What Is Man?

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> What Is Man?


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 respectable house since.

III

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
over-topping, 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 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 of 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 had 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 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 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 downer 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 Jonson, and
Francis Bacon, and Spenser, 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 Jonson 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 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 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 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.

In the list as above set down will 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.

IV

Conjectures

The historians "suppose" that Shakespeare attended the Free School in
Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he was thirteen.
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 returned 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 slaughtering 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 nor 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
twenty-six 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 tried 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 haled
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 addition to the young Shakespeare's Stratford history comes
easy. The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-steeling, 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 Osborn
and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet
long and sixteen 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, and 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, twenty-two, 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 rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest likely
moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably wretched from that school
where he was supposably 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, than was possessed by
any other man of his time--for he was going to make brilliant and easy
and admiration-compelling use of these splendid treasures the moment he
got to London. And according to the surmisers, that is what he did.
Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able to teach him these
things, and no library in the little village to dig them out of. His
father could not read, and even the surmisers 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 exercises 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 theaters, 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
day's imperishable 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 knowledges, 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 sutler or something, for several months or
years--or whatever length of time a surmiser needs in his business--and
thus became familiar with soldiership 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 mean time; and who studied the books in the garret; and who
frolicked in the law-courts for recreation. Also, who did the call-boying
and the play-acting.

For he became a call-boy; and as early as '93 he became a "vagabond"--the
law's 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. Thenceforward he was a busy and flourishing business
man, 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 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.

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 six hundred
barrels of plaster of Paris.



V

"We May Assume"

In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults are
transacting business. Two of these cults are known as the Shakespearites
and the Baconians, and I am the other one--the Brontosaurian.

The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's Works; the
Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the Brontosaurian 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 Baconian assumers have come out ahead
of the Shakespearites. 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 Shakespearites.
The Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a definite principle, an
unchanging and immutable law: which is: 2 and 8 and 7 and 14, added
together, make 165. I believe this to be an error. No matter, you
cannot get a habit-sodden Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials upon
any other basis. With the Baconian it is different. If you place before
him the above figures and set him to adding them up, he will never in any
case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases out of ten 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 holeless, crackless, exitless prison-cell. Wait half an
hour, then open the cell, introduce a Shakespearite 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 tom-cat.

The Shakespearite 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 have 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 triumphal
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 hardy 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 TOM-CAT CONTAINS
THE MOUSE."

VI

When Shakespeare died, in 1616, great literary productions attributed to
him as author had been before the London world and in high favor for
twenty-four 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 twenty-two or twenty-three
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 twenty-three 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 the 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 Jonson 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 sixty 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
inquires 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.