Ambrose Bierce Is Missing by Nickell Joe;

Author:Nickell, Joe; [Nickell, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Suspect Documents

Lincoln’s Bixby Letter

However true the old saw that imitation is the sincerest flattery, something more is usually at stake when it becomes blatant forgery—resentment and greed perhaps, as prompted the spurious letter by the king’s bastard son in Lear.1 Shakespeare would himself be victimized by the crime, becoming probably its greatest target. As the late Curtis D. MacDougall, author of Hoaxes, wrote: “It is natural that the biggest names should be those most often forged, and the best work that most frequently plagiarized or stolen.2

Works bearing Shakespeare’s name, but which are now regarded as of doubtful authenticity, appeared in his own lifetime. Certainly a deliberate forgery occurred in 1728 when Lewis Theobald claimed to have discovered a Shakespearean play titled The Double Falsehood; or the Distrest Lovers. Actually The Double Falsehood was a triple one, but before being exposed as a fake it was performed at Drury Lane and saw two editions.3

Additional plays were “discovered” in the 1790s by William Henry Ireland. He had been influenced by a man he had met on a visit to Stratford, John Jordan, the forger of a will of Shakespeare’s father. In addition to two plays, Ireland drew up legal contracts and faked various autographed receipts, even a love letter to Anne Hathaway with an enclosed lock of hair.4 He was exposed by Shakespearean critic Edmund Malone, and he later confessed publicly.5

Among the documents deliberately intended to falsify history are the so-called Donation of Constantine and the False Decretals. The former—a blatant forgery believed produced at Rome in the eighth century—granted Roman Pontiffs spiritual authority within Christendom, as well as temporal supremacy over Rome, Italy, and the Italian provinces. Supposedly the “Donation” (of the emperor’s crown, Lateran Palace, and provinces of the Italian peninsula) was in gratitude for Constantine’s alleged miraculous recovery from leprosy and his conversion to Christianity.

The false Decretals (papal decrees) appeared in the tenth century, having been devised to establish the antiquity of papal authority. The forger slyly incorporated some genuine elements into the epistles, thereby helping to mask the spurious ones.

Both the Donation and the False Decretals survived detection for centuries. Even after being suspected, the latter withstood decisive rejection until the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and the Donation’s defenders were not silenced until the close of the eighteenth century.6 In the meantime, according to hoax authority MacDougall: “As Christianity spread, the emulators of the authors of the False Decretals and the Donation of Constantine became legion. To give greater weight to their own essays and homilies, churchmen thought nothing of attaching the names of holy fathers whose authority was recognized. Erasmus was known to have complained that he possessed not a single work of the fathers upon the genuineness of which he could depend.”7

Secular examples are likewise legion. Among the “discoveries” inflicted on the historical community are a letter to Columbus from Queen Isabella, who offered to pawn her jewels to finance the explorer’s expedition. It is, of course, dated 1492, but—less appropriately—is written in modern Spanish.

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