Another Lost Mark Twain Playscript

While living in Vienna between autumn 1897 and spring 1899, Twain was an avid theater buff and he experimented with writing for the stage. He penned Is He Dead? and translated or planned to translate other plays, including Theodor Herzl's Das neue Ghetto, Philipp Langmann's Bartel Turaser, and Ernst Gettke and Alexander Engel's Im Gegenfeuer. Charles Frohman considered producing the latter farce but concluded it was “all jabber and no play.”1 Twain also began to collaborate with Sigmund Schlesinger on a pair of translations: Der Gegenkandidat, oder die Frauen Politiker and Die Goldgräberin. Most of these projects were abandoned, if started never completed, or if completed they have disappeared. As Thomas Schirer concludes, Twain during his career began to draft at least eleven plays, collaborated on an additional ten, and translated at least three others from German into English.2 To this list of plays may be added one more: a comedy entitled “The End of the World” that Twain began to co-author in spring 1898 with playwright Sydney Rosenfeld (1855–1931), who was vacationing in Vienna at the time. This script was apparently completed by 1901 but has since been lost.In a letter to the editor of the New York Dramatic Mirror dated April 22, 1898, Rosenfeld announced that he had “this day concluded an agreement with Mark Twain, who is residing in Vienna, whereby he and I are to work conjointly on a new comedy. He has today given me the rough draft of the play as it has emerged from his foundry. It will probably be with this play that Mr. [Benjamin] Sire3 and I will begin operations together in a business way.”4 In October 1900, upon his return from his long residence in Europe, Twain and Rosenfeld offered the comedy to the producer Daniel Frohman, who thought “any play by Mark Twain would be assured a wide hearing.” Frohman had a contract drawn “and as soon as the author of Tom Sawyer gets his effects together in comfortable quarters for his family he will begin work.”5 By early March 1901, the playwrights had apparently finished a draft and, if Frohman declined it, Twain authorized Rosenfeld to confer with other producers:6The collaborators were still tinkering with the script in June 1901, when the news broke that they were “at work on a new play which will likely have a New York presentation early next season” and which they planned to embellish with a scene based on Twain's “experience last winter” with a cabbie who tried to extort an exorbitant fare from the family maid.7 In March 1903, Sire announced plans to premiere “The End of the World” at the new Lyric Theater on Broadway in November: “Representatives of Twain and Rosenfeld are authority for the statement that the new play . . . is of a spectacular nature, the scenes being laid in a fanciful land. The staging of the piece will require a dozen principals and an army of supernumeraries.”8 But the Schuberts preempted Sire by leasing the theater first. In December 1903 Rosenfeld told an interviewer that “Mark Twain has written a play and I think we can cook up a few jokes” to add to the script.9 As late as May 1910, less than a month after Twain's death, Rosenfeld announced the “libretto” of the “humorous extravaganza” he had co-written with Twain was complete and would be produced the next season.10 He also described the setting and outlined the plot of the first act: It tells the story of a poor astronomer, who for years had been struggling to earn a living by his trade—that is to say, he had been able by laborious work to forecast eclipses of the sun and moon, calculate distances by heavenly bodies, and do those perfunctory jobs that for a mere pittance were required of astronomers to keep body and soul together. The scene is laid, of course, in an imaginary kingdom over which a beautiful and haughty queen holds sway. Wearied of the labor of struggling for a mere existence, the astronomer thinks out a scheme for becoming famous overnight.Like Hank Morgan, who foretells the imminent end of the world when a solar eclipse occurs in chapter 6 of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889),11 the hero of the play announces that the end of the world will occur on a certain not far distant day. The whole kingdom is aroused; crowds flocked to hear and see the great man, who lectures and draws big crowds who pay well. He is in the midst of this newfound glory when the queen summons him to her presence. She is struck by his comeliness, but suspicious of his sincerity. “You say,” she tells him, “the world will come to an end two months from this day. If it does we shall both die, but if the world should not come to an end and you have deceived us with needless alarm and distressed your queen, you shall be put to death all the same. So there you are.”This is the situation at the end of the first act. What happens next I must leave to your imagination, for that makes the play, which is full of Mark Twain's quaint humor and unexpected turns. The idea was an original one with him and he used it in no other way. “The End of the World” will have an added interest as the only posthumous work of this nature by the famous humorist.I wanted to produce the play years ago as my own venture, but I do better as playwright than manager. It requires two stars, a man and a woman. It will be a costume play, and while not musical throughout will have lyrics introduced.12But it never appeared. Nor does any Rosenfeld archive apparently survive.