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SAT Essay范文分享

　　The discoveries aroused a predictable mixture of popular excitement and learned skepticism. On March 31, 1796, Edmond Malone, the greatest Shakespeare scholar of the age, published a 400-page book examining each of the documents Ireland had printed and enumerating in numbing detail their historical inaccuracies and manifold flaws in handwriting, diction and the like. Two days later, Vortigern and Rowena opened at the Drury Lane Theater to a sold-out house. The audience listened raptly to the opening words of Constantius, the king of the Britons Good Vortigern! as peace doth bless our isle, / And the loud din of war no more affrights us but by the third act its mood had shifted. Whispered criticisms turned into catcalls, wags shouted rude jokes and the audience laughed so uproariously that the performance had to come to a halt until order was restored. The actors gamely limped through to the close, but the play was not performed again. Shortly thereafter, William Henry Ireland confessed that he had forged Vortigern and the rest of the documents. But in a strange twist, his father continued to insist that they were authentic. Disgraced and ridiculed, estranged from his son, shortly before his death he printed the plays with a preface in which he declared that neither Malones refutation nor any declaration since made from a quarter once domestic to this Editor . . . can induce him to believe that great mass of papers in his possession are the fabrication of any individual, or set of men of the present day.