The Ireland story has been especially well documented. I have drawn on the following contemporary accounts: Samuel Ireland, Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Head and Seal of William Shakspeare (London, 1796); James Boaden, A Letter to George Steevens, Esq. Containing a Critical Examination of the Papers of Shakespeare (London, 1796); Edmond Malone, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments … Attributed to Shakespeare (London, 1796); Samuel Ireland, Mr Ireland’s Vindication of His Conduct, Respecting the Publication of the Supposed Shakspeare MSS (London, 1796); William-Henry Ireland, An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manuscripts (London, 1796); Francis Webb, Shakespeare’s Manuscripts, in the Possession of Mr Ireland, Examined (London, 1796); Samuel Ireland, An Investigation of Mr Malone’s Claim to the Character of Scholar, or Critic, Being an Examination of His Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Shakspeare Manuscripts, &c., by Samuel Ireland (London, 1797); George Chalmers, An Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers (London, 1797); George Chalmers, A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers (London, 1799); George Chalmers, An Appendix to the Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Suppositious Shakespeare-Papers (London, 1800); William-Henry Ireland, The Confessions of William Henry Ireland (London, 1805); and William-Henry Ireland, Vortigern: An Historical Play with an Original Preface (London, 1832).
I have also drawn on the following modern accounts: Clement M. Ingleby, The Shakespeare Fabrications (London, 1859); Bernard Grebanier, The Great Shakespeare Forgery (New York, 1965); S. Schoenbaum, ‘The Ireland Forgeries: An Unpublished Contemporary Account’, Shakespeare and Others (Washington DC, 1985), pp. 144–53; Jeffrey Kahan’s excellent Reforging Shakespeare: The Story of a Theatrical Scandal (London, 1998); Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Brookfield, Vermont, 1999); Patricia Pierce, The Great Shakespeare Fraud: The Strange, True Story of William-Henry Ireland (Phoenix Mill, 2004); and Tom Lockwood, ‘Manuscript, Print and the Authentic Shakespeare: The Ireland Forgeries Again’, Shakespeare Survey 59 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 108–23. Finally, for what the small number of surviving early modern dramatic manuscripts looked like, see William Long, ‘Precious Few: English Manuscript Playbooks’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford, 1999), pp. 414–33, and Grace Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood (London, 2006).
SHAKESPEARE DEIFIED
For the deifying performances at Drury Lane, see Richard Fitzpatrick, The Occasional Prologue, Written by the Rt. Hon. Major General Fitzpatrick, and Spoken by Mr Kemble, on Opening the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Monday, April 21st 1794 (London, 1794). See too, vol. 1 of Biographia Dramatica, ed. David Erskine Baker, Isaac Reed and Stephen Jones, 3 vols (London, 1812), and The London Stage 1660–1800, part 5, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale, 1968). On the deification of Shakespeare in general, see Robert Witbeck Babcock, The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry 1766–1799 (Chapel Hill, 1931); Péter Dávidházi, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare (Houndmills, 1998); Charles Laporte, ‘The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question’, English Literary History 74 (2007), pp. 609–28; and Marcia Pointon, ‘National Identity and the Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Portraits’, in Searching for Shakespeare, ed. Tarnya Cooper (London, 2006). Dryden’s remarks about the divine Shakespeare can be found in Aureng-Zebe (1676), The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (1670) and All for Love (1678). For Voltaire, see Thomas R. Lounsbury, Shakespeare and Voltaire (London,1902). For an account of deifying Shakespeare in the visual arts, see William L. Pressly, The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s ‘Fine Frenzy’ in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Art (Newark, 2007).
The literature on Garrick and the Jubilee is considerable. I have relied on Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (New York, 1964); Johanne M. Stochholm, Garrick’s Folly; the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 at Stratford and Drury Lane (London, 1964); Martha W. England, Garrick’s Jubilee (Columbus, Ohio, 1964); Halliday, Cult of Shakespeare; and Vanessa Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick (Cambridge, 2008); I quote from Samuel Foote, Letter … to the Reverend Author of the Remarks, Critical and Christian (London, 1760).
For the emergence of the Shakespeare expert, see Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford, 1995); Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1990); Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (Cambridge, 1997); Arthur Sherbo, The Birth of Shakespeare Studies (Michigan, 1986); Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford, 1989); Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford, 1992); and Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare.
‘LIKE A DECEIVED HUSBAND’
The best biography of Malone is Peter Martin, Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar (Cambridge, 1995). On Malone’s attempts to establish the plays’ chronology and topicality, see his ‘Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare were Written’ (London, 1778); his ‘A Second Appendix to Mr Malone’s Supplement’ (London, 1783); and ‘Mr Malone’s Preface,’ as quoted in The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 4th edn (London, 1793). Margreta de Grazia writes about Malone in Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authority and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford, 1991). William Oldys’s manuscript notes, which Malone consulted, can be found in British Library Add. MSS 22959. For the emendation to ‘brown best bed’, see Malone’s account in vol. 1 of the 1793 edition of Johnson and Steevens, where he writes: that ‘Mr Theobald and other modern editors have been more bountiful to Mrs Shakespeare, having printed instead of these words, “– my brown best bed, with the furniture”.’ See, too, Kenneth Gross’s inventive and often brilliant Shylock is Shakespeare (Chicago, 2006).
For Heywood’s unfinished or lost literary biographies from the early seventeenth century, see vol. 2 of Edmond Malone, ed., The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (London, 1821), where he cites Heywood’s note to Hierarchy of Blessed Angels (1635) where he is still promising this work over twenty years after Richard Brathwaite first mentioned in 1614 that his ‘judicious friend, Master Thomas Heywood, hath taken in hand, by his great industry, to make a general, though summary, description of all the poets’. For the rise of literary biography in eighteenth-century England, see, in addition to Biographia Britannica: Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who have Flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, 7 vols (London, 1747–66), Roger Lonsdale’s outstanding introduction to his edition of Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 4 vols (Oxford, 2006). On the missing inventory of Shakespeare’s will, see J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 3rd edn (London, 1883), pp. 235 ff. The quotation from Capell is from ‘Mr Capell’s Introduction’, in The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Johnson and Steevens.
‘WITH THIS KEY’
For autobiographical readings of the Sonnets cited here, see A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1944). On Wordsworth in particular, see The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787–1805, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967). Anna Jameson is quoted from her The Loves of the Poets, 2 vols (London, 1829). For Keats, see The Letters of John Keats, 1814–21, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). And for Coleridge, see Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. N. Coleridge, 2 vols (London, 1835); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (Princeton, 1987); and Samuel T. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols (London, 1960). Gary Taylor’s account of this autobiographical turn in Reinventing Shakespeare is especially helpful. For the backlash against reading Shakespeare’s life through his works, see C. J. Sisson, ‘The
Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare’, Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, Proceedings of the British Academy 20 (1934).
For an early response to collaboration, see Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus (London, 1687). For Theobold, Hanmer and other editors on plays they deemed collaborative or not by Shakespeare, see Babcock, The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry; see too Alexander Pope’s Preface, included in vol. 1 of The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Johnson and Steevens; Edmond Malone, A Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI Tending to Show that Those Plays Were Not Written Originally by Shakspeare (London, 1787); Henry Tyrrell, The Doubtful Plays of Shakespere (London, 1851); and Joseph C. Hart, The Romance of Yachting (New York, 1848).
MONEYLENDER AND MALT DEALER
On biographical information about Shakespeare that emerged in the nineteenth century, see Schoenbaum, Chambers and Wheler. On Collier’s discoveries, see J. Payne Collier, Reasons for a New Edition of Shakespeare’s Works (London, 1841); Collier’s biographical essay in vol. 1 of his edition of The Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1844); and the magisterial study by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols (New Haven, 2004). Joseph Hunter published his discovery in vol. 1 of New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, 2 vols (London, 1845). On Halliwell-Phillipps and his discoveries, see Halliwell-Phillipps, ‘Life of William Shakespeare’, in vol. 1 of his Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1853). See too, Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman, ‘Did Halliwell Steal and Mutilate the First Quarto of Hamlet?’, The Library 2.4 (2001), pp. 349–63, as well as D. A. Winstanley, ‘Halliwell Phillipps and Trinity College Library’, The Library 5.2 (1948), pp. 250–82. And for a defence of Halliwell-Phillipps, see Marvin Spevack, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: The Life and Works of the Shakespearean Scholar and Bookman (London, 2001). For the verdicts rendered by Halliwell-Phillipps and Alexander Dyce that Shakespeare attended carefully to his financial interests, see Halliwell-Phillipps, ‘Life of William Shakespeare’, in his Works of William Shakespeare, and Dyce, ‘Some Account of the Life of Shakespeare’, in his Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1857). The essay ‘Who Wrote Shakespeare?’ appeared anonymously in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 449 (August 1852), pp. 87–9.
HOMER, JESUS AND THE HIGHER CRITICISM
For a detailed overview of the Homeric authorship question see J. A. Davison, ‘The Homeric Question’, in A Companion to Homer, ed. Alan J. B. Wace and Frank H. Stubbings (London, 1962), pp. 234–65; see too Martin West, ‘The Invention of Homer’, Classical Quarterly 49.2 (1999), pp. 364–82. Emerson’s assessment of Wolf is quoted from Moncure Daniel Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (London, 1883). See as well Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (London, 1775), and Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735).
For an excellent edition of Wolf, see, F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, translated with introduction and notes by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton, 1985). I am deeply indebted to Anthony Grafton, ‘Prolegomenon to Friedrich August Wolf’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981), pp. 101–29. For responses to Wolf ’s argument in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see, in addition to Disraeli’s novel: Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey (London, 1897); de Quincey’s essays in vol. 13 of The Works of Thomas de Quincey, eds. Grevel Lindop and John Whale (London, 2001); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (New York, 1996), cited in Laporte, ‘The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question’; and E. V. Rieu’s introduction to his translation of The Iliad (Harmondsworth, 1950).
On Strauss and his Life of Jesus, see David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, 3 vols, [trans. George Eliot] (London, 1846); Richard S. Cromwell, David Friedrich Strauss and His Place in Modern Thought (Fair Lawn, New Jersey, 1974); and Horton Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology (Cambridge, 1973). H. Bellyse Baildon discusses the Higher Criticism in the introduction to his edition of Titus Andronicus (London, 1904), and Robertson speaks of it in The Baconian Heresy (New York, 1913). For Shakespeare as holy writ, see Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago, 1998), and J. B. Selkirk, Bible Truths (London, 1862). On Carlyle, see Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London, 2004); Arnold is quoted from Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott and Robert H. Super (Oxford, 1986), and George Gilfillan from ‘Shakespeare – A Lecture’ in A Third Gallery of Portraits (New York, 1855) – I’m indebted to Laporte for this reference. So far as I know, Gary Taylor, in Reinventing Shakespeare, is the only Shakespeare scholar to mention Samuel Mosheim Schmucker, and I’m grateful that his work alerted me to The Errors of Modern Infidelity Illustrated and Refuted (Philadelphia, 1848), reprinted (unchanged except for the title) as Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare: Illustrating Infidel Objections against the Bible (Philadelphia, 1853), from which I have quoted.
BACON
DELIA BACON
The Beechers’ remarks about Delia Bacon are quoted in Martha Bacon, ‘The Parson and the Bluestocking,’ in The Puritan Promenade (Boston, 1964). The admirer’s glowing description was offered by Sarah Edwards Henshaw; see Theodore Bacon, Delia Bacon: A Biographical Sketch (Boston, 1888), as well as Henshaw’s article (under the pseudonym Sydney E. Holmes) that appeared in the Chicago Advance, 26 December 1867. Henshaw is also the source for Bacon’s lecturing style, in her ‘Delia Bacon as a Teacher of Shakespeare’ in Shakespeareana 5 (February 1888). Bacon’s academic range is described in an admiring letter about her lectures that appeared in the New York Herald on 21 December 1852. For other facts about her background described here, see the standard biography, Vivian C. Hopkins, Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). See, too, Nina Baym’s excellent ‘Delia Bacon, History’s Odd Woman Out’, The New England Quarterly 69 (1996), pp. 223–49. For more on her association with Tree, see Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage (Washington DC, 1976), and Joy Harriman Reilly’s Masters essay, ‘Miss Ellen Tree (1805–1880), Actress and Wife to Charles Kean’ (Columbus, Ohio, 1979). Letters are quoted from Hopkins’s edition – except for those quoted specifically from Delia Bacon’s surviving correspondence and papers that are housed in the Folger Library.
Bacon’s remarks about the subject of her play are quoted from her Preface to The Bride of Fort Edward, Founded on an Incident of the Revolution (New York, 1839). For more on early American women dramatists, see Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850, ed. Amelia Howe Kritzer (Ann Arbor, 1995) and The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights, ed. Brenda Murphy (Cambridge, 1999). Bacon’s disappointment in seeing Shakespeare staged is recorded by Henshaw, who remembers Bacon saying that it ‘is impossible to put Shakespeare on the stage in a way to satisfy one’s expectations … Nothing can equal the imagination.’ For Poe on Bacon, see Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Burton R. Pollin, 2 vols (New York, 1985). Bacon may have been thinking about the Shakespeare authorship problem for considerably longer, if her letter of 1854 to her patron, Charles Butler, does not exaggerate: ‘It is more than ten years since I have had’ the ‘whole business thrust upon me’.
Gary Taylor notes in his Reinventing Shakespeare that it wasn’t until 1865 that the Harvard finally added a curriculum requirement of ‘reading English aloud’; another decade would pass before there would be a composition requirement on set literary texts, including Shakespeare’s. Bacon’s unique approach to teaching Shakespeare is described both by Henshaw and another of her students, Rebecca Taylor Hatch, Personal Reminiscences and Memorials (New York, 1905). Bacon’s view of the ‘ignorant masses’ is quoted from her The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (London and Boston, 1857). The only time she ever expressed the idea that Francis Bacon might somehow have been related to her was in October 1857, after she had published her last word on the authorship
controversy and was quite ill. See the letter described by Hopkins, from Maria Mitchell, a scientist who visited the ailing Bacon in Stratford, and in the course of urging her family to come to England and bring her home, mentioned Delia’s ‘claim of descent from Francis Bacon’.
For Francis Bacon’s reputation, see Graham Rees, ‘Novum Organum and the Texts of 1620: Fluctuating Fortunes’, in The Instauratio Magna Part II: Novum Organum and Associated Text, ed. Rees and Maria Wakely, The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (Oxford, 2004); Charles Webster, ‘The Origins of the Royal Society’, History of Science 6 (1967); and Richard Yeo’s excellent ‘An Idol of the Market-Place: Baconianism in Nineteenth Century Britain’, History of Science 23 (1985). For Emerson on Francis Bacon, see Vivian C. Hopkins, ‘Emerson and Bacon,’ American Literature 29 (1958), as well as The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). For Bacon’s reception in antebellum America, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill, 1977), as well as George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York, 1968). And on the lost sections of Francis Bacon’s work, see for example, Byron Steel [pseud. for Francis Steegmüller], Sir Francis Bacon: The First Modern Mind (Garden City, New York, 1930).
Contested Will Page 35
