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    Is Shakespeare Dead? From my autobiography.
    Is Shakespeare Dead? From my autobiography.
    Is Shakespeare Dead? From my autobiography.
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    Is Shakespeare Dead? From my autobiography.

    By Mark Twain

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Mark Twain (1835-1910) was an American humorist, novelist, and lecturer. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, a setting which would serve as inspiration for some of his most famous works. After an apprenticeship at a local printer’s shop, he worked as a typesetter and contributor for a newspaper run by his brother Orion. Before embarking on a career as a professional writer, Twain spent time as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi and as a miner in Nevada. In 1865, inspired by a story he heard at Angels Camp, California, he published “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” earning him international acclaim for his abundant wit and mastery of American English. He spent the next decade publishing works of travel literature, satirical stories and essays, and his first novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). In 1876, he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel about a mischievous young boy growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River. In 1884 he released a direct sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which follows one of Tom’s friends on an epic adventure through the heart of the American South. Addressing themes of race, class, history, and politics, Twain captures the joys and sorrows of boyhood while exposing and condemning American racism. Despite his immense success as a writer and popular lecturer, Twain struggled with debt and bankruptcy toward the end of his life, but managed to repay his creditors in full by the time of his passing at age 74. Curiously, Twain’s birth and death coincided with the appearance of Halley’s Comet, a fitting tribute to a visionary writer whose steady sense of morality survived some of the darkest periods of American history.

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      Is Shakespeare Dead? From my autobiography. - Mark Twain

      Is Shakespeare Dead?, by Mark Twain

      The Project Gutenberg eBook, Is Shakespeare Dead?, by Mark Twain

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Is Shakespeare Dead?

      from my Autobiography

      Author: Mark Twain

      Release Date: July 7, 2008 [eBook #2431]

      Language: English

      Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

      ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?***

      Transcribed from the 1909 Harper & Brothers edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org.  Proofing by Alan Ross, Ana Charlton and David.

      IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

      FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

      Mark Twain

      harper & brothers publishers

      new york and london

      M C M I X

      CHAPTER I

      Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiography and Diary of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be found which deal with Claimants—claimants historically notorious: Satan, Claimant; the Golden Calf, Claimant; the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Claimant; Louis XVII., Claimant; William Shakespeare, Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant; Mary Baker G. Eddy, Claimant—and the rest of them.  Eminent Claimants, successful Claimants, defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb Claimants, showy Claimants, shabby Claimants, revered Claimants, despised Claimants, twinkle starlike here and there and yonder through the mists of history and legend and tradition—and oh, all the darling tribe are clothed in mystery and romance, and we read about them with deep interest and discuss them with loving sympathy or with rancorous resentment, according to which side we hitch ourselves to.  It has always been so with the human race.  There was never a Claimant that couldn’t get a hearing, nor one that couldn’t accumulate a rapturous following, no matter how flimsy and apparently unauthentic his claim might be.  Arthur Orton’s claim that he was the lost Tichborne baronet come to life again was as flimsy as Mrs. Eddy’s that she wrote Science and Health from the direct dictation of the Deity; yet in England near forty years ago Orton had a huge army of devotees and incorrigible adherents, many of whom remained stubbornly unconvinced after their fat god had been proven an impostor and jailed as a perjurer, and to-day Mrs. Eddy’s following is not only immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and enthusiasm.  Orton had many fine and educated minds among his adherents, Mrs. Eddy has had the like among hers from the beginning.  Her church is as well equipped in those particulars as is any other church.  Claimants can always count upon a following, it doesn’t matter who they are, nor what they claim, nor whether they come with documents or without.  It was always so.  Down out of the long-vanished past, across the abyss of the ages, if you listen you can still hear the believing multitudes shouting for Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.

      A friend has sent me a new book, from England—The Shakespeare Problem Restated—well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years’ interest in that matter—asleep for the last three years—is excited once more.  It is an interest which was born of Delia Bacon’s book—away back in that ancient day—1857, or maybe 1856.  About a year later my pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the Pennsylvania, and placed me under the orders and instructions of George Ealer—dead now, these many, many years.  I steered for him a good many months—as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and correction of the master.  He was a prime chess player and an idolater of Shakespeare.  He would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity something to do that.  Also—quite uninvited—he would read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it was his watch, and I was steering.  He read well, but not profitably for me, because he constantly injected commands into the text.  That broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up—to that degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky and difficult piece of river an ignorant person couldn’t have told, sometimes, which observations were Shakespeare’s and which were Ealer’s.  For instance:

      What man dare, I dare!

      Approach thou what are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the there she goes! meet her, meet her! didn’t you know she’d smell the reef if you crowded it like that?  Hyrcan tiger; take any shape but that and my firm nerves she’ll be in the woods the first you know! stop the starboard! come ahead strong on the larboard! back the starboard! . . . Now then, you’re all right; come ahead on the starboard; straighten up and go ’long, never tremble: or be alive again, and dare me to the desert damnation can’t you keep away from that greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch her baldheaded! with thy sword; if trembling I inhabit then, lay in the leads!—no, only the starboard one, leave the other alone, protest me the baby of a girl.  Hence horrible shadow! eight bells—that watchman’s asleep again, I reckon, go down and call Brown yourself, unreal mockery, hence!

      He certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and stormy and tragic, but it was a damage to me, because I have never since been able to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way.  I cannot rid it of his explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere with their irrelevant "What in hell are you up to now! pull her down! more! more!—there now, steady as you go," and the other disorganizing interruptions that were always leaping from his mouth.  When I read Shakespeare now, I can hear them as plainly as I did in that long-departed time—fifty-one years ago.  I never regarded Ealer’s readings as educational.  Indeed they were a detriment to me.

      His contributions to the text seldom improved it, but barring that detail he was a good reader, I can say that much for him.  He did not use the book, and did not need to; he knew his Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication table.

      Did he have something to say—this Shakespeare-adoring Mississippi pilot—anent Delia Bacon’s book?  Yes.  And he said it; said it all the time, for months—in the morning watch, the middle watch, the dog watch; and probably kept it going in his sleep.  He bought the literature of the dispute as fast as it appeared, and we discussed it all through thirteen hundred miles of river four times traversed in every thirty-five days—the time required by that swift boat to achieve two round trips.  We discussed, and discussed, and discussed, and disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate he did, and I got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and there was a vacancy.  He did his arguing with heat, with energy, with violence; and I did

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