1601

1601 is one of the strangest items in Mark Twain’s catalogue, a short pseudo Elizabethan piece that he wrote as a private joke for a friend in the late 1870s and that circulated for decades as an underground text before being acknowledged and reprinted under his name. The full title, sometimes given as Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors, is more or less the entire description. The piece imagines a conversation in the chamber of Queen Elizabeth I, attended by Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, and various ladies of the court, in which the participants speak in mock period English about subjects that nineteenth century propriety did not permit in print.

The scatological and sexual humor of the piece is not for every reader, even today, but Twain’s command of the pseudo Tudor diction is impressive, and the piece is a useful reminder of just how unbuttoned his actual sense of humor could be when he was writing for friends rather than for the lecture circuit. He produced 1601 for his friend Joseph Twichell, a Hartford minister with whom Twain shared a lot of off color jokes, and the manuscript was passed around privately for years before pirate printers finally got hold of it.

For scholars, 1601 is interesting both as a piece of literary criticism in disguise, since Twain clearly knew his Tudor and Stuart literature well enough to parody it accurately, and as a window into the gap between the public Twain his readers knew and the private Twain his friends knew. For general readers, the piece is a curiosity, short enough to read in twenty minutes, and worth knowing about as part of the wider Twain canon.

For anyone interested in nineteenth century American literary culture, in Twain’s biography, or in the long history of underground literature in America, 1601 is a representative artifact.