John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (review)

John Payne Collier was one of the most prodigious men of letters of the nineteenth century. His History of English Dramatic Poetry (3 vols, 1831) was a standard work of the period, and he subsequently proved himself a tireless editor of Shakespeare: Collier first edited the works in eight volumes (1842–44) and published his final edition (1875–78), just before his ninetieth birthday. Collier was, moreover, variously treasurer and vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries and a founding member of the Camden, Percy, and Shakespeare societies, for whom he edited a total of thirty-six works. He was still engaged in issuing reprints of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works in his eighties—no fewer than eighty-one volumes appeared in 1871. Notwithstanding this, he also edited Edmond Spenser (5 vols, 1862), several volumes of ballads—some penned by himself—an autobiography, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare (1856), which he had attended and made shorthand transcripts of in 1811 and 1812.

Yet today Collier's fame—or rather, his notoriety—rests upon his reputation as a literary forger. Central to this more wayward corpus is the "Perkins Folio," a second folio edition of Shakespeare's plays heavily annotated in what appeared to be a seventeenth-century hand. This "Old Corrector" was arguably a contemporary of Shakespeare's—arguably being the key word. Collier published the corrections (1853) and used them as the basis for two new editions (1853, 1858). In doing so he raised a gigantic rumpus. When the Perkins Folio was eventually inspected by Frederic Madden, keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, he declared that the annotations had been forged. Collier maintained that the annotations had been in the book when he acquired it and continued his researches. But the accusation stuck and cast serious doubt over all of Collier's work, with, it transpires, complete justification.

In this extraordinarily dogged account of Collier, Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman reveal that Collier's fabrications began early, drifting into forgery from the mischievous hoaxes and jeux d'esprit of his earliest work, such as the fanciful additions he made to his history of Punch and Judy (1828, illustrated by George Cruikshank). Collier's History of English Dramatic Poetry, for instance, contains dozens of often rather pointless fabrications, while for his life of Edward Alleyn (1841), Collier interpolated material into the manuscript sources he discovered at Dulwich College, actually writing on the manuscripts in the same pseudo-seventeenth-century hand he later deployed for the Perkins Folio.

The Freemans' untangling of Collier's vast legacy of misrepresentation is unerringly meticulous and completely convincing. The last monograph on Collier, Dewey Ganzel's Fortune and Men's Eyes (1982) argued that Collier had been set up by characters such as Madden, who planted the Perkins Folio on him to exact some sort of revenge. The enormous extent of Collier's deceptions exposed by the Freemans, however, make Ganzel's thesis entirely untenable. Instead of a victim of a conspiracy, we are left with a much more complex figure: a precocious student (he was first admitted to the reading room of the British Library aged just fourteen) who devoted his entire life and boundless reserves of intellectual energy both to scholarship and to its perversion. In the ringing tones that open the book, "What distinguishes him . . . is not the intrinsic merit or originality of his work (although much of it exhibits both, as well as prodigious labour), but the large-scale, pernicious, and pervasive corruption of literary history it has engendered, through a lifetime's supply of misinformation, false evidence, forgery, and fabrication" (xi).

The Freemans cover all this in the most scrupulous, and, it must be said, mind-numbing detail. John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century is a remarkable, invaluable study and reference work, and simultaneously a staggeringly futile...