Abstract
W. H. Ireland was the last of the great eighteenth-century literary forgers. To use the period’s own sense of this genealogy, the line includes William Lauder, Psalmanazar, James MacPherson and Thomas Chatterton, and culminates in the forgery of the Shakespeare manuscripts, which from 1795 to 2 April 1796 enthralled the capital, before the forgeries were put to the test of public opinion through the performance of Vortigern and Rowena at Drury Lane, where they spectacularly failed.1
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© 2008 Robert Miles
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Miles, R. (2008). The Original Misfit: The Shakespeare Forgeries, Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness, and W. H. Ireland’s Romantic Career. In: Romantic Misfits. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582279_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582279_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-54238-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-58227-9
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