MIKEY ROBINS Reprehensible: extract

We’re delighted to bring you a tale of literary forgery and deception in eighteenth-century London in this extract from Mikey Robins’s latest book Reprehensible, an entertaining compendium of disreputable deeds from around the world and down the ages.

There’s the pharaoh who covered his slaves with honey in order to keep the flies off his meals, the ninth-century pope so consumed by revenge he had his predecessor dug up and his corpse put on trial, and stories of vanity, hot-headedness, duelling and unscrupulous scheming. There are con men and scoundrels – including the man who sold the Brooklyn Bridge (he really existed) – and a remarkable piece of literary hoaxing.

In the extract below, a put-upon son attempts to impress his cold-hearted father via a deception of, one might say, Shakespearean proportions …

Extract courtesy of Simon & Schuster 

Daddy Dearest

It is a curious fact that one of the greatest (and yet largely for­gotten) literary scandals in the English-speaking world had its origin with an insecure young man attempting to find favour with a distant, bombastic father. The father was Samuel Ireland, an engraver with aspirations to be a writer. His son went by the name of William-Henry, and he too had hopes for a creative life, as an actor or perhaps a playwright. However, by his nineteenth birthday, in 1795, he was working a rather mundane job as what we would probably consider an assistant to a law clerk’s assistant, in the offices of a friend of his father.

Poor William-Henry had once been described by a teacher as being ‘so stupid as to be a disgrace to his school’ – an insult his father frequently liked to repeat, not only to his poor son, but also to the many guests that came to their home. Samuel would entertain these guests by sharing his greatest passion, his collection of historical curios – a passion he never shared with other members of his family, to whom he paid scant attention. There were a few paintings by Hogarth and van Dyck; some rare, antiquated manuscripts and books; as well as a rag that he claimed was an actual segment from a mummy’s shroud.

Then there was his most cherished item: a goblet that he insisted was made out of the famed mulberry tree that Shakespeare had planted in his home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Samuel was obsessed with the Bard, and as William-Henry would later recall, ‘My father would declare that to possess a single vestige of the poet’s handwriting would be esteemed a gem beyond all price.’

And that’s how the whole damn mess got started.

In late 1794 William-Henry came across one of his father’s books that contained a reproduction of Shakespeare’s signature. He spirited the book away from his father’s study to his office and, considering that his job was pretty much unsupervised busy work, he spent hours diligently tracing the signature until he figured that he could reproduce it with his eyes closed. His workplace also had the advantage of being filled with old documents that stretched back years.

So William-Henry forged – quite literally – a plan.

He cut out a blank piece of an old rent agreement, wrote up a deed and then signed Shakespeare’s name. He then aged the parchment by holding it near a candle flame, exactly like a certain Year 7 student at Newcastle High would do over 170 years later to recreate a page from Captain Cook’s journal. (Yes, I got an A- for it, thanks for asking.) He then attached a wax seal, appro­priated from another document lying around his workplace, and took his dubious creation home.

Later that evening, William-Henry presented it to his father, but rather than unbridled joy the cranky old bugger cast a less than enthusiastic glance over the forgery and said, ‘I can certainly believe it to be a genuine document of the time.’ It was almost as if Samuel could not bring himself to believe that anything this astounding could have provenance with his underachieving son. He was willingly admitting to its age but not yet ready to concede to its authenticity.

In hindsight, he probably should have gone with his gut instinct.

But the next morning he showed it to a family friend, Sir Frederick Eden. Now Sir Fred was a bit of a buff on old manuscripts, and seals in particular. And it was the seal that William-Henry had grabbed at random that was the clincher in Eden’s estimation.

Eden explained that the seal contained a representation of a ‘quintain’ – a piece of medieval training equipment that jousters would level their lance at for target practice. Sir Fred then explained to Samuel that this was obviously a reference to something a knight would ‘shake a spear’ at. Therefore, it was a cryptic clue to the seal having been that of Shakespeare’s, ergo, the document was genuine. (Seriously!)

Samuel was overjoyed and soon his study was crowded with his fellow collectors, all astounded by this miraculous find that William-Henry had stumbled across. They implored the young man to explain where he had come by such a treasure and, like most scam artists, William-Henry already had a vaguely plausi­ble backstory ready to go: he had discovered it in an old trunk belonging to a wealthy and deeply private gentleman who only wanted to be known as Mr H.

Surely this would satisfy Samuel and his cronies, he thought. His father would be happy, proud that his now marginally less stupid son had procured this amazing relic, and everyone could move on with their lives.

It had the opposite result, whetting his father’s appetite for further discoveries. Samuel theorised that where there was one Shakespeare document there must be others, and his son should go back and search for more.

William-Henry would later recall, ‘I was sometimes suppli­cated; at others, commanded to resume my search among my friend’s supposed papers, and not unfrequently taunted as being an absolute idiot for suffering such a brilliant opportunity to escape me.’

Samuel was never going to win a Father of the Year trophy.

So to oblige his demanding dad, and with the resources avail­able to him at his place of employment, he did just that. Over the next few months, he forged letters both to and from Shakespeare, along with some contracts with actors. Emboldened by the recep­tion these fakes received, he even went as far as to construct a love poem from Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway, complete with a lock of hair.

You would think that William-Henry might be tempted to stop while he was ahead and simply say that the fictitious trunk was now empty of any Shakespeare-related ‘merchandise’.

You’d think that, but . . .

William-Henry then turned to printed texts of some well-known plays and got back to forging, altering a passage here or a phrase there, to produce what he declared to be early, long-lost versions of Shakespeare’s work. In short time, in his own ‘Shakespearean’ handwriting, he turned out an entire first draft of King Lear, which he followed up with a section of an early draft of Hamlet. Both forgeries featured ridiculous attempts at Elizabethan phrases and spellings, replete with way too many nouns ending in the letter ‘e’. (For those of you old enough to remember, this was also a common occurrence in the 1970s when many a cafe stopped being a cafe and became a ‘Coffee Shoppe’.)

Samuel was over the moon with these pages that, in his mind, showed an insight into Shakespeare’s writing process, and soon his drawing room was overflowing with Shakespeare and antiquity enthusiasts, to whom he would proudly show off his latest discoveries. This was a bit of a double-edged sword for the Irelands. Increased attention also meant increased scrutiny, and not every visitor to the house was as willing to believe in these writings with the same fervour, or dare I say vain gullibility, as Samuel Ireland.

William-Henry was by now getting desperately nervous – surely it was time to bring the whole misjudged endeavour to a halt?

That would be one option . . .

Or you could do as William-Henry did and inform your father that you had actually discovered remnants of a hitherto unknown play by Shakespeare! Surely this must be the Holy Grail for any Bard ‘scholar’.

William-Henry would later say, ‘With my usual impetuosity, I made known to Mr Ireland the discovery of such a piece before a single line was really executed.’ So he was forced to drip-feed his father a scene or two at a time from what would be titled, upon completion, the lost Shakespeare classic Vortigern and Rowena.

A tale set in the fifth century about a warrior king and his beloved young woman, William-Henry lifted most of his material from Holinshed’s Chronicles (a source of old stories that Shakespeare had relied on) with some slightly altered extra plots and characters from a range of Shakespeare’s tragic and historical works.

Seeing as he could not initially find enough old blank manuscript pages to construct this forgery, William-Henry wrote his opus, which was actually longer than the average work of Shakespeare, on contemporary paper. This would satisfy his father’s impatience to receive the play. He told the old duffer that it was a transcript done in his own hand, and this ploy actually worked, giving him the time he needed to scrounge up enough aged paper to fully present Vortigern and Rowena in all its forged glory.

Oh, and just to put the cherry on the cake, William-Henry also forged a letter explaining why no one had come across this master­piece before. In the letter, Shakespeare explains that Vortigern and Rowena was his greatest work, and he would not publish it until a printer would pay him what he thought it was worth.

Around this time, playwright and theatrical impresario Richard Brinsley Sheridan had expanded his Drury Lane theatre to 3500 seats. The writer of School for Scandal was looking for the right play – something newsworthy, something earth-shattering, something never before seen or heard.

I’m afraid you can probably guess where this is all heading.

Sheridan was known to be no great fan of Shakespeare’s, but he reckoned that a recently discovered masterpiece might just be the play to put those 3500 bums on seats a night that he desper­ately needed to cover his massive debts. He was also a rather bad gambler, so he went to the Irelands’ home and cast his eyes over the manuscript.

His first comment was, ‘This is rather strange, for though you are acquainted with my opinion as to Shakespeare, yet be that as it may, he certainly always wrote poetry.’ Then after more reading, ‘There are certainly some bold ideas, but they are crude and undigested.’

Yet again we arrive at a point in this story where a giant red flag should have been raised . . . but, sensing a box office hit, Sheridan announced that Vortigern and Rowena would have its London debut come April of the new year.

It was soon after this that Samuel Ireland asked his son if he could meet the reclusive owner of the trunk of wonders: the mysterious Mr H. William-Henry explained that such a request was impossible, but he could pass along his father’s correspon­dence to the non-existent landowner. So Samuel and Mr H began exchanging letters, and not surprisingly a fair amount of the content of the notes from Mr H contained passages praising William-Henry as a bright and talented young man.

Things began to unravel just before Christmas 1795. Samuel Ireland actually published his collection of forgeries under the full title Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments Printed Under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare. The London newspapers were not kind. The Telegraph even went to the point of writing a satirical version of the papers in the form of a mock letter from Shakespeare to his contemporary playwright Ben Jonson. The paper ridiculed the Shakespeare Papers’ attempts to recreate Elizabethan spelling: ‘Deere Siree, Wille youe doee mee theee favvouree too dinnee wythee mee onn Friddaye nextte, att twoo off thee clockee, eatte somme muttonne choppes andd somme poottaattoooeeese.’ (That’s the actual spelling in the mock letter, and over two hundred years later it’s still pretty funny.)

The literary sharks could smell blood in the water.

Edmond Malone, expert and editor of Shakespeare’s complete works, took aim, describing the published papers as a ‘clumsy and daring fraud’. He took particular interest in a letter supposedly written to Shakespeare from Queen Elizabeth, dismissing the style and spelling as ‘not only not the orthography of Elizabeth, or of her time, but it is for the most part the orthography of no age whatsoever’.

His 442-page annihilation of the fraudulent papers was not only an instant hit, but it also dropped on 31 March 1796. Two days before Vortigern and Rowena premiered at Drury Lane.

Opening night came with a full house, and thousands more outside unable to secure a seat. The play was rolling along – not being wildly received but there were no real problems – until the third act when a minor player, who had never been con­vinced of its authenticity, hammed up one of his lines and got a laugh.

Then in the final act, the noted actor and lead John Philip Kemble (another cast member who had expressed his doubts) completely overplayed a soliloquy where Vortigern confronts Death, and most of the audience broke out into hysterical laughter and whistling. It was all the cast could do to actually finish the performance.

But complete it they did, and as the curtain fell it was announced that there would be a repeat performance the follow­ing Monday. This was greeted with disparaging howls, and then the first few rows – divided between cynics and true believers – broke out into a prolonged brawl that lasted almost half an hour. The only thing that would calm the audience down was another announcement cancelling the performance, saying it would be replaced by a revival of School for Scandal.

Samuel Ireland, who had earlier made sure that all were aware of his arrival at the theatre, apparently exited with considerably less fanfare. But what of William-Henry, who had spent the whole wretched night watching nervously from the wings? Years later he would write, ‘I retired to bed, more easy in my mind than I had been for a great length of time, as the load was removed which oppressed me.’

A few months after the one and only performance of Vortigern and Rowena, William-Henry made a confession, to his mother and sister, and then to another history-obsessed friend of his father.

Sadly, his father refused to believe anyone who contradicted his belief in the genuine nature of his beloved Shakespeare papers. He even expressed that there was no way a dull-witted man like his son could have perpetrated such a scheme – and definitely never to the level where he, himself, could have been fooled.

He clung to this delusion for the last four years of his life.

However, for William-Henry, the fact that his father could not even contemplate that he had been the source of the forgeries was the final insult. The two men had a vicious argument and the son stormed out of the family home forever.

William-Henry would continue to pursue a creative career, this time creating original work in his own name. He even managed to publish a few novels and books of poetry, though sadly not to much acclaim or financial success.

He and his father never reconciled.

From Mikey Robins Reprehensible: Polite histories of bad behaviour Simon & Schuster 2020 PB 320pp $29.99

Like to keep reading? You can buy Reprehensible from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

Tags: Drury Lane, forgeries, literary hoaxes, Mikey | Robins, Reprehensible, Vortigern and Rowena, William | Shakespeare