AND A FORGER
A SCHOLAR
Dr Jan Piggott , formerly Head of English and Keeper of Archives at Dulwich College, evaluates the extraordinary figure of John Payne Collier, the Victorian literary antiquarian who achieved notoriety for his ‘additions’ to the works of Shakespeare, and whose mark on the Alleyn and Henslowe Papers can still be seen. F or all his crimes, John Payne Collier (1789–
roughly 40 identified interpolations. The secretive human psyche seems to harbour a gleeful deceptive cunning: Collier’s enthusiasm led him to pencil in ‘discoveries’, many of them Shakespearean, in gaps on manuscripts, in a studied ‘secretary’ hand of the period (sometimes tremulous, sometimes assured) which he would then go over in ‘antique’ ink; sometimes he did not bother to erase the pencil properly. He also forged whole documents on old paper, with a special facility in inventing whole ballads and letters. He cut out sections from the Dulwich documents, including a page of Henslowe’s Diary; he claimed it fell out of some old books he bought at auction. Collier was the Director of the Shakespeare Society, and brought out three remarkable publications with full and fairly careful transcriptions of many Dulwich papers; though a proven rogue, it was he who first researched in detail and popularised Edward Alleyn with the Society’s first publication, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn (1841), followed by The Alleyn Papers (1843), and The Diary of Philip Henslowe (1845). Among Collier’s spuria at Dulwich were his addition to cloaks listed in Alleyn’s inventory of
1883) was an astonishing bibliophile and scholar. His origin was humble, but he knew Charles and Mary Lamb well and met many luminaries of the day, including Wordsworth and Coleridge. He made his living by journalism, but was one of the many mono-maniac literary antiquarians of the age: for over 70 years he studied almost all the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature that had survived, in books and manuscripts, and especially the drama. His was an age of factual and textual scholarship: the dating of plays and their authorship, the annals of the theatre companies, and in particular the elusive facts about Shakespeare’s life (however trivial), were sought with cut-throat rivalry among scholars, as they still are – witness the Letters page of the Times Literary Supplement . He was not the first to forge Shakespeare documents: William Henry Ireland did so in the 1790s, and was followed by others. Collier might be almost forgotten today were it not that he ruined his reputation by substantial forgery, additions made to genuine manuscripts at the British Museum, the State Paper Office, and elsewhere; at Dulwich he committed a total of
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