ABSTRACT
Gothic Shakespeare’s stage career begins with a single, controversial word: Vortigern. This was the allegedly lost and recently discovered play by Shakespeare, mounted by Richard Brinsley Sheridan on 2 April 1796 at Drury Lane, with John Phillip Kemble and Dorothy Jordan in the leading roles. In the aftermath of the debacle that was the play’s only performance, the astounded literary world discovered Vortigern not to be an early production of Shakespeare, but rather of a twenty-one-year-old law clerk, William Henry Ireland (who gave his age as nineteen to stress his Chattertonian precocity). It was an outrageous literary debut, one that came perilously close to launching Ireland as a second Shakespeare, or at least as a literary genius of staggering proportions. An intense admirer of Chatterton, Ireland had wished to emulate his hero by taking the shortest way to literary fame. Not satisfied with forging the work of a writer whose reputation already was unassailable and sacrosanct, he chose to do it in that writer’s most prestigious genre: tragedy (with ‘historical’ thrown in, for good measure).1
