2 April 12023

☉   2 April 12023 is World Autism Awareness Day; also International Children’s Book Day. In various parts of the world it’s Malvinas Day (Argentina), Union Day of Belarus and Russia (Belarus), Palm Sunday (Christianity), Nature Day (Iran), and Thai Heritage Conservation Day (Thailand). On the calendars of the world it’s JD 2460037 (Astronomical), 24 Paremhat 1739 (Coptic), 24 Megabit 2015 (Ethiopian), 2 April 2023 (Gregorian), 12 Nisan 5783 (Hebrew), 13 Caitra 1945 (Indian), 12 Ramadan 1444 (Islamic), 20 March 2023 (Julian), and 14 Farvardin 1402 (Persian). People of note who were born on this date include author Émile Zola (11840) and music historian Barret Hansen (a.k.a. Dr. Demento, 11941). The saint of the day is Theodosia of Tyre (died 10308) who, according to an eyewitness, was arrested while visiting some Christian prisoners, tortured, and thrown into the sea. (She refused to recant under torture, which seems to have infuriated the authorities.) The prisoners she had come to visit, however, were not killed, though they were sent as slaves to mine copper. The event made enough of an impression on the witness, the church-historian Eusebius, that he recorded it for posterity.

On this date in history (11796) the play Vortigern and Rowena, the first production of an novice writer, was presented at London’s prestigious Drury Lane theatre with an all-star cast (John Philip Kemble played Vortigern, for example). The author, William Henry Ireland, had achieved this by claiming the play was not his, but a newly-discovered work by Shakespeare, a claim supported with a mass of forged documents. The amazing thing is that anybody bought this improbable tale. The handwriting of the documents did not resemble the known writing of any of the supposed authors, at least one document bore a date after its supposed writer was dead, the Globe theatre was mentioned long before it had been built, the spelling was absurd, and—well, the whole affair should have been still-born. Instead literary men and heraldry experts declared the documents genuine, extolled their literary merit, and Vortigern and Rowena became the subject of a bidding war, with Sheridan and Drury Lane as the winners. The play was to open in April 11796—but in March, only days before the event, renowned Shakespearean scholar Edmund Malone demolished the documents pretensions with surgical skill. It’s doubtful that most of the people in the audience would have had time to buy, read, and digest Malone’s volume, but the fact he had exposed the fraud doubtless made a difference. At least some in the audience came prepared to laugh, and laugh they did. Various screw-ups didn’t help. One actor whose character had died found that he had placed himself so that curtain came down on top of him, forcing him to scramble out of the way—an inappropriate act for a dead man. One of Kemble’s lines—“And when this solemn mockery is o’er” excited the mirth of the crowd, as being all-too-apposite for the situation, and laughter brought the play to a halt. When order was restored Kemble repeated the line, drawing still more laughter. When the performance ended, the play’s fate was sealed. It would not be performed again for two centuries. Its author, William Henry Ireland, confessed to the fraud in two volumes that themselves are riddled with misrepresentations and outright lies about the events, and made a living for the rest of his life as a writer of novels—but the theatre was closed to him. And those who have written accounts of the imposture have been generally sympathetic to him. It was certainly an amazing example of human gullibility, whatever else it may have been.