have written the plays, and goes about destroying them. Helpfully, he lists the facts that we have about Shakespeare, facts that wouldn’t take up 2 pages of note-paper. His signature, of which we only have five actual pieces of evidence, five times he wrote his name (that we know of, in his lifetime). The lawsuit. His controversial will with that pesky “second-best bed” line item which has tortured scholars for centuries. And that’s IT. From these meager facts, these scholars build entire urban cities, with Shakespeare working as a law clerk in his off-hours, and other sorts of nonsense. Twain gleefully rips the scholars to shreds.

I re-read this essay last fall, when I was struggling mightily, again, with my illness. And there’s one line in particular (“I would like to know who held the horses”) which made me laugh so loud and so long in such a dark period that I will always be thankful for this essay. I had to put the book down and guffaw for five minutes. It was beautiful and fun.

Anyway, it’s all very interesting, no matter what side of the argument you come down on!

Here’s an excerpt, which includes the line I love. The essay is quite long in its entirety, this excerpt represents only a small portion of it.

The Complete Essays Of Mark Twain, ‘Is Shakespeare Dead?’, by Mark Twain

The historians find themselves “justified in believing” that the young Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer preserves and got haled before that magistrate for it. But there is no shred of respectworthy evidence that anything of the kind happened.

The historians, having argued the thing that might have happened into the thing that did happen, found no trouble in turning Sir Thomas Lucy into Mr. Justice Shallow. They have long ago convinced the world – on surmise and without trustworthy evidence – that Shallow is Sir Thomas.

The next addition to the young Shakespeare’s Stratford history comes easy. The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-stealing and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play: result, the young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh, such a wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for all time! It is the way Professor Osborn and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural History Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton that exists on the planet. We had nine bones, and we built the rest of him out of plaster of Paris. We ran short of plaster of Paris, or we’d have built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or contained the most plaster.

Shakespeare pronounced “Venus and Adonis” “the first heir of his invention,” apparently implying that it was his first effort at literary composition. He should not have said it. It has been an embarrassment to his historians these many, many years. They have to make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and beautiful poem before he escaped from Stratford and his family – 1586 or ’87 – age, twenty-two, or along there; because within the next five years he wrote five great plays, and could not have found time to write another line.

It is sorely embarrassing. If he began to slaughter calves, and poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest likely moment – say at thirteen, when he was supposedly wrenched from that school where he was supposedly storing up Latin for future literary use – he had his youthful hands full, and much more than full. He must have had to put aside his Warwickshire dialect, which wouldn’t be understood in London, and study English very hard. Very hard indeed; incredibly hard, almost, if the result of that labor was to be the smooth and rounded and flexible and letter-perfect English of the “Venus and Adonis” in the space of ten years; and at the same time learn great and fine and unsurpassable literary form.

However, it is “conjectured” that he accomplished all this and more, much more: learned law and its intricacies, and the complex procedure of law-courts; and all about soldiering, and sailing, and the manners and customs and ways of royal courts and aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his one head every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and every kind of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more intimate knowledge of the world’s greatest literatures, ancient and modern, than was possessed by any other man of his time – for his was going to make brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling use of these splendid treasures the moment he got to London. And according to the surmises, that is what he did. Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able to teach him these things, and no library in the little village to dig them out of. His father could not read, and even the surmises surmise that he did not keep a library.

It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for a time the clerk of a Stratford court; just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Bering Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercises of that adventure-bristling trade through catching catfish with a “trot-line” Sundays. But the surmise is damaged by the fact that there is no evidence – and not even tradition – that the young Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law-court.

It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare accumulated his law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn in London, through “amusing himself” by learning book-law in his garret and by picking up lawyer-talk and the rest of it through loitering about the law-courts and listening. But it is only surmise; there is no evidence that he ever did either of those things. They are merely a couple of chunks of plaster of Paris.

There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding horses in front of the London theaters, mornings and afternoons. Maybe he did. If he did, it seriously shortened his law-study hours and his recreation-time in the courts. In those very days he was writing great plays, and needed all the time he could get. The horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it too formidably increases the historian’s difficulty in accounting for the young Shakespeare’s erudition – an erudition which he was acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk, every day in those strenuous times, and emptying each day’s catch into next day’s imperishable drama.

He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a knowledge of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages: for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges, too, into his dramas. How did he acquire these rich assets?

In the usual way: by surmise. It is surmised that he traveled in Italy and Germany and around, and qualified himself to put their scenic and social aspects upon paper; that he perfected himself in French, Italian, and Spanish on the road; that he went in Leicester’s expedition to the Low Countries, as soldier or sutler or something, for several months or years – or whatever length of time a surmiser needs in his business – and thus became familiar with soldiership and soldier-ways and soldier-talk and generalship and general-ways and general-talk, and seamanship and sailor-ways and sailor-talk.

Maybe he did all these things, but I would like to know who held the horses in the mean time; and who studied the books in the garret, and who frolicked in the law-courts for recreation. Also, who did the call-boying and the play-acting.

For he became a call-boy; and as early as ’93 he became a “vagabond” – the law’s ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in ’94 a “regular” and properly and officially listed member of that (in those days) lightly valued and not much respected profession.

Right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two theaters, and manager of them. Thenceforward he was a busy and flourishing business man, and was raking in money with both hands for twenty years. Then in a noble frenzy of poetic inspiration he wrote his one poem – his only poem, his darling – and laid him down and died:

Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.

He was probably dead when he wrote it. Still, this is only conjecture. We have only circumstantial evidence. Internal evidence.

Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which constitute the giant Biography of William Shakespeare? It would strain the Unabridged Dictionary to hold them. He is a brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris.