An Interlude or Mystery Play by William Ireland, 1795

An Interlude or Mystery Play by W illiam Ireland, 1795 J. W. Robinson The story of the young William Ireland’s provocative Shake­ spearean forgeries, which culminated in the production of the pseudo-Shakespearean Vortigern at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on April 2, 1796, has often been told. He gave his father (to impress and please him) his first Shakespearean forgery, a lease signed by Shakespeare, on December 16, 1794, and from then until mid-1796, when he confessed to his deeds, he “lived under continual pressure, working furtively at great speed whilst maintaining a pretence of his ordinary casualness, terri­ fied by recurring fears of exposure, and exalted to extravagant conceit by the praises of the great and distinguished.”! He did not confine himself to purely Shakespearean work. Some time before April 26, 1795, while he was still producing Shake­ spearean material, he also found time to write an unfinished mystery play, “The Divill and Rychard.” The Ireland family had close connections with the theatre. As a child, William had had the run backstage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a few minutes’ walk across the Strand from the family house in Norfolk Street, where his father, Samuel, an engraver and gentlemanly dealer, fostered his collection of old books, curios, objets d’art, paintings, and engravings. William came under the spell of Thomas Chatterton, the young author of the Rowleyan poems supposed to have been written in the fifteenth century, and acquired a kind of reputation as a medievalist, specializing in stained glass and collecting old armor. His interests in the Middle Ages, Shakespeare, and the theatre came together in his mystery play. In Ids Confessions (in what appears to be the only reference in print to this play) he writes that “having perused several curious interludes and sacred mysteries, from the pen of Bayle, &c., I determined on 235 236 Comparative Drama producing a performance of the same nature, and selected the subject of the Devil and Richard the Third.”2 It was Samuel’s obsession with Shakespeare (as well as his scorn for his son) that governed William’s work, and the dis­ covery of “The Divill and Rychard” is probably to be under­ stood as an impressive contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. William’s discoveries were supposed to come from a cache of Shakespeare’s own papers lying in an old chest belonging to an anonymous gentleman, and the sup­ position on the part of the few of the many “believers” in the Shakespearean papers who were told of the existence of “The Divill and Rychard” (there were at least two—Samuel and his friend, John Byng3) must have been that Shakespeare had owned this mystery play. In Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), long one of his favorite books,4 William could have found advanced the interesting theory that the “poor artless” mystery plays gave rise, by “representing a series of historical events simply in the order of time in which they happened,” to the history plays, including Shakespeare’s.5 The two mystery plays referred to by Percy are Bale’s God’s Promises and John the Baptist. It is thus not unlikely that William was interested in showing the influence of the pre-Shakespearean drama on Shakespeare’s plays, especially since he was not only fortunate enough to find “The Divill and Rychard,” but also to find Shakespeare’s own catalogue of his books (a fourteen-page list, which William promised to present to his father, headed, “These bee the Nvmbre ande Orderre o mye Bookes”), which shows that Shakespeare owned a large number of early plays, including a “Mysterye O Jesus Chryste 1538,”6 by which must be meant a play by Bale, who wrote a number of plays about the life of Christ, and four of whose plays were “compiled” in 1538, as their title-pages state. William could have read in print these four plays “from the pen of Bayle” (God’s Promises, John the Baptist, Three Laws, and The Temptation of Our Lord), seven mystery plays (the Digby Herod, the Newcastle Noah, and the first five plays of the Ludus Coventriae) ,7 and a...