by Mark Twain
5 (p. 32) “Go ’long, ”I said; you ain’t more than a paragraph”: Dan Beard, the novel’s illustrator, based a number of his Arthurian characters on famous people of his own time. Clarence here, for example, looks exactly like a well-known photograph of the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Merlin is based on the British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (p. 35); the ”troublesomest old sow“ (p. 193), on Queen Victoria; the slave driver (p. 379) on the American financier Jay Gould. Beard even put himself into a picture: He is the middle figure on p. 39].
6 (p. 38) shot in Arkansas: Here, as elsewhere in the novel and in other works, the Missouri-born author uses “Arkansas” to epitomize a rough or primitive back-woods society. On p. 276, for instance, Hank calls the kingdom’s crudely printed first newspaper ”good Arkansas journalism.” In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Duke brags that his salacious advertising will ”fetch“ an audience, or ”I don’t know Arkansaw.”
7 (p. 46) Indelicacy is too mild a term: As someone who came from the profane worlds of steamboats and silver mining on the frontier to the genteel world of the East, Twain had learned to watch his own language very carefully. In several different ways he made the point that in earlier times even the upper classes used words that were now forbidden; the most notorious was his sketch ”1601,“ in which Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare and other dignitaries exchange bawdy jokes. This piece was surreptitiously circulated among Twain’s male friends and privately printed twice during his lifetime.
8 (p. 55) Columbus ... played an eclipse: Hank, or Mark Twain, may have read about Columbus using an eclipse to intimidate a tribe of Caribbean Indians in Washington Irving’s Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1829; book 16, chapter 3). H. Rider Haggard’s best-selling novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885) contains a similar scene.
9 (p. 64) ”Clothe him like a prince!”: It is through exchanging their clothes that King Edward and Tom Canty, in The Prince and the Pauper (1881), switch places. Twain comes back to this motif again in Pudd‘nhead Wilson (1894), in which a slave mother dresses her son in her master’s baby’s clothes, and vice versa, and so switches their identities.
10 (p. 69) even Raphael himself: Many in Twain’s time considered the Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520) the greatest artist of all time. But to Twain Raphael epitomized the faults that he repeatedly satirized, burlesqued, or directly attacked in the art of the ”Old Masters“—especially his lack of realism and his flattering treatment of both churchly and aristocratic themes.
11 (p. 79) inherited ideas: Hank will come back to this idea often in the novel. Twain had already implicitly explored it in Huckleberry Finn, where we see (though Huck himself cannot) how Huck’s thoughts have been conditioned by his social environment. This concept of the self as determined by circumstances, what Hank later calls ”training” (p. 177), becomes a central theme of Twain’s later, philosophically pessimistic writings.
12 (p. 81) that awful power, the Roman Catholic Church: Samuel Clemens was raised as a Presbyterian and admits in his book The Innocents Abroad (1869), ”I have been educated to enmity toward every thing that is Catholic.” When he wrote Connecticut Yankee, the United States was still almost 90 percent Protestant and, as a result of increased immigration from Catholic countries, in the midst of another wave of anti-Catholic rhetoric. Twain cautioned his publishing agent to avoid using any of Hank’s diatribes against ”the Church” in the advertising materials for the book.
13 (p. 127) if the freeman’s daughter: As Hank implies here and more explicitly on pp. 256, le droit du seigneur (the privilege of the lord) was to have sex with an untitled woman on her wedding night before her husband. The list of aristocratic abuses here is derived from material Twain originally found in Hippolyte Adolphe Taine’s The Ancient Regime (translated and published in the United States in 1876), which was also a source for several other passages in the novel.
14 (p. 130) a new deal: In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the country, ”I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” It is generally believed that he took this phrase, which became the defining slogan of his administration, from Hank’s program for changing Arthurian England.
15 (p. 154) ”Persimmons’s Soap”: Advertising first became a major part of American life in the late nineteenth century. Here Twain is making fun of ad campaigns like the one for Pear’s Soap, which featured endorsements from contemporary celebrities. Later he mocks Sozodont Mouthwash as Noyoudont (p. 195). But Twain himself was an active and adept advertiser, and he once seriously proposed using men wearing sandwich boards like Sir Cote’s to promote his lectures.
16 (pp. 178-179) gave a noble even so much as a Damiens-scratcb ... dismemberment of Louis XV’s poor awkward enemy: In 1757, after Robert François Damiens attacked King Louis XV with a penknife (the ”scratch”), he was publicly tortured for four hours, then pulled apart by horses (the ”dose”). The ”unprintable” passage from Casanova’s Memoirs that Hank refers to describes Madame XXX and her lover having sex while looking out the window at Damiens’s execution.
17 (p. 179) my conscience kept prodding me ... work off a conscience: This passage seems to appear from nowhere, but Twain expresses the same irritation with the conscience in many other works, including ”The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” (1876), where his own conscience appears before him as his deformed dwarf twin.
18 (p. 200) one small countess: Talking about ”ostensible ladies” as hogs is a memorable example of Twain’s egalitarian humor, like the unwashed con men who call themselves the King and the Duke in Huck Finn or Twain’s speech at the Whittier Birthday Dinner (1877), in which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are impersonated by three drunken, thieving tramps. Some of his contemporaries found such humor extremely distasteful, but most enjoyed seeing high cultural icons toppled from their pedestals.
19 (pp. 213-214) They were slaves ... forty-three burdened feet rose and fell: This description is partly drawn from Sam Clemens’s childhood memories. In one of his autobiographical dictations he recalls seeing ”a dozen black men and women chained to one another, awaiting shipment” from Hannibal down the river: ”Those were the saddest faces I had ever seen.” But the chief source for the novel’s several accounts of this slave gang is the slave narrative by Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (originally published in 1859). These passages in Connecticut Yankee constitute the most explicit critique of slavery Twain ever published, although of course since they depict slavery in feudal Europe rather than the antebellum South, the slaves are white and their oppressors are not American.
20 (p. 223) I ventured a story myself: Hank’s standing up in front of an audience after dinner to get them to laugh at a ”humorous thing” is one of the most obvious places in the novel where Twain projects his own ambitions and experiences onto his character. During Twain’s first lecture tour in Britain, in 1873, he said almost exactly the same thing about the risibility of English audiences as Hank does here.
21 (pp. 228-229) from hermit to hermit ... forty-seven years holy abstinence from water: As he notes at the end of the chapter, Twain took Hank’s description of the hermits from William Lecky’s History of European Morals (1869), one of his favorite books. The ”frank details” Twain says he had to leave out refer to such gross matters as the worms that dropped from one ascetic’s putrefied flesh.
22 (p. 247) Confound a telephone: Loving new technology as much as Hank, Twain had the first telephone ever installed in a private residence set up in his Hartford house in 1876, but he also kept a comic record of how much the static interfered with his family’s attempts to use it.
23 (p. 253) he was on a rail: Though Hank says the abbot ordered this punishment, riding a malefactor out of town on a rail was not a medieval practice. On the other hand, it was common on the southwestern frontier where Sam Clemens g
rew up, as the King and the Duke in Huck Finn, for example, find out. This is one of the clearest instances in the novel where Twain’s representation of Arthurian England looks more like the American antebellum South.
24 (p. 295) ”Brother!—to dirt like this?”: This is one of the most obvious instances of illustrator Dan Beard’s adding meanings that are not in Hank’s text. As a socialist, Beard here calls attention to the similarities between three different systems of economic exploitation, with their respective masters: aristocrats in sixth-century England; slave owners in the antebellum South; and robber barons in late-nineteenth-century America. Hank, however, as someone who worked his way up into the management ranks at the Colt factory, believes very strongly in what our time calls ”entrepreneurial capitalism.” Twain’s own stand on this issue is much harder to pin down. He approved the illustration, but he also counted people like Standard Oil executive Henry Rogers among his best friends.
25 (p. 303) upon his breast lay a slender girl.... He was great, now: On one hand, this scene of the King dressed as a commoner carrying a peasant child is a wonderfully democratic image, like Twain’s depiction of a black slave and a poor white boy together on a raft. On the other hand, that idea is complicated here by the way the King attributes his chivalrous act to his aristocratic training: ”It were a shame that a king should know fear, and shame that belted knight should withhold his hand where be such as need succor.”
26 (p. 342) the ”protection” system: Protectionism versus free trade was the major issue in the presidential election of 1888. Though earlier Twain had campaigned for Republican candidates, in this election he supported the losing Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, who agreed with Hank’s position against tariffs.
27 (p. 400) belted knights on bicycles!: The first machines to be called bicycles appeared in the 1870s. Their large front wheels made them more dangerous to ride than modern bikes, but in the 1880s they became a fad. Stage shows with titles like ”50 Fat Women on Bicycles” were a popular form of entertainment. In the article ”Taming the Bicycle” (1886) Twain let his contemporaries laugh at his own attempt to learn to ride.
28 (p. 422) This experiment was base-ball: The origins of American baseball are still disputed, but it almost certainly evolved from an English bat-and-ball game like rounders. America’s first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed in 1869; the National League came into existence in 1876.
29 (p. 433) the stock board.... He skinned them alive: Hank, who had earlier bragged about deceiving investors who bought stock in his St. Stylite shirt company (see p. 230), sees nothing wrong with turning the Round Table into a stock exchange or with Launcelot’s financial shenanigans here. But such stock swindles and manipulations were increasingly a problem in Gilded Age America, and Twain may have expected readers to wince at this image of Launcelot, who chivalrously came to Sir Kay’s rescue in the novel’s first chapter, using the tools of capitalism ruthlessly to exploit others here.
30 (p. 440) none younger than fourteen, and none above seventeen years old: These boys are just about the age of Twain’s two best-known creations, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn; there is also a caye and even (after they reroute the mountain brook during the battle) ”a river a hundred feet wide.“ Boys, cave, river—by surrounding Hank with these echoes of his earlier books in the context of this novel’s apocalyptic ending Twain makes the destruction of Arthur’s Camelot and Hank’s own ambitions even more inclusive.
31 (p. 448) the ”righteous cause“: This phrase, in quotation marks and repeated, evokes ”the Lost Cause,“ as the postwar South’s enshrining of the Confederacy was called in Twain’s time. The commoners’ allegiance to the system that oppresses them had already reminded Hank of ”the ’poor whites’ of our [that is, America‘s] South“ who laid down their lives in the Civil War to preserve the power of the plantation aristocracy (p. 316). Later in this chapter the doomed assault of the 25,000 knights against a position defended by modern weaponry can be compared to Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. In all these cases the novel that Twain wrote to expose medieval Europe again seems to hold up a mirror to nineteenth-century America.
32 (p. 467) Dreams that were as real as reality—delirium, of course, but so real: It’s not clear what Hank is dying of, but his bewilderment here is a subject that Twain will return to with increasing force. Among his last, unfinished, and unpublished manuscripts are tales titled ”Which Was the Dream?“ and ”The Great Dark,“ in which characters lose the ability to distinguish between being asleep and dreaming, and being awake in a real world. And at the climax of the last story he ever tried to write, ”The Mysterious Stranger,“ a supernatural figure named Satan tells the narrator, ”Nothing exists; all is a dream.“ This motif had appeared earlier in Twain’s work (Huck Finn, for example, tries to convince Jim that he had only dreamed their separation in the fog) but never with the urgency it has as the note Hank’s tale ends on.
INSPIRED BY
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT
Musical
Mark Twain, a devoted theater lover, would have been delighted with the musical adaptation of his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Premiering on November 3, 1927, at Broadway’s lavish Vanderbilt Theater, A Connecticut Yankee was the second collaboration by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart. In the musical, Martin Barrett, a jive-talking English history scholar and Connecticut businessman, is betrothed to a woman named Fay Morgan. On the eve of their wedding, Fay catches Martin visiting his true love, Alice. Fay cracks Martin over the head with a viola, sending him into a hallucination of Arthurian England. Enter sixth-century knights garbed in elaborate costumes and catchy show tunes.
Running on Broadway for 421 performances, A Connecticut Yankee put the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart on the map. The wildly successful production introduced the world to the duo’s particular brand of memorable songs, including “Thou Swell, Thou Witty” and “My Heart Stood Still,” both of which became standards. “Thou Swell, Thou Witty,” with its simple and sweetly archaic lyric remains a favorite in the Rodgers and Hart canon and has been sung by Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Natalie Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and the Supremes, among others. One of the most famous versions of the song appears in the MGM spectacular Words and Music (1948), in which Tom Drake (playing Richard Rodgers), Mickey Rooney (playing Lorenz Hart), June Allyson, and the Black-burn Twins perform a rousing rendition of “Thou Swell, Thou Witty.” Indeed, this song more than any other has become emblematic of Rodgers and Hart’s musical output. Dorothy Hart titled her 1976 memoir of her brother-in-law Thou Swell, Thou Witty: The Life and Lyrics of Lorenz Hart, and David Thompson’s PBS documentary The Rodgers & Hart Story: Thou Swell, Thou Witty aired in 1999.
Thou swell! Thou witty!
Thou sweet! Thou grand!
Wouldst kiss me pretty?
Wouldst hold my hand?
In 1943 Rodgers was invited to view an early screening of Irving Rapper’s film The Adventures of Mark Twain, starring Fredric March, and the story moved the composer to tears. Inspired by Rapper’s film, and in an attempt to reinvigorate Hart, whose health was being destroyed by alcoholism, Rodgers decided to revise A Connecticut Yankee with his partner of nearly twenty-five years. During the summer of 1943, Rodgers and Hart worked on updating the dialogue, refining the story line, and writing new music. They also made Martin’s character a U.S. Navy war hero to reflect the new era. Six songs were added, including Hart’s wonderfully romantic “To Keep My Love Alive.”
The revival of A Connecticut Yankee ran for 135 performances, alongside Oklahoma!, the first collaboration between Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. On November 22, 1943, five days after the reopening of A Connecticut Yankee, Hart died of pneumonia. After Oklahoma! won the Pulitzer Prize, Rodgers and Hammerstein went on to enjoy one of the most noteworthy collaborations in American musical theater.
Film
Mark Twain’s novel of comical anachro
nism has been brought to the screen numerous times, including a 1921 silent; David Butler’s 1931 film A Connecticut Yankee, starring Will Rogers; NBC’s 1955 version of the Rodgers and Hart musical, starring Eddie Albert, Janet Blair, and Boris Karloff; and A Young Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1995), starring Michael York and Theresa Russell. But the most popular version of Twain’s classic continues to be Tay Garnett’s 1949 film starring Bing Crosby as Hank Martin. With a screenplay by Edmund Beloin, this version of Yankee is the most faithful to Twain of all the adaptations. Unsurprising for a Bing Crosby vehicle, Garnett’s Yankee is a musical, but it has nothing to do with the Rodgers and Hart production. Instead, Garnett’s film features songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, who wrote songs for twenty-three Bing Crosby movies. Crosby’s Yankee numbers include “If You Stub Your Toe on the Moon,” “When Is Sometime,” and “Once and for Always.” Filled with slapstick violence, Crosby’s hammy colloquialisms (“Hey, buster”), and impressive old English sets and costumes, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court sports a cast rounded out by Sir Cedric Hardwicke as a doddering Arthur, William Bendix as the dense Sir Sagramore, and Murvyn Vye as the conniving and villainous Merlin.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.