This research will examine the eighteenth-century forgery of a purported play by Shakespeare, Vortigern, as well as other documents relating to or supposedly written by Shakespeare, by one William Henry Ireland, the only son of a London engraver, Samuel Ireland. What motivated W.H. Ireland to produce a whole range of Shakespeareana seems most credibly attributed to what are today known as oedipal issues between parent and child. Young Ireland appears to have had the misfortune of being born into a family in which the father-son relationship was strained by ambiguity of affection and parental identity, and complicated by evidence of his father Samuel Ireland's obsession with the life and work of Shakespeare, as well as with a more general project of upward-class mobility. The range of issues dealing with the ambiguity of family relationships in the Ireland household can be seen in Freud's analysis of the power of the superego, or the civilizing influences on the individual psyche of the developing child, in terms of the child's suppression of natural tendencies toward aggression vis-a-vis "the authority which prevents him from having his . . . satisfactions" (Freud 76). Freud's view is that conscience (superego) formation can occur whether or not a child is leniently or strictly brought up. The most "severe" kind of conscience "arises from the joint operation of . . . frustration of instinct, which unleashes aggressiveness, and the experience of being loved, which turns e aggressiveness inwards and hands it over to the super-ego" (Freud 77).
Freud says rational action in perpetual tension with emotional and especially sexual behavior characterizes human experience. Rational action per se comes about as the individual ego evolves from infancy to adulthood and makes sense of the fact the organism that it inhabits is different from (and alien to) the external world: "originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an exte...