IN LONDON IN THE WINTER OF 1795, a 19-year-old apprentice named William-Henry Ireland pretended he’d discovered an unknown play in Shakespeare’s handwriting while rummaging in an old trunk.

The boy had hoped to impress his chilly,Shakespeare-worshipping father. Instead he caused a public sensation. No one had seen any of Shakespeare’s manuscripts before. Scholars,dukes,the future king,the poet laureate—people who should have known better—were overjoyed. The new play was greeted as Shakespeare’s lost masterpiece and staged before a tumultuous full house at the Drury Lane Theatre.

The play and the boy’s other forgeries were forensically implausible,but the people who inspected them ached to see first hand the words that had flowed from Shakespeare’s quill. So see them they did.

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Praise for Doug Stewart’s The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare:


“An unforgettable story,beautifully told. The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare conjures the peculiar world of late-18th-century London,where Shakespeare was a god. Stewart’s wry,lively narrative brings out the comic absurdity of the events without losing their strange undercurrent of sadness.”

—Jon Spence,author of Becoming Jane Austen


“A fascinating tale of forgery,greed,and deception. It’s the Catch Me If You Can of eighteenth-century London—gripping,fast-moving,and funny.”

—Joseph Finder,New York Times best-selling author
of Vanished and Paranoia


“Doug Stewart has proved himself a chronicler of great stories,but he outdoes himself with this story of a forger in search of a father’s love that reads like a Shakespeare plot in its own right.”

—Gail Kern Paster,Director,Folger Shakespeare Library


“Doug Stewart shows how popular history writing is done. His superbly written account of boy forger William-Henry Ireland’s ill-fated stab at literary immortality is as entertaining and poignant as a good novel. I loved it.”

—Clifford Irving,author of The Hoax and The Autobiography of Howard Hughes