What Is Man?

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


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 straitened 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 summer wear, probably. I lived in
Hannibal fifteen 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--thirteen hundred 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 fifty-two. He had lived in
his native village twenty-six 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 sixty years
afterward no 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 first-hand 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 worth while? Wasn't the matter of sufficient consequence? Had
the inquirer an engagement to see a dog-fight 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 life--my seventy-third year being already
well behind me--yet SIXTEEN 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 mine together; things that happened 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 gipsying, a long time ago." Most
of them creditable 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 hale 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 numbers--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 deck-hands who used to heave the lead
for me and send up on the still night the "Six--feet--SCANT!" that made
me shudder, and the "M-a-r-k--TWAIN!" that took the shudder away, and
presently the darling "By the d-e-e-p--FOUR!" that lifted me to heaven
for joy. [1] 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.

------ 1. Four fathoms--twenty-four feet.



VII

If I had under my superintendence 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 wrote the plays was not merely
myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished: that he not only knew some
thousands of things about human life in 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 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 court-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 mile-stoned 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 made the bunt of each sail
fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the word the whole canvas
of the ship was loosed, and with the greatest rapidity possible
everything was sheeted 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, reeving 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 fore-royal; and while standing by
to loose it again, I had a fine view of the scene. From where I 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. "Sheet home the
fore-royal!"--"Weather sheet's home!"--"Lee sheet's home!"--"Hoist away,
sir!" is bawled from aloft. "Overhaul your clew-lines!" shouts the mate.
"Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut leech! belay! Well the lee brace; haul
taut 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 three hundred years? It is
my conviction that Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him.
For instance--from "The Tempest":

MASTER. Boatswain!

BOATSWAIN. Here, master; what cheer?

MASTER. Good, speak to the mariners: fall to 't, yarely, or we run
ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir! (ENTER MARINERS.)

BOATSWAIN. Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare!
Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's whistle. . . . Down with the
topmast! yare! lower, lower! Bring her to try wi' the main course. . . .
Lay her a-hold, a-hold! Set her two courses. Off to sea 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 quoins into the standing galley and the
imposing-stone into the hell-box; 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 lodes, 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 charge them with quicksilver and
sulphate of copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the
resulting amalgam in 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 argot and the
quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so whenever Bret Harte
introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of his miners
opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte 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
dialects that belongs with them; and whenever Harte 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 argot 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 perhapes, 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
indefintenesses, 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 sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen and
friend of his later days remembered to tell anything about him, did not
write the Works.

Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED bears the heading
"Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty 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.



VIII

Shakespeare as a Lawyer [1]

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, of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law,
lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of
exceptions, nor writ of error." Such was the testimony borne by one of
the most distinguished lawyers of the nineteenth 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 (p. 164): "On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare
. . . obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the payment of
No. 6, and No. 1, 5s. 0d. 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 deeply 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
Clarke 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
acquired 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 in the Inns 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 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 thirty-four plays, and only in one single instance
in the fifty-four 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, 'fine 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 round the
courts of law in London two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to
the title of real property were comparatively rare. And besides,
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 sciolist's
temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art. No legal
solecisms will be found. The abstrusest 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 descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries,
their vouchers and double vouchers, in 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 of 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 requisites of a valid marriage, in the presumption of
legitimacy, in 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, VIZ.: Sir James
Plaisted Wilde, Q.C. 1855, 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
marshaling 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 illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the
law. He seems almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases, the commonest of
legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or
illustration. That he should have descanted 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 conveyancer's office, but of
the pleader's 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.,
Shakspere'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?"

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 irrefragable 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 Court 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."