1. See Bernard DeVoto's remarks on Twain's burlesque, extravaganza, improvisation, and manipulation in Mark Twain's America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932), 312. Edgar Branch judges Twain's early writings to be "theatrical rather than dramatic" throughout The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), but see especially 21, 94-110. Henry Nash Smith traces moments when Twain frees himself from his "preoccupation with eloquence" and rhetorical effect, and renders experience "directly'' by becoming absorbed in a scene or memory, but these are only moments of self-forgetting ( Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962], 84-87). John C. Gerber, though he treats Twain's personae seriously, finally characterizes them as only "cleverly staged comic acts" ("Mark Twain's Use of the Comic Pose," PMLA 77 [1962]: 304). Warner Berthoff directs perhaps the most sustained criticism against Twain's "art of the performer," its "machinery" of manipulation and staging generally overpowering instances of "the free flow of perception" and "visionary truth and beauty"; see Berthoff's The Ferment of Realism: American Literature 1884-1919 (New York: Free Press, 1965), 61-64. Dwight Macdonald, in "Mark Twain: An Unsentimental Journey," The New Yorker 36 (9 April 1960), writes that Twain's "actor's sensibility" produced a "coarse" writing attuned to idiom and delivery rather than "literary technique" (165, 177). And Guy Cardwell discounts Twain's burlesquing, caricaturing, striving for effects, mimicry, and "theatricalities" ( The Man Who Was Mark Twain: Images and Ideologies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991], 45).

2. James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Constance Rourke, in American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), situates Twain among the entertainment figures of the backwoodsman, the Yankee, and the black-faced minstrel, and in an American tradition of comic display and masking that repudiates emotional expression.

3. Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells, 1872-1910 , ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), II, 780.

4. This is the argument made by Michael Davitt Bell, as part of his generally persuasive challenge to the coherence or distinctiveness of any general definition of American realism, in The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See the chapter on Mark Twain for the specific argument that Twain is not a realist because he shows little concern for the social and moral responsibility that Howells thought defined a realist novelist (39-69).

5. Forrest G. Robinson, In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain's America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

6. Franklin Rogers, Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns as Seen in the Novels and Narratives, 1855-1885 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1960).

7. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Levine does the most thorough job of recounting this history, but on the establishment of divisions between "high" and "low" theaters and repertoires, and between disciplined, bourgeois audiences and raucous music-hall ones, also see Garff B. Wilson, A History of American Acting (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 107, 173; Claudia D. Johnson, "That Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Theaters," American Quarterly 27 (December 1975): 575-84; and Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 14-23.

8. See Mark Twain, The Adventures of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass , ed. Charles Honce (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1928), 4-12, and idem, Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown , ed. Franklin Walker and Ezra Dane (New York: Knopf, 1940), 223. On the stratification within nineteenth-century theaters, see David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 53-55; Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825-1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 21-23; and Robert C. Toll, On With the Show (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 6.

9. The expansion of the number of theaters during this period was phenomenal. Between 1864 and 1870, for example, there was a 67 percent increase in the number of theaters in the country, and an 85 percent increase nationally in gross ticket receipts—all accelerated by population growth and the westward expansion enabled by railroads (see Eugene K. Bristow and William R. Reardon, "Box Office, U.S.A., 1864-1870: Regional Profiles," Theatre Survey 8 [1967]: 124).

10. Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events , ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), 255. See, for an elaboration of this point of view, Rodman Gilder, "Mark Twain Detested the Theatre," Theatre Arts 28 (1944): 109-16.

11. Alan Gribben, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction , 2 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).

12. Mark Twain, Mark Twain Speaking , ed. Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976), 338-39.

13. For the history of Twain's playwriting, see Thomas Schirer, Mark Twain and the Theatre (Nuremberg: Hans Carl, 1984). Schirer notes eleven plays that Twain attempted by himself, involvement in ten collaborations on plays, and translations of three plays from German into English (105).

14. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic lmagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), and "Secret Performances: George Eliot and the Art of Acting," in Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 253-67; Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). On Dickens, Twain's theatrical British counterpart, see Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); William Axton, Circle of Fire: Dickens' Vision and Style and the Popular Victorian Theater (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1966); and Edwin M. Eigner, The Dickens Pantomime (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). Also pertinent to the relation between novels and theater are Gillian Beer, "'Coming Wonders': Uses of Theatre in the Victorian Novel," in English Drama: Forms and Development , ed. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 164-85, and Brenda Murphy, American Realism and American Drama, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), which argues for the influence of theories of literary realism on American drama.

15. John C. Gerber, Introduction, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 9, 15; Lin Salamo, Introduction, The Prince and the Pauper (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 3-4.

16. The phrase is from Twain's denunciation of Rev. William A. Sabine for refusing to conduct the comedian George Holland's funeral service because Holland was an actor. The piece is devoted to the argument that theater teaches morals as effectively, even more effectively, than do ministers such as Sabine. See "The Indignity Put upon the Remains of George Holland by the Rev. Mr. Sabine," in What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings , ed. Paul Baender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 52.

17. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography , 3 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1980), II, 571.

18. William Dean Howells, "My Mark Twain," in Literary Friends and Acquaintance , ed. David F. Hiatt and Edwin H. Cady (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 288.

19. William Dean Howells, "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business," Scribner's (October 1893): 444, and Mark Twain's Letters , arranged with comment by Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), II, 528.

20. Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 1: 1851-1864 , ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 78-82.

21. For a concise and lucid statement of the difficulties in scholarship when we believe both that culture is socially constructed and that society is culturally constructed, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "A New Context for a New American Studies?" American Quarterly 41 (1989): 588-613. Berkhofer's (rightly) hesitant sense that scholars must contextualize reflexively, that they "must all textualize as they contextualize, poeticize as they politicize," is persuasive. Also helpful is Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), in whose first part historians grapple with the problems of conducting historical investigations of, and within, "discursive formations."

22. See Minnie M. Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 134, 141.

23. See Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

24. See John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), especially chap. 7, "The Disciplining of Spectatorship." Also see Bruce A. McConachie, "Pacifying American Theatrical Audiences, 1820-1900," in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption , ed. Richard Butsch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 47-70.

25. According to Minnie M. Brashear, in 1847 the population of Hannibal was 3,500 ( Mark Twain: Son of Missouri , 77). Elbert R. Bowen writes that, according to the Seventh Census, the population in 1850 was 2,020, excluding slaves ( Theatrical Entertainment in Rural Missouri before the Civil War [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1959], 52).

26. Mark Twain's Autobiography , ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), I, 120.

27. See Bowen, Theatrical Entertainment , 2-4, and Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 111.

28. Bowen, Theatrical Entertainment , 123. Also see ibid., 71-82, and Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 186.

29. Mark Twain in Eruption , 110.

30. On the bad reputation among "upright citizens" that showboats had during the 1840s through the 1870s, see Philip Graham, Showboats: The History of an American Institution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 7, 26-27, 35, 37, 52, 189.

31. Quoted in Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 187.

32. See ibid., 155.

31. Quoted in Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 187.

32. See ibid., 155.

33. At the beginning of "Old Times on the Mississippi," Mark Twain recalled that circus performances always left all the boys in the town "burning to become clowns," and "the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life." In notes he made much later, as he tried to gather memories about Hannibal that could serve as literary material, he mentioned a comic minstrel routine known as the ''Long Dog

Scratch" and singled out the circus and a "Nigger Show" ( Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom , ed. Walter Blair [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], 34, 37).

34. Ibid., 51-52.

33. At the beginning of "Old Times on the Mississippi," Mark Twain recalled that circus performances always left all the boys in the town "burning to become clowns," and "the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life." In notes he made much later, as he tried to gather memories about Hannibal that could serve as literary material, he mentioned a comic minstrel routine known as the ''Long Dog

Scratch" and singled out the circus and a "Nigger Show" ( Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom , ed. Walter Blair [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], 34, 37).

34. Ibid., 51-52.

35. On Dan Rice, see especially Graham, Showboats , 34-39. Also see Harold Edward Briggs and Ernestine Bennett Briggs, "The Early Theatre in the Upper Mississippi Valley," Mid-America 31 (1949): 140; Joseph S. Schick, "Early Showboat and Circus in the Upper Valley," Mid-America 32 (1950): 222; Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 192; Bowen, Theatrical Entertainment , 30.

36. Quoted in Bowen, Theatrical Entertainment , 29, and Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 192.

37. On respectable and rowdy styles of male public behavior, especially among working-class males, see Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 20-23, 151-53.

38. Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 412-53.