The Shakespearean Forgery of William Henry Ireland
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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 aggr
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liam would come up with yet another deed, letter, or notation supposedly written either by to Shakespeare. On the other hand, the fact that Samuel had connections at the Drury Lane helps explain why it was there that Vortigern was mounted by Mr. Kemble and company.
Grebanier and Mair both conclude that young Ireland had literary and theatrical ambition per se. Mair says that Ireland's pamphlet Confessions was intended to "display his own talents, clear his father's reputation, and score off his enemies" (236). Keevak (67) says that "Ireland's eventual aim, which failed disastrously, was to put himself forward as a new young bard," by way of Vortigern. The disaster was twofold. First, Kemble became convinced the play was a fraud and so mounted it in a spirit of vicious irony. Second, a critique, published just before opening night, declared that Vortigern resembled "nothing of the history of Shakspeare, nothing of the history of the Stage, or the history of the English Language" (Malone 352-3). The play was laughed--more exactly howled--off the stage (Grebanier 221).
Ireland's literary ambition an be discerned in his preface to an 1832 edition of Vortigern, which cites his and the play's humiliation, but then comments that so many
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Approximate Word count = 2522
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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