Mark Twain's bizarre obsession with ‘killing' Shakespeare

Telegraph

17-05-2025

When Mark Twain was convinced of something, he seldom brooked disagreement. Over the two dozen books he wrote, he showed an exceptional level of intellectual vigour, commitment and acuity. Yet he used those mental powers to advance one particular unusual belief: that William Shakespeare had never written the plays attributed to him, and that credit probably belonged to Francis Bacon.
Such was Twain's zeal on the subject, wrote his secretary Isabel Lyon, that one would have thought he 'had Shakespeare by the throat righteously strangling him for some hideous crime'. For two months, from January until March 1909, Twain beavered away at what would become his final published book, Is Shakespeare Dead? He had a bullheaded certainty. 'I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to believe he did not touch the text in any way,' he told his friend and authorised biographer Albert Paine. 'It is the great discovery of the age.'
Twain, it should be noted, ­cherished Shakespeare's plays, and saw them often. In the 1870s, he and his wife, Livy, had visited ­Stratford-upon-Avon, and Twain, in these early days, backed the creation of a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. He had researched Shakespeare while preparing his novel The Prince and the Pauper (1881), and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the King and Duke try to palm themselves off as Shakespearean actors, offering hilariously garbled versions of the Bard to backwoods audiences.
But Twain had always questioned the authorship of Shakespeare 's oeuvre. His 50-year faith in Bacon dated back to his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, when fellow pilot George Ealer, 'an idolater of Shakespeare', read the plays aloud to him and bashed Bacon supporters royally. Twain begged to differ. After going to see one performance of Romeo and Juliet, Twain even told a companion, 'That's one of the greatest things Bacon ever wrote.'
Why did Twain attack Shakespeare with such gusto? Partly it stemmed from his extreme disillusionment with people, which only grew in his later years: his belief that the planet was chock-full of fools and frauds such as the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy: 'I think he [Shakespeare] & Mother Eddy are just about a pair – a pair of humbugs.' The Shakespeare cult, as Twain saw it, proved that people were merely sheep who followed a herd instinct and echoed what they heard.
Twain's error was using his own career as a frame of reference. In his final years, he had devoted enormous time to his auto­biographical dictations, which by this point amounted to 450,000 words: he simply couldn't believe that Shakespeare had left behind no manuscripts or letters. With an extreme paucity of original doc­umentation, Shakespeare bio­g­raphers had relied on a handful of mouldy anecdotes about the man, many recorded long after he was gone. Twain compared his own ­literary fame to the glaring emptiness of Shakespeare's record.
Had Shakespeare been truly famous in his own time, Twain argued, 'his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my own village [Hannibal] out in Missouri... a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short space of 60 years'. He mentioned his Hannibal schoolfriends, who regularly retailed legends about him to reporters. Yet the comparison was odd: Twain lived in a very different media environment, one in which a thriving American newspaper industry published features, ­profiles and interviews, and in which celebrity culture had already taken root.
Like many Shakespeare deniers, Twain also observed that the ­playwright was curiously well versed in law courts and legal proceedings. Nobody, thought Twain, could master 'the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served'. Some scholars have ­spec­ulated that Shakespeare clerked in a law office before ­starting his ­theatre career in ­London, but Twain was convinced that Shakespeare plays betray know­ledge that only a highly educated person such as Bacon might have known.
Yet Twain failed to confront many obvious objections to his ­theory. How could Bacon's imposture have remained hidden during his lifetime and after? Did he ­confide in no one? How did he make necessary changes to plays during rehearsals? Or did Shakespeare, the man under whose name all this work was disguised, rush to Bacon's home each night for secret revisions? What about cases such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, in which we know that Shakespeare collaborated with other authors? Twain never dealt with the problem of the First Folio: the fact that Elizabethan actors thought so highly of William Shakespeare that they assembled this legacy for posterity only seven years after the playwright had died. It should further be noted that this wasn't for Twain a unique situation: he had also identified John Milton, not John Bunyan, as the true author of The Pilgrim's Progress.
Even Twain's heartiest admirers, Paine and Lyon, appealed to him not to publish Is Shakespeare Dead? Colonel Harvey, his editor and publisher at Harper & Brothers, agreed that it would be ill-advised, both showing intellectual slippage on Twain's part and dealing another blow to his image as America's ­leading humorist. But Twain was hell-bent on publishing it; worse, he was desperate to beat into print another book, Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon by William Stone Booth, which aimed to show that Shakespeare's work was shot through with coded messages pointing to Bacon's secret authorship.
As a result of the rushed editing process, Twain's last published book appeared on April 8 1909, a mere month after the manuscript was completed. It was greeted with something less than acclaim: no one endorsed it, then or later, as 'the great discovery of the age'. And the haste landed Twain in an embarrassing imbroglio with another writer, George Greenwood, who claimed that Twain had quoted freely from Greenwood's similar book, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, without crediting him – an awkward position for Twain, a militant on copyright issues.
The problem, in truth, was a rogue footnote, and Twain's apology ended the kerfuffle. But it may have contributed to the health problems that increasingly plagued him. The Greenwood controversy blew up in June 1909, as Twain travelled to Baltimore. On the day he checked into the Belvedere Hotel, one newspaper carried the incendiary headline 'Is Mark Twain a Plagiarist?' Feeling worn out, Twain shunned newspapermen who came to elicit his reaction, and lay down in the hotel room with a book. When he arose and paced the room, he suddenly paused with one hand clutching his chest. 'I have a curious pain in my breast,' he told Paine. 'It's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of pain. I never had anything just like it.'
Twain's instincts were accurate: at 73, he was suffering from angina pectoris, with a reduced blood flow to the heart muscle producing sharp, frightening attacks. Twain rallied enough to address the ­graduates at St Timothy's School, in Catonsville, Maryland, a tiny, elite and very proper all-female boarding establishment. On his way to the graduation, he chomped on a cigar and glanced admiringly at the parade of Baltimore girls traipsing down the sidewalk. 'Pretty girls – and you almost have a monopoly of them here – are always an inspiration to me,' he told a reporter. In addressing the graduates, Twain's eyes sparkled, and he spiced his remarks with trademark mischief. He advised the girls not to smoke or drink to excess, then delivered his punchline: 'Don't marry – I mean, to excess.'
It was to be the last speech of his 43-year lecturing career. In terms of health, Twain knew that he had passed a watershed. After the Baltimore trip, among many restrictions the doctor placed on the writer's activities the most onerous was an exhortation to cut down on smoking and try to heal his 'tobacco heart'. Since boyhood, Twain had remained defiant on this score – as defiant as his lifelong pro-Bacon stance. 'It isn't going to happen,' he insisted. 'I shan't diminish it by a single puff.' In the end, he did, slashing his consumption from 40 cigars per day to four. 'I don't care for death,' he wrote, '& I do care for smoking.'
But this consummate American showman knew exactly what approached. 'I came in with Halley's comet in 1835,' Twain said. 'It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't.' After 75 years away, in April 1910 the comet returned, appearing above Twain's home in Redding, Connecticut. Twain, ­having suffered successive angina attacks, was heavily sedated and probably didn't know. On April 21, with the comet still in the sky, he breathed his last.