BOOK BELONGING TO THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN, OF WHOSE
COMPANY SHAKESPEARE WAS A MEMBER
However, there was one doubting Thomas, who refused to believe, almost from the beginning of the “discoveries,” that there was an iota of truth concerning their origin. His name was Edmund Malone. He was the one literary critic who did not make a fool of himself at any time during a controversy which later developed to a furious pitch, and resulted in a full published confession from Ireland.
Young Ireland’s final burst of inspiration led him to write a pretended play of Shakespeare, entitled Vortigern and Rowena. This was the straw which eventually broke the camel’s back, but not until Sheridan had produced it, with two of the foremost players of the day, John Philip Kemble and Mrs. Jordan, appearing in the leading rôles.
Ireland appealed to me, not because he was a forger but because of a certain further cleverness. When he was discovered and his misdeeds revealed to a curious world, there suddenly sprang up a great demand to behold the handiwork of this delectable young villain. People in England, and collectors and curio seekers everywhere, wanted to own specimens of his fraudulent but interesting papers. They were so much in demand that he was kept busy from morning to night making forgeries of his own forgeries.
The sudden demand was not for Shakespeare’s own letter to Anne Hathaway but for Ireland’s original imaginary manuscript. What, then, could the poor fellow do? He just had to sit himself down and ply his trade as long as his supply of old paper and precious ink held out.
It was these humorous and at the same time dramatic facts which touched my imagination as a collector. I wanted Ireland’s original forgeries, not his double and triple fabrications. I naturally wanted the original manuscript of Vortigern, the one the lovely Mrs. Jordan had reverently held in her adoring—and adorable—hands. I thought I knew where they were—in the collection of the Marquis of Blandford, to whom they were sold many years ago. Imagine my surprise when I purchased the library of Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, to discover in his world-famed collection the actual forgeries not only of Vortigern but of King Lear and Hamlet as well. Here were the original documents which had deceived some of the choicest minds in England. Looking further, I also found the first draft of Ireland’s confession. I have the actual drafts with which Richard Brinsley Sheridan was so delighted; the very pages from which Kemble studied the part of Vortigern, and before which Boswell knelt, “a tumbler of warm brandy and water” at his side.
Ireland was not the first spectacular forger of tender years. In his confession he speaks of having been influenced by reading of Thomas Chatterton’s career. Chatterton was an English youth who kept the literary world titillating twenty-five years earlier. It is a strange thing, this psychologic kink which sometimes forms in the brains of very young men. Why they should risk bringing the world about their ears through impersonating the famous dead, when they have brains and originality of their own, no one knows.
Poor Chatterton! His is the only great genius which has come to light through the art of forgery. He began writing when he was sixteen, and almost from the beginning produced some of the finest poetry in the history of eighteenth-century literature. Perhaps he was unhappily shy, as boys often are at that age; or he may have suffered from some gloomy mental obsession. His manner of screening his identity when these remarkable poems first appeared has caused many a student to pause and wonder.
Chatterton’s first writings appeared with an accompanying explanation. He said his father had found them years before in an ancient chest belonging to the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol. The verses were supposed to have been composed by Thomas Rowley, a monk who had lived in that neighborhood during the fifteenth century. Chatterton, according to his story, had merely copied them. At first, this story was accepted, while critics praised the undeniable beauty of the lines. Then some contemporary littérateur called attention to the incorrect usage of Anglo-Saxon words of Rowley’s day, and suspicion hovered over Chatterton. It was soon charged that Chatterton had written the poems of Rowley, using a certain dictionary from which he chose Anglo-Saxon words in order to create the atmosphere and flavor of antiquity.