WHAT IS MAN? AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

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 are a dozen that are

recognizably competent to do that poem. Do you remember

“Beautiful Snow”? Do you remember “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,

Rock Me to Sleep”? Do you remember “Backward, turn, backward, O

Time, in thy flight! Make me a child again just for 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 made that mighty trail? Were there a dozen claimants?

Where there two? No–the people knew who it was that had been

along there: there was only one Hercules.

There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn’t be two;

certainly there couldn’t be two at the same time. It takes ages

to bring forth a Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him.

This one was not matched before his time; nor during his time;

and hasn’t been matched since. The prospect of matching him in

our time is not bright.

The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not

qualified to write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was.

They claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment–both

natural and acquired–for the miracle; and that no other

Englishman of his day possessed the like; or, indeed,

anything closely approaching it.

Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor

and horizonless magnitude of that equipment. Also, he has

synopsized Bacon’s history–a thing which cannot be done for the

Stratford Shakespeare, for he hasn’t any history to synopsize.

Bacon’s history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his

death in old age–a history consisting of known facts, displayed

in minute and multitudinous detail; FACTS, not guesses and

conjectures and might-have-beens.

Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen,

and had a Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was

“distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian: she

corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his

APOLOGIA from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor

Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration.” It is the

atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations

and aspirations shall tend. The atmosphere furnished by the

parents to the son in this present case was an atmosphere

saturated with learning; with thinkings and ponderings upon deep

subjects; and with polite culture. It had its natural effect.

Shakespeare of Stratford was reared in a house which had no use

for books, since its owners, his parents, were without education.

This may have had an effect upon the son, but we do not know,

because we have no history of him of an informing sort. There

were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do

and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to

the dead languages. “All the valuable books then extant in all

the vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a

single shelf”–imagine it! The few existing books were in the

Latin tongue mainly. “A person who was ignorant of it was shut

out from all acquaintance–not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but

with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of

his own time”–a literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for

his fictitious reputation’s sake, since the writer of his Works

would begin to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way before

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