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believing his output was real, but as he began to see that his actions might actually be discrediting his father rather than helping him, he began to enter into a most bizarre correspondence with him – writing as Mr H.
    Samuel had wanted to apply in writing to Mr H to ask him about the provenance of the papers, and William encouraged him to do so. In his replies he used his imagined relationship with the son to tell the father how much he liked and admired the boy, and how clever and soulful he thought he was. In one letter, which reads very much like a schoolboy’s madeup games note, he even opined that he thought Samuel ought to stop making William powder his wig, because it was unnecessary and expensive. In this imagined voice, over a series of increasingly emotional letters, he says to his father all the things he could not say in real life. This is about as far from hoaxing for financial gain as you can get.
    Still using the story of Mr H, still responding to the excitable desires of Samuel who was now becoming quite famous in London for his burgeoning collection of Shakespeare papers, William set about the
coup de grâce
that would ultimately bring the whole edifice of his deception crashing down around him: the creation of an entire new Shakespeare play.
    The story of Vortigern and Rowena is one Shakespeare might well have told. It can be found in Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, one of his favourite sources, and tells a
Lear
-ish,
Macbeth
-ish tale of an ancient British king who would give away half his crown. But in Ireland’s clumsy hands it is about as un-Shakespearean as it is possible to imagine. At the very worst, it reads like a silly pastiche, or so thought the various dissenters, growing in number and led by the renowned Shakespeare critic Malone, who were beginning to question the papers’ authenticity. And so thought the cast and audience at Drury Lane when, amazingly, in April 1796, Samuel persuaded his contacts in the theatre to put on a performance of it.
    By this time, even before the night of the ill-fated play (which surely rates as one of the most disastrous events in English theatre), William knew he was in too deep. Journalists were writing unforgiving editorials about the Shakespeare papers, cruel satires on William’s crazy spelling abounded in magazines and more and more experts were joining Malone in opposing the Irelands’ version of events. Despite the initial support of the Prince of Wales, Pitt the Younger, Edmund Burke and Boswell, William was making too many mistakes for his hoax to last for long. He had just produced an ‘original’ text of
King Lear
. Its spelling was a sight to behold (‘Unfriended, new adopted’ becoming ‘Unnefreynnededde newee adoppetedde’) but even if that did nothing to alert any remaining doubters, the fact that he prefaced the text with an address to ‘mye gentle Readerres’ ought to have rung alarm bells with anyone conversant enough with Shakespeare to know that he had viewers, not readers.
    Malone, referring to the mythical chest in which William claimed Mr H kept the papers, said that after the imaginary chest in which Chatterton had ‘found’ his poems, he ‘did not expect to have heard again, for some time at least, of such a repository for ancient manuscripts’. A satirical poem was written about Ireland, positioning him alongside Macpherson, Chatterton and Lauder as one of the famous ‘four forgers’ of the day. And when the cartoonist James Gillray illustrated the verse with an unkind caricature, the Irelands’ fate never to be taken seriously was surely sealed.
    Finally, William decided to confess his crime to his family. First he told Mrs Freeman and his sisters, then his father. All of them flatly refused to believe him. It was beyond their comprehension that the intellectually puny black sheep of their family could pull off such a stunt, and it would take months of persuasion for them even to start to believe that maybe this Mr H was