Collier, JOHN PAYNE

Collier, JOHN PAYNE, Shakespearian critic and commentator, was born in London, 11th January 1789, son of an unprosperous merchant who had succeeded as a reporter and journalist. His parents were friends of Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. The boy passed some years at Leeds, and early began to write. Still a boy, he became parliamentary reporter for the Times, next for the Morning Chronicle, and wrote regularly for the latter down to 1847. His call to the bar was delayed till 1829, probably through the odium he incurred by a foolish volume of satirical verse. His real literary career commenced in 1820 with the publication of The Poetical Decameron. From 1825 to 1827 he issued a new edition of Dodsley's Old Plays, and in 1831 his best work, a History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration. This opened up to him the libraries of Lord Francis Gower, afterwards Lord Egerton and Earl of Ellesmere, and of the Duke of Devonshire, the latter appointing him his librarian. From 1835 to 1839 Collier published his New Facts regarding the life and works of Shakespeare, followed by an edition of Shakespeare (8 vols. 1842-44), and supplemented by Shakespeare's Library (2 vols. 1844), a reprint of the histories, novels, and early dramas on which Shakespeare founded his plays. He was one of the leading members of the Camden Society from its foundation in 1838, and he edited for its issues Bale's Kynge Johan (1838), the Egerton Papers (1840), and the Travelyan Papers (1857 and 1863). He contributed ten publications (1840-44) to the Percy Society, and twenty-one (1841-51) to the Shakespeare Society, of which he was long director. In 1852 he announced his discovery of an extensive series of marginal annotations in a 17th-century hand on a copy of the second Shakespeare folio (1631-32) he had bought—the famous Perkins folio, so called from a name inscribed on the cover. Late in the same year he published these to the world as Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare, and calmly lifted them into the text in his 1853 edition of Shakespeare, and again in his annotated six-volume Shakespeare in 1858. The emendations caused a great commotion in the literary world, and were furiously applauded or furiously assailed. The best Shakespearian students were more or less sceptical, but S. W. Singer and E. A. Brae were the first to express openly an unfavourable opinion. The latter also attacked Collier's alleged discovery of his suspiciously long- lost notes of Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, delivered in 1811. Collier, in the course of abortive proceedings for libel against Brae's publisher, swore to the truth of his statements respecting both the Perkins folio and his Coleridge notes. Meantime he had been judicious enough to keep his folio from the eyes of experts, but at length in 1859, the Duke of Devonshire, to whose predecessor Collier had given it in 1853, sent it, at Sir F. Madden's request, to the British Museum for examination. The result was a conclusive proof, by Mr N. Hamilton in letters to the Times, and more completely in his Inquiry (1860), that the boasted 17th-century emendations were entirely recent fabrications. Still further forgeries were later brought to light in Mr Warner's Catalogue of MSS. at Dulwich College (1883), from which Collier had prepared three publications for the Shakespeare Society. Collier replied angrily in the Times, in his long Reply (1860), the disingenuousness of which injured his reputation as much as the facts of his antagonist. The controversy widened, but every competent writer concluded against Collier, the only question that remained uncertain being whether he himself was merely a dupe or more. Unhappily for the name of a sound scholar ruined by one fatal weakness, this too was answered by the discovery after his death of some manipulated books in his own library. In 1847 Collier was named secretary to the Royal Commission on the British Museum, and in 1850 he removed to Maidenhead, where he died 17th September 1883. He had enjoyed since October 1850 a civil list pension of £100. His later books were A Booke of Roxburghie Ballads (1847), Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers' Company (2 vols. 1848-49), The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood (1850-51), a good edition of Spenser (5 vols. 1862), a series of small reprints of rare 18th and 17th century pieces in prose and verse (1863-71), Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (1865), and An Old Man's Diary Forty Years Ago (1871-72). See Dr Ingleby's Complete View of the Shakspeare Controversy (1861), which contains a bibliography of the books.