Hank Morgan, the hero of Mark Twain's A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court, is a nineteenth-century
master mechanic who mysteriously awakening in
sixth-century Britain, launches what he hopes will be a
peaceful revolution to transform Arthurian Britain into an
industrialized modern democracy. The novel, written as a
spoof of Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, a popular
collection of fifteenth-century legends about
sixth-century Britain, has been made into three upbeat
movies and two musical comedies. None of these
translations to screen and stage, however, dramatize the
anarchy at the conclusion of A Connecticut Yankee, which
ends with the violent overthrow of Morgan's
three-year-old progressive order and his return to the
nineteenth century, where he apparently commits suicide
after being labeled a lunatic for his incoherent babblings
about drawbridges and battlements. The American public,
although enjoying Twain's humor, evidently rejected his
cynicism about technological advancement and change
through peaceful revolution as antithetical to the United
States doctrine of progress.