John Payne Collier

John Payne Collier (11 January 1789 – 17 September 1883) was an English writer and scholar. He was well known for publishing many books on Shakespeare. However, his reputation has declined as a result of the Perkins Folio forgery.

His father, John Dyer Collier (1762–1825), was a successful journalist, and his connection with the press obtained for his son a position on The Morning Chronicle as leader writer, dramatic critic and reporter, which continued until 1847; he was also for some time a reporter for The Times. He was summoned before the House of Commons in 1819 for giving an incorrect report of a speech by Joseph Hume. He entered the Middle Temple in 1811, but was not called to the bar until 1829. The delay was partly due to his indiscretion in publishing the Criticisms on the Bar (1819) by "Amicus Curiae".

Collier's leisure was given to the study of Shakespeare and the early English drama. After some minor publications, he produced in 1825–1827 a new edition of Dodsley's Old Plays and in 1833 a supplementary volume entitled Five Old Plays. In 1831 appeared his 3-volume History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration, a badly arranged but valuable work. It obtained for him the post of librarian to the 6th Duke of Devonshire, and, subsequently, access to the chief collections of early English literature throughout the kingdom, especially to the treasures of Lord Ellesmere at Bridgewater House. Other publications included a script in 1828 under the title The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy.

He produced the Memoirs of Edward Alleyn for the Shakespeare Society in 1841. He followed up this volume with the Alleyn Papers (1843) and the Diary of Philip Henslowe (1845). Collier used these opportunities to commence a series of literary fabrications, as the debates of the following decades revealed. His 8-volume edition of the Works of Shakespeare began to appear in 1842. His edition attracted criticism from his long-time friend, the literary historian Revd. Alexander Dyce, who nonetheless also found much to commend in it, including Collier's biographical essay. In 1847 he was appointed secretary to the Royal Commission on the British Museum.

Over the next several years he claimed to find a number of new documents relating to Shakespeare's life and business. After New Facts, New Particulars and Further Particulars respecting Shakespeare had appeared and passed muster, Collier produced (1852) the famous Perkins Folio, a copy of the Second Folio (1632), so called from a name written on the title-page. In this book were numerous manuscript emendations of Shakespeare, said by Collier to be from the hand of an "old corrector". He published these alterations as Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare (1853) as a supplementary volume to his edition of Shakespeare's works, bringing out a revised edition of this volume within months of the first. At the same time he published an edition of the plays in a single volume (the "Monovolume" edition), incorporating the Perkins Folio amendments without any detailed commentary.

Collier's friend Dyce was among the first to reject many of the alterations by the "Old Corrector" as "ignorant, tasteless and wanton", while recognizing that others required no more authority than common sense to be accepted as correct, many having been proposed already by other scholars. The authenticity of the whole, however, was roundly rejected, on internal evidence, by S. W. Singer in The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated (1853). In 1853 J.O. Halliwell showed the Dulwich letter to have been (at best) misinterpreted by Collier, and stated (with the owner's permission) his misgivings that Lord Ellesmere's Shakespearean manuscripts were all modern forgeries.

In 1855, in Notes and Queries, Volume X, Collier reported a new "find" in the re-discovery of his own shorthand notes from lectures given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1811 or 1812, which he published as a volume in 1856 together with a list of the emendations in the Perkins Folio. In a public letter soon extended into a short tract of 1855, A.E. Brae (anonymously) brought evidence challenging the authenticity of Collier's lecture notes, and in effect accusing Collier of having perpetrated the Shakespeare alterations as a fraud. In response to these challenges, in January 1856 Collier made a legal affidavit swearing to the truth of his statements regarding the Coleridge lectures and the Perkins folio, and sought to move the Court of Queen's Bench for a criminal action for libel against the publisher John Russell Smith. While Lord Campbell, presiding, refused to proceed, he commended the character of the applicant and pronounced him to be vindicated by his affidavit, and afterwards gave Collier other tokens of his friendship and esteem.

Collier's second edition of the Works of Shakespeare appeared in 6 volumes in 1858, and bore both in its Preface and in the notes to the text a scathing attack on (among others) Alexander Dyce, accusing him of selective appropriation of Collier's emendations without acknowledgement, motivated by an intention to disparage. Their friendship irrecoverably broken, Dyce responded in a full volume by rejecting Collier's charges against him as artful and deliberate misrepresentations.