Is Shakespeare Dead by Mark Twain
Think about it. The work is by that satirist extraordinaire Mark Twain, the man who could and did string sentences so sharp, they could be wielded like a sabre. The subject is the Bard of Avon. And the title? It`s Is Shakespeare Dead? Now tell me which Lit major, which lover of words, which teenager who has just finished reading Romeo and Juliet on Twitter, will not pick up the book?
The aforementioned word-lover will not be disappointed, either. The befuddling title of the book notwithstanding, in this slim volume dated 1909, Twain takes up that old rumour/ supposition/ canard (depending which side you are viewing it from): did Shakespeare really write Shakespeare? He avers that Stratford`s William S could not possibly have written all that he was supposed to have written. Then he makes a wonderfully witty case for …yes, you guessed right, Sir Francis Bacon being the real bard.
Twain`s main plank is as funny as it is irrefutable. It is that the only four lines we can certainly say was authored by Shakespeare was the less than soaring prose on his tombstone. It ran thusly: Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloased heare Blest be y man y spares thes stones And curst be ye y moves my bones. This, Twain points out, will render a severe jolt to those who have read the collected plays, sonnets and poems written by the man of the same name. They will find the transition from great poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort.
Then Twain delivers the mot juste: You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel is until you bite into a layer of it in a pie. Ouch. In another of many ouch-inducing posits, Twain puts Shakespeare alongside other notorious claimants: Satan, the Golden Calf, Louis XVII, and others of their ilk. All laying claim to fame, that is. He then scoffs at surmisers, supposers, educated and uneducated guessers, pointing out that the myth and legend (of William S being an attorney`s apprentice, of having travelled around the world, of having learned his language on the job, of having written all that he wrote, again on the job) just does not match up to the reality. Which is that Mr Shakespeare apparently was a feller of calves, a butcher`s apprentice rather than a lawyer`s, went to London and became a stagehand, returned to Stratford to become a small trader, and eventually died wholly unsung by the townspeople, even though all of England was already raving over this man`s plays and sonnets and poems.
Legend has it that the young Shakespeare taught himself the finer points of law, even as he was writing great plays. Twain laughs so hard at this, you can hear the cackle down the decades.
But no, he isn’t merely heaping endless scorn on Shakespeare. In a beautiful passage, Twain writes: 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; and hadn’t been matched since. The prospect of matching him in our time is not bright. After which, Twain goes on to present the case of Francis Bacon who was Attorney General as also Lord Chancellor of England. While not unearthing any new argument, Twain makes his case most convincingly.
However, as a card-holding `Stratfordolater,` an unabashed `Shakepearoid,` (Twain`s descriptive phrases, not mine), I`m not giving up my reverence for William S that easily. But what a wacking good read this book is! Is Shakespeare Dead? also holds a short pastiche set in the time of Elizabeth I which is more raunchy than witty but one of the characters in it is, yes, William Shakespeare. Who may or may not be the Bard of Avon.