Forging a Romantic Identity: Herbert Croft's Love and Madness and W.H. Ireland's Shakespeare MS

Forging a Romantic Identity: Herbert Croft's Love and Madness and W.H. Ireland's Shakespeare MS Robert Miles W.H. Ireland was the last ofthe 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 ofdie 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.1 Recently the material has been reinvestigated as critical interest in the history ofliterary forgery has grown, an interest KK. Ruthven links to "two intellectual developments in the final decades of the twentieth century": poststructuralist critical theory and the "continuing anatomy of ... the 1 S. Schoenbaum provides the most reliable account of the affair in Shakespeare's Lives: New EdüUm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 130-167. But see also John Mair, The FourthForger. William Ireland andtheShakespearePapers (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1938); Bernard Grebanier, The Great Shakespeare Forgery: A New Look at the Career ofWilliam Henry Ireland (Heinemann: London, 1966); and Peter Martin, EdmondMolane, ShakespeareScholar A Literary Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 190-99.JeffreyKahan, ReforgingShakespeare: TheStory ofa TheatricalScandal (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1998), although more recent, is also more speculative. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 17, Number 4,JuIy 2005 600 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION postmodern condition." The first development forced a rethinking of traditional assumptions about "authorship, originality, authenticity and value," while the second fundamentally undermined commonsense apprehensions ofthe real and the simulated.2 Ruthven outlines two broad approaches to "faking" generated by these developments, one synchronic, the other concerned with differences. Ruthven characterizes the ambitions of the latter approach. Instead ofgrand, synoptic narratives, "we should pay scrupulous attention to the specificities ofparticular works which congregate within the same chronotope , and knuckle down to the task of producing archivally based 'thick descriptions' of them which will enable their microhistories to be written."3 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. Such approaches tend to focus on the history of the copyright acts together with the pressures these acts place upon notions of originality and authenticity; on the rise of "original genius," a locution which, while it might satisfy the imperatives of copyright, flies in the face ofthe allusive facts ofart; and on the deep connections between the cult of bardic or original genius and the rise of nationalist ideologies . For these approaches, forgery is the necessary other of the modern—which is to say Romantic—construction of authorship. To focus on the legal and epistemological anxieties attendant upon ideas of authenticity, especially as regards documents, paper money, and literary fabrications, is to find oneselfin the discursive underpinnings ofthe modern state. In all ofthese areas, Ireland's spectacular career as the forger ofthe national Bard is peculiarly important, as Ian Haywood , Paul Baines, and Nick Groom have all recently pointed out.4 My aim in the present article is to contribute to this growing body ofcritical literature by producing a micro-history with a complementary yet altered focus. Although I retell the story, I do so selectively, with a view to highlighting details germane to my focus. By "forging a Romantic identity" I mean, primarily, its social construction. The 2 KK. Ruthven, FakingIt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 63. 3 Ruthven, 60-61. 4 Paul Baines, TheHouseofForgery inEighteenth-Century Britain (Brookfield, Singapore, Sydney: Ashgate, 1999), and "'All ofthe House ofForgery': Walpole, Chatterton, and Antiquarian Commerce," Poetica:AnInternationalfournalofLinguistic-Literary Studies39-40 (1994): 45-72; Ian Haywood, TheMaking ofHistory: A Study oftheLiterary Forgeries offames Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas ofHistory and Fiction (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986); and Nick Groom, TheForger's Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course ofLiterature (London: Picador, 2002). FORGING A ROMANTIC IDENTITY 601 kinds ofconcern that Haywood, Baines, and Groom have teased out in relation to Ireland...