Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.

There are two kinds of pretending. There is the bad kind, as when a person falsely promises to be your friend. But there is also a good kind, where the pretense eventually turns into the real thing. For example, when you are not feeling particularly friendly, the best thing you can do, very often, is to act in a friendly manner. In a few minutes, you may really be feeling friendlier.

Adapted from a book by C. S. Lewis

Assignment:

Can deception―pretending that something is true when it is not―sometimes have good results? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

The act of deceiving, could it lead to something good?

Somewhere buried under the floorboards of this splendidly devious novel is a real-life event. In 1794, a young Englishman, William Henry Ireland, came across something astonishing that he hurried to show his father: an old mortgage deed, with its seal intact, signed by none other than William Shakespeare.

The young man’s father, Samuel, an antiquarian and a passionate Shakespeare enthusiast, was thrilled, and still more thrilled when from the same mysterious source ― an old chest in the possession of a reclusive aristocrat who wished his identity to remain secret ― his son came up with a series of further discoveries. These included contracts; theatrical receipts; correspondence between Shakespeare and his patron, the Earl of Southampton; a letter to Shakespeare from Queen Elizabeth herself; a “profession of faith” in Shakespeare’s own hand, proving once and for all that he was a good Protestant; and the playwright’s own manuscript of “King Lear.” Alerted to the news, people crowded into Ireland’s house. James Bos??well fell to his knees to kiss the great playwright’s relics. Against his son’s vehement objections, the proud Samuel hurried most of these stupendous finds into print. But he held in reserve the best of them all, until they could be returned in glory to the stage where they belonged: two full-lengt
h plays by Shakespeare, both hitherto unknown, “Vortigern and Rowena” and “Henry II.”

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 for
ged “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 Malone’s 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.”