Ireland Shakespeare forgeries

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the leading theatre manager of his day, agreed to present one of the newly discovered plays with John Philip Kemble in the starring role.

In spite of an intense search by would-be Shakespeare biographers from Nicholas Rowe to Edmond Malone, only scraps and legends turned up.

Samuel Ireland was an eager collector of antique relics—his collection included a piece of Charles II's cloak, Oliver Cromwell's leather jacket, and Joseph Addison's fruit knife[1]—as well as a Shakespeare enthusiast.

He was heavily influenced by the novel Love and Madness by Herbert Croft which contained lengthy passages on the forger Thomas Chatterton.

[5] From a chance acquaintance met at a book-binder's the young man learned of a technique for simulating the appearance of ancient writing by using a special ink and then heating the paper.

[7] Ripping a seal from another early deed, young Ireland attached it to this concoction and presented the result to his father on 16 December.

[8] Asked where he had turned up this deed, William Henry replied that he had found it in an old trunk belonging to a chance acquaintance who did not wish to have his name revealed.

[11] Having learned—apparently from a chance remark by one of his father's friends rather than by research—that Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton had been Shakespeare's patron, he decided to create correspondence between them.

[12] "Doe notte esteeme me a sluggarde nor tardye for thus havyinge delayed to answerre or rather toe thank you for youre greate Bountye," he has Shakespeare write sans punctuation.

The Earl of Southampton replies in a similar vein, also sans punctuation, and with a similar spelling: “…as I have beene thye Freynde soe will I continue aughte thatte I canne doe forre thee praye commande me ande you shalle fynde mee Yours Southampton”.

Described in the letter as a "whysycalle conceyte", it was (as Malone put it) "most truly whimsical, being a miserable drawing of our poet done by himself with a pen, from Martin Droeshout's print of him engraved seven years after his death….

[18] One hitch developed when an alert visitor noted that a document supposedly written by the Earl of Leicester was dated 1590, whereas the nobleman had died in 1588.

[19] When Samuel Ireland confronted his son with this information, William Henry wanted to burn the document, but his father demurred.

[23] As Samuel Ireland did not invite the two greatest Shakespeare scholars of the day, Edmond Malone and George Steevens, to examine the manuscripts, suspicion was aroused.

[27] As early as 26 December 1794 William Henry had announced the existence of Shakespeare's unknown play Vortigern and Rowena, but it was not until March that he was able to present his father with the manuscript.

[28] Both Richard Brinsley Sheridan of Drury Lane Theatre and Thomas Harris of Covent Garden expressed an interest in producing the play.

Shortly after the appearance of the book Samuel Ireland's neighbour, Albany Wallis, who had discovered one of the few authentic signatures of Shakespeare, came up with a new and startling discovery.

Colonel Francis Webb, writing under the name "Philalethes," argued that as the paper was old the documents must have belonged to Shakespeare's time; there would have been no reason to forge them then; therefore they must be genuine.

For the Irelands, father and son, the failure of the play, coupled with Malone's exposure of the hoax, was an unmitigated disaster.

William Henry confessed the forgery to his sisters, to his mother, and to Albany Wallis, but his father did not believe his story.

With the aid of Thomas Caldecott he attacked Malone for using forensic techniques like handwriting comparison to settle a literary question, rather than relying on taste and aesthetic sensibilities.

George Steevens accused the two of collusion:The hopeful youth takes on himself the guilt of the entire forgery, and strains hard to exculpate his worthy father from the slightest participation in it.

[42] After Samuel Ireland's death in 1800, the original forgeries, bound in three folio volumes, were sold to John "Dog" Dent, MP and bibliophile.

[43] British writer Peter Ackroyd provides an imaginative account of the Irelands' forgeries in his novel The Lambs of London published by Chatto & Windus in 2004.

[45] Images of forged signatures and notes of William Shakespeare in The courtier of Counte Baldessar Castilio Diuided into foure bookes.

[46] In the following DNB refers to Sidney Lee, "Samuel Ireland" in Dictionary of National Biography, London, 1892, volume 29, pp.