As the Hamlet! advertisement reveals, the actor or musical interlude or “crowded and brilliant” audience could be themselves the true selling points for a production, far over and above the entertainment value of a Shakespearean play-text itself.  And this was true as well in print, as can be seen in this specimen plate for Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare, given away with the first number and first part of the edition: price one penny for the first number, available on January 19; price sixpence for the first part, ready on February 27.

But the Shakespeare illustrated here is not that seen in Garrick’s Jubilee or Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery.  Instead of processions of characters, or illustrations of well-remembered scenes, we find instead the imagined spaces inhabited by Shakespeare, author, in his lifetime or after:  Stratford upon Avon, alongside the house in which he was born and the memorial, which we have seen already from William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1667).  Shakespeare, wistful, wispily bearded in the center, peers out at his viewer above a signature almost as convincing as that forged by William Henry Ireland.

The endless variability of Shakespeare’s texts, and of the constantly changing expectations of Shakepeare as author, can be seen in this theatre advertisement for Charles Kean’s performance of Hamlet–or, Hamlet!–at London’s Theatre Royal in 1838. 

Hamlet! is slated here to conclude (first time at half price) with the musical opera of Joan of Arc, and was performed for “crowded and brilliant audiences” by Kean, alternating with his performances of Richard III.

And performed.  Here, the actor Paul Robeson, photographed in his role as Othello, in the 1943-44 Theater Guild production in New York City,  directed by Margaret Webster. As Miles Jefferson wrote in a Phylon review, “His emergence from the Shubert Theater, where ‘Othello’ was housed in New York, into the fabulous Shubert Alley was the cue for the onslaughts of the autograph hounds and the curious star-worshippers.”

Portrait by Carl Van Vechten of Paul Robeson as Othello.  From the Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.  Published with permission of the Van Vechten Trust.

And assigned, in courses.  Here, the 1949-50 syllabus of Maynard Mack, Sterling Professor of English at Yale, for his English 34 Shakespeare survey course:

From the Maynard Mack Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University.  Call number: YCAL MSS 111, Box 8.

And then, of course, Shakespeare was simply bought.  Here, another item not included in the exhibition: an inventory of books, dated Dec 3 1768, bought by David Garrick from London bookseller William Griffin. 

Part of the David Garrick Papers from the Thomas Rackett Collection, from the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.  Call number: OSM MSS 125, Folder 41.

In 1727, Lewis Theobald, himself a Shakespearean editor, published The Double Falsehood, a play he claimed was “Written Originally by W. Shakespeare” and that he merely “Revised.” Scholars still debate whether this is a revision or a forgery. The play is based on the “Cardenio” episode in Cervantes’s Don Quixote; a lost play, Cardenio, was in fact performed by Shakespeare’s acting company in 1613, and attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher by a publisher in 1653, two factsTheobald seems unlikely to have known.

Double falshood; or, The distrest lovers (London, 1728).  From the collections of the Beinecke Library, Yale University.  Call number:  Ik D744 728

And modern playwrights and authors continue to wrestle in various ways with the specter of Shakespeare, often producing works original and consequential in their own right. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf imagines the fortunes of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, Judith, possessed of equal talent and imagination but encountering an entirely different set of social circumstances and expectations. For Woolf, as for many, Shakespeare could also and perhaps primarily be understood as the measure of what was not possible, what could not be had.

Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own (London: at the Hogarth Press, 1929).  From the collections of the Beinecke Library, Yale University.   Call number: 1975 2236

“How happy I am to have lived to the present day of discovery of this glorious treasure,” wrote James Boswell, on the recovery of an archive of Shakespeare documents in 1795.  The discovery proved even more dramatic when the documents were revealed as a forgery by the nineteen-year old William Henry Ireland, son of a London engraver.  In characteristically exhaustive, even exhausting fashion, Malone challenged Ireland’s documents in his An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796).

Ireland’s story continues to haunt, not least because so many Shakespearean editors went on to produce texts written in the style of, or sometimes attributed directly to their hero.   As Ireland said, in his wonderfully engaging Confessions (1805), reading–or, more precisely, hearing–Shakespeare drove him to the act of writing Shakespeare.  Ireland is eloquent as well on the dangers of reading Shakespeare to one’s children.  “I had daily opportunities of hearing Mr. Samuel Ireland [his father] extol the genius of Shakspeare,” he relates, “as he would very frequently in the evening read one of his plays aloud, dwelling with enthusiasm on such passages as most peculiarly struck his fancy.  At such periods, there was no divine attribute which Shakspeare did not possess, in Mr. Ireland’s estimation: in short, the Bard of Avon was a god among men.”

But how did he do it?  And what did a persuasively authentic Shakespearean document look like to a nineteen-year old forger in eighteenth-century London?  While he might have attributed his motivations to his father, Ireland traced his abilities as a forger to a “predilection for old books.”  He happened to buy a “small quarto tract” dedicated by its author to Queen Elizabeth, and decided to “establish it as the presentation copy from the author.”   In this beautifully elliptical passage, Ireland describes his moment of translation, from reader and owner, into author of the book: 

As the work was dedicated to the queen, and as from the appearance of the internal emblazoning, covers, &c., it had very probably once belonged to the library of that queen, I determined on endeavouring to establish it as the presentation copy from the author, whose name has now altogether escaped my recollection.  In order to compass this, I weakened some common ink with water, and on a piece of old paper wrote a dedicatory epistle, as if from the author, to Elizabeth, requesting her gracious acceptance and countenance of his work.  This letter I thrust between the vellum cover and the paper, which had originally stuck to it but had then given way.

This first venture led to a better source for old-looking ink, to a better supply of parchment and other materials, and to Ireland’s anxious creation of Shakespearean documents and seals.   Ireland describes his difficulties with wax, and the scorched appearance of the Shakespeare manuscripts, from being held too close to the fire, as he tried in haste to dry and fade the ink. 

Ireland’s account, some ten years later, hums with self-congratulation. And yet, it is worth noting that while Malone faulted Ireland’s craftsmanship, pointed out his inaccuracies, disclosed his errors, the two works, Ireland’s Miscellaneous papers and legal instruments under the hand and seal of William Shakespeare and Malone’s Inquiry into the Authenticity, are not dissimilar.  Together, they frame a forensic Shakespeare, an author reclaimed through the archive, through the dissection of material evidence.  In their facsimile illustrations of signatures and seals, of authentic and inauthentic handwriting, Ireland and Malone share an undeniable fascination with the detailed anatomy of a textual corpus, the physical evidence of Shakespeare’s remains.