Ye Olde Englishe
Stilgherrian has posted a photograph of some interesting graffiti he saw in Woolloomooloo. I have no idea what the “Secrite Butlere” is, or why it would require your “reale ID”, but the unorthodox spelling reminds me of a story told in one of my favourite books, Banvard’s Folly.
One of the “Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck” is the story of William Henry Ireland, a dullard who managed to convince England’s elite that he had stumbled upon a cache of William Shakespeare’s manuscripts. He started by forging mundane documents, like receipts and contracts, which would be more believable. It worked:
Words of his discoveries spread quickly, and so many visitors descended upon Norfolk Street that Samuel had to print up admission tickets. But he basked in the attention; once the son of a mediocre engraver and antiquarian book collector, he was now the possessor of the greatest literary discovery of the century. The rich and the powerful knocked on the door: the Prince of Wales came to visit, as did Prime Minister William Pitt and Poet Laureate Henry Pye. When James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, stopped in, he was so overcome with emotion at the sight of the papers that he could only recover with the aid of a tumbler of warm brandy and water…
Clearly, then, the documents were the work of a master forger, who had spent years studying Shakespeare’s words and imagery and cadences? Not so:
William couldn’t forge a document in Elizabethan English, as his love letter to Anne Hathaway demonstrates:
O Anna doe I love doe I cheryshe thee inne mye hearte forre thou arte as a talle Cedarre stretchynge forthe its branches ande succourynge smaller Plants fromme nyppynge Winneterre orr the boysterouse Wyndes Farewelle toe Morrowe bye tymes I wille see thee tille thenne Adewe sweete Love
This was the work of an ambitious but inexperienced youth who mimicked old writing by arbitrary additions of double consonants, replacing i with y, and tacking e at the end of words. It wasn’t Elizabethan dialect.
It wasn’t any dialect.
As Ireland’s confidence grew, he came to believe that he could truly channel the words of the Bard. He churned out poems, a handwritten manuscript of King Lear, and books with Shakespeare’s notes in the margins. He even discovered “a manuscript of Hamlet—or ‘Hamblette,’ as he had renamed it in a bizarre attempt at archaic spelling”. Yet still the public devoured news about Shakespeare’s lost documents.
It was only after Ireland claimed to have discovered an entire new play that the press begin to raise serious questions about the authenticity of the documents — and when they turned, they really turned:
The obvious target for ridicule was Ireland’s bizarre spelling, and on January 14 a journalist at The Telegraph happily “discovered” another letter of Shakespeare’s:
Tooo Missterree Beenjaammiinnee Joohnnssonn
Deeree Sirree,
Wille youe doee meee theee favvourree too dinnee wythee meee onnn Friddaye nextte attt twoo off theee clockee too eatee sommee muttonne choppes andd somme poottaattooeesse
I amm deerree sirree
Yourre goodde friendde
Williame Shaekspare
But the real twist comes at the end of the story. Ireland’s forgeries became “a subject of morbid literary interest” and were popular with collectors. In order to supplement his income, Ireland began “doing something almost dazzlingly postmodern in its sheer ingenuity and conception”: he forged and sold extra copies of his own forgeries.
It’s a great story, brilliantly told by Collins, and there are twelve others like it in Banvard’s Folly, including those of the world’s first dandy, America’s most- yet least-successful grape grower, and (my favourite) a pneumatic subway system illegally built beneath New York. The book is well worth reading — even if it does nothing to explain the “Secrite Butlere”…