What’s in a pen name, like Sam Clemens’s “Mark Twain”? Literary criticism should assume that a pseudonym is an alternate personality unless proven otherwise.

Importance of Names and Naming in

Shakespeare, Bible, Multiple Personality

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet…”

But in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,

names are a matter of life and death.

In The Bible, naming was how God created everything:

God said, “Let there be [name]”; and there was [name].

In a person with multiple personality, the names of alternate personalities are pseudonyms.

Samuel Clemens & Mark Twain

“Mark Twain & Samuel Clemens” is a chapter (pp. 87-99) in Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms (New York, Harper Perennial, 2011):

“How the protean Samuel Clemens became the world’s most famous literary alias will never be known for sure…Clemens liked to explain that his appellation had been swiped from…a well-known steamboat man…There are other stories and legends as to how “Twain” came to be…Some have ascribed to Clemens a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature; some have remarked on pseudonymity as a conventional choice for Victorian humorists…

“Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835…‘Mark Twain’ made his debut on February 3, 1863, launched in an Enterprise column with the line, ‘I feel very much as if I had just awakened out of a long sleep.’ It was signed, ‘Yours, dreamily, Mark Twain’…

“At one point he even joked that an ‘independent Double’ was going around causing the kind of mischief that Sam Clemens wouldn’t dream of attempting…”

On his deathbed, April 21, 1910, “Not long before drifting off to sleep for the last time, he mumbled something about ‘dual personalities.’ ”