{"id":9375,"date":"2017-04-27T09:41:12","date_gmt":"2017-04-27T13:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=9375"},"modified":"2017-04-27T09:41:12","modified_gmt":"2017-04-27T13:41:12","slug":"finding-new-shakespearean-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=9375","title":{"rendered":"Finding New Shakespearean Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

In winter of 1794, a young man whose father apparently cared more for this worldly treasures than his family presented his elder with a sealed document he said he found in a trunk. It was a mortgage with Shakespeare’s name on it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That document became the first of many fraudulent discoveries William-Henry Ireland revealed to London society, to the excitement of his father and many notable scholars. He even produced a long lost play,\u00a0Vortigern and Rowena,<\/em> which was performed in a large theater, though many viewers and performers remained skeptical of its authenticity.<\/p>\n

Perhaps all of this was for his father.\u00a0\u201cFrequently,\u201d William-Henry wrote, \u201cmy father would declare, that to possess a single vestige of the poet\u2019s hand-writing would be esteemed a gem beyond all price.\u201d<\/p>\n

But his estimation of his son<\/a> was not so high. Doug Stewart writes,<\/p>\n

Samuel Ireland, a self-important and socially ambitious writer, engraver and collector, went so far as to hint that William-Henry was not his son. The boy\u2019s mother did not acknowledge her maternity; as Samuel\u2019s mistress, she raised William-Henry and his two sisters by posing as a live-in housekeeper named Mrs. Freeman. Samuel had found the boy an undemanding job as an apprentice to a lawyer friend whose office was a few blocks from the Irelands\u2019 home on Norfolk Street in the Strand, at the edge of London\u2019s theater district. At the lawyer\u2019s chambers, William-Henry passed his days largely unsupervised, surrounded by centuries-old legal documents, which he would occasionally sift through, when asked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In winter of 1794, a young man whose father apparently cared more for this worldly treasures than his family presented his elder with a sealed document he said he found in a trunk. It was a mortgage with Shakespeare’s name on it. That document became the first of many fraudulent discoveries William-Henry Ireland revealed to … Continue reading Finding New Shakespearean Stuff<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[997,2555],"class_list":["post-9375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-publishing","tag-forgery","tag-shakespeare"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}