Fake and Authentic Shakespeare

Abstract Joseph Farington, painter and member of the Royal Academy, kept a diary documenting many aspects of London’s cultural, social, and political life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay focuses on Farington’s accounts of two important moments in the stage presentation of Shakespeare in the period: the one and only performance in 1796 of Vortigern, a play allegedly by Shakespeare, and the great actress Sarah Siddons’s final appearance as Lady Macbeth in 1812. Reaching beyond descriptions of stage performance, Farington’s diary entries show how star Shakespearean actors (like Siddons and her brother John Philip Kemble) and performers with royal connections (like Dorothy Jordan) engaged with questions of Shakespearean authenticity and promoted themselves as the true interpreters of Shakespeare. These accounts also demonstrate that when it came to evaluating Shakespeare, the public trusted more in theatrical royalty than in the royal family itself.