Explore "Is Shakespeare Dead?" by Mark Twain on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If I had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to decide whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or not, I believe I would place before the debaters only the one question, _Was Shakespeare ever a practicing lawyer_? and leave everything else out.
It is maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not merely myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished: that he not only knew some thousands of things about human life in all its shades and grades, and about the hundred arts and trades and crafts and professions which men busy themselves in, but that he could _talk_ about the men and their grades and trades accurately, making no mistakes. Maybe it is so, but have the experts spoken, or is it only Tom, Dick, and Harry? Does the exhibit stand upon wide, and loose, and eloquent generalizing -- which is not evidence, and not proof -- or upon details, particulars, statistics, illustrations, demonstrations?