The Duke and King Rehearse Shakespeare
Chapter 21 opens aboard the raft, where the king and the duke throw themselves into rehearsing scenes from Shakespeare. The duke coaches the king on how to play Juliet in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, scolding him for bellowing the lines like a bull rather than delivering them softly and lovingly. They also practice a swordfight for Richard III, prancing around the raft with oak-lath swords until the king trips and tumbles overboard. To round out their act, the duke decides the king should recite Hamlet's soliloquy. Unable to find the text, the duke pieces together a wildly garbled version from memory—a comic mashup of lines from Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard III—that Huck finds beautiful, even though every line is hilariously wrong.
A Shabby Arkansas Town
The group floats into Arkansas and ties up near a rundown one-horse town where a circus is expected that afternoon. While the duke rents the courthouse and posts playbills advertising their fraudulent "Shaksperean Revival," Huck explores the town and delivers one of the novel's most vivid pieces of social realism. He describes crumbling houses raised on stilts above the floodplain, gardens choked with jimson weeds and trash, mud-clogged streets roamed by hogs, and a main street lined with idle loafers who whittle, chew tobacco, and amuse themselves by setting dogs on stray sows. Through Huck's matter-of-fact narration, Twain paints a devastating portrait of poverty, apathy, and casual cruelty in the antebellum South.
Boggs and Colonel Sherburn
The town's languid mood is broken by the arrival of Boggs, a harmless old drunk who rides in monthly to bluster and threaten people. Today his target is Colonel Sherburn, the best-dressed and proudest man in town. Sherburn steps out of his store and calmly warns Boggs that he will tolerate the abuse only until one o'clock. Despite the crowd's attempts to quiet him and send for his daughter, Boggs keeps raging. When the deadline passes, Sherburn appears in the street with a pistol and shoots Boggs dead in front of the entire town—including Boggs's sixteen-year-old daughter, who throws herself on her dying father in anguish.
The Aftermath and the Call for a Lynching
The townspeople carry Boggs into a drugstore, where Huck watches through the window as the old man dies with a Bible on his chest. Outside, the crowd buzzes with morbid excitement: a lanky man with a stovepipe hat reenacts the shooting step by step, earning free drinks for his performance. The spectacle of violence has become entertainment. Then someone cries that Sherburn ought to be lynched, and in moments the entire mob surges toward his house, tearing down clotheslines for rope. The chapter ends on this ominous note, setting up the confrontation between Sherburn and the mob that follows in Chapter 22. Twain uses the Boggs-Sherburn episode to expose the moral cowardice and herd mentality lurking beneath small-town life.