Men who faked the Bard's tales

An exhibition in the US presents the tale of two Shakespeare imitators who grew so infamous that their fabrications became valuable in their own right


Plagiarists, reporters who cook up sources, academics who conveniently forget to footnote — all of them might take inspiration from the case of William Henry Ireland, a youthful forger of Shakespearean documents who became so infamous at the end of the 18th century that his fabrications were soon valuable in their own right. Literary malfeasance, over time, becomes just another fact of literary history, and master deceivers present as interesting a study in psychology as many a legitimate literary figure.

Ireland's work, along with 19th-century fakes by the troubled English scholar John Payne Collier and a small orgy of other guilty pleasures — paintings that have been retouched and books that have been added to, emended or "repaired,'' — form the core of the Folger Shakespeare Library's delightful exhibition Fakes, Forgeries and Facsimiles. As much as any play by Shakespeare, it is filled with small studies in cupidity, stupidity and self-deception.

Like plagiarists, forgers may start small, but in the end they cannot do it by halves.

Master forgers don't just produce the stray love letter or autograph. Some are forced deeper and deeper into the swamps of deception by the bloodhounds of skeptical scholarship. Others enjoy the creation of a self-justifying paper trail, like some dark shadow of the pleasures of true scholarship.

Ireland was a faker of the first sort. His father, like many educated men of the day, had a powerful fetish for the Bard and wanted nothing so much as a little bit of authentic Shakespeareana to add to his collection. So 17-year-old William obliged, claiming to have discovered a cache of original Shakespearean material, including a manuscript letter from Elizabeth I to the playwright thanking him for his "pretty verses''. In fact, he was ginning them up himself.

Dad was ecstatic, so William kept on "finding'' more and more material, claiming that it was emerging from the collection of a mysterious gentleman, Mr H., who preferred to remain anonymous. But this lie created the need for another one, because it wasn't entirely clear why this unnamed individual was just handing over perhaps the most important Shakespearean material to emerge since the poet's last will and testament. There were also possible claims on the material from potential Shakespeare descendants.

So he cooked up a deed, recording Shakespeare's gift of the papers to his friend "Masterre William Henrye Irelande,'' ancient patriarch of the Ireland clan.

There were skeptics about all of this, and their numbers swelled when young William produced an entirely new, lost play by Shakespeare called Vortigern, an atrocious hodgepodge of faux Shakespearean dialect masquerading as a history play. By the time it was performed (it closed after one horrible night, April 2, 1796), the game was almost up. An influential Shakespeare scholar, Edmond Malone, had published an attack on the authenticity of Ireland's material, and the audience at the premiere of Vortigern was dubious.

"People were throwing oranges,'' says Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts, who along with Rachel Doggett, curator of books, and Erin Blake, curator of art, has put together one of the most entertaining exhibits at the Folger in recent years.

William finally confessed that it was all a farce, but his father had so much invested in the material's authenticity that he responded to his son's confession with a pamphlet defending the authenticity of the material.

If the Ireland affair feels a bit like a schoolboy's lark, the case of John Payne Collier is darker and more troubling. Collier was a respected literary scholar and historian, but with a bad habit of inserting his own material into books like The History of English Dramatic Poetry, which he published in 1831.

In 1852 he claimed to have discovered a Second Folio (a large-format volume of collected works) of Shakespeare's plays, loaded with 17th-century corrections and emendations. These were attributed to "the Old Corrector,'' a figure as fictional as Ireland's Mr. H.

The full extent of Collier's literary chicanery — which included tampering with and adding to historical documents — is still not known. He lived into his nineties, and some of the most fascinating material is from his later life, when he hinted at but never confessed to his misdeeds.

"My repentance is bitter and sincere,'' reads his journal, the words scrawled in an old man's palsied script. His later years seem to have been spent in a karmic Shakespearean torment, raving (like Lear) about unconfessable guilt (like Macbeth). His motto might have been Iago's creepy one-liner: "I am not what I am.''

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