Mark Twain’s Lost “Burlesque Hamlet”

The comic possibilities of satirizing Shakespeare’s Hamlet by adding a character to the cast fascinated Mark Twain as early as 1873. After attending a performance of the play starring Edwin Booth in New York on November 3 that year, Twain recalled an idea his friend Joe Goodman had once mentioned to him: introduce “a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the situations” and transform the tragedy into a comedy.¹ Twain soon began to draft a playscript along these lines. “I have written a 5-act play, with only one (visible) character in it,” he reported to Mary Mason Fairbanks in February 1874. “It may never be played—but you shall read it—it is at least novel & curious.”² But as he later conceded to W. D. Howells, “the addition was a country cousin of Hamlet’s” but the script “did not suit me & I burnt it.”³

Twain took another stab at a burlesque Hamlet in the summer of 1881. Again he based the play on the premise that Shakespeare had omitted a character from the cast. In this version, Hamlet’s foster brother, a Danish subscription book agent named Basil Stockmar, wanders into Elsinore and disrupts events from behind the scenes. A fragment of this script survives in the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been published in Mark Twain’s Satires and Burlesques (1967), edited by Franklin R. Rogers. As Rogers explains, it “was written in three days of enthusiastic work at Quarry Farm, Elmira,” following Twain’s visit with Howells in Boston in late August.⁴ As Twain notified Howells on September 3, “I’ve got a character, now, who is all right. He goes & comes as he pleases; yet he does not need to be spoken to. I’ve done the first & second Acts; but this was too much work for three days; so I am in bed.”⁵ Howells welcomed the news in his reply: “That is a famous idea about the Hamlet, and I should like ever so much to see your play when it’s done. Of course you’ll put it on the stage, and I prophesy a great triumph for it.”⁶ But the subsequent record of the project is muddy. According to Rogers, Twain “apparently did not work as fast as he claimed in the letter to Howells” and “the surviving manuscript breaks off . . . early in Act II, scene ii. Twain abandoned the project at this point and seems to have lost all enthusiasm for the idea.”⁷ In late January 1882, Howells asked Twain, “What did you ever do with your amended Hamlet? That was a famous idea.”⁸ Twain’s reply to this question, if any, does not survive. Though the play was even scheduled for production in New York during the winter of 1881–82, those plans were cancelled. Keith Arbour has expressed the consensus view of the episode: “Sometime in the fall of 1881, Twain abandoned the project he had barely started and consigned Basil Stockmar to the limbo of unfinished characters.”⁹

To judge from newfound contemporary evidence, however, Twain not only finished the play but it was even typeset for publication under the title “Hamlet’s Brother.” The page proof of the completed script was reviewed in the Detroit Free Press on December 2, 1881, and this review was widely copied across the country and in Australia and New Zealand.¹⁰As the Detroit reviewer noted, Twain posited that “Hamlet as it came from the pen of Shakspeare was incomplete” and “that a man of Hamlet’s melancholy and eccentric temperament must of necessity had a younger brother in the family of a more sprightly and sunny disposition.” In his hitherto-unknown preface to the play, Twain professed to have discovered incontrovertible evidence of the existence of this brother—renamed William or Billy—in a (fictional) History of England and Parts Adjacent, which purportedly reprinted a letter from the King of Denmark to Tom Sayers (a famous mid-nineteenth-century bare-knuckled boxer):

Dear Tom—Those hair-stuffed boxing gloves and foils came by...