“Forger” John Payne Collier Hand Written Letter Dated 1875 Mounted. This item is authenticated By Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity. 17 September 1883. He was summoned before the. In 1819 for giving an incorrect report of a speech by. 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. 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. 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. 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. (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. In The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated (1853). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. In 1853 Collier had made a gift of the Perkins Folio to his patron, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, who remained supportive towards him but died in 1858. In 1859, his cousin and successor the. Submitted the Folio to the scrutiny of Sir. Keeper of Manuscripts at the. And Nicholas Hamilton, of that Department, who pronounced that the emendations were incontestably forgeries of modern date. These findings were further confirmed by a microscopic physical analysis by. Keeper of the Mineral Department, showing that the supposed archaic handwriting of the emendations was made using not ink but a sepia paint, which overlay erased pencil annotations in modern handwriting closely resembling that of John Payne Collier. The facts were presented by. In collected form in 1859, with a full-page dedication naming Andrew Edmund Brae as the first to protest against the specious readings of the Perkins Folio, and, by the use of. Methods, the first to prove that they were modern fabrications. Ingleby showed that the annotations incorporated ideas drawn from very recent scholarship, knowledge or usage. Hamilton’s findings were more fully expressed in his Inquiry (1860). Brae, now in his own name, reviewed the matter more at length in 1860, and Ingleby gave a fuller account of the discussion raised by Collier’s emendations in his Complete View of the Shakespeare Controversy (1861). During the later 18th century, literary forgeries had a certain esteem, when audacious impostures like the. The medieval poems of. Or the works of. Might carry their own worth, and capture the romantic imagination. The case of Collier, in the mid-19th century, was different, because it was profoundly shocking to the scholarly establishment to discover that a long-established colleague in their midst, a person closely associated with the British Museum, the editor of numerous important editions, with privileged access to the primary documents of English literature, should become suspected of the systematic falsification of evidence and possibly the mutilation of original materials, especially in relation to William Shakespeare. S forgeries had corrupted the historical record in ways that were then not yet recognized such a presence placed a question-mark over the authenticity of the whole resource, and over the work of other scholars whom he might have misled. It became clear during the 1850s to most of his critics, that Collier was himself the deceiver, not the deceived. Since then, the falsifications of which he was unquestionably guilty among the manuscripts at. Have left little doubt of it. He interpolated the name of Shakespeare in a genuine letter at Dulwich, and the spurious entries in Alleyn’s Diary were proved to be by Collier’s hand when the sale of his library in 1884 gave access to a transcript he had made of the Diary with interlineations corresponding with the Dulwich forgeries. No statement of his can be accepted without verification, nor any manuscript handled by him, without careful examination, but he did much useful work. He compiled a valuable Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (1865); he reprinted a great number of early English tracts of extreme rarity and rendered good service to the numerous antiquarian societies with which he was connected, especially in the editions he produced for the. His Old Man’s Diary 1871-72 is an interesting record, though even here the taint of fabrication is not absent. Unfortunately, what he did amiss is more striking to the imagination than what he did aright, and he will be chiefly remembered by it. Where he had long resided, on 17 September 1883. This item is in the category “Collectibles\Autographs\Historical”. The seller is “historicsellsmemorabilia” and is located in this country: US. 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• Industry: Historical
• Signed: Yes
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