Classic Audiobook Collection - Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain ~ Full Audiobook [history]

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain audiobook. Genre: history A short, semi-autobiographical work by American humorist Mark Twain. It explores the controversy over the authorship of the Shakespearean literary canon via satire, anecdote, and extensive quotation of contemporary authors on the subject. In the book, Twain expounds the view that Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author of the canon, and lends tentative support to the Baconian theory. The book opens with a scene from his early adulthood, where he was trained to be a steamboat pilot by an elder who often argued with him over the controversy. Twain's arguments include the following points: That little was known about Shakespeare's life, and the bulk of his biographies were based on conjecture. That a number of eminent British barristers and judges found Shakespeare's plays permeated with precise legal thought, and that the author could only have been a veteran legal professional. That in contrast, Shakespeare of Stratford had never held a legal position or office, and had only been in court over petty lawsuits late in life. That small towns lionize and celebrate their famous authors for generations, but this had not happened in Shakespeare's case. He described his own fame in Hannibal as a case in point. Twain draws parallels and analogies from the pretensions of modern religious figures and commentators on the nature of Satan. He compares the believers in Shakespeare to adherents of Arthur Orton and Mary Baker Eddy. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:22:30) Chapter 02 (00:41:39) Chapter 03 (01:02:14) Chapter 04 (01:28:26) Chapter 05 (02:01:59) Chapter 06 (02:29:58) Chapter 07 (02:44:12) Chapter 08 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain, Chapter 1. Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript, which constitute this formidable autobiography and diary of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be found which deal with claimants,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 Corrason, claimant, Louis XIV, Claimant, William Shakespeare, Claimant, Arthur Orton, Claimant, Mary Baker G. Eddie, 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 Titch-born baronelieu, net come to life again, was as flimsy as Mrs. Eddies that she wrote science and health from the direct dictation of the deity. Yet in England, nearly 40 years ago, Orton had a huge army of devotees and incorrigible adherents, many of whom remained stubbornly unconvinced after their fact God had been proven an imposter and jailed as a perjurer. And today, Mrs. Eddie'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. Eddie has had the like among hers from the beginning. Her church is as well equipped in those particulars as in 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 Simnell. A friend has sent me a new book from England. The Shakespeare Problem Restated. Well, restated, and closely reasoned, and my 50 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 Eeler, 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 eelers. 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 here can 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 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. Snatcher, snatch her bald-headed, with thy sword. If trembling, I inhabit then. Lay in the leads. No, only the starboard one. Leave the other one 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 51 years ago. I never regarded Euler'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, and 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 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 40 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, and, and, you know, and, and, you know, and translatable into a compliment. Compliment coming down from above the snowline and not well thawed in the transit, and not likely to set anything a fire, 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 the 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 principal and personal interest found themselves in opposition to each other, and a choice had to be made. I let principal 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. Euler was satisfied with that, and the war broke loose. Study, practice, experience, and 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 today, 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. Euler 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 Eeler 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 them 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 was 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 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 mast and magnificent whole. I waited a week to let the incident fade, waited longer, waited until he brought up for reasonings in vituporation 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 stardust 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 argo 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. Euler 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 a while, 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 dassent. 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. Euler 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 breastboard. When the Pennsylvania blew up and became a drifting rack heap, freighted with wounded and dying poor souls, my younger brother Henry, among them, Pilot Brown had the watch below and was probably asleep and never knew what killed him. But Eeler escaped unhurt. He and his pilot house were shot up into the air. Then they fell, and Eelor sank through the ragged cavern where the hurricane deck and the boiler deck had been and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on top of one of the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of scalding and deadly steam. But not for long.

He did not lose his head. Long familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it in any and all emergencies. He held his coat lapels to his nose with one hand to keep out the steam, and scrabbled around with the other till he found the joints of his flute, then he has took measures to save himself alive and was successful.

I was not on board. I had been put ashore in New Orleans by Captain Kleinfelter. 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. End of Chapter 1. Chapters 2 and 3 of Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Chapters 2 and 3 When I was a Sunday school scholar, something more than 60 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. Barkley, 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. 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. Barkley that he was willing to tell me the facts of Satan's history, but he stopped there. He wouldn't allow. 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 traveled 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, and 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 one. Then on 1,500 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 unquestionably's, 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. Suspitions that my attitude in this matter was not reverent,

and that a person must be reverent when writing about the sacred characters. He said anyone 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 equaled and possibly even exceeded that of any member of the 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, they might have been

the could have binners, the must have binners, 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 30 miles high. What did Mr. Barkley 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 recent. I wrote, respectable house since. Chapter 3. 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 overtopping, 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 23rd 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 19 important men charged with the government of the town,

13 had to make their mark in attesting important documents because they could not write their names. Of the first 18 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 Waitley. 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 bans. 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 10-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 45 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 to 1611 he returned to stratford and settled down for good and all and busied himself in lending money trading in tithes trading in land and houses shirking a debt of forty-one shillings borrowed by his wife during his long-distance 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 businessman'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 19, the wife whom he had left husbandless so many years, the wife who had had to borrow 41 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 businessman'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 not a poem, not an unfinished literary work, not a scrap of manuscript of any kind. Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that has died this poor. The others all left literary remains behind, also a book, maybe two. If Shakespeare had owned a dog, but we need not go into that. We know he would have mentioned it in his will. If a good dog, Susanna would have got it. If an inferior one, his wife would have got a dower interest in it. I wish he had had a dog, just so we could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among the family, in his careful business way.

He signed the will in three places. In earlier years, he signed two other official documents. These five signatures still exist. There are no other specimens of his penmanship in existence, not a line. Was he prejudiced against the art? His granddaughter, whom he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no teaching. He left no provision for her education, although he was rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't tell her husband's manuscript

from anybody else's. She thought it was Shakespeare's. When Shakespeare died in Stratford, it was not an event. It made no more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten. theater actor would have made. Nobody came down from London. There were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears. There was merely silence and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Johnson and Francis Bacon and Spencer 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 Johnson 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 anyone knows, he received only one letter during his life. So far as anyone 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 Jesus' sake forbear, to dig the dust and closed here. Blessed be ye man yet spares these stones, and Curst be he yet moves my bones.

In the list as above set down, we'll be found every positively known fact of Shakespeare's life, lean and meager as the invoice is. Beyond these details, we know not a thing about him. All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures, an Eiffel Tower of Artificialities

Rising sky high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts End of chapters 2 and 3 Chapters 4 and 5 of Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Chapters 4 and 5 Chapter 4 Conjectures The historians suppose that Shakespeare

attended the free school in Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he was 13. 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 26 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 hailed 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 edition 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 Osborne and I built the colossal skeleton Brontosaur that stands 57 feet long and 16 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, 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 22, 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 rollic around and learn English at the earliest likely moment, say at 13, when he was supposedly wrenched from that school where he was supposedly 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, then was possessed by any other man of his time, for he was going to make brilliant and easy, an admiration-compelling use of these splendid treasures the moment he got to London. And according to the surmiser's, that is what he did. Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able to teach him these things, and no lie to in the little village to dig them out of. His father could not read, and even the surmiser's surmise, that he did not keep a library. It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance with the manners and customs

and shop talk of lawyers through being for a time the clerk of a Stratford court. Just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Bering Strait Whale Fishery, and the shop talk of the veteran exercisers of that adventure bristling trade through catching catfish with a trot-line Sundays. But the surmise is damaged by the fact that there is no evidence, and not even tradition that the young Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law court. It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare accumulated his law treasures

in the first years of his sojourn in London through amusing himself by learning book law in his garret and by picking up lawyer talk and the rest of it through loitering about the law courts and listening. But it is only surmise. There is no evidence that he ever did either of those things. They are merely a couple of chunks of plaster of Paris. There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding horses in front of the London 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 days in perishable 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 knowledge, too into his dramas. How did he acquire these rich assets? In the usual way, by surmise. It is surmised that he traveled 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 subtler or something,

for several months or years, or whatever length of time, a surmiser needs in his business, and thus became familiar with soldier ship 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 froliced in the law courts for recreation. Also, who did the call-boying and the play-acting? For he became a cowboy, and as early as 93, he became a vagabond, the law's ungentle term for an ungentle term for an unlisted actor. And in 94, a regular and properly and officially listed member of that, in those days, lightly valued and not much respected profession.

Right soon thereafter, he became a stockholder in two theaters and manager of them. Thence forward, he was a busy and flourishing businessman, 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 Jesus' sake forbear,

to dig the dust enclosed here, blessed be ye man, yet spares these stones, And cursed be he, yet 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 600 barrels of plaster of Paris. Chapter 5. We may assume. In the assuming trade, three separate and independent cults are transacting business. Two of these cults are known as the Shakespeareites and the Baconians, and I am the other one, the Brontasaurian. The Shakespeareite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's works. The Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them.

The Brontasurian 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 Bayconian assumeers have come out ahead of the Shakespeareites. 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 Shakespeareites. The Shakespeareite conducts his assuming upon a definite principle.

an unchanging and immutable law, which is, two and eight and seven and fourteen, added together, make 165. I believe this to be an error. No matter, you cannot get a habit-soddened Shakespeareite to cipher up his materials upon any other basis. With the Baconian, it is different. If you place before him the above figures, and say, him to adding them up, he will never in any case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases out of 10, 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 wholeness, crackless, exitless prison cell. Wait half an hour. Then open the cell, introduce a Shakespeareite 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 Shakespeareite 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 hearty, 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. End of chapters four and five. Chapters six and seven of Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain? This Lieber Vox recording is in the public domain. Chapters six and seven.

Chapter 6. When Shakespeare died in 1616, great literary productions attributed to him as author, had been before the London world and in high favor for 24 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 22 or 23 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 23 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 Johnson 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 60 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 straightened 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 summerwear, probably, I lived in Hannibal 15 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, 1,300 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 52. He had lived in his native village 26 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 60 years afterward, no tax. 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 firsthand 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 worthwhile?

Wasn't the matter of sufficient consequence? Had the inquirer and engagement to see a dogfight 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 my life, my 73rd year being already well behind me, yet 16 of my Hannibal schoolmates are still alive today, and can tell, and do tell, inquirers dozens and dozens of incidents of their young lives and mind together. Things that happen 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 gypsying a long time ago. Most of them credible 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 hal 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's number, there are still findable two or three river pilots who saw me do creditable things in those ancient days, and several white-headed engineers, and several roustabouts and mates, and several deckhands who used to heave the lead for me and send up on the still night air, the six feet scant that made me shudder, and the Mark Twain that took the shuttered and presently the darling, by the deep four, that lifted me to heaven for joy.

footnote four fathoms 24 feet and footnote 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 7. If I had, under my superintendents, 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, 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 and 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, 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 courts,

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 milestoneed 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 make the bunt of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the word the whole canvas of the ship has loosed, and with the greatest rapidity possible, everything was sheeded 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, reaving 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. Once more, a race in the Pacific. Our antagonist was in her best trim. Being clear of the point, the breeze became stiff, and the royal masts bent under our sails, but we would not take them in until we saw three boys spring into the rigging of the California. Then they were all furled at once, but with orders to our boys to stay aloft at the top-gallant mast heads and loose them again at the word. It was my duty to furl the four royal, and while standing by to loose it again. I had a fine view of the scene, from where I saw,

stood, the two vessels seemed nothing but spars and sails, while their narrow decks far below, slanting over by the force of the wind aloft, appeared hardly capable of supporting the great fabrics raised upon them. The California was to windward of us, and had every advantage. Yet, while the breeze was stiff, we held our own. As soon as it began to slacken, she ranged a little ahead, and the order was given to loose the royals. In an instant the gaskets were off, and the bunt dropped. Sheat home the four royal, weather sheets home, lee sheets home, hoist away, sir, is bald from aloft. overhaul your clue lines shouts the mate aye aye sir all clear taut leech belay well the libraise haul taught to windward and the royals are set what would the captain of any sailing vessel of our time say to that he would say the man that wrote that didn't learn his trade out of a book he has been there But would this same captain be competent to sit in judgment upon Shakespeare's seamanship,

considering the changes in ships and ship-talk that have necessarily taken place, unrecorded, unremembered, and lost to history in the last 300 years? It is my conviction that Shakespeare's sailor talk would be chock-taught to him. for instance from the tempest master boat swain boat swain here master what cheer master good speak to the mariners fall tote yearly or we run ourselves to ground bestirr be Enter Mariners. Boatswain. Hey, my hearts, cheerily, cheerily, my hearts. Yeah, yeah, take in the top sail.

Ten to the master's whistle. Down with the topmast, yeah, lower, lower. Bring her to try with the main course. Lay her a hold, a hold. Set her two courses. To see again, lay her off. That will do for the present. Let us yare a little now for a change. If a man should write a book, and in it, make one of his characters say, Here, devil, empty the coins into the standing galley and the imposing stone into the hellbox,

assemble the comps around the frisket, and let them Jeff for takes and be quick about it. I should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically, not practically. I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions, a pretty hard life. I know all the palaver of that business. I know all about discovery claims and the subordinate claims.

I know all about loads, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air shafts, horses, clay casings, granite casings, quartz mills, and their batteries, arastras, and how to change them with quicksilver and sulfate of copper, and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting amalgam and the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs, and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt for something less robust to do and find it. I know the argo of the quartz mining and milling industry familiarly, and so whenever Brett Hart introduces that industry into a story,

the first time one of his miners opens his mouth, I recognize from his phrasing that Hart got the phrasing by listening, like Shakespeare, I mean the Stratford one, not by experience. No one can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse. I have been a surface miner, gold, and I know all its mysteries and the dialect that belongs with them. And whenever Hart 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 Argo that goes with them. And whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them,

without having learned it at its source, I can trap him always before he gets far on his road. And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to superintend a Bacon Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the matter down to a single question. The only one, so far as the previous controversies have informed me, concerning which illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified, was the author of Shakespeare's works a lawyer?

A lawyer deeply read and of limitless experience. I would put aside the guesses and surmises and purposes and purposes. hapses and might have beens and could have beens and must have beens, and we are justified in presumings, and the rest of those vague specters and shadows and indefinitenesses, and stand or fall, win or lose by the verdict rendered by the jury upon that single question. If the verdict was yes, I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare, the actor, manager, and trader, who died so obscure, so forgotten, so destitute of even village consequence that 60 years afterward no fellow citizen and friend of his later days remembered

to tell anything about him did not write the works. Chapter 13 of the Shakespeare problem restated bears the heading, Shakespeare as a lawyer and comprises some 50 pages of expert testimony with comments thereon, and I will copy the first nine as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to me to settle the question which I have conceived to be the master key to the Shakespeare Bacon puzzle. End of chapters six and seven. Chapter 8 of Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 8. Shakespeare as a lawyer.

Footnote. From Chapter 13 of the Shakespeare problem restated. End footnote. 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 demure nor bill of exceptions nor writ of a

error. Such was the testimony born by one of the most distinguished lawyers of the 19th 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, page 164. On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the payment of number six and number one, five shillings, zero pence 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 deep, 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-Clark

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 a quire, by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending mind. It has the appearance of technical skill. Another lawyer and well-known Shakespearean, Richard Grant White, says, No dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, who was the younger son of a judge of the common pleas,

and who after studying at the ends of court abandoned law for the drama, used legal phrases with Shakespeare's readiness and exactness. And the significance of this fact is heightened by another, that it is only to the language of the law that he exhibits this inclination. The phrases peculiar to other occupations serve him on rare occasions by way of description, comparison, or illustration, generally when something in the scene suggests them, but legal phrases flow from his pen as part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought.

Take the word purchase, for instance, which in ordinary use means to acquire by giving value, but applies in law to all legal modes of obtaining property except by inheritance or descent, And in this peculiar sense, the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's 34 plays, and only in one single instance in the 54 plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. It has been suggested that it was in attendance upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal vocabulary. But this supposition not only fails to account for Shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not such as he would have heard at ordinary proceedings, at Nisi Prius,

but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property. and recovery. Statutes merchant, purchase, indenture, tenure, double voucher, fee simple, fee farm, remainder, reversion, forfeiture, etc. This conveyancer's jargon could not have been picked up by hanging around the Courts of Law in London 250 years ago, when suits as to the title of real property were comparatively rare. And beside, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his first plays, written in his first London years, as in those produced at a later period. Just as exactly too.

For the correctness and propriety with which these terms are introduced have compelled the admiration of a chief justice and a Lord Chancellor. Senator Davis wrote, We seem to have something more than a siloist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art. No legal solacisms will be found. The abstrusist elements of the common law are impressed into a disciplined service. Over and over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession of it. In the law of real property, its rules of tenure and dissents, its entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers

and double vouchers, and the procedure of the courts, the method of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules of pleading, the law of escapes, and of contempt in court, in the principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the law of attainder and forfeiture, in the requisition, of a valid marriage, and the presumption of legitimacy, and the learning of the law of prerogative, in the inalienable character of the crown, this mastership appears with surprising authority. To all this testimony, and there is much more which I have not cited, may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own times, v. Sir James,

Placeted Wild, Cucy, created a baron of the exchequer in 1860, promoted to the post of Judge Ordinary and Judge of the Courts of Probate and Divorce in 1863, and Better Known to the World as Lord Penzance, to which dignity he was raised in 1869. Lord Penzance, as all lawyers know, and, as the late Mr. Inderwick, K.C. has testified, was one of the first legal authorities of his day, famous for his remarkable grasp of legal principles, and endowed by nature with a remarkable facility for marshalling facts and for a clear expression of his views.

Lord Penzance speaks of Shakespeare's perfect familiarity with not only the principles, axioms, and maxims, but the technicalities of English law, a knowledge so perfect and intimate, that he was never incorrect and never at fault. The mode in which this knowledge was pressed into service on all occasions to express his meaning and illustrate his thoughts was quite unexampled. He seems to have had a special pleasure in his complete and ready mastership of it in all its branches. As manifested in the plays, this legal knowledge and learning had therefore a special character which places it on a wholly different footing from the rest of the multifarious knowledge which is exhibited in page after page of the plays. At every turn and point

at which the author required a metaphor, simile or illicitory. his mind ever turned first to the law. He seems almost to have thought in legal phrases, the commonest of legal expressions, wherever at the end of his pen in description or illustration. That he should have discanted in lawyer language when he had a forensic subject in hand, such as Shylock's bond, was to be expected. But the knowledge of law in Shakespeare, was exhibited in a far different manner. It protruded itself on all occasions, appropriate or inappropriate,

and mingled itself with strains of thought widely divergent from forensic subjects. Again, to acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases, not only of the conveyancers' office, but of the pleaders' chambers and the courts at Westminster. Nothing short of employment in some career involving constant contact with legal questions and general legal work would be requisite. But a continuous employment involves the element of time,

and time was just what the manager of two theaters had not at his disposal. In what portion of Shakespeare's, i.e. Shaxpiers, career, would it be possible to point out that time could be found for the interposition of illegal employment in the chambers or offices of practicing lawyers? Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some possible explanation of Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of law, have made the suggestion that Shakespeare might conceivably have been a clerk in an attorney's office before he came to London. Mr. Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his opinion as to the probability of this being true. His answer was as follows. You require us to believe implicitly a fact of which, if true, positive and irrefragor,

evidence in his own handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it. Not having been actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local court at Stratford nor of the superior courts at Westminster would present his name as being concerned in any suit as an attorney. But it might reasonably have been expected that there would be deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant, and after a very diligent search, none such can be discovered. Upon this, Lord Penzance comments, It cannot be doubted that Lord Campbell was right in this. No young man could have been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon continually

to act as a witness, and in many other ways, leaving traces of his work and name. There is not a single fact or incident in all that is known of Shakespeare, even by rumor or tradition, which supports this notion of a clerkship. And after much argument and surmise which has been indulged in on this subject, we may, I think, safely put the notion on one side, for no less and authority than Mr. Grant White says finally that the idea of his having been clerk to an attorney has been blown to pieces. It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that he, nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth. That Shakespeare was an 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 besides 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 butcher killing calves in a high style and making speeches over them. This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument.

him. There is, as we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher's apprentice. John Dowdell, 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 Phillips, Volume 1, page 11, and see Volume 2, pages 71 and 72. Mr. Sidney Lee sees nothing and probable in it, and it is supported by Aubrey, who must have written his account sometime before 1680 when his manuscript was completed. Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the other hand, there is not the faintest vestige of a tradition. It has been evolved out of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed Stratfordians,

seeking for some explanation of the Stratford Rustic's marvelous acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life. But Mr. Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in its stead this ridiculous invention. for which not only is there no shred of positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and Lord Penzance point out, is really put out of court by the negative evidence,

since no young man could have been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways, leaving traces of his work and name. And as Mr. Edwards further points out, since the day when Lord Campbell's book was published between 40 and 50 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 Dowdell's old clerk, over 80 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 has also 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 Mr. Garnet and Goss suspect that he was a soldier. This may be conceded, but the concession hardly furnishes an analogy. To these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but with reminiscences of the law, his memory, as is abundantly clear, was simply saturated. In season and out of season, now in manifest, now in recondite application, he presses it into the service of expression and illustration. At least a third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it.

It would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of which is not colored by it. Much of his law may have been acquired from three books easily accessible to him, namely Tatelle's Precedence 1572, Poulton's Statutes, 1572, Pulton's Statutes, 1570, and France's Loyes's Logique, 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 and 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,

in 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 ends of court. One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated the fact that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training. but I may be forgiven if I do not attach quite so much importance to his pronouncements on this branch of the subject as to those of Malone, Lord Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C., Lord Penzance, Mr. Grant White, and other lawyers,

who have expressed their opinion on the matter of Shakespeare's legal acquirements. Here it may, perhaps, be worthwhile to quote again from Lord Penzance's book as to the suggestion that Shakespeare had somehow or other managed to acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases not only of the conveyancers' office, but of the pleaders' chambers and the courts at Westminster. This, as Lord Penzance points out, would require nothing short of employment in some career involving constant contact with legal questions and general legal work. But in what portion of Shakespeare's career would it be possible to point out that time could be found for the interposition of a

legal employment in the chambers or offices of practicing lawyers? It is very important. It is very much. It is beyond doubt that at an early period he was called upon to abandon his attendance at school and assist his father, and was soon after, at the age of 16, bound apprentice to a trade. While under the obligation of this bond, he could not have pursued any other employment. Then he leaves Stratford and comes to London. He has to provide himself with the means of a livelihood, and this he did in some capacity at the theater. No one doubts that. The holding of horses is scouted by many,

and perhaps with justice as being unlikely and certainly unproved. But whatever the nature of his employment was at the theater, there is hardly room for the belief that it could have been other than continuous, for his progress there was so rapid. year long he had been taken into the company as an actor and was soon spoken of as a Johannes factotum. His rapid accumulation of wealth speaks volumes for the constancy and activity of his services. One fails to see when there could be a break in the current of his life at this period of it, giving room or opportunity for legal or indeed any.

other employment. In 1589, says Knight, we have undeniable evidence that he had not only a casual engagement, was not only a salaried servant, as many players were, but was a shareholder in the company of the Queen's players with other shareholders below him on the list. This, 1589, would be within two years after his arrival in London, which is placed by White and Hallowell Phillips about the year 1587. The difficulty in supposing that, starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when he is supposed to have come to London, he was induced to enter upon a course of most extended study and mental culture is almost insuperable. Still, it was physically possible. possible, provided always that he could have had access to the needful books. But this legal

training seems to me to stand on a different footing. It is not only unaccountable and incredible, but it is actually negatived by the known facts of his career. Lord Penzance then refers to the fact that by 1592, according to the best authority, Mr. Grant White, several of the plays had been written, The Comedy of Errors in 1589, Love's Labor's Lost in 1589, two gentlemen of Verona in 1589 or 1590, and so forth, and then asks, with this catalog of dramatic work on hand, was it possible that he could have taken a leading part in the management and conduct of two theaters, and if Mr. Phillips 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 asked 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. End of Chapter 8. chapters nine and ten of Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain? This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Chapters nine and ten. Chapter nine.

Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's works? Nobody knows. We cannot say we know a thing when that thing has not been proved. No is too strong a word. to use when the evidence is not final and absolutely conclusive. We can infer, if we want to, like those slaves. No, I will not write that word. It is not kind. It is not courteous. The upholders of the Stratford Shakespeare superstition call us the hardest names they can think of, and they keep doing it all the time. Very well, if they like to descend to,

that level, let them do it. But I will not so undignify myself as to follow them. I cannot call them harsh names. The most I can do is to indicate them by terms reflecting my disapproval, and this without malice, without venom. To resume, what I was about to say was, those thugs have built their entire superstition upon inferences, not upon known and established facts. It is a weak method and poor, and I am glad to be able to say our side never resorts to it, while there is anything else to resort to. But when we must, we must, and we have now arrived at a place of that sort. Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the works, we infer that somebody did. Who was it then? This requires some more inferring.

Ordinarily, when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a tidal wave, whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of admiration, delight, and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up and claim the authorship. Why a dozen instead of only one or two? One reason is because there's a dozen that are recognizably competent to do that poem. Do you remember beautiful snow? Do you remember rock me to sleep, mother rock me to sleep? Do you remember backward, turned backward, oh time in thy flight, make me a church, child again just for tonight? I remember them very well. Their authorship was claimed by most of the grown-up people who were alive at the time, and every claimant had one plausible argument in his favor,

at least, to wit he could have done the authoring he was competent. Have the works been claimed by a dozen? They haven't. There was good reason. The world knows there was but one man on the planet at the time who was competent, not a dozen, and not two. A long time ago, the dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a procession of prodigious footprints stretching across the plain. Footprints that were three miles apart, each footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong deep, and with forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there any doubt as to who had made that mighty trail? Were there a dozen claimants?

Were there two? No. The people knew who it was that had been along there. There was only one Hercules. There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn't be two. Certainly there couldn't be two at the same time. It takes ages to bring forth a Shakespeare and some more ages to match him. This one was not matched before his time, nor during his time, and hasn't been matched since. The prospect of matching him in our time is not bright. The baconian, Ceyans claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not qualified to write the works, and that Francis Bacon was. They claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment, both natural and acquired for the miracle, and that no other Englishman of his day possessed the like, or indeed

anything closely approaching it. McCauley, in his essay, has much to say about the splendor and horizonless magnitude of that equipment. Also, he has synopsized Bacon's history, a thing which cannot be done for the Stratford Shakespeare, for he hasn't any history to synopsize. Bacon's history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his death in old age. A history consisting of known facts displayed in minute and multitudinous detail, facts, not guesses and conjectures and might have beens. Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had a lord chancellor for his father, and a mother who was distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian. She corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewel

and translated his Apologia from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration. It is the atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations and aspirations shall tend. The atmosphere furnished by the parents to the sun in this present case was an atmosphere saturated with learning, with thinkings and ponderings upon deep subjects, and with polite culture. It had its natural effect. Shakespeare of Stratford was reared in a house which had no use for books, since its owners, his parents, were without education.

him. This may have had an effect upon the sun, but we do not know, because we have no history of him of an informing sort. There were but few books anywhere in that day, and only the well-to-do, and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to the dead languages. All the valuable books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe, would hardly have filled a single shelf. Imagine that. The few existing books were in the Latin tongue mainly. A person who was ignorant of it was shut out from all acquaintance, not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of his own time, a literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for his fictitious reputation's sake, since the writer of his works would begin to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way, before the lad was hardly more than out of his teens and into his twenties.

At 15, Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured, the great, and the aristocracy of fashion during another three years. A total of six years spent at the sources of knowledge, knowledge both of books and of men. The three spent at the university were co-eval with the second, and the last three spent by the little Stratford Lad at Stratford School supposedly and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference, with nothing

to infer from. The second three of the Baconian Six were presumably spent by the Stratford Lad as apprentice to a butcher. That is, the thugs presume it, on no evidence of any kind, which is their way when they want a historical fact. Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same to them. They know the difference, but they also know how to blink it. They know, too, that while in history building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when they have the handling of it. They know, by old experience, that when they get a hold of a presumption tadpole, he's not going to stay tadpole in their history tank.

No, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of fact, and make him sit up on his hands and puff out his chin and look important and insolent and come to stay, and assert his genuine Simon pure authenticity with a thundering bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud. The thug is aware that loudness convinces 60 persons where reasoning convinces but one. I wouldn't be a thug, not even if, but never mind about that. It has nothing to do with the argument, and it is not noble in spirit besides. If I am better than a thug is the merit mine, no, it is his. Then to him be the praise. That is the right spirit. They presume the lad severed his presumed connection with the Stratford School.

to become apprentice to a butcher. They also presume that the butcher was his father. They don't know. There's no written record of it, nor any other actual evidence. If it would have helped their case any, they would have apprenticed him to 30 butchers, to 50 butchers, to a wilderness of butchers, all by their patented method presumption. If it will help their case, they will do it yet, and if it will further help it, they will presume that all those butchers were his father, and the week after they will say it. Why, it is just like being the past tense of a compound reflexive, adverbial, incandescent, hypodermic, irregular, accusative noun of multitude, which is father to the expression which the grammarians call verb.

It is like a whole ancestry with only one posterity. To resume. Next, the young bacon took up the study of law and mastered that abstruse science. From that day to the end of his life, he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges, not as a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in front of a theater, but as a practicing lawyer, a great and successful one, a renowned one, a lancelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in the high brotherhood of the legal table round. He lived in the law's atmosphere thenceforth all his years,

and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult steeps to the supremest summit, the Lord Chancellor'ship, leaving behind him no fellow craftsman qualified to challenge his divine right to that majestic place. When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses, brilliances, profundities, and felicities so prodigally displayed in the plays, and try to fit them to the history-less Stratford stage manager. They sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous. But when we put them in the mouth of bacon, they do not sound strange.

They seem in their natural and rightful place. They seem at home there. Please turn back and read them again. Attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford, they are meaningless. They are inebriate, extravagancies, intemperate admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak. Attributed to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of the moon's front side, the moon at the full, and not intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and right and justified.

At every turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or ill, illustration. His mind ever turned first to the law. He seems almost to have thought in legal phrases. The commonest legal phrases, the commonest of legal expressions, were ever at the end of his pen. That could happen to no one but a person whose trade was the law. It could not happen to a dabbler in it. veteran mariners fill their conversation with sailor phrases and draw all their similes from the ship and the sea and the storm. But no mere passenger ever does it, be he of Stratford or elsewhere. Or could do it with anything resembling accuracy if he were hardy enough to try. Please read again what Lord Campbell and the other great authorities have said about baking.

when they thought they were saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford. Chapter 10. The rest of the equipment. The author of the plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind, grace, and majesty of expression. Everyone has said it, no one doubts it. Also, he had humor. humor and rich abundance, and always wanting to break out. We have no evidence of any kind that Shakespeare of Stratford possessed any of these gifts or any of these acquirements. The only lines he ever wrote, so far as we know, are substantially barren of them, barren of all of them.

Good friend for Jesus's sake for bear to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be ye man yet spares these stones, and cursed be he yet moves my bones. Ben Johnson says of Bacon as orator. His language, where he could spare and pass by a jest, was nobly censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his its own graces. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end. From McCauley.

He continued to distinguish himself in Parliament, particularly by his exertions in favor of one excellent measure on which the king's heart was set, the union of England and Scotland. It was not difficult for such an intellect to discover many irresistible arguments in favor of such a scheme. He conducted the great case of the post-Nati in the Exchequer Chamber, and the decision of the judges, a decision the legality of which may be questioned, but the beneficial effect of which must be acknowledged was in a great measure attributed to his dexterous management. Again, while actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts of law,

he still found leisure for letters and philosophy. The noble treatise on the advancement of learning, which had a later period was expanded into day augmentis, appeared in 1605. The wisdom of the ancients, a work which, if it had proceeded from any other writer, would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit and learning, was printed in 1609. In the meantime, the Novum or Ganum was slowly proceeding. Several distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see portions of that extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest admiration of his genius. Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the cogitata et visa, one of the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great

oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that in all proposals and plots in that book, Bacon showed himself a master workman, and that it could not be gained said, but all the treatise over did abound with choice conceits of the present state of learning and with worthy contemplations of the means to procure it. In 1612, a new edition of the essays appeared, with additions surpassing the original collection, both in bulk and quality. Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon's attention from a work the most arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his mighty powers could have achieved, the reducing and recompiling, to use his own phrase, of the laws of England. To serve the exacting and laborious offices

of Attorney General and Solicitor General would have satisfied the appetite of any other man for hard work. But Bacon had to add the vast literary industries just described to satisfy by his. He was a born worker. The service which he rendered to letters during the last five years of his life, amid 10,000 distractions and vexations, increased the regret with which we think on the many years which he had wasted, to use the words of Sir Thomas Bodley, on such study as was not worthy such a student. He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a history of England, under the princes of the House of Tudor, a body of national history, a philosophical romance. He made extensive and valuable additions to his essays. He published the inestimable treatise de argumentus

Scientiarum. Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment and quiet his appetite for work? Not entirely. The trifles with which he amused himself and hours of pain and languor bore the mark of his mind. The best jest book in the world as that which he dictated from memory without referring to any book on a day on which, illness had rendered him incapable of serious study. Here are some scattered remarks from Macaulay, which throw light upon Bacon, and seem to indicate, and maybe demonstrate, that he was competent to write the plays and poems. With great minuteness of observation, he had an amplitude of comprehension such as has never

yet been vouchsafed to any other human being. The essays contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden, or a court mask, could escape the notice of one whose mind was capable of taking in the whole world of knowledge. His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribonou gave to Prince Ahmed. Fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady. Spread it, and the armies of powerful sultons might repose beneath its shade. The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge. In a letter written when he was

only 31, to his uncle, Lord Burley, he said, I have taken all knowledge to be my province. Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric. The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon, but not, like his wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and to tyrannize over the whole man. There are too many places in the plays where the happens. Poor old dying John of Gaunt, volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a pathetic instance of it. We may assume

that it is Bacon's fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame. No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly subjugated. It stopped at the first check from good sense. In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world, amid things as strange as any that are described in the Arabian tales, amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parisade, conveyances more rapid than the hippogriff of Rogierio, arms more formidable than the lance of Estolfo,

remedies more efficacious than the balsam of Fiarabra. Yet in his magnificent daydreams there was nothing wild, nothing but what sober reasons sanctioned. Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the Novum Organum. Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth. No book ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so many prejudices, introduced so many new opinions. But what we most admire is the vast capacity of the intellect,

which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science, all the past, the present, and the future, all the errors of two thousand years, all the encouraging signs of, of the passing times, all the bright hopes of the coming age. He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and rendering it portable. His eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank in literature. It is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts and each and every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally displayed in the plays and poems. and in much higher and richer degree than any other man of his time or of any previous time.

He was a genius without a mate, a prodigy not mateable. There was only one of him. The planet could not produce two of him at one birth, nor in one age. He could have written anything that is in the plays and poems. He could have written this. The cloud-capped towers, the gorge, gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve. And, like an insubstant faded, leave not a rack behind.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with asleep. Also, he could have written this, but he refrained. Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be ye man yet spares these stones, and cursed be ye yet moves my bones. When a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-capped towers, he ought not to follow it immediately with good friend for Jesus' sake for bear, because he will find the transition from great poetry to poor prose to violent for comfort. It will give him a shock. You will never notice how commonplace an unpoetic gravel is

until you bite into a layer of it in a pie. End of chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 11 and 12 of Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 11 and 12 Chapter 11 Am I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's works?

Ah now, what would you take me for? Would I be so soft as that, after having known the human race familiarly for nearly 74 years, It would grieve me to know that anyone could think so injuriously of me, so uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me. Oh, 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 a person. 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 secondhand 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 of religious and political parties, and our acceptance or rejection of the Shakespeare's and the Arthur Orton's and the Mrs. Eddies. We get them all at secondhand. 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 watch. When ever 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, Massachusetts.

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, and 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 post-mortem 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 purse. 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 strat fortulators 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 chips, monk 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 mustache and the putty face unseemed 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 odd pilgrim three hundred more with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder. Chapter 12 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, them, to proceed. One of the most trying defects, which I find in these stratfortulators, these Shakespeare-oids, these thugs, these bengolores, these troglomeres, these troglomeres, these troglos, These Heromphrodites, these blatherskites, these buccaneers, these bandaliers, 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 Krishna 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 million Hindus, or their equivalence 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 sex, thus making it clearly compulsory upon us to revere his gods and his sacred things and nobody else's. We can't say a word, for he has our own dictionary at his back and its decision is final. law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this. 1. Whatever is sacred to the Christian must be held in reverence by everybody else. Two, whatever is sacred to the Hindu must be held in reverence by

everybody else. Three, 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 bandaliers 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-concerns. conceited and insolent and impudent and dictatorial word in the language. And people will say, whose business is it? What God's eye 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 only. only sect that knows how to employ it gately, 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 irreverancers turn upon Thomas Payne 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 quarreling, 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 and Arthur Orton, Mary Baker, Thompson, Eddie, Lewis, the 17th, veiled prophet of Karrasin,

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. End of chapters 11 and 12. Chapter 13 of Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 13.

Isn't it odd when you think of it, that you may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishman, and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first tutors, a list containing 500 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, bunko-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 1,500 celebrities, and you can trace the authentic life histories of the whole of them, save one, far and away the most colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation, Shakespeare.

About him, you can find out nothing. Nothing of even the slightest importance. Nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your memory. Nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly commonplace person, a manager, an actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten all about him before he was fairly cold in his grave. We can go to the records and find out the life history of every renowned racehorse 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. It's 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 after 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 gnome 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 molder away, they will turn to dust, but the works will end up. until the last sun goes down. Mark Twain. P.S. March 25th. About two months ago, I was illuminating this autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the Bacon Shakespeare controversy, and I then took occasion to air the opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly obscure and unimportant. And not only in Great London, but also in the little village where he was born, where he lived a

quarter of a century, and where he died and was buried. I argued that if he had been a person of any note at all, aged villagers would have had much to tell about him many and many a year after his death, instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact connected with him. I believed, and I still believe, that if he had been famous, his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my native village out in Missouri. It is a good argument, a prodigiously strong one, and a most formidable one for even the most gifted, and ingenious and plausible strap-forter later to get around or explain away. Today, a Hannibal Courier post of recent date has reached me,

with an article in it which reinforces my contention that a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short space of 60 years. I will make an extract from it. Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she has produced. And as the years go by, her greatest son, Mark Twain, or S. L. Clemens, as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of the residents of the town he made famous and the town that made him famous.

His name is associated with every old building that is torn down to make way for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and with every hill or cave over or through, which he might by any possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest which he wove into his stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson's Island, or Mark Twain Cave, are now monuments to his genius. Hannibal is glad of any opportunity to do him honor as he has honored her. So it has happened that the old-timers who went to school with Mark, or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been honored with large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary boy who came to be a very

extraordinary humorist and whose every boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of what was to come. Like Aunt Becky and Mrs. Clemens, they can now see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here, and that the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were not all bad after all. So they have been in no hesitancy about drawing out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to get a Mark Twain story, all incidents being viewed in the light of his present fame, until the volume of Twainiana is already considerable. It's already considerable. and growing in proportion as the old-timers drop away, and the stories are retold second and third hand by their descendants. With some 73 years young, and living in a villa instead of a house,

he is a fair target, and let him incorporate, copyright, or patent himself, as he will, there are some of his works that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as gray beards gather about the fires and begin with, I've heard Father tell, or possibly, once when I, the Mrs. Clemens referred to as my mother, was my mother. And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper, of date 20 days ago. Miss Becca Blackenship died at the home of William Dickison 408 Rock Street at 2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72 years. The deceased was a sister of Huckleberry Finn, one of the famous characters in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. She had been a member of the Dickerson family, the housekeeper, for nearly 45 years, and was a highly respected lady. For the past eight years, she had been an invalid, but was as well cared for by

Mr. Dickison and his family as if she had been a near relative. She was a member of the Park Methodist Church and a Christian woman. I remember her well. I have a picture of her in my mind, which was graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, 63 years ago. She was at that time, nine years old, and I was about 11. I remember where she stood and how she looked, and I can still see her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and her short, toe-linen frock. She was crying. What it was about, I have long ago forgotten, but it was the tears that preserved the picture for me, no doubt. She was a good child, I can say that for her. I can say that for her. She knew me nearly 70 years ago. Did she forget me in the course of time? I think not.

If she had lived in Stratford in Shakespeare's time, would she have forgotten him? Yes. For he was never famous during his lifetime. He was utterly obscure in Stratford, and there wouldn't be any occasion to remember him after he had been dead a week. Injun Joe, Jimmy Finn, and General Gaines were prominent and very intemperate near-duels in Hannibal two generations ago. Plenty of gray heads there, remember them to this day, and can tell you about them. Isn't it curious that two town drunkards and one half-breed loafer should leave behind them, in a remote Missourian village, a fame a hundred times greater and several hundred times more particularized in the matter of definite facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the village where he

had lived the half of his lifetime. Mark Twain. End of Chapter 13. End of Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain.