1601: And, Is Shakespeare Dead?, Volume 27

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Oxford University Press, 1996 - Fiction - 178 pages
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."

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About the author (1996)

Mark Twain was born Samuel L. Clemens in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835. He worked as a printer for a time, and then became a steamboat pilot. He traveled in the West, writing humorous sketches for newspapers. In 1865, he wrote the short story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which was very well received. He then began a career as a humorous travel writer and lecturer, publishing The Innocents Abroad in 1869, Roughing It in 1872, and, co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner, Gilded Age in 1873. His best-known works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Mississippi Writing: Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910.

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