Twain's essay "Is Shakespeare Dead," as well as the rest of WHAT IS MAN, can
be retrieved on the Web at
gopher://wiretap.spies.com:70/00/Library/Classic/man.mt.

Before you get so taken with Twain's delightful iconoclasm that you are led
to take Baconian claims and their modern-day Oxfordian variants seriously,
check out the Shakespeare Authorship Web Page at
http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~tross/ws/will.html for a healthy dose of common
sense and sober scholarship on the issue.

The "Authorship" controversy got so rancorous that it was banished from the
SHAKSPER listserv, so I don't want to ignite it here.  Though I am a
Statfordian I find Twain's foray into the debate a joy to read.  Twain,
unlike Carleton Ogburn and his minions, is _intentionally_ comic.

The FRONTLINE program did a great disservice by giving the impression that
the Anti-Stratfordian theories had more credibility than they really do.
 This was accomplished in part by presenting the issue as if it were a
debate
between Ogburn on the one hand and A.L. Rowse on the other.  A certain
visual
drama was achieved by flashing from one old crank to the other but what was
lost was the true imbalance between Ogburn's handful of strident paranoid
conspiracy theorists and the overwhelming weight of a century of literary
scholarship.  I worked, briefly, in television "journalism" and know how
tempting it is to forgo boring accuracy for the sake of televisual drama.
 Even as high-quality a program as FRONTLINE sometimes falls prey to the
pull
of television's demand for over-simplified conflict.

Tom Dale Keever