Is Shakespeare Dead--again?
book...@yahoo.com
publishing his unabridged biography according to his will. It
remains to be heard whether a new biographer will find more references
and allusions to Shakespeare in the Twain canon, but pending that
eventuality, here is what's on the record of what Twain said in "Is
Shakespeare Dead?" about Shakespeare in terms of the authorship
attribution issue.
(quoted from http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/?p=119)
Is Shakespeare Dead?
By Mark Twain
“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 ….
He was born on the 23d of April, 1564.
Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write,
could not sign their names.
At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby and
unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged
with the government of the town, thirteen had to “make their mark” in
attesting important documents, because they could not write their
names.
Of the first eighteen years of his life NOTHING is known. They are a
blank.
On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a license
to marry Anne Whateley.
Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne
Hathaway. She was eight years his senior.
William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a hurry. By grace of a
reluctantly granted dispensation there was but one publication of the
banns.
Within six months the first child was born.
About two (blank) years followed, during which period NOTHING AT ALL
HAPPENED TO SHAKESPEARE, so far as anybody knows.
Then came twins – 1585. February.
Two blank years follow.
Then – 1587 – he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family
behind.
Five blank years follow. During this period NOTHING HAPPENED TO HIM,
as far as anybody actually knows.
Then – 1592 – there is mention of him as an actor.
Next year – 1593 – his name appears in the official list of players.
Next year – 1594 – he played before the queen. A detail of no
consequence: other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of
her reign. And remained obscure.
Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then in 1597 he
bought New Place, Stratford.
Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated
money, and also reputation as actor and manager.
Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become
associated with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly)
author of the same.
Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no
protest.
Then – 1610-11 – he returned to Stratford and settled down for good
and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes,
trading in land and houses; shirking a debt for forty-one shillings,
borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing
debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings
and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbor who tried to rob
the town of its rights in a certain common, and did not succeed.
He lived five or six years – till 1616 – in the joy of these elevated
pursuits.
Then he made a will, and signed each of its three pages with his name.
A thoroughgoing business man’s will. It named in minute detail every
item of property he owned in the world – houses, lands, sword,
silver-gilt bowl, and so on – all the way down to his “second-best
bed” and its furniture.
It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the
members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even his
wife: the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry by urgent grace
of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the wife whom he
left husbandless so many years; the wife who had had to borrow
forty-one shillings in her need, and which the lender was never able
to collect of the prosperous husband, but died at last with the money
still lacking. No, even this wife was remembered in Shakespeare’s
will.
He left her that “second-best bed.”
And NOT ANOTHER THING; not even a penny to bless her lucky widowhood
with.
It was eminently and conspicuously a business man’s will, not a
poet’s.
It mentioned NOT A SINGLE BOOK.
Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and
second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned one
he gave it a high place in his will.
The will mentioned NOT A PLAY, NOT A POEM, NOT AN UNFINISHED LITERARY
WORK, NOT A SCRAP OF MANUSCRIPT OF ANY KIND.
Many poets die 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.
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 anyone else’s – she thought it was Shakespeare’s.
When Shakespeare died in Stratford it was not an event. It made no
more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten
theater-actor would have made. Nobody came down from London; there
were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears – there was
merely silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what
happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh,
and the other literary folk of Shakespeare’s time passed from life! No
praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson
waited seven years before he lifted his.
SO FAR AS ANYBODY 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 in his
life.
SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS, HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER DURING HIS LIFE.
SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, SHAKESPEARE OF STRATFORD WROTE
ONLY ONE POEM DURING HIS LIFE. This one is authentic. He did write
that one – a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote the whole of it;
he wrote the whole of it out of his own head. He commanded that his
work of art be engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed. There it
abides to this day. This is it:
Good friend of Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
Am I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did not write
Shakespeare’s Works? Ah, now, what do you take me for? Would I be so
soft as that, after having known the human race familiarly for nearly
seventy-four years? It would grieve me to know that any one could
think so injuriously of me, so uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of
me. No, no, I am aware that when even the brightest mind in our world
has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it
will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine
sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any
circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of
that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself. We always get
second hand our notions about systems of government; and high tariff
and low tariff; and prohibition and anti-prohibition; and the holiness
of peace and the glories of war; and codes of honor and codes of
morals; and approval of the duel and disapproval of it; and our
beliefs concerning the nature of cats; and our ideas as to whether the
murder of helpless wild animals is base or is heroic; and our
preferences in the matter of religious and political parties; and our
acceptance or rejection of the Shakespeares….
We are the reasoning race, and when we find a vague file of
chipmunk-tracks stringing through the dust of Stratford village, we
know by our reasoning powers that Hercules has been along there. I
feel that our fetish is safe for three centuries yet. The bust, too –
there in the Stratford Church. The precious bust, the priceless bust,
the calm bust, the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy
mustache, and the putty face, unseamed of care – that face which has
looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and
fifty years and will still look down upon the awed pilgrim three
hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle,
expression of a bladder….
[Shakespeare] HASN’T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD. There is no way of getting
around that deadly fact. And no sane way has yet been discovered to
getting around its formidable significance. Its quite plain
significance… is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he lived,
and none until he had been dead two or three generations. The Plays
enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote them it seems a
pity the world did not find it out. He ought to have explained that he
was the author, and not merely a nom de plume for another man to hide
behind. If he had been less intemperately solicitous about his bones,
and more solicitous about his Works, it would have been better for his
good name, and a kindness to us. The bones were not important. They
will moulder away, they will turn to dust, but the Works will endure
until the last sun goes down.”
(unquote)
neonprose @ gmail.com
> Mark Twain is in the news--again, following the 100-year hiatus on
> publishing his unabridged biography according to his will.
>
>
> My grandmother was a Twain groupie from Iowa, I really enjoyed
>
> reading the book.
>
> So why do we need a new biographer? I don't think anyone
>
> could beat the original Twain.
>
> remains to be heard whether a new biographer will find more references
> and allusions to Shakespeare in the Twain canon, but pending that
> eventuality, here is what's on the record of what Twain said in "Is
> Shakespeare Dead?" about Shakespeare in terms of the authorship
> attribution issue.
>
>
> (quoted from http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/?p=119)
>
> Is Shakespeare Dead?
> By Mark Twain
>
> “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 ….
>
> He was born on the 23d of April, 1564.
>
> Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write,
> could not sign their names.
>
> At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby and
> unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged
> with the government of the town, thirteen had to “make their mark” in
> attesting important documents, because they could not write their
> Of the first eighteen years of his life NOTHING is known. They are a
> blank.
>
> On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a license
> to marry Anne Whateley.
>
> Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne
> Hathaway. She was eight years his senior.
>
> William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a hurry. By grace of a
> reluctantly granted dispensation there was but one publication of the
> banns.
>
> Within six months the first child was born.
>
> About two (blank) years followed, during which period NOTHING AT ALL
> HAPPENED TO SHAKESPEARE, so far as anybody knows.
>
>
> put on his fists like mittens, entertaining the customers who entered
>
> his father's butcher shop, William performing all the speaking parts?
> Then came twins – 1585. February.
>
> Two blank years follow.
>
> Then – 1587 – he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family
> behind.
>
> Five blank years follow. During this period NOTHING HAPPENED TO HIM,
> as far as anybody actually knows.
>
>
> many Blackfriar's Map, made by some critic of The Bard which
>
> reads "He took the men upstairs." The owner of the Blackfriar's
>
> Theatre decided to build an addition above the stage (an upper
>
> story) so the owner divided the space into two large rooms, Shappere
>
> purchased one of the rooms. Then he engaged in business
>
> practices that the Strats don't like to hear about.
>
> In two years he had amassed a fortune. Just read something
>
> about that today. Oh, right, I was reading it in Twain. Love
>
> Twain.
>
>
> Then – 1592 – there is mention of him as an actor.
>
> Next year – 1593 – his name appears in the official list of players.
>
> Next year – 1594 – he played before the queen. A detail of no
> consequence: other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of
> her reign. And remained obscure.
>
> Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then in 1597 he
> bought New Place, Stratford.
>
> Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated
> money, and also reputation as actor and manager.
>
> Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become
> associated with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly)
> author of the same.
>
>
> in honor of Pallas Athene. Bacon wrote and staged the thirty-eight
>
> plays in Bacon's First Folio (Comedies, HIstories, Tragedies)
> Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no
> protest.
>
> Then – 1610-11 – he returned to Stratford and settled down for good
> and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes,
> trading in land and houses; shirking a debt for forty-one shillings,
> borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing
> debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings
> and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbor who tried to rob
> the town of its rights in a certain common, and did not succeed.
>
>
> during a terrible famine in Warwickshire, I was surprised that
>
> the English government levied severe fines for hoarding, I've
>
> seen no record that the fine was actually levied but children
>
> were perishing of starvation in Warwickshire at the same time.
> 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.
>
>
> on the last of the Broker's deeds. The worst part is that he
>
> couldn't spell his own name, he gets to Shappe and then can't
>
> remember the rest. Probably picked up some brain virus in
>
> his London working environment.
> 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 anyone else’s – she thought it was Shakespeare’s.
>
> When Shakespeare died in Stratford it was not an event. It made no
> more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten
> theater-actor would have made. Nobody came down from London; there
> were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears – there was
> merely silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what
> happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh,
> and the other literary folk of Shakespeare’s time passed from life! No
> praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson
> waited seven years before he lifted his.
>
> SO FAR AS ANYBODY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of
> Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.
>
>
> say that.
> SO FAR AS ANYBODY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, he never wrote a
>
> letter in his life.
>
> SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS, HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER DURING HIS LIFE.
>
> SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, SHAKESPEARE OF STRATFORD WROTE
> ONLY ONE POEM DURING HIS LIFE. This one is authentic. He did write
> that one – a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote the whole of it;
> he wrote the whole of it out of his own head. He commanded that his
> work of art be engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed. There it
> abides to this day. This is it:
>
> Good friend of Iesus sake forbeare
> To digg the dust encloased heare:
> Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
> And curst be he yt moves my bones.
>
>
> of Bacon and Jonson's that was a great success. What really bothers
>
> me is that the Strats believe that Shappere wrote all the plays in
>
> Bacon's (and essentially Jonson's) First Folio.
>
> Thanks for letting me play.
Melanie Sands
Since they had no newspapers then, and no clippings could be
kept, stuff that happened got forgotten about.
>
> Then came twins – 1585. February.
>
> Two blank years follow.
exist then stored their clippings in a barn that burned down.
>
> Then – 1587 – he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family
> behind.
trips up to London, or vice versa, without anyone being the wiser -
just because we've lost the Twitter and Facebook records from 1590,
doesn't mean he didn't tweet away about the wifey coming up to visit
him.
>
> Five blank years follow. During this period NOTHING HAPPENED TO HIM,
> as far as anybody actually knows.
>
> Then – 1592 – there is mention of him as an actor.
>
> Next year – 1593 – his name appears in the official list of players.
>
> Next year – 1594 – he played before the queen. A detail of no
> consequence: other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of
> her reign. And remained obscure.
>
> Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then in 1597 he
> bought New Place, Stratford.
>
> Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated
> money, and also reputation as actor and manager.
>
> Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become
> associated with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly)
> author of the same.
>
> Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no
> protest.
> Then – 1610-11 – he returned to Stratford and settled down for good
> and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes,
> trading in land and houses; shirking a debt for forty-one shillings,
> borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing
> debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings
> and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbor who tried to rob
> the town of its rights in a certain common, and did not succeed.
>
> He lived five or six years – till 1616 – in the joy of these elevated
> pursuits.
>
> Then he made a will, and signed each of its three pages with his name.
>
> A thoroughgoing business man’s will. It named in minute detail every
> item of property he owned in the world – houses, lands, sword,
> silver-gilt bowl, and so on – all the way down to his “second-best
> bed” and its furniture.
he obviously wasn't capable of doing it himself.
>
> It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the
> members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even his
> wife: the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry by urgent grace
> of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the wife whom he
> left husbandless so many years;
and should not speculate.
>the wife who had had to borrow
> forty-one shillings in her need, and which the lender was never able
> to collect of the prosperous husband, but died at last with the money
> still lacking. No, even this wife was remembered in Shakespeare’s
> will.
>
> He left her that “second-best bed.”
Susannah.
>
> And NOT ANOTHER THING; not even a penny to bless her lucky widowhood
> with.
>
> It was eminently and conspicuously a business man’s will, not a
> poet’s.
>
> It mentioned NOT A SINGLE BOOK.
of his Stratford life.
> Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and
> second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned one
> he gave it a high place in his will.
> The will mentioned NOT A PLAY, NOT A POEM, NOT AN UNFINISHED LITERARY
> WORK, NOT A SCRAP OF MANUSCRIPT OF ANY KIND.
>
> Many poets die 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.
having to think about his unkind personality.
>
> 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.
> 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 anyone else’s – she thought it was Shakespeare’s.
he obviously had written some manuscript, if she thought it was
>
> 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.
theatre, or at least faded into the background a bit, so people
would hardly fall into a fit from shock and horror at the news
of his death, would they?
> A striking contrast with what
> happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh,
> and the other literary folk of Shakespeare’s time passed from life! No
> praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson
> waited seven years before he lifted his.
>
> SO FAR AS ANYBODY 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 in his
> life.
>
> SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS, HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER DURING HIS LIFE.
dinner. Does this mean I can't write, I can't speak and I can't eat?
Oh, sorry, my husband phones and my mother phones.
Melanie
>
Sneaky O. Possum
news:a6429b76-fb0b-4750...@googlegroups.com:
[snip]
> having to think about his unkind personality.
to read and enjoy if not for his unkind personality. It's impossible to
write observantly and honestly about people unless one is also willing
to be unkind.
Unfortunately, the converse is not also true: as some recent posts to
this newsgroup by John W. Kennedy have shown, it's easy enough to write
inobservantly and dishonestly about people while also being unkind. The
trick is to be inobservant and dishonest about yourself: for example, if
you've spent over a decade pointing and laughing at another person's
posts for your own amusement, do not under any circumstances acknowledge
that fact when (your amusement having at long last palled) you decide to
exhort everyone else to shun the person from whom you've derived so much
fun.
--
S.O.P.
book...@yahoo.com
acquaintance with different aspects of the human condition, although
it's true he was not just amused but highly critical. Yet he seems to
be among the best of us at both satirizing and empathizing with us. He
said, "Man is the only creature that blushes; or needs to."
Probably there is something formative about growing up in Hannibal,
Missouri, that is significant about Twain's angles of vision; as there
probably is about Shakespeare's makeup and outlook, if you compare
them as portraits of an artist as a young man?
So I think it's unfair to compare Twain with Kennedy in terms of
honesty; because Twain was painfully honest. Supposedly he had to
leave his newspaper job in Nevada when someone he wrote about came
looking for him with a gun. When he went to California as a
newspaper writer in a small town, he wrote an article exposing the
massacre of Chinese workers by local miners, and soon found it was
dangerous for him to stay. He had a deep satirical, occasionally
sardonic strain, developed early on and enforced by experience.
In terms of word skills, Kennedy's ad homenem railings are pretty
petty, compared to Twain's languid journalistic lancings, although if
Kennedy resorted to verbal pyrotechnics, I bet he could be amusing.
bookburn
marco
neonprose @ gmail.com
>
> expecting Twain to remark on that at the end of his book. If you
>
> havent' read Twain you're missing something, he goes into a
>
> commission that he and his friend got from a museum in which
>
> they made plaster casts of dinosaurs, mentioning that they had
>
> twenty-thousand barrels of plaster left over. Darn, I wanted to
>
> know what they did with the leftover barrels of plaster.
>
> Keep posting to HLAS, Melanie, I like reading your witty posts.
>
> Eliz.
Arthur Neuendorffer
>>
>> SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS,
Melanie Sands <Melanie_Sa...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well, nobody writes me letters. Nobody phones. Nobody invites me to
> dinner. Does this mean I can't write, I can't speak and I can't eat?
theatre, or at least faded into the background a bit.
Art N.