Is Shakespeare Dead? / From My Autobiography

s 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

wn of Stratford. Does this mean that in Stratfor

ttle 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

. Then the quarto was published, and Ben Jonson awoke out of his long indifference an

een 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 h

e 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 i

biting a condition of things quite likely to result, most likely to result, indeed substantia

e, 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 ha

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

literary celebrity, there or elsewhere, and

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; an