SOURCE: Hirsh, James. “Samuel Clemens and the Ghost of Shakespeare.” Studies in the Novel 24, no. 3 (fall 1992): 251-72.

[In the following essay, Hirsh traces the influence of Shakespeare on Huckleberry Finn, and explores the anxieties Twain experienced in comparing himself with Shakespeare.]

Because Shakespeare's works are so famous, a later writer's adaptation of Shakespeare is apt to seem trite unless the source is significantly transformed, but this transformation may obscure the influence. Like the location of the purloined letter, Shakespeare's influence sometimes does not become obvious until after it has been pointed out. The extent of Samuel Clemens's indebtedness to Shakespeare, for example, has only recently begun to be charted in detail—by Howard G. Baetzhold, Alan Gribben, and others.¹ The present essay is an attempt not only to indicate further examples of this indebtedness, which is often disguised by the particular methods of transformation used by Clemens, but to demonstrate that the influence of Shakespeare provoked anxiety for Clemens throughout his career and that his struggle with the ghost of Shakespeare, although sometimes bitter, was a key factor in the creation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Clemens was self-conscious about literary indebtedness. His frequent comments on the issue throughout his career are remarkably inconsistent. Those comments included facetious acknowledgements, frank admissions, exculpations, and denials. At one extreme, Clemens suggested that his works owed nothing to other writers: “as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well equipped for that trade. I surely have the equipment, … all of it real, none of it artificial, for I don't know anything about books.”² This assertion of his literary originality contrasts sharply with his comment in an 1875 letter to William Dean Howells: “I would not wonder if I am the worst literary thief in the world, without knowing it.”³ In a marginal note in his copy of a book by Henry H. Breen, Clemens specifically cited Shakespeare to justify the use of materials from other writers: “Shakespeare took other people's quartz and extracted the gold from it—it was a nearly valueless commodity before.”⁴ The obvious catch in this formulation is that a later writer could not mine Shakespeare's works in the same way that Shakespeare mined the works of lesser writers—one would only tarnish what was already gold.

Such paeans to the genius of Shakespeare were common in nineteenth-century America. “If Americans lost much by their distance from [Shakespeare's England], they compensated by the enthusiasm of their idolatry,” noted Robert Falk, who cited Walt Whitman's remark, “If I had not stood before [Shakespeare's] poems with uncover'd head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written Leaves of Grass.”⁵ James Fenimore Cooper paid homage by using “1,089 quotations from Shakespeare as mottoes for entire books or as chapter headings.”⁶ The Familiar Quotations compiled by the American John Bartlett contained more than twice as many passages from Shakespeare as from the entire Bible.⁷ Shakespeare was ubiquitous in popular culture of the time. “Performances of Shakespeare were … a common occurrence along the Mississippi in the mid-nineteenth century.”⁸ Like Clemens himself, “famous Shakespearean actors came to California, to cash in on the free-flowing gold” in the 1860s⁹—this conjunction perhaps inspired the particular metaphor Clemens employed in his expression of bardolatry quoted above.

When the Paige typesetter was temporarily in operation, Clemens recorded in his notebook that at precisely 4:45 p.m. on January 7, 1889, he himself had typed “William Shakspeare [sic]” as the “first proper name ever set by the new keyboard.”¹⁰ In an article “About Play-Acting” (1898), Clemens complained that New York lacked a theater devoted to “the most effective of all the … disseminators of high literary taste and lofty emotion—the tragic stage.” And he asked, “Nowadays, when a mood comes which only Shakespeare can set to music, what must we do?” In the same essay, he implicitly accepted a lower status for his own most successful literary mode: “Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare.”¹¹

The bardolatry to which Clemens contributed could become oppressive and a source of anxious envy for ambitious writers. According to Falk, Whitman “considered himself Shakespeare's rival in the New World and was even jealous of his fame,”¹² a fame which Whitman himself promoted with worshipful remarks. Clemens's attitude to Shakespeare was similarly ambivalent, as ambivalent as his comments on literary indebtedness. Alongside his admiration for Shakespeare and arising from it was an intense, anxious, sometimes bitter rivalry, often masked by facetiousness.

In an 1876 sketch entitled “1601,” Clemens presented a fictional conversation among Queen Elizabeth, “Shaxpur,” and others, as reported by the Queen's cupbearer, who also comments on the proceedings. At one point, Shaxpur pompously denies that he farted, and when he reads aloud from his works, the cupbearer is unimpressed:

Master Shaxpur did rede a part of his King Henry IV, ye which, it seemeth unto me, is not of the value of an arseful of ashes, yet they praised it bravely, one and all.

Ye same did rede a portion of his “Venus and Adonis” to their prodigious admiration, whereas I, being sleepy and fatigued withal, did deme it but paltrie stuff.¹³

While covertly ridiculing the supposedly obtuse narrator, the passage overtly ridicules Shakespeare.

When the dramatist John Lyly becomes the topic of conversation, the cupbearer reports that “Shaxpur did fidget to discharge some venom of sarcasm.” The cupbearer comments that some people “having a specialtie, and admiring it in themselves, be jealous when a neighbor doth essaye it, nor can abide it in them long.”¹⁴ This observation anticipates Harold Bloom's account of literary anxiety: “The strong poet's love of his poetry … must exclude the reality of all other poetry.”¹⁵ The cupbearer himself repeatedly discharges his own venom of sarcasm against Shakespeare, and the cupbearer's resentment, incongruously, seems at least partly due to the favorable response of others to Shakespeare's works (“yet they praised it bravely one and all,” “to their prodigious admiration”). The cupbearer seems to have projected his own anxiety in regard to Shakespeare onto Shakespeare in the form of Shakespeare's anxiety in regard to Lyly. Why should the cupbearer, fictional author of only this brief diary entry, resent the favorable reception of Shakespeare's works? It is difficult not to see both depictions of literary anxiety in this sketch as projections of Clemens's own anxiety. As Walter Jackson Bate has pointed out, evidence for literary anxiety will usually be, as in this instance, implicit rather than explicit “because of the natural pride and embarrassed silence of the writer himself”: “when his anxiety has to do with the all-important matter of his craft, and his achievement or fear of impotence there, he naturally prefers to wrestle with it privately or to express it only indirectly … We begin to sense its importance only when we look between the lines.”¹⁶

Parodies of Shakespearean works were common in the nineteenth century, and Clemens produced several. One impulse behind such parodies was presumably a desire to deflate the oppressive bardolatry of the period. But in the case of Clemens, “if we look between the lines,” traces of literary rivalry also become apparent. “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized’” (1864) is an account of the assassination of Caesar as it might have been reported in a contemporary American newspaper. The fictional narrator is an intensely competitive writer. He imagines, if he were in ancient Rome, that he would get an exclusive interview with the dying Caesar “And be envied by the morning paper hounds!”¹⁷ The sketch is actually in competition, however, not with other newspaper accounts but with Shakespeare's account of the event. If the narrator had interviewed the dying Caesar, he would also have gotten the scoop on Shakespeare, who “saw the beginning and the end of the unfortunate affray.”¹⁸ The sketch consists in large part of a paraphrase of 3.1.1-73 of Julius Caesar. Clemens translated Shakespeare's dramatic dialogue into narrative prose:

I could be well mov'd, if I were as you; …
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.

(3.1.58, 60-62)¹⁹

[Caesar] said he could not be moved; that he was as fixed as the North Star, and proceeded to speak in the most complimentary terms of the firmness of that star, and its steady character.²⁰

The sketch is not an event from Roman history localized, but a passage from Shakespeare localized.

In an account of his trip to Hawaii in 1866, Clemens included a sketch entitled “I Endeavor to Entertain the Seasick Man.” Clemens's persona Mark Twain reports that he “had been writing a poem—or rather, been paraphrasing a passage from Shakespeare,” and he decides to read this composition, “Polonius' Advice to His Son—Paraphrased from Hamlet,” to his afflicted fellow passenger.²¹ The composition does get a rise out of the seasick man: “As I finished, Brown's stomach cast up its contents.”²² Although the joke is supposedly at Twain's expense, a sketch in which a Shakespearean monologue, even in paraphrase, induces a listener to vomit, it also pokes fun at Shakespeare.

The sketch provides an early example of a key feature of many of Clemens's works: beneath an explicit Shakespearean borrowing occurs an implicit but no less important form of Shakespearean influence. In this case Clemens's persona not only paraphrases Polonius but resembles Polonius. His verbose endorsement of brevity recalls Polonius's famous remarks at 2.2.86-104. Twain's fatuous self-congratulation for his imitation of Polonius recalls Polonius's foolish pride in his performance as Julius Caesar in his university days.

In 1881 Clemens worked on a burlesque version of Hamlet.²³ He attempted to insert into the play a contemporary book salesman, Basil Stockmar, without actually changing any of Shakespeare's dialogue. Again, beneath the explicit borrowing occurs a no less important form of influence. The character Clemens inserted into Shakespeare's play is based on a Shakespeare character: Clemens's version of Hamlet could be entitled Autolycus in Denmark.²⁴ Stockmar's opening soliloquy is indebted to the soliloquy by Autolycus that opens 4.3 of The Winter's Tale, as well as to Autolycus's monologues in 4.4. Just as Autolycus describes techniques he uses to induce the peasants of Bohemia to buy his wares, Stockmar describes techniques he plans to use on the “clod-hoppers” of Denmark.²⁵ Like Autolycus, Stockmar meddles in the affairs of others, and when he expresses his satisfaction with his intervention, he paraphrases Autolycus:

I am courted now with … a means to do the Prince my master good … I will bring these two moles, these blind ones, aboard.

(4.4.833-37)

Meantime my little benevolent game glides along first-rate … I've secured a lower berth amidships for Laertes and he'll sail today.²⁶

Stockmar's assertions of off-stage chumminess with the royal family parallel Autolycus's assertions that he is an influential courtier (4.4.729-99), and Stockmar's satisfaction with the success of his conundrum at Claudius's drinking party parallels Autolycus's satisfaction with the success of his thievery at the sheep-shearing festival (4.4.595-618).²⁷

Another notable feature of the burlesque is that Stockmar, like the cupbearer in “1601,” displays anxieties that seem to reflect the author's anxieties. Stockmar wonders whether endorsements from the royal family of Denmark will help him unload his inferior books, just as Clemens explicitly worried whether his revision of Shakespeare's play about the Danish royal family would please readers: “the sacrilegious scribbler who ventured to put words into Shakespeare's mouth would probably be hanged.”²⁸ Like his creation Stockmar, Clemens borrowed from Autolycus to express his anxiety. After delivering a soliloquy in which he celebrates his thievery, Autolycus notices other characters in the vicinity and, in an anxious aside, fears that, if they have overheard his soliloquy, he will be hanged (4.4.626-27). Clemens repeatedly took up this project, repeatedly abandoned it, and left it incomplete. It does not seem coincidental that, within the burlesque itself, Stockmar is repeatedly frightened off the stage by the Ghost of Hamlet's father; at one point he returns to the stage and boldly declares, “I ain't afraid of any ghost,” but the Ghost re-appears, whereupon Stockmar “Kneels, quaking, before Ghost, and holds out his book.”²⁹

At another point, Stockmar practices his dishonest sales pitch: “the book which I have the honor to offer … is a work which has been commended by the highest authorities as an achievement of transcendent and hitherto unparalleled merit.”³⁰ He acknowledges to himself that no book in his stock actually deserves such fulsome praise, but such praise was commonly lavished on Hamlet, the work into which Stockmar has intruded, and an author concurrently at work on Huckleberry Finn might hope that that book would eventually elicit similar praise.

The overt target of these burlesques is the coarseness and obtuseness of Americans compared with the eloquence and profundity of Shakespeare. But the comparison cuts two ways. Next to the simplicity and directness of the Americans, Shakespeare is made to seem grandiloquent and unintelligible. Stockmar explicitly complains about the way people in the palace speak, that is, about the way characters in Hamlet speak: “they … talk the grandest kind of book-talk … It's the most unnatural stuff! why, it ain't human talk; nobody that ever lived, ever talked the way they do. Even the flunkies can't say the simplest thing the way a human being would say it … Lord, I get mighty tired of this everlasting speechifying.”³¹ The main target of this passage is Shakespeare not Stockmar. Like Duchamp's depiction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache, Twain's burlesque is iconoclastic.

A writer might also use literary travesties as practice for more serious adaptations of an earlier writer's work. And Clemens did attempt to build “snow-summits” of his own with the help of Shakespeare. For example, as Robert L. Gale has pointed out, there are numerous resemblances between The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and King Lear. Gale argued, however, that these resemblances are “not sufficiently in the open to have been the result of any sustained intention on Twain's part.”³² But Clemens used a Shakespearean quotation, from The Merchant of Venice, as an epigraph to the novel, and Gale himself pointed out a paraphrase of a famous line in Henry IV, Part 2 at a key moment of the novel: when Tom Canty, in his new princely surroundings, repudiates his own mother by saying, “I do not know you, woman” (Ch. 31), he echoes the repudiation of Falstaff by the newly crowned Henry—“I know thee not, old man” (5.5.47).³³ Even if Clemens's adaptation of Shakespearean materials is not “in the open,” openness is not a necessary hallmark of “sustained intention.” An author's intention in regard to a reader's awareness of the author's source materials can fall anywhere on a wide spectrum. At one extreme, an author may explicitly identify a source, and at the other extreme a plagiarist may hope his source is never recognized. In between is a range of implicit reference, from easily recognized allusions to deeply buried ones. An author might, for example, intentionally obscure a source because of his or her anxiety about literary indebtedness or in order to allow a parallel with the source to work subliminally on a reader.

The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, on which Clemens worked intermittently between 1897 and 1908, include significant adaptations of specific Shakespearean situations and dialogue. Several critics have cited parallels between these manuscripts and The Tempest. Baetzhold, for example, pointed out that the second paragraphs of both “The Chronicle of Young Satan” and “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” paraphrase Prospero's “insubstantial pageant” speech (4.1.146-63).³⁴ In Chapter 2 of “The Chronicle” Satan creates for the amusement of the children a group of miniature people and then abruptly destroys his creatures. William M. Gibson noted that this episode illustrates Gloucester's view of the human condition: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, / They kill us for their sport” (King Lear, 4.1.36-37).³⁵ Indeed, Gibson might have pointed out a specific verbal echo: Satan kills his creatures “just as if they had been flies.”³⁶ In a later passage in the same chapter of “The Chronicle,” Satan picks up a wood-louse and philosophizes: “What is the difference between Homer and this? between Caesar and this? … Man is made of dirt … He comes today and is gone to-morrow, he begins as dirt and departs as a stench.”³⁷ These remarks paraphrase Hamlet's comments in the graveyard on Yorick, Alexander, and Caesar (5.1.195-216). In an earlier draft, this source would have been more readily recognized by a reader: instead of “Homer,” Clemens originally wrote “Shakspeare.”³⁸

John S. Tuckey pointed out that when Clemens wrote in a 1905 letter to his daughter Clara that he had broken his bow and burned his arrows, “His expression recalls Prospero's—and supposedly Shakespeare's—valedictory speech in The Tempest” (5.1.54-57).³⁹ For Clemens, Shakespeare was not merely a figure to idolize or to parody but someone to emulate.

Clemens's most impassioned discussion of literary influence and his most overt comparison of himself and Shakespeare both occur in a single passage in What is Man? Clemens produced preliminary studies for this work around 1880 but did not publish it until 1906.⁴⁰ It consists of a dialogue between a young man and an old man (each of whom seems to be an alter ego of Clemens himself). The following passage presents striking evidence not merely of literary anxiety but of literary anxiety specifically in regard to Shakespeare:

O. M.
A man's brain is so constructed that it can originate nothing whatever. It can only use material obtained outside. It is merely a machine.
Y. M.
… but certainly Shakspeare's creations—
O. M.
No, you mean Shakspeare's imitations. Shakspeare created nothing … He was a machine, and machines do not create … He was not a sewing-machine, like you and me, he was a Gobelin loom. The threads and the colors came into him from the outside; outside influences … framed the patterns in his mind … and it automatically turned out that pictured and gorgeous fabric which still compels the astonishment of the world. If Shakspeare had been born and bred on a barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had … no outside influences … and so, Shakspeare would have produced nothing … In England he rose to the highest limit attainable through the outside helps afforded by that land's ideals, influences and training. You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor, and care nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out Gobelins.(41)

(Clemens's emphases)

Who reproached Clemens for not producing works as great as Shakespeare's? The answer seems to be Clemens himself, who here sought relief both from the anxiety of influence (even Shakespeare depended on outside influences) and from the responsibility for the relative inferiority of his work (if Shakespeare had been raised on a barren island, he would have produced nothing—and, presumably, if he had been raised in Missouri, he would have produced nothing better than what Clemens had managed to produce). Despite the supposedly leveling fatalism that reduces all men to machines, however, Clemens still could not erase his sense of inferiority to Shakespeare, a Gobelin loom in comparison to himself, a mere sewing-machine. Adding to the poignancy of Clemens's machine imagery is the reminder of his disastrous investment in the Paige typesetting machine.

It is appropriate that Shakespeare figures so prominently in Clemens's most anxious debate with himself about literary influence because, as the examples that have already been noted and those that will be noted later in this essay suggest, Clemens was profoundly influenced by Shakespeare throughout his career. Even some of the commentary in What Is Man? itself paraphrases Hamlet, as does the title (“What a piece of work is a man,” 2.2.303-04).

In his 1909 essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?,” Clemens entered the controversy over the authorship of the works attributed to Shakespeare. As Marjorie Garber has pointed out, “by far the greatest number of contributions, on both sides of the question, have come from Americans.”⁴² A major reason for this, in Garber's view, is “an impulse to reverse colonization, a desire to recapture ‘Shakespeare’ and make him new (and in some odd way ‘American’) by discovering his true identity, something at which the British had failed.”⁴³ A similar attempt at reverse colonization could explain the intensity of American bardolatry—by being more bardolatrous than the Bard's own countrymen, American could lay claim to him (whoever he was).

Whatever part nationalism may have played in Clemens's decision to enter the controversy, he also seems to have had something personal at stake. Clemens makes the following presumably facetious but cryptic comment about his rejection of Shakespeare's authorship: “in it I find comfort, solace, peace, and never-failing joy.”⁴⁴ Why would anyone find “comfort, solace, peace, and neverfailing joy” in the notion that the most highly praised literary works had been falsely attributed to Shakespeare? Perhaps beneath the puzzling overt joke lies a covert truth: daunted by a precursor (to use Harold Bloom's terminology), a later writer might find solace in depriving the precursor of the glory of achievement, or (to paraphrase the cupbearer) someone who has a specialty himself is apt to be jealous when another is praised for it—and therefore may find comfort in the denial of that praise. In the course of the essay, Clemens falsifies his own past. He reports that ever since the 1850s, “that ancient day,” he has been convinced that Shakespeare's plays were ghostwritten.⁴⁵ This is contradicted by the reverence with which Clemens typed the name “William Shakspeare” on the Paige typesetter in 1889, by his other expressions of high praise for “Shakespeare,” and even by the disparagement of the works attributed to “Shaxpur” in “1601.”

Like the spate of Shakespearean parodies in the nineteenth century, the authorship controversy was a reaction against the bardolatry of the period. Although she does not specifically apply her argument to Clemens, Garber argues that “For some combatants [in the controversy], Shakespeare represents a juggernaut, a monument to be toppled.”⁴⁶ This impulse in response to the oppressive cultural authority granted to Shakespeare would be most intense for writers who felt in competition with Shakespeare.

What Clemens took from Shakespeare he hesitated to give to Bacon: “I only believed Bacon wrote Shakespeare, whereas I knew Shakespeare didn't.”⁴⁷ Such uncertainty about the issue would avoid the replacement of one identifiable, daunting precursor by another. And Clemens's literary expropriation throughout his career of material from formerly Shakespearean but now anonymous works would not qualify as theft, according to the advice Clemens once gave authors: “never let a false modesty deter you from ‘cabbaging’ anything you find drifting about without an owner.”⁴⁸

Even if established, Bacon's authorship would be easier to accept than Shakespeare's. If Bacon wrote the plays, Clemens would have an excuse to soothe his sense of inferiority: “It is the atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations and aspirations shall tend. The atmosphere furnished by the parents [of Bacon] was … saturated with learning; with thinkings and ponderings upon deep subjects; and with polite culture.” If, on the other hand, Shakespeare wrote the plays, Clemens would have no such excuse because, as Clemens points out in a direct comparison, Shakespeare's upbringing was at least as deprived as his own:

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.⁴⁹

(Clemens's emphasis)

This seems to be another example of anxiety masked as a joke. If Shakespeare, reared in an out-of-the-way village, could have learned enough to produce masterpieces of high culture, then Clemens, also reared in an out-of-the-way village, was not thereby incapacitated from producing works of similar quality and sophistication. The passage simultaneously may reveal Clemens's anxiety about Melville; indeed, the two anxieties are interconnected because Moby-Dick is openly and pervasively influenced by Shakespeare.

In yet another comparison between himself and Shakespeare, Clemens even used his own celebrity as an argument against Shakespeare's authorship: if Shakespeare had written the plays, “his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my native village … For he was never famous during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in Stratford,” unlike Clemens, who at the time he wrote the essay was the subject of a glowing article in the Hannibal Courier-Post, quoted at length by Clemens.⁵⁰

At one point in the essay, Clemens also tried to suggest that a specific early experience prevented Shakespeare's works from having any influence at all on his own work. George Ealer, the riverboat pilot under whom Clemens trained, used to read aloud from Shakespeare's plays while Clemens was steering the boat: “He read well, but not profitably for me, because he constantly injected commands [regarding the operation of the boat] into the text. That broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up … it was a damage to me, because I have never since been able to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way. I cannot rid it of his explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere.”⁵¹ If Ealer damaged Clemens's ability even to read Shakespeare, it would follow that Shakespeare could not possibly have influenced Clemens.

This autobiographical anecdote—which resembles the incident in which Huck Finn, also on a vessel on the Mississippi, also listens to an older man garble Shakespeare (Ch. 21)—presents an image of young Clemens doubly under instruction: he is the apprentice steamboat pilot listening to the voice of his master, and simultaneously he is the would-be writer listening to the creations of a literary genius. The anecdote also gave Clemens another opportunity for a Shakespearean parody. He quotes a passage from Macbeth interspersed with Ealer's supposed commands about the operation of the boat. It does not seem a matter of mere chance that, in an essay entitled “Is Shakespeare Dead?” which attributes Shakespeare's works to someone else, Clemens chose to travesty the speech in which Macbeth addresses the ghost of Banquo and exclaims, “Take any shape but that … Hence, horrible shadow!” (3.4.101, 105).

The cryptic title of the essay becomes less so if one recalls two episodes in literary works, one by Shakespeare and one by Clemens. In Richard III, when informed that Richmond is headed for England “to claim the crown” (4.4.468), Richard responds sarcastically but proleptically, “Is the King dead?” (470), whereas in “Is Shakespeare Dead?” Clemens tries to remove Shakespeare from his position at the top of the literary realm. In Chapter 27 of The Innocents Abroad, an American doctor standing before the bust of a person as famous as Shakespeare, pulls the leg of his Genoese guide: “Christopher Columbo—pleasant name—is—is he dead?”⁵² During the course of the episode the doctor also facetiously denies that Columbus could have discovered America. Clemens's persona Twain comments, “That joke was lost on the foreigner—guides can not master the subtleties of the American joke.”⁵³ When later in his career Clemens, in an essay entitled “Is Shakespeare Dead?,” denies that Shakespeare could have written the works attributed to him, he may be playing a more elaborate joke of the sort played by the doctor. The cryptic allusion in the title of the essay to the episode in The Innocents Abroad, as well as the occasional facetiousness of the essay, could also be defensive ploys—anyone who pointed out the weaknesses in Clemens's arguments could, like the Genoese guide, be accused of missing the joke. Clemens was thus able to deny Shakespeare's authorship and simultaneously to be in a position to evade responsibility for this denial.

Finally, it does not seem merely fortuitous that Clemens, who throughout his career implicitly and explicitly compared himself to Shakespeare and who announced his own retirement by paraphrasing Shakespeare's supposed announcement of his retirement, should, at the age of seventy-four and in ill health (and, as it turned out, in the year before his own death), entitle an essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?”

Although his struggle with Shakespeare was sometimes bitter, the most profound work Clemens produced was also the one most profoundly influenced by Shakespeare. Huckleberry Finn contains several explicit references to Shakespeare. In Chapter 20 the duke proposes a performance of Shakespearean selections for the local rubes. When he assigns the part of Juliet to the king, the latter objects, “my peeled head and my white whiskers is goin' to look oncommon odd on her, maybe.”⁵⁴ But the duke reassures him: “these country jakes won't ever think of that.” In the following chapter, the two rehearse. Using swords “that the duke made out of oak laths,” they also practice a battle scene from Richard III, until the king falls overboard. For an encore, the duke suggests that the king recite Hamlet's “most celebrated” soliloquy. With much exertion, the duke calls up this “sublime” monologue “from recollection's vaults”:

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane

This jumble of phrases from various parts of Hamlet, as well as from Macbeth and Richard III, continues for 22 more lines.⁵⁵ When the show goes on, “only about twelve people” attend, “And they laughed all the time” (Ch. 22). Angered, “the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn't come up to Shakespeare.” Another explicit reference to Shakespeare occurs in Chapter 24 when the duke “dressed Jim up in King Lear's outfit.” Michael Patrick Hearn has noted two allusions in the novel to Richard III and one to Othello.⁵⁶ Many critics have pointed out the implicit but obvious Shakespearean source for the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud: Harney Shepherdson and Sophia Grangerford more closely resemble Romeo and Juliet than do the duke and the king.

But Huckleberry Finn contains a surprising number of other adaptations of Shakespearean material. The trip down the Mississippi is also a trip through Shakespeare country. The Cave Hollow robbery in Chapter 3 is a children's version of the Gadshill robbery in Henry IV, Part 1. Like Falstaff, Tom tells outrageous lies about what happened, lies which Huck, like Hal, tries to expose. The episode includes at least one paraphrase of the play. Tom reports to his playmates “that next day a whole parcel of Spanish merchants and rich A-rabs was going to camp in Cave Hollow.” Poins reports to his confederates that “tomorrow morning … at Gadshill, there are pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding to London with fat purses” (1.2.124-27). Colonel Sherburn's contemptuous dismissal of the mob in Chapter 22 (“droop your tails and go home”) re-enacts Coriolanus's defiance of the Roman populace (“You common cry of ours … I banish you!” [3.3.120, 123]). The appearance of two sets of Wilks brothers in the same town (Ch. 28-29) creates a Comedy of Errors. A brief description of a slave in Chapter 34 is Macbeth localized: “the witches was pestering him awful, these nights, and making him see all kinds of strange things, and hear all kinds of strange words and noises.” Jim angrily lashes out at his daughter for her disobedience in not responding to his command and later suffers intense remorse (Ch. 23); in each of these specifics, Jim resembles King Lear, whose clothes he is subsequently made to wear.

Even the explicit references to Shakespeare include buried Shakespearean adaptations. The attempt by the duke and the king to practice a sword-fight in Richard III by using “laths” recalls an episode during the ill-fated and at times farcical Cade rebellion in Henry VI, Part 2 in which one commoner opens a scene by telling another: “Come and get thee a sword, though made of a lath” (4.2.1-2). The king's description of himself as Juliet with “white whiskers” mirrors the image created by Lear, another old king down on his luck, when he describes Gloucester as “Goneril with a white beard” (4.6.96). When the duke responds to the king's concern about this example of casting against type by saying “these country jakes won't ever think of that,” his words describe with greater plausibility the unlikelihood that readers would recognize the Shakespearean source of the image. And while the king and the duke may not much resemble the Shakespearean characters they explicitly try to impersonate, they do, like Stockmar, greatly resemble the Shakespearean entertainer-thief-con man Autolycus.

Autolycus even supplies elements of Huck's characterization. Huck expresses his decision not to inform Miss Watson about the location of her runaway slave in terms strikingly similar to those in which Autolycus expresses his decision not to inform Polixeness about the whereabouts of his runaway son:

The Prince himself is about a piece of iniquity: stealing away from his father … If I thought it were a piece of honesty to acquaint the King withal, I would not do't. I hold it the more knavery to conceal it; and therein am I constant to my profession.

(4.4.678-83)

I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line … And as for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse I would do that, too.

(Ch. 31)

The Shakespearean play that influenced Huckleberry Finn most deeply was Hamlet. In the opening chapter of the novel, Huck hears “twelve licks” of the clock, determines “something was a stirring,” and then hears Tom's identifying signal. In the opening scene of Hamlet, after Barnardo says the clock has “strook twelf” (7), Fransisco reports “Not a mouse stirring” (10), but at that point Horatio and Marcellus arrive and give the identifying passwords. And something very similar to what is eventually encountered in the first scene of Hamlet makes its presence felt in the first chapter of Huckleberry Finn: “I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave and has to go about that way every night grieving.”⁵⁷

The duke plays the part of Hamlet on the raft then relinquishes it to the king. But these are not the only Hamlets in the novel. Clemens distributed some of Hamlet's notable actions and characteristics to other characters. Tom resembles Hamlet in a remarkable number of ways. In Chapter 2 Tom's companions follow him in the night, and he eventually and melodramatically makes them “swear to keep the secret,” just as Hamlet swears his companions to secrecy at the end of 1.5. After his first meeting with the Ghost, Hamlet is initially unresponsive to the questions of his friend Horatio, and he often resists the interrogations of other characters. Tom also often refuses to answer questions: “That was just his way. If it didn't suit him to explain a thing to you, he wouldn't do it. You might pump him a week, it wouldn't make no difference” (Ch. 38). Hamlet compares himself to the player of Aeneas: “What would he do / Had he the motive … for passion / That I have?” (2.2.560-62). Tom holds himself (and Jim) up to the standards of literary characters, such as the Count of Monte Cristo. Hamlet is the most notoriously intellectual character in world literature, and Tom's schemes give him “intellectural” (Ch. 36) satisfaction. Huck's description of Tom “thinking” echoes Ophelia's description of Hamlet:

And thrice his head thus waving up and down, / He rais'd a sigh.

(2.1.90-91)

Pretty soon, he sighs, and shakes his head; then sighs again.

(Ch. 35)

Tom also shares Hamlet's fondness for machinations and his disturbing tendency to treat other people as objects of manipulation. Tom's callous treatment of Jim is held against him by many critics, as is Hamlet's callous treatment of Ophelia and other characters.

The explicit literary sources, such as The Count of Monte Cristo, from which Tom derives his plans for the rescue of Jim provide examples of characters confronting unavoidable difficulties. But no such difficulties actually exist in this case—the hut in which Jim is held is no Chateau d'If, and Tom knows all along that Jim has been granted his freedom—so Tom has to imagine or create impediments. The literary character with whom Tom is in competition on the score of needless delay is not the Count of Monte Cristo, but Hamlet. Hamlet's supposedly needless delay in exacting his revenge was perhaps the single most famous literary issue of the nineteenth century. Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge, and many others devised theories to explain the delay. If Clemens had intentionally included this episode in the novel to create a similar controversy, he could not have been more successful. The controversy that eventually arose among critics—including De Voto, Eliot, Trilling, Leo Marx, and many others—over Tom's delay of Jim's release resembles the earlier critical controversy over Hamlet's delay. Each set of critics debated the artistic justifications for the delay and its thematic implications. Just as Tom is a boyish parody of Hamlet, the entire long final episode of Huckleberry Finn is a parody of Hamlet or, more precisely, a parody of the prevalent view of the play in the nineteenth century.

In the later part of the novel Tom becomes the main character; Huck is his admiring friend and the eventual teller of his story and thus resembles Horatio. But Huck himself also plays Hamlet at times. In the first chapter, Huck's description of his feelings when alone—“I most wished I was dead”—is a summary of the opening lines of the soliloquy Hamlet delivers in the scene in which he makes his first appearance in the play (1.2.129-34). In the middle of the novel, Huck again meditates on the attractiveness of death—a mere sound “makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all” (Ch. 32). Huck here summarizes the same speech in the middle of Hamlet that the duke had earlier garbled and in which Hamlet says that death is “a consummation / Devoutly to be wish'd” (3.1.62-63). Three paragraphs after his summary of that speech, Huck paraphrases another famous speech by Hamlet:

Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

(5.2.8-11)

I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come; for I'd noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth, if I left it alone.

The words in Huck's mouth, rough-hew them how he will, come from Shakespeare.

Even Pap echoes Hamlet. Long before the duke garbles Hamlet's “celebrated” soliloquy, Pap unintentionally parodies the passage in which Hamlet mentions the “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.78-79): “for two cents I'd leave the blamed country and never come anear it agin” (Ch. 6). But Pap more closely resembles two other Hamlet characters. The first appearance of this father figure, who is presumed to have died and thus returns from the dead, as it were, and whose face is “a white to make a body's flesh crawl” (Ch. 5), is a not entirely comic version of the “hideous” (1.4.54) apparition of Hamlet's dead father, whose countenance is “very pale” (1.2.233). The Ghost's account of its nightly suffering—“I am thy father's spirit, / Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night” (1.5.9-10)—is parodied by Pap's complaint: “your own father got to sleep with the hogs in the tanyard” (Ch. 5). The Ghost's stern injunction to Hamlet to revenge his murder is parodied by Pap's stern injunction to Huck to get him money. Like Hamlet, Huck at first is startled but then shows courage in confronting the disturbing apparition of his father. At times, Pap also resembles Hamlet's step-father. Pap refuses to let Huck leave the cabin, just as Claudius at first refuses to let Hamlet leave the “prison” of Denmark (2.2.243). In the so-called Prayer Scene, Hamlet has an opportunity to kill Claudius, his mortal enemy, but does not do so. In Chapter 6, Huck, who is in mortal danger from Pap, has a gun pointed at him but does not kill him.

The strangest and most profound Shakespearean influence on Huckleberry Finn also involves the Prayer Scene, but in this instance Clemens gave the part of Claudius to Huck. The passage generally regarded as Clemens's greatest accomplishment, Huck's meditation in Chapter 31, consists in large part of paraphrases of Claudius's soliloquy:

CLAUDIUS:
Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.

(3.3.38-39)

HUCK:
I about made up my mind to pray; …
But words wouldn't come.
CLAUDIUS:
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin.

(41-42)

HUCK:
I knowed very well why they wouldn't come …
it was because I was playing double.
CLAUDIUS:
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash [this hand] white as snow?
… Then I'll look up.

(45-46, 50)

HUCK:
I felt good and all washed clean of sin …
and I knowed I could pray now.
CLAUDIUS:
I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murther.

(53-54)

HUCK:
I was letting on to give up sin, but …
I was holding on to the biggest one of all.
CLAUDIUS:
but 'tis not so above:
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compell'd,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence.

(60-64)

HUCK:
my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven … there's One that's always on the lookout … It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him.
CLAUDIUS:
Bow, stubborn knees.

(70)

HUCK:
So I kneeled down.
CLAUDIUS:
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

(97-98)

HUCK:
I was trying to make my mouths the right thing …
but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie. You can't pray a lie.

The final words of Claudius's soliloquy (line 98) carry the obvious implication that, unable to repent, he, too, will “never to heaven go,” and thus his final words are echoed in the final words of Huck's meditation: “All right, then, I'll go to hell.” The final words of Huck's meditation are even spoken aloud, like a soliloquy by a Shakespearean character.

One of the features that makes Huck's meditation more than a pale imitation of Claudius's is that Clemens has turned the situation upside down. Claudius's assessment of his moral state is sophisticated, and his failure to follow the dictates of his conscience is his personal tragedy; Huck's assessment of his moral state is naive, and his refusal to follow the dictates of his conscience is a victory of innate compassion over social conditioning. Clemens's technique of paraphrasing Shakespeare, which was used early in his career for such simple and obvious parodies as “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized,’” is here put to profound purposes.⁵⁸

Although Clemens's pervasive adaptation of Shakespearean materials in Huckleberry Finn produced a masterpiece, the novel itself contains suggestions that the influence of Shakespeare was a source of anxiety for Clemens. Four chapters after the Shepherdson-Grangerford episode, Clemens's version of Romeo and Juliet, the duke and the king present a version of Romeo and Juliet that is not well received. Like Stockmar, the con men in Huckleberry Finn seem to be self-portraits created in anxiety. Clemens intended Huck's paraphrase of Claudius's soliloquy to be moving; the duke, however, intended his ludicrous version of a soliloquy from the same play to be impressive. As a collection of adaptations from various Shakespearean plays, the duke's version of Hamlet's speech is Huckleberry Finn writ small. Although Clemens's own adaptation of Shakespearean materials in Huckleberry Finn is a remarkable success, he incorporated in the novel a portrait of an adapter of Shakespeare who is a failure. Huck, too, at times seems an alter ego for an anxious author. Underlying Huck's struggle with his conscience in Chapter 31 is Clemens's struggle with Shakespeare. Both author and character do something magnificent—Huck decides to free Jim from slavery, and Clemens constructs a crucial moment in a great novel—but both deeds entail theft (of a slave from his owner and of a passage from Shakespeare) and anxiety.

The novel contains other features that raise the issue of literary influence. In Chapter 2 Tom's friends are impressed by the oath he asks them to swear, and they ask him “if he got it out of his own head.” Tom acknowledges his literary indebtedness: “some of it, but the rest was out of pirate books, and robber books.” His acknowledgment, however, does not mention that the episode, as noted above, is a parody of the swearing episode in Hamlet (although pirates do enter the plot of Hamlet). Throughout the novel, Tom is obsessed with imitating books, whereas Pap is violently opposed to book learning and its influence. Huck veers between these extremes. On the one hand, he allows himself to be dominated by Tom's bookishness, especially in the final chapters of the novel. On the other hand, when Miss Watson tries to force book learning on him in Chapter 1, he says he would rather be in “the bad place.” This preference anticipates his later willingness to go to hell—when he decides to free Jim—and thus associates the influence of books with slavery. Each is worse than hell. Each entails a loss of personal freedom and identity. At the very end of the novel Huck expresses a desire to escape from Aunt Sally's efforts to “sivilize” him. This desire to escape the civilization of book learning parallels Jim's desire to escape from slavery. As noted earlier in this essay, Clemens himself shifted among diverse positions in regard to literary influence. Sometimes he tried to give the impression he was not influenced at all by other writers. Sometimes he displayed as much boyish bravado in imagining himself “the worst literary thief in the world” as Tom does in pretending to be a robber in Chapter 2. Sometimes he revealed a deep anxiety about literary influence.

According to Ernest Hemingway, “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn … All American writing comes from that.”⁵⁹ But all American writing also comes from a struggle with the heritage of European culture, the civilization that Huck seeks to escape at the end of Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn itself, the most American of American novels, comes in no small part from Shakespeare, the most imposing figure of European culture. In Huckleberry Finn Clemens localized or Americanized Shakespeare by transferring Shakespearean plot situations to the American frontier and by translating speeches by Shakespearean characters into American frontier dialects. He simultaneously Shakespeareanized America by giving American experiences Shakespearean patterns. Huckleberry Finn was in large part the product of the creative interaction, or the struggle, in Clemens's imagination between his American experience and Shakespeare's works.

Some of the elements of Clemens's complex attitude toward Shakespeare occur in his attitudes toward other writers. He parodied Cooper, praised Cervantes, and showed signs of rivalry in regard to Bret Harte and Melville.⁶⁰ But no other writer inspired more intensely ambivalent emotion in Clemens than did Shakespeare, and with no other influence did he struggle so profoundly or so creatively. And no other influence was the cause of such long-term and intense anxiety. To set oneself in competition with Shakespeare and to suffer the resulting anxiety seems irrational, but the evidence suggests that Clemens did feel such anxiety, however irrational it may be.

By focusing on poetic influence, Harold Bloom has implied that literary influence flows within generic bounds. But the novelist Clemens was profoundly influenced by the poet-dramatist Shakespeare. Bloom himself argued that one of the tactics a later writer may employ to establish his independence from a precursor is to swerve in some way from a direct imitation of the precursor's work. Thus, as indicated above, although Clemens incorporated paraphrases of Claudius's meditation in Huck's, Clemens turned the moral implications of the situation upside down. Another way a writer might swerve, however, would be to take material from a precursor's work in one genre and to incorporate it in a work in a different genre. Genres change, sometimes in unpredictable ways, precisely because authors combine in new works elements from earlier works of diverse genres.

In most accounts, the history of literature presents an orderly sequence of period styles—Renaissance, Baroque, neoclassical, Romantic, modernist, post-modernist—in which each style is a reaction against the immediately preceding style or a reflection of the social context of its own time. Bloom has implied, in particular, that post-Cartesian writers are insulated from the influence of pre-Cartesian writers. But on the evidence presented here, it seems that, for Clemens, Shakespeare was an active inspiration, a live influence, and therefore a source of present rivalry and anxiety. For Clemens, Shakespeare was not dead. Nor does he seem to have been dead for Whitman or for Melville or for many other artists of various sorts who have worked in various times and places. Like the ghost of Hamlet's father, Shakespeare is an “old mole” “in the cellarage” (1.5.162, 151); he is a disruptive old mole in the cellarage of culture. That an artist could significantly influence other artists who live in much later time periods or in distant places or who work in different genres or media may defy common sense, but such influence at a distance is a demonstrable element in the process of artistic creation and therefore a source of complexity and unpredictability in cultural history.

Notes

1. See Howard G. Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull: The British Connection (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970); and Alan Gribben, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols. (Boston: Hall, 1980).

2. Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1917), 2:543. Gribben explained such comments as follows: “In casting his persona as a common man, Twain was obliged to lower the admitted level of his sophistication about literature. It also gratified him that his public thought of his artistry as spontaneous and nonderivative” (p. xxv).

3. Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells, 1872-1910, ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960), 1:112. In the following year in another letter to Howells, Clemens described his general procedure in using source material:

   That is a good story of your sister's, but I don't think I could make it go except in one fashion—by taking the idea & applying it in some other way, as I … do with pretty much everything … the idea … is always bettered by transplanting.

   (1:152-53)

   One effect of such transplantation would be to obscure the original source.

4. Quoted by Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1960), p. 60. Clemens may have borrowed his description of Shakespeare's transformation of borrowed material from Goethe's description of the transformation of material borrowed from Shakespeare: “Shakespeare ‘gives us golden apples in silver dishes.’ By careful study we may acquire the silver dishes while discovering that we have ‘only potatoes to put in them’” (as translated and paraphrased by Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet [Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1970], p. 5).

5. Robert Falk, “Shakespeare in America: A Survey to 1900,” Shakespeare Survey 18 (1965): 103, 115.

6. Louis Marder, His Exits and His Entrances: The Story of Shakespeare's Reputation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963), p. 297.

7. Ibid., p. 27.

8. Ibid., p. 303.

9. Ibid., p. 306.

10. Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, ed. Frederick Anderson, et al., 3 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975-), 3:443.

11. “About Play-Acting,” in The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), p. 207.

12. Falk, p. 115.

13. “1601,” in The Outrageous Mark Twain: Some Lesser Known But Extraordinary Works, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 56.

14. Ibid., p. 57.

15. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 147.

16. Bate, p. 8.

17. Clemens, “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized,’” in Early Tales and Sketches, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst, 2 vols. (1979-81), vol. 15 of The Works and Papers of Mark Twain, ed. John C. Garber, et al., 24 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972-), 2:111.

18. Ibid., p. 112.

19. The text of Shakespeare's works cited throughout this essay is The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

20. Clemens, “Julius Caesar,” 2:113.

21. Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii, ed. A. Grove Day (New York: Appleton-Century, 1966), pp. 199-200.

22. Ibid., p. 201.

23. Clemens himself never published the piece. It is included in Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques, ed. Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), pp. 55-87.

24. Clemens had once given an essay the title “Dogberry in Washington” (The essay is included in Clemens's Contributions to “The Galaxy,” 1868-1871, ed. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr. [Gainsville: Scholar's Facsimiles, 1961], pp. 105-06).

25. Burlesque Hamlet, in Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques, pp. 55-57.

26. Ibid., p. 70.

27. Ibid., pp. 70, 79. Stockmar owes something to Bottom as well as to Autolycus. Stockmar's expression of bewilderment after encountering the Ghost closely resembles Bottom's recollection of his dream:

    Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—.

    (4.1.207-09)

    To think that I, a full grown lout—but at the same time I wish I may die if I didn't think I saw—.

    (p. 59)

    Stockmar's name, along with its connotations, resembles that of Martext, the vicar in As You Like It.

28. Mark Twain-Howells Letters, 1: 369.

29. Clemens, Burlesque Hamlet, p. 61.

30. Ibid., p. 56.

31. Ibid., pp. 69-70.

32. Robert L. Gale, “The Prince and the Pauper and King Lear,” The Mark Twain Journal 12 (1963): 16.

33. Ibid., p. 17.

34. Baetzhold, pp. 231-33. Baetzhold also noticed an echo of Macbeth in a description of a dead page in Chapter 18 of A Connecticut Yankee in Arthur's Court and a series of resemblances between the two Parts of Henry IV and Clemens's Joan of Arc (pp. 373, 259-61).

35. William M. Gibson, “Introduction,” in Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, ed. Gibson (Berkeley; Univ. of California Press, 1969), p. 22.

36. “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” in Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, p. 50.

37. Ibid., p. 55.

38. “Alterations in the Manuscripts,” in Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, p. 524.

39. John S. Tuckey, Mark Twain and Little Satan: The Writing of “The Mysterious Stranger” (West Lafayette: Purdue Univ. Press, 1963), p. 69.

40. Clemens, What Is Man? in What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings, ed. Paul Bender (1973), Vol. 19 of Works, p. 124.

41. Ibid., pp. 130-31.

42. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 7.

43. Ibid., p. 8.

44. Clemens, “Is Shakespeare Dead?” in Complete Essays, p. 411.

45. Ibid., pp. 408-11.

46. Garber, p. 7.

47. Clemens, “Is Shakespeare Dead?” p. 410.

48. Clemens, “Literary Connoisseur” in Early Tales and Sketches, 2: 196.

49. Clemens, “Is Shakespeare Dead?” pp. 441, 421.

50. Ibid., pp. 453-54.

51. Ibid., pp. 408-09.

52. Clemens, The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress (Hartford: American, 1869), p. 292.

53. Ibid., p. 293.

54. Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer (1988), Vol. 8 of Works. All further quotations from the novel are from this edition. For the convenience of readers with other editions, quotations will be located by chapter number (supplied in the body of the essay) rather than by page number.

55. In a brief essay on the duke's “sublime” speech, E. Bruce Kirkham located the Shakespearean source for each of the duke's phrases, some of which are paraphrases rather than exact quotations, and argued that “the theme of action/inaction found in Twain's three sources” is reflected in the duke's “ability to shift ground on a moment's notice” and in Huck's inner debate over “the morality of helping a slave to escape.” (“Huck and Hamlet: An Examination of Twain's Use of Shakespeare,” The Mark Twain Journal 14 [1969]: 17-19).

56. Michael Patrick Hearn, ed. The Annotated Huckleberry Finn (New York: Potter, 1981), pp. 199, 227, 230.

57. See Anthony J. Berret's ground-breaking essay, “The Influence of Hamlet on Huckleberry Finn,” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 18 (1985): 200-01.

58. Berret noted an echo of Claudius's soliloquy in Huck's meditation, but in an effort merely to show that Clemens “liked Hamlet” (p. 205), Berret ignored those ways in which Chapter 31 of Huckleberry Finn turns 3.3 of Hamlet upside down and commented only on incidental similarities between the two episodes: “Both of these scenes occur in spots where key practical decisions are made. Hamlet decides not to kill Claudius and Huck decides not to report Jim. Both scenes also end with decisions about going to hell—Hamlet's to send Claudius there and Huck's to go there himself. Finally, both scenes express the disharmony between words and feelings, custom and nature, that Hamlet and Huck, and in this instance Claudius, experience” (p. 204).

59. Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribner's, 1935), p. 22.

60. For an account of Clemens's explicit literary judgments, see Sydney J. Krause, Mark Twain as Critic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1967).