Belles Lettres to Burletta: William Henry Ireland as Fortune’s Fool

Abstract

The case of William Henry Ireland, probably the most famous eighteenth-century Shakespeare forger, is already well known to literary scholars through his notorious ‘Shakespearean’ tragedy, Vortigern.³⁵⁵ What has not been noticed before is that the cultural conditions of stage drama in Britain in the 1790s make his activities remarkably rational and consonant. His greatest problem was that he tried to write belles lettres when he should have been aiming to produce burletta. With only two London venues available for spoken tragedy, if Ireland wished to write a five-act tragedy for the stage, the Royal theatrical duopoly curtailed his range of manoeuvre. Outside of the Royal theatres, in London, burletta was the only permissible dramatic genre, and it was in those alternative playhouses that the future of British drama lay. Furthermore, even if the generic restraints were surmounted, any new dramatic piece containing a text (whether song, prologue, epilogue, five-act spoken tragedy or three-act burletta), and which was deemed to fall within the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, the piece would be further subject to licensing, cutting or even prohibition.