`That Is the Bare Bodkin'

I am reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn again, on a last-minute whim, in the bloated University of California Press edition, published in 2003 and tarted up with maps, photos, E.W. Kemble’s drawings, glossary, “explanatory notes,” “documentary appendixes,” and “textual apparatus.” Scholars have turned my grandfather’s ’59 Studebaker Lark into a ’59 Cadillac Eldorado, but despite the extras I’m enjoying Twain’s novel, as always. I’m struck by how funny Huck’s voice is and how horrifying it must have been, for whites and blacks, to live in his time and place. But mostly I’m reveling in Twain’s exuberant, limitless pleasure in language. Take the scene in Chapter XXI, in which the Duke is rehearsing Hamlet’s soliloquy:

“So he went to marching up and down, thinking – and frowning, horrible, every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next he would sigh, and next he’d let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him. By and by he got it. He told us to give attention. Then he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back looking up at the sky – and then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth – and after that, all through his speech he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before.”

Huck as drama critic. Or rather, Mark Twain issuing his declaration of independence from – what? High culture? The European tradition? That’s not how I read it. It’s an act of American cultural audacity, in solidarity with Melville and Whitman. Twain is joining the big boys, the biggest of all, in fact – Shakespeare. Of course, Shakespeare was wildly popular in 19th-century America, so the Duke and Dauphin scenes are historically plausible. In 1849, partisans of two Shakespearean actors rioted in New York City. The militia was called, and at least 20 people were killed and 100 wounded. Twain knew his nation and his era, its passions and pretensions. The version of Hamlet’s soliloquy he puts in the Duke’s mouth, a pastiche of half-remembered Bard, is still a howler:

“To be, or not to be: that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane …”

And so on for another 22 delicious lines, ending with “But get thee to a nunnery – go!”

The Oxford English Dictionary cites Twain 1,700 times, making him one of its six most quoted modern writers. For pure verbal vivacity in English, Twain is in a league with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens and Joyce. It’s fitting that Twain corresponded with Sir James A.H. Murray, the OED editor, and visited him in Oxford in 1900, according to Murray’s granddaughter and biographer, “with the excuse that as a last resort he was thinking of making a dictionary, and wanted to see how it was done.”