• To The Reader
• 1. Shakspere or Shakespeare?
  • 1.1. Shakspere versus Shakespeare
  • 1.2. List of non-literary references
  • 1.3. List of literary references
  • 1.4. Summary
  • 1.5. Shakspere's Handwriting and the Booke of Sir Thomas More
  • 1.6. Is Shakespeare dead? by Mark Twain
• 2. Shakespeare a Pseudonym?
• 3. Treasure Texts
• 4. Edward de Vere
• 5. Works
• 6. Ben Jonson’s Forgery
• 7. Research for Shake-speare
• 9. Relationship
• 10. Chronology

1.6. Is Shakespeare dead? by Mark Twain

 

Throughout his life, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) took great pleasure in peering beyond society's respectable facade exposing both pretentiousness and, every now and then, a most elegant fraud.

In Mark Twain's eyes the actor and privateer Will Shaksper-e was nothing more than a lousy con man who has been staring down at his own empty grave with an expression of the deepest boredom for hundreds of years. Nobody has knocked the naked Shakespeare out of the saddle in such an amusing way. Nobody has ever poured such sarcasm over the phony legend. Nobody has ever dared to expose how shallow and laughable the fraud actually was. Shaksper himself was troubled about the cult that was created around his person. Not the golden calf is to blame for the situation, but those who abandon their powers of reasoning and bow down before him.

Ten years before Looney's big break through, Mark Twain felt that Francis Bacon was the author of the poems and the plays. This mistake can be forgiven when we consider the information that was available to him at the time. Friedrich Nietzsche also took a step or two along the wrong track. Wrong because there is nothing to back up the theory that Francis Bacon was the author of the Shakespearian works other than his legal education. The philosopher was a cold, sometimes cynical pragmatist and analyst, neither poet, visionary, nor playwright, he was not blessed with with a powerful picturesque literary style, he could even bring generous impartiality to the table.

But these shortcommings do not reduce Mark Twain’s merit. His "autobiographical" essay is a refreshing work of art - and a permanent affront to all the Philistines.

Here the 1909 version of his book, slightly abridged, yet with the additions of some of the most necessary comments.

 

 

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

by Mark Twain

1909

 

	Chapter I	[Mississippi]
	Chapter II	[Satan]
	Chapter III	[Shakespeare]
	Chapter IV	Conjectures
	Chapter V	We May Assume
	Chapter VI	[A Celebrity]
	Chapter VII	[An Expert]
	Chapter VIII	Shakespeare as a Lawyer
	Chapter XI	[Superstition]
	Chapter XII	Irreverence
	Chapter XIII	[The Author]

 

 

CHAPTER I — [Mississippi]

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.

A friend has sent me a new book, from England—The Shakespeare Problem Restated [by Sir George Greenwood, 1908] —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-lappels 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 is 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.

 

CHAPTER II — [Satan]

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.

 

CHAPTER III — [Shakespeare]

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—1610-11—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 theatre-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 meagre 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.

 

CHAPTER 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 trustworthy evidence—that Shallow is Sir Thomas.

The next addition to the young Shakespeare’s Stratford history comes easy.  The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-stealing, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play: result, the young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh such a wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for all time!  It is the 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 surmisers, 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 surmisers 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 Behring 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 theatres, 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 frollicked 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 theatres, 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.

 

CHAPTER 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.”

 

CHAPTER VI — [A Celebrity]

When Shakespeare died, in 1616, 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 deck-hands 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. 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.

 

CHAPTER VII — [An Expert]

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 studding-sail 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.

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; what cheer?

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.

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.

 

CHAPTER VIII —Shakespeare as a Lawyer

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.” 

[…]

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.”

It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins [Studies in Shakespeare, 1904] 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.  (Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1883. Vol I, p. 11, 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 marvellous 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 [William H. Edwards, Shaksper not Shakespeare, 1900] 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 [1903] ‘suspect’ that he was a soldier!)  “To these and all other subjects Shakespeare 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.

[…]

Lord Penzance [James P. Wilde, Baron Penzance. A Judicial Summing-Up. 1902] refers to the fact that “by 1592 several of the plays had been written.  The Comedy of Errors in 1589, Love’s Labour’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 theatres, 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.

 

CHAPTER XI — [Superstition]

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 notions 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.

 

CHAPTER XII — Irreverence

One of the most trying defects which I find in these—these—what shall I 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 to 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 in reverence 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 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.

 

CHAPTER XIII — [The Author]

Isn’t it odd, when you think of it: that you may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first Tudors—a list containing five hundred names, shall we say?—and you can go to the histories, biographies and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one of them. Every one of them except one—the most famous, the most renowned—by far the most illustrious of them all—Shakespeare! You can get the details of the lives of all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges, lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors, inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers, prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys, bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists, Claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists, philologists, college presidents and professors, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors, politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots, demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists, physicians, surgeons—you can get the life-histories of all of them but one. Just one—the most extraordinary and the most celebrated of them all—Shakespeare!

You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons furnished by the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries, and you can find out the life-histories of all those people, too. You will then have listed 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.