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Rare forgery of a letter from William Shakespeare, executed by William Henry Ireland, who rocked London's literary elite in the 1790's with the "discovery" of a cache of documents and letters, and even entire plays (two of which were previously unknown) by the Bard of Avon. William Henry Ireland's father, Samuel Ireland, was a collector of books, especially the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. His son, as gifts to his father, was to create an ever growing number of items in the supposed hand of Shakespeare, at first accepted by luminaries ranging from James Boswell to Sir Frederick Eden, then eventually exposed, leading to mortification and estrangement of father and son.

The present item is the first Shakespeare letter Ireland forged. It was preceded by a couple of couple of documents, a "self-portrait" sketch of the Bard, and possibly an inscribed book to Queen Elizabeth. Having already given his father the afore-mentioned "self-portrait" by Shakespeare, Ireland, in an effort to give the sketch greater credibility, forged this letter to the actor Richard Cowley, in which Shakespeare purportedly presented the self-portrait -- here called a "whymsicalle conceyte" -- to Cowley.

Most, if not all, of the original letters given by William Ireland to his father apparently were destroyed by fire. W.H. Ireland, however, made copies of his forgeries in later years (in exchange for needed funds,) and it is possible that the present letter is in fact such a copy. Though the paper accords in kind with the description we have of Ireland's initial forgeries -- old unwatermarked laid paper (usually a flyleaf from an old book) -- the text of the letter varies in a few minor ways from that recorded in "The Great Shakespeare Fraud" by Patricia Pierce. We are unable to determine whether this letter is the original forgery or a later copy; it is even possibly a preliminary or practice draft of the letter Ireland ultimately presented to his father.