William Henry Ireland

Life
1775-1835 [William-Henry; Samuel William Henry]; b. London; son of the Shakespeare scholar Samuel Ireland (d.1800); ed. in France; forged deeds of, and relating to. Shakespeare when employed in New Inn, 1794-95, to please his father; proceeded to ‘find’ Shakespearean letters to Anne Hathaway and Queen Elizabeth; faked books with Shakespeare's marginal notes, a transcript of Lear and extracts from Hamlet; his findings published by his father in Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare (1796), deceiving scholars incl. Dr. Parr, Joseph Wharton, and George Chalmers; his son went on to forged pseudo-Shakespearean play, Vorgtigern and Rowena, selling the rights to R. B. Sheridan, the who suspected forgery from relative simplicity of plot;

the play was produced by Sheridan at Drury Lane (2 April 1796), with sceptical lines added in an epilogue by Kemble (“And when this solemn mockery is o’er”), closing to cat-calls from the knowledgeable audience; Ireland’s forgeries conclusively revealed by Edmund Malone in An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (March 1796), published but two days before; his admission of the fraud in “Authentic Account” was afterwards expanded in Confessions (1805); subsequently sold his forgeries and wrote ballads, narrative poems, and romances; his forgeries were destroyed by fire in Birmingham Library, 1879; d. in obscurity. ODNB WIKI

Wikipedia on William Henry Ireland

[...] Although Ireland claimed throughout his life that he was born in London in 1777, the Ireland family Bible puts his birth two years earlier, on 2 August 1775. His father, Samuel Ireland, was a successful publisher of travelogues, collector of antiquities and collector of Shakespearian plays and ‘relics’. There was at the time, and still is, a great scarcity of writing in the hand of Shakespeare. Of his 37 plays, there is not one copy in his own writing, not a scrap of correspondence from Shakespeare to a friend, fellow writer, patron, producer or publisher. Forgery would fill this void. [...]

See Wikipedia - online; accessed 25.08.2023.

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Works
An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manuscripts [1796]; Confessions of William Ireland (1805; rep. 1872); sundry Gothic novels.

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Reference
See Fact Index website [online].

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