Where do we locate the authentic Shakespeare? This was the question asked, rather less bluntly, by Stephen Orgel in his influential Representations essay of 1988. Taking and testing Shakespearian examples in manuscript, in print, in the theatre and in portraiture, Orgel asked how the category of the authentic varied historically in, and was varied historically by, these different but clearly related contexts. Orgel argued that although these locations can perform authenticity they cannot themselves be authentic; despite their variety, Shakespearian authenticity oddly still exists elsewhere:

What we want, as Orgel put it, others have wanted also; and this article explores an earlier version of those desires for Shakespearian authenticity: the Shakespeare forgeries of William-Henry Ireland. The story of those forgeries has been often told, and the narrative of the young William-Henry Ireland’s ‘discovery’ of a trunk of papers containing not only Shakespeare’s long-lost correspondence with Queen Elizabeth, Lord Southampton, Richard Burbage and others, but also manuscripts of King Lear and Hamlet, with, to top it all, two ‘lost’ plays, Vortigern and Henry II, does not need retelling here. Rather my argument focuses on the relation between the forgeries and their most devastating exposure, Edmond Malone’s An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796).