Lawyer, scholar and editorial genius Edmond Malone is remembered as the man who guided and improved drafts of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), helping to make it the greatest of all English biographies. Born into a Dublin legal family in 1741, Malone attended the Molesworth Street school, where he fell in love with Shakespeare’s works. After completing a BA at Trinity College he commenced studies at the Inner Temple and was called to the bar in Dublin. While practising law he also completed literary projects, including editing an unfinished and unpublished poem by Alexander Pope.
Short of stature and mild of manner, Malone ‘created a favourable impression by his urbanity of temper, kindliness, and social ease’. His father’s death left him with an inheritance and a modest income that allowed him to leave Ireland and the law, and to set up in London as a man of letters. There, he befriended Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Horace Walpole. The first true historian of early English drama, he became the greatest of all Elizabethan scholars. His literary life’s work would be to establish an authentic text and chronology of Shakespeare’s works.
After editing a version of Rowe’s life of Shakespeare, he embarked on a new, accurate version. In Malone’s biographical research, he followed every possible lead, however tenuous, that might find for him Shakespearean relics and documents, and Shakespeare’s library.
A self-appointed prosecutor of crimes against Shakespeare, Malone did not share Boswell’s enthusiasm for the Ireland documents. When they appeared in their lavish book form, he scrutinised them with a sceptical eye and the formal rules of legal evidence. He studied the facsimiles’ handwriting, orthography, vocabulary, phraseology and history. Immediately he noticed problems. The letters contained words not used in Shakespeare’s time—words like ‘whimsical’, ‘accede’ and ‘witty’. The Queen’s signature was an obvious fake, the handwriting a dead giveaway. When compared with genuine specimens of Elizabeth’s writing, ‘no magnifying glasses or other aids are requisite: it is only necessary for any person, however unconversant with ancient manuscripts, to cast his eye on the facsimiles…to be convinced that the pretended Letter of Queen Elizabeth to Shakespeare is a manifest and bungling forgery.’ And there were other problems, too.
On 31 March 1796, the results of Malone’s investigation appeared under the title An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments. Five hundred copies of the four-hundred-page book sold within the first forty-eight hours. Readers devoured every sensational page. Literary London had of course been duped. Many ‘experts’ were left looking foolish. Speaking of which, the Inquiry appeared just before the Vortigern premiere—too late to cancel the performance, which degenerated into a farce when, all as one, cast and audience ridiculed the incompetent dialogue and plotting and characterisation. When Kemble reached the line, ‘and when this solemn mockery is o’er’, he voiced it with comedically poignant emphasis.
Malone’s Inquiry exposed this and other Ireland documents as crude fakes full of elementary errors and stark anachronisms. He remarked, with restraint, on ‘the absurd manner in which almost every word is over-laden with both consonants and vowels’. An excruciating example is the purported letter to ‘Anna Hatherrewaye’, which reads in part, ‘I praye you perfume thys mye poore Locke with thye balmye Kysses forre thenne indeede shalle Kynges themmeselves bowe ande paye homage toe itte’.
To produce the forged letters and deeds, William-Henry had started with genuinely old papers, no doubt first furnished through his work in the conveyancer’s office. When he ran out of paper there he turned to other sources; at Verey’s bookshop in St Martin’s Lane he cut blank flyleaves from old folios and quartos. To make old-looking ink, he employed a cocktail of dyes normally used for paper marbling. To add another antiquarian touch, he tied documents into bundles using string he filched from an old tapestry in the House of Lords.
Constructing the ‘Shakespeare library catalogue’ was childishly simple. William-Henry plucked the books’ titles and dates from eighteenth-century sources such as Edward Capell’s Notes and Various Readings of Shakespeare (1779–83) and David Erskine Baker’s Biographia Dramatica (1782). He may also have used seventeenth-century bibliographies like Francis Kirkman’s and Gerard Langbaine’s. Langbaine was one of the first to comment in print on the extent to which Shakespeare relied on prior sources. For William-Henry’s purposes, Langbaine’s section on Shakespeare was especially helpful, as it identified the principal sources for each play.
Samuel Ireland maintained that his son was not smart enough to pull off a deception of such ambition and complexity. Malone, though, mocked the ease with which the fraud was perpetrated. To compile the catalogue, all the forger need do was to transcribe ‘Mr Capell’s List’ and then add ‘from any old Catalogues whatever might be wanting…By turning over the pages of the late editions of Shakspeare, I make no doubt, the names of a thousand books or tracts of his age, might be collected in a few days: and names alone are wanting to make a catalogue.’
After selecting suitable titles from such published sources, William-Henry then used his unique linguistic formula to transform them into pseudo-Elizabethan gibberish. He also seems to have made up some of the titles; it is hard to tell, as much of the catalogue has since been destroyed and much of the remainder is indecipherable. When selecting genuine titles for the inventory, William-Henry was astute enough to choose only titles that had been printed before Shakespeare’s death. He used the same approach when gathering actual books that he claimed had Shakespearean provenance.
Point by point, Malone dismantled William-Henry’s library evidence: the catalogue, the books, the inscriptions. To the rhetorical rejoinder, ‘But some of the books themselves have been produced,’ Malone responded, ‘I make no doubt of it’:
But are old books so very difficult to be procured? And could not two or three hundred have been picked up on stalls, and elsewhere, in five or six years, during which this scheme may have been in contemplation? Within these few years past the price of Holinshed’s Chronicle has doubled, in consequence of his having been pointed out as the author whom Shakspeare followed in his Historical Plays, and of our poet’s daily-increasing reputation: yet still it is without much difficulty to be procured…The same observation may be made on many other valuable books of that age…But valuable or costly books were not always necessary; worthless books, when duly appropriated by writing our poet’s name forty or fifty times in them, would do just as well.
Picking apart the spurious library, Malone showed how the whole enterprise could be accomplished by even the clumsiest of fraudsters.
With respect to smaller tracts, a different process was to be pursued, for they could not be safely exhibited as Shakspeare’s, while they remained in miscellaneous volumes. It is well known to the collectors of these rarities, that very often pieces extremely discordant, both in their subjects and dates, are strangely blended together under the same covering. Thus ‘The Golden Legend,’ printed by Wynken de Worde, or the ‘Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions,’ or Greene’s ‘Art of Connycatching,’ or ‘A Fig for Momus,’ or ‘The Nest of Ninnies,’ or ‘The Art of Swimming’ (not by the renowned William Henry Ireland of Blackfriars, but by Christopher Middleton)…may happen to be bound up [with] ‘The Unloveliness of love-locks,’ or ‘Papers Complaint against the paper-spoylers of these times,’ which belong to a period subsequent to Shakspeare’s death. No such volume therefore could be safely exhibited as his. What then is to be done? The process is extremely simple. The unknown gentleman from whose store-house all these rarities have issued, has nothing to do but to cut out such tracts as are dated prior to 1616; and after each of them has been separately cloathed with morocco or vellum, or any other covering that fancy may direct, and the name of William Shakspeare has been written in the upper, lower, and side margin of twenty or thirty pages, it becomes a most valuable relick, miraculously preserved for near two hundred years, and now first displayed to the gazing world…In two months two hundred such volumes might be procured. Let us then hear no more of Shakspeare’s Library.
Though the Ireland forgeries included a document showing the Shakespeare family coat of arms, William-Henry seems to have lacked the skill and wherewithal to forge Shakespearean bindings. The Irelands did, however, have their own fake Shakespeare volumes uniformly bound in green goatskin. Thus bound, they remain today as sad curiosities in collections such as the British Library’s and the Folger’s.
Adding insult to injury, farmer Williams’ partridge coop story was almost certainly another hoax, a practical joke made by a Stratford-upon-Avon local at the expense of nosy and naive antiquarians. The Stratford historian Robert Bell Wheler reported that Williams confessed to the prank. A note in the British Library describes the farmer as ‘a country wit who amused himself with telling the story in order to ridicule Mr Ireland’. At least he didn’t burn Shakespeare’s papers.
Let us return to Reverend James Wilmot’s failed Warwickshire search. Many scholars have emphasised that failure as a turning point in Shakespeare studies, one that led to the first overt questioning of Shakespearean authorship. Allardyce Nichol (1932), F. E. Halliday (1957), Reginald Churchill (1958), H. N. Gibson (1962), Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman (1988 and 1994), Peter Sammartino (1990), Samuel Schoenbaum (1991 and 2006), Ian Wilson (1993), Jonathan Bate (1997), John Michell (1999 and 2004), Virginia M. Fellows (2006), Bill Bryson (2007) and William Rubinstein (2008)—these and other authors took the Wilmot–Cowell papers seriously, seeing them as crucial for the birth of scepticism in general and the Baconian heresy in particular.
That the first doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship were raised when people could not find his library is an appealing idea. But the appeal, unfortunately, is illusory. The whole Wilmot story—the exhaustive search, the revelatory Cowell papers, the shocked Philosophic Society—is a bigger hoax than farmer Williams’ paper bonfire or William-Henry’s catalogue.
To their great and lasting credit, a group of leading orthodox and unorthodox Shakespeare scholars revealed the Wilmot–Cowell papers as forgeries. The first revelation was made in 2003 by a physicist and amateur Shakespeare scholar, Dr John Rollett, who lived at Ipswich, about 150 miles east of Stratford. After ‘many hours spent in the Suffolk Record Office’, Rollett found no evidence of an Ipswich Philosophic Society, and no references to the supposed lecturer or president. When he examined the Wilmot–Cowell papers at London University, he thought the paper stock and the handwriting seemed much more recent than 1805.
Rollett shared his misgivings with two leading academics: Dr Daniel Wright, Director of the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre at Concordia University; and, Professor Alan Nelson, a documents expert from U. C. Berkeley. Looking closely at the papers, Wright noticed that several of the Wilmot–Cowell arguments in favour of Baconian authorship had not been put forward until well after 1805. Nelson, too, thought the manuscript was a forgery; this was later confirmed by a palaeographer. The papers were ‘a Baconian spoof’.
Announcing the findings in his 2010 book Contested Will, James Shapiro added further evidence that the language was anachronistic, probably dating from the twentieth century. All these scholars did well to spot the fake, but in hindsight the papers were obviously bogus, just too good to be true—something they had in common with the Ireland forgeries. Let us all be wary of future ‘discoveries’.
The field of Shakespeare studies is still coming to terms with the implications of the Wilmot–Cowell forgery. For our present purposes, one point is key: the most thorough of the first searches never happened. Well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in one or more of those private libraries already mentioned, Shakespeare’s books could have been sitting there all along, waiting to be found.
The Ireland episode shows how easy it is to fake association copies. Though recklessly executed, the forgeries convinced many people. William-Henry’s creative efforts sparked off an appalling tradition of copycats. In nearly every decade since, a new ‘discovery’ has been announced: Shakespeare’s copy of Florio’s Montaigne (1580), Halle’s Chronicles (1548), Bacon’s Essays (1597), Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568). Shakespeare’s prayer book. Shakespeare’s journal. Shakespeare’s dictionary. Shakespeare’s almanac. Shakespeare’s Greater London phone book.
Halle’s Chronicles were a source for the history plays. In 1940, Alan Keen, an antiquarian bookseller, purchased a copy that contained what appeared to be early marginal annotations. Keen, along with Roger Lubbock, later argued that the annotations were in Shakespeare’s hand, and that the book was Shakespeare’s own copy, the very one he used when writing his plays. Keen and Lubbock presented a weight of evidence, including a chain of provenance back to the aristocratic Worsley family, with whom Shakespeare may have spent time in Lancashire in his youth. The case, which Samuel Schoenbaum called ‘unilluminating’ and ‘suppositious’, has yet to be proven.
Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives has already been cited as a Shakespeare source. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has a copy of that work, published in 1579 and printed by Thomas Vautrollier and possibly his Stratford-born apprentice, Richard Field. The Trust’s Lives has interesting provenance; it was owned for a time by the Fifth Earl of Derby, Lord Strange, whose company performed early Shakespeare plays. An annotation by the Earl’s widow, Alice, can only be read under ultra-violet light. Tantalisingly but inconclusively, the annotation inscribes the book to ‘William’.
Apart from obvious Ireland forgeries, the British Library holds a 1603 copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. The copy is signed on the flyleaf, ‘William Shakespeare’. In the eighteenth century the book belonged to a clergyman who lived near Stratford-upon-Avon and ‘who is known to have shown the volume to his friends before the year 1780’. The Library bought the book in 1837 or 1838. Though initially regarded as genuine, the signature was subjected to rigorous analysis by principal librarian and first director of the British Museum Edward Maunde Thompson, who denounced it as a forgery produced in ‘a more practiced hand and one more expert than is usually to be found in such Shakespearean curiosities’. Thompson reached the same conclusion about a similar signature on a volume of Ovid in the Bodleian.
In 1573 the lexicographer John Baret published An Alvearie, or Triple Dictionarie in English, Latin, and French. A second edition appeared in 1580. Shakespeare almost certainly used one of these editions as a source of words and sayings—and inspiration. For Gertrude’s line in Hamlet, ‘Your bedded haire, like life in excrements, / Start up, and stand an end’, Shakespeare may have noticed the Alvearie entry for ‘stare’, ‘His haire Stareth or standeth on end’. In writing the words, ‘Oh that this too too solid Flesh, would melt, / Thaw, and resolve it selfe into a Dew’, he seems to have been inspired by the definition of ‘thawe’: ‘resolve that which is frozen’. ‘Forsworne’ (‘perjured, false, that hath broken his oth’) echoes Sonnet 152:
In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworne,
But thou art twice forsworne, to me love swearing;
In act thy bed-vow broake, and new faith torne,
In vowing new hate after new love bearing.
In 2008, the search for Shakespeare’s library collided with the internet era. New York booksellers George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler purchased a 1580 Alvearie on eBay, where it had been listed as ‘an early Elizabethan dictionary with contemporary annotations’. The book features many marginal notes and symbols, and much underlining. Appearing on a terminal blank page is what Koppelman and Wechsler call a ‘word salad’, a rich selection of French words and their corresponding English ones. After matching many of the notes and highlighted words to lines from Shakespeare, the two booksellers co-authored a monograph in which they argued the eBay Alvearie was Shakespeare’s own copy.
The Shakespearean connections are indeed fascinating. One example: next to the Alvearie entry for ‘scabbard’ (‘vide sheath’) someone has written ‘vagina’. This brings to mind for Koppelman and Wechsler Juliet’s suggestive, ‘Yea noise? then ile be briefe. O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath, there rust and let me dye’. Like several of the most promising association copies, the Alvearie was printed by Richard Field. The book includes phrases that Shakespeare used, some of which are underlined or circled or asterisked. Koppelman and Weschler have been admirably transparent about the book’s content and their method. Nevertheless, they are probably wrong. The handwriting doesn’t match, the chain of provenance is broken, the attribution argument too improbable, too circumstantial.
(Another recent ‘discovery’ is far less credible. In what the editor of Country Life called ‘the literary discovery of the century’, botanist Mark Griffiths claimed to have found, in a 1598 edition of John Gerard’s The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, the only portrait of Shakespeare that was executed in his lifetime. The argument rests on an arcane code of rebuses, ciphers, heraldry and floristry—an argument so patently ridiculous that the whole thing must be a publicity stunt.)
When the alleged association copies are examined as a group, it is easy to see that the handwriting and inscriptions are worryingly variable. More than one person has been at work, more than one person with mischievous intent. Some annotations are very brief, others wax lyrical with suspiciously helpful additions like addresses and occupational information. Most of the discoveries are obvious try-ons, and not a single one has been authenticated. To do so is difficult. Malone’s critique continues to apply: it is easy to obtain an old book and add old-looking writing that is difficult to expose, whether chemically or orthographically. In an annotated sixteenth- or seventeenth-century book, it is hard to tell which of the annotations are contemporary and which are eighteenth-, nineteenth- or even twentieth-century additions. William-Henry Ireland was not the only forger to use genuinely early documents along with specialised inks that confound detection. Some documents feature a thwarting combination of old and new ink.
Even genuinely old annotations must be treated with care. Suppose the writing in a marked-up book is shown, through chemical or spectral analysis, to date from Shakespeare’s day. Suppose also that the words appear to align with the contents of Shakespeare’s plays. It does not necessarily follow that the Bard made the marks or owned the book. The inscriptions could have been added by a fan, an editor, a collaborator, a relative, a bookseller, a critic. Or the similarity could simply be coincidental.
A 1570 Bible in the Folger Shakespeare Library contains more than a thousand underlinings and notes, possibly in the hand of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Many of the marked passages can be linked to Shakespeare’s plays. These linkages have been cited as evidence that de Vere authored those plays. What are we to make of this? The annotations, even if they were added at an early date, do not prove the Folger Bible was a Shakespearean source, or that the annotator was a Shakespearean author. The notes could have been made after a reading of the plays, by de Vere or someone else, perhaps intrigued by the Shakespearean echoes. They could be evidence of a predecessor text, perhaps used by Shakespeare. Or, as always, the echoes could be the result of chance. Without strong provenance and corroboration, it is difficult to prove that any particular ‘ancient’ book belonged to any particular person, or that any one book was used in the writing of another.
Trying to match the language of an inscription with the language that Shakespeare used is problematic for other reasons as well. Select any two Elizabethan authors and you will see commonalities in their vocabulary, grammar and turns of phrase. Looked at in isolation, the harmonies intensify, readily suggesting an important connection between the two authors, even one as close as tautology. But such a connection is nearly always an illusion, a symptom of blinkering. Educated Elizabethans used the same language, employed overlapping vocabularies, read the same or similar books, knew the same or similar people, frequented the same places and were interested in similar matters. Focusing on resemblances tends to magnify them. Looked at in isolation, any literate Elizabethan can be made to fit Shakespeare’s jerkin.
Let us take stock. Two of the earliest searches for Shakespeare’s library were, to say the least, unsatisfactory. The first, Wilmot’s, did not take place at all. The second, equally colourful, was at least partly a fabrication, and was relayed to us by forgers and fantasists. In the search for Shakespeare’s library, we are back to square one.