1601: Conversation as It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors
1901
1601: Conversation as It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors
1901
Mark Twain's most scandalous work imagines Queen Elizabeth I's court in candid conversation - and what conversation it is. In the private chambers of the Virgin Queen, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, and the Earl of Southampton dispense with dignity to discuss matters no Victorian gentleman would utter aloud: flatulence, menstruation, the mechanics of conception. The brilliance lies in the clash. These immortal figures of English literature speak in the towering, elaborate prose of the Elizabethan stage while debating topics so crude they got Twain arrested in more than one American city. Originally circulated privately in 1880 and published (barely) in 1901, 1601 remains a gleeful grenade tossed at the pomposity of high culture. Twain understood that the great minds of history were as human as the rest of us - and far funnier. This is satire that refuses to be respectable, delivered in language so dignified it makes the subject matter somehow even more obscene.
