costumes (1600) of the words ‘for Leir’ and ‘Romeos’ (pictured top right), as if the genuine ‘Faustus his jerkin his cloke’ were not romantic enough. To Alleyn’s Diary he added references to attending performances of As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet , to Ben Jonson coming to dinner at the College, and that Alleyn ‘went to see poor Tom Dekker’. To one of Joan Alleyn’s letters to her husband (written when he was acting outside London during the plague) Collier printed additional sentences about a man calling on her who claimed to know both Alleyn and ‘Mr Shakespeare of the globe’. When challenged that this was not in the original document, he said that the edge of the paper must have crumbled away since then. He interpolated ‘Mr. Shaksper’ twice in Alleyn’s Southwark papers (pictured left), to make a case for his being a Bankside resident in 1596 and 1609. When Sir George Warner, of the Manuscript Department at the British Museum and the meticulous author of the Catalogue of the Dulwich papers (1881), composed Collier’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography he concluded that ‘in one fatal propensity Collier sacrificed an honourable fame won by genuine services to English literature’; he cautioned that ‘none of his statements or quotations can be trusted without verifying, and no volume or document’. Collier was in time rumbled for his Dulwich and other forgeries, a challenge first made in 1848. Howard Staunton (1810-74) was the greatest chess player in the world of his day (and in 1868 a Dulwich Village resident who gave the Estate’s
Governors great vexation), but was also a notable Shakespeare scholar who exposed many of Collier’s forgeries in his famous edition of the plays in 1860. The same year Nicholas Hamilton published a detailed and convincing Inquiry revealing even more. No Chatterton-style suicide for Collier, no Oprah Winfrey confessional; at 71, he carried on with research and publication. He did respond, however, in print, with a pamphlet, Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Reply : he was a feeble old man; his friends who could have vouched for what he saw were dead; it was Malone who made the Dulwich interpolations; manuscripts crumble away. However, in a diary entry, the year before he died at 94, he wrote of his ‘many base’ actions: ‘my repentance is bitter and sincere’. Despite this, Collier, perched on the ledge of the circle of Dante’s Hell reserved for literary forgers, might well now be smiling. An ‘Elizabethan’ ballad he composed is in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations : ‘Love me little, love me long’, ascribed to ‘Anon., 1569-70’; this bagatelle he forged for the Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, 1557-70 , published by the Shakespeare Society in 1848. Note: over 2,000 pages of the Dulwich College manuscripts can now be studied online with the marvellous Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project (www.henslowe-alleyn. org.uk). A version of this article was previously published in the Dulwich Society Journal
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