My parents had a fascinating collection of books.
Some had been Mum’s, like the edition of Chaucer’s poems that still had her small, precise notes from her classes at Thiel College penciled in the margins, or the carefully chosen illustrated editions of The Faerie Queen, Candide, Gray’s Elegy, and Anna Karenina. Others had been Dad’s, like the copy of Worlds in Collision he’d tried to read and failed to read when it was au courant during his graduate school days at Teachers’ College, or the copies of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. They were all treasured friends, and I worked my way through many of them as I moved straight from children’s books to adult works.
One of the very first I read was Curtis D. MacDougall’s book Hoaxes. It was hefty paperback with photographs of curious objects on its lurid orange cover. I remember being terrified of the mummified corpse of a man who’d claimed to be John Wilkes Booth, but that didn’t stop me from eventually opening the book and starting to read.
That book was a revelation to me. The Lacon cat-rat ranch, H.L. Mencken’s bathtub article, April Fool’s headlines, the “Hitler baby” photo, jackalopes, the Winsted Liar, the Jersey Devil – the book was a print equivalent of Snopes.com, only better written and much more nuanced. MacDougall, a college professor, not only had studied famous hoaxes and deceptions in depths, he’d listed all the reasons why humans believe in the ridiculous and the inane, from vanity to ignorance, revenge to bigotry, chauvinism to stubborn pride. I knew about concepts like confirmation bias long before most of my classmates, and before I’d finished high school I knew better than to take most of what was in the papers with a pound or two of salt.
I’d also acquired a deep and abiding love of the mysterious, the weird, and the deliberately false.
Hoaxes, which I later bought for myself and still have, was only the first of many similar books, from Carl Sagan’s gorgeous debunking of Immanuel Velikovsky to Charles Mackay’s pioneering Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I had a subscription to The Skeptical Inquirer for several years, and still cherish my copy of Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. One of the great crusades of my life has been combating the myths and outright falsehoods that have sprung up around quilts and needlework, from Victorian fancies to the horror that is Hidden in Plain View.
To this day, there are few things I enjoy more than laughing myself sick over a book touting a ridiculous conspiracy or impossible theory, especially when taking a nice long bath. Many hoaxes and other bits of weirdness are well written and quite entertaining in spite of themselves.
In short, they’re Hoaxes So Bad They’re Good.
This week I come bearing but a single example instead of the usual two or three horrors. This was scarcely for lack of material. Writers do have this interesting tendency to make things up, after all, which means that I had an unusually rich selection from which to choose. Still, after long consideration, a lot of hits on Wikipedia, and a more than satisfactory quesadilla at the local Internet coffeehouse, I come bearing a single jewel-like hoax, one of the greatest of all time. I have little doubt that you'll look at Shakespeare, or chickens, in quite the same way.
Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare, by William-Henry Ireland. London in the late 18th century was a huge, filthy, fascinating, dangerous, enticing, glorious mess of a city. Britons great and small flocked to its muddy, dung-heaped streets to seek their fortunes or take their place in society. Soldiers, sailors, courtiers, poets, playwrights, actresses, scientists, nobles, commoners, sugar planters and honest Kentish farmers, black slaves from the West Indies, expatriate French fleeing the Revolution, Tories who’d bet on Crown and Country during the late American unpleasantness and lost, whores and thieves and honest men – there was nothing and no one that could not be had for the right price in its streets, and no better place in Europe to make a name for one’s self.
One of its inhabitants, a teenage law clerk named William-Henry Ireland, succeeded in his quest for eternal fame despite the scorn of practically everyone who knew him. This included his own father, Samuel Ireland, an engraver and minor literary figure who told everyone who asked (and many who didn’t) that his nineteen year old son was a dull, talentless hack. William-Henry, who was far more intelligent and sensitive than his father realized, decided to prove him wrong. He did so by preying upon his father’s greatest weakness: his fanatic, almost terrifying love of William Shakespeare, both as man and as playwright.
Samuel Ireland was far from alone in what critic S. Schoenbaum refers to as “Bardolatry.” Shakespeare was not only a popular playwright, but by the late 1700s he had become a national figure as renowned and beloved as St. George and King Arthur combined. There were Shakespeare festivals, revivals of his plays, biographies both potted and scholarly, books and poems and pictures of Shakespeare, his wife, his home, and even his mulberry tree for sale. That the mulberry tree itself was hacked to bits for souvenirs, and most of the biographies poorly written nonsense, made no difference. Shakespeare was the darling of Georgian Britain despite having died almost two centuries before, and anyone with a connection to him shared in his glorious reputation.
That included William-Henry. An admirer of the gifted "boy genius" Thomas Chatterton, who had romantically expired in a garret after his allegedly medieval poems were exposed as forgeries, William-Henry decided that if Chatterton could do it, so could he. His work in a legal office gave him access to stacks of old documents, many with extra pages bound into the flyleaf. Late in 1794 he took one of these pages, scrawled a deed in a rough facsimile of Shakespeare’s handwriting, and showed it to his father, claiming that he had found it in an ancient chest owned by a wealthy young man who had befriended him. He further claimed that Mr. H, his benefactor, had told him that he could take whatever he wished from the chest, as he (Mr. H) had no interest in a bunch of moldy old scribblings.
Samuel's mania for Stratford's favorite son had led him to discover what purported to be Shakespeare's crabtree and Anne Hathaway's childhood cottage, while his personal collection of antiquities included Oliver Cromwell's (alleged) jacket and Joseph Addison's (putative) fruit knife. When his son, whom he credited with all the talent and intelligence of the fruit knife, showed up with a battered old parchment signed "William Shakespeare," he had no reason to question its authenticity. He was even happier when William-Henry, who had won his father’s approval for the first time in his life, solemnly promised to look for more Shakespeare documents on his next visit to Mr. H's abode.
Samuel was thrilled. He was even more thrilled when his otherwise useless offspring “discovered” more and more items in the Swan of Avon’s own hand over the course of the next year or so: legal documents, a poem to “Anna Hattherrawaye,” letters to patrons and associates that made it clear that Shakespeare, far from being the humble son of a glover, was a powerful and respected man who rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful, even a self-portrait. Finest of all was a touching testament of faith that ended with the following passage:
forgyve O Lorde alle oure Synnes ande withe thye greate goodnesse take usse alle to thye Breaste O cheryshe usse like the sweete Chickenne thatte under the coverte offe herre spreadynge Wings Receyves herre lyttle Broode ande hoverynge overre themme keepes themme harmlesse ande in safetye [sic] [sic] [sic sic sic sic]
Samuel all but wept when he read this masterpiece of theological insight, and showed it to the increasing numbers of friends, scholars, and curiosity seekers who had heard of the wonders emerging from Mr. H’s chest and came to the Irelands’ home to examine the documents for themselves. One of them proclaimed the above passage a work of genius equal to anything Shakespeare had ever written, from Hamlet on down.
William-Henry was more than thrilled. Samuel might call him a dullard, but he was actually a genius.
And scarce had his father dried his tears over the Sweete Chickenne when William-Henry had promised to fetch him yet more riches, like an oil portrait of the Bard himself, annotated copies of some of the early Quartos, and a previously unknown play in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. And despite a full time job and a father pressing him for yet more, more, MORE Shakespeare, William-Henry did exactly what he had promised: he wrote a completely new Shakespeare play, Vortigern and Rowena.
Because it was theater-mad London…because the Ireland “discoveries” had been the talk of literary London for over a year…because Samuel had published an expensive, lavishly illustrated edition late in 1795 of every single Shakespearean document his son had brought him…most of all, because it was a brand new Shakespeare play…Vortigern and Rowena was accepted for production. On Drury Lane. By no less than the playwright and impresario Richard Brinsley Sheridan of the Theatre Royal, with J.P. Kemble playing the lead and Dorothy Jordan, mistress of the Duke of Clarence, in one of the female roles. William-Henry’s fortune, and his place in English literature, seemed assured.
Unfortunately, it was about then, with the young Bard at the glorious heights of his career, that he found himself cast low by a truly Shakespearean flaw: he wasn’t all that good a forger. Oh, he could fake an early 17th century hand fairly well, and his surreal misspellings certainly looked archaic enough, but what fooled a Bardolator like Samuel Ireland was laughably bad in the eyes of a true scholar. A couple of these rare and skeptical creatures had seen the forgeries, nodded politely, and laughed themselves sick in private. Word inevitably began to circulate through the salons that maybe, just maybe, the wonderful documents at Samuel Ireland’s house weren’t quite what they appeared.
Then Edmond Malone, the greatest Shakespearean scholar of his day, published a dense, thorough, devastating critique of the Ireland collection only two days before the opening night of Vortigern and Rowena. He analyzed the handwriting, history, language, and especially the ridiculous spelling, and made it clear that the papers were not only not by Shakespeare, they weren't by anyone who'd lived in the early 17th century.
Despite this blow, the premiere of Vortigern and Rowena went ahead as planned on April 2, 1796, with William-Henry doing his best not to panic. Alas, the actors did not cooperate. They had realized early on that Vortigern and Rowena was weak tea indeed (Kemble had tried and failed to have opening night on April 1st), and as the night wore on they started to camp it up. The climax came in Act V, when Kemble, in his best stentorian whisper, portentously proclaimed:
Subject! to whom? To thee, 0! sovereign death!
That hast for thy domain this world immense :
Church-yards and charnel-houses are thy haunts,
And hospitals thy sumptuous palaces;
And, when thou wouldst be merry, thou dost choose
The gaudy chamber of a dying King.
0! then thou dost ope wide thy boney jaws,
And, with rude laughter and fantastic tricks,
Thou clapp'st thy rattling fingers to thy sides:
And when this solemn mockery is o'er....
With just enough pomposity to reduce the audience to hysterics. The rest of the run was cancelled, and Vortigern and Rowena remained unproduced until the 1990s, when it was staged as a comedy.
The Sweete Chickenne was suddenly very sour indeed.
William-Henry had no choice but to confess that the whole thing was a joke that had gotten out of hand - and no one, including his father, believed him. He was too young, too stupid, too ignorant of life to have produced so many deeds and legal documents and poems. That his father was a noted Shakespeare fanboy made him a more logical candidate, and the Irelands quickly became a laughingstock when Samuel mounted a desperate attack on Malone for having the audacity to analyze literature using forensics.
William-Henry, stung at not being believed when finally telling the truth, promptly issued a pamphlet detailing the whole scheme and taking full blame (or credit). Samuel, who still thought the eldest fruit of his loins a brainless boob, refused to believe him, and died in 1800 stoutly maintaining that he was right and Malone was wrong. The question of Sameul's involvement in the forgeries wasn't settled until the 1870s, when his papers were acquired by the British Museum and it became clear that he hadn't had a clue.
As for William-Henry...his career as Shakespeare Junior ended in disaster. However, he now knew that he could write, despite his father's scorn. He wrote several Gothic novels, a series of popular travelogues, and even a poem about the literary life. He never got rich but he wrote almost until the end in 1835, including a new edition with a preface of (of course) Vortigern and Rowena.
He also wrote a complete account of the Shakespeare forgeries in 1805. The introduction makes it clear that becoming rich was the furthest thing from his mind:
In the anxious hope that nothing herein contained may tend to my detriment in the estimation of the public at large, I shall conclude these prefatory lines by referring my readers to the following pages for the proofs requisite to the full establishment of the positions stated at the end of the volume, and with a sanguine hope that my conduct will henceforth be regarded rather as that of an unthinking and impetuous boy than of a sordid and avaricious fabricator instigated by the mean desire of securing pecuniary emolument.
One wonders what his father would have thought of that.
So, fellow Kossacks...do you have a favorite hoax to share? A copy of Michelle Remembers on a dusty shelf in the garage? Perhaps Wilkomirski's Fragments? The collected works of James Frey? Surely William-Henry isn't the only solemn mockery for a Saturday night!