Is Shakespeare Dead?
Is Shakespeare Dead? from my autobiography page 1
by Mark Twain
A friend has sent me a new book, from England--The Shakespeare Problem Restated--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years' interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is excited once more. It is an interest which was born of Delia Bacon's book--away back in that ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856. About a year later my pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the Pennsylvania, and placed me under the orders and instructions of George Ealer--dead now, these many, many years. I steered for him a good many months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and correction of the master. He was a prime chess player and an idolater of Shakespeare. He would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity something to do that. Also--quite uninvited--he would read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it was his watch, and I was steering. He read well, but not profitably for me, because he constantly injected commands into the text. That broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky and difficult piece of river an ignorant person couldn't have told, sometimes, which observations were Shakespeare's and which were Ealer's. For instance:
What man dare, I dare!
Approach thou what are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of an idea!
http://manybooks.net/pages/twainmar24312431/2.html
by Mark Twain
A friend has sent me a new book, from England--The Shakespeare Problem Restated--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years' interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is excited once more. It is an interest which was born of Delia Bacon's book--away back in that ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856. About a year later my pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the Pennsylvania, and placed me under the orders and instructions of George Ealer--dead now, these many, many years. I steered for him a good many months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and correction of the master. He was a prime chess player and an idolater of Shakespeare. He would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity something to do that. Also--quite uninvited--he would read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it was his watch, and I was steering. He read well, but not profitably for me, because he constantly injected commands into the text. That broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky and difficult piece of river an ignorant person couldn't have told, sometimes, which observations were Shakespeare's and which were Ealer's. For instance:
What man dare, I dare!
Approach thou what are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of an idea!
http://manybooks.net/pages/twainmar24312431/2.html
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