Shakespeare's queer 'Sonnets' and the forgeries of William Henry Ireland - William Shakespeare

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Michael Keevak

Each of these debates has inspired its own veritable industry of subsequent comment. A number of them are of course rather hollow and irrelevant, and it has often been lamented how many false questions and crackpot theories have grown up around the poems; as E. K. Chambers famously put it, "[m]ore folly has been written about the sonnets than about any other Shakespearean topic."(14) But the extent to which these debates depend on conjectures about Shakespeare's "real life" is extraordinary, and it is no accident that the Sonnets stand in the center of this sort of biographical game. The problem hinges on the extent to which the poems can serve as "evidence" for the life of Shakespeare (or somebody else), and it is in precisely the same way that the Ireland forgeries--and the supposed letter from Queen Elizabeth in particular, which will be our focus here--relate to these discussions. For both the impetus and the result of the documents was their presumed ability to fill in some of the large gaps that existed in the Shakespeare biography, and indeed Ireland himself describes a similar motivation for his creations. We have already mentioned the Profession of Faith, the letter to Anne Hathaway, and the Deeds of Gift as representative of this sort of biographical fantasy, but it is the Queen's letter which had unwittingly produced the most telling "story"--and the most telling response from one former believer, George Chalmers.(15) "Wee didde receive youre prettye Verses goode Masterre William through the hands off oure Lorde Chambelayne," Elizabeth is made to write, "ande wee doe Complemente thee onne theyre greate excellence." She continues:

Wee shalle departe fromme Londonne toe Hamptowne forre the holydayes

where wee Shalle expecte thee withe thye beste Actorres thatte

thou mayste playe before oureselfe toe amuse usse bee notte slowwe

butte comme toe usse bye Tuesdaye nexte asse the lorde Leycesterre

will bee withe usse.

Elizabeth. R.

The letter is also addressed: "For Master William Shakspeare atte the Globe bye Thames." Finally, on an attached piece of paper the poet was made to add, obviously to provide an explanation for the fact that the letter itself has survived:

Thys Letterre I dydde receyve fromme mye moste gracyouse Ladye

Elyzabethe ande I doe requeste itte maye be kepte withe all care possyble.

Wm. Shakspeare.(16)

William Henry's chaotic spelling and seeming disinterest in punctuation are just two of the more noticeable features in the forgeries, but here the chattiness of the Queen is positively astonishing. Malone had many other objections, however: would Elizabeth have misspelled Leicester's name in such a way (even if standard orthography did not yet exist), not to mention London or Hampton Court? Why should the letter have survived when so many other documents, not to mention the "prettye Verses" themselves, have not? Perhaps the reference to Leicester was designed to give the note an added air of authenticity, but since he had died in 1588 it would have to be written when Shakespeare was at most twenty-four years old, and (unluckily) in that year the Globe did not yet exist either.(17) According to Ireland's subsequent account, the idea of a letter from the Queen was suggested to him by a legendary missive from James I, which (it was hoped) might turn up with the other papers; "[m]y principal object in the production of this letter was to make our bard appear of so much consequence in his own time as to be personally noticed by so great and politic a princess as our Elizabeth," but "[a]s to the verses alluded to in my gracious epistle, they certainly never had existence, to the best of my knowledge."(18) But the letter had already worked its intended effect, to herald Shakespeare as "the Garrick of his age," and it was the chief piece of evidence which in 1797 led Chalmers to posit his own theory, in his Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers, that the "prettye Verses" were none other than Shakespeare's Sonnets, and that all of them were in fact addressed to the Queen.(19)