theoryofliteratu00inwell

The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 6
poetry, the controversy around Chatterton led to an intensified
study of English medieval history and literature, and the Ire-
land Forgeries of Shakespeare plays and documents led to de-
bates about Shakespeare and the history of the Elizabethan
stage. 33 Discussing Chatterton, Thomas Warton, Thomas Tyr-
whitt, and Edmond Malone brought forth historical and lit-
erary arguments to show the Rowley Poems to be modern fabri-
cations. Two generations later W. W. Skeat, who had made a
systematic study of Middle English grammar, pointed to the
violations of elementary grammatical conventions which should
have betrayed the forgery much more quickly and completely.
Edmond Malone demolished the clumsy forgeries of the Ire-
lands; but even they, like Chatterton and Ossian, had bona fide
defenders (such as Chalmers, a man of considerable learning)
who were not without merit in the history of the Shakespearean
research.
The mere suspicion of forgery has also forced scholars to buttress
the arguments for the traditional dating and ascription and
thus to go beyond acceptance of tradition to positive arguments:
for example, in the case of Hroswitha, the German nun of the
tenth century whose plays were sometimes supposed to have
been forged by Conrad Celtes, the German fifteenth-century
humanist, or the Russian Slovo o folku Igoreve, which is
ascribed usually to the twelfth century but has even recently
been argued to be a forgery of the late eighteenth century. 34
In Bohemia, the question of the forgeries of two supposedly
medieval MSS, the Zelend hora and Krdlove dvur MSS, was
a hot political issue as late as the 1880's; and the public reputation
of the future President of Czechoslovakia, Thomas
Masaryk, was partly made in these contests and arguments
which began with linguistics but widened into an issue of scien-
tific truthfulness versus romantic self-delusion. 35
In some of these questions of authenticity and authorship, very
elaborate problems of legal evidence may be involved; and all
kinds of learning such as paleography, bibliography, linguistics,
and history may have to be invoked. Among recent exposures,
nothing has been neater than the conviction of T. J. Wise of the
forgery of some eighty-six nineteenth-century pamphlets: the
detective work, by Carter and Pollard, 36 involved watermarks,
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