He Was A Shakespeare Fraud Who Duped London In The 18th Century
One day, in December 1794, a 19-year-old man in London named William Henry Ireland snuck into his father’s study and started looking through his collection of books about William Shakespeare.
His father, Samuel Ireland, was obsessed with collecting antiquities and curiosities, particularly Shakespearean memorabilia. He cared more about his collection than his family.
So, in an attempt to connect with his cold and distant father, William Henry decided to trace Shakespeare’s signature from a book, kickstarting his career of fabricating precious historical documents.
He presented his father with a parchment document sealed with wax. When Samuel opened it, he was shocked to see a mortgage deed dated to 1610.
It was signed by William Shakespeare and John Heminges, an actor in Shakespeare’s King’s Men troupe of players.
At the time, very few signatures from Shakespeare were known to have survived from his records, so a personal document such as this one was extraordinary.
William Henry claimed that the document was just one of dozens that he had found while going through an old chest belonging to a rich gentleman named Mr. H.
The man wanted to remain anonymous to avoid being bothered, but William Henry was welcome to take whatever he wanted.
He continued to bring home letters that Shakespeare had apparently written to famous figures from the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages, love letters written to his wife Anne Hathaway, a document in which Shakespeare discussed his Protestant faith, and manuscript drafts of King Lear and Hamlet.
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Samuel Ireland contacted the College of Heralds to figure out whether the documents were real. The organization determined that they were genuine.
Samuel put them on display in his home on Norfolk Street in London. Before long, people flocked to his residence to check out the artifacts.
Eventually, the family had to start issuing tickets to control the crowds, as the demand to see these items had grown beyond their wildest imaginations. Soon enough, London newspapers began questioning the authenticity of the documents.
Critics pointed out that the documents contained poor-quality prose and inconsistent handwriting. Opinion was divided over whether they were fraudulent.
William Henry decided to take his deception to the next level, unearthing a manuscript of an “original” Shakespeare play titled Vortigern. He wrote an entire five-act play featuring Vortigern, a brutal King of the Britons from the 5th century.
In the spring of 1795, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan wanted to stage the play at his theater. It opened in April 1796 and sold a total of 3,500 tickets.
When the play was over, fistfights broke out in the audience between those who believed the work was genuine, and those who did not.
In late 1796, William Henry confessed to forging all the documents. However, his father refused to believe it was a hoax. He died in 1800, thinking that his son was incapable of such an elaborate fraud.
William Henry was never charged with a crime because he did not make any money from the scam. He wrote several books throughout his life but still struggled to make ends meet. He died in relative obscurity in 1835.
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