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and rapt attention of his father. Overjoyed with his son’s discovery, Samuel immediately wanted more. He begged to know where the boy had found this incredible relic and William, thinking on his feet, began to spin the unlikely tale of Mr H.
    Mr H, who wished to remain anonymous, had, he said, encountered William by chance one day when he was on an errand and discovered that the boy had an interest in antiquities. He happened to mention that he had a chest full of old papers at his grand house across town and, having little interest in such things, invited William to come and rifle through it and take away anything that caught his eye.
    Blinded by ambition to the absurdity of this story, Samuel implored his son to return to Mr H’s house and bring him back more treasures, even hinting at the specific sort of things it would be most pleasing to have him unearth. Fuelled by his father’s enthusiasm, William threw himself into a frenzy of activity which must have been something of a shock to the system for such an idle youth. Happily, his employer was rarely in his chambers, so he kept his forging materials in a locked cabinet there and continued his work undisturbed.
    The next Shakespeare document he produced was a receipt pertaining to the business of the Globe Theatre. Claiming to be a rare promissory note from the bard to his colleague John Hemynge, it contained both a mistake in the year the theatre was built and a misspelling of Stratford. This was passed off as a mere sign that, in Shakespeare’s time, orthography was less standard, and scribes were more careless. William appeared to be on a roll. Another note regarding a play performed before the Earl of Leicester was dated after Leicester’s death and also misspelled his name, but, astonishingly, no one seemed to mind. William even created a letter claiming to be from Shakespeare to an ancestor of the Irelands (also called, coincidentally, William) thanking him for saving him from drowning.
    Of course Samuel, not wishing to compromise his carefully built reputation as a serious book-collector, sought to have all these papers authenticated. Poor William had to sit by half-terrified and half-amused as the city’s foremost handwriting, bookselling and heraldry experts scrutinized everything from seal to letter-formation. The fact that these great men would sit in what William now realized was a bogus Shakespeare courting chair only served to increase the sense of superiority the young hoaxer felt when they all deemed the documents bona fide.
    Before long, William was using his phoney papers to paint the great man in colours which he thought would especially please his father. Unbelievably boldly, these included a lengthy profession of Shakespeare’s Protestant faith, written in his own hand, which was designed to put paid once and for all to rumours of his Catholicism. Then came a love-letter to Anne Hathaway, complete with lock of hair and romantic verses. In his later
Confession
, William would admit he composed these things ‘just as the thoughts arose in [his] head’ and, as for the actual writing, a spidery scrawl with weird orthography and nothing recognizably Shakespearean, he merely used as many ‘
double-yous
and
esses
as possible’.
    How could so many people have been fooled? How could even Boswell be blind to the truth? To a large extent the lack of special forensic techniques must be to blame, and also the paucity of examples of Shakespeare’s real writing. But in the main, as with all successful literary hoaxes, it was simply because people wanted it so much to be true. Like the perpetrators of the Sophocles hoax and the Hitler Diaries, William Henry had tapped into a vein of cultural enthusiasm so rich that it obscured the rational minds of any number of intelligent men.
    If the imaginations of the victims were willing, so was that of William himself, albeit to a different, more private end. He was never so unhinged as to trick himself into