Is Shakespeare Dead? From my autobiography. E-Book

Mark Twain

• Herausgeber: libreka classics
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 108

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Titel: Is Shakespeare Dead? / From my autobiography.

von ca. 337-422 Faxian, Sir Samuel White Baker, Sax Rohmer, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Maria Edgeworth, Saint Sir Thomas More, Herodotus, L. Mühlbach, Herbert Allen Giles, G. K. Chesterton, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, A. J. O'Reilly, William Bray, O. Henry, graf Leo Tolstoy, Anonymous, Lewis Wallace, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Jules Verne, Frank Frankfort Moore, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Anthony Trollope, Henry James, T. Smollett, Thomas Burke, Emma Goldman, George Eliot, Henry Rider Haggard, Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay, A. Maynard Barbour, Edmund Burke, Gerold K. Rohner, Bernard Shaw, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jerome K. Jerome, Isabella L. Bird, Christoph Martin Wieland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Anzengruber, Freiherr von Ludwig Achim Arnim, G. Harvey Ralphson, John Galsworthy, George Sand, Pierre Loti, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Giambattista Basile, Homer, John Webster, P. G. Wodehouse, William Shakespeare, Edward Payson Roe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Victor [pseud.] Appleton, Arnold Bennett, James Fenimore Cooper, James Hogg, Richard Harding Davis, Ernest Thompson Seton, William MacLeod Raine, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Maksim Gorky, Henrik Ibsen, George MacDonald, Sir Max Beerbohm, Lucy Larcom, Various, Sir Robert S. Ball, Charles Darwin, Charles Reade, Adelaide Anne Procter, Joseph Conrad, Joel Chandler Harris, Joseph Crosby Lincoln, Alexander Whyte, Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, James Lane Allen, Richard Jefferies, Honoré de Balzac, Wilhelm Busch, General Robert Edward Lee, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, David Cory, Booth Tarkington, George Rawlinson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Christopher Evans, Thomas Henry Huxley, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Erskine Childers, Alice Freeman Palmer, Florence Converse, William Congreve, Stephen Crane, Madame de La Fayette, United States. Army. Corps of Engineers. Manhattan District, Willa Sibert Cather, Anna Katharine Green, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charlotte M. Brame, Alphonse Daudet, Booker T. Washington, Clemens Brentano, Sylvester Mowry, Geoffrey Chaucer, Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, Gail Hamilton, William Roscoe Thayer, Margaret Wade Campbell Deland, Rafael Sabatini, Archibald Henderson, Albert Payson Terhune, George Wharton James, Padraic Colum, James MacCaffrey, John Albert Macy, Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller, Walter Pater, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Baron de Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcelin Marbot, Aristotle, Gustave Flaubert, 12th cent. de Troyes Chrétien, Valentine Williams, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Alexandre Dumas fils, John Gay, Andrew Lang, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Jeffery Farnol, Alexander Pope, George Henry Borrow, Mark Twain

ISBN 978-3-7429-2338-7

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Is Shakespeare Dead?, by Mark Twain

Transcribed from the 1909 Harper & Brothers edition by David Price, email [email protected].  Proofing by Alan Ross, Ana Charlton and David.

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Mark Twain

harper & brothers publishersnew york and londonM C M I X

CHAPTER I

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

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

What man dare, I dare!

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

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

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

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