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    Is Shakespeare Dead?
    Is Shakespeare Dead?
    Is Shakespeare Dead?
    Audiobook2 hours

    Is Shakespeare Dead?

    Written by Mark Twain

    Narrated by Richard Henzel

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    About this audiobook

    As a cub pilot, one of Mark Twain’s masters was a pilot named George Ealer, who recited Shakespeare by the hour -- from memory -- and who was a virulent opponent of the notion that the so-called Shakespeare plays and poems were in truth written by Sir Francis Bacon. At first young Sam Clemens agreed with his teacher and boss, but he soon realized that it was no fun for the pilot to argue with someone who agreed with him all of the time. And so, young Sam Clemens became quite skilled in defending this position: he said he was not a Shakespearite nor a Baconite, but that he was a "Brontosaurian": didn't know who did write them, but knew Shakespeare didn't. He explained, "It is the very way Professor Osborn and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural History Museum, and is the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton that exists on the planet. We had nine bones, and we built the rest of him out of plaster of Paris. We ran short of plaster of Paris, or we'd have built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or contained the most plaster."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBig Happy Family
    Release dateFeb 28, 2011
    ISBN9780982668870
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835, the son of a lawyer. Early in his childhood, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri – a town which would provide the inspiration for St Petersburg in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After a period spent as a travelling printer, Clemens became a river pilot on the Mississippi: a time he would look back upon as his happiest. When he turned to writing in his thirties, he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain ('Mark Twain' is the cry of a Mississippi boatman taking depth measurements, and means 'two fathoms'), and a number of highly successful publications followed, including The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee (1889). His later life, however, was marked by personal tragedy and sadness, as well as financial difficulty. In 1894, several businesses in which he had invested failed, and he was declared bankrupt. Over the next fifteen years – during which he managed to regain some measure of financial independence – he saw the deaths of two of his beloved daughters, and his wife. Increasingly bitter and depressed, Twain died in 1910, aged seventy-five.

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    • 5/5
      Pure Comedy as Twain lends his views on the Shakespeare authorship question.