Contested Will (47 page)

My account of the Riley adventure draws on the report of Isabel Lyon
about the composition of Twain's various works now housed at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library: ‘(Clemens), M. B. Isabel Lyon, “Holograph notes on books by S. L. Clemens”'. See too the correspondence at the Berg, ‘Clemens, S.L., A.L.S. to J. H. Riley', 9 October 1870. An alternative version of Riley's death appears in Twain's correspondence with Bliss, to whom he writes on 15 May 1872 that ‘cancer has fast hold of his vitals and he can live but a little while. Nine physicians have tried their hands on him, but the cancer has beaten the lot' (
Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers
, ed. Hamlin Hill [Berkeley, 1967]).

For Twain's allusions to
The Tempest
, see, for example, his ‘Memorable Midnight Experience', in Mark Twain,
The Complete Works
(New York, 1923). And for Twain's sense of himself as a classic, see Samuel Moffett, ‘Mark Twain: A Biographical Sketch',
McClure's Magazine
13 (October 1899), pp. 523–9, which subsequently appeared as a preface to the
Works
. For Twain's self-promotion, see, in addition to Gribben's essay, Louis J. Budd, ‘A “Talent for Posturing”: The Achievement of Mark Twain's Public Posturing', in
The Mythologizing of Mark Twain
; Justin Kaplan, Mr.
Clemens
and Mark Twain
; and R. Kent Rasmussen and Mark Dawidziak, ‘Mark Twain on the Screen', in
A Companion to Mark Twain
, ed. Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd (Oxford, 2005).

The best account of Helen Keller's life can be found in Joseph P. Lash,
Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy
(New York, 1980). See too her memoir Midstream:
My Later Life
(New York, 1929). Kittredge's review appeared in
The Nation
75 (1902), pp. 268–70. While the review was published anonymously, Kittredge claimed it as his own: see James Thorpe,
A Bibliography of the Writings of George Lyman Kittredge
(Cambridge, Mass., 1948). Keller's account of her growing scepticism about Shakespeare's authorship appears in her unpublished and virtually unknown manuscript, ‘Francis Bacon', in the Helen Keller Archives, American Foundation for the Blind, Box 223, Folder 9. Keller's review of Greenwood's book appeared in
The Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind
, as cited in
Baconiana
7, 3rd series (1909), pp. 55–6. My account of Keller, Anne Sullivan Macy and John Macy's visit to Twain at Stormfield draws heavily on the recollections of Isabel Lyon in her ‘Holograph notes on books by S. L. Clemens', under the heading ‘
Is Shakespeare Dead?
' (in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library). See William Stone Booth,
Some Acrostic
Signatures of Francis Bacon
(Boston, 1909).

For how
The Testament of Love
altered biographies of Chaucer, see for example, William Godwin,
Life of Geoffrey Chaucer
(London, 1803). See too: Walter W. Skeat,
Chaucerian and Other Pieces
(Oxford, 1897), R. Allen
Shoaf, ed.,
Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love
(Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1998), and Paul Strohm, ‘Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s', in
Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530
, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 83–112.

On the high hopes Baconians had for cracking the code and uncovering lost manuscripts at this time, see, for example, ‘The Goal in Sight',
Baconiana
7, 3rd series (1909), pp. 145–9, as well as
New Shakespeareana
9 (1910). For a fascinating account of codes and literature, see Shawn James Rosenheim,
The
Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet
(Baltimore, 1997). See too, David Kahn,
The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret
Writing
(New York, 1996).

Donnelly's diary entry of 23 September 1882 is quoted from Martin Ridge,
Ignatius Donnelly: The Portrait of a Politician
(Chicago, 1962). See too, vol. 1 of
Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals
, ed. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley, 1975), as well as vol. 3 of Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, ed. Robert Pack Browning, Michael B. Frank and Lin Salamo (Berkeley, 1979). Twain's recollections of Donnelly's book appear in his ‘Autobiographical Dictation, 11 January 1909', archived in the Mark Twain Papers, University of California, Berkeley. See Ignatius Donnelly,
The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-
Called Shakespeare Plays
(Chicago, 1888). For Donnelly's approach to breaking the Shakespeare code, also see R. C. Churchill,
Shakespeare and His
Betters
, as well as Donnelly's
The Cipher in the Plays and on the Tombstone
(Minneapolis, 1899). The definitive book on Shakespearean codes and ciphers is William F. Friedman and Elizebeth S. Friedman,
The
Shakespearean Ciphers Examined
(New York, 1958).

Walt Whitman had first called his poem ‘Shakspere's Cipher'; after a half-dozen or so periodicals rejected it, the poem ran in a new magazine,
The Cosmopolitan
(October 1887). For more on Whitman and the Shakespeare authorship question, see vol. 3 of Horace Traubel,
With Walt
Whitman in Camden
(New York, 1914). See too, Whitman's
November Boughs
(1888), where he writes: ‘we all know how much
mythus
there is in the Shakespeare question as it stands today. Beneath a few foundations of proved facts are certainly engulfed far more dim and elusive ones, of deepest importance – tantalizing and half suspected – suggesting explanations that one dare not put in plain statement,'
The Works of Walt Whitman
, ed. Malcolm Cowley, vol. 2 (New York, 1948). And for Twain on Milton as the
true author of
Pilgrim's Progress
, see vol. 3 of
Mark Twain's Notebooks and
Journals
.

For more on Orville Ward Owen, see Friedman and Friedman,
The
Shakespearean Ciphers Examined
, as well as John Michell,
Eccentric Lives and
Peculiar Notions
(London, 1984). I also quote from Schoenbaum's account in
Shakespeare's Lives
. The New York Public Library has a manuscript archive – the ‘Bacon Cipher Collection', consisting of thirty boxes of material from Owen, Gallup and the Riverbank Laboratory. See Kate H. Prescott,
Reminiscences of a Baconian
(n.p., 1949). And for Gallup's investigations, see Elizabeth Wells Gallup,
The Bi-literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon
, part 3 (Detroit, 1910). Sceptics still try to decode the true meaning behind Malvolio's lines in Act 2 of
Twelfth Night
; see, for example, Sundra G. Malcolm, ‘M.O.A.I. Unriddled: Anatomy of an Oxfordian Reading', in
Shakespeare Matters
(Fall 2007), which takes this seriously as an Oxfordian anagram, and concludes that the anagram should read IAMO – ‘I am Oxford. (I am O).'

For Helen Keller's frustrated efforts to see her work on Bacon into print, see her letter to Gilder, archived in the Henry E. Huntington Library, Francis Bacon Foundation/Arensberg Archive, Box 58, Folder for ‘Keller, Helen'. For his response, see R. W. Gilder to Helen Keller, 20 April 1909, American Foundation for the Blind, Helen Keller Archives, Box 210, Folder 5. And see Lash,
Helen and Teacher
, on her frustrated efforts to write something other than memoir. For Keller's further correspondence on her authorship project, see Helen Keller to R. W. Gilder, 9 May 1909, American Foundation for the Blind, Helen Keller Archives, Box 210, Folder 4 (the lines about the ‘genuine data of Shakespeare's life' are dictated, not typed by Keller herself). See, too, Helen Keller's letter to William Stone Booth, 23 May 1909, Helen Keller Archives, American Foundation for the Blind, Box 48, Folder 6. And for her additional recollections of Twain's response to Booth's ciphers, see Keller's 1929 memoir,
Midstream
.

For Twain's familiarity with Shakespeare, see Howard G. Baetzhold,
Mark
Twain and John Bull: The British Connection
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1970); Anthony J. Berret,
Mark Twain and Shakespeare: A Cultural Legacy
(Lanham, Maryland, 1993); Thomas J. Richardson, ‘Is Shakespeare Dead? Mark Twain's Irreverent Question', in
Shakespeare and Southern Writers: A Study in
Influence
, ed. Philip C. Kolin (Jackson, Mississippi, 1985), pp. 63–82; Joe Falocco, ‘Is Mark Twain Dead? Samuel Clemens and the Question of
Shakespearean Authorship',
The Mark Twain Annual
2 (2004), pp. 25–40; and Alan Gribben,
Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction
, 2 vols (Boston, 1980). See too Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer (Berkeley, 1988). And for his observation about the absence of evidence in Stratford, see vol. 1 of
Mark Twain's Notebooks and
Journals
. For Twain's parody of
Julius Caesar
, see
The Works of Mark Twain:
Early Tales and Sketches, vol
. 2, 1864–1865, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley, 1981); and for his 1881 burlesque of
Hamlet
, see
Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques
, ed. Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley, 1967).

For the composition of Is
Shakespeare Dead?
see Mark Twain, ‘Autobiographical Dictation, 11 January 1909', Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library; Berret,
Mark Twain and Shakespeare
; Isabel Lyon, ‘Holograph notes on books by S. L. Clemens'; Paine's
Mark Twain: A Biography
; and Mark Twain,
Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography
(New York, 1909). Twain complained to Macy that Booth made his case poorly. He wrote to him on 27 March 1909 that he himself had trouble with the acrostics, and, more damagingly, 

Twain's description of Tichborne's background and upbringing, written in the margins of a blank page of Greenwood's book, overlaps at many points with his sense of the background and attributes of the true author of Shakespeare's plays; see Mark Twain's copy of George Greenwood,
The
Shakespeare Problem Restated
in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. His comments on the Tichborne trial appear in his
Following the
Equator
(New York, 1897). For more on the case, see Rohan McWilliam,
The
Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation
(London, 2007).

Fiedler is quoted in Susan Gillman,
Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in
Mark Twain's America
(Chicago, 1989). Twain's view of Keller and Sullivan is found in Nella Braddy,
Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller
(Garden City, New York, 1933). And see Leslie A. Fiedler, ‘Afterword', in Mark Twain,
1601
, and
Is Shakespeare Dead?
ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York, 1996), as well as Gillman,
Dark Twins
, for Twain on twins and impostures. Twain's interest in whether Queen Elizabeth was a man is recounted in Henry W. Fisher,
Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field: Tales They
Told to a Fellow Correspondent
(New York, 1922). And his sceptical remarks about Shakespeare's authorship can be found littered throughout his copy of Greenwood's
The Shakespeare Problem Restated
. Also of interest is Twain's late claim, in an imaginary dialogue, that ‘Shakespeare created nothing,' in ‘What Is Man?' published by Twain in 1905, begun, he says, around 1880, reprinted in Mark Twain,
Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays,
1891–1910
, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York, 1992).

Twain prefaced
Pudd'nhead Wilson
with a fascinating ‘A Whisper to the Reader' that directly addresses the question of an author's limited legal knowledge; see Mark Twain,
Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary
Twins
(1893–4; New York, 1922). See too Daniel J. Kornstein, ‘Mark Twain's Evidence: The Never-Ending Riverboat Debate', from the ‘
Symposium: Who
Wrote Shakespeare? An Evidentiary Puzzle', Tennessee Law Review 72
(2004). For more on Twain's plagiarism, see
A Bibliography of the Works of Mark
Twain
, by Merle Johnson (Folcroft, Pennsylvania, 1935). See too Twain's letter to Macy on 25 February 1909, Helen Keller Archives, American Foundation for the Blind, Box 50, Folder 12, as well as Michael Bristol, ‘Sir George Greenwood's Marginalia in the Folger Copy of Mark Twain's
Is
Shakespeare Dead?', Shakespeare Quarterly
49 (1998), pp. 411–16.

On the publication and aftermath of
Is Shakespeare Dead?
, see Lyon's ‘Holograph notes'; Hill,
Mark Twain, God's Fool
; Fiedler, ‘Afterword'; Alan Gribben, ‘Autobiography as Property'; Justin Kaplan,
Mark Twain and His
World
(New York, 1974);
Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews
, ed. Louis J. Budd (Cambridge, 1999), and especially Eugene H. Angert's withering review, ‘Is Mark Twain Dead?' in
The North American Review
190 (September 1909). I am grateful to William Sherman for sharing with me Macy's letter about ‘Shake and Bake': Macy to Walter Conrad Arensberg, 20 October 1926, Arensberg Francis Bacon Collection, Henry E. Huntingon Library. For the afterlife of the cipher hunters, see Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare's Lives
; Virginia M. Fellows,
The Shakespeare Code
(Gardiner, Montana, 2006); Friedman and Friedman,
The Shakespeare Ciphers
Examined
; and, for Friedman's military work, Rosenheim,
The Cryptographic
Imagination
and Ronald Clark,
The Man Who Broke Purple: A Life of the
World's Greatest Cryptographer
(Boston, 1977). For Twain's defence of
Is
Shakespeare Dead?
, see his brief letter to M. B. Colcord in May 1909, Folger MS. Y.c.545.