Customer Reviews

Is Shakespeare Dead?

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Twain critiques spectacularly--as usual, in this piece. I found it to be incredibly interesting and convincing, as Twain believes Shakespeare did not, in fact, write those plays and poems.

I would also recommend, by Twain: "1601", "In Defense of Harriet Shelley", and
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"

This is a book worth owning but make sure you purchase it from a different publishing house. Kessinger Publishing will sell you a hardcover book for $24 that is so badly made that you can see the glue holding the binding together on page one. I expect a better quality from a hardcover than i would in a paperback and yet this hardcover is so cheaply made that the average paperback would put it to shame.

Now for the material itself. This is not Twain's wittiest of works nor even his best written, but I relish every line of it nonetheless as he builds a case advancing the notion that just perhaps the works of Shakespeare are not written by Shakespeare at all. Pen name? Sure, especially if you suspect the real author to be by Bacon instead but Twain goes about piecing together the sparse information concerning the great bard and the inconsistencies of what is known sniffing out what can only be a conspiracy to rival that of 9/11. But this is not the beauty of this work because after all what difference does it make who wrote the great works, shakespeare will always continue to be 'shakespeare', what Twain seems to be exploring is the ability for one to address what is known to be a 'fact', accepted truth or Holy Cow. Or as he wrote "I am aware that when even the brightest of mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never b e possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast doubt upon the validity of that superstition." All notions he suggests we get second-hand "we reason none of them out for ourselves".