1. "A Notable Dinner," Hartford Courant , October 23, 1890, p. 2. [BACK]

2. Paul Baender, "The Jumping Frog as a Comedian's First Virtue," Philological Quarterly 60 (1963): 194. Critics, of course, have written about the deadpan style, but usually as a kind of archetype in American literature of the "wise fool"—a figure given little historical specificity, usually treated in a broad sweep of American humor, and certainly never culturally situated in the way that I propose. See, for example, such surveys as Walter Blair's books: The Mirth of a Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury , written with Hamlin Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Horse Sense in American Humor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). [BACK]

3. I am once again referring to the divisions created between "low" and "high" theater and culture, especially from midcentury on, including the emergence of "respectable" theaters, the expulsion from them of burlesque and variety, and the proliferation of minstrel halls and music halls; the disciplining in "legitimate'' theaters of boisterousness and its flourishing in "low" venues; and the consolidation of associated contrasts in taste and spectatorship. These are developments especially of the 1850s and 1860s, and therefore form a crucial background for Twain's and Jefferson's performances. See especially Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow , but also the other sources listed in my Introduction, notes 6 and 7. More than thirty years ago, Raymond Williams, writing about English entertainment, described the configuration of cultural developments I want to explore: the burgeoning of music halls in the 1840s, the related expansion of "serious" and "respectable" theater and audiences, especially between 1860 and 1900, and the consolidation of sentimental comedy, with its mixture of comedy and pathos, as the beloved form of the newer middle-class audiences. See Williams's essay, "The Social History of Dramatic Forms," in The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 246-73. [BACK]

4. My sense of the deadpan style as a popular form that is contradictory, open to multiple readings, resonant with both vernacular traditions and bourgeois values, and generally an acting-out of cultural tensions is influenced by work in "cultural studies"—for example, Stuart Hall's well-known essay, "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular," in People's History and Socialist Theory , ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 227-41, which characterizes popular culture as always composed of "antagonistic and unstable elements," and as a "ground" for a "double movement" of popular resistance and the superimposition of dominant cultural forms to contain that resistance. Also see, for example, Tony Bennett's "The Politics of 'the Popular' and Popular Culture," in Popular Culture and Social Relations , ed. Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott (London: Open Uni-

versity Press, 1986), 6-21, which pertinently argues that "the very organisation of cultural forms" is shaped by the intermingling within them of antagonistic cultural values and ideologies. Helpful, too, is John Clarke's essay, "Pessimism Versus Populism: The Problematic Politics of Popular Culture," in For Fun and Profit , ed. Butsch, 28-44, because it underscores the instability and variability of meaning in any popular cultural text, but also insists on the ways in which culture limits the range of possible meanings, and on the ways in which bourgeois forms and meanings work to incorporate and dominate the pleasures and practices of subordinate groups. For a similar account of popular culture that focuses on nineteenth-century American theater—that stresses multiple audiences and various possible audience responses and identifications, but that also puts a somewhat greater stress than I do on the power of containment and hegemony—see Bruce A. McConachie, ''Using the Concept of Cultural Hegemony to Write Theatre History," in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance , ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 37-58. [BACK]

5. Stuart Hall's "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular" is pertinent on this point as well; Hall stresses that languages, cultural practices, and cultural forms (and the deadpan style is a good example) never simply belong to a particular class, but are used variously by different class cultures (238). [BACK]

6. Despite the unpredictability of individual response to popular forms, and despite the many variations in response shaped by people's differences in gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, sexual orientation, and so on, there do seem to be persistent configurations in popular culture and its reception that signal widespread preoccupations, anxieties, desires, conflicts. My aim here is to identify one such configuration, in which an extensive range of deadpan performances, and the existing responses to them, continually suggest and rehearse a prevalent concern over a separation between class cultures and gender ideals. These conflicts, I suggest, work to constitute a "horizon" of reading—or to set a group of canonical procedures for reading—that clearly shaped (even if it could never fully determine) what particular audiences saw in particular performances. Relevant to this conception is the work of Tony Bennett, who has argued that extratextual "codes," "discourses," "cultures," and protocols or conventions of interpretation can converge as "reading formations" that shape, organize, regulate, and activate readings and popular texts (or, I might add, viewings and performances); the effect is that readings are structured (though, often, very indirectly or unevenly) by larger social, cultural, and ideological relationships, and do not, therefore, dissolve into infinite idiosyncratic interpretations. See Bennett's essays, "Texts, Readers, Reading Formations," Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 16, no. 1 (1983): 3-17; "Marxism and Popular Fiction," Literature and History 7 (1981): 138-65; and "Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts," in Post-structuralism and the Question of History , ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1987), 63-81. Also see Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 69-71, which argues against totalizing ideas of "the public" but nonetheless argues for discernible regularities and tendencies in readings, some of them tied to class cultures and their worries and interests. [BACK]

7. On the practical anxiety among men, in the new urban situations of crowds of strangers, to avoid exposing themselves—partly by adopting an impassive visage—and the concomitant middle-class anxiety that the public world was filled with manipulating con men whose intentions could hardly be read from their faces, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), especially chaps. 1 and 2, "The Era of the Confidence Man" and "Hypocrisy and Sincerity in the World of Strangers." The deadpan style obviously crystallized anxiety about self-exposure and about not being able to detect the masking of another. [BACK]

8. Mark Twain's comment on Fred Franks appears in Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 11; also see his remark on seeing Franks in San Francisco, in Clemens of the "Call," 40; and on Franks's performances in Virginia City in 1863, see Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 521-22, and Watson, Silver Theatre , 133, 186, 192. On Billy O'Neil's deadpan performance, see Mark Twain of the "Enterprise," 132; on O'Neil's performances in Virginia City, see Watson, Silver Theatre , 186, 240-41. Twain's notice of Stephen Massett's performance appears in Clemens of the "Call," 96; also see Watson, Silver Theatre , 317. For Twain's comment on Billy Birch, see Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 1, 316; for remarks on Birch's acting style, see Toll, Blacking Up , 250-51, and Minstrelsy , vol. 13 of The San Francisco Theatre Research Monographs , ed. Estavan, 64. Finally, for Twain on Setchell, see Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2, 169-73. Setchell later starred in Artemus Ward, Showman —which further ties Twain, Ward, and Setchell together as kindred humorists and theatrical performers. [BACK]

9. Richard Moody, America Takes the Stage: Romanticism in American Drama and Theatre, 1750-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 110, and Rourke, American Humor , 87. [BACK]

10. Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2, 49-56. [BACK]

11. Twain's comment on Billy O'Neil is in Mark Twain of the "Enterprise," 132. [BACK]

12. On Toodles at Ben de Bar's Theatre in St. Louis, see Mark Twain's Notebook, #46, typescript p. 10, in the Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley (hereafter Mark Twain Papers). [BACK]

13. William Evans Burton, The Toodles: A Domestic Drama in Two Acts (New York: Samuel French, [1853?]). [BACK]

14. See Garff B. Wilson's report on the reception of Burton's Toodles in A History of American Acting , 158-60. To cite a possible influence on Twain, I also note that Burton and John Brougham played the Siamese twins, Chang as the drinker and Eng as helplessly and unintentionally drunk; see Laurence Hutton, Plays and Players (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875), 243. [BACK]

15. Burton and other deadpan performers, that is, represent a kind of continuous self that has moved somewhat beyond the sureties of "character" that such historians as Joseph Kett, Warren Susman, and Karen Halttunen have placed earlier in the century. Kett has observed that, between 1840 and 1880, "character" as "a configuration of moral qualities molded in each person" dominated American conceptions of the self ( Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present [New York: Basic Books, 1977], 105-8, 112-14). Halttunen has elaborated this conception of character as a matter of "fixed principles'' and "stable character"—something antebellum Americans opposed to indulgence and pleasure ( Confidence Men and Painted Women , especially chap. 2). Susman, compatibly, has argued that such a concept of character as a developing structure began to erode in mainstream thinking after 1880, culminating in twentieth-century versions of the self as shaped by ephemeral determinants (" 'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture," in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century [New York: Pantheon, 1984], 274, 280). The "unified" self: of the drunken or befuddled deadpan obviously is not that of character "structure," which was becoming obsolete and untenable, but it is that of interior integrity, of a unity and continuity of consciousness, of a psychologistic consciousness of ongoing free associations which could accommodate drunkenness and pleasure and yet keep a coherent, private identity intact. It is a reassurance of continuity and flow rather than of structural solidity. [BACK]

16. "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 282-88. [BACK]

17. On the Marsh troupe in Carson City, see Mark Twain of the "Enterprise," 129-31. Hutton is quoted in Rella, A History of Burlesque , 53. Also see Watson, Silver Theatre , 240. [BACK]

18. For accounts of Burton's Captain Cuttle, see Donald Mullin, ed., Victorian Actors and Actresses in Review (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 96-97, and William C. Young, Famous Actors and Actresses on the American Stage , 2 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1975), I, 139-42. Twain's fondness for Captain Cuttle was long-standing; from 1862 through 1903 he made a variety of references to Cuttle in his notebooks (to Cuttle's catch phrases, to his movements and mannerisms) and seems generally to have thought, as he wrote in 1885, that "Captain Cuttle is good anywhere," whether on the stage or in a novel (see the entry for Dombey and Son in Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , I, 189). [BACK]

19. The praise for Setcheil appears in "A Voice for Setcheil," Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 169-73. [BACK]

20. Edgar M. Branch, "'My Voice Is Still for Setchell': A Background Study of 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,'" PMLA 82 (1967): 598. [BACK]

21. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor , 28-30. For the opposing point of view, see, for example, Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 145-47, and Paul Schmidt, "The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler," Southwest Review 51 (1956): 270-77. [BACK]

22. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980). [BACK]

23. Quoted in the editors' note to the "Jumping Frog" story, Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 2 , 272. [BACK]

24. Rourke, American Humor , 169. [BACK]

25. On the history of lecturing in the United States, see Paul Fatout, Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 97-98; and Fatout's Introduction to Mark Twain Speaking , xv. On Twain's quickly growing popularity, see Fred W. Lorch, The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain's Lecture Tours (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968), 224. Also see Donald M. Scott, "The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of American History 66 (March 1980): 791-809. On Redpath and lecturing see Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 84-86. [BACK]

26. See, for example, Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 142.

27. On Holland, see ibid., but also Lorch, Trouble Begins , 232, and Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , 146 and, for Twain's response, 147. [BACK]

26. See, for example, Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 142.

27. On Holland, see ibid., but also Lorch, Trouble Begins , 232, and Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , 146 and, for Twain's response, 147. [BACK]

28. Lorch, Trouble Begins , 230, and Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 112. Both Lorch and Fatout refer to responses to a January 1869 lecture in Decatur, Illinois, reported in the Decatur Herald and Republican . [BACK]

29. Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 136, 127, 73, 59. [BACK]

30. Lorch, Trouble Begins , 44, 114, 128. [BACK]

31. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor , 59. [BACK]

32. See Twain's remarks about pauses in Mark Twain in Eruption , 225-27, and in a letter to his wife, Livy, in The Love Letters of Mark Twain , ed. Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 162. [BACK]

33. See Fatout's remarks in Mark Twain Speaking , xviii, and in Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 134-35. [BACK]

34. Quoted in Lorch, Trouble Begins , 219.

35. For example, ibid., 71, 200, 227, and Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 42, 70, 75-76, 86, 107, 182. [BACK]

34. Quoted in Lorch, Trouble Begins , 219.

35. For example, ibid., 71, 200, 227, and Fatout, Lecture Circuit , 42, 70, 75-76, 86, 107, 182. [BACK]

36. See especially Fatout's quotation, from the January 28, 1896, Bombay Gazette , in Lecture Circuit , 260. [BACK]

37. In a letter to Livy Clemens, from Bennington, Vermont, November 27, 1871, in Love Letters , 165. [BACK]

38. Mark Twain Speaking , 247-49; also see 230, 450. [BACK]

39. Hutton, Plays and Players , 46-47; Mark Twain's comment appears in Autobiographical Dictation, April 28, 1908, in the Mark Twain Papers. Quoted with permission. ^* [BACK]

40. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 416-17, and Moses J. Montrose, Famous Actor-Families in America (1906; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968), 98. [BACK]

41. Henry Austin Clapp, Reminiscences of a Dramatic Critic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 99-100. [BACK]

42. Jefferson began playing the role of Rip Van Winkle in 1865 (for a run of 170 nights), and by 1881 he had performed the part 2,500 times. On Jeffer-

son's popularity, see Richard Moody, "American Actors and Acting before 1900: The Making of a Tradition," in American Theatre: A Sum of Its Parts , ed. Henry B. Williams (New York: Samuel French, 1971), 59. [BACK]

43. L. Clarke Davis, "Among the Comedians," Atlantic Monthly 19 (June 1867): 751, and Joseph Jefferson, Rip Van Winkle , in Nineteenth-Century American Plays , ed. Myron Matlaw (New York: Applause, 1967), 166-67, 179, 183. [BACK]

44. "Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly 82 (March 1891): 643. [BACK]

45. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 273, and "Jefferson in 'Rip Van Winkle,'" The Nation 9 (23 September 1869): 248. [BACK]

46. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 272-74. [BACK]

47. Jefferson's remark is quoted in Young, Famous Actors , I, 585. Jefferson, Rip Van Winkle , 153, 155, 162, 175. [BACK]

48. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 274. [BACK]

49. Davis, "Among the Comedians," 752. [BACK]

50. Young, Famous Actors , I, 586. [BACK]

51. Mullin, Victorian Actors , 273, and Young, Famous Actors , I, 583. [BACK]

52. Jerry Wayne Thomason has helpfully made the play available, and has fully recounted its history, in his dissertation, "Colonel Sellers: The Story of His Play" (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri—Columbia, 1991). For more succinct and accessible accounts of the play, which Twain took originally from a copyright violator's dramatization of the novel, see Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 861-62; Phillip Walker, "Mark Twain, Playwright," Educational Theatre Journal 8 (1956): 185; Gilder, "Mark Twain Detested the Theatre," 111; and Schirer, Mark Twain and the Theatre , 42-48. Brenda Murphy discusses the trend of plays focused on one comic character in American Realism and American Drama, 1880-1940 , 4, 48. [BACK]

53. September 20, 1874, Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 26; July 15 or 25, 1874, ibid., I, 20. [BACK]

54. Twain's comment on Rip Van Winkle and Solon Shingle appears in his letter to Mr. Watt, January 26, 1875, quoted in Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , I, 359. [BACK]

55. William Dean Howells, "Drama," Atlantic Monthly 35 (1875): 749-51. [BACK]

56. Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton, Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States , 5 vols. (Boston: L. C. Page, 1900), V, 235, 231. [BACK]

57. Brander Matthews, "The American on the Stage," Scribner's Monthly 18 (1879): 329. [BACK]

58. New York Times , September 27, 1874, p. 6.

59. Ibid., August 17, 1875, p. 4, and September 17, 1874, p. 6. [BACK]

58. New York Times , September 27, 1874, p. 6.

59. Ibid., August 17, 1875, p. 4, and September 17, 1874, p. 6. [BACK]

60. See Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses , V, 236, 240-41, and Mullin, Victorian Actors , 374. [BACK]

61. Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses , V, 234. "The Gilded Age," Rochester Evening Express , September 1, 1874, p. 2, col. 2, quoted in Thomason, "Colonel Sellers," 332. Thomason has brought together in his dissertation a host of otherwise difficult to acquire reviews of the play. [BACK]

62. Mark Twain Speaking , 88. [BACK]

63. The Autobiography of Mark Twain , ed. Charles Neider (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 21. [BACK]

64. Matthews, "The American on the Stage," 328. [BACK]