But people wanted more. They were ravenous enough for his work to make it worth faking it, and within two decades of Donne’s death, ‘new’ work by him began appearing. The phenomenon – pseudepigraphy, the attribution of work to an author who didn’t write it – was nothing new. People had been doing it to Shakespeare for decades; the market mushroomed with work by ‘W.S.’ or ‘W.Sh.’ – as many as ten between 1595 and 1622. In the mid-seventeenth century poems began to crop up in printed miscellanies, aping Donne’s style and ascribed to a just-about-plausibly deniable ‘J.D.’ or ‘Dr Dun’. The
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