Mark Twain and Felicia Londré: Missouri Authors United on the Shakespeare Authorship Question
by Thomas Canfield
Those of us here in the “Show-Me State” are known for both our common sense and our skepticism. And, as Last Will. & Testament so eloquently points out, Mark Twain, Missouri’s native son, was an outspoken critic of the traditional authorship attribution of Shakespeare’s works. Anyone who has read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should recall the great sport that Twain has with Shakespeare in it, especially through the guise of two con artists who pass themselves off as the King and the Duke. Shortly after these two scoundrels join forces with Huck and Jim, they decide to raise some funds in a small Mississippi river town by performing selected scenes from Romeo and Juliet and Richard III, along with a travesty of an encore piece cobbled together from some half-remembered lines of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy– and a few odd passages from Macbeth thrown in for good measure. When it came to the subject of Shakespeare, Twain was no stranger to preposterous interpretations.
But it was in another work, published 25 years later, that Twain clearly and unabashedly outlined his thesis that the man from Stratford could not have written the poems and plays attributed to him. In 1909, the year before his death, Twain published a book with the simple and arresting title Is Shakespeare Dead?1 This 150-page study demonstrates not only Twain’s tremendous knowledge of—and love for—the works; it also explains his real doubts about their authorship. In all fairness, it should be noted that Twain was not an Oxfordian; his book was published over a decade before J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward De Vere, the Seventeeth Earl of Oxford (1920), the seminal work that first proposed De Vere as a candidate for the authorship of the poems and plays. However, this does not diminish Twain’s arguments for doubting Stratfordian tradition, nor does it invalidate the inconsistencies that Twain points out regarding what we know about Shakespeare the man versus what we see reflected in his literary and dramatic creations.
Separating the few undisputed facts of Shakespeare’s life from the long tradition of what he terms “‘conjectures,’ and ‘suppositions,’ and …‘rumors,’ and ‘guesses’” (23) that are the stock and trade of all Shakespeare biographies, Twain confesses that he is “quite composedly and contentedly sure” (50) that “Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s works” (14). Many of Twain’s arguments are identical to those highlighted in the film. Twain goes on to conclude that, in his own words,
The author of the plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind, grace and majesty of expression. Every one has said it, no one doubts it. Also, he had humor, humor in rich abundance, and always wanting to break out. We have no evidence of any kind that Shakespeare of Stratford possessed any of these acquirements. (116)
Twain describes the Shakespeare of tradition as a “fetish,” and remarks that, “whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refrain from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong, that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty and devotion” (129). He then says, “I haven’t any idea that Shakespeare will have to vacate his pedestal this side of the year 2209. Disbelief in him cannot come swiftly, disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby has never been known to disintegrate swiftly, it is a very slow process” (129-30).
Today, a little over one century later, we are in the presence of another prolific and respected Missouri author who is just as passionate as Twain about the authorship question. Like Twain’s journey to doubt, which he describes as a very gradual and studied process, Kansas City’s own Felicia Londré, Curators’ Professor of Theatre at UMKC and Dean of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, admits that she was hesitant to even entertain the idea that anyone other than the man from Stratford could have penned the works. Felicia was happy with the traditional Shakespeare we had. She liked the Stratford legend; she didn’t really want to hear about alternative authorship theories. And, she admits that, when she began her quest, it was not with an entirely open mind, but rather with a reluctant curiosity and a highly critical attitude.
Felicia began by reading Charlton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Man and the Myth (1984), but it would take much more reading, research, and careful deliberation before she would make up her mind and “come out of the closet as an Oxfordian,” as she describes it. As a respected member of the academic community, this decision also involved courage on her part; when Felicia first began sharing the revelations and new meanings she was finding in the poems and plays, some of her closest and most revered colleagues warned Felicia that no one would take her work seriously and that her career as a scholar would be ruined. Obviously that has not happened, as demonstrated by the 60 scholarly articles, 25 journalistic publications, 100 book and theatre reviews, and 14 books that Felicia has to her credit today. Three of these books include Shakespeare Around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar Revivals (1986), Shakespeare Companies and Festivals: An International Guide (1995), and Love’s Labour’s Lost: Critical Essays (1997). Felicia also transformed her research on these books into opportunities to lobby for the creation of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival in Kansas City, of which she is the Honorary Co-Founder.
After adopting the daring belief that the works were written by Edward De Vere, Felicia then had to support her position. She has been doing this since 1991 with a persuasive, meticulously-researched authorship lecture that she has taken on the road across the United States, as well as to Beijing, Budapest, Tokyo, and London. Next month, she will be giving it again, here in Kansas City on the campus of UMKC. Felicia’s riveting lecture is free and open to the public, so anyone who is interested in this fascinating “whodunit” should attend. For those in the “Show-Me State” who are hungry for more information about the authorship of the poems and plays, this will be another rare opportunity in our own backyard to obtain a wealth of excellent information to help make up their minds about this controversial subject.
Thomas Canfield has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he completed a dissertation on the plays of John Lyly. A writer of court plays for Queen Elizabeth, Lyly was one of the first English novelists, and Edward De Vere’s personal secretary for several years. Lyly dedicated his second novel to De Vere, and was employed by the Earl of Oxford to manage the acting companies that he sponsored. For the last six seasons, Dr. Canfield also has been the Dramaturg for the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. Currently, he is pursuing a second master’s degree in Theatre History and Dramaturgy at UMKC, where he teaches Shakespeare and Foundations of Theatre. He is writing a history of the first professional resident theatre company in Kansas City, the Circle theatre, which was located in Union Station from 1962-67.
1Twain, Mark. Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography. New York: Harper and Brothers,
1909. Print.
