John Payne Collier, the Scholar Forger (original) (raw)

2007, Essays in Criticism

As far back as the 1860s, the forgeries of John Payne Collier were notorious. The question since then has been, how extensive were they? As well as a thousand-page biography, "John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century" (2 volumes, Yale University Press, 2004) by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman contains a 350-page bibliography, covering Collier's 185 books and pamphlets and his 600 or so articles, including, for instance, papers for the Shakespeare Society under 18 pen names. In each instance, they evaluate each claim made by Collier that has ever been challenged. On the basis of a fresh examination, each is graded from A (‘certainly genuine’) to E (‘certainly a forgery or fabrication/ falsification’) – with an extra category (H) for honest mistakes. This is no mere antiquarianism. On the contrary, the number of consequent corrections to be made across swathes of 20th century literary scholarship is startling.