The reader’s introduction to Miles Hendon references an opera by a well-known composer in Twain’s time, Don César de Bazan:
The speaker was a sort of Don Caesar de Bazan in dress, aspect and bearing. [...] His doublet and trunks were of rich material, but faded and threadbare, and their gold lace adornments were sadly tarnished; his ruff was rumpled and damaged; [...] at his side he wore a long rapier in a dusty iron sheath; his swaggering carriage marked him at once as a ruffler of the camp.
Don César de Bazan was a comic opera written by Jules Messenet, a noted composer and leading figure in French opera in the 19th century. Twain references a character in this opera whose story parallels many of Miles’s plot points in The Prince and the Pauper, and who also shares Miles’s good nature, generosity, courage, and poverty.
The opera follows, among other characters, an impoverished Spanish nobleman named Caesar who rescues a street boy from danger at the hands of an evil army captain. Caesar duels the captain and takes the boy, Lazarille, under his wing. This mirrors Miles’s confrontations with John Canty over Edward.
Like Miles, Caesar is arrested as a result of his decision to protect his friend, though he is ultimately rescued from punishment by Lazarille. Through a convoluted series of events, Caesar ultimately befriends King Charles of Spain, is given a governorship for his good deeds, and marries the love of his life. Likewise, Miles befriends a king, is given an official post (Earl of Kent), and marries Edith.
The most important visual elements of Miles’s appearance echo the comparison to the Spanish grandee (the doublet, the lace, the ruff, the sword, all in a state of disrepair). Like Caesar, Miles is a nobleman who has fallen on hard times, whose appearance belies his status in the world. Both Caesar and Miles are loyal friends and compassionate protectors of the weak. The points of comparison between Caesar and Miles not only highlight the positive traits they share, they also foreshadow the possibility of a happy ending for Miles. For 19th century readers, the allusion to Don César de Bazan could have signaled early on that Miles’s fate will ultimately be as happy as Caesar’s.
Early on in the novel, Twain makes an allusion to a well-known medieval novel called The English Rogue. When Edward comes to among the band of thieves and outlaws John Canty is living with, they are singing a song taken directly from the novel:
By the time the last stanza was reached, the half-drunken enthusiasm had risen to such a pitch, that everybody joined in, and sang it clear through from the beginning [...]:
Bien Darkman’s then, Bouse Mort and Ken,
The bien Coves bings awast,
On Chates to trine by Rome Coves dine,
For his long lib at last.
Bing’d out bien Morts and toure, and toure,
Bine out of Rome vile bine,
And toure the Cove that cloy’d your duds,
Upon the Chates to trine.
The English Rogue was an episodic novel written in 1665 by Richard Head, an Irish novelist and playwright. The English Rogue follows a criminal named Meriton Latroon as he tries to survive in Elizabethan England on his wits, drifting from one place to another. The stories in The English Rogue are vulgar and comedic, intending to satirize English society at the time. Because of its low-born, roguish hero, realism, and episodic structure, The English Rogue is considered a picaresque novel, much like Twain’s own Huckleberry Finn.
This song is lifted in its entirety from an early chapter of The English Rogue. It is written in thieves’ cant, a kind of secret slang used by thieves to prevent outsiders or law enforcement from understanding their conversations. For this reason, it is nearly impossible to say what the song means. The cant used here is Elizabethan, which is likely why Twain adopted it unchanged from its source material. As a result, the song adds realism to the scene, but also alienates the reader in the same way Edward is alienated from the new subculture he has stumbled into.
When a local peasant invites Edward into her home, she guesses from his condition that he is a runaway apprentice who has gone insane. She feels free to assign him tasks around the house; Edward obliges at first, thinking of past kings as a model for his behavior. Twain alludes to the legend of King Alfred below:
Afterwards she kept him carding wool until he began to think he had laid the good King Alfred about far enough in the shade for the present in the matter of menial heroisms that would read picturesquely in storybooks and histories, and so he was half-minded to resign.
The peasant has kept Edward “carding” (cleaning and disentangling) wool for hours. He has worked long enough that he feels he has “laid the good King Alfred [...] in the shade.” Edward’s generosity, in his own estimation, has already surpassed his medieval predecessor’s.
King Alfred was an Anglo-Saxon monarch who reigned over Wessex, a kingdom in southwestern England, in 871 C.E. He was famous for, among other things, once stumbling into a herdsman’s hut after a particularly draining battle against the Vikings in 878.
According to legend, the disheveled and disoriented king was led inside by a housewife, who offered him food and rest. Unaware that he was the king, she asked him to watch some bread she had put on the fire while she ran an errand. King Alfred agreed, but fell asleep in front of the fire after the long battle. According to the myth, the peasant returned and scolded him, still unaware of his status.
This apocryphal story is the motivation behind Edward’s willingness to be ordered around by the peasant woman. He figures if Alfred, a great king, was willing to watch a peasant’s baking, he must be willing to help this woman with her chores in exchange for his meal. The myth of King Alfred and the cakes, though not well known in America, has long been a classic children’s story in England. With this allusion, Twain builds a greater sense of place in the novel by referencing something hyper-specific to this culture and era.
