Vortigern - Later Appearances

Later Appearances

Vortigern's story remained well known after the Middle Ages, especially in Great Britain. He is a major character in two Jacobean plays, the anonymous The Birth of Merlin and Thomas Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent, first published in 1661. His meeting with Rowena became a popular subject in 17th-century engraving and painting, for example William Hamilton's 1793 work Vortigern and Rowena. He also appeared in literature, such as John Lesslie Hall's poems about the foundations of England.

One of Vortigern's most notorious literary appearances is in the play Vortigern and Rowena, which was promoted as a lost work of William Shakespeare when it first emerged in 1796. However, it was soon revealed as a hoax written by the play's purported discoverer, William Henry Ireland, who had previously forged a number of other Shakespearean manuscripts. The play was at first accepted as Shakespeare's by some in the literary community, and received a performance at London's Drury Lane Theatre on April 2, 1796. The play's crude writing, however, exposed it as a forgery, and it was laughed off stage and was never performed again. Ireland eventually admitted to the hoax and tried to publish the play under his own name, but met with little success.

Vortigern often appears in modern Arthurian fiction. In the miniseries Merlin (1998) which uses the legend of Merlin and the dragons, Vortigern is played by Rutger Hauer. The film The Last Legion (2007), based in part on the novel of the same name (2002) by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, features a highly fictionalized portrayal of Vortigern under the pseudo-authentic name Vortgyn.