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even as the Irelands themselves should not have fallen for the cock-and-bull story that Mr and Mrs Williams of Clopton House – toying with the expectations of tourists hunting for curios – told them about having recently burned Shakespeare’s papers. One reason why the Miscellaneous Papers succeeded in duping so many is because the collection read like a documentary life, one that refracted the profile of Shakespeare through the expectations of the time. The good husband, loyal subject, devout Protestant and all-round contemporary man of letters perfectly matched what people hoped to discover about Shakespeare, and established a precedent for future claims about the identity of the author of the plays, which would turn out to be no less grounded in fantasy, anachronism and projection.
    Ireland’s most notorious attempt at passing his own words off as Shakespeare’s – the chronicle history of Vortigern – was performed on the London stage on 2 April 1795, on the eve of the exposure of the forgeries. It was a disaster. The most humiliating moment for the Irelands may well have been the ten-minute uproar, much of it consisting of raucous laughter, that followed John Philip Kemble’s pointed delivery of the unfortunate line, ‘And when this solemn mockery is ended’. Had the Irelands held off on seeing it staged and refrained from publishing ‘Shakespeare’s papers’, the controversy over the documents’ authenticity would likely have gone on for years.

Shakespeare Deified
    William-Henry undertook these forgeries not long after the author of Hamlet and Lear had begun to be regarded as a literary deity, a crucial precondition for this and all subsequent controversies over his identity. It also helps explain why Drury Lane had won out over Covent Garden for the right to stage Vortigern , given how heavily invested that playhouse had been in promoting a divine Shakespeare. In April 1794, the newly rebuilt Drury Lane had been rededicated as a ‘monument’ to Shakespeare, a ‘shrine more worthy of his fame we give, / Where unimpaired, his genius still may live’. The opening-night performance of Macbeth concluded with an epilogue spoken by the popular actor Elizabeth Farren, who called for the ‘Genius of Shakespeare’ roaming in the air to spread his ‘broad wings’ over their ‘new reared stage’. As a larger-than-life sculpture of Shakespeare was revealed onstage, Farren proclaimed:
    And now the image of our Shakespeare view
    And give the Drama’s God the honour due.
    This divine image of Shakespeare was surrounded by a group of his literary creations along with the Muses of Comedy and Tragedy, and the performers onstage burst into song:
    Behold this fair goblet, ’twas carved from the tree,
    Which, O my sweet Shakespeare, was planted by thee;
    As a relic I kiss it, and bow at the shrine,
    What comes from thy hand must be ever divine!
    All shall yield to the mulberry-tree.
    Bend to thee,
    Blest mulberry,
    Matchless was he
    Who planted thee,
    And thou like him immortal be.
    Audience members would have known that the ‘relic’ they were celebrating could be traced back to ‘Drama’s God’ himself – awooden chalice carved from the famed mulberry tree that the playwright had reportedly planted at New Place, the large house he had purchased in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was the closest thing to a literary Holy Grail. The old tree had been cut down in 1756 by the owner of New Place, who had grown tired of all the souvenir hunters disturbing his peace. A savvy local tradesman named Thomas Sharp saw his chance, bought most of the logs and spent much of the next half-century enriching himself by selling off countless carvings from it, far more than one tree, no matter how miraculous its origins, could ever produce. No one at Drury Lane that evening objected to a spectacle that a former age would have found