Shakespeare In The Stacks: The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare with Doug Stewart

Join author Doug Stewart for a discussion of his book – “The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale Of Forgery and Folly."

About The
Talk: In London in the winter of 1795, a 19 year-old apprentice named William-Henry Ireland pretended he'd discovered an unknown play in Shakespeare's handwriting wihle rummaging in an old trunk.  The boy had hoped to impress his chilly, Shakespeare-worshipping father.  Instead he caused a public sensation.  No one had seen any of Shakespeare's manuscripts before.  Scholars, dukes, the future king, the poet laureate - people who should have known better - were overjoyed.  The new play was greeted as Shakespeare's lost masterpiece and staged before a tumultuous full house at Drury Lane Theatre.  The play and the boy's other forgeries were forensically implausible, but the people who inspected them ached to see first hand the words that had flowed from Shakespeare's quill.  So see them they did.