Excerpts from one chapter of Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (2002), by Paul Collins.
And everyone knew that William Ireland wasn’t clever enough to write well in his own modern tongue, never mind forge a document in Elizabethan English. They would have been right on the last count, if only they could see it. William couldn’t forge a document in Elizabethan English, as his love letter to Anne Hathaway demonstrates:
O Anna doe Ilove doe I cheryshe thee inne mye hearte forre thou arete as a talle Cedarre stretchynge forthe its branches ande succourynge smaller Plants fromme nyppynge Winneterre orr the boysterouse Wyndes Farewelle toe Morrowe bye tymes I wille see thee tille thenne Adewe sweete Love
This was the work of an ambitious but inexperienced youth who mimicked old writing by arbitrary additions of double consonants, replacing i with y, and tacking e at the end of words. It wasn’t Elizabethan dialect. ¶ It wasn’t any dialect. [pg 36]
On Christmas Eve 1795, the London Times ran a notice that Miscellaneous Papers Under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare was now ready to be picked up at Samuel’s house. [ ... ] The obvious target for ridicule was Ireland’s bizarre spelling, and on January 14 a journalist at The Telegraph happily “discovered” another letter of Shakespeare’s:
Tooo Missteerree Beenjaammiinnee Joohnnssonn:
Deeree Sirree,
Wille youe doee meee theee favvourree too dinnee wythee meeee onnn Friddaye nextte attt twoo off theee clockee too eatee sommee muttonne choppes andd somme poottaattooeesse
I amm deerree sirree
Yourre goodde friendde
Williame Shaekspare [pg 40]By now the public had accepted the notion that William had been behind the forgeries, and for some time William had been receiving inquiries from interested collectors: did he still have any of the old Shakespeare forgeries lying around? Perhaps he would like to sell them? The manuscript of Vortigern, say? Might he still have that in his possession? ¶ Oh yes, William would reply. It just so happens that I do. ¶ It just so happened that William always had one in his possession. For ever since the forgeries had been exposed, and become a subject of morbid literary interest, he had been quietly doing something almost dazzlingly postmodern in its sheer ingenuity and conception. ¶ He was making forgeries of the forgeries. ¶ No fewer than seven “original” copies of the manuscript of Vortigern surfaced after William’s death, along with a whole array of other copies that he made of the Shakespeare papers. Each is utterly authentic in appearance; it is impossible to tell which is the original and which is the copy. After all, the collectors were getting them straight from the source, and besides, who’d ever heard of a forgery of a forgery? [pg 51]
