The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship’s 2019 conference will take place at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, October 17-20. Mark Twain lived for 17 years in the house that now bears his name. It is where he wrote Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and The Prince and the Pauper, among other great works. Mark Twain’s importance to the Shakespeare authorship controversy cannot be questioned, as he is perhaps the most prominent writer to doubt openly that William Shakspere of Stratford was the author of the works of “William Shakespeare.”
Twain addressed the authorship question in his usual witty manner in his book Is Shakespeare Dead?, published in 1909. At the end of a chapter summarizing the conjectures, surmises, and speculations about how the Stratford man came to write such great plays and poems, Twain asks: “Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which constitute the giant Biography of William Shakespeare? It would strain the Unabridged Dictionary to hold them. He is a Brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of paris.”
The SOF conference will take place in the 175-seat auditorium in the modern Mark Twain Museum, located right next to the Mark Twain House. On the Saturday evening of our conference, our attendees and the public will be invited to Keir Cutler’s brilliant performance of Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? You can see a 2½-minute video of the facilities at the Museum here:
There is also a 6-minute video about the Mark Twain House & Museum:
Conference details, including information on hotel reservations and conference registration, will be announced by January 2019. The SOF will arrange shuttle service between the hotel and the Museum. Groups of SOF members will be treated to private tours of the Mark Twain House.
Mark your calendars now for October 17-20, 2019. We look forward to an exciting and unusual conference in Hartford. See you there!
See also Tom Regnier’s article on the Mark Twain House on the SOF website.
For more information on the Mark Twain House & Museum, visit their website.
Mark Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? is freely available online or may be purchased in paperback from Amazon.
See also Professor James Norwood’s article, “Mark Twain and ‘Shake-Speare’: Soul Mates,” published in the SOF’s Brief Chronicles, Volume 6.
[published October 22, 2018]
