Mark Twain Speaking

76. Curtain Speech

256 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING· 76 · The Prince and the Pauper was dramatized by Mrs. Abby Sage Richardson, the production managed by Daniel Frohman and staged by David Belasco. The star was Elsie Leslie, a talented child actress who played the dual roles ofPrince Edward and Tom Canty, and whose golden-haired appeal charmed the most acidulous critic. She stood hand in hand with Mark Twain during his curtain speech at the end ofthe third act. Having walked offwith Elsie, he immediately returned with Mrs. Richardson, who took her bows, as the New York Herald said next day, 'trom beneath a pert bonnet ofgray silk andfrom above a gala gown of maroon satin." Thanks to winsome Elsie, the play didfairly wellfor several weeks in New York and later on the road. Curtain Speech Opening of The Prince and the Pauper, Broadway Theatre, New York, January 20,1890 For fifteen years I have had in my mind's eye such an idyl as we have seen this evening. Years ago I went to an old friend of mine and told him the story of the prince and the pauper. He didn't know-Stop that hammering back there! [this to some stage hands who were making a dreadful racket behind the dropJ-he didn't know anything about dramatic affairs, he was without bias, and he said it would make a rattling play. He used some other phrase that I forgetjust now, but it was strong and convincing. So I went home and started to write the play. Somehow I couldn't make it go. I had written books, and knew I could write books as well as anyone. But I couldn't make the play. I found that it required qualities to make a play different from those needed to write a book. To write a book one must have great learning, high moral qualities and-some other little things like that. But to make a play requires genius. So I spread my story out in a book and waited for the genius to come along to do the dramatizing. And therefore the honor of this curtain call belongs not to me but to MARK TWAIN SPEAKING 257 Mrs. Abby Sage Richardson, who, I regret to say, is not in the house tonight or even in the city. Text / "Rags and Royalty," New York Herald, January 21, 1890. Abby Sage Richardson / (1837-1900). American writer. A quondam actress, then author and lecturer, known as a student of Shakespeare , she published books on literary subjects and adapted plays of Sardou and others for Daniel Frohman's stock company. Her dramatization of The Prince and the Pauper precipitated a wrangling lawsuit involving herself, Mark Twain, Daniel Frohman, and Edward H. House. See Paul Fatout, "Mark Twain, Litigant," American Literature 31, no. 1 (March 1959):30-45. Mark Twain's praise of the lady as a genius is at odds with his private grumbling that she had so mangled his story that nothing of his was left in it. He set forth his complaints of her in a strong but apparently unmailed letter to Frohman, February 2, 1890, MTP. It is an explosive example of Mark Twain in eruption.· 77 · Mark Twain, continuing hisfeud with foreign critics in general and with the ghost ofMatthew Arnold in particular, fired another round, conjecturally on the occasion noted below. On Foreign Critics Dinnerfor Max O'Rell, Everett House, Boston, April 27, 1890 If I look harried and worn, it is not from an ill conscience. It is from sitting up nights to worry about the foreign critic. He won't concede that we have a civilization-a "real" civilization. Five years ago, he said we had never contributed anything to the betterment of the world. And now comes Sir Lepel Griffin, whom I had not suspected of being in the world at all, and says "there is no country calling itself civilized ...