When Shakespeare died, in 1616, great literary productions attributed to
him as author had been before the London world and in high favor for
twenty-four years. Yet his death was not an event. It made no stir, it
attracted no attention. Apparently his eminent literary contemporaries
did not realize that a celebrated poet had passed from their midst.
Perhaps they knew a play-actor of minor rank had disappeared, but did not
regard him as the author of his Works. "We are justified in assuming"
this.
His death was not even an event in the little town of Stratford. Does
this mean that in Stratford he was not regarded as a celebrity of _any_
kind?
"We are privileged to assume"--no, we are indeed _obliged_ to
assume--that such was the case. He had spent the first twenty-two or
twenty-three years of his life there, and of course knew everybody and
was known by everybody of that day in the town, including the dogs and
the cats and the horses. He had spent the last five or six years of his
life there, diligently trading in every big and little thing that had
money in it; so we are compelled to assume that many of the folk there in
those said latter days knew him personally, and the rest by sight and
hearsay. But not as a _celebrity_? Apparently not. For everybody soon
forgot to remember any contact with him or any incident connected with
him. The dozens of townspeople, still alive, who had known of him or
known about him in the first twenty-three years of his life were in the
same unremembering condition: if they knew of any incident connected with
that period of his life they didn't tell about it. Would they if they
had been asked? It is most likely. Were they asked? It is pretty
apparent that they were not. Why weren't they? It is a very plausible
guess that nobody there or elsewhere was interested to know.
For seven years after Shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been
interested in him. Then the quarto was published, and Ben Jonson awoke
out of his long indifference and sang a song of praise and put it in the
front of the book. Then silence fell _again_.
For sixty years. Then inquiries into Shakespeare's Stratford life began
to be made, of Stratfordians. Of Stratfordians who had known Shakespeare
or had seen him? No. Then of Stratfordians who had seen people who had
known or seen people who had seen Shakespeare? No. Apparently the
inquiries were only made of Stratfordians who were not Stratfordians of
Shakespeare's day, but later comers; and what they had learned had come
to them from persons who had not seen Shakespeare; and what they had
learned was not claimed as _fact_, but only as legend--dim and fading and
indefinite legend; legend of the calf-slaughtering rank, and not worth
remembering either as history or fiction.
Has it ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated person who had
spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the village where he was born
and reared, was able to slip out of this world and leave that village
voiceless and gossipless behind him--utterly voiceless, utterly
gossipless? And permanently so? I don't believe it has happened in any
case except Shakespeare's. And couldn't and wouldn't have happened in
his case if he had been regarded as a celebrity at the time of his death.
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
to-day, 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 number--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 air 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.