Existing comment:
Walt Whitman and Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain):
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), one of America's greatest poets, and Mark Twain (1835-1910), one of her greatest humorists, also held conflicted views about Shakespeare.
Whitman found Shakespeare undemocratic in many respects. He wrote preliminary notes for his essay "Shakspere for America," on the back of two envelopes. In the essay, Whitman honors Shakespeare for his influence on modern literature, but he feels that the playwright is too attached to the English aristocratic past and not in tune with America's democratic future. Yet there is no doubt that Whitman loved what he called Shakespeare's "riches"; he carried around a copy of Shakespeare's Poems and owned Shakespeare's Works, seen here.
Mark Twain and his family read Shakespeare, and it has been said that he knew Shakespeare's works "nearly as well as he knew the Bible." Twain was fully aware how widely the English playwright was known in America. In Huckleberry Finn he pokes fun at amateur productions of Shakespeare on the Mississippi River. Nevertheless, Twain came to question Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. in his essay "Is Shakespeare dead?" Twain proposes that we don't know enough about Shakespeare to state unconditionally that he wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. But is Clemens fooling with us, as he writes under his pseudonym Twain? It's hard to know. |