William Henry Ireland, 1777-1835, was a forger whose forgeries primarily centered around Shakespearean documents and ephemera. He was born on August 2, 1775 in London to Samuel Ireland, a collector of Shakespeare plays, and Anna Maria de Burgh Coppinger. William Ireland created his first Shakespeare forgery in 1794: a fake document containing a fake signature of Shakespeare's. He gave this document to his father, much to Samuel Ireland's delight. After an expert confirmed Ireland's forgery as "genuine," he grew bolder. He would go on to forge many more documents relating to Shakespeare, including letters to Anne Hathaway and Queen Elizabeth supposedly in Shakespeare's hand, as well as "original" manuscripts for Hamlet and King Lear.

His most daring move was to claim that he had discovered a manuscript of lost play of Shakespeare's: Vortigern and Rowena. When this play, which had actually been written by Ireland himself, was staged on April 2, 1796, it was met with catcalls and jeers from the audience after one of the actors, John Philip Kemble, repeated the line "and when this solemn mockery is o'er" to indicate that he suspected the play to be a fake. This incident, coupled with the publication of Edmond Malone's book An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments on March 31, 1796, exposed Ireland as a forger and all his documents as fakes. Ireland published an apology in 1805, but his reputation had been permanently ruined. He died on April 17, 1835 in London.