He was so close.
Mossey Madness was his stage, and all the other writers merely players. He strode confidently from round to round until, unjustly, he fell to Jane Austen.
Looking back at the bracket — a campus-wide contest to pick the greatest writer, based loosely on NCAA basketball brackets — heads will shake. He was the greatest writer up there, and he should have won.
I am speaking, of course, about Mark Twain.
Not William Shakespeare. Not the Bard, whose 400th anniversary of death approaches; that old Elizabethan playwright whom Wordsworth slew in the fourth round. Good, I say, that Mark Twain made it further than Shakespeare.
Good, because the bard of Hannibal, Missouri was a greater writer than the Bard of Avon. Let me put that another way.
Mark Twain > William Shakespeare.
Some of you just flinched. And when you flinched, I heard the clinking of chains. For those of you who flinched are bound in chains you cannot feel, chains that connect you to something very heavy. This thing, that shackles you, which was also given to you, is the Western canon.
You flinched at my claim because you are enslaved to the canon.
So sheathe your knives, put down your pitchforks, douse your torches, and listen. The canon, through the mouths of parents and teachers, has trained you to venerate the golden calf of Avon and flinch when someone questions his supremacy. “Shakespeare? No one’s greater than Shakespeare!” Do you hear the clinking now?
Cast off your chains and walk with me a moment.
As it turns out, Shakespeare may not have been all that special. He was brilliant, to be sure, but his true genius was reworking extant material. When he wrote Hamlet, he simply wrote the best version of the Legend of Amleth, adding his spin to centuries’ worth of material — something his contemporary playwrights also did masterfully. Had Shakespeare never existed, we might utter the name of his rival Christopher Marlowe in the same hushed tones of obsequious reverence.
Mark Twain (real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens) never said much of anything in hushed tones of reverence. His tongue, silver though it was, was also edged with razors, and with it he sheared through social follies and hypocrisies with a seer’s glee.
Speaking of silver tongues, perhaps he has Shakespeare peripherally in mind here: “When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his.”
If only Mark Twain had a quote for you flinchers’ problem, your enslavement to the canon.
Oh wait. He does: “Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will.”
A key distinction between the two writers is that while Shakespeare refined extant works of art, Mark Twain created his own. He listened to dialects, felt the actual soil beneath his feet, and wrote about a particular place in a particular time. In doing so, he created something utterly new (American literary realism) and became central to American literature in a way that Shakespeare has never been central to English literature.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Take that of Ernest Hemingway, who once said: “All American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
Shakespeare must compete with Chaucer and Milton for dominance of his island, but Mark Twain towers over American letters, alone. Where Shakespeare is a glorified tributary of his literary river, Mark Twain is the very source of ours.
In river boating language, to “mark twain” is to measure the depth of something. When we plumb the depths of our canon and our understanding of it, what do we find?
Perhaps we find that Shakespeare deserves to be read and respected, even revered, but not worshipped. He was a participant in a great tradition, rummaging around in the rag and bone shop of the heart just like any other writer. He was a great writer, but not the best.
As we move past mystique and reputation to engage with actual texts, we will find that Mark Twain was the better artist.
So wait until the canon’s guard sleeps, and slip out of your chains. We will go to Mossey and look at the bracket with approval. Your secret will be safe with me.
