Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Mark Twain

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  FRANCIS A. NICHOLS

  Mark Twain’s new book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, invades sacred precincts of literature, and no particular good comes to the author for his trespass. The humor comes of 19th century with sixth century customs and manners, and leaving out the humor of the general conception, which is omnipresent, there is little along the treatment that is equal to what Mark Twain has written before, and a good deal that is inferior.

  —from the Boston Globe (December 22, 1889)

  WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

  Mr. Clemens, we call him, rather than Mark Twain, because we feel that in this book our arch-humorist imparts more of his personal quality than in anything else he has done. Here he is to the full the humorist, as we know him; but he is very much more, and his strong, indignant, often infuriate hate of injustice, and his love of equality, burn hot through the manifold adventures and experiences of the tale. What he thought about prescriptive right and wrong, we had partly learned in The Prince and the Pauper, and in Huckleberry Finn, but it is [A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court] which gives his whole mind. The elastic scheme of the romance allows it to play freely back and forward between the sixth century and the nineteenth century; and often while it is working the reader up to a blasting contempt of monarchy and aristocracy in King Arthur’s time, the dates are magically shifted under him, and he is confronted with exactly the same principles in Queen Victoria’s time. The delicious satire, the marvellous wit, the wild, free, fantastic humor are the colors of the tapestry, while the texture is a humanity that lives in every fibre. At every moment the scene amuses, but it is all the time an object-lesson in democracy. It makes us glad of our republic and our epoch; but it does not flatter us into a fond content with them.

  —from an unsigned review in Harper’s Magazine (January 1890)

  THE CRITIC

  How far is it permitted a modern iconoclast to go in demolishing idols, mutilating the Hermœ, knocking off the noses of the gods, and desecrating the sanctuary? Alcibiades and his gang tried it ages ago at Athens. Cervantes kindled wondrous laughter—inextinguishable to this day—over the inanities of chivalry. Ariosto smote Bombast under the fifth rib. Reineke Fuchs set all the Netherlands agog at the slyness of its satire. Even Homer the other day came out in Punchinello costume, and Offenbach set the myth of Helen to delicious derisive music. A parody on the Book of Job or the Apocalypse is next in order. Such seems the natural sequence: after the sweet, the acid; after tragedy, a farce; after Arthur—Mark Twain! There—it is out! We do not at all approve of Mark’s performance: it is very naughty indeed: but—and that is all he and his publishers want—we cannot help laughing at it. A more grotesque knot of chapters and illustrations on the foolishness and fooleries of knight-errantry has never been bound between two covers. Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Sir Launcelot—all the Round Table kith and kin,—are here gathered in goodly fellowship, made infinite fun of, put through their paces in a series of delicious adventures, and made to succumb before the victorious “smartness,” the nineteenth-century science, of a Connecticut Yankee. Could anything be more unparalleled? The whole Table Round scattered by a dynamite bomb,—Sir Galahad performing on the “funny-graph”—Vivien taking a dose of Simmons’s Liver Regulator, and Guinevere typewriting to lovelorn Launcelot! Such is the character of the book,—not that precisely these “phenomena” crop out in Avalon, but others quite similar and much funnier set the whole world snickering over Malory’s immortal stories and the legends that Wace wept over. The more’s the pity. “Ring out the old, ring in the new”: people must laugh. Now it is in order to see whether this acid will eat through the Arthur romances and cause them to drop to pieces, or whether, like gold, they will not be corroded by it.

  —February 22, 1890

  THE SPECTATOR

  Nothing in its way could well be more deplorable than the latest and certainly not the least ambitious example of Transatlantic humour, —A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. Mark Twain has surpassed himself as a low comedian in literature by the manner in which he has vaulted at a bound into the charmed circle of Arthurian romance. The gallant deeds of the Knights of the Round Table have enlisted many pens, since the far off years in which Sir Thomas Malory gave them a setting in the exquisite prose of Morte d‘Arthur, to the present century in which the genius of the Laureate has conjured back the days of chivalry and interpreted the moral significance of the old allegory, in poetry that is already classic,—the Idylls of the King. Let it be granted at once that Lord Tennyson has idealised, as only a supreme poet can, the life and aspirations which, according to tradition, prevailed at the Court which King Arthur kept in the mystic border-land where legend and history meet and blend in indissoluble union....

  Camelot may be a beautiful dream; but Connecticut is a hard reality about which no illusions are possible. Hitherto, Dagonet has held undisputed sway as the only fool at the Court of King Arthur, but he, it seems, is scarcely up to modern requirements; so Mark Twain has come to the rescue with a brand-new specimen of the breed, in the shape of this Yankee “Boss.” He swaggers upon the scene with jaunty assurance, and proceeds to disport himself after the manner of his kind. Once at Camelot, this ‘cute, enterprising, conceited product of the nineteenth century duly “plays the fool exceedingly,” airing his choice slang and cutting his insufferable capers in a way which was certainly calculated to astonish the natives. How the “Boss” started a newspaper, arrived at the conclusion that King Arthur’s Knights were a “childlike and innocent lot,” denounced Merlin as a “cheap old humbug,” and discovered that in the Quest of the Holy Grail there were “worlds of reputation, but no money,”—is it not written in this coarse and clumsy burlesque, of which America in general, and Mark Twain in particular, ought already to be heartily ashamed? ...

  Mark Twain is quite right about the Quest of the Holy Grail, for it—in common with other enterprises the memory of which mankind will not willingly let die—had “worlds of reputation in it, but no money.” Possibly, however, he may find a tangible consolation in the fact—since reverence fails to keep pace with knowledge in the present generation—that these broad grins at the expense of his betters are likely to bring him “worlds” of money, if no reputation.

  —April 5, 1890

  BOOTH TARKINGTON

  For my part, always when I think of that true United States, part of the thought is Mark Twain. For, complete citizen of the world as he was, he was the American Spirit. And oh! how that spirit spoke in him—and from him, from that great pen, now quiet....

  His presence here made the world a more ‘reassuring’ place to live in than it had been before. Everything seemed safer because he was with us. For the multitude who read all he wrote, it was like a child having a grown person’s hand in the dark.

  —from North American Review (June 1910)

  BRANDER MATTHEWS

  George Eliot in one of her essays calls those who parody lofty themes “debasers of the moral currency.” Mark Twain is always an advocate of the sterling ethical standard. He is ready to overwhelm an affectation with irresistible laughter, but he never lacks reverence for the things that really deserve reverence.

  —from Inquiries and Opinions (1907)

  H. L. MENCKEN

  Huck Finn and Life on the Mississippi and the Connecticut Yankee will remain, and so long as they remain there can be no question of [MarkTwain‘s] literary stature. He was one of the great artists of our time. He was the full equal of Cervantes and Molière, Swift and Defoe. He was and is the one authentic giant of our national literature.

  —from Smart Set (February 1913)

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  Mark Twain, the Innocent Abroad, who saw the lovely churches of the Middle Ages without a throb of emotion, author of A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, in which the heroes and heroines of medieval chivalry are guys seen through the eyes of a street arab, was clearly out of court from the beginning.

/>   —from his preface to St. Joan (1924)

  GEORGE ORWELL

  [Mark Twain] squandered his time on buffooneries, not merely lecture tours and public banquets, but, for instance, the writing of a book like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which is a deliberate flattery of all that is worst and most vulgar in American life.

  —from the Tribune (November 26, 1943)

  ROBERT PENN WARREN

  If Twain were a wanderer who, with no address ever definitely fixed, founded our ‘national literature,’ the key image we refer to here is not a record of his surroundings back and forth over two continents but of the journey into the darkest of all continents—the self. In A Connecticut Yankee, the explorer gets as close to the heart of darkness as he ever could—or dared—get.... A Connecticut Yankee is to be set alongside historical accounts of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or Communist Russia. This novel was prophetic.

  —from the Southern Review (summer 1972)

  Questions

  1. “I have always preached,” said Mark Twain. What would you say is the theme of his sermon in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court?

  2. Is there anything admirable about the Dark Ages as they are represented by Twain in this book?

  3. Twain clearly spoofs much of what was popularly associated with the world of King Arthur, and, less clearly, he satirizes certain attitudes and values of his own time. But are there also some things he satirizes that are human—traits, actions, and values that take on different forms at different times but are always there?

  4. How do you interpret the battle depicted in the novel’s final chapters? Is Twain preaching here?

  FOR FURTHER READING

  Biographical Studies

  Cardwell, Guy A. The Man Who Was Mark Twain: Images and Ideologies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. A controversial look into the dark places of the author’s psyche.

  Harris, Susan K. The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. A postfeminist examination of the role Clemens’s marriage played in his life and in Mark Twain’s career.

  Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. One of the best American biographies ever written, but it begins when Clemens is thirty years old.

  Powers, Ron. Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain. New York: Basic Books, 1999. A modern study of that source of so much of Twain’s best work: the childhood of Sam Clemens.

  Sanborn, Margaret. Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Focuses on the period between Clemens’s childhood and Mark Twain’s career.

  Wecter, Dixon. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. The classic study of Clemens’s childhood.

  Critical Studies

  Budd, Louis J. Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. A well-researched account of what Mark Twain meant to his contemporaries.

  Cox, James M. Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. An eloquent study of the deepest sources of the pleasure we find in Mark Twain’s work.

  Hoffman, Andrew. Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. New York: William Morrow, 1997. An illuminating analysis of the beginnings of the persona and career of Mark Twain.

  Knoper, Randall K. Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Locates Mark Twain’s preoccupation with performing in the context of popular entertainment in his time.

  Railton, Stephen. Mark Twain: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Includes chapters on Mark Twain’s six major works, including Connecticut Yankee.

  Rich, Janet A. The Dream of Riches and the Dream of Art: The Relationship Between Business and the Imagination in the Life and Major Fiction of Mark Twain. New York: Garland, 1987. Looks at the fascination with money that Clemens shared with America in the context of four of his novels, including Connecticut Yankee.

  Robinson, Forrest G. In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain’s America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. An insightful analysis of Mark Twain’s response to the country’s refusal to face the truths about itself.

  Smith, Henry Nash. Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. One of the best books on Twain’s whole career, focusing on the role of voice.

  . Mark Twain’s Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in “A Connecticut Yankee. ”New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964. An illuminating close reading of the novel.

  Ziff, Larzer. Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Short, readable, and particularly interested in the motif of travel.

  Other Resources

  Burns, Ken. Mark Twain. VHS. Directed by Ken Burns. New York: PBS Home Video: 2001. This four-hour film ignores the controversies about Twain and race but is often emotionally powerful (see below for the accompanying volume).

  Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, ed. A Historical Guide to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A collection of essays by seven Twain scholars that try to locate his works in the context of his cultural time and place.

  Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight! VHS. West Long Branch, NJ: Vining Productions, 1999. Holbrook’s long-running and popular impersonation of Mark Twain is based on sound scholarship as well as great showmanship.

  Meltzer, Milton, ed. Mark Twain Himself: A Pictorial Biography. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Mark Twain’s works, life, and times mainly in pictures—a very rich resource.

  Railton, Stephen. Mark Twain in His Times: An Electronic Archive. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton. An online Web site drawn mainly from rare material in the University of Virginia Library’s Barrett Collection on Twain.

  Ward, Geoffrey C., and Dayton Duncan. Mark Twain: Based on a Documentary Film Directed by Ken Burns. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. The accompanying volume to the Ken Burns film listed above.

  a Doctrine that a ruler’s power comes directly from God.

  b Notorious mistresses of Louis XV and Charles II.

  c Major English tourist attraction, containing a large collection of armor.

  d Doctrine that after death a soul passes into another body.

  e Person who gives tours to sightseers.

  f Warwick was a battle site during the seventeenth-century English Civil War.

  g Le Morte d’Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory, originally published in the fifteenth century.

  h From book 6, chapter 11 of Le Morte d’Arthur (slightly abridged).

  i Demented [author’s note].

  j Connecticut city, winter home of P. T. Barnum’s circus.

  k Parchment from which text has been scraped to make room for new text.

  l Sign that a person is a slave.

  m Discussion between two parties.

  n Chain mail tunic and helmet.

  o Shafted weapon with an axe-like blade.

  p There was no total eclipse of the sun in the sixth century.

  q Feudal lord entitled to allegiance and service.

  r Closely spaced supports for a railing; also called a balustrade.

  s Archaic form of “got.”

  t Archaic word for “if.”

  u Archaic form of “account.”

  v Curses.

  w From book 1, chapter 25 of Le Morte d’Arthur.

  x Archaic term for a physician; sometimes spelled “leach.”

  y No matter [author’s note].

  z Popular nineteenth-century form of entertainment, featuring white men in black-face.

  aa Intermittent spasmodic pain in the intestines.

  ab Almost broke (archaic).

  ac Cheap, ready-made clothing.

  ad Eighteenth-century novels by British authors Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollet.

  ae Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), popular
Romantic poet and historical novelist.

  af livanhoe and Rowena are characters in Scott’s historical novel Ivanhoe (1820). By “Rachel,” Hank (or Mark Twain) probably meant “Rebecca,” another major character in Scott’s novel.

  ag Archaic form of “I pray thee”—that is, “I ask you, please.”

  ah Archaic way to say “in fact” or “in truth.”