10472-542). Extensive bibliographies are given in Lowndes’s ‘Library Manual’ (ed. Bohn); in Franz Thimm’s ‘Shakespeariana’ (1864 and 1871); in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ 9th edit. (skilfully classified by Mr. H. R. Tedder); and in the ‘British Museum Catalogue’ (the Shakespearean entries in which, comprising 3,680 titles, were separately published in 1897).
Critical studies.
The valuable publications of the Shakespeare Society, the New Shakspere Society, and of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, comprising contributions alike to the æsthetic, textual, historical, and biographical study of Shakespeare, are noticed above (see pp. 333-4, 346). To the critical studies, on which comment has already been made (see p. 333)—viz. Coleridge’s ‘Notes and Lectures,’ 1883, Hazlitt’s ‘Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays,’ 1817, Professor Dowden’s ‘Shakspere: his Mind and Art,’ 1875, and Mr. A. C. Swinburne’s ‘A Study of Shakespeare,’ 1879—there may be added the essays on Shakespeare’s heroines respectively by Mrs. Jameson in 1833 and Lady Martin in 1885; Dr. Ward’s ‘English Dramatic Literature’ (1875, new edit. 1898); Richard G. Moulton’s ‘Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist’ (1885); ‘Shakespeare Studies’ by Thomas Spencer Baynes (1893); F. S. Boas’s ‘Shakspere and his Predecessors’, (1895), and Georg Brandes’s ‘William Shakespeare’—an elaborately critical but somewhat fanciful study—in Danish (Copenhagen, 1895, 8vo), in German (Leipzig, 1895), and in English (London, 1898, 2 vols. 8vo).
Shakespearean forgeries.
The intense interest which Shakespeare’s life and work have long universally excited has tempted unprincipled or sportively mischievous writers from time to time to deceive the public by the forgery of documents purporting to supply new information. The forgers were especially active at the end of last century and during the middle years of the present century, and their frauds have caused students so much perplexity that it may be useful to warn them against those Shakespearean forgeries which have obtained the widest currency.
John Jordan, 1746-1809.
The earliest forger to obtain notoriety was John Jordan
(1746-1809), a resident at Stratford-on-Avon, whose most important achievement was the forgery of the will of Shakespeare’s father; but many other papers in Jordan’s ‘Original Collections on Shakespeare and Stratford-on-Avon’ (1780), and ‘Original Memoirs and Historical Accounts of the Families of Shakespeare and Hart,’ are open to the gravest suspicion. [366a]
The Ireland forgeries, 1796.
The best known Shakespearean forger of the eighteenth century was William Henry Ireland (1777-1835), a barrister’s clerk, who, with the aid of his father, Samuel Ireland (1740?-1800), an author and engraver of some repute, produced in 1796 a volume of forged papers claiming to relate to Shakespeare’s career. The title ran: ‘Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare, including the tragedy of “King Lear” and a small fragment of “Hamlet” from the original MSS. in the possession of Samuel Ireland.’ On April 2, 1796 Sheridan and Kemble produced at Drury Lane Theatre a bombastic tragedy in blank verse entitled ‘Vortigern’ under the pretence that it was by Shakespeare, and had been recently found among the manuscripts of the dramatist that had fallen into the hands of the Irelands. The piece, which was published, was the invention of young Ireland. The fraud of the Irelands, which for some time deceived a section of the literary public, was finally exposed by Malone in his valuable ‘Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Ireland MSS.’ (1796). Young Ireland afterwards published his ‘Confessions’ (1805). He had acquired much skill in copying Shakespeare’s genuine signature from the facsimile in Steevens’s edition of Shakespeare’s works of the mortgage-deed of the Blackfriars house of 1612-13, [366b] and, besides conforming to that style of handwriting in his forged deeds and literary compositions, he inserted copies of the signature on the title-pages of many sixteenth-century books, and often added notes in the same feigned hand on their margins. Numerous sixteenth-century volumes embellished by Ireland in this manner are extant, and his forged signatures and marginalia have been frequently mistaken for genuine autographs of Shakespeare.