Shakespeare Reads about a Jesuit Plot to Kill the King!
“Bardolatry,” as we know it today, grew out of an eighteenth-century impulse to trace a distinctly English vernacular cultural heritage, dating at least as far back as the Renaissance, with Shakespeare crowned its king. Aficionados of Shakespeare were, at the same time, frustrated by the relative dearth of historical evidence that might fill in the picture of their literary icon and assuage lingering doubts some had about the playwright’s personal morality. A small host of forgers entered the breach, among them the young William Henry Ireland, whose father Samuel was as fanatical as he was credulous a collector of anything remotely connected to the Bard. In a bid to please and win his father’s affection, the still teenaged and romantic son revealed to Samuel that he had “discovered” a deed signed by Shakespeare himself in the collection of a shadowy “Mr. H.”
The deed, of course, was actually penned by young William himself, which only emboldened him to continue producing more eureka moments for the “archives.” He obtained old books and documents from shops and the conveyancer’s office in which he worked and turned them into a revelatory gold mine of materials that univocally resuscitated Shakespeare’s mixed reputation as an impious libertine and unlettered artificer regardless of his literary talents. The same playwright who had spent much of his life in London far from his family home, and whose will revealed that he bequeathed to his wife Anne Hathaway only his “second best” bed, was suddenly transformed into a dutiful husband by a love letter to her containing amorous verses and even a lock of his hair. A manuscript “profession of faith” (an incomplete copy of which is also in the Bibliotheca Fictiva) ostensibly written by the playwright’s father, John Shakespeare, laid out sterling Anglican credentials for the Shakespeare family. It is as eccentric as it is unconvincing, for it implores God, through the device of a most un-Shakespearean metaphor, to “take us all to thy breast, O cherish us like the sweet chicken that under the cover of her spreading wings receives her little brood.” A chatty letter between Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth all but “proved” him to be on intimate terms of friendship with the good and the great.
Ireland’s exploits grew ever more ambitious, culminating in his “discovery” of a complete, hitherto unknown, five-act history play by Shakespeare dramatizing the exploits of Vortigern, the fifth-century warlord of Britain. The Bibliotheca Fictiva holds two inscribed presentation copies of the Irelands’ 1799 edition of the play—one with a tipped-in letter by William Henry Ireland commenting on the qualities of what was, in fact, his own work, the other inscribed by his father. Even more rare in the collection at JHU is an ephemeral broadside playbill advertising the first and only performance of Vortigern on the London stage at Drury Lane in 1796, originally scheduled for performance on April Fool’s Day. Ever the pragmatic fantasist, Ireland elected to invent a deed of gift “proving” that Shakespeare himself had bequeathed his long-lost personal papers to a contemporary, eponymous William Henry Ireland who had once saved him from drowning! Thus did the latter-day William attempt to explain his unique access to this stupendous archival trove while also securing copyright over Shakespeare’s literary estate.
Among the most preposterous of William Henry Ireland’s inventions was a fragmentary manuscript “catalogue” of Shakespeare’s personal library, now held in the Charles K. Ogden Collection at University College London (MS Ogden 54). Among the titles listed there is the Bibliotheca Fictiva’s 1610 copy of John Camilton’s anti-Catholic pamphlet about a supposed Jesuit plot against King James I. This Ireland would almost certainly have acquired from one of several London antiquarian bookstores he frequented and from which he also acquired nonce collections of bound-together pamphlets. These he disassembled and rebound in green goatskin, adding to their title pages either William Shakespeare’s initials or approximations of his signature. In some cases, the young forger simply could not resist increasing particular value to his discoveries where he could, such as in the JHU Camilton volume, which is filled with numerous manuscript marginalia in mock-secretary hand, some pretending cryptic though conventional anti-Catholic outrage.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Full Citation
Bibliography
Arthur Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts relating to Literary Forgery, 44 BC–AD 2000 (Quaritch, 2014), 43–46, nos. 491, 495–97; Jeffrey Kahan, “Shakespeare Papers: The Master Plan,” in Reforging Shakespeare: The Story of a Theatrical Scandal (Lehigh University Press, 1998), 41–70; Jack Lynch, “England’s Ireland, Ireland’s England: William Henry Ireland’s National Offense,” in Walter Stephens and Earle Havens (eds.), Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 255–73; Paul Baines, “William Henry Ireland (1775–1835),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online database; Heather Wolfe and Arnold Hunt, “Shakespeare’s Personal Library, as Curated by William Henry Ireland,” The Collation, online blog, Folger Shakespeare Library, June 17, 2013.
