The Lambs of London

Near the end of Peter Ackroyd's The Lambs of London, Thomas De Quincey reminds Charles Lamb that even a teenager like William-Henry Ireland could have convincingly forged a work by Shakespeare: "Chatterton accomplished as much.  And he was even younger.  It is not impossible" (182).  The allusion to Chatterton reminds the reader of Ackroyd's own Chatterton, a structurally and stylistically more complicated novel that dwelt on forgery, betrayal, and artistic greatness.  The Lambs of London, while deliberately constrained in both form and language (to the point of "lapsing" into historical summary at the end), reexamines the links between forgery and art through the prism of Romantic bardolatry.  Why, the novel asks, was Ireland able to convince so many people--albeit temporarily--that his productions really belonged to the Bard?

The answer, the novel suggests, is that Ireland did not write Shakespeare; he wrote "Shakespeare."  Ireland's Shakespeare conforms to an elite fantasy of Shakespearean gentility: the playwright as  Protestant (66) and naturally inclined to high polish instead of obscenity (100).  Indeed, Ireland's Shakespeare proves so welcome precisely because he relieves all doubts, particularly doubts about his theological, artistic, and sexual tastes.  The plays and poems are not enough; the author himself must be put right.  The overtly circular logic of experts like Edmond Malone turns Shakespeare into a convenient copy of late eighteenth-century social mores, thereby denuding him of mystery and danger alike.   In that sense, Ireland is hardly the novel's only forger; every character who willfully sees Will in Ireland's writings--Vortigern in particular--colludes in the crime.  (Ackroyd doesn't mention Ossian, but there are noticeable historical parallels here.)

Significantly, Ireland himself appears entirely insusceptible to the Bard's cultural aura.  Visiting the purported place of Shakespeare's birth, Ireland finds himself dead to the magic: "And yet to feel nothing, to sense no familiar presence, to be stripped of all enchantment--that was most mysterious of all.  He blamed his own incapacity.  A more sensitive person would no doubt have thrived in this redolent atmosphere" (37).  It's not at all clear, however, that we are necessarily to blame Ireland for his "incapacity"; after all, nobody knows if the house in question is really the birthplace, and the characters obsessed with Shakespeare himself (as opposed to the plays) all have suspiciously financial, theological, or careerist motives.  Ireland can be "Shakespeare," albeit not Shakespeare, because he yearns above all for the power of poetic language.  Granted, Ireland's skills are best described as uneven--Ackroyd offers us excerpts from some extraordinarily bathetic sonnets--but he does want to write.

The novel contains more tragic forms of forgery, however.  Charles Lamb's sister Mary (subject of a recent biography) "forges," in effect, her own version of Ireland.  (Ackroyd has invented this connection.)  Mary, who has always found refuge in literature, has her own version of Shakespeare--a "purely expressive" poet (45)--and becomes attracted to Ireland in part because he strikes her, too, as somehow purely expressive.  Mary regards Ireland as the embodiment of truth and honor, but her belief in him arises from sheer desperation: "She wanted to reinforce his excitement, to be caught up in his elation so that she might leave her own life behind" (83).  This is the flip side of the Bardolatry present elsewhere in the text; whereas the other characters seize on Ireland's Shakespeare to advance their own agendas, Mary forges her own Ireland the better to escape becoming Ophelia.  (Nevertheless, she does wind up taking a symbolic fall into the Thames.)  Her inability to see through Ireland's deceit, pointedly echoed by her inability to perceive a beggar's fake disfiguration (115-16), is not incapacity, but need.  When she reads Vortigern, "[h]er overwhelming impression was one of gratitude that she was able to read it at all.  She was happy to ignore the occasional blemish or ambiguity" (141).  Like the characters who confuse Shakespeare with his plays, Mary confuses Ireland with his forgeries; if Ireland's "Shakespeare" is, after all, fake, then so must be Ireland.  In Ackroyd's fanciful account of Mary's final descent into madness and murder, Ireland's revelation of his deceit triggers Mary's mental collapse.  It's all a rather drastic warning against the biographical fallacy.