The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly - Hardcover

Stewart, Doug

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0306818310 ISBN 13: 9780306818318

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2010

Synopsis

In the winter of 1795, a frustrated young writer named William Henry Ireland stood petrified in his father's study as two of England's most esteemed scholars interrogated him about a tattered piece of paper that he claimed to have found in an old trunk. It was a note from William Shakespeare. Or was it?
In the months that followed, Ireland produced a torrent of Shakespearean fabrications: letters, poetry, drawings—even an original full-length play that would be hailed as the Bard's lost masterpiece and staged at the Drury Lane Theatre. The documents were forensically implausible, but the people who inspected them ached to see first hand what had flowed from Shakespeare's quill. And so they did.
This dramatic and improbable story of Shakespeare's teenaged double takes us to eighteenth century London and brings us face-to-face with history's most audacious forger.

About this title

About the Author

Doug Stewart, a freelance journalist, frequently writes about history and the arts for Smithsonian magazine. His articles have also appeared in Time and Discover. He lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts. For more information, visit fakeshakespeare.com.

From the Back Cover

"Worn at the edges and heavily creased, the paper was inscribed with florid handwriting in faded ink. Dated two centuries earlier, the document was an avowal of religious faith. On it, the writer declared himself 'most solemnly' a Protestant. At the bottom was a signature with embellished capitals: 'Wm Shakspeare.'

"It was an astonishing discovery. William Shakespeare, who had died in relative obscurity in 1616, had lately risen in popular esteem to become England's matchless literary genius. Will of Stratford was now a secular god: the immortal Bard! Yet aside from a few signatures, nothing written in Shakespeare's hand--not a letter, not so much as a couplet--had ever been found. If the yellowed note William-Henry Ireland had discovered was genuine, it was the literary equivalent of the Crown Jewels."

"A fascinating tale of forgery, greed, and deception. It's the Catch Me If You Can of eighteenth-century London--gripping, fast-moving, and funny."--Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of Vanished and Paranoia

"Doug Stewart has proved himself a chronicler of great stories, but he outdoes himself with this story of a forger in search of a father's love that reads like a Shakespeare plot in its own right."--Gail Kern Paster, Director, Folger Shakespeare Library

"Doug Stewart shows how popular history writing is done. His superbly written account of boy forger William-Henry Ireland's ill-fated stab at literary immortality is as entertaining and poignant as a good novel."--Clifford Irving, author of The Hoax and The Autobiography of Howard Hughes

From the Inside Flap

"An unforgettable story, beautifully told. The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare conjures the peculiar world of late 18th-century London, where Shakespeare was a god. Stewart's wry, lively narrative brings out the comic absurdity of events without losing their strange undercurrent of sadness."

--Jon Spence, author Becoming Jane Austen

Reviews

William Henry Ireland was an unassuming law clerk in Georgian England when he seemingly stumbled on the greatest literary find of his generation-a chest of documents in the home of an unnamed patron, full of Shakespeare's receipts, private letters, and a draft of an unpublished play. This find brought fame and notoriety to Ireland and his father, Samuel, a collector with a low opinion of his son. Soon, however, that fame turned to ignominy when it is was revealed that Ireland's Shakespearean trove was entirely fabricated; perhaps even more tragic was Samuel's unwillingness to believe his son had the talent to execute the forgery. Stewart's exhaustively researched examination of the Irelands' rise and fall is as entertaining as it is informative; modern readers, accustomed to Shakespeare's place of reverence, will be surprised to learn how ignorant Georgian England was of his work. Where Stewart's research truly shines is in accessing Ireland's human motivations-his desire for approval and artistic legitimacy, not profit, distinguishes him from other cons, making him neither wholly despicable nor pitiable. History and literary enthusiasts will be delighted with this smart investigation into a high-minded hoax.
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William-Henry Ireland (1775–1835) earned his footnote in literary history in the 1790s, crafting a series of forged letters, documents, and manuscripts all by or about William Shakespeare. He and his antiquarian father, Samuel, claimed they were the real thing. Stewart’s fascinating history recounts William-Henry’s short, frantic rise and fall, his brush with fame, and his subsequent lifelong infamy. He places William-Henry’s remarkable achievement, which for a time fooled many of England’s literary and other notables, including James Boswell, in the context of eighteenth-century England, a time when literacy was rising, the gossip-filled newspaper business booming, and the country was hungry for any artifact connected to the Bard. But Stewart’s real achievement lies in how grippingly he tells William-Henry’s story, so that it climaxes in a disastrous premier of William-Henry’s faked “lost” Shakespeare play Vortigern and Rowena at London’s famed Drury Lane Theatre in 1796 as well as in how much, by the end of the book, he has got us to care about the young, hapless fraud. --Jack Helbig

Edition details

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0306818310
• ISBN 13: 9780306818318
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 229