


Mark Twain 



Is Shakespeare Dead? 




About the print version 
Is Shakespeare Dead? From my autobiography. 
Mark Twain 
Harper & Brothers 
New York 
1909 
Published: 1909 




IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD? 
FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



MARK TWAIN 
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

MCMIX Copyright, 1909, by MARK TWAIN COMPANY.
All rights reserved.
Published April, 1909.









PUBLISHERS' NOTE 
Chapter VIII, "Shakespeare as a Lawyer," is taken from "The Shakespeare 
Problem Restated," by George G. Greenwood, M.P., published by John Lane, of 
London, and the John Lane Company, of New York. We are indebted to the John Lane 
Company for permission to publish the extract. 





IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?
FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY





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SCATTERED here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript which 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 mine with the reserve 
and moderation of a subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a 
pilot-house that is perched forty feet above the water. He was fiercely loyal to 
Shakespeare and cordially scornful of Bacon and of all the pretensions of the Baconians. So was I -- at first. And at first he was glad that that was my attitude. There were even 
indications that he admired it; indications dimmed, it is true, by the distance 
that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical altitude and my lowly one, yet 
perceptible to me; perceptible, and translatable into a compliment -- compliment 
coming down from above the snow-line and not well thawed in the transit, and not 
likely to set anything afire, not even a cub-pilot's self-conceit; still a 
detectable compliment, and precious. 
Naturally it flattered me into being more loyal to Shakespeare -- if possible 
-- than I was before, and more prejudiced against Bacon -- if possible -- than I 
was before. And so we discussed and discussed, both on the same side, and were 
happy. For a while. Only for a while. 

Only for a very little while, a very, very, very little while. Then the 
atmosphere began to change; began to cool off. 
A brighter person would have seen what the trouble was, earlier than I did, 
perhaps, but I saw it early enough for all practical purposes. You see, he was 
of an argumentative disposition. Therefore it took him but a little time to get 
tired of arguing with a person who agreed with everything he said and 
consequently never furnished him a provocative to flare up and show what he 
could do when it came to clear, cold, hard, rose-cut, hundred-faceted, 
diamond-flashing reasoning. That was his name for it. It has been applied since, 
with complacency, as many as several times, in the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle. On 
the Shakespeare side. 
Then the thing happened which has happened to more persons than to me when principle and personal interest found themselves in opposition to each 
other and a choice had to be made: I let principle go, and went over to the 
other side. Not the entire way, but far enough to answer the requirements of the 
case. That is to say, I took this attitude, to wit: I only believed Bacon wrote 
Shakespeare, whereas I knew Shakespeare didn't. Ealer was satisfied with that, 
and the war broke loose. Study, practice, experience in handling my end of the 
matter presently enabled me to take my new position almost seriously; a little 
bit later, utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, 
devotedly; finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly. After that, I was 
welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I looked down 
with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody else's faith that didn't tally with mine. That faith, imposed upon me by self-interest in that ancient 
day, remains my faith to-day, and in it I find comfort, solace, peace, and 
never-failing joy. You see how curiously theological it is. The "rice Christian" 
of the Orient goes through the very same steps, when he is after rice and the 
missionary is after him; he goes for rice, and remains to worship. 
Ealer did a lot of our "reasoning" -- not to say substantially all of it. The 
slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it by that large name. We others 
do not call our inductions and deductions and reductions by any name at all. 
They show for themselves, what they are, and we can with tranquil confidence 
leave the world to ennoble them with a title of its own choosing. 
Now and then when Ealer had to stop to cough, I pulled my induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead myself: always getting eight feet, 
eight-and-a-half, often nine, sometimes even quarter-less-twain -- as I 
believed; but always "no bottom," as he said. 
I got the best of him only once. I prepared myself. I wrote out a passage 
from Shakespeare -- it may have been the very one I quoted a while ago, I don't 
remember -- and riddled it with his wild steamboatful interlardings. When an 
unrisky opportunity offered, one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and 
buoyed a tangled patch of crossings known as Hell's Half Acre, and were aboard 
again and he had sneaked the Pennsylvania triumphantly through it without once 
scraping sand, and the A. T. Lacey had followed in our wake and got stuck, and 
he was feeling good, I showed it to him. It amused him. I asked him to fire it 
off: read it; read it, I diplomatically added, as only he could read dramatic poetry. The compliment 
touched him where he lived. He did read it; read it with surpassing fire and 
spirit; read it as it will never be read again; for he knew how to put the right 
music into those thunderous interlardings and make them seem a part of the text, 
make them sound as if they were bursting from Shakespeare's own soul, each one 
of them a golden inspiration and not to be left out without damage to the massed 
and magnificent whole. 
I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited until he 
brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet position, my pet argument, the 
one which I was fondest of, the one which I prized far above all others in my 
ammunition-wagon, to wit: that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's 
works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, 
and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways -- and if Shakespeare was 
possessed of the infinitely-divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, 
how did he get it, and where, and when? 
"From books." 
From books! That was always the idea. I answered as my readings of the 
champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me to answer: that a 
man can't handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of 
a trade at which he has not personally served. He will make mistakes; he will 
not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right; and the 
moment he departs, by even a shade, from a common trade-form, the reader who has 
served that trade will know the writer hasn't. Ealer would not be convinced; he said a man could learn how to 
correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and free-masonries of any trade by 
careful reading and studying. But when I got him to read again the passage from 
Shakespeare with the interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books couldn't 
teach a student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and 
perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and make 
no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover. It was a triumph for me. 
He was silent awhile, and I knew what was happening: he was losing his temper. 
And I knew he would presently close the session with the same old argument that 
was always his stay and his support in time of need; the same old argument, the 
one I couldn't answer -- because I dasn't: the argument that I was an ass, and better shut up. He delivered it, and I obeyed. 
Oh, dear, how long ago it was -- how pathetically long ago! And here am I, 
old, forsaken, forlorn and alone, arranging to get that argument out of somebody 
again. 
When a man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without saying that he 
keeps company with other standard authors. Ealer always had several high-class 
books in the pilot-house, and he read the same ones over and over again, and did 
not care to change to newer and fresher ones. He played well on the flute, and 
greatly enjoyed hearing himself play. So did I. He had a notion that a flute 
would keep its health better if you took it apart when it was not standing a 
watch; and so, when it was not on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the 
compass-shelf under the breast-board. When the Pennsylvania blew up and became a drifting rack-heap freighted with 
wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother Henry among them), pilot Brown 
had the watch below, and was probably asleep and never knew what killed him; but 
Ealer escaped unhurt. He and his pilot-house were shot up into the air; then 
they fell, and Ealer sank through the ragged cavern where the hurricane deck and 
the boiler deck had been, and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on top 
of one of the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of scalding and 
deadly steam. But not for long. He did not lose his head: long familiarity with 
danger had taught him to keep it, in any and all emergencies. He held his 
coat-lapels to his nose with one hand, to keep out the steam, and scrabbled 
around with the other till he found the joints of his flute, then he took measures to save himself alive, and was successful. I was not on board. I 
had been put ashore in New Orleans by Captain Klinefelter. The reason -- 
however, I have told all about it in the book called Old Times on the 
Mississippi, and it isn't important anyway, it is so long ago.

II
WHEN I was a Sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years ago, I 
became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about him. I 
began to ask questions, but my class-teacher, Mr. Barclay the stone-mason, was 
reluctant about answering them, it seemed to me. I was anxious to be praised for 
turning my thoughts to serious subjects when there wasn't another boy in the 
village who could be hired to do such a thing. I was greatly interested in the 
incident of Eve and the serpent, and thought Eve's calmness was perfectly noble. 
I asked Mr. Barclay if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached 
by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber. He did not answer my 
question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and 
comprehension. I will say for Mr. Barclay that he was willing to tell me the 
facts of Satan's history, but he stopped there: he wouldn't allow any discussion 
of them. 
In the course of time we exhausted the facts. There were only five or six of 
them, you could set them all down on a visiting-card. I was disappointed. I had 
been meditating a biography, and was grieved to find that there were no 
materials. I said as much, with the tears running down. Mr. Barclay's sympathy 
and compassion were aroused, for he was a most kind and gentle-spirited man, and 
he patted me on the head and cheered me up by saying there was a whole vast 
ocean of materials! I can still feel the happy thrill which these blessed words shot through me. 
Then he began to bail out that ocean's riches for my encouragement and joy. 
Like this: it was "conjectured" -- though not established -- that Satan was 
originally an angel in heaven; that he fell; that he rebelled, and brought on a 
war; that he was defeated, and banished to perdition. Also, "we have reason to 
believe" that later he did so-and-so; that "we are warranted in supposing"that 
at a subsequent time he travelled extensively, seeking whom he might devour; 
that a couple of centuries afterward, "as tradition instructs us," he took up 
the cruel trade of tempting people to their ruin, with vast and fearful results; 
that by-and-by, "as the probabilities seem to indicate," he may have done 
certain things, he might have done certain other things, he must have done still 
other things. 
And so on and so on. We set down the five known facts by themselves, on a 
piece of paper, and numbered it "page 1"; then on fifteen hundred other pieces 
of paper we set down the "conjectures," and "suppositions," and "maybes," and 
"perhapses," and "doubtlesses," and "rumors," and "guesses," and 
"probabilities," and "likelihoods," and "we are permitted to thinks," and "we 
are warranted in believings," and "might have beens," and "could have beens," 
and "must have beens," and "unquestionablys," and "without a shadow of doubts" 
-- and behold! 
Materials? Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare! 
Yet he made me put away my pen; he would not let me write the history of 
Satan. Why? Because, as he said, he had suspicions; suspicions that my attitude 
in this matter was not reverent; and that a person must be reverent when writing about the sacred characters. He 
said any one who spoke flippantly of Satan would be frowned upon by the 
religious world and also be brought to account. 
I assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had wholly misconceived 
my attitude; that I had the highest respect for Satan, and that my reverence for 
him equalled, and possibly even exceeded, that of any member of any church. I 
said it wounded me deeply to perceive by his words that he thought I would make 
fun of Satan, and deride him, laugh at him, scoff at him: whereas in truth I had 
never thought of such a thing, but had only a warm desire to make fun of those 
others and laugh at them. "What others?" "Why, the Supposers, the Perhapsers, 
the Might-Have-Beeners, the Could-Have-Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners, the Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters, the 
We-are-Warranted-in-Believingers, and all that funny crop of solemn architects 
who have taken a good solid foundation of five indisputable and unimportant 
facts and built upon it a Conjectural Satan thirty miles high." 
What did Mr. Barclay do then? Was he disarmed? Was he silenced? No. He was 
shocked. He was so shocked that he visibly shuddered. He said the Satanic 
Traditioners and Perhapsers and Conjecturers were themselves sacred! As sacred 
as their work. So sacred that whoso ventured to mock them or make fun of their 
work, could not afterward enter any respectable house, even by the back door. 
How true were his words, and how wise! How fortunate it would have been for 
me if I had heeded them. But I was young, I was but seven years of age, and vain, foolish, and anxious to attract 
attention. I wrote the biography, and have never been in a respectable house 
since.

III 
How curious and interesting is the parallel -- as far as poverty of 
biographical details is concerned -- between Satan and Shakespeare. It is 
wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite alone, there is nothing resembling it 
in history, nothing resembling it in romance, nothing approaching it even in 
tradition. How sublime is their position, and how over-topping, how 
sky-reaching, how supreme -- the two Great Unknowns, the two Illustrious 
Conjecturabilities! They are the best known unknown persons that have ever drawn 
breath upon the planet. For the instruction of the ignorant I will make a list, 
now, of those details of Shakespeare's history which are facts -- verified facts, established facts, 
undisputed facts.



Facts 
He was born on the 23d of April, 1564. 
Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write, could not 
sign their names. 
At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby and 
unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged with the 
government of the town, thirteen had to "make their mark" in attesting important 
documents, because they could not write their names. 
Of the first eighteen years of his life nothing is known. They are a blank. 
On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a license to 
marry Anne Whateley. 
Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne Hathaway. She 
was eight years his senior. 
William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a hurry. By grace of a 
reluctantly-granted dispensation there was but one publication of the banns. 
Within six months the first child was born. 
About two (blank) years followed, during which period nothing at all happened 
to Shakespeare, so far as anybody knows. 
Then came twins -- 1585. February. 
Two blank years follow. 
Then -- 1587 -- he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family 
behind. 
Five blank years follow. During this period nothing happened to him, as far 
as anybody actually knows. 
Then -- 1592 -- there is mention of him as an actor. 
Next year -- 1593 -- his name appears in the official list of players. 
Next year -- 1594 -- he played before the queen. A detail of no consequence: 
other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of her reign. And remained 
obscure. 
Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then 
In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford. 
Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated money, 
and also reputation as actor and manager. 
Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become associated with 
a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly) author of the same. 
Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no 
protest. 
Then -- 1610-1611 -- he returned to Stratford and settled down for good and 
all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes, trading in land and 
houses; shirking a debt of forty-one shillings, borrowed by his wife during his 
long desertion of his family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being 
sued himself for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbor 
who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common, and did not 
succeed. 
He lived five or six years -- till 1616 -- in the joy of these elevated 
pursuits. Then he made a will, and signed each of its three pages with his name. 

A thoroughgoing business man's will. It named in minute detail every item of 
property he owned in the world -- houses, lands, sword, silver-gilt bowl, and so 
on -- all the way down to his "second-best bed" and its furniture. 
It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even his wife: the wife he had 
been enabled to marry in a hurry by urgent grace of a special dispensation 
before he was nineteen; the wife whom he had left husbandless so many years; the 
wife who had had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the lender 
was never able to collect of the prosperous husband, but died at last with the 
money still lacking. No, even this wife was remembered in Shakespeare's will. 
He left her that "second-best bed." 
And not another thing; not even a penny to bless her lucky widowhood with. 
It was eminently and conspicuously a business man's will, not a poet's. 
It mentioned not a single book. 
Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and 
second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned one he gave it a high 
place in his will. 
The will mentioned not a play, not a poem, not an unfinished literary work, 
not a scrap of manuscript of any kind. 
Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that has died 
this poor; the others all left literary remains behind. Also a book. Maybe two. 
If Shakespeare had owned a dog -- but we need not go into that: we know he 
would have mentioned it in his will. If a good dog, Susanna would have got it; 
if an inferior one his wife would have got a dower interest in it. I wish he had 
had a dog, just so we could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog 
among the family, in his careful business way. 
He signed the will in three places. 
In earlier years he signed two other official documents. 
These five signatures still exist. 
There are no other specimens of his penmanship in existence. Not a line. 
Was he prejudiced against the art? His granddaughter, whom he loved, was 
eight years old when he died, yet she had had no teaching, he left no provision 
for her education although he was rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't 
write and couldn't tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's -- she 
thought it was Shakespeare's. 
When Shakespeare died in Stratford it was not an event. It made no more stir 
in England than the death of any other forgotten theater-actor would have made. 
Nobody came down from London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no 
national tears -- there was merely silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and 
Raleigh and the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed 
from life! No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben 
Jonson waited seven years before he lifted his. 
So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of 
Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life. 
So far as anybody knows and can prove, he never wrote a letter to anybody in 
his life. 
So far as any one knows, he received only one letter during his life. 
So far as any one knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford wrote only 
one poem during his life. This one is authentic. He did write that one -- a fact 
which stands undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it out of his own head. He commanded that this work of art be engraved upon his tomb, 
and he was obeyed. There it abides to this day. This is it:


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. 



In, the list as above set down, will be found every positively known fact of 
Shakespeare's life, lean and meager as the invoice is. Beyond these details we 
know not a thing about him. All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by 
the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, 
theories, conjectures -- an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from 
a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.


IV
Conjectures

THE historians "suppose" that Shakespeare attended the Free School in 
Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he was thirteen. There is no 
evidence in existence that he ever went to school at all. 
The historians "infer" that he got his Latin in that school -- the school 
which they "suppose" he attended. 
They "suppose" his father's declining fortunes made it necessary for him to 
leave the school they supposed he attended, and get to work and help support his 
parents and their ten children. But there is no evidence that he ever entered or retired from the school they suppose he attended. 
They "suppose" he assisted his father in the butchering business; and that, 
being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-grown butchering, but only 
slaughtered calves. Also, that whenever he killed a calf he made a high-flown 
speech over it. This supposition rests upon the testimony of a man who wasn't 
there at the time; a man who got it from a man who could have been there, but 
did not say whether he was or not; and neither of them thought to mention it for 
decades, and decades, and decades, and two more decades after Shakespeare's 
death (until old age and mental decay had refreshed and vivified their 
memories). They hadn't two facts in stock about the long-dead distinguished 
citizen, but only just the one: he slaughtered calves and broke into oratory 
while he was at it. Curious. They had only one fact, yet the distinguished citizen had 
spent twenty-six years in that little town -- just half his lifetime. However, 
rightly viewed, it was the most important fact, indeed almost the only important 
fact, of Shakespeare's life in Stratford. Rightly viewed. For experience is an 
author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and 
the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes. Rightly viewed, 
calf-butchering accounts for Titus Andronicus, the only play -- ain't it? -- 
that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote; and yet it is the only one everybody 
tries to chouse him out of, the Baconians included. 
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 trust-worthy 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 very 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 supposably wrenched from that school where he was 
supposably 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 the law 
courts; and all about soldiering, and sailoring, 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 great literatures, ancient and 
modern, than was possessed by any other man of his time -- for he 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 exercisers 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 travelled 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 meantime; 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.
V
"We May Assume"

IN the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults are transacting 
business. Two of these cults are known as the Shakespearites and the Baconians, 
and I am the other one -- the Brontosaurian. 
The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's Works; the 
Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the Brontosaurian doesn't really 
know which of them did it, but is quite composedly and contentedly sure that 
Shakespeare didn't, and strongly suspects that Bacon did. We all have to do a 
good deal of assuming, but I am fairly certain that in every case I can call to mind the Baconian assumers have 
come out ahead of the Shakespearites. Both parties handle the same materials, 
but the Baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and rational and 
persuasive results out of them than is the case with the Shakespearites. The 
Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a definite principle, an unchanging and 
immutable law -- which is: 2 and 8 and 7 and 14, added together, make 165. I 
believe this to be an error. No matter, you cannot get a habit-sodden 
Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials upon any other basis. With the Baconian 
it is different. If you place before him the above figures and set him to adding 
them up, he will never in any case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine 
cases out of ten he will get just the proper 31.

Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and homely way 
calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the ignorant and unintelligent. 
We will suppose a case: take a lap-bred, house-fed, uneducated, inexperienced 
kitten; take a rugged old Tom that's scarred from stem to rudder-post with the 
memorials of strenuous experience, and is so cultured, so educated, so 
limitlessly erudite that one may say of him "all cat-knowledge is his province"; 
also, take a mouse. Lock the three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless 
prison-cell. Wait half an hour, then open the cell, introduce a Shakespearite 
and a Baconian, and let them cipher and assume. The mouse is missing: the 
question to be decided is, where is it? You can guess both verdicts beforehand. 
One verdict will say the kitten contains the mouse; the other will as certainly 
say the mouse is in the tomcat. 
The Shakespearite will Reason like this -- (that is not my word, it is his). 
He will say the kitten may have been attending school when nobody was noticing; 
therefore we are warranted in assuming that it did so; also, it could have been 
training in a court-clerk's office when no one was noticing; since that could 
have happened, we are justified in assuming that it did happen; it could have 
studied catology in a garret when no one was noticing -- therefore it did; it 
could have attended cat-assizes on the shed-roof nights, for recreation, when no 
one was noticing, and harvested a knowledge of cat court-forms and cat 
lawyer-talk in that way: it could have done it, therefore without a doubt it 
did; it could have gone soldiering with a war-tribe when no one was noticing, 
and learned soldier-wiles and soldier-ways, and what to do with a mouse when 
opportunity offers; the plain inference, therefore is, that that is what it did. Since all these 
manifold things could have occurred, we have every right to believe they did 
occur. These patiently and painstakingly accumulated vast acquirements and 
competences needed but one thing more -- opportunity -- to convert themselves 
into triumphant action. The opportunity came, we have the result; beyond shadow 
of question the mouse is in the kitten. 
It is proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant a "We think we 
may assume," we expect it, under careful watering and fertilizing and tending, 
to grow up into a strong and hardy and weather-defying "there isn't a shadow of 
a doubt" at last -- and it usually happens. 
We know what the Baconian's verdict would be: "There is not a rag of evidence 
that the kitten has had any training, any education, any experience qualifying 
it for the present occasion, or is indeed equipped for any achievement above lifting 
such unclaimed milk as comes its way; but there is abundant evidence -- 
unassailable proof, in fact -- that the other animal is equipped, to the last 
detail, with every qualification necessary for the event. Without shadow of 
doubt the tomcat contains the mouse."

VI 
WHEN Shakespeare died, in 1616, the great literary productions attributed to 
him as author had been before the London world and in high favor for twenty-four 
years. Yet his death was not an event. It made no stir, it attracted no 
attention. Apparently his eminent literary contemporaries did not realize that a 
celebrated poet had passed from their midst. Perhaps they knew a play-actor of 
minor rank had disappeared, but did not regard him as the author of his Works. 
"We are justified in assuming" this. 
His death was not even an event in the little town of Stratford. Does this 
mean that in Stratford he was not regarded as a celebrity of any kind? 
"We are privileged to assume" -- no, we are indeed obliged to assume -- that 
such was the case. He had spent the first twenty-two or twenty-three years of 
his life there, and of course knew everybody and was known by everybody of that 
day in the town, including the dogs and the cats and the horses. He had spent 
the last five or six years of his life there, diligently trading in every big 
and little thing that had money in it; so we are compelled to assume that many 
of the folk there in those said latter days knew him personally, and the rest by 
sight and hearsay. But not as a celebrity? Apparently not. For everybody soon 
forgot to remember any contact with him or any incident connected with him. The 
dozens of townspeople, still alive, who had known of him or known about him in the first twenty-three years of his life were in the same 
unremembering condition: if they knew of any incident connected with that period 
of his life they didn't tell about it. Would they if they had been asked? It is 
most likely. Were they asked? It is pretty apparent that they were not. Why 
weren't they? It is a very plausible guess that nobody there or elsewhere was 
interested to know. 
For seven years after Shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been 
interested in him. Then the quarto was published, and Ben Jonson awoke out of 
his long indifference and sang a song of praise and put it in the front of the 
book. Then silence fell again. 
For sixty years. Then inquiries into Shakespeare's Stratford life began to be 
made, of Stratfordians. Of Stratfordians who had known Shakespeare or had seen him? No. Then of Stratfordians who had seen people who had known or seen people 
who had seen Shakespeare? No. Apparently the inquiries were only made of 
Stratfordians who were not Stratfordians of Shakespeare's day, but later comers; 
and what they had learned had come to them from persons who had not seen 
Shakespeare; and what they had learned was not claimed as fact, but only as 
legend -- dim and fading and indefinite legend; legend of the calf-slaughtering 
rank, and not worth remembering either as history or fiction. 
Has it ever happened before -- or since -- that a celebrated person who had 
spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the village where he was born and 
reared, was able to slip out of this world and leave that village voiceless and 
gossipless behind him -- utterly voiceless, utterly gossipless? And permanently 
so? 
I don't believe it has happened in any case except Shakespeare's. And 
couldn't and wouldn't have happened in his case if he had been regarded as a 
celebrity at the time of his death. 
When I examine my own case -- but let us do that, and see if it will not be 
recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things quite likely to result, most 
likely to result, indeed substantially sure to result in the case of a 
celebrated person, a benefactor of the human race. Like me. 
My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of 
the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old. I entered school at five 
years of age, and drifted from one school to another in the village during nine 
and a half years. Then my father died, leaving his family in exceedingly 
straitened circumstances; wherefore my book education came to a standstill 
forever, and I became a printer's apprentice, on board and clothes, and when the clothes 
failed I got a hymn-book in place of them. This for summer wear, probably. I 
lived in Hannibal fifteen and a half years, altogether, then ran away, according 
to the custom of persons who are intending to become celebrated. I never lived 
there afterward. Four years later I became a "cub" on a Mississippi steamboat in 
the St. Louis and New Orleans trade, and after a year and a half of hard study 
and hard work the U. S. inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of 
long sittings and decided that I knew every inch of the Mississippi -- thirteen 
hundred miles -- in the dark and in the day -- as well as a baby knows the way 
to its mother's paps day or night. So they licensed me as a pilot -- knighted 
me, so to speak -- and I rose up clothed with authority, a responsible servant of the United States government. 
Now then. Shakespeare died young -- he was only fifty-two. He had lived in 
his native village twenty-six years, or about that. He died celebrated (if you 
believe everything you read in the books). Yet when he died nobody there or 
elsewhere took any notice of it; and for sixty years afterward no townsman 
remembered to say anything about him or about his life in Stratford. When the 
inquirer came at last he got but one fact -- no, legend -- and got that one at 
second hand, from a person who had only heard it as a rumor, and didn't claim 
copyright in it as a production of his own. He couldn't, very well, for its date 
antedated his own birth-date. But necessarily a number of persons were still 
alive in Stratford who, in the days of their youth, had seen Shakespeare nearly every day in the last five years of his life, and they would have been able to 
tell that inquirer some first-hand things about him if he had in those last days 
been a celebrity and therefore a person of interest to the villagers. Why did 
not the inquirer hunt them up and interview them? Wasn't it worth while? Wasn't 
the matter of sufficient consequence? Had the inquirer an engagement to see a 
dog-fight and couldn't spare the time? 
It all seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity, there or 
elsewhere, and no considerable repute as actor and manager. 
Now then, I am away along in life -- my seventy-third year being already well 
behind me -- yet sixteen of my Hannibal schoolmates are still alive to-day, and 
can tell -- and do tell -- inquirers dozens and dozens of incidents of their young lives and mine together; things that happened to us in the morning of 
life, in the blossom of our youth, in the good days, the dear days,"the days 
when we went gipsying, a long time ago." Most of them creditable to me, too. One 
child to whom I paid court when she was five years old and I eight still lives 
in Hannibal, and she visited me last summer, traversing the necessary ten or 
twelve hundred miles of railroad without damage to her patience or to her 
old-young vigor. Another little lassie to whom I paid attention in Hannibal when 
she was nine years old and I the same, is still alive in London and hale and 
hearty, just as I am. And on the few surviving steamboats -- those lingering 
ghosts and remembrancers of great fleets that plied the big river in the 
beginning of my water-career -- which is exactly as long ago as the whole 
invoice of the life-years of Shakespeare number -- there are still findable two or three 
river-pilots who saw me do creditable things in those ancient days; and several 
white-headed engineers; and several roustabouts and mates; and several deckhands 
who used to heave the lead for me and send up on the still night air the "six -- 
feet -- scant!" that made me shudder, and the "M-a-r-k -- twain!" that took the 
shudder away, and presently the darling "By the d-e-e-p -- four!" that lifted me 
to heaven for joy.1 They know about me, and can tell. And so do printers, from 
St. Louis to New York; and so do newspaper reporters, from Nevada to San 
Francisco. And so do the police. If Shakespeare had really been celebrated, like 
me, Stratford could have told things about him; and if my experience goes for 
anything, they'd have done it.


[1] Four fathoms -- twenty-four feet. 
VII 
IF I had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to decide whether 
Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or not, I believe I would place before the 
debaters only the one question, Was Shakespeare ever a practicing lawyer? and 
leave everything else out. 
It is maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not merely 
myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished: that he not only knew some 
thousands of things about human life in all its shades and grades, and about the 
hundred arts and trades and crafts and professions which men busy themselves in, 
but that he could talk about the men and their grades and trades accurately, making no mistakes. Maybe it is so, but have the experts spoken, or is it only 
Tom, Dick, and Harry? Does the exhibit stand upon wide, and loose, and eloquent 
generalizing -- which is not evidence, and not proof -- or upon details, 
particulars, statistics, illustrations, demonstrations? 
Experts of unchallengeable authority have testified definitely as to only one 
of Shakespeare's multifarious craft-equipments, so far as my recollections of 
Shakespeare-Bacon talk abide with me -- his law-equipment. I do not remember 
that Wellington or Napoleon ever examined Shakespeare's battles and sieges and 
strategies, and then decided and established for good and all, that they were 
militarily flawless; I do not remember that any Nelson, or Drake or Cook ever 
examined his seamanship and said it showed profound and accurate familiarity with that art; I don't remember that any king or prince or duke has 
ever testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in his handling of royal 
court-manners and the talk and manners of aristocracies; I don't remember that 
any illustrious Latinist or Grecian or Frenchman or Spaniard or Italian has 
proclaimed him a past-master in those languages; I don't remember -- well, I 
don't remember that there is testimony -- great testimony -- imposing testimony 
-- unanswerable and unattackable testimony as to any of Shakespeare's hundred 
specialties, except one -- the law. 
Other things change, with time, and the student cannot trace back with 
certainty the changes that various trades and their processes and technicalities 
have undergone in the long stretch of a century or two and find out what their 
processes and technicalities were in those early days, but with the law it is different: it is mile-stoned and documented 
all the way back, and the master of that wonderful trade, that complex and 
intricate trade, that awe-compelling trade, has competent ways of knowing 
whether Shakespeare-law is good law or not; and whether his law-court procedure 
is correct or not, and whether his legal shop-talk is the shop-talk of a veteran 
practitioner or only a machine-made counterfeit of it gathered from books and 
from occasional loiterings in Westminster. 
Richard H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had every experience 
that falls to the lot of the sailor before the mast of our day. His sailor-talk 
flows from his pen with the sure touch and the ease and confidence of a person 
who has lived what he is talking about, not gathered it from books and random 
listenings. Hear him: 
Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt of each sail fast 
by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the word the whole canvas of the 
ship was loosed, and with the greatest rapidity possible everything was 
sheeted home and hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship 
under headway.
Again: 
The royal yards were all crossed at once, and royals and sky-sails set, and, 
as we had the wind free, the booms were run out, and all were aloft, active 
as cats, laying out on the yards and booms, reeving the studdingsail gear; 
and sail after sail the captain piled upon her, until she was covered with 
canvas, her sails looking like a great white cloud resting upon a black 
speck.
Once more. A race in the Pacific: 
Our antagonist was in her best trim. Being clear of the point, the breeze 
became stiff, and the royal-masts bent under our sails, but we would not take them in until we saw three boys spring into the 
rigging of the California; then they were all furled at once, but with 
orders to our boys to stay aloft at the top-gallant mast-heads and loose 
them again at the word. It was my duty to furl the fore-royal; and while 
standing by to loose it again, I had a fine view of the scene. From where I 
stood, the two vessels seemed nothing but spars and sails, while their 
narrow decks, far below, slanting over by the force of the wind aloft, 
appeared hardly capable of supporting the great fabrics raised upon them. 
The California was to windward of us, and had every advantage; yet, while 
the breeze was stiff we held our own. As soon as it began to slacken she 
ranged a little ahead, and the order was given to loose the royals. In an 
instant the gaskets were off and the bunt dropped. "Sheet home the 
fore-royal!" -- "Weather sheet's home!" -- "Lee sheet's home!" -- "Hoist 
away, sir!" is bawled from aloft." "Overhaul your clewlines!" shouts the 
mate."Aye-aye, sir, all clear!" -- "Taut leech! belay! Well the lee brace; haul taut to windward!"and the royals are set.
What would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say to that? He 
would say,"The man that wrote that didn't learn his trade out of a book, he has 
been there!" But would this same captain be competent to sit in judgment upon 
Shakespeare's seamanship -- considering the changes in ships and ship-talk that 
have necessarily taken place, unrecorded, unremembered, and lost to history in 
the last three hundred years? It is my conviction that Shakespeare's sailor-talk 
would be Choctaw to him. For instance -- from The Tempest:

Master.

Boatswain!

Boatswain.

 Here, master; whatcheer?

Master.

Good, speak to the mariners: fall to't, yarely, or we run ourselves to 
ground; bestir, bestir!
[(Enter mariners.)]


Boatswain.

Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the 
topsail. Tend to the master's whistle. . . . Down with the topmast! yare! 
lower, lower! Bring her to try wi' the main course. . . . Lay her a-hold, 
a-hold! Set her two courses. Off to sea again; lay her off.
That will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now, for a change. 
If a man should write a book and in it make one of his characters say, "Here, 
devil, empty the quoins into the standing galley and the imposing stone into the 
hell-box; assemble the comps around the frisket and let them jeff for takes and 
be quick about it," I should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing, and 
would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically, not practically. 
I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions -- a pretty hard life; I 
know all the palaver of that business: I know all about discovery claims and the 
subordinate claims; I know all about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, 
angles, shafts, drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay 
casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries; arastras, and how to 
charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how to clean them up, 
and how to reduce the resulting amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the 
bullion into pigs; and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to 
hunt for something less robust to do, and find it. I know the argot of the 
quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so whenever Bret Harte 
introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of his miners opens 
his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte got the phrasing by listening 
-- like Shakespeare -- I mean the Stratford one -- not by experience. No one can talk the quartz dialect 
correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse. 
I have been a surface-miner -- gold -- and I know all its mysteries, and the 
dialect that belongs with them; and whenever Harte introduces that industry into 
a story I know by the phrasing of his characters that neither he nor they have 
ever served that trade. 
I have been a "pocket" miner -- a sort of gold mining not findable in any but 
one little spot in the world, so far as I know. I know how, with horn and water, 
to find the trail of a pocket and trace it step by step and stage by stage up 
the mountain to its source, and find the compact little nest of yellow metal 
reposing in its secret home under the ground. I know the language of that trade, 
that capricious trade, that fascinating buried-treasure trade, and can catch any writer who tries to use it without 
having learned it by the sweat of his brow and the labor of his hands. 
I know several other trades and the argot that goes with them; and whenever a 
person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them without having learned it 
at its source I can trap him always before he gets far on his road. 
And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to superintend a 
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the matter down to a single 
question -- the only one, so far as the previous controversies have informed me, 
concerning which illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified: 
Was the author of Shakespeare's Works a lawyer? -- a lawyer deeply read and of 
limitless experience? I would put aside the guesses, and surmises, and perhapses, and might-have-beens, and could-have 
beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are justified-in-presumings, and the rest of 
those vague specters and shadows and indefinitenesses, and stand or fall, win or 
lose, by the verdict rendered by the jury upon that single question. If the 
verdict was Yes, I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare, 
the actor, manager, and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so destitute 
of even village consequence that sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen and 
friend of his later days remembered to tell anything about him, did not write 
the Works. 
Chapter XIII of The Shakespeare Problem Restated bears the heading 
"Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages of expert testimony, 
with comments thereon, and I will copy the first nine, as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to 
me, to settle the question which I have conceived to be the master-key to the 
Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.
VIII
Shakespeare as a Lawyer1

THE Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence that their author 
not only had a very extensive and accurate knowledge of law, but that he was 
well acquainted with the manners and customs of members of the Inns of Court and 
with legal life generally. 
"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the laws 
of marriage, of wills, and inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he 
expounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of 
error." Such was the testimony borne by one of the most distinguished lawyers of 
the nineteenth century who was raised to the high office of Lord Chief Justice in 1850, and 
subsequently became Lord Chancellor. Its weight will, doubtless, be more 
appreciated by lawyers than by laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it 
is for those who have not served an apprenticeship to the law to avoid 
displaying their ignorance if they venture to employ legal terms and to discuss 
legal doctrines. "There is nothing so dangerous," wrote Lord Campbell, "as for 
one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry." A layman is certain to 
betray himself by using some expression which a lawyer would never employ. Mr. 
Sidney Lee himself supplies us with an example of this. He writes (p. 164): "On 
February 15, 1609, Shakespeare . . . obtained judgment from a jury against 
Addenbroke for the payment of No. 6, and No. 1. 5s. 0d. costs." Now a lawyer 
would never have spoken of obtaining "judgment from a jury," for it is the 
function of a jury not to deliver judgment (which is the prerogative of the 
court), but to find a verdict on the facts. The error is, indeed, a venial one, but it is just one of those little things which at once enable a lawyer to 
know if the writer is a layman or "one of the craft." 
But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal subjects, he is 
naturally apt to make an exhibition of his incompetence. "Let a non-professional 
man, however acute," writes Lord Campbell again, "presume to talk law, or to 
draw illustrations from legal science in discussing other subjects, and he will 
speedily fall into laughable absurdity." 
And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare? He had "a deep 
technical knowledge of the law," and an easy familiarity with "some of the most 
abstruse proceedings in English jurisprudence." And again: "Whenever he indulges 
this propensity he uniformly lays down good law." Of Henry IV., Part 2, he says: 
"If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written the play, I do not see how he 
could be chargeable with having forgotten any of his law while writing it." 
Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke speak of "the marvelous intimacy which he 
displays with legal terms, his frequent adoption of them in illustration, and his curiously technical knowledge of their form and 
force." Malone, himself a lawyer, wrote: "His knowledge of legal terms is not 
merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his 
all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill." Another 
lawyer and well-known Shakespearean, Richard Grant White, says: "No dramatist of 
the time, not even Beaumont, who was the younger son of a judge of the Common 
Pleas, and who after studying in the Inns of Court abandoned law for the drama, 
used legal phrases with Shakespeare's readiness and exactness. And the 
significance of this fact is heightened by another, that it is only to the 
language of the law that he exhibits this inclination. The phrases peculiar to 
other occupations serve him on rare occasions by way of description, comparison 
or illustration, generally when something in the scene suggests them, but legal 
phrases flow from his pen as part of his vocabulary, and parcel of his thought. 
Take the word 'purchase' for instance, which, in ordinary use, means to acquire by giving value, but applies in law to all legal modes of 
obtaining property except by inheritance or descent, and in this peculiar sense 
the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four plays, and only in one 
single instance in the fifty-four plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. It has been 
suggested that it was in attendance upon the courts in London that he picked up 
his legal vocabulary. But this supposition not only fails to account for 
Shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that phraseology, it 
does not even place him in the way of learning those terms his use of which is 
most remarkable, which are not such as he would have heard at ordinary 
proceedings at nisi prius, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real 
property, 'fine and recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,' 'indenture,' 
'tenure,' 'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' 'remainder,' 'reversion,' 
'forfeiture,' etc. This conveyancer's jargon could not have been picked up by 
hanging round the courts of law in London two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of real property were comparatively rare. 
And beside, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his first plays, written 
in his first London years, as in those produced at a later period. Just as 
exactly, too; for the correctness and propriety with which these terms are 
introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a Lord 
Chancellor." 
Senator Davis wrote: "We seem to have something more than a sciolist's 
temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art. No legal solecisms 
will be found. The abstrusest elements of the common law are impressed into a 
disciplined service. Over and over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in 
writers unlearned in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession of it. 
In the law of real property, its rules of tenure and descents, its entails, its 
fines and recoveries, their vouchers and double vouchers, in the procedure of 
the Courts, the method of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the 
rules of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the principles of evidence, both 
technical and philosophical, in the distinction between the temporal and 
spiritual tribunals, in the law of attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites 
of a valid marriage, in the presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of the 
law of prerogative, in the inalienable character of the Crown, this mastership 
appears with surprising authority." 
To all this testimony (and there is much more which I have not cited) may now 
be added that of a great lawyer of our own times, viz.: Sir James Plaisted 
Wilde, Q.C. 1855, created a Baron of the Exchequer in 1860, promoted to the post 
of Judge-Ordinary and Judge of the Courts of Probate and Divorce in 1863, and 
better known to the world as Lord Penzance, to which dignity he was raised in 
1869. Lord Penzance, as all lawyers know, and as the late Mr. Inderwick, K.C., 
has testified, was one of the first legal authorities of his day, famous for his 
"remarkable grasp of legal principles, and "endowed by nature with a remarkable facility for marshalling facts, and for a clear expression of his views." 
Lord Penzance speaks of Shakespeare's "perfect familiarity with not only the 
principles, axioms, and maxims, but the technicalities of English law, a 
knowledge so perfect and intimate that he was never incorrect and never at 
fault. . .The mode in which this knowledge was pressed into service on all 
occasions to express his meaning and illustrate his thoughts, was quite 
unexampled. He seems to have had a special pleasure in his complete and ready 
mastership of it in all its branches. As manifested in the plays, this legal 
knowledge and learning had therefore a special character which places it on a 
wholly different footing from the rest of the multifarious knowledge which is 
exhibited in page after page of the plays. At every turn and point at which the 
author required a metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned first 
to the law. He seems almost to have thought in legal phrases, the commonest of 
legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or illustration. That he should have descanted in lawyer language when he had a 
forensic subject in hand, such as Shylock's bond, was to be expected, but the 
knowledge of law in 'Shakespeare' was exhibited in a far different manner: it 
protruded itself on all occasions, appropriate or inappropriate, and mingled 
itself with strains of thought widely divergent from forensic subjects." Again: 
"To acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate and 
ready use of the technical terms and phrases not only of the conveyancer's 
office but of the pleader's chambers and the Courts at Westminster, nothing 
short of employment in some career involving constant contact with legal 
questions and general legal work would be requisite. But a continuous employment 
involves the element of time, and time was just what the manager of two theaters 
had not at his disposal. In what portion of Shakespeare's (i.e. Shakspere's) 
career would it be possible to point out that time could be found for the 
interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of practicing 
lawyers?"

Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some possible explanation 
of Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of law, have made the suggestion that 
Shakespeare might, conceivably, have been a clerk in an attorney's office before 
he came to London. Mr. Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his opinion as to 
the probability of this being true. His answer was as follows: "You require us 
to believe implicitly a fact, of which, if true, positive and irrefragable 
evidence in his own handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it. Not 
having been actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local 
court at Stratford nor of the superior Courts at Westminster would present his 
name as being concerned in any suit as an attorney, but it might reasonably have 
been expected that there would be deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant, 
and after a very diligent search none such can be discovered." 
Upon this Lord Penzance comments: "It cannot be doubted that Lord Campbell 
was right in this. No young man could have been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon continually to 
act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work and name." 
There is not a single fact or incident in all that is known of Shakespeare, even 
by rumor or tradition, which supports this notion of a clerkship. And after much 
argument and surmise which has been indulged in on this subject, we may, I 
think, safely put the notion on one side, for no less an authority than Mr. 
Grant White says finally that the idea of his having been clerk to an attorney 
has been "blown to pieces." 
It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that he, nevertheless, 
adopts this exploded myth. "That Shakespeare was in early life employed as a 
clerk in an attorney's office, may be correct. At Stratford there was by royal 
charter a Court of Record sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, beside 
the town clerk, belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining probability 
to suppose that the young Shakespeare may have had employment in one of them. There is, it is true, no tradition to this effect, but such traditions as 
we have about Shakespeare's occupation between the time of leaving school and 
going to London are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed in 
them. It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an attorney's office 
than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a high style,' and making speeches 
over them." 
This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument. There is, as we have 
seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher's apprentice. John 
Dowdall, who made a tour in Warwickshire in 1693, testifies to it as coming from 
the old clerk who showed him over the church, and it is unhesitatingly accepted 
as true by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps. (Vol. I, p. II, and see Vol. II, p. 71, 72.) 
Mr. Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in it, and it is supported by Aubrey, who 
must have written his account some time before 1680, when his manuscript was 
completed. Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the other hand, there is not 
the faintest vestige of a tradition. It has been evolved out of the fertile imaginations of 
embarrassed Stratfordians, seeking for some explanation of the Stratford 
rustic's marvelous acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life. But Mr. 
Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the tradition 
which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in its stead this ridiculous 
invention, for which not only is there no shred of positive evidence, but which, 
as Lord Campbell and Lord Penzance point out, is really put out of court by the 
negative evidence, since "no young man could have been at work in an attorney's 
office without being called upon continually to act as a witness, and in many 
other ways leaving traces of his work and name." And as Mr. Edwards further 
points out, since the day when Lord Campbell's book was published (between forty 
and fifty years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing of other legal 
papers, dated during the period of William Shakespeare's youth, has been 
scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not one signature of the young man has 
been found."


Moreover, if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's office it is 
clear that he must have so served for a considerable period in order to have 
gained (if indeed it is credible that he could have so gained) his remarkable 
knowledge of law. Can we then for a moment believe that, if this had been so, 
tradition would have been absolutely silent on the matter? That Dowdall's old 
clerk, over eighty years of age, should have never heard of it (though he was 
sure enough about the butcher's apprentice), and that all the other ancient 
witnesses should be in similar ignorance! 
But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy. Tradition is to be 
scouted when it is found inconvenient, but cited as irrefragable truth when it 
suits the case. Shakespeare of Stratford was the author of the Plays and Poems, 
but the author of the Plays and Poems could not have been a butcher's 
apprentice. Away, therefore, with tradition. But the author of the Plays and 
Poems must have had a very large and a very accurate knowledge of the law. 
Therefore, Shakespeare of Stratford must have been an attorney's clerk! The method is 
simplicity itself. By similar reasoning Shakespeare has been made a country 
schoolmaster, a soldier, a physician, a printer, and a good many other things 
beside, according to the inclination and the exigencies of the commentator. It 
would not be in the least surprising to find that he was studying Latin as a 
schoolmaster and law in an attorney's office at the same time. 
However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that he has fully 
recognized, what is indeed tolerably obvious, that Shakespeare must have had a 
sound legal training. "It may, of course, be urged," he writes, "that 
Shakespeare's knowledge of medicine, and particularly that branch of it which 
related to morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that no one has ever 
contended that he was a physician. (Here Mr. Collins is wrong; that contention 
also has been put forward.) It may be urged that his acquaintance with the 
technicalities of other crafts and callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was also extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of 
being a sailor or a soldier. (Wrong again. Why even Messrs. Garnett and Gosse 
'suspect' that he was a soldier!) This may be conceded, but the concession 
hardly furnishes an analogy. To these and all other subjects he recurs 
occasionally, and in season, but with reminiscences of the law his memory, as is 
abundantly clear, was simply saturated. In season and out of season now in 
manifest, now in recondite application, he presses it into the service of 
expression and illustration. At least a third of his myriad metaphors are 
derived from it. It would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his 
dramas, nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of which 
is not colored by it. Much of his law may have been acquired from three books 
easily accessible to him, namely Tottell's Precedents (1572), Pulton's Statutes 
(1578), and Fraunce's Lawier's Logike (1588), works with which he certainly 
seems to have been familiar; but much of it could only have come from one who had an intimate acquaintance with legal proceedings. We quite 
agree with Mr. Castle that Shakespeare's legal knowledge is not what could have 
been picked up in an attorney's office, but could only have been learned by an 
actual attendance at the Courts, at a Pleader's Chambers, and on circuit, or by 
associating intimately with members of the Bench and Bar." 
This is excellent. But what is Mr. Collins' explanation. "Perhaps the 
simplest solution of the problem is to accept the hypothesis that in early life 
he was in an attorney's office (!), that he there contracted a love for the law 
which never left him, that as a young man in London, he continued to study or 
dabble in it for his amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts, and 
to frequent the society of lawyers. On no other supposition is it possible to 
explain the attraction which the law evidently had for him, and his minute and 
undeviating accuracy in a subject where no layman who has indulged in such 
copious and ostentatious display of legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in keeping himself from tripping." 
A lame conclusion. "No other supposition" indeed! Yes, there is another, and 
a very obvious supposition, namely, that Shakespeare was himself a lawyer, well 
versed in his trade, versed in all the ways of the courts, and living in close 
intimacy with judges and members of the Inns of Court. 
One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated the fact that 
Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training, but I may be forgiven if I do 
not attach quite so much importance to his pronouncements on this branch of the 
subject as to those of Malone, Lord Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C., 
Lord Penzance, Mr. Grant White, and other lawyers, who have expressed their 
opinion on the matter of Shakespeare's legal acquirements. . . . 
Here it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from Lord Penzance's book 
as to the suggestion that Shakespeare had somehow or other managed "to acquire a 
perfect familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases, not only of the 
conveyancer's voice, but of the pleader's chambers and the courts at 
Westminster." This, as Lord Penzance points out, "would require nothing short of 
employment in some career involving constant contact with legal questions and 
general legal work." But "in what portion of Shakespeare's career would it be 
possible to point out that time could be found for the interposition of a legal 
employment in the chambers or offices of practicing lawyers?. . .It is beyond 
doubt that at an early period he was called upon to abandon his attendance at 
school and assist his father, and was soon after, at the age of sixteen, bound 
apprentice to a trade. While under the obligation of this bond he could not have 
pursued any other employment. Then he leaves Stratford and comes to London. He 
has to provide himself with the means of a livelihood, and this he did in some 
capacity at the theater. No one doubts that. The holding of horses is scouted by 
many, and perhaps with justice, as being unlikely and certainly unproved; but whatever the nature of his employment 
was at the theater, there is hardly room for the belief that it could have been 
other than continuous, for his progress there was so rapid. Ere long he had been 
taken into the company as an actor, and was soon spoken of as a 'Johannes 
Factotum.' His rapid accumulation of wealth speaks volumes for the constancy and 
activity of his services. One fails to see when there could be a break in the 
current of his life at this period of it, giving room or opportunity for legal 
or indeed any other employment. 'In 1589,' says Knight, 'we have undeniable 
evidence that he had not only a casual engagement, was not only a salaried 
servant, as many players were, but was a shareholder in the company of the 
Queen's players with other shareholders below him on the list.' This (1589) 
would be within two years after his arrival in London, which is placed by White 
and Halliwell-Phillipps about the year 1587. The difficulty in supposing that, 
starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when he is supposed to have come to London, he was induced to enter upon a course of most 
extended study and mental culture, is almost insuperable. Still it was 
physically possible, provided always that he could have had access to the 
needful books. But this legal training seems to me to stand on a different 
footing. It is not only unaccountable and incredible, but it is actually 
negatived by the known facts of his career.' Lord Penzance then refers to the 
fact that "by 1592 (according to the best authority, Mr. Grant White) several of 
the plays had been written. The Comedy of Errors in 1589, Love's Labou's Lost in 
1589, Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1589 or 1590, and so forth, and then asks, 
"with this catalogue of dramatic work on hand. . .was it possible that he could 
have taken a leading part in the management and conduct of two theaters, and if 
Mr. Phillipps is to be relied upon, taken his share in the performances of the 
provincial tours of his company -- and at the same time devoted himself to the 
study of the law in all its branches so efficiently as to make himself complete master of its principles and practice, and saturate his mind with all its most 
technical terms?" 
I have cited this passage from Lord Penzance's book, because it lay before 
me, and I had already quoted from it on the matter of Shakespeare's legal 
knowledge; but other writers have still better set forth the insuperable 
difficulties, as they seem to me, which beset the idea that Shakespeare might 
have found time in some unknown period of early life, amid multifarious other 
occupations, for the study of classics, literature and law, to say nothing of 
languages and a few other matters. Lord Penzance further asks his readers: "Did 
you ever meet with or hear of an instance in which a young man in this country 
gave himself up to legal studies and engaged in legal employments, which is the 
only way of becoming familiar with the technicalities of practice, unless with 
the view of practicing in that profession? I do not believe that it would be 
easy, or indeed possible, to produce an instance in which the law has been 
seriously studied in all its branches, except as a qualification for practice in the legal profession."



This testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative; and so uncheapened, 
unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and maybe-so's, and might-have-beens, and 
could-have-beens, and must-have-beens, and the rest of that ton of plaster of 
paris out of which the biographers have built the colossal brontosaur which goes 
by the Stratford actor's name, that it quite convinces me that the man who wrote 
Shakespeare's Works knew all about law and lawyers. Also, that that man could 
not have been the Stratford Shakespeare and -- wasn't. 
Who did write these Works, then? 
I wish I knew.


[1] From Chapter XIII of "The Shakespeare Problem Restated." 







IX 
DID Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works? 
Nobody knows. 
We cannot say we know a thing when that thing has not been proved. Know is 
too strong a word to use when the evidence is not final and absolutely 
conclusive. We can infer, if we want to, like those slaves. . . .No, I will not 
write that word, it is not kind, it is not courteous. The upholders of the 
Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call us the hardest names they can think of, 
and they keep doing it all the time; very well, if they like to descend to that 
level, let them do it, but I will not so undignify myself as to follow them. I 
cannot call them harsh names; the most I can do is to indicate them by terms reflecting my 
disapproval; and this without malice, without venom. 
To resume. What I was about to say, was, those thugs have built their entire 
superstition upon inferences, not upon known and established facts. It is a weak 
method, and poor, and I am glad to be able to say our side never resorts to it 
while there is anything else to resort to. 
But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of that sort. . 
. .Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the Works, we infer 
that somebody did. Who was it, then? This requires some more inferring. 
Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a tidal 
wave, whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of admiration, delight and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up 
and claim the authorship. Why a dozen, instead of only one or two? One reason 
is, because there's a dozen that are recognizably competent to do that poem. Do 
you remember "Beautiful Snow"? Do you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother, Rock 
Me to Sleep"? Do you remember "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight! 
Make me a child again just for to-night"? I remember them very well. Their 
authorship was claimed by most of the grown-up people who were alive at the 
time, and every claimant had one plausible argument in his favor, at least: to 
wit, he could have done the authoring; he was competent. 
Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven't. There was good reason. 
The world knows there was but one man on the planet at the time who was competent -- not a dozen, and not two. 
A long time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a 
procession of prodigious footprints stretching across the plain -- footprints 
that were three miles apart, each footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong 
deep, and with forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there any doubt as 
to who had made that mighty trail? Were there a dozen claimants? Were there two? 
No -- the people knew who it was that had been along there: there was only one 
Hercules. 
There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn't be two; certainly there 
couldn't be two at the same time. It takes ages to bring forth a Shakespeare, 
and some more ages to match him. This one was not matched before his time; nor 
during his time; and hasn't been matched since. The prospect of matching him in our time is not bright. 
The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not qualified to write 
the Works, and that Francis Bacon was. They claim that Bacon possessed the 
stupendous equipment -- both natural and acquired -- for the miracle; and that 
no other Englishman of his day possessed the like; or, indeed, anything closely 
approaching it. 
Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor and horizonless 
magnitude of that equipment. Also, he has synopsized Bacon's history: a thing 
which cannot be done for the Stratford Shakespeare, for he hasn't any history to 
synopsize. Bacon's history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his death 
in old age -- a history consisting of known facts, displayed in minute and 
multitudinous detail; facts, not guesses and conjectures and might-have-beens. 
Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had a Lord 
Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was "distinguished both as a 
linguist and a theologian: she corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and 
translated his Apologia from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor 
Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration." It is the atmosphere we 
are reared in that determines how our inclinations and aspirations shall tend. 
The atmosphere furnished by the parents to the son in this present case was an 
atmosphere saturated with learning; with thinkings and ponderings upon deep 
subjects; and with polite culture. It had its natural effect. Shakespeare of 
Stratford was reared in a house which had no use for books, since its owners, 
his parents, were without education. This may have had an effect upon the son, but we do not 
know, because we have no history of him of an informing sort. There were but few 
books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do and highly educated 
possessed them, they being almost confined to the dead languages. "All the 
valuable books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly 
have filled a single shelf" -- imagine it! The few existing books were in the 
Latin tongue mainly. "A person who was ignorant of it was shut out from all 
acquaintance -- not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but with the most interesting 
memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of his own time" -- a literature necessary 
to the Stratford lad, for his fictitious reputation's sake, since the writer of 
his Works would begin to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way before the lad was hardly more than out of his teens and into his twenties. 
At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years there. 
Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English Ambassador, and there he 
mingled daily with the wise, the cultured, the great, and the aristocracy of 
fashion, during another three years. A total of six years spent at the sources 
of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of men. The three spent at the 
university were coeval with the second and last three spent by the little 
Stratford lad at Stratford school supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by 
inference -- with nothing to infer from. The second three of the Baconian six 
were "presumably" spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher. That 
is, the thugs presume it -- on no evidence of any kind. Which is their way, when 
they want a historical fact. Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the 
same to them. They know the difference, but they also know how to blink it. They 
know, too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, 
it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when they have the 
handling of it. They know by old experience that when they get hold of a 
presumption-tadpole he is not going to stay tadpole in their history-tank; no, 
they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of fact, and 
make him sit up on his hams, and puff out his chin, and look important and 
insolent and come-to-stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a 
thundering bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud. The thug 
is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where reasoning convinces but one. I wouldn't be a thug, not even if -- but never mind about that, it has 
nothing to do with the argument, and it is not noble in spirit besides. If I am 
better than a thug, is the merit mine? No, it is His. Then to Him be the praise. 
That is the right spirit. 
They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with the Stratford 
school to become apprentice to a butcher. They also "presume" that the butcher 
was his father. They don't know. There is no written record of it, nor any other 
actual evidence. If it would have helped their case any, they would have 
apprenticed him to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a wilderness of 
butchers -- all by their patented method "presumption." If it will help their 
case they will do it yet; and if it will further help it, they will "presume" 
that all those butchers were his father. And the week after, they will say it. Why, it is just like being the past tense of 
the compound reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic irregular accusative 
Noun of Multitude; which is father to the expression which the grammarians call 
Verb. It is like a whole ancestry, with only one posterity. 
To resume. Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and mastered that 
abstruse science. From that day to the end of his life he was daily in close 
contact with lawyers and judges; not as a casual onlooker in intervals between 
holding horses in front of a theater, but as a practicing lawyer -- a great and 
successful one, a renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable 
lance in the high brotherhood of the legal Table Round; he lived in the law's 
atmosphere thenceforth, all his years, and by sheer ability forced his way up 
its difficult steeps to its supremest summit, the Lord Chancellorship, leaving behind him no 
fellow craftsman qualified to challenge his divine right to that majestic place. 

When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other illustrious 
experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses, brilliances, profundities 
and felicities so prodigally displayed in the Plays, and try to fit them to the 
historyless Stratford stage-manager, they sound wild, strange, incredible, 
ludicrous; but when we put them in the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, 
they seem in their natural and rightful place, they seem at home there. Please 
turn back and read them again. Attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford they are 
meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies -- intemperate admirations of the 
dark side of the moon, so to speak; attributed to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of the moon's front side, 
the moon at the full -- and not intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and 
right, and justified. "At every turn and point at which the author required a 
metaphor, simile or illustration, his mind ever turned first to the law; he 
seems almost to have thought in legal phrases; the commonest legal phrases, the 
commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen." That could 
happen to no one but a person whose trade was the law; it could not happen to a 
dabbler in it. Veteran mariners fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and 
draw all their similes from the ship and the sea and the storm, but no mere 
passenger ever does it, be he of Stratford or elsewhere; or could do it with 
anything resembling accuracy, if he were hardy enough to try. Please read again what Lord Campbell and the other great authorities have said about Bacon when 
they thought they were saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.
X
The Rest of the Equipment

THE author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his time, 
with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind, grace and majesty of 
expression. Every one has said it, no one doubts it. Also, he had humor, humor 
in rich abundance, and always wanting to break out. We have no evidence of any 
kind that Shakespeare of Stratford possessed any of these gifts or any of these 
acquirements. The only lines he ever wrote, so far as we know, are substantially 
barren of the -- barren of all of them.


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. 
Ben Jonson says of Bacon, as orator: 
His language, where he could spare and pass by a jest, was nobly censorious. 
No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered 
less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech 
but consisted of his (its) own graces. . . The fear of every man that heard 
him was lest he should make an end.
From Macaulay: 
He continued to distinguish himself in Parliament, particularly by his 
exertions in favor of one excellent measure on which the King's heart was 
set -- the union of England and Scotland. It was not difficult for such an 
intellect to discover many irresistible arguments in favor of such a scheme. 
He conducted the great case of the Post Nati in the Exchequer Chamber; and 
the decision of the judges -- a decision the legality of which may be 
questioned, but the beneficial effect of which must be acknowledged -- was 
in a great measure attributed to his dexterous management.
Again:

While actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts of law, he 
still found leisure for letters and philosophy. The noble treatise on the 
Advancement of Learning, which at a later period was expanded into the De 
Augmentis, appeared in 1605.

The Wisdom of the Ancients, a work which if it had proceeded from any other 
writer would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit and learning, was 
printed in 1609.

In the meantime the Novum Organum was slowly proceeding. Several 
distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see portions of that 
extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest admiration of his 
genius.

Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the Cogitata et Visa, one of the most 
precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great oracular volume 
was afterward made up, acknowledged that "in all proposals and plots in that book, Bacon showed himself a master workman"; and that "it 
could not be gainsaid but all the treatise over did abound with choice 
conceits of the present state of learning, and with worthy contemplations of 
the means to procure it."

In 1612 a new edition of the Essays appeared, with additions surpassing the 
original collection both in bulk and quality.

Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon's attention from a work the most 
arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his mighty powers 
could have achieved, "the reducing and recompiling," to use his own phrase, 
"of the laws of England."
To serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney General and Solicitor 
General would have satisfied the appetite of any other man for hard work, but 
Bacon had to add the vast literary industries just described, to satisfy his. He 
was a born worker. 

The service which he rendered to letters during the last five years of his 
life, amid ten thousand distractions and vexations, increase the regret with 
which we think on the many years which he had wasted, to use the words of 
Sir Thomas Bodley, "on such study as was not worthy such a student."

He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of England under the 
Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of National History, a Philosophical 
Romance. He made extensive and valuable additions to his Essays. He 
published the inestimable treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum.
Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment, and quiet 
his appetite for work? Not entirely: 
The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor bore 
the mark of his mind. The best jestbook in the world is that which he 
dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day on which 
illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.
Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw light upon Bacon, 
and seem to indicate -- and maybe demonstrate -- that he was competent to write 
the Plays and Poems: 

With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of comprehension 
such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other human being.

The "Essays" contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of character, no 
peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden or court-masque, could 
escape the notice of one whose mind was capable of taking in the whole world 
of knowledge.

His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave to 
Prince Ahmed: fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady; spread 
it, and the armies of powerful Sultans might repose beneath its shade.

The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of the mutual relations of all departments of 
knowledge.

In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle, Lord 
Burleigh, he said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province."

Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he 
adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.

The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like his wit, so 
powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and to tyrannize 
over the whole man.
There are too many places in the Plays where this happens. Poor old dying 
John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a pathetic instance 
of it. "We may assume" that it is Bacon's fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare 
has to bear the blame. 

No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly subjugated. It stopped at the first check from good sense.

In truth much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world -- amid things 
as strange as any that are described in the "Arabian Tales". . .amid 
buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains more 
wonderful than the golden water of Parizade, conveyances more rapid than the 
hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more formidable than the lance of Astolfo, 
remedies more efficacious than the balsam of Fierabras. Yet in his 
magnificent day-dreams there was nothing wild -- nothing but what sober 
reason sanctioned.

Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the Novum Organum. . . 
.Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed only to 
illustrate and decorate truth. No book ever made so great a revolution in 
the mode of thinking, overthrew so many prejudices, introduced so many new 
opinions.

But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect which, 
without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science -- all the past, 
the present and the future, all the errors of two thousand years, all the 
encouraging signs of the passing times, all the bright hopes of the coming 
age.

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and rendering it 
portable.

His eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank in literature.
It is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts and each and 
every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally displayed in the Plays and 
Poems, and in much higher and richer degree than any other man of his time or of 
any previous time. He was a genius without a mate, a prodigy not matable. There 
was only one of him; the planet could not produce two of him at one birth, nor in one age. He could have written anything that is in the 
Plays and Poems. He could have written this:


The cloud-cap'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 
And, like an insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep.

Also, he could have written this, but he refrained:


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

When a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap'd towers, he ought 
not to follow it immediately with Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare, because he will find the transition from poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort. 
It will give him a shock. You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel 
is, until you bite into a layer of it in a pie.
XI 
AM I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's 
Works? Ah, now, what do you take me for? Would I be so soft as that, after 
having known the human race familiarly for nearly seventy-four years? It would 
grieve me to know that any one could think so injuriously of me, so 
uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me. No-no, I am aware that when even the 
brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition 
of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to 
examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any 
circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself. 
We always get at second hand our notion about systems of government; and 
high-tariff and low-tariff; and prohibition and anti-prohibition; and the 
holiness of peace and the glories of war; and codes of honor and codes of 
morals; and approval of the duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs 
concerning the nature of cats; and our ideas as to whether the murder of 
helpless wild animals is base or is heroic; and our preferences in the matter of 
religious and political parties; and our acceptance or rejection of the 
Shakespeares and the Arthur Ortons and the Mrs. Eddys. We get them all at 
second-hand, we reason none of them out for ourselves. It is the way we are 
made. It is the way we are all made, and we can't help it, we can't change it 
And whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and 
refrain from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong, 
that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty and our devotion. In 
morals, conduct, and beliefs we take the color of our environment and 
associations, and it is a color that can safely be warranted to wash. Whenever 
we have been furnished with a tar baby ostensibly stuffed with jewels, and 
warned that it will be dishonorable and irreverent to disembowel it and test the 
jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it. We submit, not reluctantly, but 
rather gladly, for we are privately afraid we should find, upon examination, 
that the jewels are of the sort that are manufactured at North Adams, Mass. 
I haven't any idea that Shakespeare will have to vacate his pedestal this 
side of the year 2209. Disbelief in him cannot come swiftly, disbelief in a healthy 
and deeply-loved tar baby has never been known to disintegrate swiftly, it is a 
very slow process. It took several thousand years to convince our fine race -- 
including every splendid intellect in it -- that there is no such thing as a 
witch; it has taken several thousand years to convince that same fine race -- 
including every splendid intellect in it -- that there is no such person as 
Satan; it has taken several centuries to remove perdition from the Protestant 
Church's program of postmortem entertainments; it has taken a weary long time to 
persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it 
the best they can; and it looks as if their Scotch brethren will still be 
burning babies in the everlasting fires when Shakespeare comes down from his 
perch.


We are The Reasoning Race. We can't prove it by the above examples, and we 
can't prove it by the miraculous "histories" built by those Stratfordolaters out 
of a hatful of rags and a barrel of sawdust, but there is a plenty of other 
things we can prove it by, if I could think of them. We are The Reasoning Race, 
and when we find a vague file of chipmunk-tracks stringing through the dust of 
Stratford village, we know by our reasoning powers that Hercules has been along 
there. I feel that our fetish is safe for three centuries yet. The bust, too -- 
there in the Stratford Church. The precious bust, the priceless bust, the calm 
bust, the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy moustache, and the 
putty face, unseamed of care -- that face which has looked passionlessly down 
upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years and will still look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, 
subtle, subtle, subtle, expression of a bladder.
XII
Irreverence

ONE of the most trying defects which I find in these -- these -- what shall 
call them? for I will not apply injurious epithets to them, the way they do to 
us, such violations of courtesy being repugnant to my nature and my dignity. The 
furthest I can go in that direction is to call them by names of limited 
reverence -- names merely descriptive, never unkind, never offensive, never 
tainted by harsh feeling. If they would do like this, they would feel better in 
their hearts. Very well, then to proceed. One of the most trying defects which I 
find in these Stratfordolaters, these Shakesperoids, these thugs, these bangalores, these troglodytes, these 
herumfrodites, these blatherskites, these buccaneers, these bandoleers, is their 
spirit of irreverence. It is detectable in every utterance of theirs when they 
are talking about us. I am thankful that in me there is nothing of that spirit. 
When a thing is sacred to me it is impossible for me to be irreverent toward it. 
I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, 
except toward the things which were sacred to other people. Am I in the right? I 
think so. But I ask no one to take my unsupported word; no, look at the 
dictionary; let the dictionary decide. Here is the definition: 

Irreverence. The quality or condition of irreverence toward God and sacred 
things.
What does the Hindu say? He says it is correct. He says irreverence is lack of respect for Vishnu, and Brahma, and Chrishna, and his other gods, and for his 
sacred cattle, and for his temples and the things within them. He endorses the 
definition, you see; and there are 300,000,000 Hindus or their equivalents back 
of him. 
The dictionary had the acute idea that by using the capital G it could 
restrict irreverence to lack of reverence for our Deity and our sacred things, 
but that ingenious and rather sly idea miscarried: for by the simple process of 
spelling his deities with capitals the Hindu confiscates the definition and 
restricts it to his own sects, thus making it clearly compulsory upon us to 
revere his gods and his sacred things, and nobody's else. We can't say a word, 
for he has our own dictionary at his back, and its decision is final. 
This law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this: 1. Whatever is sacred to 
the Christian must be held in reverence by everybody else; 2, whatever is sacred the 
Hindu must be held in reverence by everybody else; 3, therefore, by consequence, 
logically, and indisputably, whatever is sacred to me must be held inreverence 
by everybody else. 
Now then, what aggravates me is, that these troglodytes and muscovites and 
bandoleers and buccaneers are also trying to crowd in and share the benefit of 
the law, and compel everybody to revere their Shakespeare and hold him sacred. 
We can't have that: there's enough of us already. If you go on widening and 
spreading and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to be conceded 
that each man's sacred things are the only ones, and the rest of the human race 
will have to be humbly reverent toward them or suffer for it. That can surely 
happen, and when it happens, the word Irreverence will be regarded as the most meaningless, and foolish, and 
self-conceited, and insolent, and impudent and dictatorial word in the language. 
And people will say, "Whose business is it, what gods I worship and what things 
I hold sacred? Who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and where did he 
get that right?" 
We cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us. We must save the word 
from this destruction. There is but one way to do it, and that is, to stop the 
spread of the privilege, and strictly confine it to its present limits: that is, 
to all the Christian sects, to all the Hindu sects, and me. We do not need any 
more, the stock is watered enough, just as it is. 
It would be better if the privilege were limited to me alone. I think so 
because I am the only sect that knows how to employ it gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately. The other sects lack the 
quality of self-restraint. The Catholic Church says the most irreverent things 
about matters which are sacred to the Protestants, and the Protestant Church 
retorts in kind about the confessional and other matters which Catholics hold 
sacred; then both of these irreverencers turn upon Thomas Paine and charge him 
with irreverence. This is all unfortunate, because it makes it difficult for 
students equipped with only a low grade of mentality to find out what 
Irreverence really is. 
It will surely be much better all around if the privilege of regulating the 
irreverent and keeping them in order shall eventually be withdrawn from all the 
sects but me. Then there will be no more quarrelling, no more bandying of 
disrespectful epithets, no more heart burnings. 
There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-Shakespeare 
controversy except what is sacred to me. That will simplify the whole matter, 
and trouble will cease. There will be irreverence no longer, because I will not 
allow it. The first time those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling 
their Stratford myth an 
Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-the-Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet-of-Khorassan 
will be the last. Taught by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier 
offenders by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to quiet them.
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 encyclopedias 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; 
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 1500 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 common-place 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 cartloads (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 a most 
formidable one for even the most gifted, and ingenious, and plausible 
Stratfordolater to get around or explain away. To-day 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 has 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 Beckey 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 young 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?

MARK TWAIN.

THE END



 
