Events

Get to know your colleagues 2: Hannah Booth, Melissa Farasyn, Chiara Monaco, Tim Ongenae and Laurentia Schreiber

Jack Lynch (Rutgers University): Shakespeare Forger and Cretan Liar : Puzzling over William Henry Ireland

I discuss the challenges of using bibliographical evidence to tell the truth about someone who was almost always lying. Most of our evidence about the life of William Henry Ireland is books and manuscripts that have passed through his hands -- but he was such a compulsive and pathological liar that anything he said must be doubted and anything he touched is suspect. The result is a strange version of the Cretan Liar's Paradox, in which we're forced to glean the truth from documents that refuse to give it.