1601/Is Shakespeare Dead?

by Mark Twain, Erica Young (Introduction), Leslie A. Fiedler (Afterword)

1601, or Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the time of the Tudors is a hilarious ribald send-up of Elizabethan England in which Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, and other luminaries of the period are pictured sitting about the fireplace amusing one
another with risqué tales. During a visit to West Point in 1881, Twain met Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood, adjutant to the commanding general. As Leslie Fiedler notes in his afterword, "he discovered not only that Wood, like him, was a freethinker, but that he had at his disposal a
well-equipped printing plant." He asked Wood to publish the piece, and it is the West Point edition--complete with the Old English-style type Wood selected--that is printed here.
If "in 1601 Twain both parodied and paid homage to Shakespeare's liberating bawdry," Erica Jong observes in her introduction, in "Is Shakespeare Dead? he tried to come to terms with his conflicting responses to Shakespeare as mentor and muse." Jong suggests that Twain's real concern in this book
may well be his own "place in literary history."

Genres: Literature

256 pages, Hardcover

Published December 5, 1996

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Reviews

[Joseph Downey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mark Twain wrote porn? Yep: 1601. Mostly just dirty jokes while poking fun at the British. I enjoyed the challenge of translating the medieval spelling and typography. This edition is basically a copy of the first editions.

Is Shakespeare Dead? was a bit of a trial. Technically, it's literary criticism—or criticism of literary criticism. The humor strays a bit on the irrascible side for me. And while I don't think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, I'm not in the Bacon Camp. I lean more toward the 17th Earl of Oxford.

While not my favorite, it had its good moments. And while a bit of a rant, it manages to have a lot of auto-biographical info, and some funny bits.

[Rebecca Wilkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

These are 2 seldom published (and I can see why) works from Mark Twain. 1601 is done in old style print and wording. It is very hard to read. It is supposedly pornographic but more juvenile about farts than sex. The Shakespeare part is a good argument that he didn't write all that is listed under his name. It also is apparently Twain worrying about his own legacy. This book is going straight to Used Book Store. Not worth the effort. There is a reason Twain's more well known work is read by more people, it is so much better than this.

[Ronn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Far from the most essential Twain. '1601' is a brief attempt at Elizabethan-era pornography. 'Is Shakespeare Dead?' is a treatise on how Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare's plays. This edition has facsimiles of both original publications, but that adds only a little interest. For Twain completists only.

[Crystal Ellyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was okay.