To be or not to be Shakespeare

Plagiarists, reporters who cook up sources, academics who conveniently forget to footnote -- all of them might take inspiration from the case of William Henry Ireland, a youthful forger of Shakespearean documents who became so infamous at the end of the 18th century that his fabrications were soon valuable in their own right. . .

If the Ireland affair feels a bit like a schoolboy's lark, the case of John Payne Collier is darker and more troubling. Collier was a respected literary scholar and historian, but with a bad habit of inserting his own material into books like "The History of English Dramatic Poetry," which he published in 1831.

Read the whole entertaining story in the Washington Post -- it's a review of an exhibition, "Fakes, Forgeries and Facsimiles", at Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library.

Posted by David on September 27, 2003 7:26 PM