under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare, including the
tragedy of "King Lear" and a small fragment of "Hamlet" from the original
MSS. in the possession of Samuel Ireland.' On April 2, 1796 Sheridan and
Kemble produced at Drury Lane Theatre a bombastic tragedy in blank verse
entitled 'Vortigern' under the pretence that it was by Shakespeare, and
had been recently found among the manuscripts of the dramatist that had
fallen into the hands of the Irelands. The piece, which was published,
was the invention of young Ireland. The fraud of the Irelands, which for
some time deceived a section of the literary public, was finally exposed
by Malone in his valuable 'Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Ireland
MSS.' (1796). Young Ireland afterwards published his 'Confessions'
(1805). He had acquired much skill in copying Shakespeare's genuine
signature from the facsimile in Steevens's edition of Shakespeare's works
of the mortgage-deed of the Blackfriars house of 1612-13, {366b} and,
besides conforming to that style of handwriting in his forged deeds and
literary compositions, he inserted copies of the signature on the
title-pages of many sixteenth-century books, and often added notes in the
same feigned hand on their margins. Numerous sixteenth-century volumes
embellished by Ireland in this manner are extant, and his forged
signatures and marginalia have been frequently mistaken for genuine
autographs of Shakespeare.

Forgeries promulgated by Collier and others, 1835-1849.

But Ireland's and Jordan's frauds are clumsy compared with those that
belong to the present century. Most of the works relating to the
biography of Shakespeare or the history of the Elizabethan stage produced
by John Payne Collier, or under his supervision, between 1835 and 1849
are honeycombed with forged references to Shakespeare, and many of the
forgeries have been admitted unsuspectingly into literary history. The
chief of these forged papers I arrange below in the order of the dates
that have been allotted to them by their manufacturers. {367a}

1589 (November). Appeal from the Blackfriars players
(16 in number) to the Privy Council
for favour. Shakespeare's name
stands twelfth. From the manuscripts
at Bridgewater House, belonging to
th