Forging a Romantic Identity: Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness and W.H. Ireland’s Shakespeare MS
Robert Miles, University of Victoria
Volume 17, no. 4, July 2005
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
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 in 1795 and 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. … Ireland’s career in forgery has frequently received the attention of Shakespeareans, or those with an eye for a story. Recently the material has been reinvestigated as critical interest in the history of literary forgery has grown, an interest K.K. Ruthven links to “two intellectual developments in the final decades of the twentieth century”: poststructuralist critical theory and the “continuing anatomy of … the postmodern condition.” The first development forced a rethinking of traditional assumptions about “authorship, originality, authenticity and value,” while the second fundamentally undermined commonsense apprehensions of the real and the simulated. … In the last decade or so, critics have knuckled down to Ireland, situating his forgeries within the ideological contradictions of an eighteenth-century print culture undergoing rapid change.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Romanticism” include:
Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism
by OLIVIA MURPHY (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Rewriting Radicalism: Wollstonecraft in Burney’s The Wanderer
by TARA GHOSHAL WALLACE (ECF 24.3, Spring 2012)
Editing Eve: Rewriting the Fall in Austen’s Persuasion and Inchbald’s A Simple Story
by JOHN MORILLO (ECF 23.1, Fall 2010)
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