[Is Shakespeare Dead? by Mark Twain]@TWC D-Link book
Is Shakespeare Dead?

CHAPTER III
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I wish he had had a dog, just so we could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among the family, in his careful business way.
He signed the will in three places.
In earlier years he signed two other official documents.
These five signatures still exist.
There are _no other specimens of his penmanship in existence_.

Not a line.
Was he prejudiced against the art?
His granddaughter, whom he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no teaching, he left no provision for her education although he was rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's--she thought it was Shakespeare's.
When Shakespeare died in Stratford _it was not an event_.

It made no more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten theatre-actor would have made.

Nobody came down from London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears--there was merely silence, and nothing more.

A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh and the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life! No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years before he lifted his.
_So far as anybody actually knows and can prove_, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.
_So far as anybody knows and can prove_, he never wrote a letter to anybody in his life.
_So far as any one knows_, _he received only one letter during his life_.
So far as any one _knows and can prove_, Shakespeare of Stratford wrote only one poem during his life.


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