10 Fascinating Historical Artefacts (That Weren't Real)

You'd think we'd have a pretty good hold on everything William Shakespeare wrote, and you'd be right, but that didn't stop 18th Century forger William Henry Ireland from claiming he'd found a brand new play by Shaky himself.

His story was that he had received a bunch of documents from a wooden chest found by his friend that no one had met, including letters from Shakespeare to his wife Anne Hathaway (no, not that one).

Obviously one of these documents had to be a brand new Shakespeare play, which Ireland had premiered in 1796. The first problem with 'Vortigern and Rowena' was that it sucked like Jupiter's Hoover, partly because the actors knew it was a fake and played the whole thing for laughs, but mainly because William Henry Ireland couldn't write a traffic ticket.

The performance only lasted one night, which was just as well as fights broke out at the end of it. The whole thing was such an appalling farce it ended up being at least as funny as one of Shakespeare's actual comedies.