_ Chapter XIII
Isn't it odd, when you think of it, that you may list all
the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern
times, clear back to the first Tudors--a list containing five
hundred names, shall we say?--and you can go to the histories,
biographies, and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the
lives of every one of them. Every one of them except one--the
most famous, the most renowned--by far the most illustrious of
them all--Shakespeare! You can get the details of the lives of
all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated
tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges,
lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors,
inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers,
prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys,
bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land
and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists,
claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists,
philologists, college presidents and professors, architects,
engineers, painters, sculptors, politicians, agitators, rebels,
revolutionists, patriots, demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks,
philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists, physicians,
surgeons--you can get the life-histories of all of them but ONE.
Just ONE--the most extraordinary and the most celebrated of them all--
Shakespeare!
You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons
furnished by the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries,
and you can find out the life-histories of all those people, too.
You will then have listed fifteen hundred celebrities, and you
can trace the authentic life-histories of the whole of them.
Save one--far and away the most colossal prodigy of the entire
accumulation--Shakespeare! About him you can find out NOTHING.
Nothing of even the slightest importance. Nothing worth the
trouble of stowing away in your memory. Nothing that even
remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a
distinctly commonplace person--a manager, an actor of inferior
grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him
as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten all about him
before he was fairly cold in his grave. We can go to the records
and find out the life-history of every renowned RACE-HORSE of
modern times--but not Shakespeare's! There are many reasons why,
and they have been furnished in cart-loads (of guess and
conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth
all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly
sufficient all by itself--HE HADN'T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD. There
is no way of getting around that deadly fact. And no sane way
has yet been discovered of getting around its formidable
significance.
Its quite plain significance--to any but those thugs (I do
not use the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence
while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three
generations. The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and
if he wrote them it seems a pity the world did not find it out.
He ought to have explained that he was the author, and not merely
a NOM DE PLUME for another man to hide behind. If he had been
less intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more
solicitous about his Works, it would have been better for his
good name, and a kindness to us. The bones were not important.
They will moulder away, they will turn to dust, but the Works
will endure until the last sun goes down.
Mark Twain.
P.S. MARCH 25. About two months ago I was illuminating
this Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, and I then took occasion to air
the opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no
public consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was
utterly obscure and unimportant. And not only in great London,
but also in the little village where he was born, where he lived
a quarter of a century, and where he died and was buried. I
argued that if he had been a person of any note at all, aged
villagers would have had much to tell about him many and many a
year after his death, instead of being unable to furnish
inquirers a single fact connected with him. I believed, and I
still believe, that if he had been famous, his notoriety would
have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my native village out
in Missouri. It is a good argument, a prodigiously strong one,
and most formidable one for even the most gifted and ingenious
and plausible Stratfordolator to get around or explain away.
Today a Hannibal COURIER-POST of recent date has reached me, with
an article in it which reinforces my contention that a really
celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short
space of sixty years. I will make an extract from it:
Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but
ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men
she has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son, Mark
Twain, or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him,
grows in the estimation and regard of the residents of the town
he made famous and the town that made him famous. His name is
associated with every old building that is torn down to make way
for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and
with every hill or cave over or through which he might by any
possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest which
he wove into his stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson's Island,
or Mark Twain Cave, are now monuments to his genius. Hannibal is
glad of any opportunity to do him honor as he had honored her.
So it has happened that the "old timers" who went to school
with Mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have
been honored with large audiences whenever they were in a
reminiscent mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with
the ordinary boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and
whose every boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of
what was to come. Like Aunt Becky and Mrs. Clemens, they can now
see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here and that
the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were not all
bad, after all. So they have been in no hesitancy about drawing
out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to
get a "Mark Twain" story, all incidents being viewed in the light
of his present fame, until the volume of "Twainiana" is already
considerable and growing in proportion as the "old timers" drop
away and the stories are retold second and third hand by their
descendants. With some seventy-three years and living in a villa
instead of a house, he is a fair target, and let him incorporate,
copyright, or patent himself as he will, there are some of his
"works" that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as
graybeards gather about the fires and begin with, "I've heard
father tell," or possibly, "Once when I."
The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother--WAS my mother.
And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper, of date
twenty days ago:
Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William Dickason,
408 Rock Street, at 2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72
years. The deceased was a sister of "Huckleberry Finn," one of
the famous characters in Mark Twain's TOM SAWYER. She had been a
member of the Dickason family--the housekeeper--for nearly forty-
five years, and was a highly respected lady. For the past eight
years she had been an invalid, but was as well cared for by
Mr. Dickason and his family as if she had been a near relative.
She was a member of the Park Methodist Church and a Christian woman.
I remember her well. I have a picture of her in my mind
which was graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three
years ago. She was at that time nine years old, and I was about
eleven. I remember where she stood, and how she looked; and I
can still see her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and
her short tow-linen frock. She was crying. What it was about I
have long ago forgotten. But it was the tears that preserved the
picture for me, no doubt. She was a good child, I can say that
for her. She knew me nearly seventy years ago. Did she forget
me, in the course of time? I think not. If she had lived in
Stratford in Shakespeare's time, would she have forgotten him?
Yes. For he was never famous during his lifetime, he was utterly
obscure in Stratford, and there wouldn't be any occasion to
remember him after he had been dead a week.
"Injun Joe," "Jimmy Finn," and "General Gaines" were
prominent and very intemperate ne'er-do-weels in Hannibal two
generations ago. Plenty of grayheads there remember them to this
day, and can tell you about them. Isn't it curious that two
"town drunkards" and one half-breed loafer should leave behind
them, in a remote Missourian village, a fame a hundred times
greater and several hundred times more particularized in the
matter of definite facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the
village where he had lived the half of his lifetime?
________
THE END-
Mark Twain's essay: Is Shakespeare Dead? _