WHAT IS MAN? AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

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 fifteen hundred 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 RACE-HORSE of

modern times–but not Shakespeare’s! There are many reasons why,

and they have been furnished in cart-loads (of guess and

conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth

all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly

sufficient all by itself–HE HADN’T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD. There

is no way of getting around that deadly fact. And no sane way

has yet been discovered of getting around its formidable

significance.

Its quite plain significance–to any but those thugs (I do

not use the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence

while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three

generations. The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and

if he wrote them it seems a pity the world did not find it out.

He ought to have explained that he was the author, and not merely

a NOM DE PLUME for another man to hide behind. If he had been

less intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more

solicitous about his Works, it would have been better for his

good name, and a kindness to us. The bones were not important.

They will moulder away, they will turn to dust, but the Works

will endure until the last sun goes down.

Mark Twain.

P.S. MARCH 25. 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 most formidable one for even the most gifted and ingenious

and plausible Stratfordolator 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 sixty 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,