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De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 46 (2014)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 46

(2014)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Not-so-splendide mendax: standing up for dupes
Jack Lynch

In examining fakes and forgeries, we moderns often forget that we occupy a position unavailable to the original disputants. The very framing of our subject of inquiry, fakes, takes for granted that the items we study are inauthentic, which allows us to pass judgment on those who were duped. At the time, though, there was very little clarity, and those who argued over authenticity had the difficult task of sorting the true from the false. This article encourages us to try on occasion to see fakery from the point of view of those who did not know the outcome of the disputes.

The phrase splendide mendax comes from Horace's Odes, book 3, ode 11, though it gets its most famous eighteenth-century outing in the frontispiece to the 1735 Faulkner edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Swift is toying with the degree of authority he warrants, signaling to classically educated readers that the narrator may not be as trustworthy as his text insists. The Horatian tag, a famous oxymoron, is not easy to translate - not because the words are difficult, but because they contain a lot of compressed paradoxical sense. Classicist James Gow uses the phrase as an example of ‘Horace's untranslatable brevity’.1 Mendax is easy; it means ‘false’, usually in the sense of ‘prone to tell falsehoods’, though it can refer either to the teller of an untruth or to the untruth itself. Splendide is less obvious. It is the adverbial form of the adjective splendidus, which in turn derives from splendeo ‘to shine, to be bright or radiant’. It is significant that the English words used to render the noun splendidus capture both the literal and metaphorical implications of the original: to call someone or something ‘bright’, ‘brilliant’, or ‘illustrious’ is to express abstract or moral qualities with a metaphor related to light.

How, then, to reconcile the splendide and the mendax? Most translators have dwelt on the idea of a virtuous lie, a falsehood told for the sake of a higher good - the context of the original Horatian ode. Merriam-Webster opts for ‘nobly untruthful’. Others have seen the lie as wonderful in its own right: one translator renders it ‘splendidly deceiving’. David Womersley's edition of Gulliver recycles an eighteenth-century translation, ‘gloriously false’.2 A few translators, though, treat splendide not as a compliment, but as a more literal kind of glowing. Shining, after all, the etymon of splendide, can mean

both ‘wonderful’ and ‘difficult to miss’. So splendide mendax can also mean something like ‘glaringly false’.

My interest is in the falsehoods that are less noble, less glorious - or, what may be a better way to put it, the less noble and glorious aspects of the familiar falsehoods. And I am especially interested in the falsehoods that are, or at least were, less glaring - the ones that are easily missed. A fundamental bias all too often threatens to distort the modern study of deception. An inclination, a habit of mind, that guides most investigation of literary lies calls for some caution.

Those who study fraud and deception generally proceed by assembling a canon - perhaps more accurately an anti-canon, perhaps a shadow-canon - of lies of many varieties: plagiarisms, forgeries like the poems of Ossian and Rowley, pseudepigrapha like the Epistles of Phalaris, hoaxes like Psalmanazar's Formosan imposture, and so on. Then they sit in judgment over the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century participants in the story - but they do it from a twenty-first-century bench.

We moderns like to introduce complexity where we imagine earlier commentators saw only black-and-white answers. We pride ourselves on this, and figure our complexity to ourselves as sophistication. Where Thomas Warton and Edmond Malone could look at the poems of Rowley and ask only ‘Were they really written in the fifteenth century?’, we enlightened moderns can meditate on the role played by an imagined late-medieval Bristol as a font of poetic genius among the early Romantics. Where Samuel Johnson and William Shaw could look at the Ossianic poems and ask only ‘Were they real or not?’, we can bring in modern conceptions of oral transmission and improvisatory composition. Howard Gaskill, for instance, argues that ‘Johnson got it wrong’ with his restrictive literalist approach to truth in the Ossianic poems arguing that Fingal is ‘a synthetic epic whole which is in part a collage of genuine elements, and in part free invention’.3 As another critic, Donald Rayfield, writes:

Macpherson has been partly rehabilitated: partly because the boundary between recording and inventing folk poetry has been recognized as fuzzy, and because translation theory now accommodates exercises in re-creation where, in Borges's words, the original can instead be accused of being unfaithful to the translation.4

I admire Borges, and I love ideas about folk poetry and fuzzy boundaries and all the rest. I am, after all, a product of my own age. At the same time, I am convinced we should feel at least a momentary hesitation before we start talking about Borgesian notions of reality, parasitic conceptions of literary authenticity, and ‘synthetic epics’ in the eighteenth century. It becomes easy to fall into the enthusiastic postmodern rapture that possesses Margaret Russett in her book Fictions and Fakes: ‘The ancient is actually modern; the youth is ancient; the copy is the original; the original is the copy; the author is a fictional character; the editor is the author’.5 Paradoxical formulations like these are undeniably appealing ideas for moderns, and they keep us interested when our source material starts to get dull. But I worry that imposing twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas about authenticity on eighteenth-century disputes over authenticity can distort the material we have an obligation to see clearly.

What we too often forget is that, in making these judgments from a position of knowledge, we risk misrepresenting the process of discovery that the original participants were engaged in. We, after all, know how the story ends - that is to say, we already know which lies are lies. It is built into the very fact of our assembling a canon: when we talk about what Nick Groom calls ‘fakelit’, we are taking a lot of complicated answers about authenticity for granted in a way the original participants could never have done. At least in the major fakes, we now have a pretty good idea of the facts of the matter - even if we are at times prone to forget them when they interfere with the narratives we want to tell. When we talk about Ossian, for instance, we do so with the benefit of the report of the Highland Committee of 1805 and the mid-twentieth-century work of Derick Thomson, which between them established as authoritatively as we're likely to see the ratio of authentic traditional material to James Macpherson's confection.6 Macpherson's contemporaries, though - and, for that matter, the people who lived in the decades after the publication of the Ossianic poems - had to get by without the benefit of that work.

Why is this a problem? Isn't it always better to know more than less? Of course it is good to have the knowledge. The danger, though, is that we may lose the ability to place ourselves in the position of the original disputants who were charged with separating the authentic from the bogus. It is easy to look down on our predecessors for lacking our own sophistication in understanding

deception, but this may be unfair to those predecessors. Where we see clarity - often clarity that needs to be rendered more complex to sustain our critical interest - the original disputants saw murkiness. My hope is to recover the mentality of those who were originally charged with arguing over the authenticity of the deceptions that we now study - an on-the-ground view that does not take the outcome of the investigations for granted. This unfamiliar epistemological position makes us sensitive to elements of the debates that we are too quick to neglect.

Consider how many of the techniques we moderns use to distinguish fakes were simply unavailable to eighteenth-century readers. Take, for instance, one of the most outrageous hoaxes of the eighteenth century, George Psalmanazar's Formosan imposture. Somehow a European teenager - probably from the south of France - managed to convince the world that he was a native of Formosa, modern Taiwan.7 This strikes us as so outrageous that we have trouble imagining anyone was ever taken in, especially when we consider the evidence that he may have been blond-haired and blue-eyed. And that judgment comes with an implied sneer: ‘If I had been there, I certainly would not have fallen for that crude hoax’.

But would I? - would any of us? Had we met Psalmanazar in London in 1704, we would not be able to compare him to the East Asians we have met over our lifetimes, or to the photographs, films, and television programs that show us Taiwan and the Taiwanese. Actual Formosans were exceptionally rare in Europe at the turn of the century, and most people would never have met one. Examining the far side of the world was out of the question. Textual evidence about Formosa was of course available, but the exotic tales from abroad circulating in the early eighteenth century were far from reliable. In 1703, the very year of Psalmanazar's arrival in London, William Dampier advised his readers to be prepared for many oddities:

Considering that the main of this Voyage hath its Source laid in long Tracts of the Remoter parts both of the East and West Indies, some of which very seldom visited by English men, and others as rarely by any Europeans, I may without vanity encourage the Reader to expect many things wholly new to him.8

A struggle to find the proper balance between foolish credulity and corrosive skepticism was the default mode of anyone reading travel narratives in the early eighteenth century. And so most contemporary inquirers into Psalmanazar's story, unable to draw on indisputably true accounts of Formosa, had to content themselves with hunting for internal inconsistencies in his story. How readily would any of us have spotted them?

It is not merely a matter of information about faraway countries or unfamiliar ethnicities. Even textual analysis of the kind that literary scholars now practice for a living can be riddled with problems. We know that anachronisms, for instance, are usually disqualifying: if a text purporting to be from the third century refers to something that did not exist until the tenth, or if a putatively fifteenth-century English text uses a word not coined until the eighteenth, we can say with confidence it is a fake. Even that judgment, though, is more complex, more fraught, than it sounds. Many debates over authenticity played out before a public ill qualified to judge them. Only the tiniest minority of Malone's readers, for example, had any experience with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century documents he introduced into the disputations about Thomas Chatterton and William Henry Ireland, and virtually no English readers were prepared to enter the debate over Ossian's Erse grammar and style.

Chatterton is the richest mine of literary anachronisms used to invalidate a spurious work of literature. He composed putatively fifteenth-century poetry and attributed the works to one Thomas Rowley.9 He gave Rowley's poems an air of antiquity by peppering them with obsolete words, most of which he found in the glossaries to editions of early poets and in dictionaries like Stephen Skinner's Etymologicon Linguoe Anglicanoe.10 He also artificially aged modern words by cloaking them in pseudo-antique spellings. It is easy to be cynical about his approach to old orthography: take your text; double every consonant that can be doubled; change i's to y's and vice versa; sprinkle silent e's liberally; be a little more sparing with silent h's. But it is not far wrong. (Ireland, whose pseudo-Shakespearean forgeries appeared a quarter-century after Chatterton's, was much influenced by the boy from Bristol, and his altered Hamlet, with its ‘Toe bee orre notte toe bee’, captures the Chattertonian spirit, as many of his critics were quick to point out.)

Chatterton's ineptitude in handling the old vocabulary and orthography convinced many skeptics that Rowley was a fake, and that Chatterton had tried to pass off his own pastiche as authentically late-medieval. As Thomas Warton observed, ‘As to internal arguments, an unnatural affectation of antient spelling and of obsolete words, not belonging to the period assigned to the poems, strikes us at first sight’.11 As the story is usually told today, that was a fairly straightforward judgment; we accept Warton's ‘at first sight’ and assume that any intelligent reader should have been able to spot Chatterton's telltale orthographical manipulation. We typically divide the early partisans into two camps: the sages who, looking at the texts with open eyes, came to the inevitable conclusion that they were fakes; and the dupes who, blinded by some ulterior motive or character flaw, somehow persisted in their credulity even when every bit of evidence proved Rowley's poems fraudulent.

An on-the-ground view, however, shows us that it was never so clear-cut. It was possible for reasonably intelligent critics to look at the Rowleian texts and see not a single problem. As Robert Glynn, one of Rowley's early defenders, put it, ‘If these Poems were forged by an ignorant Boy it is certainly very Extraordinary that they shoud [sic] not contain a single Anachronism or the slightest Mistake as to History or Chronology, the Manners and Customs of those Remote times &c &c’.12 That would be very extraordinary - from our vantage point, though, Chatterton's texts are positively loaded with anachronisms and mistakes as to history, chronology, manners, and customs. Still, we should resist the urge to look at Glynn and his like as buffoons. Glynn may not have been a towering intellect, but neither was he a dunce. He won Cambridge's Seatonian Prize and was elected a fellow of the College of Physicians at London. Truth be told, his mental acuity was probably at least the equal of any of us. If he, and many others like him, could look at the Rowleian poems and see none of the supposed glaring inconsistencies that we convince ourselves we see, then perhaps they were not really so glaring as we imagine. We have an unfair advantage when we consider the case: we already know the answer.

Consider, too, the problem of circular argument that haunts arguments over investigations of anachronistic vocabulary. I say I discovered this English

document, an authentic manuscript of the early seventeenth century; you say I wrote it myself last week. You, armed with the Oxford English Dictionary, point to words in it that we know entered the language decades after my proposed date. It seems to demolish my claims. My document contains words that were not in use around 1600, so it cannot be authentic. I am guilty of either fraud or gullibility. Score one for the skeptics.

But I can say that my newly discovered document is itself the evidence that those questioned words were in use in the early seventeenth century. The cogency of this line of argument becomes clear if we apply the anachronism test to a document we know to be genuine. Suppose the text I had the great fortune to discover was Shakespeare's Hamlet, a play entirely unknown before my find. I show up waving the manuscript and proclaiming it a work of genius from 1604. You, less credulous, quote a passage from my play - ‘When sorrowes come, they come [...] in battalians: [...] her Father slaine, [...] your sonne gone, [...] the people muddied Thick and vnwholsome in thoughts’ - and you point out that the verb to muddy was not used until 1652, in John Smith's Select Discourses. You also quote ‘So oft it chaunces in particuler men, [...] By their ore-grow'th of some complextion’, and note that overgrowth was not used until 1667, when it appeared in Paradise Lost. You quote ‘And now no soyle nor cautell doth besmirch/The vertue of his will’, and say besmirch is not attested before about 1700 - and even then, it was in Percy's Reliques, unpublished until 1765. You press the case: the document I am touting simply could not have come from 1604; it must have been composed long after Shakespeare died. I am guilty of either fraud or gullibility.

In fact the argument, while entirely wrong on the facts, is formally perfectly sound, and every bit as convincing as many of the arguments that were used to destroy Chatterton's claims to authenticity. If Hamlet had not been around to provide the first citations in the OED, this would indeed be the state of our knowledge. If we define ‘anachronism’ as ‘something that had not been done by the supposed date of origin’, how can we distinguish that from a legitimate first citation? The more lexically inventive the author, the more likely our tools are to show him or her to be a fraud. There are 2,269 words in the OED with their first citation from Chaucer, 1,721 from Shakespeare, and 673 from Milton; if we expanded our search to include not just new words but new senses of words, all three figures would be well into the thousands. Surely no authors so loaded with violations of chronology could be authentic - and out go all the major writers from the canon. By injudiciously applying the

techniques that successfully revealed Ossian and Rowley as fakes, we could ‘prove’ that virtually every great work is fraudulent.

Comparable difficulties apply to the arguments over orthography. When Edmond Malone criticized Ireland's amateurish attempts to make his words look old, he noted that the spelling ‘is not only not the orthography of Elizabeth, or of her time, but is for the most part the orthography of no age whatsoever’.13 But one of the defenders of the Ireland papers, Matthew Wyatt, came back with a good objection: ‘The orthography of that age was [...] little reducible to any fixed standard. [...] But that a vast superfluity of letters is generally observable, no man at all conversant with antient writings can doubt’. He then laid out two pages of authentic manuscript spellings like farre and oppenned, adding, ‘It is unnecessary to swell this publication, or to tire the reader with more numerous examples of what no one can doubt’.14 Samuel Ireland, William's father, made the same argument: ‘As the orthography was then quite unfixed - I think it will be no easy matter to point out by what rule any individual could set down, & be governed by any fashion or mode of spelling’.15 For Malone, as for many of Ireland's and Chatterton's critics, the faux-antique spellings are evidence of anachronism. For Wyatt, as for many of Ireland's and Chatterton's defenders, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were times of so much orthographical variability that no ‘fashion or mode of spelling’ can be determinative. How, then, do we settle the dispute?

New discoveries always call for some degree of skepticism, and any time we are asked to revise conventional wisdom, we should do so only after deliberation. Some anachronisms are more damning than others. Malone, for instance, blasts W.H. Ireland for the line ‘Each titled dame deserts her rolls and tea’, noting that he had ‘introduc[ed] our fragrant Chinese beverage’ decades too early: although the Dutch were drinking tea early in the seventeenth century, it took until the 1660s for the English to catch up.16 And of course particularly outrageous anachronisms should tip us off; Woody Allen wrote a story about the discovery of a new set of Dead Sea Scrolls whose authenticity has been questioned by a few scholars because of the occasional appearance of the word Oldsmobile.17 We recognize certain classes of words as more

convincing evidence of anachronism than others, though formulating a clear set of rules about those words would be a significant challenge.

But we should pause again - even if we could formulate and agree on rules for distinguishing legitimate first uses from anachronisms, eighteenth-century critics simply did not have the necessary tools at hand. As late as 1857, Richard Chenevix Trench was lamenting the absence of a proper historical dictionary of the English language, and the product of his complaint, the first edition of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, later known as the Oxford English Dictionary, was not complete until 1928. Things were even slower in other European languages: although the Deutsches Wörterbuch of the Brothers Grimm was begun in 1838, long before the OED, it was not completed until 1961, and the great Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was the work of five generations, from 1864 to 1998. Anyone in the eighteenth century who wanted to know when a word was first used had nowhere to turn.

When they wanted to make claims about anachronism, then, eighteenth-century critics were obliged to rely on their memories, and critics like Edmond Malone and Thomas Warton were often forced to make broad claims of the form ‘Such a word was not found in the fifteenth century’ based only on their personal scholarly authority. Malone, for instance, insisted that Ireland's spellings were consistent with no era in English linguistic history, and answered Wyatt's concern about orthographical variability in Early Modern English by claiming to have read all there was to read: ‘From the time of Henry the Fourth, I have perused, I will not say several hundred deeds and other MSS., and I never once found the copulative and spelt as it is here, with a final e’.18 The gauntlet was thrown down: never once found the spelling ande. Ireland's defender, George Chalmers, was quick to reply:

He challenges all comers to show, that and was never spelt with a final e, as it is in Elizabeth's epistle to Shakspeare. [...] This is, no doubt, a long life (from the time of Henry IV) of painful perusal, but not successful search! Among the black-letter books, which he has, carefully, collected, he has not, it seems, the very black-letter book, which contains, not indeed some thousands, but several ands with the final e. Here are two, in a short passage: ‘Ande y I have not that repentaunce, even from the bottome of my herte, ande beleve not that I am forgeven for Chrystes sake, as aforesayde.19

We now have sixteenth-century examples of and with an e. Does this mean Malone was wrong when he called anachronism? - does it mean he was wrong when he called fake? Once again, we should consider it not from the point of view of someone studying a known deception, but of someone who does not yet know whether something is or is not true. To approach a puzzle like this with the correct answer in mind, and to assume anyone who reached the wrong answer was exceptionally deficient, is to do an injustice both to the believers and to history itself.

Without the benefit of reliable historical dictionaries, eighteenth-century critics often made historical claims about modes of expression and poetic form - poetic form, versification, registers of diction - and those are much more difficult to quantify. Malone actually puts metrical concerns first in his list of subjects on which he plans to challenge Chatterton:

I will confine my observations to these four points. 1. The versification of the poems attributed to Rowley. 2. The imitations of modern authours that are found in them. 3. The anachronisms with which they abound. 4. The hand-writing of the Mss.-the parchments, &c.20

Concerns like meter have been largely neglected in modern discussions of fakes: when we comment on eighteenth-century arguments over anachronism, we tend to focus on things like the dates when words entered the language, because we now have reasonably reliable information on these matters. But the actual eighteenth-century disputes merit more attention than they have received.

Jacob Bryant, for instance, makes a very typical claim about the historical development of versification, and what it can tell us about the likelihood that the Rowley poems were composed in the fifteenth century:

Many have maintained, that if these poems were of the date supposed, and if poetry had been so much improved, it would never have fallen off afterwards: as there would have been a standard for future composition. The lines in Rowley for the most part terminate with the true accent: and seldom close with words of three or four syllables, as is observable in other poets of that century. This excellence, say they, being once established, would have been copied by subsequent writers. But herein, I think, there is much uncertainty: and whoever proceeds upon these principles, may form a very wrong judgment: for this rule of determination is certainly very precarious.21

Bryant has what strikes modern sensibilities as a strangely ahistorical conception of versification: there is such a thing as a ‘true accent’, and Rowley is said to have achieved it centuries before literary history tells us it was common. But whether or not there is an absolutely superior poetic mode, Bryant uses the notion for historicist purposes by teasing out the implication of many discussions: had such an advance been made in the fifteenth century, there would be evidence of it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Bryant's concern is not at all idiosyncratic, and Chatterton's meter was one of the central concerns in debates over the authenticity of the Rowley poems. Many periodical writers noted that the excellence of the versification was the first indication of fraud in the works of Rowley: ‘On our first opening these Poems’, the writer for the Monthly Review observed, ‘the smooth style of the harmony, the easy march of the verse, the regular station of the caesura, the structure of the phrase, and the case and complexion of the thoughts, made us presently conclude they were Mock Ruins’.22 Malone too pointed to the ‘smoothness of the versification’, which is for him the ‘first and principal objection to the antiquity of these poems’. Even if his poetry is ‘disfigured by old spelling’, Chatterton's verse flows ‘as smoothly as any of Pope's’, and that, for Malone, is ‘a matter difficult to be got over’.23

No one was more committed to this line of argument than Horace Walpole, conventionally, albeit unfairly, cast as the villain in the Chatterton story. He was one of many to raise the biggest question in the dispute over the authenticity of Rowley's poems:

An amazing genius for poetry, which one of them possessed, might flash out in the darkest age - but could Rowley anticipate the phraseology of the eighteenth century? His poetic fire might burst through the obstacles of the times; like Homer or other original bards, he might have formed a poetical style - but would it have been precisely that of an age subsequent of his own by some hundred years? Nobody can admire the poetry of the poems in question more than I do - but except being better than most modern verses, in what do they differ in the construction?24

‘I told him also’, Walpole wrote, ‘that I had communicated his transcripts to much better judges, and that they were by no means satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed MSS. I mentioned their reasons, particularly that

there were no such metres known to the age of Richard I - and that might be a reason with Chatterton himself to shift the era of his productions’.25

Rowley's defenders, like Bryant, had to address the too-good-to-be-true prosodic mastery - and even Bryant was obliged to admit ‘I have had my scruples upon this head’. He was left with a not very convincing appeal to rule-transcending genius: although Rowley's versification was better than anything else yet discovered in the fifteenth century, still, ‘In every age there will be a difference among writers; and whatever number of poets there may be found, it is a great chance, but there will be some one person more eminent than the rest’.26

And so to the peroration. I conclude with three things I am not saying, and the one I am. First, I am not saying that, because it is difficult to apply these techniques, there is no difference between truth and falsehood - quite the opposite. I accept without demur that the poems attributed to the fifteenth-century Rowley were in fact written by the eighteenth-century Chatterton; I believe the third-century epics attributed to Ossian were mostly an eighteenth-century pastiche by James Macpherson; I am not trying to convince anyone that Psalmanazar was really from Formosa. We have, as far as I can determine, discovered the truth about these matters, and it seems our scholarly consensus on the facts is correct. (Of course there are still some cases where we have not achieved consensus.) Neither, on the other hand, do I want to discourage the postmodern interrogations of what authenticity means to us: it is only fair to question whether our culture's ideas of deception are adequate for dealing with all the complexities of true and false representation. There is a time to play the part of jesting Pilate and demand ‘What is truth?’

Finally, I do not want to encourage pyrrhonism, a creeping skepticism and the suspicion that everything may be fraudulent. Doubt can become corrosive. Nineteenth-century attempts to write histories of the development of early English poetry in the wake of high-profile fakers of older English literature like Macpherson, Chatterton, and Ireland are haunted by a fear of being caught by fraud. The fear is so intense that the history is often written almost in the subjunctive - at one degree of remove from reality. So many positive claims are prefaced with ‘Should this discovery prove genuine’ or ‘If Professor So-and-So is correct in his attribution’, with the result that very little gets said. We should not be so timid that we say nothing at all.

But we should be aware of the dangers of beginning with the fact that the lies we study are in fact lies. Our stories of exposed liars too often assume the matter was fairly simple and straightforward, but that was not always the case. Over and over again, an ostensibly definitive exposure of a fraud was not in fact convincing to contemporaries, and probably should not be to us. Those who think about deception should therefore spare a thought for those who were thrust into the midst of a dispute and charged with distinguishing the true from the false, and be more sympathetic to the plight of the dupe. That will require us to shed our smug confidence in the superiority of the present - a vulgar kind of literary-historical Whiggism, in which we enlightened moderns would not make the mistakes of our benighted eighteenth-century forebears.

It has often been noted that, if we consider the lie as a literary kind, we know only the inferior examples of that genre. The best fakes, the successful ones, are not recognized as fakes at all - we still think they're genuine, and therefore exclude them from our canon of ‘spuriosities’. No other literary genre has that distinction: imagine if the only epics we knew were the failed ones, or if we knew only the unsuccessful plays. And though I do not have the temerity to identify them, it is nearly certain that there are fakes and frauds still in our canon. We have probably all taught and done research on works that some later age will regard as not merely fraudulent, but self-evidently fraudulent. We need, then, a degree of modesty, an all-too-rare scholarly virtue. It does no justice to historical episodes of deception to gloss over the complications of the original investigations that have enabled us to classify them with other deceptions. Better to imagine approaching the question of deception without the handy checklist of lies we get from the simple accident that we were born in the twentieth century rather than the seventeenth or eighteenth.

About the author:

Jack Lynch is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge, 2003) and Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2008), and co-editor of The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual. He is currently working on a study of the Romantic-era forger William Henry Ireland. Email: Jack.Lynch@rutgers.edu.

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Wyatt, A Comparative Review of the Opinions of Mr. James Boaden, (Editor of the Oracle) in February, March and April, 1795; and of James Boaden, Esq. (Author of Fontainville Forest, and of a Letter to George Steevens, Esq.) in February, 1796, Relative to the Shakspeare MSS (London 1796).

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