1. Philip Fisher, "Appearing and Disappearing in Public: Social Space in Late-Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture," in Reconstructing American Literary History , ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 155-88.

2. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 142-44.

3. "Queen Victoria's Jubilee," in Europe and Elsewhere , vol. 29 of The Writings of Mark Twain , Stormfield Edition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), 193-94.

4. Michael Rogin," 'Make My Day!': Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics," Representations 29 (1990): 99-123.

5. Life on the Mississippi , chap. 46.

6. Mark Twain, "About Play-Acting," in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Essays and Stories , vol. 23 of The Writings of Mark Twain , Stormfield Edition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), 213-25.

7. Twain's remarks about the Children's Theatre are taken from speeches in Mark Twain Speaking , 546, 596, and 620, and from a typescript of

"The Great Alliance" (January 16, 1908), in the Mark Twain Papers. Quoted with permission. ^*

8. Mark Twain in Eruption , 110-15.

9. Macdonald, "Mark Twain: An Unsentimental Journey," 188. Howells's remark is in his letter to Twain, December 13, 1880, Mark TwainHowells Letters , I, 338.

10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics , trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 124. On the crowning of fools, also see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 79, 138, 217-19. These two books were initially helpful in framing the issues in Twain's fascination with spectacle and carnival. Ultimately, however, the Mark Twain of The Prince and the Pauper is more distressed than Bakhtin with the failures of official symbols, and less enamored of carnival licentiousness and "gay relativity."

11. Although Hank's discussion of "protection" and "free trade" certainly is related to the particular conflict in the 1880s between Republican party advocacy of tariffs and Democratic opposition to them, as Henry Nash Smith points out (in Mark Twain's Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in "A Connecticut Yankee" [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964], 57), focusing on this connection can obscure the larger tension raised here between fixed and circulating value.

12. Part of Mark Twain's grasp of Hank's performance business clearly draws on the tradition traced by Jean-Christophe Agnew in Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 , which argues that, in the years he studies, the abstractions of "the market," of money values, and of impersonal contracts raised fears of misrepresentation and ideas of temporary and artificial selves—matters reproduced and explored in the theater. The issues raised in Twain's clash between the sixth and the nineteenth centuries are much the same.

13. Twain here invokes a distinction akin to Roland Barthes's wellknown contrast "between feudal society and bourgeois society, index and sign," the indexical sign in feudal society always fixed to an origin, the sign in bourgeois society released into the "limitless process of equivalences, representations that nothing will ever stop, orient, fix, sanction" ( S/Z , trans. Richard Miller [New York: Hill and Wang, 1974], 39-40). Jean Baudrillard also writes of a pre-Renaissance security in signs and a post-Renaissance proliferation of signs (imitations, counterfeits, etc.) "emancipated" into a new culture of exchange that made their meanings quickly changeable ( Simulations , trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman [New York: Semiotext(e), 1983], 83-86). These are clearly among the contrasts Twain invokes between Arthur's England and Morgan's United States.

14. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics , trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 83. Robert Shulman suggests that Hank Morgan introduces "the reifying process" and "commodity value" into sixth-century England; see his Social Criticism and Nineteenth-Century Fictions (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 153.

15. The idea that capitalism annihilates not only referents but also signifieds is familiarly associated with Baudrillard, for example in Simulations , 43. A number of critics have situated a crisis in the sign, specifically the release of signifiers from signifieds, in the postmodern era, when, supposedly, capital finally fully penetrates the artistic sign and colonizes it with the forces of reification. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review , no. 146 (1984): 56, and Hal Foster, "Wild Signs: The Breakup of the Sign in Seventies' Art," in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism , ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 253. Since it is obvious, however, that the nineteenth century is a heyday of capitalist commodification of cultural production, I am arguing that Twain turns his astute attention to anatomizing a full-blown (not simply emergent) phenomenon. If postmodern spectacles are different from late-nineteenth-century ones (and certainly they are), the colonization by capital of the aesthetic realm must not be the decisive difference.

16. Note how the supposed magnificence of each of Hank's theatrical effects surpasses all precedents: he makes his threat of the eclipse "in as sublime and noble a way as ever I did such a thing in my life" (87-88); the miracle of the fountain is "the very showiest bit of magic in history" (282), and his theatrical chanting there was "one of the best effects I ever invented" (267); on his display of conspicuous consumption before Marco and friends, he says, "I don't know that I ever put a situation together better, or got happier spectacular effects out of the materials available" (365); but he soon surpasses that by producing a "fine effect'' in arguing with them, "as fine as any I ever produced, with so little time to work it up in" (379); the rescue by the knights on bicycles was the "grandest sight that ever was seen" and "one of the gaudiest effects I ever instigated" (425-26). And so on.

17. James M. Cox, " A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court : The Machinery of Self-Preservation," in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , ed. Allison R. Ensor (New York: Norton, 1982), 392, and Michaels, "An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life," 73-78.

18. Francis Hodge, in his Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825-1850 , gives the fullest account of the stage Yankees. Hank Morgan's predecessors, for example, appeared in David Humphrey's The Yankey in England (1815), Charles Mathews's Jonathan in England (1824), James Hackett's Jonathan Doubikins (1834), James Kirke Paulding's The Bucktails; or, Americans in England (1847), John Augustus Stone's The Knight of the Golden Fleece (1834) (which put Yankee Sy Saco in the world of Spanish medieval romance), Bayle Bernard's Speculations, or Major Wheeler in Europe (1838), and Charles Selby's A Day in France (1838).

19. Burlesque Hamlet, in Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques , 49-87.

20. Bakhtin considers marketplace misrule and irreverence in Rabelais and His World ; see especially chap. 2, "The Language of the Marketplace in Rabelais."

21. Ann Douglas's argument that Hank is a nineteenth-century manipulator of crowd psychology, freeing Arthurians from "the conformist mob-

mentality of serfs" only to instill "the conformist mob-mentality of consumers" strikes me as more persuasive than Forrest G. Robinson's argument that the Arthurians were the best audience for Hank, because his showmanship flourished best in a culture of aristocrats and slaves. See Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture , 189-90, and Robinson, In Bad Faith , 160, 235. Hank reconceives Arthurians in terms of nineteenth-century conceptions of crowds and mobs. For pertinent background, see Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), on the crowd psychologists of the turn of the century (e.g., Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, William McDougall, William Trotter, Nietzsche, Freud) and the general, growing concern about "the masses"—their supposed barbarism, their irrationality, their surrender to animal instinct, etc. (19, 30-31, 109, 166-67). On late-nineteenth-century conceptions of crowds as primitive, irrational, instinctual, and credulous, also see Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 127, 131, and John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 97.

22. Forrest G. Robinson, in In Bad Faith , has relatedly traced depictions of "bad faith" in Twain's fiction—rationalizations, conscious dissimulations, self-deceptions, hypocrisies, distractions (sometimes in the form of amusements)—that serve to mask or deny racism, cruelty, and tragedy. Hank's spectacles suit this pattern, for they certainly divert his own attention from the ugliness of his acts at the same time that they invite his spectators and his readers to look at the astonishing rather than the repellent.

23. Mark Twain Speaking , 88.