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