One of the most famous literary hoaxes in history
William Henry I R E L A N D (1775–1835)?
perhaps the greatest English forger
of would-be Shakespearean documents and plays.
- Video (Short9
Henry Ireland (1777–1838) was an English literary forger best known for the Shakespeare forgeries of the 1790s.
As a teenager, he fabricated a large collection of fake “Shakespeare” documents—including deeds, letters, poems, and even an entire play (Vortigern and Rowena, 1796). He claimed to have found them hidden in an old chest, hoping to impress his Shakespeare-obsessed father, Samuel Ireland, who at first championed them as genuine.
The forgeries deceived parts of the literary world but collapsed under scholarly scrutiny. When Vortigern was staged at Drury Lane, its poor reception exposed the fraud. Henry Ireland confessed and later published An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manuscripts (1796),
detailing how he created the fakes.
Ireland’s affair became one of the most famous literary hoaxes in history and significantly sharpened scholarly skepticism toward alleged Shakespeare documents—highlighting how little authentic documentary evidence of Shakespeare actually exists.
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