Edmond Malone played a central role in exposing literary forgery: ‘unmasking’, as he put it, Thomas Chatterton in the ‘Rowley Controversy’ (usually dated 1777–82), and William Henry Ireland in the affair of the ‘Shakspeare Papers’ (1795–6). This essay and its companion piece, ‘Edmond Malone and the Trials of Forgery: William Henry Ireland and the Shakspeare Papers’, significantly revises the chronology of these episodes and in doing so repositions Malone’s own role and reconsiders the implications of his work.