John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century

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Tseng 2004.2.20 08:57 6956 Freeman and Freeman / JOHN PAYNE COLLIER (VOLUME I) / sheet 1 of 864

THE ELIZABETHAN CLUB SERIES 9

6956 Freeman and Freeman / JOHN PAYNE COLLIER (VOLUME I) / sheet 2 of 864

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

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Pencil drawing of John Payne Collier by Thomas C. Wageman, ca. 1816; reproduced by permission of Collier’s great-great-granddaughter, Mrs. Wendy Gillett.


JOHN PAYNE COLLIER cholarship and orgery in the ineteenth entury

Arthur Freeman & Janet Ing Freeman

VOLUME I

Yale University Press

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New Haven and London


Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham of the Class of 1917, Yale College. Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright © 2004 by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Charles Ellertson and typeset in Minion type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Freeman, Arthur, 1938– John Payne Collier : scholarship and forgery in the nineteenth century / Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-300-09661-5 (set : alk. paper) 1. Collier, John Payne, 1789–1883. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616— Forgeries. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation—History—19th century. 4. Literary forgeries and mystifications—History—19th century. 5. English literature— Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 6. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Bibliography— Methodology. 7. Scholars—Great Britain—Biography. 8. Editors—Great Britain—Biography. 9. Forgers—Great Britain— Biography. I. Ing, Janet Thompson. II. Title. pr2951.f74 2003 822.3'3—dc22 2003061261 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


contents

VOLUME I List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xvii Abbreviations in the Text and Notes xxi A Note on Spelling and Transcription xxvii

I. The Life of John Payne Collier part one: 1789–1820

3

Family—Henry Crabb Robinson—Household and Early Circle—Radicals and Romantics—1811: The Coleridge Lectures—Newspapermen: Thomas Barnes and His Friends—James Perry—Essayist and Collector, 1814–16— The Critical Review—Marriage—Breadwinner, 1817–20—Criticisms on the Bar—The Edinburgh Magazine—‘The Scrape’—The Poetical Decameron

part two: 1821–31

101

Early Verse and The Poet’s Pilgrimage—Hammersmith, 1821–25—The Freebooter Episode—Family, 1820–25—Septimus Prowett and Dodsley’s Old Plays—Punch and Judy

part three: the 1830s (i)

149 The History of English Dramatic Poetry—New Faces in the Circle: Dyce, Devonshire, and Egerton—The Society of Antiquaries—A Digression on Forgery—George Steevens and Thomas Warton—HEDP: Questioned Data—Evidence—Devonshire and ‘A Sort of Librarian’—The Troublesome Affair of Kynge Johan

part four: the 1830s (ii)

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228 The Books of Richard Heber—William Henry Miller—The Bridgewater House Library: New Facts, New Particulars—The Protectorate

v


vi

contents Manuscript—The Bridgewater Catalogue—‘Poor Drudge or Hack’— Farther Particulars

part five: the societies and shakespeare (i)

316

James Orchard Halliwell: Early Years—The Percy Society—The Shakespeare Society—Dulwich College Revisited: The Alleyn Papers— Malone and Dulwich—Henslowe’s Diary

part six: the societies and shakespeare (ii)

377 Reasons for a New Edition of Shakespeare—Shakespeare’s Text—The Bridgewater Folio—Commentary and ‘Life’—Peter Cunningham and the Revels Accounts—Reviews and Reaction—Dyce Again—Shakespeare’s Library and the First ‘Reprint Club’—Joseph Hunter

part seven: shakespeariana

446 Shakespeare Society Papers—The T. C. Croker Episode—Memoirs of Actors—B. H. Bright and the Roxburghe Ballads—Halliwell, Trinity College, and the British Museum—The Stationers’ Registers and the Hall Commonplace Book—Collier’s 1848 Masques: Red Herrings, New Problems—Obligations—Marlowe: A Project Released—Shakespeare’s House—The Museum Commission

part eight: the perkins folio (i)

563 The Hermit of Holyport—Notes and Queries and W. J. Thoms—The Perkins Folio Announced: Notes and Emendations—Germany—Richard Grant White and America—The Issue of Presentation: Extracts and the 1853 Shakespeare—Coincidental Suggestions—The Case for Forgery: Early Warnings—The Search for Provenance

part nine: away from perkins

640 Halliwell Again—The Hillier Affair—The Roxburghe Club Drayton— Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Coleridge Pursued: Literary Cookery—Seven Lectures—Shakespeare Pursued—Hamlet, 1603—The Taming of the Shrew, ‘1607’—Mommsen and Pericles—The 1858 Shakespeare—Collier and Dyce: The Last Act

part ten: the perkins folio (ii)

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718 The Museum Inquisition—Provenance Revisited—The Scientific Approach—The Search Widens—1860: Expostulation and Reply— 18 February–15 March—Herman Merivale—The Will Warner Episode— The Investigation Continues—The Complete View


contents

vii

VOLUME II

part eleven: after perkins

825 Halliwell and the Collier Shelves—The Works of Edmund Spenser—Child and Collier: An Interlude—‘Drayton’s Own Copy of Spenser’—Periodicals, 1861–63—Reprints: The Red Series—Rarest Books—William Carew Hazlitt—Echoes of Perkins, and a Counter-Hoax—Green and Blue Series, and Trevelyan Papers

part twelve: the long last years

898 Bereavements—Hazlitt, Thoms, and Ouvry—Pen Friends: J. W. Ebsworth and Alexander Smith—The Americans: Furness, Norris, and Crosby—New Adversaries: F. J. Furnivall—Alexander Grosart—Swinburne: A Sunny Episode—Reprints, Ballads, and Poems—Reminiscences: An Old Man’s Diary—Pseudo-Shakespeare—The ‘Purest Text’ Shakespeare, 1875–78— Last Days at Maidenhead

epilogue: property and reputation

996

appendices I. Collier’s Physical Forgeries 1031 II. Red Herrings 1037 III. Collier’s Pseudonyms 1042 IV. Publications on the ‘Perkins Folio’, 1852–62 V. Books Dedicated to Collier 1055

1049

II. Bibliography of Works by John Payne Collier introduction 1059 a. books and pamphlets 1064 b. contributions to books and periodicals 1347 c. indirect contributions 1393 d. rejected and doubtful attributions 1395 works cited Manuscript Sources for the Life of Collier Printed Sources 1402

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index

1423

1399



illustrations

VOLUME I John Payne Collier, about 1816

frontispiece

following page 376 John Dyer Collier James Perry Title-page of Collier’s annotated Poet’s Pilgrimage Marked proofs of The Poet’s Pilgrimage Thomas Amyot Henry Crabb Robinson Francis Egerton, first Earl of Ellesmere William Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire Sir Frederic Madden Alexander Dyce Richard Heber William Henry Miller James Orchard Halliwell (-Phillipps) Joseph Hunter Peter Cunningham Samuel Weller Singer

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William John Thoms

ix

6956 Freeman and Freeman / JOHN PAYNE COLLIER (VOLUME I) / sheet 10 of 864 Tseng 2004.2.20 08:57

x

illustrations

VOLUME II John Payne Collier, 1873

frontispiece

following page 1056 Forged verses, ‘The Fooles of the Cittie’ Forged document of 1608 naming Shakespeare Forged accounts listing a 1602 performance of Othello Page from the ‘Hall Commonplace Book’ Expense account of John Willoughby, with forged insertions Four examples of forged interpolations in the 1632 ‘Perkins Folio’ Letter from Collier to John Bruce, 1841 Letter from Collier to W. J. Thoms, 1881 The sale of Shakespeare’s house, 1847


preface

This is a bio-bibliography: that is, a biography of John Payne Collier (1789–1883), keyed to an account of his published writings over a period of nearly seventy years. That large and influential body of work—editorial, critical, historical, and bibliographical—is what distinguishes Collier, as a student and reviver of early English literature, from a host of industrious contemporaries: he was perhaps the most knowledgeable, and certainly the most active and prolific, commentator of his time on the drama, poetry, and popular prose of Shakespeare’s age, bridging the long gap between titans like Thomas Warton and Edmond Malone and the rise of ‘scientific’ bibliography in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What distinguishes him further, however, 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. It is this aspect of Collier’s double career that has dominated studies of his oeuvre, with its true, false, and questionable testimony, for more than a century—although no systematic effort has hitherto been mounted to treat the mixture coherently, laying to rest what is spurious, while preserving the valid and valuable. Collier’s positive achievements, and his earned place in the history of scholarship, merit latter-day recognition as well: dozens, even hundreds of discoveries and revaluations have perpetuated his name, through standard editions, compilations of still-pertinent data, and fresh critical appraisals, the last o en informed by a poet’s eye and ear for the remarkable in a welter of unexplored early text. We have tried to do justice to Collier’s good work and assess its significance, and to maintain a balance between (deserved) praise and blame. His long life itself, packed with intellectual incident, mirrors nineteenth-century literary culture in multiple aspects: the worlds of publishing and publicity, newspaper journalism, literary societies, theatres and clubs, librarianship and bibliophily, and above all the reawakening of public interest in the English literary past. One obituarist called him, with good reason, ‘the most successful seconder of Charles Lamb and Hazlitt in reviving a study of the works of the Elizabethan xi


xii

preface

writers’, which in turn ‘had so marked an effect upon the poetry of the present century’; and Collier is also to be thanked for preserving, in shorthand reports, early lectures of Coleridge on Shakespeare which would otherwise have been lost to us. His own memoirs of a youth and early manhood passed among literary giants and the minor lights in their train make compelling, if forever untrustworthy, reading: had he done no more than preserve his recollections he would still interest posterity. This last aspect of Collier’s career has played a large part in our study, for the circle of his mentors, friends, colleagues, and adversaries makes a remarkable roll-call. From his early Romantic heroes Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb, and his acquaintances Hazlitt, Godwin, Keats(?), Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, and Leigh Hunt, through early Victorian contacts with Dickens, Thackeray, George Cruikshank, and John Forster, to a late link with Swinburne, Collier dwelt comfortably among literary lions; less celebrated but closer friends and associates included most of the leading English antiquaries and editors, as well as loyal pen-friends in Germany, Scotland, and the United States, and luminaries of the newspaper world (James Perry, Thomas Barnes, John Easthope, and John Walter II), the theatre (Macready, the Kembles), book-collecting and bookselling (Heber, Daniel, Bright, Phillipps, Corser and Huth, R. H. Evans and Thomas Rodd), and public life (Collier’s patrons the sixth Duke of Devonshire and the first Earl of Ellesmere, and Chief Justice Lord Campbell). We have paid special attention to several men, some of them biographically neglected, whose interaction with Collier was long-standing and significant: antiquaries and editors Thomas Amyot, John Bruce, Joseph Hunter, Thomas Wright, and W. J. Thoms, Robert Lemon and W. B. D. D. (‘Alphabet’) Turnbull of the Record Office, the Manchester fabricator James Crossley, the Anglo-Australian Barron Field, ‘poor’ Peter Cunningham, and William Carew Hazlitt, the essayist’s grandson; ballad and early music specialists William Chappell, Edward Rimbault, and J. W. Ebsworth; rival or friendly Shakespearians S. W. Singer, Charles Knight, and Tycho Mommsen of Oldenburg; Americans Francis James Child, Richard Grant White, and H. H. Furness; and the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, whose upright loyalty to his younger friend, and his avuncular concern for him, endured more than sixty years. Relationships with Collier could and did prove difficult, and among friends-turned-foes we count especially Sir Frederic Madden of the British Museum, whose own intemperate but invaluable diary is among our principal sources, and the best-loved and best-persecuted intimate of Collier’s early years, the Rev. Alexander Dyce. James Orchard Halliwell (-Phillipps), perhaps Collier’s only rival in the century for productivity in their common areas of research, had his ins and outs too with Collier over some four decades, but remained unestranged at the end. Out-and-out literary enemies


preface

xiii

include the exposers of Collier’s Shakespearian forgeries, Clement M. Ingleby, N. E. S. A. Hamilton (of the British Museum), the chessmaster/Shakespearian Howard Staunton, and the elusive, obsessed Andrew E. Brae; the ‘Prince of Librarians’ Antonio Panizzi, whose great catalogue Collier opposed, to his sorrow; and the severe heirs of Collier’s pioneering and corrupt editorial corpus, Frederick J. Furnivall and Alexander B. Grosart. Whatever we came finally to think of John Payne Collier—and fi een years in his company cannot have passed without some sympathy and affection— our initial concern has been with the dark side of his work. As biographers we have tried to respond to the first and last questions everyone asks: Why would anyone with Collier’s undoubted abilities gamble so recklessly, and on so many occasions, on hoaxing his audience? Why was it, in the words of Sir George Warner (Dictionary of National Biography, 1887), that Collier ‘sacrificed an honourable fame won by genuine services to English literature . . . to one fatal propensity’? The temptation to crack this nut cleanly has ever been with us, and to what extent we have succeeded in even denting it our readers may judge; but we hope not to have taken a glib line on the undoubtedly complex motives for a lifetime of intermittent perversity. Although Collier’s apologists in his own day and ours have submitted alternative scenarios for the hundreds of falsifications we calendar, involving for the most part alternative blame, there is really (alas) no case at all for Collier as innocent dupe or conspiracy victim. Any attempt to understand John Payne Collier that begins by positing his literary crimes as ‘unproven’, however charitable or high-mindedly suspended such a judgement might seem, simply forfeits the opportunity to explain him at all.

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Collier’s myriad forgeries and falsifications are by no means dead-letter distractions in the world of modern scholarship: dozens of new works each year are still contaminated by uncertainty or error deriving from Collier, or from the o en hapless attempts of his successors to cope with his far-flung dragon’s teeth. Were only physical forgeries at issue the task of dismissing them would be easy, but these are comparatively few (see Appendix I), and by far the more insidious mischief is by way of ‘report’ in Collier’s vast range of publication—e.g., ‘I have before me’ a copy of a now-unlocated text, or ‘A friend of mine informs me’, etc., etc. Add to these unconfirmed and unconfirmable statements the fact that they proliferate wildly, reappearing from volume to volume via reprint or citation in whatever form Collier adopted or his followers trusted, and the need for root-and-branch pursuit will be clear. Our solution has been to endow our bibliography of Collier’s published works—the chronological list of 185 volumes and sets (‘A’ numbers), more than 500 periodical papers and articles, and a few


xiv

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linked items—with a list of ‘Questioned Data’ (QD) for each entry, identifying statements that have been suspected in the past as false or misleading, or now deserve to be. Some of these QD, which are numbered sequentially and by entry for easy cross-reference, have turned out to be verifiable, and should help to combat another of Collier’s dangerous legacies: the ‘contagion of forgery’, as we have called it elsewhere, or the shadow cast on genuine evidence by the mere fact of its origin. Other QD may be honest mistakes or misjudgements by Collier—dismissible as such, but not based upon a corrupt or untrustworthy source. In many cases the problem involved is addressed in the main text, to which reference is given. In the interest of preserving narrative coherence in the biography, we have endeavoured to minimize duplication between it and the bibliography by cross-referring instead of repeating. For the convenience of those who want a no-frills synopsis, we have ‘graded’ each QD on a sliding scale, from sans-serif ‘A’ and ‘B’ (certainly or probably genuine) to ‘D’ and ‘E’ (probably or certainly false), via ‘C’ (we simply don’t know), and with ‘H’ (apparently honest mistake) and ‘N’ (no judgement called for) alongside; we have normally resorted to ‘B’ and ‘D’ when the materials involved seem to be clearly genuine or clearly false but remain unlocated. These are no more than summary opinions, based in most cases upon more extended exposition in the text; any new discovery or reconsideration will of course moderate such conclusions, which are restricted to detachable sigla for that reason. Between our biography and bibliography are five appendices, treating (I) all the physical forgeries now known to us, and some others (‘landmines in waiting’) that probably exist but whose location we have not ascertained; (II) ‘red herrings’—suggestions of forgeries by Collier, beyond those addressed in the text and bibliography, which we believe groundless; (III) pseudonyms employed by Collier in books, periodicals, and collections of essays; (IV) the literature of the ‘Perkins Folio’ controversy, 1852–62; and (V) books dedicated to Collier by his contemporaries. Our MS sources are indicated specifically in the text and footnotes, and there is a narrative summary of their whereabouts at page 1399, followed by a list of printed sources; a list of abbreviations used in the text and notes appears at page xxi, and there is a separate preface to the bibliography at page 1059. While the entire career of John Payne Collier has been our chosen province, and we ourselves have come to regard the light and dark parts of it as complementary, and worth more than case-by-case clearance or censure, object-oriented users of these volumes will have other priorities: our index is designed (in part) to guide them directly to the individual texts and QD they require, with no need of the bio-bibliographical tour. A final note: our documentation and indictive arguments in the biographical text may seem at times over-zealous, but from the outset of our study we


preface

xv

have been painfully aware of how open to dispute and misunderstanding such matters can be. Without wishing to belabour the obvious or the conceded, we have tried to imagine Collier himself—a trained barrister—peering over our shoulders through every stage, as keen to catch us out in argumentative leaps as we are to present our best case. Readers who will accept that we have not consciously drawn conclusions beyond what extant records confirm may address the citation selectively. London, February 2003



acknowledgements

A project involving two of us for fi een years, and in some respects stretching back over another three decades, has incurred a large number of debts, which it is a pleasure to acknowledge. Our dependence upon prior scholarship is largely recorded at pages 1018– 29, with special note of the unpublished research of A. W. Ashby. Here we wish to thank libraries and repositories that have unfailingly welcomed us, allowed us to quote from material in their collections, and o en provided services beyond any expectation. In London: the Athenaeum Club, the British Library, the Corporation of London (Guildhall Library and the London Metropolitan Archives), the Trustees of Dr. Williams’s Library, Dulwich College Library, the John Murray archive, Lambeth Palace Library, the London Library, the National Art Library (Victoria and Albert Museum), the TNL Archive, the Public Record Office and Family Records Centre, the Roxburghe Club, and the libraries and archives of the British Museum, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Worshipful Company of Stationers, City University, the Institute of Historical Research, the University of London, King’s College, and University College. Elsewhere in Great Britain: the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; the Central Library, Manchester; the Shakespeare Centre Library and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office, Stratford-upon-Avon; the Somerset Record Office, Taunton; the Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich; the Trustees of the Trevelyan Family Papers at the Robinson Library, University of Newcastle; the Bodleian Library and English Faculty Library, Oxford; the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge; and the libraries of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Reading. In New Zealand, the Alexander Turnbull Library (National Library of New Zealand, Wellington); and in the United States: the Armstrong Browning Library (Baylor University, Waco, Texas); the Boston Public Library; the Chapin Library (Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts); the Clements Library (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor); the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.; the H. H. Furness Manuscript Collection (University of Pennsylvaxvii


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acknowledgements

nia, Philadelphia); the library of the Grolier Club, New York City; the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the New York Public Library; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City; the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia; and the libraries of Harvard University (the Houghton and Widener Libraries and the Harvard Theatre Collection), Princeton University, Vassar College, and Yale University (Beinecke Library and the James and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection). For extraordinary support we thank the Centre for the Book at the British Library, through whose fellowship programme Janet Freeman enjoyed special access to the collections in 1995–96, and—sine qua non potest esse—the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, whose more than generous publication subsidy permitted our work to see the light in the form we had envisioned. Our thanks are also due to our editors at Yale University Press, John Kulka, Margaret Otzel, and Ann Hawthorne; to the designer, Charles Ellertson; and to our friend and agent, Jane Gelfman. Librarians and archivists past and present who have particularly helped us are Melanie Aspey, Alan Bell, Sue Berry, John Bidwell, W. H. Bond, Michael Bott, Diana Chardin, John Creasey, Stephen Crook, Peter Day, Sarah Dodgson, Mark Farrell, Stephen Ferguson, Annette Fern, Elizabeth Freebairn, Elizabeth Fuller, Vincent Giroud, John Goldfinch, Lesley Gordon, Wayne G. Hammond, Mihai Handrea, P. R. Harris, Mervyn Jannetta, Brian Jenkins, Susan Jones and other members of the Athenaeum Indexing Project, Hilton Kelliher, Richard Luckett, Joy McCarthy, Mairi Macdonald, David McKitterick, Leslie Morris, Virginia Murray, Robin Myers, Jean Newlin, Elizabeth Niemyer, Bernard Nurse, Richard W. Oram, Robert Parks, Ronald D. Patkus, Ann Payne, Michael Pearman, Jan Piggott, Suzanne Porter, Katherine Reagan, Mairi C. Rennie, David C. Retter, Arlene Shy, Theresa Thom, Daniel Traister, Kay Walters, Bruce Whiteman, and Heather Wolfe. We owe very special thanks, for their generosity in response to a host of nagging enquiries, to Jean Archibald, Thomas V. Lange, Stephen Parks, Mary L. Robertson, Roger E. Stoddard, Stephen Tabor, and Georgianna Ziegler. Private collectors who have shared Collierian materials with us include Tyrus Harmsen, Giles Mandelbrote, and Toshiyuki Takamiya. Without our own collection of books and manuscripts we could not have faced up to our task, and that has long depended on hints and offers from colleagues in the booktrade. We are grateful to everyone who supplied us over the years or alerted us to available resources, but in particular to Julian Browning, James Burmester, the late Robert Clark, James Cummins, Roy Davids, Christopher Edwards, Simon Finch, William F. Hale, Martin Hamlyn, A. R. Heath, David Holmes, Jolyon


acknowledgements

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Hudson, Brian Lake, Anthony and William Laywood, Peter Miller and Tony Fothergill, John Price, Jonathan and Lisa Reynolds, Justin Schiller, Michael Silverman, John Walwyn-Jones, Stephen Weissman, and John Wilson; to Robert Harding and John Manners of Maggs Brothers, Ltd.; and—for nearly thirty years’ assistance, encouragement, and indulgence—to the firm and staff of Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., notably Lord Parmoor, Nicholas Poole-Wilson, and the late Edmund M. Dring. Colleagues and fellow-scholars who provided essential help on many fronts, and tolerated our monomania, are Nicolas Barker, Peter Beal, Eric Berryman, John Blatchly, Peter Blayney, Martin Butler, the late Giles E. Dawson, A. S. G. Edwards, Donald Farren, R. A. Foakes, Roland Folter, Mirjam Foot, Colin Franklin, Paul Grinke, Werner Gundersheimer, Robert D. Hicks, Robert D. Hume, Ian Jackson, the late William Alexander Jackson, Ricky Jay, David Jenkins, Laurie E. Maguire, Louis Marder, Judith Milhous, Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, Paul Needham, Alan H. Nelson, Katharine F. Pantzer, Anthony Payne, Julian Pooley, John Porter, Richard Proudfoot, Donald H. Reiman, Joe Riehl, the late Samuel Schoenbaum, Albert Tricomi, Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, Valerie Wayne, Oskar Wellens, Anthony West, Joan Winterkorn, John Wolfson, Henry Woudhuysen, and Joyce Youings. We want especially to thank three friends among the above: Theodore Hofmann, for his enthusiasm and innumerable timely kindnesses since the mid-1960s; Marvin Spevack, for sharing with us his bio-bibliographical research on James Orchard Halliwell in rich detail; and Arnold Hunt, who in recent years unearthed considerable Collierian data for us, and read our text through with great care and patience, preserving us from many errors and infelicities—not to say (of course) all. And finally, our gratitude must be recorded to John Payne Collier’s great-great-granddaughters, Wendy Gillett and the late Diana Rees, who allowed us to consult, and eventually to acquire, a large and biographically rewarding Nachlass of manuscripts, letters, and annotated books, which we promised to put to good use. Some of our conclusions may seem poor return for their hospitality and trust, but we hope that a balanced account of their remarkable ancestor—neither demonizing nor a whitewash—will justify both.



abbreviations in the text and notes

Arber

Ashby papers

BARB

Beinecke Bentley BL BLM BM

Bodl. BoPL Boswell-Malone BRH Bullough Camden Society Minutes CET Chambers, ES

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Chambers, WS

Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640, 5 vols. (London, 1875–94; reprint, 1950 and 1967) Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.1455–56: notes by Arthur William Ashby toward a biography and bibliography of John Payne Collier, ca. 1949–51 J. P. Collier, A Bibliographical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1865; reprint, 1966) Beinecke Library, Yale University Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1941–68) British Library, London British Lady’s Magazine British Museum, London (the Museum Library, founded in 1753, became part of the British Library in 1973) Bodleian Library, Oxford Boston Public Library, Boston, Mass. William Shakespeare, Plays and Poems, ed. Edmond Malone and James Boswell Jr., 21 vols. (London, 1821) Bulletin of Research in the Humanities Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London, 1957–75) Minute Books of the Camden Society, Royal Historical Society, London Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923) E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1930) xxi


xxii Child CMI Crum

CUL DAB Dawson Dickens, Letters Dickey DNB Dyce Collection EETS EHR ELH ELR EMS EUL FF and FF/K

FJF Folger Forster Collection Furness Collection Ganzel

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GM Greg

abbreviations Francis J. Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (Boston, 1882–98; reprint, 1957–65) Clement Mansfield Ingleby Margaret Crum, ed., First-Line Index of English Poetry, 1500–1800, in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1969) Cambridge University Library Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1927–36) Giles Dawson, ‘John Payne Collier’s Great Forgery’, SB 24 (1971), 1–26 The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1965–2002) Franklin Dickey, ‘The Old Man at Work: Forgeries in the Stationers’ Registers’, SQ 11 (1960), 39–47 Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vols. (London, 1885–1901) Books and papers of Alexander Dyce, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Early English Text Society English Historical Review English Literary History English Literary Renaissance English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 Edinburgh University Library Books and manuscripts in the collection of Arthur and Janet Freeman, London; ‘FF/K’ indicates material formerly in the possession of Collier’s descendants, some of which was cited by Dewey Ganzel as ‘Koop’ Frederick James Furnivall Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Books and papers of John Forster, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London H. H. Furness Manuscript Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania Dewey Ganzel, Fortune and Men’s Eyes: The Career of John Payne Collier (Oxford, 1982) Gentleman’s Magazine W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (London, 1939–59)


abbreviations Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines

xxiii

J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (unless otherwise stated, reference is to the 7th ed., 1887) Hamilton N. E. S. A. Hamilton, An Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakspere, Folio, 1632 (London, 1860; reprint, 1973) Hardy T. D. Hardy, A Review of the Present State of the Shakespearian Controversy (London, 1860) Harmsen Collection of Tyrus Harmsen, Pasadena, Calif. Hazlitt, Handbook William Carew Hazlitt, Handbook to the Popular, Poetical, and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain (London, 1867) HCB Folger MS V.a.339: the so-called Hall Commonplace Book HCR Henry Crabb Robinson HCR Correspondence Correspondence, 32 vols., arranged chronologically, Dr. Williams’s Library, London HCR Diary MSS 101.1–33 (1811–67), Dr. Williams’s Library, London HCR Reminiscences Reminiscences, 1790–1843, written 1846–59; 4 vols., Dr. Williams’s Library, London HCR Travel Diary Travel diaries, 1801–66, Dr. Williams’s Library, London Heber sale Sale catalogues of Richard Heber’s books and MSS (London, 1834–37) HEDP J. P. Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry . . . and Annals of the Stage, 3 vols. (London, 1831; reprint, 1970) HEP Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, 3 vols. (London, 1774–81; reprint, 1968) HHF Horace Howard Furness HLB Harvard Library Bulletin HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University HRC Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin Huntington Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. IELM Index of English Literary Manuscripts (1980–) ILN Illustrated London News Ingleby, Clement Mansfield Ingleby, A Complete View of the Complete View Shakspere Controversy, Concerning the Authenticity and


xxiv

abbreviations

Genuineness of Manuscript Matter . . . Published by Mr. J. Payne Collier (London, 1861; reprint, 1973) JEGP Journal of English and German Philology JOH James Orchard Halliwell(-Phillipps) John Murray archives Archives of John Murray, London JPC John Payne Collier JPC Diary Folger MSS M.a.29–40, 12 vols. (1872–82) JPC Early Diary Folger MSS M.a.219–28: JPC’s diary (1811) and notes of lectures by Coleridge, 10 vols. (1811–12) JPC Memoirs Folger MS M.a.230, written ca. 1879 JPC sale Sale catalogue of JPC’s books and MSS, Sotheby’s (London), 7–9 August 1884 JWE Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth L-A-R R. W. Lowe, English Theatrical Literature, 1559–1900: A Bibliography, rev. J. F. Arnott and J. W. Robinson (London, 1970) Lee Sidney Lee, Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies . . . A Census of Extant Copies (Oxford, 1902) Lemon Robert Lemon, Catalogue of a Collection of Printed Broadsides in the Possession of the Society of Antiquaries (London, 1886) LOA J. O. Halliwell’s ‘Letters of Authors’, 300 vols., Edinburgh University Library Lowndes W. T. Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, rev. Henry Bohn, 6 vols. (London, 1864; reprint, 1967) LSE Leeds Studies in English McKerrow Ronald B. McKerrow, Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices in England & Scotland, 1485–1640 (London, 1949) Madden Diary Bodl. Eng.hist.c.140–182: private diary of Frederic Madden, 43 vols. (1819–72) Malone, Inquiry Edmond Malone, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (London, 1796; reprint, 1970) MLN Modern Language Notes MLR Modern Language Review Mostyn Papers Mostyn Papers, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth MP Modern Philology MSC Malone Society Collections


abbreviations Munby, Phillipps Studies N&E

N&Q NCBEL

Nelson & Seccombe New Variorum

NLS NLW NMM NYPL OED OHEL OMD Ouvry sale PBSA Pepys Ballads

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Pforzheimer Catalogue PML PMLA PQ PRO REED RES Rollins

xxv

A. N. L. Munby, Phillipps Studies, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1951–60) J. P. Collier, Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare’s Plays, from Early Manuscript Corrections in a Copy of the Folio, 1632 (London, January 1853; reprint, 1970); N&E II indicates the 2d ed. (London, June 1853) Notes and Queries George Watson and Ian Willison, eds., New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1969–74) Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe, British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641–1700 (1987) New Variorum Shakespeare, begun by H. H. Furness in 1871 and since 1933 published under the sponsorship of the Modern Language Association of America, New York National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth New Monthly Magazine New York Public Library, New York City Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1989) Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford, 1945–) J. P. Collier, An Old Man’s Diary, Forty Years Ago, 4 vols. (London, 1871–72; reprint, 1975) Sale catalogue of Frederic Ouvry’s books and MSS, Sotheby’s (London), 30 March–5 April 1882 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Broadside ballads in the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge; published in facsimile, ed. W. G. Day, 5 vols. (1987) The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library: English Literature, 1475–1700 (New York, 1940; reprint, 1997) Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City Publications of the Modern Language Association Philological Quarterly Public Record Office, London Records of Early English Drama Review of English Studies Hyder E. Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad-


xxvi

RORD Rudick SA SB SBT-RO Seven Lectures

Sibley SP SPD Spevack SQ SR STC

Steele

TCC TCD Tilley

TNL Archive

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TLS Trevelyan Papers UCL VPR

abbreviations Entries (1557–1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (Chapel Hill, 1924) Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama Michael Rudick, ed., The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition (Tempe, Ariz., 1999) Society of Antiquaries, London Studies in Bibliography Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Records Office, Stratford-upon-Avon Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, ed. J. P. Collier (London, 1856; reprint, 1975) Gertrude M. Sibley, The Lost Plays and Masques, 1500–1642 (London, 1933) Studies in Philology State Papers Domestic Marvin Spevack, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: A Classified Bibliography (Hildesheim, 1997) Shakespeare Quarterly Stationers’ Registers, Worshipful Company of Stationers, London Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. 2d ed., ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (London, 1976–91) Robert Steele, A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns . . . 1485–1714, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1910) Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College, Dublin M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950) Archives of Times Newspapers Limited (News International), London Times Literary Supplement Trevelyan Family Papers, Robinson Library, University of Newcastle University College, London Victorian Periodicals Review


abbreviations Warner

WCH WCT Wellesley Index Wing

xxvii

G. F. Warner, Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s College . . . at Dulwich (London, 1881); continued by F. B. Bickley, Catalogue of the Manuscripts . . . Second Series (London, 1903) William Carew Hazlitt Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, 5 vols. (Toronto, 1966–89) Donald Wing, ed., Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 2d ed., 4 vols. (New York, 1982–98)

a note on spelling and transcription In transcribing modern manuscript material (which consists principally of correspondence, diaries, memoranda, and reminiscences), we have expanded abbreviations other than ampersands, brought down superscript letters, and in some instances normalized punctuation, in particular replacing sentenceending dashes with full stops. Significant interlineations and deletions have been indicated as such. Transcriptions of shorthand passages in Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary have been taken from R. Travers Herford’s manuscript key, shelved with the original diaries in Dr. Williams’s Library. Robinson frequently switched into and out of shorthand within a single sentence, and to enhance the readability of his text we have not signalled shorthand passages in our transcriptions. Quotations from printed works are as exact as possible, including the various spellings of Shakspere, Shakspeare, etc. that appear in the writings of Frederic Madden, C. M. Ingleby, Charles Knight, and others; Collier himself unswervingly preferred the conventional ‘Shakespeare’, telling Madden in 1837 that ‘I would rather rectify one syllable that he wrote, than find the true way of spelling the name of all the Poets that ever lived’ (BL Egerton MS 2841, fols. 172–73). Titles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works are generally given in a modernized form (Farewell to Military Profession, not Militarie), unless the old spelling form remains in general use (The Faerie Queene, Kynge Johan). Titles of MS works and some ephemeral published works (broadside ballads in particular) are given within quotations, as are citations from the Stationers’ Registers. Unless otherwise indicated, line references to Shakespeare are to the second Riverside edition (1997).



I

The Life of John Payne Collier



part one

1789–1820

‘Nonsensical as it may seem’, John Payne Collier reflected at the brash age of twenty-two, ‘it gives me some pleasure to think that the period at which I was born was marked by some extraordinary occurrence’—echoing, if unwittingly, the boast of Owen Glendower, with no Hotspur to prick his conceit.1 His nativity, in the ‘great dawn’ of 1789, fell just six months before the storming of the Bastille, but other datemarks would now seem more relevant: one year a er Byron, three before Shelley, and seven before Keats. Longevity personified, Collier died in September 1883, surviving the Romantic trinity by six decades, and his mid-life friends Thackeray and Dickens by thirty and twenty-three years. The ‘Nestor of English Literature’ (as one obituarist called him) was still at ninety intent on contextualizing his own life, weaving together in halting memoirs his recollections of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, of actors and theatres, publishers and newspapers, book collectors and libraries, and reminding posterity of the formidable service to literary history that his own nearly two hundred publications had already rendered. To some extent we have followed our subject’s lead in examining his vast and chequered output in its immediate setting; for while the culture of earlier centuries became his effective milieu and refuge, he laboured, accomplished, and transgressed in his own. This long-lived custodian of the literary past—a more than proprietary and less than scrupulous keeper, be it said—was no less a child of his protracted time. He was born on 11 January 1789 in New Broad Street in the City of London, the first son and the second of five children of a cultivated and initially well-to-do young couple, John Dyer Collier and Jane Payne. Both parents came of respectable mercantile stock, from families accustomed to providing their offspring with both practical education and some kind of material legacy, as individual circumstances might permit. Circumstances for the London Colliers and the infant John Payne would rapidly alter, although an inherited tradition

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1. JPC Early Diary, 10 October 1811.

3


4

the life of john payne collier

of professional independence endured. So, stubbornly, did the strain of intellectual invention, perceptible for at least two generations before John Payne himself exhibited its best and worst aspects. As a family they functioned, cooperated, and struggled, and as a family the Colliers, with John Payne in their midst, may first be considered.

Family In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there were Colliers or Collyers in the vicinity of Witney, Oxfordshire, who operated fulling-mills—factories for processing woollen cloth—and the family still retained a modest interest in at least one in John Payne’s day.2 Jeremy Collier (1650–1726), the famous nonjuring historian and controversialist whose best-known work is an extended attack on the corruptness of the Restoration stage, is supposed to have been ‘distantly related’, but no real evidence of this survives.3 John Dyer Collier’s father, John, however, was a considerable figure whose activity bridged commerce and literature. Born in Stoke Newington (North London) about 1732, John Collier studied medicine in Edinburgh and in 1756 set up an apothecary’s practice in Newgate Street, in the City of London. He married Mary Dyer, the daughter of a wholesale linen-draper, through whom his business prospered, and his relatives now included the Maltbys of Norfolk as well as the eminent Calamys, traditional dissenters, or ‘noncons’, as his descendants faithfully remained. Grandfather John was able to purchase a sleeping partnership in the firm of John Devaynes (Apothecary to the Queen’s Household and to the Charterhouse), moved to Charterhouse Square, and had accumulated a small fortune of £40,000 or £50,000 by 1785, when he sold his practice and abruptly retired.4 At Theobald’s

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2. The Collier name can be found in Witney records of the thirteenth century; by the sixteenth century members of the family were identified as ‘clothiers’ (i.e., engaged in the control and direction of cloth manufacture) and ‘fullers’. See James L. Bolton and Marjorie M. Maslan, eds., Calendar of the Court Books of the Borough of Witney, 1538–1610, Oxfordshire Record Society, vol. 54 (Oxford, 1985); and Alfred Plummer, The Witney Blanket Industry (1934). 3. Collier referred to Jeremy as ‘my ancestor’ in a letter to the sixth Duke of Devonshire, 13 July 1832 (Chatsworth, uncalendared correspondence), and in his MS memoirs written in late 1879 claimed that his grandfather was indeed descended from him (JPC Memoirs, p. 1), but he was less emphatic in a diary entry of the early 1870s: ‘My Grandfather was a younger son of Joshua Collier, & he had brothers named Thomas and Jeremy, the last aer the Old Nonjuror, who was distantly related, but how near I have never attempted to ascertain’ (JPC Diary, undated entry made between 10 November 1872 and 27 April 1873). 4. JPC gave both figures, claiming £40,000 in the undated diary entry of 1872–73 and £50,000 ‘if not more’ in the Memoirs, p. 2. In the biography of Collier that appeared in the 1862 and subsequent editions of Men of the Time, ed. Thompson Cooper, his grandfather was described as ‘in


1789–1820

5

Park in Hertfordshire (1785–89) and Amersham and High Wycombe (1790–93), the apothecary devoted himself to authorship, publishing at High Wycombe in 1791 a massive paraphrase of the Bible ‘intended for the perusal of the young’, Historical and Familiar Essays on the Scripture of the Old Testament (2 vols.), followed in 1797 by two further volumes of Historical and Familiar Essays on the Scripture of the New Testament. Later he would gather, again for ‘my young Friends’, Essays on the Progress of the Vital Principle from the Vegetable to the Animal Kingdoms and the Soul of Man, Introductory to Contemplations on Deity (1800), dedicated to his cousin Edmund Calamy of Lincoln’s Inn; and finally he turned from juvenile instruction to ‘addresses and consolations to the old’ with Thoughts on Reanimation, from the Reproduction of Vegetable Life, and the Renewal of Life aer Death of Insects; Containing a Brief View of Nature, as She Is Fulfilling Her Benevolent Designs in the Two Systems (1809), an appropriate last topic for the valetudinarian. John Collier’s two sons, Joshua and John Dyer, attended Charterhouse School in nearby Charterhouse Square, where John Dyer learned Latin and Greek, and picked up French and a smattering of Italian. But Charterhouse was not succeeded by Oxford or Cambridge, a decision—possibly reflecting religious considerations—that John Dyer bitterly resented in later life. Their father had determined that both male children should be merchants, and gave them each £10,000 at their coming-of-age, a gesture evoking (perhaps deliberately) the appropriate parable. Unfortunately for the family, both sons’ speculations mirrored those of the more celebrated Old Testament beneficiary. Joshua, the elder brother, invested his stake capital in shipping and the oil trade, and with the increased popularity of natural gas lost not only his original £10,000 but a further large sum advanced him by his father, and having brought the latter into a partnership that failed, the whole of John Collier senior’s life earnings were ‘swallowed up by bankruptcy’.5 Joshua had married one Jane Landon, the daughter of a silk merchant—‘reckoned handsomer but not so engaging as my mother’, his nephew remarked—whose personal fortune was luckily secured in trust and remained unattached by her husband’s creditors. An inheritance from old John in 1816 would later provide Joshua with a modest annuity, and a er about 1802 he spent much of his time in France, latterly separated from his wife and six children; he was contemptuously described by Henry Crabb Robinson in 1823 as ‘a common gambler’ (HCR Diary, 1 November). But

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1775, one of the medical attendants on the household of Queen Charlotte’. Cooper’s entry was undoubtedly based on information provided by Collier himself, and is probably the source of the DNB statement that John Collier was a ‘London physician’. 5. JPC Diary, undated entry of 1872–73. The bankruptcy of Joshua Collier, ‘oil-man’, was published in The Times on 6 May 1793; the elder Collier seems not to have been named.


6


John Payne Collier remembered his paternal uncle as generous, and indeed his own family sought refuge with Joshua’s in their lean times. Like all the Colliers, Joshua had a scribbling bent, contributing papers to the Philosophical Magazine and Nicholson’s Journal, and composing at least three short replies to wellknown writers on accountancy (E. T. Jones) and political economy (Malthus and Baron Lyndhurst). John Dyer Collier turned twenty-one in 1783.6 He soon put his £10,000 birthright into importing Spanish Merino wool, like the oil trade a promising business but headed for trouble.7 He travelled in Spain, where he learned Spanish well enough to impress a law court some twenty years later, and in March 1786 married Jane Payne, the lively and intelligent daughter of a deceased sugar refiner of Rutland Place, Upper Thames Street, who had le her £7,000, yielding an ultra-secure £120 a year.8 The couple took a smart house at 36 New Broad Street, where their first daughter, Jane, was born on New Year’s Day 1787. Their first son, John Payne, followed in just over two years. John Dyer and his wife were intellectually demanding parents, and John Payne’s personality and career owe perforce to their influence. A conventionally stable upbringing, however, was not one of their gi s to the child, although 6. Two years later he sat for the fashionable miniaturist George Engleheart; the resulting portrait, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is reproduced in its 1959 Portrait Miniatures catalogue, plate 25, and in our illustrations. 7. John Dyer Collier’s dates are 17 February 1762–27 November 1825. ‘Mr. Collier of New Broad Street’ was sufficiently well-known in the trade to be approached in 1787 by Evan Nepean, acting for Sir Joseph Banks and ultimately for George III, on the subject of importing Merino sheep to England. Collier referred the question to Henry Hinckley, a colleague or partner in Spain, but nothing seems to have followed directly from their efforts to procure Merinos from Bilbao. See Harold B. Carter, His Majesty’s Spanish Flock (Sydney, 1964), p. 76; and The Sheep and Wool Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1781–1820, ed. Harold B. Carter (1979), pp. 116 and 152–53. 8. She was born 18 May 1768 and died 20 October 1833. The figure of £7,000 is JPC’s, and he frequently referred to Jane’s income as £120 per annum in his Memoirs; Henry Crabb Robinson, who was intimately familiar with the Collier finances, gave Jane’s fortune as £10,000 in his MS reminiscences (i:104, written in 1846). Jane had two younger sisters: Mary married William Field, and Elizabeth married George Proctor, a retired Indian civil officer. John Payne, sugar baker or refiner, is named in several mid-century London directories, and from 1765 had premises in Thames Street near Puddle Dock, at first in partnership with a man named Bishop, but from 1767 on his own. His brother Samuel joined him as a partner in 1774, and is later listed alone at the Upper Thames Street address. John Payne died a widower in October 1775, leaving his considerable property in trust for his three daughters, then aged four to seven, who were placed under the guardianship of his mother, brother, and two friends (PRO PROB 11/1012). Jane Payne’s mother, also Jane (b. 1748), was the daughter of Stephen London, a prosperous leather finisher of Kingston-on-Thames, and his wife Mary Phillips. The births of all three Payne daughters were registered with the Carter Lane (Blackfriars) Presbyterian Meeting; in February 1750 John Payne had registered the birth of a son, Samuel, from a previous marriage, but the boy presumably predeceased him.


1789–1820

7

John Dyer’s first financial reversal cannot have been all his fault: the French Revolution, that ‘extraordinary circumstance’ which tickled John Payne’s sense of destiny, spelled disaster for the Spanish Merino wool supply. It also wrought havoc in the domestic wool-spinning industry of England, and John Dyer was not an isolated victim. In the autumn of 1789 the Colliers gave up their house in New Broad Street and decamped to Leeds, where John Payne’s earliest recollections include a bee-sting, an amputated chilblain, and ‘the large dog bringing in a bone from the churchyard and being beaten for it’.9 The family remained at Leeds for about thirty months, while John Dyer struggled to salvage his business. But Saxony wool had won the day, and John Dyer was obliged to pay off his Spanish contracts out of his own funds, his coadjutants having shrewdly fixed everything in his name.10 He seems narrowly to have skirted bankruptcy, and the family was now dependent upon Jane’s inherited income alone. With no professional training and no obvious prospects, John Dyer Collier migrated with his wife and three children (Mary, or ‘Polly’, was born at Leeds in late 1791) to his father’s retreat at High Wycombe, and subsequently to cheap lodgings with a shoemaker at Worthing. Tempers became strained; John the apothecary was in no position to help, with his savings under siege from Joshua’s creditors; and John Payne remembered his mother ‘o en in tears’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 14). By 1793 they were installed in a small cottage at Thames Ditton, across the river from Hampton Court, where John Dyer, now aged thirty-two, and self-instructed from his father’s cast-off Blackstone, commenced to read for the bar. A fourth child and second son, Richard Price—named a er another famous ‘noncon’ and family connection, the Newington Green moralist and political philosopher (1723–91)—was born at Thames Ditton when John Payne was five.11 One further son, William Field, was later christened with the name of Jane Collier’s brother-in-law, a tallow importer who provided the family with a brief and unexpected period of prosperity in 1795–98. Still reading law while coping with creditors and a ‘bad ague’ contracted while bathing near his riverside cottage, John Dyer had reluctantly assumed the management of an unpromising soap factory in Great Suffolk Street, Southwark, at Field’s invitation. A er a short stay with uncle Joshua in nearby West Square, the family took up quarters in the factory building, and by dint of hard work and a ‘glib tongue’ in merchan-

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9. Collier recalled these episodes in his Memoirs and in an autograph note in his copy of W. J. Thoms, Human Longevity (1873), now BL C.45.d.26. 10. JPC named these as John Maitland, M.P. for Chippenham, and one Metcalf; Diary, undated entry of 1872–73. 11. Collier called Price ‘my grandmother’s cousin’ in OMD, iii:55, and Mary Dyer Collier is named in Price’s will; see HCR Diary, 24 February 1825.


8


dising John Dyer turned the business around. In less than four years of administration, with Jane’s help as bookkeeper, he more than doubled its output and banked a personal dividend of £2,500; whereupon William Field sought to restrict his manager to a fixed salary, and John Dyer Collier resigned in a huff. In the summer of 1798 he converted his entire savings from the soap business into a 250-acre farm at Abridge near Epping, which proved an unmitigated disaster. For nearly four years, remembered John Payne, he ‘struggled on, from bad to worse . . . finally lost all his capital and was made bankrupt. He was in confinement part of the time & the misery and grief to us children and our mother is not to be described.’ 12 Their only unassailable income was again Jane’s £120 a year, and by mid-1802 John Dyer and his long-suffering wife, with five children under age sixteen, were once more at loose ends in London. Joshua took them in briefly, and John the apothecary (who had resumed his practice a er losing his own savings in Joshua’s failure) managed some help; they took lodgings in Lambeth, with an engraver who taught Jane the rudiments of his trade, and subsequently in Pimlico. With the prospect of a late legal career yielding to family demands, John Dyer Collier at forty became, in the words of his friend and creditor Henry Crabb Robinson, ‘a bookseller’s fag’ (HCR Reminiscences, i:218). Authorship, journalism, reportorial and editorial work became the mainstay of the Colliers henceforth.

Henry Crabb Robinson Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1869), lawyer and literary enthusiast, o en characterized as ‘the diarist’, was John Dyer Collier’s junior by thirteen years, and Jane Payne Collier’s by seven. The son of a staunch dissenting family of tanners in Bury St. Edmunds, he had been denied, like John Dyer, a much-desired university education. Throwing up a legal apprenticeship in Colchester, he came to London in April 1796 to seek work as a solicitor’s clerk, but a timely inheritance freed him from wage-slavery. So provided, from the outset of his cosmopolitan bachelor career he expressed strong Republican sympathies and a literary taste more radical and prescient than most of his dilettante contemporaries, including the Colliers.13 By 1799 he knew Thomas Holcro , William Hazlitt, and William Godwin personally, and was reading Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Lamb, all later to be intimate friends. But the acquaintance which he himself says ‘changed the whole course of my life’ was with John Dyer Collier, his wife, and his children, especially John Payne; Robinson’s diary, reminiscences,

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12. JPC Memoirs, p. 47. The bankruptcy of ‘J. D. Collier, Abridge, Essex, farmer’ was published in The Times on 3 May 1802. 13. For Robinson’s early political views see Corfield and Evans 1996.


1789–1820

9

and voluminous correspondence remain, a er John Payne Collier’s own writings, the most significant source for any account of the early life of the latter, and for our purposes invaluable.14 In his first years in London Robinson frequented the evening ‘forums’, public (but polite) debates on social issues held at Coachmaker’s Hall and elsewhere, and before June 1797 had observed from afar one ‘occasional speaker of extreme liberal opinions who was distinguished from all others by an aristocratic air— his voice very sweet tho’ feeble—his tone that of a high bred man. . . . He was accompanied by his wife, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.’ They met briefly, and on 13 July Robinson encountered Jane at another forum in company with a friend, a Miss Dawson. Carriages being unavailable a er the debate, Robinson gallantly escorted the ladies home to Southwark, and a few days later John Dyer called on the young clerk to thank him. An invitation to dine at the soap factory followed (13 August), and an association that endured for the lifetimes of all was begun. ‘My intimacy with [John Dyer] encreased and during my life to no family have I ever been so much indebted for happiness as to the Collier family’, wrote Robinson (always a bachelor) nearly fi y years later. And having loyally concealed his own feelings for Jane—despite seven years of sharing a roof and three decades of personal correspondence—he committed them retrospectively to paper in 1846: ‘Of Mrs Collier I will say only thus much, that of all the women I have ever known she is the one with whom I should have been most willing to have passed my life in marriage’—adding, immediately, ‘Now, their eldest son John Payne Collier, the editor of Shakespeare, is one of my most respected friends’ (HCR Reminiscences, i:91). Robinson continued to visit the Colliers at Hydes Farm in Essex, while John Dyer mismanaged his capital away. In January 1799 the younger man lent his friend £400, which predictably vanished with the rest. When in May 1802 John Dyer became formally bankrupt, he asked Robinson not to prove his outstanding debt for proportionate settlement, ‘because he would treat it as a debt of honour’. Meantime Robinson had embarked on a protracted Lehrjahr in Germany (it turned into five), and in March 1803 John Dyer proposed a further

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14. Crabb Robinson bequeathed his papers—diaries and travel journals (1811–67), correspondence, and manuscript reminiscences (compiled between 1845 and 1853)—to Dr. Williams’s Library, London. In addition to incoming letters the correspondence includes copies of many outgoing letters and in some cases the originals, presumably returned to HCR aer the deaths of the recipients. Three volumes of extracts from the papers were published in 1869 (ed. Thomas Sadler); in the 1920s Edith J. Morley edited a further three volumes of HCR’s correspondence, and in 1938 published Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, a final three volumes of extracts from the diaries and reminiscences. Morley’s biography of the diarist, The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson (1935), has not been superseded; the diary and reminiscences are now available on microfilm.


10


rearrangement: in lieu of £20 per annum interest, Robinson should lodge with the Colliers when in London (‘You have a rascally debtor, and you might conveniently contrive to put yourself under his roof and set his Beef and Pudding at work to rub off a little of the score’).15 Robinson, ever unattached, was pleased with the suggestion, and on his return to London in early 1806 moved in with the Colliers at 3 Little Smith Street, Westminster. He would remain more or less en famille until July 1813. The authorship trade that John Dyer Collier embraced in 1802 was hard work, but like his son he was never a shirker. He began by editing a miscellaneous journal, the Monthly Register (founded in April by Charles and John Wyatt), his task being to write or procure ‘theoretic and practical’ articles on law, commerce, agriculture, genealogy, architecture, and literature. By August he was publishing contributions from Robinson, now at Jena, describing the renaissance of philosophy and belles-lettres in Germany (Robinson had already met Goethe, Herder, and Wieland, and supplied translations of Goethe, Schiller, and Klopstock for a largely unappreciative audience),16 but at the end of March 1803 the father of five was again out of a job: ‘The Wyatts have found that I have now procured them sufficient connection to go on with the work without my assistance’, he wrote to Robinson. ‘I had an agreement with them for six months which they were obliged to eke out because I would not take the hint & be gone’(HCR Correspondence, 29 March 1803). But John Dyer’s new professionalism sustained him. He had meantime composed a useful treatise on the law of patents (no doubt inspired by his work for the Wyatts), for which the Wyatts declined to pay him sixty guineas, and so he published it himself in July 1803. An Essay on the Law of Patents for New Inventions, with two chapters ‘on the general history of monopolies . . . to the time of the Inter-regnum’ and an appendix listing all patents granted from 1800 on, is a 316-page octavo dedicated to Baron Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, printed ‘for the Author’ by Andrew Wilson, and sold by Longman and Rees. A bound-in slip offered the author’s services as agent for patent applications, and the folding plate illustrating Arkwright’s machinery was engraved, John Payne Collier later recalled, by Jane Collier. A year later she told Robinson that 1,000 copies had been printed, and 250 to date sold at 10s. 6d., of which the Colliers would net 7s.; one agency for a patentee had by then made them about £12, and three more were in prospect (HCR Correspondence, 25 June 1804). ‘Beating about in all directions for the employment of his pen’, as John Payne

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15. HCR Correspondence, 29 March 1803. 16. Collier rejected a translation of Schlegel sent in 1803, suggesting to his friend that the Wyatts did not have a high opinion of ‘your poetical effusions’; see Wellens 1983, pp. 108–09.


1789–1820

11

later put it, John Dyer projected a novel ‘upon a Spanish story’, which he dictated in part to his wife before May 1803 (JPC Memoirs, p. 56). But Elvira ‘is abandoned at least for the present’, Jane told Robinson in September; her son said it was completed and submitted to several publishers, but rejected and finally lost. Other piece-work included ‘a history of Egypt at 1 Guinea & a half per sheet’ and the translation of a novel, Etienne François de Lantier’s Voyageurs en Suisse (4 vols., 1803–04, for John Badcock); and ‘we have a concern in an Agricultural Magazine, but the proprietor is very poor & I fear also a rogue’—he paid £2 12s. 6d. a sheet. Richard Phillips, the Whig ‘master of hacks’, gave John Dyer three guineas a sheet for work in the Law Journal, based on parliamentary and trial reports taken in shorthand, but this was a short-lived arrangement. Jane Collier contributed to the precarious family income by colouring prints for a bookseller, putting to use the techniques learnt in Lambeth. ‘He squeezed me in price so that with the childrens help I could only make £2 10s. a month’, she told Robinson, and ‘I was up at 6 & worked till eight, but I have applied . . . for some Botanical colouring which I hope will be more productive’ (HCR Correspondence, 23 September 1803). A better venue for John Dyer’s journalism was the Daily Advertiser and Oracle, a respectable Tory newspaper owned by Peter Stuart, whose brother Daniel controlled the Morning Post and the Courier. ‘My father was more successful in political than in poetical compositions’, his son recalled, and those submitted to the Oracle ‘were so well liked that Peter Stuart . . . agreed to give my father a guinea for every column he supplied’ (Memoirs, p. 57). From this new outlet John Dyer Collier’s work caught the sharp eye of John Walter II, proprietor of The Times, and a casual vocation became a career. Walter called at the house in Little Smith Street, a bargain was struck, and ‘my husband has become a Reporter!!!’ wrote Jane to Robinson (HCR Correspondence, 31 August 1804). In April 1804 he began to cover proceedings in the Court of King’s Bench and at parliamentary sessions for The Times, once more employing shorthand to advantage. His son soon would follow him. From Jena in December 1803 Henry Crabb Robinson enquired anxiously from John Dyer of ‘your plan as to John [Payne]. I confess I have my suspicions that you have not with due reflection determined on the life he shall lead—I fear this. I heard long ago of his being actually at or about to go to Westminster School. And lately you talked of his learning German. Do you mean to breed him up to Authorship? But perhaps these Questions are impertinent’ (HCR Correspondence, 27 December 1803). Indeed John Payne received virtually no formal education at all; whereas his uncle Joshua (not a ‘bookish man’) sent two sons to Westminster School, which was nearly on John Dyer’s doorstep, John Payne continued in family tutorials at home. The father whose own schooling


12


terminated at Charterhouse was no mean linguist, however, and before he was nine John Payne had classical grammar to study, while in the evenings John Dyer read plays aloud to the family: ‘Here, under my father’s tuition, I may say that I began my knowledge, though I cannot say study, of Shakespeare.’ In the subsequent farm years at Abridge, aged ten to twelve, John ‘used to do any work of which I was capable—especially scare-crowing; but my Father made me take my books, Latin or Greek with me, and some part of the day he used to come out & hear me say my lessons. . . . I drove plough, and thus saved the cost of a boy, but still I was kept going with my education: that was never neglected, even if my F[ather] was away from home. I rather disliked Latin, but I liked Greek. My Father made me learn by heart the Catalogue of ships in Homer!’ 17 These beginnings may not have been rock solid, for on the family’s return to London ‘by industry & my father’s aid [I] made up for lost time in Greek and Latin; but I never became a good scholar and to this day I am very ignorant as to metres & quantities so that I am almost afraid to open my mouth when a classical question is proposed’ (JPC Diary, 16 January 1878). John’s older sister, Jane, studied Latin alongside him, and ‘as for Greek my father was never remiss, and if I am only a moderate Grecian it was not his fault’. Indeed a Christmas visit to Eton in 1807, when John Payne stayed with his uncle the Rev. Richard Godley, found John Dyer urging his son to resolve ‘some of the difficulties which must be unavoidable, under the ignorance of your instructor’, in his understanding of Greek prosody, by questioning his host on a variety of abstruse particulars.18 In a long and self-conscious letter that flattered the young man’s grasp of the scholarly issues, John Dyer poured out his somewhat pompous Hellenophilia: the Greek language ‘is the most complete, harmonious, expressive, & beautiful that ever engaged the wonderful organ of human speech, & . . . the best means to improve the English tongue, & the other barbarous dialects of the north, is to understand correctly & apply faithfully, the energy grace & variety of the former’.19 By practical contrast, Jane taught her daughters French, a language that John Payne always ‘disliked’ but half-mastered, and he was later to pick up a better-than-average reading knowledge of Italian. When Crabb Robinson came to live in Little Smith Street in early 1806 ‘he taught me German’, while ‘I taught him, or more properly improved him in Greek and Latin’, John Payne saucily added, ‘as his early education had been neglected’.20 17. JPC Memoirs, p. 33; JPC Diary, 18 April 1878. 18. Godley (1780–ca. 1848) was the second husband of Jane Payne’s sister Elizabeth; he was an Eton scholar, B.A. and M.A. (1806) of King’s College, Cambridge, and later prebendary of Chester. 19. John Dyer Collier to JPC, 26 December 1807; FF/K MS 610. 20. JPC Memoirs, p. 53. In a diary entry of 27 January 1881 Collier recalled that he had also had German lessons from the elder Frederic Shoberl, a publisher with whom he was later much involved.


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Jane Payne Collier, with her modest training in draughtsmanship and engraving, may have encouraged what John Payne called his ‘knack for taking likenesses’. We have found no extant evidence of such skills, but he claimed that ‘one of them, that of Sir Vicary Gibbs had actually been published by a print-seller in the Strand’, and in Collier’s copy of the Gordonstoun sale catalogue (1816) a tantalizing bibliophile relic once survived, ‘a portrait of R[ichard] Heber, a pencil drawing by J. P. Collier’.21 By the beginning of 1806, moreover, John Dyer had imparted to his son the mysteries of shorthand, which would prove of life-long service to him. For the moment, its use was more practical to the father: John Payne could now help with the courtroom and parliamentary reporting for The Times, and could decipher and transcribe John Dyer’s notes. This was the first kind of ‘authorship’ John Payne was bred up to, and by the age of seventeen he was ready to assume his own share of the Collier family cottage industry— literature, in the broadest sense, the generation of text. In the narrower sense, John Payne had already developed a youthful taste for fiction, poetry, and drama. There were novels by Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith at the Abridge farm, and John Dyer’s cousins the Calamys made a present to young John Payne of Robinson Crusoe: Collier remembered it vividly as the 1785 edition published by John Walter’s new Logographic Press, a two-volume octavo with engraved plates by Robert Pollard. Although there was already at least one Shakespeare on the family shelves, the boy coveted his own set, and in his teens purchased, volume by volume as he could pay for it, John Bell’s attractive but editorially undistinguished duodecimo edition.22 And in about 1806 father gave son a Faerie Queene ‘in four or five small volumes. I did not read them so much as I devoured them’, John Payne remembered, and the resulting ‘possession’ with Spenser formed the basis of his own first attempts at versifying, ‘when I was 18 or 19’. Yet that harmless practice, when—no doubt shortly—projected as a métier, drew a coolly ironic response from John Dyer: ‘Ovid (like you) had in view the duties of the bar, but (not I hope like you herea er) he abandoned his professional studies for the metric art . . . . His subsequent history will be a lesson to you not to fall into the same error’.23 21. JPC Memoirs, p. 66, apparently referring to a date of about 1805; JPC sale, lot 381. 22. Thirteen of the fourteen volumes (1785–1809) survive, some annotated by Collier, who in 1835 presented the set to his eldest son (now FF/K). 23. JPC Memoirs, pp. 125–26; John Dyer Collier to JPC, 27 December 1807. The moralizing but gentle conclusion to this letter, which JPC retained all his life, deserves quoting: ‘I have never my dear represented the steep ascent of literature as an easy path; the pure stream you partake of & the pure air you inhale, the fragrant odours you enjoy, the delicious fruits you taste in your progress are rewards which if you know how to value you will obtain. But supposing my dear you knew none of the ways which lead to this sacred Temple. Is there any course you could take[?] Would you descend into the lower walks of life? Would you tread the dirty road of dishonour? Would you grope in the dark recesses of ignorance, or in the yet filthier haunts of Vice[?] I declare


14


Collier’s earliest memories of play-going are similarly keen: Sarah Siddons with her half-brothers John and Charles Kemble in Sheridan’s Pizarro (a famous revival in October 1803 at Covent Garden), Mrs. Siddons with John Kemble and George Frederick Cooke in Venice Preserved (November–December 1803, ‘perhaps the drama that at this instant has le the strongest impression upon my mind’), and the same trio in Shakespeare. Jane Collier was devoted to Covent Garden and Drury Lane, explained her son, ‘and [as] my father could not always accompany her, she sometimes availed herself of the escort of young Robinson, generally taking my elder sister or myself with them’ (Memoirs, p. 54). He told Lord Glengall ‘that I could go back [in theatrical memories] even to 1797’, the Southwark soap-factory years, which would square with Henry Crabb Robinson’s first acquaintance with Jane (OMD, i:19); but John Payne’s more specific recollections were nearly all of 1803–08, following the Colliers’ return to Westminster. He remembered Charles Mathews as Jabel in The Jew (1803 or 1806), John Liston as Sheepface in The Village Lawyer (Haymarket, June 1805), and Joseph Munden as Sir Francis Gripe in The Busy Body (1808). If he indeed saw the bibulous Richard Suett in the same role (OMD, i:19), it cannot have been in 1805, but no later than 8 December 1802 (Drury Lane). With Robinson’s return to London and installation with the Colliers the theatrical excursions may have continued, as the home-schooling and moral education clearly did, but John Payne’s principal activity was now his apprentice journalism. In early 1806 he accompanied his father to the celebrated trials of Sir Thomas Picton, the murderer Richard Patch, and Viscount Melville. At Picton’s, for sanctioning torture during his administration of Trinidad, John Dyer Collier impressed his son by giving evidence on a point of Spanish law, from a law book ‘which nobody could understand’; for this he ‘had the special thanks of the Lord Chief Justice’, the formidable Lord Ellenborough, but his own anonymous report in The Times of 24 February forbore to take personal credit. Patch was convicted of murdering his partner Isaac Blight on 6 April, and John Payne sat with his father ‘in front of the dock . . . when the murderer’s hand, to my young horror, touched my shoulder’. On 29 April began what Robinson called the ‘great event of the Season’, Lord Melville’s fi een-day trial for corruption in Admiralty affairs. John Dyer procured ‘occasional admission’ for his lodger, but his son was apparently already a working assistant (‘My father went to aid to God my dear I care not much which direction you prefer so that you do but preserve your truth purity & virtue & with these I had rather have you the most witless of human beings than the most profound learned & ingenious without them. I have always thought that in the path of knowledge you would take these companions by the hand & if you had not met with them it would have been both your greatest misfortune & ruin.’ Nearly seventy-five years later the addressee remembered his father as ‘singularly excellent in every virtue, & as upright as an arrow & as honest as daylight: I never knew him to do an unworthy thing in his life’; JPC Diary, 17 February 1881.


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in the report of the proceedings and I helped him’), and in addition to the reports in The Times a book came of it, published by B. Crosby and Company of Paternoster Row. This venture earned John Dyer a hundred guineas, said his son, and if there was any even stenographic contribution by seventeen-year-old John Payne, it would constitute his first ‘book appearance’.24 At much the same time John Payne began to report parliamentary debates, and with his press privileges was able to swank with his avuncular friend: on 3 March, ‘a er Tea, Mr Collier’s Son proposed taking me with him to the House of Lords’, Robinson wrote to his brother Thomas. ‘It was a night of interest. And the door keepers turned several away while we were there, but John stepped forward, said he came from the Times, beckoned to me & I marched in under the Character of a reporter’ (HCR Correspondence, 5 March 1806). The ‘juvenile reporter’, as Robinson describes him in a letter to Jane from Bury St. Edmunds (4 February 1806), published his first independent article in the spring of this year, an account of a speech by Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Henry Petty, later Marquess of Lansdowne. ‘I was considered by some older rivals to have failed in my first attempt’, John recalled nearly seventy-five years later—can he have meant his father among them?—‘but Mr Walter did not complain’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 72). Indeed Walter had consistently encouraged the young man, increasing his salary from an initial one and a half guineas per week to two, and by now to three. Apparently his personal earnings were pooled, for he estimated the ‘combined’ income of the family as £1,200–1,300 in these years; but he must have retained enough to go on buying books. His ‘strong, and even greedy, desire’ for a collection of his own, as he later described it, was already at work.

Household and Early Circle

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For the period from mid-1806 through early 1811, John Payne’s seventeenth through twenty-first years, fewer details survive, but our overall picture of the Collier household is one of a busy professional family in variegated action. Buoyed by steady employment, in December 1806 John Dyer gave up Little Smith Street and took a ‘good comfortable house’ at 56 Hatton Garden, a broad thoroughfare leading north from High Holborn. Robinson followed them, and the grandparents John and Mary Dyer Collier moved in as well, no doubt paying their own way, for the apothecary had come out of his early retirement and successfully replenished some of the savings he had lost on his sons. Just before the move John Dyer had travelled to Germany on John Walter’s 24. JPC Memoirs, p. 70. We have not identified this version of the trial report (there are several), and Collier’s ‘hundred guineas’ is problematic, as he tended to double such figures.


16


behalf to cover the imminent confrontation of the Prussian and French armies. His sensational report of the taking of Hamburg on 26 November by Napoleon’s forces was a great scoop for The Times, and Robinson wrote to his brother Thomas that his friend had ‘remained in that Town 2 days a er the French were there, and escaped at last leaving everything behind him. He was forced to steal out of the gates without a second shirt to his back or stockings to his feet’ (HCR Correspondence, 3 December 1806). Robinson himself in 1806 continued to pursue his literary acquaintancemaking, and little else: Hazlitt, Anna-Laetitia Barbauld, the Aikens, Amelia Opie, and above all Charles and Mary Lamb, whom he met through Catherine Clarkson early in the year. He accompanied brother and sister to the premiere of Charles’s ill-fated Mr. H at Covent Garden on 10 December, when Lamb joined enthusiastically in the hissing, and saw them home a erward. A proposal to accompany the two sons of Alexander Davison, a wealthy merchant, on a very grand tour of America—two years, with a draughtsman to record the scenery, and with a European excursion to follow—came finally to nothing, and he sank to considering a job as ‘a bookseller’s journeyman’. In February 1807, however, through John Dyer’s intervention, Robinson began to put his continental experience to use. Walter hired him to travel to Altona, near Hamburg, and report on the events preceding the fall of Danzig and the Treaty of Tilset. He remained abroad for eight months at a guinea a day plus expenses, returning to London in November to an impressive new salary of £400 per annum, soon increased to £500. His domestic tasks were to monitor and select news items from foreign newspapers, and to act occasionally as theatre critic for The Times. The latter assignment might have appealed strongly to young John Payne, but Robinson professed to find it uncongenial, as it conflicted with his social routine: ‘I confess [it] alarms me—Not for the labour of writing, but for the waste of time previously’, he primly informed John Dyer, from Bury St. Edmunds, on 8 November 1807. By the end of January 1808 the increasingly benign John Walter had promoted Robinson from ‘a kind of foreign editor’ to ‘the Editor’ so styled, or at least this was Robinson’s understanding; he was now to answer letters on Walter’s behalf, and occasionally to ‘make calls upon persons of respectability’, and Walter told him ‘certainly you can’t appear otherwise than as a principal [and therefore] you might be known expressly as the Editor’.25 Thus a er eleven months’ employment at The Times John Dyer’s protégé found himself in charge of his landlord at about double his fixed salary—although John Dyer clearly regarded himself as eligible to free-lance. 25. HCR to Thomas Robinson, 25 January 1808, HCR Correspondence; quoted in Stanley Morison’s History of The Times, i:142–43.


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Robinson’s ‘editorship’ was short-lived, however, for within five months he was again off on a continental mission, this time to report from Corunna on the campaigns in Spain, and he remained on the Iberian peninsula until January 1809. In his absence, apparently in November 1808, John Dyer Collier and John Walter quarrelled, and Collier père ‘transferred his services as Reporter to the [Morning] Chronicle. He & Walter were embittered against each other, and I thought Collier most to blame’, Robinson later recalled (HCR Reminiscences, i:416). The cause of this ri is not known, although John Dyer’s short fuse over matters of money and dignity is well documented. Robinson told his brother that ‘all, I am sure, is owing to an inherent pride & impatience at the restraints & mortifications his want of fortune subjects him to, which encrease with his years’, and wrote from Spain to both parties ‘with the hope of effecting a reconciliation’ (HCR Correspondence, 27 November 1808). But John Dyer, ‘very imprudent’ as Robinson thought him, had parted company with Walter for good. His stipend (no more than six or seven guineas weekly, during ‘term and Parliament’) may have been at issue; and perhaps his activity away from The Times (see below) had begun to annoy Walter, who had a paternalistic streak as employer—although Robinson’s reiterated ‘most to blame’ suggests that the employee had provoked the divorce. Nonetheless John Payne’s position with Walter appears not to have been compromised. At twenty he had served nearly three years in the ‘regular corps of Reporters’ formed by Walter in 1806 ‘in order that his paper might rival [James Perry’s] ‘‘The Morning Chronicle’’, which had been for some time famous for its parliamentary debates’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 71), and losing the volatile father gave Walter no incentive to discharge the son. He raised John Payne’s salary from three guineas to four. It was Robinson instead who was sacked within the year, though so amicably that he and Walter remained good friends for life. Walter cited ‘the great advance in the sale of the paper’ and ‘the mechanical business [which] has become so principal a feature of it’; and Robinson, who had been dri ing into the office at five in the a ernoon and o en departing by nine, replied equably that ‘engagements like that we formed depend upon mutual convenience, and when either party finds it in his interest to dissolve it, he has a perfect right to do so’.26 He maintained his solicitude for John Payne and later for his brother William Field Collier in their work with The Times, and forty years later served as John Walter’s executor.

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It may be appropriate to attempt a reconstruction of the Collier household in this period: let us say the spring of 1808. In the house described by Robinson 26. HCR Correspondence, 17 August 1809; the letters to and from Walter, copied into a letter to Thomas Robinson, are printed from that source in Morison, i:145–46.


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as ‘good’ and ‘comfortable’, at the northern end of Hatton Garden, nine Colliers resided, plus Henry Crabb Robinson, plus whatever servants the family employed. Quarters were close—Robinson at first was ‘actually debating with myself the propriety of staying here, as I fear I am incumbering the family’— but clearly manageable; the common rooms in 1811 could accommodate dinner for twenty-seven, followed by whist and dancing. The inhabitants ranged in age from about twelve to nearly eighty. Senior were John Collier the apothecary (seventy-four) and his wife (seventy-eight). Old John had finally retired from active practice, having salvaged a tidy nest-egg, its value unknown to and underestimated by his children and grandchildren—prudent secrecy, perhaps. In 1808 he was probably putting the last touches to Thoughts on Reanimation, published ‘for the Author’ in 1809 by J. and E. Hodson, a firm of printers in Cross Street, Hatton Garden, not far from the Colliers’ residence. The apothecary’s wife, Mary Dyer, four years older than he, would survive him by nine years, amply provided for in a will re-dra ed by Robinson, which would cause some bad blood.27 John Dyer Collier at forty-six, in harness at The Times, was still casting about for projects to supplement the family income. Early in the year he had generated an instant biography of Abraham Newland, the legendary cashier of the Bank of England who had died on 21 November 1807; for twenty-five years this worthy ‘had slept . . . at his apartments in the Bank, without absenting himself for a single night’. John Dyer’s publishers were Crosby and Co., who had supposedly paid him a hundred guineas for the report of the Melbourne trial; his printers were again his neighbours J. and E. Hodson, a fact that may suggest self-financing. Like Collier’s patent law book, The Life of Abraham Newland contains practical additions (‘some account of that great national establishment [the Bank of England]’ and ‘an Appendix containing the late correspondence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the Bank, and a List of the Statutes passed relative to it’), the last of the correspondence being dated 5 February 1808; and the whole project, according to his son, ‘took one week to compose and another to print it, though it formed a respectable and creditable volume of nearly two hundred pages’. This John Dyer accomplished ‘without a scrap of information supplied to him’, marvelled John Payne, an observation that may lend a hint of self-mockery to his father’s whimsical preface: ‘The writer has had no occasion, in imitation of some modern biographers, to give a diffuse list of au-

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27. HCR to Thomas Robinson, 12 December 1806, HCR Correspondence; HCR Diary, 24 February. The elder Colliers had le Hatton Garden by 8 June 1811, when HCR recorded visiting them at Newington Green. But on 23 February 1815 he noted that ‘I dined at the Colliers. Mrs C. and the old lady have quarrelled, and the old people threaten to leave’; shared housing was perhaps resumed when the younger family moved to Salisbury Square in April 1814.


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thorities printed and manuscript, nor has there been any motive to search the great libraries at Paris and Rome, in hope of discovering some neglected composition, or latent anecdote, absolutely insignificant, but relatively important’. Elsewhere he claimed to have failed to find out Newland’s first school only ‘a er the utmost diligence we have employed’, suggesting exhaustive inquiry: for a seven-day task this claim verges on fiction.28 At forty, Jane Payne Collier continued to conduct a social life of her own, while managing the extended household and educating the younger children. Her personal if pooled income was rising, from £120 per annum in the first years of the century to £300 by 1814.29 Robinson, now aged thirty-three, was clearly still smitten with her, and some members of his new literary circle, like the Lambs and William Hazlitt, formed friendships with her more or less independent of John Dyer. He seems not to have resented this overmuch, nor to have confused loyalty in marriage with submissiveness. When recording the religious differences (and domestic harmony) of the parents of Abraham Newland, he struck a deliberately personal note: ‘we are advocates of that dissonance of opinion, without rancour or acrimony, in either party to the marriage contract, which indicates sanity and strength of intellect, a due respect for the sacred character of truth, and an admission of its superiority in all the relations of domestic and social life’ (p. 5). Jane attended the playhouses with Robinson and with other friends, made and broke off acquaintances on her own initiative, and even passed three unchaperoned weeks in 1809 with her younger admirer at his brother’s house in Bury St. Edmunds. There was never any hint of impropriety: the Thomas Clarksons were there too, and Robinson took Jane to visit the radical philanthropist Capell Lofft and the new dissenting minister Thomas Madge. Jane’s behaviour must not have seemed untoward to John Dyer, to her family, or to Robinson—who was scandalized by the domestic arrangements of the Godwins, the Hazlitts, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the spring of 1808 Robinson was busier with his own social affairs than with John Walter’s work, but his income held steady and sufficient. A year earlier he had felt ‘much pressed for room’ at Hatton Garden, but feared that living alone was beyond his unsalaried means. Now, however, when he could afford to take accommodation for himself, he remained, bridging the household agegap between John Dyer and Jane and their five children; he would stay five

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28. OMD, iii:55. John Dyer inscribed one copy to his son, ‘From the Author: an anxious father to a beloved son—J. Payne Collier’. A note by JPC adds: ‘My father might then well be ‘‘anxious’’, having a Wife & five children, and very little to keep them upon excepting what he received from ‘‘The Times’’. He got on better aerwards’ (JPC sale, lot 98; now BL 10827.bbb.8). 29. ‘C[ollier] said he has now an income of 18 hundred a year, 3 from Mrs C.’s fortune’; HCR Diary, 1 May 1814.


20


more years, and haunt the tea- and supper-table for decades a er that. He must be considered as ‘family’ in this period, when Lofft breakfasted, Coleridge dined, and the Lambs spent the evening ‘with us’, and the suppers, whist parties, and dances arranged by the Colliers were always, in Robinson’s own words, ‘at home’. Young Jane Collier, whom Robinson called Jenny, was now twenty-one, and like most of her siblings not one to marry young and leave home. John Payne was nineteen, a full-time newspaper reporter juggling poetry, play-going, bookbuying, and billiards as hobbies: his was a crowded adolescence. Mary (‘Polly’), whose travels in the 1820s suggest a liveliness beyond Jane’s, was sixteen, and Richard Price fourteen. Richard, rebellious and improvident, and later regarded as the black sheep of the family, may have already developed the temper that would flare in quarrels with his father in the years 1818–25. William Field Collier, the youngest, may also have been a handful when young—in a letter of 1806 to Jane Collier, Robinson calls him ‘little fiery Will’—but he took work at The Times in 1815 and seems never to have caused any trouble, nor earned much acclaim. He died young in 1830 of a brain tumour. The principal breadwinners in the Collier household by 1808, John Dyer and John Payne, were bound to an irregular but arduous schedule of working hours. John Walter II, in his competition with the Morning Chronicle for the best full account of parliamentary debates—now the main thrust of ‘news’ for all the leading daily papers—probably imitated James Perry’s system of reporting in relays: a reporter would cover two hours of the session, give way to a colleague, write up his shorthand, and deliver the longhand text to the typesetters, before returning to the House of Commons or Lords to spell his replacement. In twos or threes reporters would thus alternate, the last of them in a long parliamentary session going back to the printing-house with only the last segment to add, thus enabling the newspaper to close up and issue its morning hard copy as early as possible. This system would have stretched Walter’s complement of four to six reporters, but a staff of the same number served Perry, and some priorities must have been raised if sessions in the Commons and the Lords conflicted, or competed for interest with each other or with the more sensational trials in the law courts.30 Parliamentary debates sometimes lasted until well past midnight, and a reporter or his alternate was in contractual thrall to them, whenever they ended. Parliament normally sat for about thirty weeks in the year. These were timetable facts at 56 Hatton Garden. And there was more piece-work, or what began as it. Both Walter and Perry were reluctant to pay their parliamentary reporters a stipend other than per

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30. See Christie 1970a and Aspinall 1955.


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diem or sessional, with extras for special assignments, and John Dyer Collier necessarily sought further sources of income. His principal independent pursuit, begun sometime before 1811 and probably by 1808, was a service to provide provincial British newspapers with up-to-the-minute handwritten abstracts of London and foreign events, selected and digested for republishing all over the country. Perhaps Crabb Robinson, whose experience in Altona had led him to assess continental news-summary services for John Walter, inspired Collier’s domestic enterprise;31 and the ‘letters’ generated from Hatton Garden filled a profitable niche in the trade. John Payne ‘lent [his father] active assistance . . . in the preparation & transmission of these’, which found clients in Bristol, Newcastle, York, Edinburgh, and Dublin;32 and later Richard and William joined in the enterprise. The work was laborious and time-consuming, and conflicted materially with John Dyer’s and John Payne’s commitments to The Times and later the Morning Chronicle, but it brought in several hundred pounds a year from the start, and well over a thousand at its peak (1813). Although subscriptions fell off by half a er the Peace of 1814, in 1818 profits a er expenses were still about £640, and constituted for Richard his sole source of income. This led to a struggle between second son and father, who distributed the takings as he saw fit, retaining a good share for himself even a er his retirement from active participation.33 Long and irregular working hours may have curtailed John Dyer’s theatregoing more than his wife’s or his lodger’s, but the Collier household was hardly unsocial. From Robinson we hear of frequent dinners and suppers, whist parties and musical evenings, and forty-five years on John Payne himself remembered a pattern of events as ‘not unusual’ at home: ‘tea was concluded before eight in the evening, and about eleven a supper, hot and cold, was served up in the diningroom, and the company, without any excess either of eating or drinking, did not separate till one or two in the morning. These parties may have commenced when I was sixteen or seventeen years old [sic, but more likely a er 1807], and they continued until I quitted my father’s roof, and had a roof of my own’.34 Robinson records the occasionally even later night, with friends breaking up at four. What convivial but well-behaved circle of intimates and acquaintances can

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31. Morison, i:138. 32. JPC Memoirs, p. 73. To his list may be added Norwich: in 1863, forwarding an autograph requested by C. H. Watson, Collier noted that ‘the name of the ‘‘Norwich Mercury’’ is familiar to my ears: my Father, some 30 [sic] years ago, was one of its London Correspondents’; 8 June 1863, Harvard Theatre Collection. 33. A profit-sharing formula was worked out on John Dyer’s return to farming in 1818. 34. N&Q, 8 July 1854, p. 21.


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we reconstruct for the hospitable Colliers? Blood relations included at least two of the ten children of Brough Maltby, a wholesale draper who had married Mary Dyer Collier’s sister, and Edmund Calamy the barrister, grandson of the biographer and a cousin on the Collier side. The Maltby cousins, Rowland and William, served as solicitors for the bankruptcies of both John Dyer and Joshua Collier, and the younger William may have been John Payne’s first bibliographical acquaintance. Also a barrister with literary leanings, a friend of Richard Porson and Samuel Rogers, and later of Alexander Dyce, William Maltby abandoned his law practice in 1808–09 to succeed Porson as librarian of the new London Institution. The principal founder of this subscription repository had been the bibliophile West India merchant George Hibbert, and Maltby’s assistant during his twenty-five-year librarianship was William Upcott, the leading autograph collector of his day. Maltby himself was credited with a remarkable memory and knowledge of books,35 and John Payne cannot but have encountered these early in life: Robinson met Maltby as early as 1797, at Joshua Collier’s house, so the propinquity was long-standing. Edmund Calamy of Lincoln’s Inn may have been closest to the old apothecary, who had in 1800 dedicated to him his Essays on the Progress of the Vital Principle. John Payne remembered him as ‘the Edmond of my youth’ (JPC Diary, 27 March 1879), but Calamy le London for retirement near Exeter in 1812, aged sixty-nine, and died four years later. Jane’s sister Mary and her husband, William Field, perhaps temporarily unwelcome a er the soap-factory debacle of 1798, were dinner guests again at ‘a family party’ with Mr. and Mrs. ‘D Paine’ in 1811 (HCR Diary, 23 June); the other Payne sister, Elizabeth (Proctor, later Godley), was then living at Eton. Her sons George and Robert, aged thirteen and ten in 1808, would marry Jenny and Polly respectively in 1818 and 1820. John Payne mentions also ‘the Landons’ among his in-law relations: Jane Landon had married uncle Joshua in 1787, and their sons—one and three years younger than John Payne—attended Westminster School in 1801–05, a few blocks from the Colliers in Little Smith Street. In 1808 Joshua and his family were all resident in France, whence they would return only a er the war, in May 1814. Old friends and new neighbours of the Colliers included the Dr. Joseph Adamses. Joseph (1756–1818), a physician and former apothecary, editor of the Medical and Physical Journal, lived a stone’s throw from the Colliers at 17 Hatton Garden. Old John Collier dedicated his Thoughts on Reanimation (1809) to this medical man, and Adams was one of two non-family mourners noted

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35. In his reminiscences Dyce remarked that ‘in a knowledge of bibliography [Maltby] could hardly have been surpassed’; Schrader 1972, pp. 210–11.


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by Robinson at the funeral of the apothecary, on 7 February 1816. The Dawson sisters of Leeds, Alice and Mary—from the extensive nonconformist Yorkshire family—crop up as friends and fellow forum-goers with Jane Payne as early as 1797; they were house-guests in October 1811, when Coleridge was produced at dinner, ‘to give them a treat’. ‘These are two very respectable Women’, Robinson thought, ‘with sufficient intelligence to understand & relish literary conversation, of amiable manners & with character that secures general esteem’ (HCR Diary, 21 October 1811). Robinson himself probably introduced four or more of the six Stansfeld brothers—also from Leeds, ranging in age in 1808 from twentyfour to eleven—into the Hatton Garden circle: he had met the eldest brother, George, in Altona in 1805, where George had warned him in time to evacuate. In January 1811 we hear of ‘the four Stansfelds & Bakewell’ dining at the Colliers’, when ‘the young ones were merry’; ‘three Stansfelds’ in February; and Hatton Stansfeld alone in July. The latter (b. 1793) formed a partnership in a dairy with Polly’s husband Robert in 1825, and John Payne later remembered him as the man ‘who took a wife and poison in the same year’.36 ‘Bakewell’ was Robert Bakewell the geologist (1768–1843), originally a woolstapler of Nottingham and Wakefield, whose relations with the Colliers had their ups and downs. Robinson first met him in 1798, an ‘intimate friend’ of John Dyer, who ‘professed real regard’ for the then-farmer, and ‘yet to me freely confided his friend’s faults of vanity & ambition (as friends are in the habit of doing)’. When John Dyer’s financial affairs reached a crisis in 1802 Bakewell ‘behaved ungenerously: therefore I broke off all acquaintance with him—for many years’, Robinson recalled in 1846, describing him elsewhere as ‘a heartless man’.37 Bakewell published his Observations on Wool at Wakefield in 1808, but then turned his attention to geology and mineralogy, and removed to London with his family, where he lectured and wrote. The Bakewells were frequent dinner guests in 1811, although on 26 November John Payne recorded in his diary that he found their company ‘dull’, adding haughtily (at age twenty-two): ‘I am quite out of my element with young people.’ But by 20 February 1812 Bakewell senior had broken with the Colliers, according to Robinson ‘in consequence of an affronting letter Mrs C. wrote to [him]. She feared B. encouraged an acquaintance between John [Payne] & Miss B. & rather indelicately insisted on the acquaintance being broken off ’ (HCR Diary, 30 October 1818). This is the first we have heard of John Payne and any young woman, and Jane Payne’s firm behaviour—John was now, a er all, twenty-three—deserves to be remarked. Nor was Robinson approving of John’s intimacy with the young 36. Collier’s annotated copy of OMD (Folger W.b.505), ii:118. 37. HCR Reminiscences, i:101; HCR Diary, 30 October 1818.

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23


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Bakewells: ‘I was fearful’, he wrote to John in September 1812, ‘that you preferred the Company of your inferiors to that of your superiors’.38 It is worth noting, however, that the Bakewell brothers, Robert Jr. and Frederick, later pursued serious scientific and literary careers, Robert emigrating as a geologist to Connecticut, Frederick publishing such works as Philosophical Conversations (1833) and Natural Evidence of a Future Life (1835, several editions), the latter work echoing old John Collier’s concerns. The Collier-Bakewell ri went apparently unmended until a half-reconciliation between Jane and Robert in 1818, and a further rapprochement a er the death of John Dyer in 1825.

Radicals and Romantics Not unnaturally, John Payne’s published memories of the circle of his youth concentrate upon literary figures, some of whose interplay with the Colliers may have been comparatively slight. But John Dyer’s personal acquaintance certainly included William Godwin, Thomas Holcro , and John Thelwall, the strain of radicalism perhaps shared from the forum days of the 1790s, ‘a period of great political excitement’, as John Payne later put it, following ‘the acquittals of Tooke, Hardy, Thelwall and others’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 54)—the others including Holcro , dramatist, novelist, and translator of Beaumarchais. John Dyer introduced Crabb Robinson to Holcro as early as October 1797; Robinson found him ‘harsh and forbidding in his manners’ (Lamb said ‘candid’, ‘upright’, and ‘single-meaning’), while admitting that ‘I admired [him], yet he never liked me’ (HCR Reminiscences, i:93). From 1799 to 1803 Holcro and his family lived abroad, eluding creditors, but from 1803 to his death in 1809 he was back in London, cranking out fiction, poetry, plays, and theatrical history, and failing as a publisher. His widow Louisa (daughter of Louis Sébastien Mercier, author of the famous L’An 2440) was at least thrice a guest at Hatton Garden in 1811–12, along with ‘Miss Holcro ’ (probably Fanny, the novelist and translator) and a Miss Mercier. In 1812 Louisa married another dramatist, James Kenney, and ‘the Kennies’ turned up there as well. John Payne Collier in later life remembered Louisa as ‘a charming French woman’, but Holcro , ‘a frequent visitor at my father’s house when I was a boy’, rather as ‘a remarkable man, very ugly, very clever, but just not clever enough’ and ‘not very agreeable company’ (OMD, ii:110). In 1816, however, reviewing Hazlitt’s edition of Holcro ’s memoirs, he tempered his judgement, describing the late bugbear as ‘a man of unblemished integrity’.39 Holcro ’s co-defendant

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38. HCR to JPC, 27 September 1812; FF MS 346. 39. Critical Review (May 1816), p. 451.


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of 1794, John Thelwall (1764–1834), also figured with his ‘good angel’ wife in the Colliers’ whist-parties of 1811–13. He took a large house in nearby Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1809, where he established a clinic for stammerers, whose ‘entertainments’ Robinson attended—marvelling in 1815 at hearing Milton’s Comus recited in chorus. William Godwin, like Holcro , may have known John Dyer since the 1790s. Crabb Robinson, a passionate early convert to Political Justice (‘no book ever made me feel so generously’), was one of many contemporaries to have been attracted by Godwin’s work and repelled by his conversation and behaviour. ‘He took great liberties with me’, Robinson recollected in 1846. ‘Indeed, that he did with every one’, although he had not yet begun to beg loans from even casual acquaintances, ‘which ultimately forced me to break with him’ (HCR Reminiscences, i:116). Godwin or ‘the Godwins’ dined with the Colliers at least three times in 1811–12, and a ‘Miss Godwin’ (Frances?) danced with Robinson at a large party in Hatton Garden in January 1812. John Payne Collier seems to have been equally unimpressed with ‘the great apostle of the new school’, recording his opinions a day a er Godwin dined with the family (JPC Early Diary, 13 October 1811): He is a man who tho’ he ought to be above conceit possesses it in a high degree: the very tones of his voice are manufactured; the set of his countenance is settled by previous thought & his sentences are studied. There is besides about him an affectation of simplicity & a pretence of being unlearned. It is bad enough when a man pretends to more learning than he is worth but surely to assume ignorance or rather an appearance of it is several degrees worse. In the first instance the man is ashamed of being uneducated, in the last he is ashamed of God’s gi s and his attainments. It also shews much artifice. Godwin at the same time is a man of taste—of talents—& ought to be above this pettyness which may be le to ladies of the blue stocking or the boarding school. He is a very good hearted man a er all I believe, and beyond dispute an honest man. Another circumstance shews him to have a narrow mind. He keeps a booksellers shop in Skinner Street but he is ashamed of having his own name over the door so he affixes the maiden name of his wife.40 . . . I was very attentive to him during the whole time he was at our house and did not hear him say one thing I thought worth remembering. He seemed anxious rather to display the ignorance of others than his own learning unless by contrast. . . . Mrs G. a woman of a shewy kind and by no means de-

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40. This garbled charge clearly reflects gossip misunderstood by young John: the signboard in fact read ‘M. J. Godwin’; St. Clair 1989, pp. 291–92 and 546n.


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ficient in impudence was not there. Mr Godwin has had the misfortune of not meeting with wives of the most exemplary character: witness Mary Wolstonecro . Another prickly liberal of the Lamb-Godwin circle was the great essayist William Hazlitt, who was to join John Dyer as a parliamentary reporter on the Morning Chronicle in 1812 and to edit Holcro ’s Memoirs in 1816.41 Ten years earlier Robinson had helped Hazlitt to find a publisher for his Eloquence of the British Senate (1807), but his report of Hazlitt’s lifelong gratitude (Hazlitt is supposed to have told Mary Lamb that Robinson ‘was the first person that found out there was anything in me’) may be as faulty as his recollection that Eloquence was Hazlitt’s first book. Robinson’s early esteem for Hazlitt’s genius (‘the cleverest person I know’) was perspicacious, however—Hazlitt’s sister-in-law replied ‘Cleverest? We all take him to be a fool’—and when Hazlitt lived in or visited London Robinson saw him, as the Colliers may also have done. John Payne himself later recalled that Hazlitt was ‘a warm admirer of three pictures in my father’s drawing-room’ and ‘very partial to my mother’.42 At the supper-parties in Hatton Garden, John Payne recollected, ‘my acquaintance with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, and others, began’, although ‘Coleridge was not so frequent a visitor as some others’ (N&Q, 8 July 1854). These contacts came largely through Robinson, as did the visits from Capell Lofft to breakfast and dinner in May 1809. Charles Lamb was the conduit, the most affectionate and accessible of the Romantics, whose own friends were numberless, and whose kind words about them brighten every appropriate biography. Robinson met him in early 1806, and it is characteristic of Lamb’s spontaneous enthusiasm that a few months later Robinson found himself at the first (and last) night of Lamb’s play, in the company of the author and his sister. He had not been invited to Thomas Holcro ’s similar flop, The Vindictive Man, which opened and closed at Drury Lane a few nights before. Charles and Mary Lamb remained life-long friends of Robinson, and were frequent visitors to the Colliers’ in the years Robinson lodged with them; they appear to have warmed especially to Jane, but John Payne, who remembered seeing Charles Lamb together with Coleridge in Hatton Garden when he was (so he said) ‘about sixteen or seventeen’, deliberately cultivated a literary intimacy with the author of Elia. He developed a taste for punning that Lamb may have inspired, and many years later he dedicated to Lamb his only book-length poem, The Poet’s Pilgrimage, begging ‘genius’ to judge him with ‘charity’. Lamb

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41. A letter from Charles Lamb to John Dyer Collier, asking the latter to recommend Hazlitt to the editor of the Chronicle, is provisionally dated 4 October 1812 by Marrs, iii:85–86. 42. OMD, i:32–33; but see QD 180.13 regarding the poem there printed.


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in his turn gave tempered approval to John Payne’s published verse and prose, and made him a present of Elia (1823), ‘inscribed . . . in return for one of my Poet’s Pilgrimage’.43 Writing to Dorothy Wordsworth in 1826, Crabb Robinson unflatteringly described John Payne as ‘an affectionate indeed passionate admirer of your brother’s works’, whose ‘own writings will never acquire any character’, adding however that ‘Lamb respects them and the writer’—so that Elia again provided the echo of a puff (HCR Correspondence, 6 January 1826). The figurehead of the Romantic poets, however, was no constant visitor to the Collier establishment: Robinson’s particular but distant characterization of the Collier family in 1826 suggests as much. Wordsworth’s visits to London a er 1803 had been infrequent, and his society much in demand. Robinson met him through Lamb on 15 March 1808, at the time of Coleridge’s first lectures on poetry, but there is no sign of any contact then with John Dyer and his family. Four years later, revisiting Coleridge, Wordsworth walked with Robinson ‘towards the city and called on Serjeant [William] Rough and the Colliers’ (HCR Diary, 10 May 1812), and this may have been their first meeting. It provoked a small social fiasco, for Wordsworth agreed to dine in Hatton Garden on Sunday 17 May, and then ‘wrote on Friday to say a prior engagement which he had forgotten when he accepted Mr C.’s rendered it impossible to come’. All the other bidden guests—Robinson named five—were ‘disappointed by the absence of Wordsworth’, and Robinson did not again record him chez Collier until 1815, when on 28 May he noted in his diary that he ‘dined at Colliers with a party assembled to see the poet Wordsworth. . . . The a ernoon passed off pleasantly, but the conversation was not highly interesting.’ Indeed John Payne in 1856 stated that he ‘had not seen Wordsworth before . . . 1811–12’, although ‘a erwards I met him rather frequently’, and elsewhere he suggested that their intercourse was regular, if intermittent (‘he has much aged within the last four or five years’).44 But John Payne’s ‘memories’ of Wordsworth a er 1822 are suspect, as will be shown; and there is no independent evidence of Wordsworth’s participation in the earlier period of John Dyer’s suppers and soirées in Hatton Garden.45 Of Coleridge’s visits, however, there is evidence, although John Payne called them ‘less frequent . . . than some others’. In 1872 he described one, ‘the first time I saw Coleridge and Lamb together: they came to my father’s; he was then living

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43. OMD, iv:84. The taste for punning is noted in JPC Early Diary, 10 October 1811. 44. Seven Lectures (1856), p. liv; OMD, i:88–90 (purporting to record the events of 1832). 45. Dorothy Wordsworth dined at the Colliers’ in October 1810; she was then staying in London with the Lambs, having travelled there from Bury St. Edmunds with HCR. Many years later she recalled this visit in a letter to HCR (25 February 1826), mentioning Jane Collier’s ‘hospitable kindness’.


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in Hatton Garden, but was not at home’. The two bandied Shakespeare allusions with Jane Collier, which her son professed to remember in detail, and ‘both made themselves very agreeable, and even my young mind was struck by the pleasant way in which they treated the familiar topics of conversation. . . . Coleridge, as I thought, especially endeavoured to adapt his remarks for the younger children. I . . . was a most greedy listener. They did not stay long, but went away with Robinson’ (OMD, iii:99–100). This otherwise credible episode is dated impossibly about 1805–06 by John Payne; Robinson met Coleridge only in March 1808, and first broke bread with him in 1810. But on a Sunday before Christmas 1810 Coleridge was certainly a guest of the Colliers, for Robinson wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth that he ‘spent an a ernoon with us’ and ‘was delightful’ (HCR Correspondence, 25 December 1810). And on 20 October 1811, just before beginning the Shakespeare lectures that John Payne would record in shorthand, Coleridge dined with the family and a party of friends, and held forth to mixed effect. Robinson records that his presence was sought as ‘a treat’ for the visiting Dawson sisters, who joined with the Joseph Adamses and several others as a kind of audience. Coleridge ‘spoke of poetry, and gave an opinion of Southey’, Robinson wrote in his diary. He ‘denied all merit to Scott . . . [but] nevertheless did not seem inclined to place Southey above Scott. He considered neither of them as poets. [He] spoke of his own poems with seeming disesteem. . . . He mentioned that when his poems were first published he was accused of being inflated and bombastical in his style; but now he is ranked with those who delight in false simplicity.’ The company, at least one of whom arrived a er supper, remained until midnight. For John Payne, who ‘felt vast reverence for Coleridge’, ‘the greatest man of the present day, and in some respects unrivalled in any former age’, this proved an inspiring occasion, which he evoked at some length in his own short-lived diary of 1811. By 13 October he had already met Coleridge ‘several times, and was highly delighted with a fund of anecdote and humour’, and four days later he had encountered him at the Lambs’, intending ‘that if I saw him I would set down on the tablet of my memory everything that he said worthy of recollection’. In forty-five minutes of Coleridgean conversation or monologue, however, John found ‘my mind . . . so burdened with the things worthy of recollection that he said that I was obliged to relieve myself by quitting his company, and not attending to him for the remainder of the night’: such was the effect of Coleridge’s wit and eloquence upon the (now) twenty-two-year-old. Coleridge’s expostulations at Hatton Garden equally ravished the young man’s attention, and to Robinson’s laconic summary of the talk he added, in his diary, points made by the philosopher-poet about Humphry Davy, Locke, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, military punishments (at length, against flogging), criminal


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law, state trials, and policy toward Sicily, and on Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, and another ‘no poet’, Thomas Campbell. Collier felt that the company ‘suffered . . . a severe loss indeed, as [Coleridge’s] memory would not serve him to repeat two of his Poems, one called the ‘‘Walk of the Devil’’ ’. John Payne’s devotion to Coleridge bore immediate and rich fruit, in the shorthand transcript of two lectures on Shakespeare given a month a er the inconsistently dazzling dinner-party performance at Hatton Garden. Robinson, however, may have the last word on the latter event: Coleridge, he wrote to his brother, ‘became, if I may use the phrase, bodily drunk, while his mind was, tho’ weak, quite sober. He became quite incapable even when he was solving metaphysical riddles. To change the subject, I begged him to repeat to the ladies ‘‘The Devil’s Walk’’—he could not recollect a single stanza. . . . I then perceived that his face was deadly pale, his eyes staring from the sockets, his lips quivering; he was bodily drunk. He staid half an hour a erwards, began sentences he could not end, but uttered not a single impropriety nor forgot himself a moment’ (HCR Correspondence, 30 October 1811). The following day Robinson asked Coleridge what had transpired; Coleridge explained that the Colliers’ brandyand-water was stronger than gin-and-water, his accustomed tipple, and that he had unwisely consumed the same quantity. Less glamorous than the Romantic poets among John Payne’s early acquaintance, but far more influential in his career, was an attorney from Norwich, Thomas Amyot (1775–1850), the first serious antiquary the young man had met. Robinson, who had become acquainted with Amyot at Norwich in 1794, introduced him to the elder Colliers, and by February 1811 (if not earlier) ‘the Amyots’ were dining in Hatton Garden. As private secretary to the patrician Whig minister William Windham, Amyot had resided in London since 1806, reaping a series of lucrative appointments in the Colonial Office which supported him a er Windham’s death in 1810, and le him leisure to pursue scholarly and bibliophile interests. Though publishing little save a collection of Windham’s speeches and a few later archaeological papers, he built up a distinguished reference and ‘rare book’ library of his own, and frequented the British Museum, the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, and Buckingham House, as well as the necessary booksellers and auction-rooms. His generosity to other scholars, including beginners, was conspicuous: the historian John Bruce (1802–69) recalled in 1851 that ‘more than thirty years ago . . . Mr. Amyot endeavoured in vain to procure [me] admission to the British Museum’, and when the Librarian Joseph Planta proved ‘inexorable’ (Bruce was well under age), Amyot ‘set apart a place for the writer in his own library, gave him unrestricted access to his wellstored shelves, fetched him books from every room of his house, procured him


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access to the library of the Society of Antiquaries, and—best of all—to the noble library of George III, then lying unconsulted at Buckingham House’.46 Amyot need not have taken similar trouble with young John Payne Collier, for John Dyer managed that for his son at a surprisingly early date. That Amyot in some manner encouraged John Payne’s antiquarian bent we can credit, however, for Collier in his Poetical Decameron (1820) makes Amyot his ‘Morton’, the indulgent interlocutor who approves the arcane disclosures of ‘Bourne’ (= Collier), while ‘Elliot’, the more up-to-date Robinson-figure, remains sceptical. Amyot’s active collecting would have inspired any neophyte,47 and his later services as go-between ‘were innumerable’, Collier recollected: introductions to Henry Ellis and Frederic Madden at the British Museum, and above all to the Duke of Devonshire in 1830—the last invaluable office acknowledged by Collier in correspondence, but never in print.48 Amyot proposed Collier to the Society of Antiquaries in 1830, and joined him in the largely thankless administration of the Camden, Percy, and Shakespeare Societies. Collier found fault only with Amyot’s indiscriminate generosity (‘I should take [his assistance] the more kindly if I did not know that he was just as ready to give his aid to people who in my opinion do not deserve it’, he complained to Robinson in 1829), but Jane remonstrated with him about his ingratitude, and thought him ‘repentant’.49 A few of Amyot’s suggested readings appear in Collier’s first Shakespeare (1842–44); Collier dedicated his Roxburghe Ballads (1847) to Amyot ‘in testimony of long friendship and sincere esteem’ and—perhaps less loyally— addressed to him New Facts Concerning the Life of Shakespeare (1835), the first and most flagrant of his biographical impostures. Precisely how early the young man met Amyot we cannot say, although John

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46. Bruce’s memories appear in his obituary notice of Amyot, which follows another by Henry Crabb Robinson in the Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., 35 (January 1851), 3–9; Bruce was at that date the principal editor of the journal, and authorship is assigned to him in the marked file copy now in the Folger Library (see Kuist 1982, p. 37). Ganzel (p. 419, n. 12) attributed this anonymous piece to Collier and treated it as autobiographical. Another young beneficiary of Amyot’s encouragement was Charles Hartshorne, the would-be bibliographer; see Hunt 1993, p. 41. On Amyot see also Corfield and Evans 1996. 47. His library was more historical than literary (Dugdale, Hearne, Camden, Strype, etc.), but he did own a First Folio (Richard Farmer’s copy), as well as a Second and a Fourth (sale, Sotheby’s, 10 February 1851). 48. JPC Memoirs, p. 124; JPC to Madden, March 1829, BL Egerton MS 2838, fols. 7–8; OMD, i:13; Jane Collier to HCR, 20 June 1830, and JPC to HCR, 18 January 1831, HCR Correspondence. In OMD (iv:26), Collier said that Amyot also introduced him to ‘Lord G. Levison Gower [sic], his old plays and MSS.’, although elsewhere in OMD (ii:79) Collier credited the introduction to Charles Greville. 49. JPC to HCR, 27 December 1829, and Jane Collier to HCR, 20 June 1830, HCR Correspondence.


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Payne recounts a visit to one of Amyot’s ‘rather smart parties . . . when I was merely a lad’ (OMD, iv:25). Ostensibly William Windham himself (d. 4 June 1810) was there, and Queen Caroline made a spectacular entrance, ‘discovered on a pedestal, as the statue of the injured Hermione in ‘‘The Winter’s Tale’’ ’ when a dark curtain was ‘at a signal drawn up’. Collier hastens to explain that ‘this was the only time I ever saw Queen Caroline in private’, but the story seems unlikely on several counts. Robinson, who would surely have been present if John Payne were, never mentions it, nor recollects any meeting with the unfortunate spouse of George IV.

1811: The Coleridge Lectures On 8 January 1811, at the age of thirty-five, Henry Crabb Robinson began to keep his celebrated diary, which he maintained faithfully until a few days before his death in 1867. John Payne Collier, ‘twenty-two years and ten months old within a day’, started a diary of his own on 10 October 1811, and abandoned it a er forty-nine days.50 Short though it is, the young man’s journal of 1811 documents the commencement of a literary career in intimate detail—ambitions, doubts and preoccupations, social and moral opinions, reading and writing—the more revealing because it has escaped the characteristic revisionary attention of the mature autobiographer. Like most diarists, he tries to be frank: ‘I dare say on reading over tomorrow, if I should not be ashamed to do it, I shall be disgusted with the nonsense I am writing; but however it may be, I write from the feeling of the moment, and if therefore I am ashamed of what I write I must be ashamed of my feelings.’ His father, he remarks, keeps a diary in private shorthand, and has complained that Gibbon wrote his ‘with the obvious view of publication’; but John Payne chooses longhand, as ‘I wish it to be read by others as well as by myself at some distant period: that is the fact’. He assesses his own character with the somewhat theatrical candour of post-adolescence, finding ‘a large portion of Vanity’, ‘the love of praise’, and ‘a dubiously valuable quality, . . . Ambition’, which he has o en, he says, defended in moral debates. ‘A young man without ambition or emulation (which is nearly the same thing)’, he declares, ‘is a pest to Society; whether he is a pest to Society or a blessing to it with Ambition may, I think, depend upon himself.’ 51

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50. The surviving diary, together with Collier’s notes on Coleridge’s lectures, was lot 301 in the JPC sale; the ten parts or ‘brochures’ are now Folger MSS M.a.219–28. Some of the diary entries are transcribed in Foakes 1971, which also contains (pp. 154–56) a detailed physical description of Collier’s notebooks. 51. JPC Early Diary, 10 October 1811. A year later Collier took the opposing position in a debate


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John’s introspection is more interesting to most of us than his record of the current events in seven autumn weeks, and certainly more so than the literary passages he laboriously copied from Pope, Johnson, Thomson, Burns, and Suckling. At twenty-two he was still profoundly dependent on household and family, and given to self-pitying melancholia: Who shall ever remember me with affection? They tell me at home ‘John, you are gloomy and discontented—You have ceased to be cheerful—Your pleasure is to plague your Sisters and torment your Mother and to disobey your father & set a bad example for your brothers’. If this be true am I fit to be an inmate under such circumstances—Oh no, let me keep my sorrow to myself—Let me pine alone—Let me not rejoice in seeing others as miserable as myself. . . . My Sister Mary used to notice me & now she seems always to avoid me. He was ‘greatly disheartened in all my studies’ because ‘my memory is so bad’ and ‘my ability is so small’. ‘I feel myself wholly inadequate to the study of the Law. . . . And yet if I do not pursue the law what am I to follow? Am I to be a Reporter all the days of my life? Am I to drag along the valley of existence which far from being covered with luxuriance and flowers serves only as the channel of a muddy river that carries to the sea of eternity all the filth of the world—Oh no—Both ways I am defeated’.52 The last overladen metaphor might prepare us for John’s alternative ambition, expressed a few days later: ‘I o en wish I was a poet, but at least I am half way, I enjoy poetry: altho’ it is not in my power to make a Sun I can bask with transports in its beams’ (5 November). And consume poetry he certainly did, from Thomson’s The Seasons and Hayley’s Epistle to Romney to Cowley’s The Mistress (with some of Cowley’s Latin poems, which he discussed with Robinson) and Martial’s epigrams, which he apparently began to translate. On 5 November he also began Paradise Lost for the first time (‘At my age it might seem a little extraordinary’) and kept hard at it, a book a day.53 On 15 November

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at the Philological Society, reported in HCR Diary, 10 November 1812. Speaking ‘on the Question Whether the love or the contempt of fame is of the greatest benefit to Society’, the young man ‘dwelt on the evils of ambition to Society, & the pains of emulation to the individual’; but while excusing Collier’s poor showing on the grounds that ‘I have reason to think he spoke worse than usual’, Robinson was not impressed: ‘His Speech was not equal to my expectations. He had the common places of speechifying, the head & tail pieces, formularies which when they are added to specific knowledge and set off what is to the purpose are of some use, but as a substitute for argument &c. are very wretched. . . . He attempted imagery, but very unsuccessfully.’ 52. JPC Early Diary, 1 November 1811. 53. The copy he annotated then (ed. Thomas Park, printed by Charles Whittingham) is now in FF/K; several of the underlined passages are discussed in the diary entries.


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he alternated Milton with part of The Tempest, and earlier he had absorbed the prefaces to Shakespeare of Johnson and Pope, Joseph Spence on the origins of Roman poetry, Goldsmith’s ‘Heroic Warlike Women’, and George Steevens’s account of the early English stage. He now also conned a little more of Blackstone’s Commentaries, in earnest of his half-hearted legal pursuits. Apart from the unsurviving translations of Martial, the diarist composed in this period at least one letter for publication to the Morning Chronicle. Sent on 29 October and signed ‘A Dreamer’, it offered ‘a view of what our situation may be 50 years hence under the semblance of a Dream’. We hear no more of this, nor of a projected letter to the Chronicle on the idea, suggested by Goldsmith, of raising a female militia; neither letter, as far as we know, was published. And he copied into his entry for 30 October a six-stanza ‘mock German Ode, written about a year ago’. Elsewhere he alludes to a more youthful obsession with writing verse in imitation of Spenser—‘when I was 18 or 19 . . . I devoted day & night to it’ (Memoirs, p. 126)—and we shall return to the vexed chronology of his early poetical efforts. Theatre- and church-going in October and November 1811 were regular pursuits for John Payne: he saw Twelh Night at Covent Garden and Measure for Measure with the Kembles and Mrs. Siddons on 13 November, as well as Isaac Pocock’s farce The Green-Eyed Monster and Thomas Dibdin’s The English Fleet in 1342 (30 October). Although never in his life conspicuously religious (‘I am a Unitarian if anything’, he wrote in his diary on 12 October 1879), he keenly devoted the Sunday mornings of his youth to services at the dissenters’ famous Essex Street Chapel, where in 1811 Thomas Belsham occupied the pulpit. John gave admiring summaries of three of Belsham’s sermons, and recorded another by Dr. Manning of Exeter: his attendance clearly was voluntary and enthusiastic. Outdoor sport of any kind seems not to have attracted young Collier. On 11 October he went shooting in Islington Fields, which led him to reflections on the cruelty of hunting, and on death itself. Public lectures were more his style; before the advent of Coleridge on 18 November he had listened to John Thelwall discussing ‘the comprehension & compressibility of the English language’, and five weeks earlier Thelwall’s sixteen-year-old son Algernon expatiating on astronomy. John Payne thought the father’s lecture ‘entertaining, for it is the one [of a series] in which he has talked least about himself ’, but found the son’s presumptuous (‘It strikes me it is the highest arrogance for a boy of 16 to lecture on a subject on which Newton & the greatest men that ever lived have professed their comparative ignorance’). And on 12 November, probably at Guy’s, he heard the chemist and philanthropist William Allen on ‘mechanics’, and joined an interesting post-mortem: ‘I a erwards saw some pupils of the Hospital take Nitrous Oxyde or gas produced by the Nitrate of Ammonia put


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into a retort, aerified & caught in a bladder or other vehicle [i.e., ‘laughing gas’]. It appeared to produce the most lively sensations of joy: indeed to make them for about two minutes quite frantic. Others it had a different effect upon, as it made them insensible to everything but the delight they felt, and they fell down without motion.’ John seems not himself to have participated in the experience, but he speculated almost wistfully about its implications: ‘If by a mere change of the air we breathe it is so easy to make men taste the most exquisite sensations of rapture, how easy would it be for the Creator to convert the Globe into an actual heaven. Perhaps in Heaven they breathe this kind of air.’ 54 John’s social intercourse in these seven weeks leads up—it now seems inevitably—to the Coleridge lectures on Shakespeare of 1811–12. Lamb, Godwin, even the satirist John Wolcot (‘Peter Pindar’) all figure in John’s diary, but the lion of the autumn was Coleridge himself, and the most memorable passages are those concerned with the great man’s conversation and opinions. ‘A few months’ before his entry of 13 October the diarist ‘was in Coleridge’s Company several times, and was highly delighted with a fund of anecdote and humour, much good nature and correct observation, besides a vast extent of knowledge delivered with much eloquence. . . . Coleridge is a man very fond of the display of his abilities, and . . . very usefully so—for no one can hear him speak if he be ever such a dolt but must improve by what he says.’ Recalling in particular an evening’s disquisition on Falstaff (‘That Falstaff was no Coward but pretended to be one’, etc.), John noted that ‘no one spoke but [Coleridge], and no one wished to speak, indeed he kept us on the continual listen and laugh so that it was almost impossible’. On 17 October John spent an hour at the Lambs’ in the presence of Coleridge, so dazzled by the monologue that he withdrew to absorb it in memory (‘It is impossible for a man to talk better’); and three days later occurred the brilliant but chaotic dinner-performance at Hatton Garden. The Collier diary of 1811 effectively terminates on 18 November, converting itself into reports on the formal discourses that Coleridge had come to London to deliver. This now-celebrated ‘Course of Lectures on Shakespear and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry’ was presented on Mondays and Thursdays from 18 November through 27 January 1812 at Scot’s Corporation Hall, Crane Court, Fleet Street, under the auspices of the London Philosophical Society. Fi een talks were promised, but in the event seventeen were given; admission was two guineas for the series, or three ‘with the privilege of introducing a Lady’. Robinson was particularly energetic in circulating Coleridge’s prospectus and collecting subscriptions (he

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54. A dozen years earlier S. T. Coleridge had undergone a similar introduction to laughing gas, through Humphry Davy; Holmes 1989, p. 245.


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was ‘hurt’ by the reluctance of Walter to advertise the event in The Times; Walter finally consented, but ‘not with a good grace’), and on one occasion ‘walked into the city to distribute Coleridge’s bills’. John Dyer Collier (John Payne wrote in 1856) ‘proposed that all his family, old enough to profit by them, should attend the Lectures’, and ‘on applying for tickets, Coleridge sent us a copy of his prospectus’. Like Robinson, however, the Colliers apparently paid their way in: Coleridge did not paper his house.55 John Payne may have attended the entire course, but his surviving reports and transcripts cover only the first through third, sixth through ninth, and twel h lectures, and it is possible that the Colliers’ subscription (two guineas was no insubstantial sum) was divided among family members. Nonetheless, John’s hero-worshipping shorthand record of what he heard remains of the greatest value, for despite its incompleteness and likely imprecision it gives us the gist of Coleridge on Shakespeare for 1811–12, available from no other source—for Coleridge wrote nothing down.56 Had the young man gone on to no further activity, good, bad or indifferent, a niche in literary history would still be his. The largely unwarranted controversy that attended the publication of these fortuitous transcripts some forty-five years later belongs to another chapter. The 1811 diary that began with a renunciation of shorthand concluded with a return to its use, for which posterity must be grateful; for Coleridge’s language was obviously better served by such on-the-spot transcripts than by memorial report. Seven months earlier shorthand had brought John Payne Collier a spell of employment away from his father, the newsletters, and The Times, and this resulted in his first title-page byline, or in effect his ‘first book’. Alexander Bartholoman, the proprietor of the York Herald and publisher of Bartholoman’s Complete Law Reports for the York assizes of 1811, was probably a subscriber to the Colliers’ news-service, and when he sought to engage a reporter from London to cover the Nisi Prius Court during the Lent session (his own man, Michael Ellis of York, handled the Crown Court) he approached John Dyer Col-

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55. HCR Diary, 18 and 14 November 1811; Seven Lectures, p. vii. Coleridge’s providing the Colliers with a printed prospectus hardly amounts to ‘a special invitation . . . urging them to attend’ (Ganzel, p. 19). 56. Robert Southey, in a letter of 13 November 1811, urged Coleridge’s host John Morgan to impress upon the lecturer ‘the fitness of having them taken down in shorthand, as a duty which he owes to himself, and his friends and his family and the world’, and Coleridge himself noted in a letter to Sir George Beaumont (7 December) that ‘several of my Friends join to take Notes’. These included, for lectures 3–5, one J. Tomalin, mentioned as a guest at the Colliers’ five times by HCR in 1811–12, and possibly the James B. Tomalin who wrote to HCR in 1843 and 1853; Inez Elliott, Index to the Henry Crabb Robinson Letters in Dr. Williams’s Library (1960), p. 34. See Foakes 1987, i:153–62.


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lier for a recommendation. On 1 March John Dyer offered the job to Robinson, who accepted but almost immediately regretted it. Robinson was on the verge of committing himself to the study of the law (two days later he resolved upon that course, a decision ‘I am willing to hope may prove one of the most important in my whole life’), and he fretted about the consequences of appearing as a reporter while embarking on a legal career. Thomas Amyot agreed with him, and Robinson tried to renege, pointing out to John Dyer ‘the objection taken to reporters being called to the bar’, although later he confessed that his true motives were ‘indolence & the unconscious consciousness . . . that I should be a bad reporter’ (HCR Reminiscences, ii:23). Initially John Dyer Collier seemed sure of finding a substitute, but this fell through on 8 March, and Bartholoman was to publish an announcement of his supplementary London reporter in the Herald for the next morning. Understandably annoyed by Robinson’s diffidence, John Dyer quarrelled with him in the evening, but by midnight ‘decided John [Payne] should go to York, & so relieved me from the distress I felt before’ (HCR Diary, 8 March 1811). Robinson, now off the hook, never again accepted work as a named reporter; John Payne travelled immediately to York, where he took notes on eighty-one causes heard before Sir Alexander Thomson in the Nisi Prius (civil) Court. Few of these were momentous in any respect, and some were tedious indeed, but John Payne may have taken a bookish interest in Raper and Others vs. Kearton and Others, an action seeking to recover lands on the basis of lineage. For the key evidence here produced was an old family Bible (described in bibliophilic detail as ‘a Breeches Bible’ of 1604, with the point of that whimsical epithet explained by the reporter), in which a handwritten pedigree may have been altered by the use of ‘vitriolic acid’ or ‘copperas water’; the leaf bearing it is described as formerly ‘loosed’, and now separated. Thomson observed that ‘all the writing looked equally old, and the ink was of the same colour’, but if this was meant to lead the jury to respect the claim, it failed: the case ended, a er twelve hours, with an award to the plaintiffs of one shilling (Bartholoman’s Reports, pp. 131– 37). A fascinating possibility—but one apparently beyond proof—is that John Payne may have encountered, while at York, the most notorious literary forger of his era. William Henry Ireland, whose Shakespearian impositions of 1794– 95 were still green in everyone’s memory, had migrated to York late in 1810, and was imprisoned for debt in York Castle, where the Nisi Prius Court sat, at precisely the time of Collier’s attendance. Ireland did not appear before Thomson in the Lent assizes (nor was there any reason he should have done), and was freed by October, but he wrote satirical verse on the same judicial event that John Payne chronicled in prose: A Poetic Epistolary Description of the City


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of York, Comprising an Account of the Processions and Entry of the Judges at the Present March Assizes (by ‘Amicus’; York, 1811). Nearly seventy years later Collier would imply that he knew nothing of Ireland personally, but if he had even heard of his incarceration nearby, a frisson of some sort might have affected the reporter of 1811, as the accidental touch of the murderer Patch had in 1806. On 26 March John Payne was back in London—‘well & in high spirits’, thought Robinson: ‘he appears to have enjoyed & profited by the excursion’. The published volume of Bartholoman’s Reports (A1) contains 115 pages of the young man’s transcriptions, ranging in length from a sentence or two to ten pages, and his name as reporter appears prominently on the title: ‘john payne collier, of Hatton Garden, London, Esquire’. John Dyer might have been pleased, but instead was ‘disposed to be out of humour . . . I am sure without reason’, Robinson noted. Curiously, John Payne himself never in any subsequent memoir or journal mentioned the York law courts, his precipitous trip, or his own unexceptionable debut on a title-page.

Newspapermen: Thomas Barnes and His Friends Despite his halfhearted pursuit of a career in law—he was admitted to the Middle Temple on 31 July 1811—newspaper reporting continued to dominate John’s working hours, and his day-to-day life remained centred on The Times. But office politics in Printing House Square also began to involve him, and with his father and Robinson now absent, John’s choice of friends and allies became increasingly important. Three of the latter, men of literary tastes and influence with John Walter II, were Thomas Massa Alsager, Barron Field, and above all Thomas Barnes. Alsager (1779–1846), ten years older than John, had given up operating a bleaching factory near the King’s Bench Prison to write for The Times on finance (a column called ‘State of the Money Market’) and on music, his special interest. He is now best remembered as an early enthusiast of Beethoven, as a friend of the Wordsworths and a sponsor of Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Lamb, and as the man who lent his copy of Chapman’s translation of Homer to Charles Cowden Clarke, who shared it with Keats. Alsager was a keen whist-player in Lamb’s circle, and doubtless figured in some of the whist-parties at Hatton Garden; he entertained John Payne Collier at least twice in 1812–13, at dinner (with Robinson and Thomas Barnes) on 6 November and again on 21 March (with Robinson, John Dyer, and Jane). He became a shareholder in The Times and remained a power there for thirty-five years, when as joint manager he was accused of ruinously mismanaging its budget. In despondency over this and the death of


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his wife, in 1846 Alsager cut his own throat; thirty years later Collier misremembered that ‘he speculated, and shot himself ’.57 Barron Field (1786–1846), only three years John’s senior, was among the first near-contemporaries with literary ambitions to appear in John’s company. The son of a London physician and apothecary to Christ’s Hospital, he reviewed plays for The Times from about 1805–06 to 1810, before going on to study the law—and, unlike John, sticking with it.58 Field also travelled in the Lambs’ circle, and made one at the Collier’s whist-party for Charles (21 June 1811) and at Hatton Garden dinners with Godwin (13 October 1811) and Godwin and Coleridge (22 January 1812). ‘A young man not deficient in quickness’, John thought him (Early Diary, 13 October 1811); with Robinson he visited Field’s chambers on 30 March 1812, meeting Lamb and Barnes once again, where the talk was of Leigh Hunt, who eight days earlier had published in the Examiner his famous libel on the Prince Regent (‘a violator of his word, a libertine . . . a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps’). Field had known Hunt for several years, having subscribed for the latter’s Juvenilia (1801) when he was only fi een and Hunt nineteen. He entered the Inner Temple in June 1809 and had terminated his drama reviewing for The Times by 1810, but his interest in early English plays and literary history continued, as did his intimacy with Hunt, Lamb, and Barnes. As early as 1808 he had written for Hunt’s Examiner, and in 1810–11 he contributed ten pieces to Hunt’s Reflector, a quarterly of just one year’s duration. Three of these, headed ‘The Law Student’, may well have inspired, alongside Barnes’s Parliamentary Portraits, John’s own series of ‘Criticisms on the Bar’, composed for the Examiner eight years later: each sequence offered impressionistic sketches of personalities in the high courts, and spared few sensibilities. Field wrote also for the Quarterly Review and produced a popular book on Blackstone’s Commentaries (1811), but in 1816 he went out to Ceylon as advocate-fiscal, and then to New South Wales as a judge. In Australia he wrote verse (First Fruits of Australian Poetry, 1819, reviewed generously by Lamb for the Examiner) and assembled materials toward The Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales, which he edited in 1825. He was back in private practice in England from 1824 to 1830, and then spent ten years more on the bench in Gibraltar, as Chief Justice. His final retirement to Torquay marked a return to the enthusiasm of his youth, editing Thomas Heywood’s and Thomas Legge’s plays for the Shakespeare Society, his old colleague’s antiquarian publishing club. On Field’s death in 1846 Collier completed the Heywood edition himself. 57. See Donald H. Reiman in Cameron et al., v:264–66; D. E. Wickham 1981; Morison, i:413– 16; and JPC Diary, 10 March 1877. 58. See the biographical introduction by Richard Edwards to the 1941 Sydney reprint of Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (pp. viii–xi).


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In 1808 or 1809 Field introduced Thomas Barnes (1785–1841) to John Walter II and The Times; in retrospect, this is perhaps the most significant thing he did in his life. Barnes, who as editor from 1817 to 1841 was to lead his newspaper into a century’s pre-eminence, was perhaps at that time an unlikely recruit. Son of a wealthy solicitor, he had enjoyed all the educational advantages denied to young Collier, beginning with eight years at Christ’s Hospital (four of them in close company with Leigh Hunt), where he excelled in classics and Italian literature.59 In 1804 he went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, with continuing success in classical studies—Porson took a liking to him—to which he added talents in swimming, cricket, and boxing: on one occasion he unwittingly challenged the great pugilist Tom Crib and, when Crib revealed himself, took him back to his rooms for an impromptu wine-party. Barnes was famously handsome, well enough off, and universally popular; and he was already a noted carouser. He came down from Pembroke in 1808 and entered the Inner Temple in November, hoping eventually for a fellowship at Cambridge. In the meantime, through Barron Field, he went to work on The Times, covering law cases and political meetings, and taking over from Field as dramatic critic in 1809–10. Henry Crabb Robinson solemnly approved of his new colleague, whom he regarded as a suitable friend for John Payne. ‘Barnes . . . has a good countenance’, he recorded on 16 March 1812, ‘and is a man who I dare say [will] make his way in the world. He has talents and activity and inducement to activity’, as well as ‘a great deal of knowledge and converses well’ (30 March). To John himself Robinson primly recommended Barnes to replace the society of inferiors such as the young Bakewells: ‘Barnes is a very sensible man and with knowledge much beyond your’s. From your intimacy with him I draw hope that you will soon be satiated with the mere elegancies of polite literature’.60 Barnes seems also to have charmed John Dyer Collier, for John Payne later recalled (in a hostile account) that he ‘was intimate in my father’s house [and] . . . used to borrow wine out of my father’s cellar’ (OMD, ii:15). Wine indeed, or brandy and water, nearly undid the young toper for good in the winter of 1811–12. Barnes drank himself silly at Thomas Hill’s Sydenham house with a literary party, and collapsed on the walk back to his inn. He was found lying in a snowdri , ‘endeavouring to pull the snow over his body, and indistinctly muttering, ‘‘I can’t get the counterpane over me!—I can’t get the counterpane over me!’’ . . . The result might have proved fatal, had not he been rescued in the nick of time from his perilous predicament. Dearly, however . . . did he pay . . . [for] a frightful attack of rheumatism crippled him for several months, and as many years elapsed before he fully shook off the effects of this Bacchanalian bivouac.’ 61 John 59. See Hudson 1944 and Morison, vol. 1. 60. HCR to JPC, 27 September 1812; FF MS 346. 61. Horace Smith, quoted in Hudson 1944, p. 13.


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Payne must have been remembering this as the ‘long, serious illness’ that Barnes underwent ‘while he lived in Lamb-buildings’, when ‘I used to call upon him almost daily’ (OMD, ii:14). Recuperative holidays were in order (at Brighton, for example, in late 1814), and apparently John’s sojourn at Margate in September 1812 was in company with his new friend, for Robinson, writing to John at that seaside resort, closed a long letter of 27 September with ‘my best remembrances to Barnes’. Leigh Hunt wrote that Barnes ‘might have made himself a name in wit and literature, had he cared for anything beyond his glass of wine and his Fielding’, a tongue-in-cheek estimate of one who—abandoning literature certainly—was later described by Lord Lyndhurst as ‘the most powerful man in the country’. Barnes’s circle in these early days included Lamb, Theodore Hook, the Smith brothers Horace and James, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Thomas Campbell, and Wordsworth, and by 1818 B. R. Haydon and Keats, in addition to Hunt. But to Hunt, his old schoolmate, he was probably closest. Like Barron Field he contributed to the Reflector in 1810–11, eight pieces including ‘Stafford’s Niobe’, an essay on Anthony Stafford’s curious prose tracts of 1611, which throws out a conjectural two-part parallel with Paradise Lost and suggests that Milton may have read Niobe. John Payne Collier in 1816 and 1820 appropriated this unconvincing suggestion as his own, without crediting Barnes. Barnes also wrote, like Field and finally Collier, for Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, providing in 1814–15 a long series of ‘Parliamentary Portraits’ under the pseudonym ‘Criticus’. These may also be compared with Collier’s ‘Criticisms on the Bar’ four years later, which combine Field’s subject matter in the Reflector with Barnes’s familiar approach to his lawmakers. Like ‘Criticisms on the Bar,’ Barnes’s ‘Parliamentary Portraits’ were collected into a single volume (1815), subtitled ‘Sketches of the Public Character of Some of the Most Distinguished Speakers of the House of Commons’. But a er his appointment to the editorship of The Times in 1816, Barnes published little of his own, at least under his own name. His Cambridge fellowship eluded him, and his study of the law led to less even than Collier’s, but his brilliant later career as a newspaperman rendered these failures slight. He died unexpectedly at fi y-six, and his famous discretion about private affairs—including his unconventional domestic arrangements—leave us nothing from his side concerning a breach with Collier that was finally bitter and deep. A er five years of good friendship, it would seem, Collier and Barnes began to fall out. An initial coolness between them in 1817 had hardened by 1823, when Barnes and Alsager dismissed John from his second stint with The Times. Seeds of the quarrel may have been sown much earlier, however, with Barnes’s unrepaid borrowings from John Dyer’s wine-cellar and other liberties. Barnes’s father had died while his son was still up at Cambridge, so Collier relates, ‘and


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le him . . . a few thousands, which he contrived very soon to get through’; wherea er he became ‘so poor, and so much in debt, that I constantly used to lend him small sums’. These small debts were subsequently compounded with a loan of twenty pounds ‘in one sum, a er I married [i.e., a er 20 August 1816]’, and despite an increased salary as ostensible editor of The Times (a er 1817), Barnes ‘never offered to pay me what he owed me’ and ‘has never forgiven me the small obligation I laid him under’. John Payne was understandably irritated about this situation as early as 23 December 1817, when he told Robinson that Barnes was not his friend, having ‘borrowed money of him long ago and forgot to repay him’ (HCR Diary). And it still rankled in 1846, when five years a er Barnes’s death Collier explained to John Walter II his own second departure from The Times as a direct result of his old generosity: ‘Mr Barnes owed me money—he died owing it me—and as it was not convenient to him to pay me, he did not like to have me a standing reproach about him in the office. This is my interpretation of the matter’; in another letter, ‘Mr Barnes took a dislike to me because he was my debtor’, and the wine-borrowing story was repeated, although ‘out of my own family this has never been mentioned until now, & I never wish to allude to it again’.62 ‘I cared little for the £20’, he still insisted in 1871 (OMD, ii:15), though by 1877 the sum had become £10, not £20, and Collier was not sacked, but ‘quitted [the] Newspaper’ over the matter; subsequently ‘Barnes avoided me in the Strand—that was natural, as he owed me money which he could not pay, and gratitude which he could not feel’ (JPC Diary, 24 April and 6 May 1877). All this may be true, or not untrue, as Robinson’s early testimony would suggest, but Barnes’s biographer was sceptical (Hudson 1944, p. 8), and certainly Barnes’s prosperous father was alive for several years a er his son came down from Cambridge. Perhaps, too, the unacknowledged obligations between the young friends were double-ended: Collier appropriated the older essayist’s conjecture about Stafford and Milton, not once but twice, without crediting him, and his own early career as a ‘retrospective critic’ followed Barnes’s so closely as to suggest some kind of patronage or a practical leg-up. Barnes preceded Collier in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, as he would precede him in the British Lady’s Magazine, where John published his earliest antiquarian résumés. And Barnes’s passionate, proselytic espousal of Italian poetry—he declaimed Metastasio with Hunt as a schoolboy, ‘as loud as we could bawl, over the Hornsey Fields’, and drummed Dante unmercifully into the head of Charles Lamb—may account for his younger friend’s early interest in Italian verse. No one else among John Payne’s immediate acquaintance knew Italian well.

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62. JPC to Walter, 15 April 1846 and 4 January 1846, Walter Papers 297 and 292, TNL Archive.


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Much of the pain of a money-borrowing snub might also be explained if Barnes—irreverent, handsome, convivial, and cut out for advancement—was effectively John’s choice of guide and example, a surrogate elder brother in literary pursuits. John Dyer must have accepted Barnes’s use of his house and winecellar, and he and Jane Collier apparently visited Leigh Hunt in Surrey Gaol in 1813 in the company of Barnes, Hunt’s great friend; John Payne later alleged that he too waited on Hunt ‘two or three times a month’ (OMD, iv:95), but no memory from Hunt or anyone else in the circle of visitors confirms this claim. And of course there was Robinson to praise Barnes to the skies, and in late summer 1812 a high-spirited joint excursion to Margate, over John Dyer’s objections. John Payne’s personal commitment to Barnes, if latterly betrayed over nothing but cash, would easily translate itself into lasting resentment. Sometime in 1812, however, when John Payne Collier first resigned—or was sacked—from The Times, Barnes was almost certainly not the cause of it. The occasion is obscure. In 1880 Collier recalled that he le ‘mainly on account of a dispute with the person who at this date had the chief management of the establishment, and who took an aversion to me on the unfounded pretext that I was endeavouring to supplant him’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 78). Elsewhere he added—repeatedly—that he was offered higher wages, and for less work, by James Perry, proprietor of the great rival daily, the Morning Chronicle, where John Dyer now was employed. But Perry and John Walter II shared a practice of not poaching each other’s employees unless contractually free, so it is unlikely that Perry instigated such a move. Nor can Barnes have been in 1812 ‘the person who had . . . the chief management of the establishment’, although seventy years on Collier would occasionally conflate his first leaving The Times (1812) with his later dismissal by Barnes and Alsager (1823); Barnes was still his friend, mentor, and holiday companion in the late summer of 1812, his link with Leigh Hunt, and the intermediary who, three years later, brought John back to The Times.63 The aversion to John was more probably taken by Dr. John Stoddart (1773–1856), to whom Walter ceded editorial control of the paper between 1813 and 1816. Stoddart, a contentious right-wing Tory and inflexible Royalist, was the brotherin-law of William Hazlitt, whom he disliked, and (inevitably) a friend of the Lambs. He was pilloried by Thomas Moore as ‘Dr. Slop’ for his invective political leaders, and by the end of 1815 a worried John Walter II licensed Barnes, a committed Liberal, to censor or suppress Stoddart’s columns. This move led to intolerable conflicts, and Stoddart lost out, being dismissed late in 1816.64 John

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63. HCR Diary, 7 June 1815, noting that ‘Barnes proposed him to W[alter]’ and that ‘W. said he should probably take him’ as a law reporter; six months earlier (8 December 1814), Robinson had recorded that Barnes was among the guests at the Colliers’, where he ‘chatted till late’. 64. See Morison, i:157–64.


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Payne Collier’s three years away from The Times coincide almost precisely with Stoddart’s management of the paper, and it is reasonable to suppose him the enemy in power—although fear on his part that young Collier might ‘supplant’ him may seem far-fetched. Just when in 1812 Collier le The Times is uncertain, but the expedition to Margate with Barnes in late August suggests a new freedom. John Dyer had implacably opposed his son’s junket, probably because his help with the family newsletters was by now essential, and Crabb Robinson played the peacemaker: ‘Today I interfered . . . with a very good & decisive effect between John and his father. John had resolved to go to Margate against his father’s will’. Robinson shrewdly suggested that young John yield on Margate, and ‘at the same time . . . propose to his father to give up his share [i.e., share of profit] in the letters’, which ‘would set him at liberty altogether’. This stratagem worked to perfection, and John Dyer ‘amicably’ gave his twenty-three-year-old son leave to go (HCR Diary, 21 August 1812). The reporter in John Payne would or could not take a complete holiday, however, and during less than one month in Margate lodgings he submitted no fewer than ten communiqués, short and middle-length sketches of fashionable life at the seaside resort, for publication in the Morning Chronicle. Perhaps he was already in James Perry’s employ, or on trial with the paper, but The Times rarely printed such light correspondence, and Collier took care not to sign any of his letters.65 They appeared on page three of the newspaper in a column headed ‘The Mirror of Fashion’ every two or three days between 2 and 25 September, normally dated from Margate two days before. General descriptions of the town, native population and visitors, dress, and diversions range from amiable to satirical, the latter in Robinson’s opinion ‘almost malevolent, so much so that if you were known I should think the people of the place justified in inflicting a chastisement on you; not precisely feathering & tarring but a little dancing à la Sancho Panza’. Most of the articles reported on the local theatre, some others on masked balls, suppers, a promenade, and a pig- and a jackass-race. But the one letter with significant ramifications was that of 20 (published 22) September, on a performance of ‘Messrs. Punch, Judy, and Co’. before the Church of St. John the Baptist. This unparalleled—and now known to be fictive—account of a Punch-play with an ‘allegorical and poetical’ conclusion impressed Robinson’s friend William Rough, the lawyer and poet, who ‘has been praising your Puppet Show Article warmly without knowing you were the Author of it’. In 1812, of course, Collier’s invention of a spurious puppeteer’s plot—Spanish and French

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65. His authorship is established by Robinson’s comments in his letter to JPC of 27 September 1812.


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Revolutionary overtones, Punch finally ‘triumphant over Doctors, Death and the Devil’—cannot but have passed for blithe and innocent fun, whether Robinson and Rough or even James Perry recognized it for such. But sixteen years later the professional drama historian would revive this canard, taking advantage of his own youthful anonymity to conceal its true source, and make it a mainstay of his account of traditional puppet-plays: and the jeu d’esprit became, retroactively, literary forgery de facto, and John Payne Collier’s earliest essay in deception.66

James Perry The celebrated newspaperman James Perry was born in Aberdeen in 1756, the son of a house-builder, James Pirie.67 He le Marischal College a er about three years’ study without a degree when his father’s business failed; he then passed a year as a solicitor’s clerk, and may have worked in a drapery shop (so Alexander Dyce told Collier, but the same was contemptuously said of Thomas Barnes) before joining a company of travelling players. As a fledgling actor he toured Scotland and the north of England with one of the Booths and Tate Wilkinson; he met and quarrelled with Thomas Holcro and was finally discouraged from a career on the stage, either by a blighted love affair or by the professional criticism of George Anne Bellamy’s actor-husband, West Digges.68 He next clerked in Manchester for two years, where like all the Colliers he participated in debating societies, and came to London in 1777 at just twenty-one. He soon made good as a miscellaneous writer and parliamentary reporter, first with the General Advertiser and the London Evening Post. Later he founded the European Magazine (1782) and le it to become editor of the distinguished Gazetteer in 1785, simultaneously overseeing John Debrett’s Parliamentary Register.69 Part of the appeal of the Gazetteer for the maturing Perry was the proprietors’ political commitment to Charles James Fox and the Whig opposition. Perry was then, and continued to be all his life, a dedicated adherent to ‘the principles of Whiggism’ in politics and—as he put it to Samuel Parr in 1805— in the ethics of publishing.70 In late 1789, with a new partner, James Gray, he acquired the moribund Morning Chronicle, and over the next decade transformed

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66. See Freeman and Freeman 1993 and below, A9. 67. See Christie 1970b; Asquith 1973; and OMD, ii:42–45. 68. The first explanation comes from Collier’s OMD account and is considered ‘not . . . in character’ by Perry’s biographer Ian Christie. 69. Although his biographers seem reluctant even to mention them, his best-known (pseudonymous) publications were two lubricious satires in verse, The Electric Eel (1777, three editions) and An Epistle to Mademoiselle D’Eon (six editions in 1778). 70. Quoted in Christie 1970b, p. 343.


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it into the leading Whig organ of its era, the most dependable record of parliamentary activity, and a daily newspaper second only in circulation to the The Times. By 1812–13, under John Stoddart’s editorial control, The Times might be perceived as arch-Tory; the Chronicle never swerved, in James Perry’s lifetime, from strong Whig. Perry’s character, in his mature years, has been widely described—by Hazlitt, Holcro , Leigh Hunt, William Jerdan, Pryse Lockhart Gordon, Mary Russell Mitford, and Collier himself, among his contemporaries. Energetic and lively (Hunt), extroverted, convivial, a consummate table-talker (Mitford, 1813), bon viveur, and clubman: a friend of Hunt’s summed him up as ‘a thorough gentleman, who attracted every man to him with whom he was connected’. He had ‘remarkably small quick eyes’, Collier remembered, and stooped shoulders (OMD, ii:45). His up-to-date literary and cultural tastes were a far cry from those of John Walter II, and he published and consorted with poets like Coleridge, Moore, Rogers, Thomas Campbell, and Byron (his fellow Hampden Club member), with playwrights like Holcro and Sheridan, and with essayists, critics and social theorists ranging from Richard Porson (briefly his brother-in-law), George Dyer, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt to the young radicals James Mackintosh and Joseph Jekyll and the economists John Ramsay McCulloch and David Ricardo. To the witty classicist Porson he remained especially close, sharing his house with him for several years; with Byron and Hobhouse he dined and drank wine in excess on more than one convivial occasion.71 Perry was also a dedicated bibliophile, and the first book collector on the grand scale whom Collier had yet met. Although William Maltby and Thomas Amyot may have introduced him to the idea of a significant private library, Perry’s ‘beautiful assemblage of curiosities’ (Poetical Decameron, i:x) must have been an eye-opener for the young antiquarian. The highly personal choice of its contents reflected the collector himself more than most libraries do, and its emphasis on the ephemerally popular, the rare, and the minor, among early literature—always books and pamphlets with a potential for ‘rediscovery’— sorted well with Collier’s predilection for disclosing novelties, rather than reexamining standard works. Perry’s taste might have seemed arcane, even perverse, to his more sober-sided contemporaries: on shelves that took nearly six thousand auction lots to disperse in 1822—at least twenty thousand volumes, including tracts and pamphlets—there was practically no divinity, law, science, or natural history, little world history other than modern, and very few books in folio format. The classical texts were nearly all relatively recent and finely bound (‘octavo et infra’ throughout), and there was no more than token repre71. Marchand 1957, ii:567 and 613.

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sentation of foreign travel, British topography, and books with coloured plates or major engravings. Perry possessed only three incunables, though remarkable ones: a fine Gutenberg Bible, ‘discovered in a monastery abroad by a gentleman who sold it to Mr. Perry’; a Catholicon ‘ascribed to the press of Mentelin’ (in fact printed by Adolph Rusch); and the Caxton translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. He had Shakespeare’s four Folios and a handful of English Reformation texts, but the strength of his collection unquestionably lay in minor poetry and fiction, English and French, much of it very rare. His penchant, going back to the libertine tastes of his twenties, was clearly for the bizarre or the ‘curious’, and his holdings of facetiae, drolleries, burlesques, satires, and epigrams must be counted among the largest of the era. He had long runs of authors dear to Collier, or soon to be dear: Greene, Churchyard, Nashe, Lodge, Samuel Rowlands, George Wither, John Davies of Hereford, and John Taylor ‘the Water Poet’. His Defoes ran to forty-six volumes, and a scanning of his sale catalogue reveals dozens of unique or all-but-unique specimens of English popular literature before 1700, mouth-watering rarities in 1822 for devotees like Richard Heber (who bought most that he lacked).72 Perry’s collecting activity may have been largely outside of the salerooms, though we find him buying a unique poem (David Gwyn, Certain English Verses, 1588) for £12 12s. at the Brand Sale in 1807, and several lots at the Roxburghe and Towneley sales of 1812 and 1814. As late as 1818–19, when his health had deserted him, he was still paying high prices for signally rare little books in the James Bindley dispersal, outbidding Heber, and some of the copies that stem from Longmans’ Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica may have come to Perry not from that high-priced retail catalogue of 1815, but from the covert auction turn-out of 1818.73 When Collier first glimpsed his collection we cannot be sure, but Perry is certainly the ‘one gentleman’, and one only, whom Collier thanked in the preface to his Poetical Decameron (1820): the personal acquaintance ‘equally distinguished for his enterprise in purchasing and his liberality in lending his rarities’ who remains unnamed ‘because he would think a public acknowledgement one of the worst returns for an act of private friendship’. The two texts that Collier especially starred as from his benefactor’s ‘beautiful assemblage’, T. M.’s Microcynicon (1600) and Lodge’s Alarum against Usurers (1584), were both acquired

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72. A Catalogue of the Curious and Extensive Library . . . which Will Be Sold by Auction (R. H. Evans, 4–16 March 1822). 73. This sale was advertised as Bibliotheca Selecta: A Catalogue of the Library of an Eminent Collector, Removed from the North of England (R. Saunders, 16 February 1818). The collector was rumoured at the time to have been one Midgeley (see De Ricci 1930, p. 92), elsewhere named as ‘Midgeley of Rochdale’ or ‘James Midgeley’, but perhaps a stalking horse for Longmans themselves, at least in respect of the Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica lots.


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by Perry, through his friend Thomas Hill, at the 1819 Bindley auction. Perry died at Brighton in December 1821. The precise date of Collier’s joining the Morning Chronicle is uncertain, although the Margate letters of September 1812 may signal a beginning. John Dyer Collier had already been with Perry for nearly four years, and John Payne’s new employment can scarcely have been accidental. ‘I soon followed him [to the Chronicle], with no increase of salary, but a change to less arduous duties’, John Payne wrote in 1872 (OMD, iv:88); on other occasions he maintained that Perry paid him more than John Walter (JPC Memoirs, p. 79; JPC Diary, 24 April 1877). John Dyer seems to have had Perry’s ear at this time, for it was he whom Charles Lamb had approached about Hazlitt, ‘at his wits end for a livelihood’, on 4 October 1812: ‘Mrs. Collier has been kind enough to say that you would endeavor to procure a Reporter’s situation for W. Hazlitt. . . . I am sure I shall feel myself obliged to you for your exertions, having a great regard for him.’ Perry hired the difficult essayist within six days, at four guineas a week.74 Hazlitt, who soon fell out with Perry, was one of John Payne’s new colleagues on a staff of parliamentary reporters rather larger than that of The Times. Besides John Dyer, who may have had other duties, there were the hard-drinking Irishmen Mark Supple and Peter Finnerty, the dour Scottish classicist John Black, one David Power, and the miniaturist W. H. Watts. So many resident columnists may have been more than enough, and over Christmas of 1813 John Payne found himself on a six-week mission to Holland, reporting on the withdrawal and redeployment of French forces there prior to the Battle of Waterloo. ‘There was a severe competition in London for priority of intelligence’, he recalled in 1880, though he adds little more than that the weather was cold and ‘I met with no particular adventures’. He remained principally at the Hague, but could iceskate to Rotterdam in an hour on the canals (‘I was a pretty good skater’), where he stayed in the best hotel in quest of suppertime gossip, and also visited the fortified town of Gorinchem (JPC Memoirs, p. 79). Collier’s later recollections of Holland were principally of solitary reading (he took only Clarissa with him, but purchased a Rabelais of a thousand pages, ‘which I read from beginning to end with many bursts of companionable laughter, though I had nobody with me to enjoy it’), of meeting a few other English reporters and merchants, and of buying books and engravings, cheap because of the war. He acquired his 1553 Rabelais, a 1552 Giolito Boccaccio, and a tractvolume that included the 1538 Wittenberg edition of Johann Agricola’s Tragedia Johannis Huss, which he retained all his life (JPC sale, lot 838), as well as various prints and engravings, including portraits of Flemish and Dutch painters and a 74. Marrs, iii:85–86.

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fine impression of Raphael’s Vierge aux Roches. His ‘great find’, he later claimed, was ‘an imperfect copy of Tyndale’s Gospel of St. Matthew, to which the date of 1526 has been assigned’. In An Old Man’s Diary Collier stated that he paid a florin for this remarkable fragment, and traded it in about 1832 to Thomas Rodd for books ‘to the value of two or three pounds’. Rodd eventually sold it, said Collier, for £50 to Thomas Grenville, in which case the young bibliophile’s oneflorin discovery must be the unique Grenville copy of all that survives of the first extant printing (1525) of the English New Testament, now in the British Library (OMD, i:iii–iv). But there is good reason to be sceptical about that claim: see QD A180.1. By mid-January the French had withdrawn from the area, and as many of the ports were closed with frost Collier thought himself lucky to procure passage from Scheveningen—open for one day—to Harwich in a forty-foot two-masted fishing boat. He shared the cost of the hazardous return with two other Englishmen, and at the last minute the three of them took in a stranded sea-captain from Berwick. This turned out to be providential, for in a squall they lost their steersman overboard, and the Berwick captain manned the helm and got them safely to port. Collier was back with his family in London by 22 January, his swag intact, exhilarated by the voyage if unimpressed by the Dutch: ‘he comes with no great love for the people or country & has a strong tincture of Smelfungus in him’, Robinson reported.75

Essayist and Collector, 1814–16 John Payne Collier passed his twenty-fi h birthday in Holland in January 1814. By now he had been writing professionally for at least eight years, with many thousands of column-inches of anonymous report or transcription to his credit —if credit were given—as well as ‘communications’, commissioned by or submitted to newspapers, and no doubt the odd review, leader, or informational notice. His name had appeared on the title-page of one book, and some version of his work in perhaps one other. On the unpublished or unpublishable side he had composed a good deal of poetry, and had kept his 1811 diary with its records of Coleridge et al. But the Margate letters of August–September 1812 to the Morning Chronicle are the earliest examples we know of rudimentary ‘periodical essays’ from his pen. Such occasional social, historical, or literary commentary—ranging from unattributed squibs to the enduring brevities of Lamb,

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75. ‘Smelfungus’ was the name given to Smollett on the publication of his xenophobic Travels through France and Italy (1766). In his memoirs Collier claimed he was in Holland ‘a few months’; Crabb Robinson’s diaries record both his departure on 3 December 1813 and his January return, and his dispatches can be found in the Chronicle from 15 December through 19 January.


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Hunt, Hazlitt, and De Quincey—was the mainstay of dozens of Regency journals, and a source of income for countless literary hopefuls. Even the meanest of such work may have seemed preferable to the drudgery of reporting or recapitulating the news, as Collier and his father had hitherto been bound to do, and among those who mattered to them it was certainly more highly esteemed. In November 1814 Robinson found John Dyer Collier flirting with the opportunity to buy into a monthly journal, the long-established but foundering Critical Review, while his son had become involved with an alternative project. Jane Collier seemed ‘full of the new literary concern in which John [Payne] is to bear a part, the British Ladies Magazine’, Robinson wrote, adding sceptically that ‘by its being begun by a person who was forced to advertise for writers [it] must certainly fail’.76 In its first two years of monthly publication, however, the British Lady’s Magazine proved moderately successful, both intellectually and commercially.77 By no means a fashion-and-gossip organ, it offered an ‘open and non-partisan view of life’ to its readership, and announced a ‘general instructional purpose’. The editor was the bookseller John Souter, who in 1814 was also involved in the distribution of the Critical Review. The contributors to the first issue included Leigh Hunt himself (two poems, one of them his sonnet to Thomas Alsager) and Thomas Barnes, who projected a series of ‘Retrospective Criticism’, articles on early writers like those he had written for Leigh Hunt’s Reflector. In the event, however, Barnes provided only two such antiquarian essays, unremarkably lightweight, in January and February 1815, before giving way as retrospective critic to his young former colleague John Payne Collier. John, alongside his father, had sensibly kept up his position with Perry and the Morning Chronicle, but in the autumn of 1814 he had also paid an extended visit to France, which gave him new matter for literary report. Henry Crabb Robinson, having at last moved out of the Colliers’ overcrowded house in July 1813, continued to dine with them and record their activity on a regular basis; in September 1814 he was spending part of his annual expatriation in Paris, and offered his hospitality to John. John turned up unexpectedly late, having come via Rouen with his cousin Joshua, a conspicuously inappropriate travel-

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76. HCR Diary, 20 November 1814. Oskar Wellens (1984) assumed that Robinson’s ‘John’ referred to John Dyer, but Robinson always called the older man ‘Collier’ in his diary, reserving ‘John’ for the son. 77. The first series under the title British Lady’s Magazine and Monthly Miscellany (hereaer BLM ) comprised twenty-nine issues, dated 1 January 1815 to 1 May 1817, published by J. Adlard and edited by John Souter; the New British Lady’s Magazine, or Monthly Mirror of Literature and Fashion, consciously less intellectual, continued under a new editor (D. MacKay) and publisher (Robins and Company) until 31 December 1819. See Mary Anne Schofield, ‘The British Lady’s Magazine’, in Sullivan 1983, pp. 62–66.


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ling companion. ‘His objects and pursuits were not at all mine, and had no relation to mine’, John Payne drily recorded (JPC Memoirs, p. 99), and on reaching Paris they parted at once. John had most hoped to spend time at the Musée du Louvre, like Robinson in September, but Robinson himself was on the verge of returning to England, and the Louvre was now closed to the public for the season (Robinson noted in his diary that he had taken ‘a last look’ on 5 October, the very day John arrived). ‘Bitterly disappointed’, but with commendable audacity—one thinks of his bluffing Robinson past the sentries at the House of Lords in 1806—the younger man called on the intimidating conservateur Baron Vivant Denon, and elicited no less than a private pass for three weeks’ admission. ‘I remained in Paris for the three weeks, and no day passed that I did not avail myself of the kind Baron’s card’, Collier later recalled, slaking his thirst for ‘not copies, but the renowned originals’ of sculptures and paintings. ‘There were not twenty strangers in the Louvre on any day, so that I had the advantage of seeing everything at my leisure, and without the inconvenience of the slightest crowd’, he exulted, as well he might: ‘I look back upon this expedition to Paris as one of the luckiest events of my life; . . . it will be a source of happiness to me as long as I live’ (OMD, i:48). When Robinson and he next met in London, John, with an almost proprietary air, ‘praised greatly the collection of armoury which I had neglected to see’ (HCR Diary, 3 November 1814). Robinson le Collier with an introduction to the old radical expatriate Helen Maria Williams, but John’s principal activity outside the museums seems to have been theatre-going, observing among others the comédienne Mlle. Mars, who had ‘unquestionably passed her zenith’, and the great Talma in Voltaire’s Oedipus, though he later remarked: ‘I must own to a prejudice against the serious productions of the French stage’ (OMD, i:48). His recollections were nonetheless vivid enough to provide six substantial reviews of the Paris productions for the British Lady’s Magazine, published between January and August 1815, revealing that he had also seen Beaupré in Tartuffe, Baptiste cadet in Les femmes savantes, and St. Prix in Corneille’s Horace, as well as Mlle. George in Racine’s Bajazet and Mlle. Volnais in L’École des femmes. These notices, on the whole lively and facile, with an occasionally pedantic digression on the nature of drama in general, or the difference between the English and French stage in former years, appeared over the initials ‘A. Z.’, as did two articles on the life of the actress Mlle. Raucourt (March) and ‘Molière’s Critique upon His Ecole des femmes’ (September), and a communiqué purportedly from ‘a theatrical acquaintance’ (June) about the revival of anti-English satire in Paris. The last, describing ‘a new a erpiece’ at the Theatre de Vaudeville, in which the absurd Milord and Milady Higgs and their vulgar son Bobbie decamp in fear of Bonaparte’s return, ‘was very successful, and is one of thirty [satires] produced within


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the last month, only six of which have been played a second time’. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to verify or dismiss this report: but it has the ring of the Margate Punch-play to it, and if French comic theatre of 1815 were as meticulously chronicled as English puppetry is, such a canard might turn into a crux. As it is, ‘Letter from Paris—New Piece against the English’ may simply be considered Collier’s imaginative ‘filler’, as ‘A. Z.’, for the June issue of BLM. ‘T. B.’, who is almost certainly Thomas Barnes, remained with the British Lady’s Magazine for only two issues, and indeed his contributions as ‘Retrospective Critic’ are at once feeble and thoughtlessly condescending. It is possible that he was ‘the writer . . . no longer connected with the British Lady’s Magazine’ about whom the editor apologized to an annoyed correspondent in the third issue (March), which contained an essay on The Duchess of Malfi signed ‘I. P. C.’ In April ‘Retrospective Criticism’ returned to what had been promised in February, an account of Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica, and the new columnist explained the delay of a month as owing to ‘the desire of varying this department of our miscellany and of making it entertaining without frivolity, and instructive without dulness’. Collier’s implicit aspersions on Barnes may seem ungrateful, but the phrase ‘entertaining without frivolity and instructive without dulness’ clearly appealed to his editor, for it was repeated verbatim in the preface to the second volume (1816), long a er Collier had gone. There are seven more articles in the BLM signed ‘I. P. C.’ or ‘C. P. I.’ (an inversion John employed several times) between January and August 1815, all certainly by Collier, including pieces on John Heywood’s interlude The Four PP; on William Cartwright’s tragicomedy The Lady Errant (1651); on James Howell’s Familiar Letters; on a travelogue called France Painted to the Life (1657, ‘by a learned and impartial hand’, in fact Peter Heylyn) that had amused the late tourist; and a two-part historical and philological discussion of St. Valentine’s Day. During his later association with Ackermann’s Repository (1820) Collier would reprint the first part of ‘St. Valentine’s Day’, with a few minor changes and no credit to the defunct BLM. ‘C. P. I.’ also provided a piece headed ‘Newly-Discovered Antiquities at Westminster Abbey’, on excavations in the Dean’s Yard (August); and a light-hearted letter in July, on ‘French Bonnets at the Theatre’, signed ‘U-No-Hoo’, is surely Collier’s, for it also appeared, revamped, in Ackermann’s Repository five years later. It is a protest against obstructive feminine headgear worn in the cheap lower seats (‘I am one of those who, from motives of economy, as well as taste, are in the habit of sitting in the pit’) and it includes an appropriate quotation from Chapman’s tragedy The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois. Citations like this of lesser-known early drama and popular literature may be good clues to Collier’s authorship of anonymous periodical articles at this early period, although a gen-


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eral familiarity with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton is not really enough: eleven further unsigned reviews in BLM have also been credited to Collier, but we treat these as ‘doubtful’ or ‘rejected’ (Bibliography, pages 1396-98). In particular he is unlikely to have reviewed run-of-the-mill modern fiction, which he disdained all his life, and his opinions of fashionable contemporary poets like Scott and Byron were never so vapid as those in the BLM ’s unsigned reviews.78 Six substantial notices of the contemporary London theatre, signed ‘Tom Nashe the Younger’ or ‘T. N.’, are very probably Collier’s, however. They appeared between March (following two dissimilar, unsigned pieces, which may be by Barnes) and August, a er which unsigned reviews resumed. And there are five uninspired contributions in verse, signed ‘Poetaster’, which seem to be his—for one of them, ‘Coelesta’s Posey’ (April 1815), is ‘humbly inscribed to Miss M. L. P, of P ’: Collier was to marry his fiancée of long standing, Mary Louisa Pycro of Putney, in August 1816. John’s antiquarian essays for the British Lady’s Magazine, his first efforts in what became nearly seventy years’ work at ‘retrospective’ criticism, exhibit a remarkably wide command of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century English literature, not easily acquired. He may have lost little in forgoing school and university, where no curriculum would have led him to Webster, Cartwright, and John Heywood, let alone pre-Restoration theatrical history; but the task of securing his primary and secondary reading-matter, at a time before the unprivileged scholar had free access to scarce or costly books, was still considerable. A year later, on projecting the series ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ for the Critical Review, the Colliers claimed ‘ample resources’ for quotation ‘either in their own, the libraries of their friends, or of public institutions’, and from these John must have educated himself, on the terms each resource imposed. We have seen him familiar with, or welcome to visit, the distinguished private library of Thomas Amyot and perhaps by now that of James Perry; he may also already have met John Bellingham Inglis (1780–1870), an eclectic book collector with a penchant for the English drama that could supplement Perry’s curiously nontheatrical taste. The London Institution, through William Maltby, was known to the family, and the British Museum, a hard nut for most young readers to crack, had yielded unusually early to John’s importunities, like the Lords’ gallery and the Musée du Louvre. In 1879 he told Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth that he had first visited the British Museum ‘with my Father more than 70 years ago: the then Senior Librarian relaxed the rule, as to age, on my account, for I was then between 16 and 17 only; the first book I called was—what do you

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78. Collier’s contributions to BLM were first noticed in Wellens 1984 and 1985.


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think? ‘‘Capt Cooke’s [sic] Voyages’’’.79 Thirty years earlier he had said much the same to the Commission on the Constitution and Government of the British Museum. When asked: ‘How long have you frequented the reading-room of the British Museum?’ John replied: ‘For at least 40 years. I first came here quite as a boy . . . when I was less than 16 years old. My father was acquainted with Mr. Planta’—principal librarian from 1799 until 1827: he who proved ‘inexorable’ in the case of John Bruce—‘and Mr. Planta gave me facilities that were extremely convenient to me, and my father too.’ 80 Although Collier was prone to exaggeration in later life, this was a true story, and indeed his precocity was even greater than he now recalled: as ‘John Payne Collier, Little Smith Street, Westminster’, he had been granted admission for six months on 11 November 1803, as a mere fourteen-year-old. His familiarity with the Museum collections by the time of his Critical Review articles is self-evident, and Reading Room call slips signed by him before March 1818 survive in the Osborn Collection at Yale.81 Robinson and John Dyer Collier himself, among ‘friends’, could no doubt supply the odd volume, but John Payne had been accumulating his own books for more than a decade. We recall his teenage purchase of Bell’s Shakespeare, and his trawl of undervalued rarities in Holland; in 1816 we hear him complain about the drawn-out publication and high price to subscribers—‘of whom we are one’, at £3 10s. a volume—of Dibdin’s Typographical Antiquities (1810–16), and lament that Sir Egerton Brydges’s tantalizing antiquarian reprints were ‘limited to from 60 to 100 copies’ while his meretricious original verse was ‘popular’ both in press-run and in price. The working young bibliophile had no love for such ‘dear-bought specimens’, which ‘only circulate . . . among collectors, who place them within their bookcases in bindings too costly for use; and though they are thus preserved from destruction by the worms, yet, like bodies embalmed, if they keep their original shape and appearance, they are inapplicable to any advantageous purpose. Russia leather and hot-pressed drawing-paper are most destructive opponents of the enlarged interests of literature’. But given the chance himself to assemble rare texts for study and republication, even ‘dearbought’, John was no stranger to the collectors’ marketplace. Frequent allusions to what this or that early edition fetched at Evans’s or Sotheby’s ‘lately’, ‘while we are engaged in writing this review’, or ‘about three months ago’ show him

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79. JPC to Ebsworth, 3 January 1879; Folger MS Y.c.1055 (64). 80. Report of the Commissioners . . . with Minutes of Evidence, Great Britain, Parliamentary Reports (1850), xxiv, qu. 5004. 81. Beinecke Osborn Files 3532. The registers show four renewals in 1804–07, but the volume for the period mid-1810 to 1819 has long been missing from the Museum archives. John Dyer Collier, recommended by Planta, obtained his first ticket on 17 June 1803, and his later renewals coincided with his son’s.


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haunting the rooms, and in mid-March 1816 he splashed out at J. G. Cochrane’s auction sale of the library of Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun.82 Gordon’s collection, assembled nearly two centuries earlier, was virtually a time-capsule of English books and pamphlets, and while some fetched high prices from such enthusiasts as Richard Heber, James Bindley, and the emergent William Henry Miller, bargains were to be found among the less glamorous lots, especially those of controversial, devotional, or theological works. Collier’s taste was more demandingly literary, however; he bought nine not-inexpensive lots under his own name, and others ‘through my friend and agent Rodd’, that is, Thomas Rodd the elder (1763–1822) of Great Newport Street.83 Collier remembered outbidding ‘even . . . such book-cormorants as Heber’ for certain rarities (JPC Memoirs, p. 95), although none of the nine titles he acquired in his own name for £4 17s. 6d. would have concerned Heber overmuch. Among them we can identify James Mabbe’s 1623 translation of Guzmán de Alfarache (lot 102, 10s. 6d.), the 1620 (i.e., 1625–20?) English Decameron with ‘three leaves mended’ (lot 313, £1 4s., perhaps = JPC sale lot 349 with ‘some leaves defective’), Lodowick Carlell’s play of 1639, Arviragus and Philicia (lot 605, 10s.), an imperfect copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 1631–32 (lot 880, 11s.), George Gascoigne’s 1576 Droomme of Doomesday, with ‘corners of the leaves damaged’ (lot 1036, cheap at 3s.), and A Compendium . . . of Certain Ordinary Complaints of Divers of our Countrymen (1581) by ‘W. S.’, once identified as Shakespeare, but now known to be William Stafford (lot 2165, 16s.). This last gave Collier an out-ofthe way illustrative footnote on May-games for his article on Philip Stubbes in the Critical Review a year later. How many of Thomas Rodd’s 260-odd purchases at the Gordon dispersal were destined for Collier is unknown, although Collier recalled in 1879 that ‘I loaded my shelves and lightened my purse so considerably, that even my family remonstrated against the expenditure’. One costly commission may have been lot 1048, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1629), a late quarto of the pamphlet that calls the young Shakespeare ‘an upstart crow’. Rodd paid four guineas for this in the rooms, and just six weeks later Collier published a long retrospective account of it in the Critical Review. Other black-letter texts might have served

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82. Critical Review, September 1816, pp. 247 and 239; June 1817, p. 641; August 1816, p. 121; and May 1817, p. 533. We have noted purchases by ‘Collier’ in a number of sales of 1815, including those of the Duke of Graon and the comedian James Dodd, as well as the first sale of the Duke of Devonshire’s duplicates. 83. Although Collier’s dealings were primarily with the younger Thomas Rodd (1796–1849), he recalled the father in BARB (1865), saying that he and John Dyer ‘were at the same public school; they aerwards met in Spain, and it was in the year 1804, or 1805, that my father first took me to the old book-shop then kept by his worthy, though less fortunate school-fellow. This was, in fact, my introduction to the early literature of our country’ (i:x–xi).


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him (there are six editions between 1592 and 1637) but the critic chose this one, ‘printed by John Haviland for Henry Bell, 1629’, which happens to be very rare: only three institutionalized copies are now known. Slender volumes costing a week’s wages each might well have alarmed Collier’s family, though he assured his readers in the May Critical Review that such ‘works [by Greene] are now usually sold at from five to ten guineas’, and the 1629 Groatsworth did not in fact survive in his final library. A copy of the book did find its way to James Perry, however (his sale, lot 2144), so perhaps Perry himself bought it in 1816 and lent it to John—though at just this time Perry was in no mood for favours. More likely John passed it along at a price, when the thrill of possession had cooled. While bearing in mind that the bibliophile Collier always professed a high-minded reluctance to sell rare books and manuscripts systematically at a profit, a certain amount of commerce in kind among collectors and dealers is inevitable in the pursuit of collectibles. Educated as he had become in the cash value of what he sought, John Payne may well have supplemented his income, or paid for some part of his activity, by a little astute ‘private dealing’ or barter.84 Meanwhile there was trouble at home, perhaps long overdue. Robinson had given up his rooms at 56 Hatton Garden in mid-1813, and in April 1814, between John Payne’s two continental excursions, the Collier family changed house once again. Still nine strong in number, now aged from sixteen to eightyfour, they moved south of the Strand to 11 Salisbury Square, a stroll from the river and The Times, close by the Temple and St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a few blocks east of the Chronicle offices. John Dyer was now fi y-two, and at twentyfive John Payne may have been suffering parental guidance less willingly than before. He had struck out on his own with the British Lady’s Magazine; he had travelled; and his salary at the Chronicle was not much, if at all, less than his father’s. While the provincial newsletters still required his participation, his book-buying and other potentially expensive avocations could ‘distress’ John Dyer and Jane, perhaps even the siblings. ‘Books, beauty, and billiards were my chief pursuits until I married’, he allowed his 1832 persona to own in 1871 (OMD, ii:91); and billiards, for which he confessed ‘an inordinate love’, proved a treacherous passion: ‘they were my stumbling block’ (JPC Diary, 16 January 1878). Competition with semi-professionals normally cost John only a few shillings a match, for he ‘never risked more’, but even so ‘I am sorry to confess [I] spent all my spare money and time upon it’ (OMD, ii:66), and at least once he was burned. ‘My love of Billiards got me into a dishonest & disgraceful scrape at one

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84. In the preface to BARB (1865), Collier remarked that ‘as I never was rich enough to collect, and keep, what may be called a library, [Thomas Rodd the younger] sold them again, and very seldom at a loss’ (p. xi).


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time’, he confided in his unpublished diary (6 May 1878), ‘out of which [Crabb Robinson] helped me & gave me the kindest & soundest advice. To this moment I feel shame and remorse regarding it, and I might have been severely punished.’ Indeed John’s ‘billiard-masters’, as he called them, were a dangerous lot, including one Bailey, who ‘was a erwards hanged for forgery: he was a most gentlemanlike gambler, and dressed to perfection: his tailor hanged him’ (OMD, ii:66); and the sharper William Weare, who was murdered by one of his victims, John Thurtell, in 1823. Thurtell claimed to have been cheated of £300 at cardplay by Weare, at Rexworthy’s billiard-rooms in Spring Gardens, while Collier, ‘having played hundreds of games of billiards with him’, appears to have escaped lightly: ‘[Weare] was a regular black-leg, and was content to do business in a small way, if he could get no larger prey’. A less sinister opponent, if we believe John—for the story occurs only in manuscript—was John Keats, whom ‘I knew, or saw a good deal of . . . when he was quite a young man and, as I understood, a medical or surgical student walking the hospitals. He played a great deal at Billiards, and so did I, in Chancery Lane & at the bottom of it in Fleet St[reet] in a room. . . . There I o en played with Keats, who, as I remember, was not so good at the game as I was’.85 An unlikely sportsman we may think him, but the gambler in Collier, cautious and aware of his own limited skills, yet ultimately hazarding all his resources, is here to be glimpsed. At more physical competition he seemed content to spectate, watching fellow reporter William

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85. The undated diary entry, written between 29 July and 10 August 1873, continues: ‘He was then a very cheerful, though thoughtful young man, rather short of stature but with regular pleasing features and a good forehead. I knew at that time that he was poetical, but he did not talk much on those subjects. Aerwards, or about the same date I used now & then to meet him in the book shop of Taylor & Hessey, the booksellers in Fleet Street. . . . One day Keats & I & another were there and he took up a copy of Milton: standing on the opposite side of the table to me he rather unexpectedly began a sort of lecture on Milton, reading out various pages, and, to my surprise, maintaining that no great poet ever wrote a great passage with a complete knowledge at the time of writing that it was great: he poured it out by inspiration and was not fully aware of its beauty or grandeur until he read & reflected upon it some time aerwards. In this position I expressed my non-concurrence and claimed, for Milton especially, that aer writing, & even during the writing of a passage, he had a most distinct knowledge of the excellence of what he composed, and of the value of every word it contained.—Keats still urged that when a poet had completed lines of unexampled merit he had a sort of muzzyness (his own word) in his mind, a sort of indistinct knowledge of his own meaning and of the merit of the mode in which he had conveyed it.’ The basis in fact of these anecdotes, never printed by Collier, is difficult to assess. Keats does not figure in any of his published reminiscences, but his mid-nineteenth-century reputation may not have encouraged John to feature him in Seven Lectures (1857) or BARB (1865), and he died too early for the supposed span of OMD. Keats’s celebrated speculation to Woodhouse on the ‘sense of delight’ that a billiard ball might have of its own roundness, smoothness, and speed of passage (Amy Lowell, John Keats [1925], ii:104–05) does suggest some acquaintance with the tables.


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Hazlitt play at the Fives Court in St. Martin’s Street, Leicester Fields (‘he was famous for what are called Volleys’, he told Hazlitt’s grandson); he rowed uncompetitively on the Thames, especially while courting Mary Louisa. Even chess he renounced, when ‘I lost a game once most provokingly by postponing the move of a pawn. It cost me a night’s rest and I never played again. No game was worth it.’ 86 In mid-December 1814 Jane Collier told Henry Crabb Robinson that her husband’s ‘behaviour becomes every day more odd. He is mortified to find that he is of little consequence and that little attention to him is paid by his son’s friends. This puts him in a temper.’ Robinson sympathized with Jane, as nearly always, and his perspective on the deteriorating Collier family relations must be evaluated accordingly. On 1 February 1815 Robinson took tea with the Colliers, when ‘Mrs C. informed me that John has gone to live out of the house by the desire of his father. The occasion or pretence is because John stays up late at night.’ Robinson could not resist interpreting the departure: ‘I believe there is no better reason [for it] than [John Dyer] Collier’s intolerable vanity, which is hurt by finding that his son is more attended to than himself.’ Driving the stake in, he continued: ‘John has much more understanding than his father; I fear that Mr Collier has not love enough for his own son not to be mortified at perceiving or suspecting the superiority. Poor Mrs C. suffers a great deal’ (HCR Diary). Another explanation for John Dyer’s bad temper that Robinson had noticed, but did not here apply, was the old bugbear of family economy: three months earlier the paterfamilias ‘had lost one half of his letters [i.e., the income from the newsletters], which I have been long apprehensive would follow from the peace’ (HCR Diary, 28 October 1814). For John Payne domiciliary independence was exhilarating, if short-lived. In later years he frequently alluded to the time ‘when I quitted my father’s house’ as a personal watershed. His new lodgings in Smith Square lay a brisk walk along the Embankment from the Chronicle offices, but conveniently adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. He may have gone on dining at his parents’ home, but Robinson reported more friction in Salisbury Square: ‘Mrs C. and the old lady [Mary Dyer Collier] have quarrelled, and the old people threaten to leave’.87 For once Robinson thought Jane at fault (‘certainly Mrs J. C. has acted very foolishly’), most likely because the senior Colliers still had an estate to bequeath. In June, furthermore, the father-son team at the Chronicle proved subvertible. Over at The Times, Dr. Stoddart’s authority had diminished, and Thomas

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86. JPC to William Carew Hazlitt, 2 June 1867, BL Add. MS 38,899, fol. 386; JPC Diary, 14 March 1879. 87. HCR Diary, 23 February 1815. We have not found the source of Ganzel’s statement (p. 21) that ‘for his mother’s sake, he continued to take his meals with the family’.


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Barnes proposed his strayed friend once again to John Walter II, this time as a law-court reporter. Walter consulted with Robinson, who ‘gave [John] a high character which I believe he deserves . . . and I declared my belief that he would soon be quite competent as a Reporter of law-proceedings. . . . W. seemed glad that J. C. does not live with his father &c. And I assured him that J. C. would have no friendly feelings toward Perry incompatible with any duties towards W.’ In the event ‘W[alter] said he should probably take him’, and shortly therea er John Payne returned to The Times (HCR Diary, 7 June 1815). The precise date of his defection is uncertain, but it must have been before the beginning of November, when Perry sacked John Dyer from the Chronicle, a er seven years’ service. This latest reverse in the father’s tempestuous journalistic career turned out to be final: he never returned to a newspaper. Robinson first heard that it happened ‘in consequence of a hoax having been played on Collier’, but added ‘I was not surprised at this. P[erry] I have no doubt was offended by John Collier leaving him and therefore readily availed himself of the first pretence for dismissing [John Dyer]’ (HCR Diary, 7 November 1815). Robinson considered this sad, and felt that ‘but for Collier’s pride he might have retained his situation’ (14 December), but it is hard to imagine him grovelling. John Walter II also ‘thought John Collier coming to him was the cause of Perry’s dismissing Mr C.’, and at Christmas ‘kindly offered . . . to relinquish [John Payne], if Perry would on John’s going back take Mr Collier again’ (26 December). Nothing came of that gesture, and as Walter was entirely satisfied with his new employee, John remained on The Times, where his brother William soon joined him as a novice reporter—again thanks to Robinson’s overtures (26 December). John Payne may once more have felt beholden to Barnes, and the young essayist’s work for the British Lady’s Magazine, from which Barnes had apparently been dropped, ceased abruptly. On 31 January 1816 old John Collier died, aged eighty-four. The provident apothecary, having seen his lifetime provisions dissipated by his two sons and experienced the a erblow of Joshua’s creditors’ claims upon what he himself had retained, clung cannily to a final small fortune which proved ‘much greater than we had expected’. John Payne in 1880 remembered his grandfather’s worth as not less than £5,000, plus about £400 in gold (JPC Memoirs, p. 113), but Henry Crabb Robinson knew better: in 1814 he had helped the old man dra his will, settling £1,250 in safe ‘three-percents’ on both John Dyer and Joshua, and the remainder on his widow for life. As he died with about £7,000, including a cloth mill at Witney from the ancient Collier inheritance, the widow’s portion was substantial (at least £4,000). Worries about Joshua’s ‘flighty’ habits had induced the apothecary to secure his moiety of the widow’s residue for the


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daughter-in-law and grandchildren, which Robinson arranged (‘one of the few acts of my life on which I look back with pleasure’) and which infuriated Joshua. Joshua took his brother to court—while simultaneously seeking a loan from him—and mortgaged ‘all he possessed or had any interest in to a large creditor, a worthy Quaker named Sherry’. Robinson somehow reclaimed this transaction, preserving the property ‘in trust’ for the family; and long a erward, when the prodigal uncle survived his wife (1839), he ‘received the interest from me—more than £100 per ann: till he died [1844] . . . and yet he never forgave me for what I had done’.88

The Critical Review In this difficult winter the immediate legacy of £1,250 to John Dyer Collier was a godsend, although John Payne complained that ‘it served him in no stead, for he threw up his profitable newspaper engagements in London and the provinces, and yielding to his old propensity took a large clay farm’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 113). But John Dyer had already lost his position at the Chronicle, and seen his earnings from the provincial newsletters diminish, subject only to further decline in the post-Napoleonic pax Britannica. What the legatee did first, in fact, was to purchase an independent literary journal and try to conduct it for profit. The venerable Critical Review, founded in 1756 by Tobias Smollett, had fallen on hard times; it boasted no clever staff like the Edinburgh or the Quarterly, no publisher of books like Constable, Blackwood or Colburn to puff his own wares in it, not even a consistent political stance to ensure the loyalty of a like-minded readership. A long liberal tradition had dissolved with its transfer in January 1814 to a Tory proprietorship, and under one George Frederick Busby as editor it lost most of its earlier audience; Thomas Kenrick described it later as having then ‘reached such a state of insignificance that to sink lower is impossible’, blaming ‘the infamous political opinions it promulgated’.89 Over eighteen subsequent months it ran through three publishers. John Dyer Collier himself had in November 1814 ‘nearly involved himself . . . in becoming a shareholder . . . but luckily found the p [publisher or proprietor? the shorthand word beginning with ‘p’ is unclear] to be not respectable before he had advanced his money’ (HCR Diary, 20 November 1814). In April 1816, however, he bought the magazine outright for the nugatory sum of £160, and Robinson thought that as ‘there is no loss on the present publication . . . the speculation

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88. HCR Reminiscences, ii:168. Robinson wrote here that John Collier ‘died worth £9000’, but the estate was sworn under £7,000 when the will (PRO PROB 11/1577) was proved 12 February 1816. 89. Wellens 1978, p. 688, quoting The British Stage (1817), i:207–08. See also Roper 1961.


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[is] not a very dangerous one’. Furthermore ‘it keeps Mr C. out of mischief and finds employment for him and son’ (HCR Diary, 1 May 1816). John Dyer took a new broom to the Critical Review. Its first number under his sole proprietorship (May 1816; the April issue reflected an editorial coalition) announced ‘a complete change . . . not a single individual formerly concerned having now any connection with it’. Henceforth, he declared, the policy would be one of ‘impartiality’, ‘industry’, and ‘fullest detail’, the reviews ‘avoiding alike the two extremes of mere analysis and separate essay’. The new Critical Reviewers—unnamed, as usual—‘will not be merely ‘‘the discoverers and collectors of the faults of writers’’ . . . neither will they be the lavish eulogists of folly and inanity’. Elsewhere the proprietor promised a return to the original principles of critical reviewing as proclaimed in 1756 (‘to exhibit a succinct plan of every performance, to point out the most striking beauties and glaring defects’, etc.) and attributed these stirring phrases to Samuel Johnson.90 They are not by Johnson, in fact, who had nothing to do with the inception of the Critical Review, although the Colliers—John Dyer especially—may have thought so.91 John Dyer had genuine innovations in mind, however: there was to be greater ‘notice of foreign valuable publications’, for ‘the connections of the Proprietors of this work abroad, and their acquaintance with modern languages will enable them to supply this deficiency’; and (‘a novelty to periodical publications of this kind’) ‘a department . . . under the head of ‘‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’’ ’, devoted to ‘the early literature of Great Britain’. Articles there would reprint specimens and extracts of works ‘sometimes of intrinsic value, and sometimes of mere curiosity’, although ‘the forgotten trash of former times will never be raked from the dust, unless for the sake of illustrating some valuable point connected with history and antiquities’; in other words, they would form a sequel to John Payne Collier’s aborted retrospections in the British Lady’s Magazine. The politics of the new Critical Review were not hinted at, but from the repudiation of the recent past and the sacking of the old staff en groupe, one might have guessed their direction—broadly liberal once more, as reviews and choice of matter for review would confirm: Bentham on parliamentary reform, Malthus, Weyland, Ricardo and Burrows, anti-slavery testimony, and The Attempt to Divorce the Princess of Wales Impartially Considered. John Dyer saw mostly to these, while John Payne—with Robinson, occasionally—concentrated on literary reviews; the family’s literary politics were of course liberal as well, and for its brief late blossoming the Critical Review provided the Romantic anti-

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90. Critical Review, December 1816, p. 554, quoting the preface to the 1756 volume. 91. Johnson did contribute a few reviews to the Critical Review in 1763–64.


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establishment with a significant new rostrum. Later commentators may have overestimated its influence, but there is no doubt that the circles of Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Lambs, and Leigh Hunt would have considered the Colliers’ new venture both friendly and useful.92 Service to his literary friends probably brought Henry Crabb Robinson into the fold, for in the fourteen issues of the Critical Review that ensued, only he, John Payne, and John Dyer Collier can be clearly identified as contributors: the Collier administration of the magazine from May 1816 to June 1817 was another family enterprise and a father-son partnership like the day-to-day newsletters and some aspects of their newspaper journalism, and the willingness of the two to work on this new enterprise together ought not to surprise us—even a er John Payne’s departure from home and the Chronicle. Robinson remained cautious, of course. On 5 May he ‘finished reading the Critical Review 1st No.’, that is, the number for April 1816, and reflected that ‘on the whole the articles were executed with average propriety in the style of the old reviews’, although ‘a little flippancy belongs to the trick of reviewing’, and ‘the perception of it is greatly increased by the knowledge the reader has of the author’.93 Robinson himself was that reader, and he considered that John Payne Collier’s articles—on Singer’s History of Playing Cards and Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, perhaps among others— were ‘much better’ than John Dyer’s. On 6 July he was increasingly doubtful: ‘I read the 3rd number [June 1816] of the Critical Review under the Colliers’ management and I continue to fear that the attempt will not succeed—and indeed it is a hopeless & injudicious plan to execute by 2 persons, neither scholars nor men of science, a review which requires such variety & extent of powers’. But meanwhile, in spite of his misgivings, he had contributed two reviews to the same number, and would add one (of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe) to that of July. Reviewing, he reminded himself, was ‘an occupation which had somewhat amused me, but in which I must not indulge’, as it had distracted him from his law-studies in the past two or three months, and seemed ‘to threaten the entire Loss of the little legal knowledge I have acquired’ (HCR Diary, 13 June 1816). By the end of November he was no more positively impressed, telling John Payne’s wife ‘freely, that I do not think the Critical Review can possibly

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92. The NMM approved the ‘complete change’ and ‘important alterations’ in July, with particular reference to ‘a department entitled Bibliotheca Antiqua, or a review of old works of much interest and curiosity which are not easy of access. . . . For this part of the undertaking we are informed the editors have ample resources’ (pp. 527–28). 93. HCR Diary, 5 May 1816. The April number appeared under the old banner of the Tory proprietors, but with contributions orchestrated by the new owner. John Dyer in mid-April must have inherited a half-completed or half-printed issue, which he restructured, while retaining the old masthead until he announced his own major changes.


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succeed’ (27 November). But he nonetheless continued to supply the odd article, especially during John Payne’s illness in February 1817.94 In three articles on the last years of the Critical Review, Oskar Wellens attributed a large number of the unsigned 1816–17 reviews to John Payne and John Dyer Collier and to Henry Crabb Robinson.95 His 1983 canon for John Payne amounts to forty-seven reviews over fourteen months, plus the signed sixteenpart ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’; in our bibliography we have added seven more reviews as probably by John Payne, but subtracted twelve attributions as ‘without foundation’ or ‘doubtful’. As virtual co-editor of the Critical John Payne may of course have provided many of the shorter notices, which give little more than a summary of plot or subject, as well as the replies to correspondents and listings of publications and events; on the other hand, despite Robinson’s hint that the two Colliers were responsible for everything—which his own participation belies—it is always possible that outside reviewers, even other family members, occasionally chipped in. We have limited ourselves to considering substantial contributions for which conservative textual evidence strongly suggests John Payne Collier’s authorship. These are largely reviews of new works of poetry, plays, theatrical memoirs, antiquarian or bibliographical studies, some fiction, and a few French books reflecting his recent excursions. Most important for John himself, certainly, were his painstaking notices of contemporary poets, Romantic or reactionary, notably Coleridge, Byron, and Southey, but also Scott, Moore, John Wilson, James Hogg, Edward Quillinan, and John Hamilton Reynolds. John Payne Collier’s review—or reviews, as we believe them to be—of Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; and The Pains of Sleep, the first new collection of poetry by Coleridge in some thirteen years, amplifies the homage he had paid the philosopher in his diary of 1811, and the service he rendered him, and posterity, by transcribing his early lectures on Shakespeare. In the first ‘Collier’ number of the Critical Review (April 1816, ‘Works in the Press’) appears what may be the earliest notice of the forthcoming volume in print: ‘Mr. S. T. Coleridge has in the press a new and corrected Edition of his poems, including ‘‘Christobell’’, a singular fragment—an effort of his youth. He is also preparing a metaphysical work.’ 96 The full six-page review comes in the May number, and

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94. HCR Diary, 18 February 1817; Wellens 1981, p. 99, misconstrued this illness as John Dyer’s. 95. See Wellens 1978, 1981, and 1983. Some attributions are revised in the course of the three articles. 96. The earliest notice of Christabel listed in E. H. Coleridge’s edition (1907, p. 99) is that in the May 1816 Monthly Literary Advertiser, which followed a note by Byron in the March Gentleman’s Magazine that referred to manuscript versions of the poem; see also Erdman 1958. The mis-


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with its almost unstinting praise it is the most positive review of any new volume of verse written for the magazine by John Payne. ‘This very graceful and fanciful poem [i.e., ‘Christabel’: ‘Kubla Khan’ is mentioned only in passing, and ‘The Pains of Sleep’ is extracted without comment] . . . is enriched with more beautiful passages than have ever been before included in so small a compass’, he wrote, having submitted seven descriptive passages ranging from ‘a beautiful picture’ and ‘a most effective finish’ to an ‘exquisite’ contrast, and ‘lines, finer than any in the language upon the same subject, with which we are acquainted’. Inevitably John must play the critical arbiter (‘we could, it is true, point out expressions that might have been better turned, and lines that perhaps might have been better omitted’), and he must quote from Ben Jonson’s Discoveries, and boast that ‘we read [Christabel] in M.S. two or three years ago’ (Robinson had a copy), but the review is one of the very few highly favourable ones that Coleridge received. Devastating attacks by Hazlitt in the Examiner and Thomas Moore in the Edinburgh Review le only four positive notices to console him: Collier’s in the Critical Review and pieces in the Literary Panorama for July 1816, in the European Magazine for November, and in The Times itself for 20 May 1816. The last, appearing five days before declared publication, was reprinted two weeks later, slightly abridged, in Coleridge’s ‘own’ newspaper, the Courier; it has recently been rediscovered and reprinted, and has been attributed to Charles Lamb, Henry Crabb Robinson, Barron Field, and others.97 But a comparison with the Critical Review notice leaves little doubt that the same hand wrote both: the opinions, the choice of passages to praise, even phrases in the expository prose are interchangeable, and little is added to The Times account beyond allusions to Milton, Chaucer, Burns, and Wordsworth (all Collier touchstones), and a characteristically pedantic correction to Coleridge’s ‘calling the principle of scanning by accents, rather than syllables, a new one. . . . The truth is, that our oldest ballad-writers were guided by no other principle.’ Collier, as we think, successfully utilized his new state of grace at The Times—no small achievement, given John Walter II’s feelings—to flesh out his yet-unpublished Critical Review notice for a much wider public, and thus to do Coleridge one more loyal service. Nor was Coleridge unmoved: sending John Payne tickets for his lectures

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spelling ‘Christobell’ may reflect the title of the parody that appeared in the April 1815 European Magazine, ‘Christobell, a Gothic Tale’. 97. David Erdman attributed the Times review to Lamb in 1958, followed by Lewis M. Schwartz (who was unaware of Erdman’s article) in 1970, Donald H. Reiman (The Romantics Reviewed, Part A: The Lake Poets [New York, 1972], ii:890) and J. R. de J. Jackson (Coleridge: The Critical Heritage [1991], ii:246). In 1998 Chris Koenig-Woodyard followed Wellens 1981 in attributing the Critical Review version to Robinson, adding that Collier himself ‘certainly had a hand in the review’, but unaccountably reasserted the Lamb claim to the Times version.


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of January and March 1818, he asked him ‘to regard [them] as a humble testimony of my sincere respect for you, and of the grateful sense, I entertain of your disinterested and very friendly services—the more affecting to me, because even the rancorous Hatred of Hazlitt . . . has not been so injurious to me as the coldness and passiveness of those, who profess privately the highest admiration and yet permit the very works, they extol to be systematically excluded from the Quarterly Review’.98 One puff alone might have merited such thanks, and two—out of four in the world—certainly did.99 Back at the Critical Review the treatment of Lord Byron was different indeed. John Payne surely wrote the condescending notice in the April issue of Hebrew Melodies . . . no. II, with Appropriate Symphonies and Accompaniments, by J. Braham and J. Nathan: ‘this second number . . . certainly superior to the first, though we doubt if it will sell so well, as his Lordship is going out of fashion, more especially with his female readers’. A short retrospective account of Byron’s publications found English Bards ‘undoubtedly the best production of his pen’, noting that because it was (reputedly) suppressed, ‘the satire, which formerly sold for four or five shillings, not long since was purchased at the hammer for more than two guineas’. Hebrew Melodies itself was ‘sentimental’, in ‘a most unmusical metre’, and ‘a sort of poetical profanation of the Holy Writ not to be endured’, although the reviewer qualifiedly admired ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold’ (‘we regret that the last verse does not continue to heighten the description’) and praised other individual songs. An offhand tag, unidentified, from the preface to Paradise Lost offers one clue to John Payne’s responsibility for this ten-page damp squib, but his gratuitous quotation from Sir John Harington’s ‘Apology of Poetry’—the introduction to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591)—pretty well nails it down. Collier also cited Harington’s ‘Apology’ knowingly in his ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ essay on Francis Meres (June 1816), and would return to it in detail in his Poetical Decameron (1820).100 Henry Crabb Robinson’s protective admiration for Goethe no doubt led him to castigate Byron’s Manfred in the June 1817 Critical as an imitation of Faust,101 but John Payne more likely contributed the negative reviews of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III (November 1816) and The Prisoner of Chillon (December 1816). They renew the aspersions cast on Hebrew Melodies about fashion, remuneration, and the implicit luxury of self-exile, and reflect high-handedly on Byron’s

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98. Coleridge to JPC, 17 January 1818, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (7); printed in Griggs, iv:813. 99. The Times review was first attributed to Collier by Oskar Wellens in 1982; he did not however link it to the Critical Review version, which he had earlier attributed to Robinson. 100. In the latter, see esp. ii:188. 101. HCR Diary, 22 June 1817.


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versification; they also reprint an unacknowledged French source (in French) at length, and expose an inaccurate use of an old word, which Shakespeare and Spenser ‘employ . . . extremely o en’. One might suspect Collier of envy, but he consistently treated Byron as a ‘popular’ poet, isolating his best passages as worthy, and appeared to regard him principally as a victim of his own literary over-production. Collier’s strictures on Robert Southey’s poetry, however, are unambiguous. It may be said that the Laureate’s ponderous narrative or elegiac verse made an easy target in 1816, but John’s dissection of The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (May 1816) was harshly acute. Southey shared ‘a misfortune to men [like himself ] who . . . write a great deal, that they get into a habitual swing of style, and acquire a facility of composition that sometimes precludes all efforts of thought’; in place of originality or nervous energy one met everywhere with ‘prosaic detail’ and ‘hacknied epithets’, and the Spenserian stanzas were so flat that ‘we can find no adequate reason why [The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo] should not have been written in prose’. Collier emphasized Southey’s debt to Spenser by supplying for comparison an ‘exquisite passage’ from The Faerie Queene, and for no more reason than usual the parallel octave (in Italian) from Tasso; Southey’s allegorical strain in the sub-section ‘A Vision’ he found likewise derived from Spenser, and disappointingly dull. Indeed Collier’s twelve-page review was as much in praise of Spenser as in dispraise of Southey, reflecting the fact that the reviewer was at this time at work on an allegorical poem of his own, in Spenserian stanzas. Six years later he would publish it as The Poet’s Pilgrimage, unabashedly appropriating Southey’s title, which he ridiculed here (‘he might more properly term [it] . . . ‘‘The Poet Laureate’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’’ ’). More derision met The Lay of the Laureate; Carmen Nuptiale (July 1816). ‘When first the title caught our eye’, John Payne asserted, ‘in its ostentatious black letter, we really imagined that it was a satire upon Mr. Southey’. In fact it was another solemn Spenserian allegory, and Collier’s review savaged it passage by passage, scattering along the way allusions to Milton’s Eikonoklastes, Lydgate, Gower, Hoccleve, Chaucer, and Shakespeare’s Lucrece. The busy journalist found Southey’s prolixity a chaffing-matter too, noting that he ‘writes currente calamo, and, as his friends report . . . he regularly emits forty lines every morning before breakfast’.102

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102. Southey himself believed that JPC was responsible for a biographical sketch in the NMM for July 1814 (pp. 566–71), but we find this unlikely (it may, however, possibly have been written by John Dyer Collier). Southey named John Payne in a letter to his son-in-law, the Rev. J. W. Warter, 17 August 1831 (‘He once wrote a life of me in a magazine—never having seen me, nor knowing anything of me, but what he could pick up by asking questions from as many of my acquaintances as he could meet with, and the result was about as accurate as you might suppose it


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Thomas Moore fared little better with the reviewer: his Sacred Songs were polished and ‘pretty’ but superficial, and lacked the ‘fervour of piety’ (June 1816); Lalla Rookh, while ‘generally harmonious’, exhibited ‘neither force nor dignity’ but ‘perversion of taste and deficiency of judgement’—although ‘there is no living poet who has had greater practice or possesses more skill in the lyrical measures of the English language than Mr. Moore’ (June 1817). Scott’s Harold the Dauntless John thought too feeble for its own author, and believed it, like The Bridal of Triermain, ‘a tolerably successful imitation of some parts of the style of Sir Walter Scott . . . but we are weary of it before we reach the end’: this is not, we think, tongue-in-cheek. He found James Hogg’s sentiments ‘very common-place’ in Mador of the Moor, and thought his anonymous parodies in The Poetic Mirror: or, The Living Bards of Britain unamusing and presumptuous (August and November 1816). A nearly charitable but double-edged notice was allowed Keats’s friend John Hamilton Reynolds for his ‘Coleridgean’ first volume of verse, The Naiad, a Tale, with Other Poems (October 1816). Although its ‘poetical prettiness’ was ‘apt to degenerate into affected trifling and paltry conceit’, Collier wrote, ‘we must admit, on the other hand, that the prettinesses are in many places as refined and delicate as any that we have read: the opening is singularly beautiful; all the little touches are given with a grace and precision not easily rivalled’. Qualifications follow, given somewhat de haut en bas, but finally young Reynolds ‘displays so much talent, that we hope to see him affix his name to something of higher aim in its subject, and greater originality in its style’; this was about the most favourable of the eight reviews he received for The Naiad.103 John Payne and the Critical Review failed to notice another first book—with a vignette of Spenser, no less, on its title-page—namely John Keats’s Poems, which appeared in March 1817. John Payne probably covered new plays in print for the Critical Review, as he had done for the British Lady’s Magazine, but the few notices we attribute to him are perfunctory. One unlucky victim of a crushing dismissal was William Monney, whose Caractacus, a New Tragedy had been refused for performance, and was self-published to defy its ‘suppression’. John, hard on amateurs, made cruel fun of the author (October 1816) and, when Monney attempted a jocular reply, insulted him all over again in the next issue. More significant were John Payne’s long reviews of two contemporary theatrical memoirs, Anna Plumptre’s

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to be’), and in another to John Kenyon (28 March 1837), saying then that the editor of the NMM had ‘put the dates [of Southey’s life, provided by him] into the hands of Payne Collier, who got acquainted with my wife’s sister . . . and . . . got from her all the details he could’; Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Warter (1856), iv:238 and 500. 103. See L. M. Jones 1984, pp. 74 and 330. Collier recalled Reynolds and the poem (misnaming it ‘The Mermaid’) in OMD, iv:60–62.


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Narrative of a Residence in Ireland (January 1817), which offered some gratuitous Shakespearian commentary and a good deal about James Shirley; and Hazlitt’s Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcro (May 1816). The latter, in which Hazlitt drew on James Perry’s recollections as well as his own, permitted John Payne to add personal memories from ‘our first introduction to the acquaintance of the subject’: house parties in Hatton Garden, Holcro losing gracefully at draughts, and a sighting of him recuperating from asthma at Margate in 1808, which ‘Mr. Hazlitt has omitted to mention’. John’s youthful admiration for Holcro (‘a man of unblemished integrity’) helped make this seventeen-page review one of his longest, with space for a little dig at Perry (as ‘Mr. P., the severity of [whose] Scottish creed’ conflicted with ‘the liberality of Mr. Holcro ’s religious tenets’). Hazlitt was not given much credit for the production, although he wrote most of it; John Payne would later review The Round Table with friendly enthusiasm, however, for both Hazlitt and his co-essayist Hunt. Writing in 1865 to Hazlitt’s grandson with reference to the young man’s novel Sophy Laurie, Collier confessed, or rather boasted, that he had read no ‘modern’ novels since Scott’s,104 and in an imaginary conversation with the sixth Duke of Devonshire he declared that, save for Smollett, Fielding, Richardson, and Defoe, novels ‘form a class of reading for which I have no partiality . . . I have tried over and over again’ (OMD, iv:96–97). Few indeed were his fiction reviews, but perhaps no one else could supply all of them for the Critical Review. Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, still ‘by the [anonymous] author of Waverley’, allowed John to quote from Alexander Barclay’s fi eenth-century adaptation of Brandt’s Ship of Fools, and to suggest that the novelist (taken to be one Forbes, aged twenty-seven, son of a Scottish baronet and former student of Dr. Valpy) might improve himself by reading some old plays (May 1816). The same hand seems to have reviewed Tales of My Landlord (December 1816), Jane Porter’s The Pastor’s Fire-Side (February 1817), Fanny Holcro ’s Fortitude and Frailty (April 1817), and Thomas Love Peacock’s anonymous Melincourt (May 1817). Fanny Holcro attracts the reviewer’s sympathy as a writer’s daughter in search of independent acclaim, like John Payne himself; the author of Melincourt is taken to task for over-cleverness and for misrepresenting the metre of Chapman’s Iliad. Three reviews of French books on European affairs also appear to be John’s, reflecting his recent visits to Paris and introducing otherwise unlikely quotations from Chapman and Marston; and the sympathetic notice of Henry Milton’s Letters on the Fine Arts, Written from Paris in the Year 1815 (October 1816) mentions attending the Louvre in 1815 ‘day a er day, with unwearied assiduity’, and re-

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104. ‘I have never looked into a ‘‘Novel’’ since ‘‘Woodstock’’ by Sir W. S. It is a principle with me to avoid them, & I am a great loser, I am sure, by my abstinence’; 23 September, BL Add. MS 38,898, fol. 298.


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capitulates observations on the Paris theatre that ‘A. Z.’ had contributed, not long since, to the British Lady’s Magazine. Antiquarian subjects, especially those bibliographical, fell naturally to John. In the first ‘Collier’ number of April 1816 he levelled a sixteen-page salvo at the bookseller and antiquary Samuel Weller Singer for his elegant but undisciplined Researches into the History of Playing Cards. Beginning with provisional compliments (Singer was ‘a learned and liberal dealer’ and ‘no individual engaged in the business of a bookseller [is] as competent as himself to the task’), Collier soon took Singer’s measure as a historian of printing, trumping his laborious accounts of early xylography and typefounding with his own fund of rival —and largely superior—scholarship. Predictably, he supplied several passages from seventeenth-century popular literature bearing on cards; and he complained that the luxurious engravings had priced the book (at four guineas) out of range, with an unworthy text: ‘the fact is, that quite sufficient pains were not bestowed on the letter-press, and the author trusted too much to the merit of the plates introduced’. A passing slight to Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania (‘a book much overvalued both in price and estimation’) confirmed Collier’s attitude toward this sort of grand book; Dibdin had praised Singer’s Playing Cards warmly. Whether Singer, who had by now in fact abandoned bookselling for genteel authorship, ever learned who his reviewer was in the Critical Review, we do not know; but thirty-seven years later his denunciation of Collier’s new Shakespearian readings helped to bring about their exposure as forgeries. Four months a er slating Singer, John Payne examined William Young Ottley’s An Enquiry into the Origin and Early History of Engraving upon Copper and Wood (August 1816), in a positive but linked review that repeated or revived many of the same animadversions. Despite his own thirst for rarities and original editions Collier remained consistently hostile to the ‘Roxburghe’ school of costly reprints and elegant bibliophile publications; a surprisingly gentle estimate, ostensibly of Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges’s feeble poem Bertram (September 1816), was most notable for its complaints about the expensive Lee Priory reprints sponsored by Brydges and the retentive habits of ‘mere black letter’ collectors. About Dibdin himself, the self-appointed shepherd of that flock, Collier was habitually caustic, even on the Bibliomaniac’s pulpit oratory. In the Critical Review for September 1816 appears a devastating notice of Dibdin’s revamped Typographical Antiquities, volume three (and last, although more were projected and subscribed for). Although the pre-Collier Critical Review had—unsurprisingly—bypassed volumes one (1810) and two (1812), John made it his business to survey the whole project. As with Singer he began with compliments (‘this great undertaking’, ‘a man of profound learning’, ‘a man of pre-eminent


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talents’) before drawing up sharply: ‘his learning is of a very inapplicable, and comparatively useless kind’, and ‘his taste has been depraved from a natural love of the beautiful, to an artificial admiration of the curious’. While all investigations of the origin and progress of printing ‘must, almost necessarily, be productive of some useful information . . . this excuse . . . will not apply to the mere divers into the depths of black-letter darkness, who exhaust those lives that might have been devoted to valuable acquisitions, in employments to which they blindly attach an imaginary and factitious importance’. Just what Collier so passionately resented is still unclear (indiscriminate pursuit of rarity? bad literary judgement? ignorance? wealth?), but whatever it was he seemed to blame Dibdin, and went on to impugn the improvident rector of gulling his old subscribers and pursuing the more lucrative project of his Bibliotheca Spenceriana at their expense. A sore point with Collier was that he himself had subscribed, and felt cheated by the lower quantity and quality of the ‘embellishments’ in volume three. And to wind up his tirade, more in anger than sorrow, he signalled one book in his own modest collection (The Lyfe of Prestes, STC 6894) that Dibdin had ‘entirely omitted’, and one other (Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric, 1553) that hardly merited citation from Richard Heber’s ‘stupendous’ collection, since ‘we have ourselves [Joseph] Ames’s copy’ together with The Rule of Reason, ‘and for the whole we only gave a guinea’. Quite apart from his literary reviews, the sixteen-part ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ constitutes John Payne’s most significant project for the Critical Review. These retrospective essays on Elizabethan and pre-Restoration literature were the only initialled or otherwise signed contributions in the magazine under the Colliers; they were praised as ‘particularly valuable and ably-written’ by Thomas Kenrick in The British Stage (1817–22), and Collier himself extracted and had bound up together the complete series for his own use.105 Longer and more discursive than their predecessors in the British Lady’s Magazine, they usually concentrate on a book at a time, like Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Meres’s Palladis Tamia, Coryate’s Crudities, or Stanyhurst’s and Fleming’s translations of Virgil, but range freely about in the commentary and footnotes, so that Greene leads to Marlowe, Lodge, Nashe, and Gabriel Harvey; Heywood’s Apology for Actors to his plays and to the Puritan opposition to the stage; and one translation to another. Besides that on Heywood’s Apology, the theatrical essays treat Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses (with a glance at Stephen Gosson), and a little tract of 1643, The Actor’s Remonstrance, which John had found in the British Museum. Collier’s two-part, twenty-five-page study of James Shirley, perhaps encouraged by the news of a forthcoming edition from William Gifford, de105. JPC sale, lot 33; now BL 836.f.26.

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serves special credit for both its perceptions and its precedence; it is by far the earliest substantial account of ‘the last pre-Restoration dramatist’ and his works.106 The Marprelate Controversy was summarized in a brief piece on Pappe with a Hatchet, which John thought by Thomas Nashe; and Sir Robert Dallington’s A Method for Travel (1598) allowed him to reflect on France past and present. And a textual comparison of Edward Fairfax’s spirited translation of Tasso (1600) with the ‘tame’ eighteenth-century version by John Hoole (February 1817) must have been helpful to Leigh Hunt, who undertook the same turn in the Indicator no. 25 (29 March 1820). Indeed John may have supplied his old editor with the suggestion, among others, for Hunt thanked one ‘J. C.’ at the end of the same number for ‘both of the subjects mentioned’ which ‘he will be happy to take up’. John’s critical discrimination in ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ is remarkably sure, and remarkably sound. Again and again he selected passages that supported whatever inextravagant claims he had staked for his minor poets and pamphleteers, and despite what Robinson and others regarded as a preference for the arcane, a lay reader of 1816 could have done worse than follow his lead. Time has vindicated many of young Collier’s opinions of his contemporaries—what he says about Byron, Southey, and Moore, for example, seldom seems witless or dated—and his resurrection of earlier poet-translators such as Fairfax and Stanyhurst, like his fascination with the scattershot trifles of Nashe, Greene, and Heywood, now strikes us as more prescient than eccentric, although prejudice in favour of his own discoveries may distort some of Collier’s estimates. His critical etiquette is likewise patchy, for he rarely gives more credit to fellow scholars than he must, and o en takes back what he gives: Edmond Malone, for example, deserved better from the young antiquary than the ironic epithets ‘indefatigable’ and ‘industrious’, and Malone’s formidable chronology of the English stage need not have been qualified sniffily with the phrase ‘if [it] may be relied upon’. This unattractive aspect of Collier’s citation will recur and recur. Identification of direct sources, at this early date, was also inconsistent. Some of the books treated in ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ were certainly on John’s own shelves, including the copy of Charles Aleyn’s verse History of Henry the Seventh (‘the small volume before us . . . [which] was once in the possession of the

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106. In fact unpublished until 1833, the edition was announced in the March 1817 Critical Review as ‘in the press’, six volumes ‘handsomely printed by Bulmer’. Collier’s articles have been entirely overlooked by NCBEL, DNB, G. E. Bentley’s Jacobean and Caroline Stage, etc. He would return to Shirley with three essays in the London Magazine, May–October 1820; his transcript of three of Shirley’s works, two of them discussed in the ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ articles, is Houghton MS Eng 785 (some paper watermarked 1815).


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celebrated antiquary Thomas Hearne’) and William Stafford’s Certain Ordinary Complaints (1581), purchased at the Gordon sale and put to use in the article on Stubbes (April 1817, p. 422). Others, like Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1629), may have been his or on loan, for the current prices he suggests for his originals are daunting: Coryate’s Crudities ‘usually sells at from eight to twelve guineas’, Greene’s pamphlets ‘are now usually sold at from five to ten guineas’, a copy of Stanyhurst’s Virgil made £9 15s. at Evans’s three months earlier, Fleming’s Georgics alone (he was dealing with Bucolics too) was priced fi een guineas by Longmans in 1815, and Thomas Churchyard’s A True Discourse Historical (1602) ‘always sells at a high price’. One volume now ‘on our table’ may have had a provenance provocatively unstated: we last met with Staffords Niobe and Niobe Dissolv’d into a Nilus (1611) in the hands of Thomas Barnes, who identified it as ‘the second edition (the first I have never seen)’ when writing about it in Leigh Hunt’s Reflector in October 1810. Collier’s copy in October 1816, surely the same, ‘is the second edition . . . a first has never we believe been heard of ’, and Niobe ‘is of extreme rarity’. Did Barnes cede this volume to John Payne, or did Barnes borrow it from the new boy at The Times in 1810? Whatever the ownership, Barnes certainly was the first to conjecture Milton’s acquaintance with Stafford’s text, and to give the two sets of parallel passages that no longer convince Miltonians; Collier could not have done this in 1810, for he began to read Milton only a year later. But in ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ the article on Staffords Niobe— which in every way supersedes Barnes’s slight effort for the Reflector—presents Barnes’s brief thesis, and the very passages he evoked, as its own introduction, without any acknowledgement (‘It seems certain that Staffords Niobe was not only known to, but used by Milton’, etc.). These are peccadilloes, if not simply discretionary silences; but one essay in ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ raises considerations more sinister. This, the second piece in the series (June 1816), concerns A True Discourse Historical of the Succeeding Governours in the Netherlands (1602), ‘a very curious and a rare historical tract’ compiled by the superannuated soldier-poet of the ‘drab age’, Thomas Churchyard. Collier extracted his quotations from a copy which ‘is rendered peculiarly valuable by the insertion of twenty lines in the old English, fourteen syllable measure upon a blank page, in a hand writing obviously of about the date when the book was printed’. He went on to speculate, with a great show of caution, upon the authorship and script of the verse: ‘At the bottom are the letters Th. Ch. the usual mode in which Churchyard signed his pieces, and it is not impossible that the whole is an autograph: the circumstances that lead to a contrary conclusion are that Churchyard in 1602 was in his 82nd year, whereas these verses do not seem to have been penned by an infirm hand, and the spelling is not as singular as he usually made it. The lines are an eulogy upon Sir John Norris and


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Sir Philip Sidney, and well merit transcribing.’ Collier’s professed ‘transcript’ follows: What greater guerdon can we give to Norrice his hie name Than that it shall while time indures have ever growing fame? In Portugale in Royal France, no lesse likewise in Spaine, In Netherlands with much renowme in Ireland and Britaine, He lawrell won for victory’s with manie a grieslie wound, His lawrell crown shall thunder stroke nor lighning ere confound. The thrones of kings may bee orethrown by time a foe to all, But under deadlie stroke of time his fame shall never fall! It is immortal, fresh and green, and ever must remaine When towers of brasse and marble tombes do show them selves but vaine.— With him Sir Philip Sidney too shall be recorded hie Who over death victoriouslie hath gain’d the victorie: Unequall’d in the British court or field with martial power When death him struck with bullet foule death was not conquerour. Now to what lo ier hight of fame can this great worthie clime, A victor over enemies, victor ore death and time? Though age and sicknesse me assaile, I feele againe returne The ardent fires wherewith whilom I did full fiercelie burne: Why could not Churchyard die with them, he must full sore complaine Not crawle into his welcome grave, his crotches age and paine? ‘A man who could thus write’, the essayist solemnly concluded, ‘was no very contemptible poet.’ Readers’ opinions may vary, yet there are so many lines metrically padded out and so many insipid epithets and lame rhymes that few now would judge these the work of even a very debilitated professional writer. Churchyard has never been systematically edited, but no subsequent critic seems to have taken ‘What greater guerdon’ seriously; and no copy of the book with such an ‘insertion’ has ever been independently described. Indeed even Collier failed to mention the poem in The Poetical Decameron, which four years later devoted considerable attention to Churchyard’s rariora, and the whole episode might have been overlooked had not its perpetrator seen fit to mark up his own set of ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ with authorial second thoughts, and republish the tell-tale result.107 That these cannot be corrected ‘readings’ of an old text, or editorial normalizations, is sufficiently obvious: the last line, for

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107. See Wood 1925a; Chambers, WS, ii:385; and Freeman and Freeman 1993, with a reproduction of the annotated poem at p. 9.


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example, turns from ‘Not crawle into his welcome grave, his crotches age and paine’ to ‘Not creepe into his lonesome grave, made welcome by his paine’. Even such evidence of tampering would still not quite seal the case, but nearly four decades a er the exercise Collier chose to resurrect his imposture in Archaeologia (1852), as part of an article on ‘Sir Walter Raleigh, His Character, Services, and Advancement’. There he reprinted the twenty poor lines, still ‘well worth preserving’, ‘precisely as they stand’ in ‘a copy of this tract [the True Discourse Historical] now before me’. And, recklessly enough, he supplied the poem in its creatively revised form, trusting perhaps that no one then would compare the 1852 text with that of the perished Critical Review. The glib little hoaxes of Collier’s 1811 Margate letter on ‘Punch’ and the perhaps imaginary French farce about Milord Bobbie in the British Lady’s Magazine (1815) were not, a er all, major corruptions of literary history, though the former has come home to haunt puppet-show scholars. But the verses by ‘Th. Ch.’ constitute a more serious offence, perhaps John Payne Collier’s first venture into literary fabrication—not forgery, for there is no reason to think he bothered to write out the lines ‘in a hand writing obviously of the date when the book was printed’. That he knew what he was doing in May 1816 (aged twenty-seven) is quite clear; that he appreciated something of the risk he was taking may also be inferred from the absence of his signature at the foot of this instalment. It can hardly be accidental that while numbers 1 and 3–5 of ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ are initialled ‘C. P. I.’ or ‘C. P. J.’, and 6–16 are signed ‘J. P. C.’, only no. 2, on Churchyard, bears no subscription. In the event of an outsider’s inquiry, one supposes, the legally trained young hoaxer could disown the one essay of sixteen that lied. Did anyone but John himself know what was afoot, or did anyone care? With no clear history of deceit immediately either side of the Churchyard concoction it is hard to imagine solemn concern from a fraternity of reporters, although Crabb Robinson no doubt would have regarded such a prank as ‘too clever’. And, had Robinson known, we should probably have heard of it. But John Dyer Collier, who had been sacked from the Chronicle six months earlier, a er being victimized by an unspecified ‘hoax’, must have been in a position to ask, if he wondered at all, what the truth was about any such ‘discovery’. In old age John Payne remembered John Dyer as ‘upright as an arrow & as honest as daylight’, a man who could hardly have condoned even a literary imposture. It is a biographical commonplace that one forger younger than John, William Henry Ireland, was inspired by a motive of impressing or duping his father, and John Payne’s tacit rivalry with John Dyer might alert us to the same kind of motive. But we are very short on hard evidence here, and it may be better to remember than John Payne desired nothing more than to be ‘no very contemptible


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poet’ himself. If John Dyer even read his son’s work with interest, we cannot now know.

Marriage The death of old John Collier early in 1816 had le John Dyer and Jane with some ready money, but John Payne with only expectations: on his grandmother’s death, as the first-born grandson, he would inherit a fulling-mill at Witney worth about £800.108 Nevertheless he ‘lightened his purse’ at the Gordon of Gordonstoun book-sale in March, and in August he committed the extravagance of marrying Mary Louisa Pycro of Putney, his mother’s first cousin. John had known Mary Louisa since at least January 1813, when Robinson mentions a ‘Miss Pycro ’ among a theatre party, with Jane Collier, John Payne, and Robinson’s young nephew Tom. By January 1814 he seems to have regarded himself as engaged, if an allusion to the relief felt by ‘my dear intended’ at his safe passage from Holland is precise (JPC Memoirs, p. 93); and we have noticed a poem by John in the British Lady’s Magazine (April 1815) ‘humbly inscribed to M. L. P , of P ’ (B22). In his memoirs John spoke of courting Mary Louisa by water in 1815, rowing up the Thames in ‘my boat’, which he kept moored at Westminster Bridge: ‘she lived at Putney, in a good house, with large garden, stabling, &c.’ Still, it is curious that Robinson never mentions Mary Louisa again before hearing from Jane ‘that on the [date le blank] John P: Collier was married to his cousin Mary Pyecro ’ (HCR Diary, 24 August 1816). The couple wed at St. Mary’s, Putney, on 20 August 1816, the Rev. Richard Sandilands presiding, and all four of the witnesses were from the Pycro household.109 At twenty-nine, Mary Louisa was two years older than John, but the youngest of twelve children (five living, in 1817) of Frances London and a once prosperous Whitechapel sugar refiner, William Pycro . William had died in 1806, worth about £20,000, but his estate was stretched thin among widow and children, for in 1817 none of Mary’s three elder sisters, aged thirty-three, forty-three, and forty-nine, was married, or would be.110 Captain Charles Pycro (1779–1854),

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108. John Collier le the ‘estate called Witney Mill in the County of Oxford unto my eldest grandson’; John Payne sold it in 1831 for £800 (Jane Payne Collier to HCR, 23 September 1831, HCR Correspondence). 109. The group consisted of Mary Louisa’s brother Charles, her sisters Emma and Harriet, and Emily Caroline Phillips, a relation of Frances who lived with the Pycros and would in 1829 marry John Payne’s youngest brother, William. 110. They are named in Frances Pycro’s will, written 20 January 1817 and proved 5 June 1820; PRO PROB 11/1631. Mary Louisa was born 13 September 1787; her mother was the older sister of Jane Payne Collier’s mother, Jane London Payne.


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Mary’s only surviving brother, had worked for The Times, had reported from Gallicia with Crabb Robinson in 1809, and had escaped with Robinson a er Corunna without ‘anything but the clothes they wore’ (OMD, iv:38). He could take care of himself, and the mother and unmarried sisters were housed and provided for, but Mary Louisa’s independent fortune in 1816 brought her no more than £100 per annum, and Frances Pycro could not or did not provide an additional dowry.111 Robinson of course worried about everything, gloomily remarking in his diary on 24 August that ‘this is not a splendid marriage. M:P: is not handsome [and] her fortune is but small’. ‘But on the other hand’, he conceded, ‘she has the character of a sensible prudent woman & I believe this praise she does deserve—John is doing a bold act in marrying with prospects of affluence so little chearing.’ John himself many years later confirmed one of Robinson’s somewhat churlish opinions: ‘my wife, though a very charming, well educated, and accomplished woman, is not a beauty’ (OMD, ii:91). Yet he hastened to add that ‘she is a great deal better [than ‘a beauty’]’, and elsewhere described her with uncondescending respect: ‘She had been well-educated & was excellently accomplished—a good musician with some skill in drawing & sketching, besides being mistress of four languages—English, French, Italian and German: in the last’— selfish credit, perhaps—‘she was of essential use to me’ (JPC Diary, 2 November 1873). There is never a harsh word in Collier’s diaries, memoirs, or letters about Mary Louisa herself, nor any hint by Robinson or anyone else of marital discord. Six children were born in eleven years, although John subsequently developed some intransigent attitudes towards sex, and Mary Louisa’s painful death from cancer in 1857 le him heartbroken.112 But Robinson’s fears about fortune, the blasted ‘prospects of affluence’ and the ‘bold’ (i.e., foolhardy) step of commitment to breed, instead of feathering a nest first, also materialized remorselessly,

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111. Robinson’s diary note of 24 August 1816 gives the figure £100; on 1 November 1823, however, Robinson noted that John Payne had only £60 per annum from his wife’s income. In his 1879 Memoirs (p. 96) Collier noted that Frances ‘had given me no fortune with my wife who had property of her own consisting mainly of productive shares in the Pelican Life Office and a freehold at Edmonton’; three years earlier he had estimated his income from the shares as £120 (JPC Diary, 8 May 1876). 112. Late in life Collier developed an obsession with the idea that many men (he named Charles Dickens, the sixth Duke of Devonshire, and Frederic Ouvry) died as a result of sexual activity: ‘Let no man look at a woman aer he is 60: that is the very utmost limit. ?50, perhaps’ (JPC Diary, 2 July 1879). He himself, he claimed at age 92, ‘never touched my wife aer I was 45 or thereabouts’ (28 May 1881). Other diary entries suggest sexual qualms at an earlier age: ‘My dear little delicate Wife used to exclaim ‘‘What nasty creatures women are’’ and it is true . . . I shall never forget how shocked & disgusted I was when first I became acquainted with the nastyness of women, accidentally, as nearly as possible 80 years ago. What I thought then, I think still’ (28 December 1880).


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and Collier’s late reflections on the consequences of his choice make bitter reading. ‘As a Bachelor’, he wrote of the detested Lord Campbell, ‘he could escape from reporting when he was called to the Bar, which I never could do, as I had foolishly married; and I married the best of wives, altho’ it kept me poor, and I never could escape from my connexion with the d d Newspapers’ (Diary, 17 July 1881); and ‘My great error was marrying before I could earn [from] the Bar enough to keep a family. This has kept me an ‘‘underling’’ ’ (7 October 1881). Let us however set these regrets against Collier’s lighter memories of marriage— his relaxed life in the 1820s, his ‘sweet little wife’, and his fond children—and remember, if only to balance the accounts, that Henry Crabb Robinson feathered his own nest for three decades, toward no similar use. John and Mary Louisa honeymooned six weeks in France, taking along with them one of her unmarried sisters, undoubtedly Emma, aged thirty-three. They saw Versailles and Fontainbleau, and at Paris ‘there was no theatre worth going to that we did not visit, and no place of amusement that ladies could with any propriety go into that we did not see’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 106). A er Paris they stopped briefly with Mary Louisa’s relations in Boulogne, and returned to their new home in Vincent Square, Pimlico, to find all their movable belongings stolen and pawned by the housekeeper. Soon they were settled well in, however, and on 3 November Robinson thought ‘the house . . . tho’ small, genteel in its appearance, and the air of comfort about it, and the respectability of the situation of married man etc., made [John] appear enviable’ (HCR Diary). John would never have expected it in 1816, but his honeymoon tour proved his own last foreign jaunt: the next sixty-seven years of his life passed no farther from London than Brighton and the Isle of Wight to the south, Exeter and Plymouth to the west, and Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, to the north.

Breadwinner, 1817–20

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Even before visiting the newlyweds in early November 1816, Robinson had drawn up an estimate of their financial resources: Mary Louisa had but £100 per annum (Robinson would later reduce this figure to £60), and between his salary as a reporter, the Collier family newsletters, and by ‘literature’—that is, ‘writing reviews &c. and by shorthand writing occasionally’—John might add nearly £400, but no more. The hard work for the Critical Review ‘will not add to the family income’, Robinson feared, and altogether ‘I do not suppose [John] can muster up even 5 hundred a year’ (HCR Diary, 24 August 1816). Nor was Robinson averse to sharing his misgivings with Mary Louisa, whom he attended alone for the first time on 27 November, and ‘chatted for some time with her on family affairs. I gave my opinion freely that I do not think the Critical Review


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can possibly succeed’. At the heart of his worries was John’s easygoing pursuit of a respectable career, and in particular his diffidence, six years now in evidence, toward the law. ‘He has talents’, wrote Robinson primly, ‘& if he had more ambition & less vanity he might succeed at the bar’. But John Payne had long balked at legal training and discipline, despite Robinson’s prodding. It was in March 1811 that Robinson had decided to give up newspaper-work for the law, and in July of that year he had certified John as ‘a Gentleman of Respectability’ at the Middle Temple for the same course of study. But while Robinson took his seat at the bar in May 1813, John dawdled unenthusiastically over his Blackstone and made little headway. Later he maintained that his new marital responsibilities impeded his qualification, ‘because I could not then afford to relinquish my connexion with newspapers’. Newspapermen were then mercilessly snubbed by the legal profession,113 and a clean break from reporting seemed necessary for any serious hope of legal preferment. Robinson had made his in 1811, but John would not, or could not: ‘I much wished to put on my wig and gown, but I could not afford to live without the income derived from newspapers’, he claimed (JPC Memoirs, p. 96), blaming domestic circumstances again. But little evidence suggests any sustained effort on Collier’s part to make good as a lawyer, and in 1818–19, perhaps out of impatience, he virtually put paid to his prospects with a journalistic coup de scandale. Ten years later he would finally be called to the bar, but by then, Robinson knew, ‘he will never have the perseverance necessary to success and he has no connections to give him business of favour’ (HCR Diary, 26 November 1828). If not to the practice of law, might John adapt himself to a less insouciant journalistic career? ‘I wish sincerely’, wrote Robinson on 23 December 1817, ‘that J. C. would either study the law earnestly or endeavour to gain [John Walter II’s] favour if he means to continue all his life connected with newspapers.’ Walter had been grumbling about his wayward young star’s extra-reportorial activities, even to his taking the house at 27 Vincent Square, a new development in what had been Tothill Fields, Pimlico. Only a week a er John’s wedding Walter complained to Robinson that Vincent Square was too far from the Times office, which Robinson thought unreasonable, for ‘C.’s occupation is definite and he is not liable to be called on at all times’. By ‘definite’ Robinson meant regular: John had negotiated a steady salary from Walter of six guineas a week year-round (HCR Diary, 5 February 1818), but with this stipendiary concession Walter seems

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113. JPC Memoirs, p. 96. See also Aspinall 1945: on 23 February 1810 the journalist George Farquharson petitioned the House of Commons to complain of an 1807 Lincoln’s Inn rule excluding those who wrote for newspapers from being called to the bar; in the course of discussion (23 March) Richard Brinsley Sheridan pointed out that eighteen of the ‘about 23’ then employed as parliamentary reporters were university-educated, and ‘most of them graduates’.


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to have thought himself entitled more exclusively to calls on John’s time. The Collier family newsletter business, always a sore spot with Walter, continued to irritate him: this now constituted for John Dyer his only real source of income, as it did for Richard, while William’s share supplemented the modest two and a half guineas a week that Walter paid him. But John Payne, who Robinson knew was ‘the principal person alone competent to write the letters’, was essential to the entire operation, which Walter in turn may have considered at odds with his own interests at The Times. Matters hardly were improved in late 1817 when John Dyer attempted to expand the family business, in some measure at Walter’s expense, while simultaneously preparing to retire to a farm;114 the last move would leave John Payne effectively responsible for four interdependent incomes.115 Walter took offence at John Dyer’s actions, Robinson wrote, ‘without any right to do so’, although one may sympathize with the proprietor’s frustration. ‘He was unreasonable enough to wish that [John and William] should in no way assist their father’, and even though ‘he seemed half ashamed of himself ’ Walter proposed to offer John compensation if he would give up his part in the enterprise. But Walter seems seriously to have underestimated its size (‘he speaks as if he thought he [John Dyer] had only 2 or 3 letters [i.e., subscribers]—I took care not to undeceive him’), and John Payne was in no position to comply. The dispute wound down for the moment to accusations of tardy copy and working-to-rule, which Robinson ‘excused only on the ground of [John’s] wife’s ill health’, but finally a new contract was necessary (HCR Diary, 22 December 1817). John sought a reduced but all-year-round weekly wage of five guineas (or 260 guineas per annum, equal to Watts’s pay at the Chronicle) for reporting Parliament, which normally sat about thirty weeks. Walter, who ‘says he allows no man such a salary’, countered with an offer based on the length of each session, with a weekly half-guinea rise for poor William thrown in, and in August 1818 they settled at 200 guineas for John’s parliamentary assignment alone (HCR Diary, 4 August 1818). Walter had

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114. James Lawson, the Times printer, died aged fiy on 7 December 1817, and the paper reported that ‘his eldest son will succeed him in the management of his various concerns’, one of which was a newsletter business similar to the Colliers’. At once John Dyer ‘wrote letters to L.’s Correspondents stating that L.’s son was not old enough to continue the correspondence, and mentioning the assistance he had from his three sons’; Walter himself, however, had meanwhile ‘taken [young Lawson’s letters] under his management’ (HCR Diary, 22 December 1817). 115. On his return to farming John Dyer proposed that thirty-two equal shares of net income be divided nine each to John Dyer and John Payne, ten to Richard, and four to William, who by now had a small salary from Walter. Richard sought twelve shares instead, or three-eighths, with John Dyer and John Payne on eight each, which John Dyer refused to grant; they apparently settled on a simpler arrangement, based on expectations of about £600 in all, namely £200 net for Richard, £100 for William, and the remainder to be divided between John Payne and John Dyer (HCR Diary, 2 June 1818).


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had much of his own way (John ‘has to give up part of his salary to Walter in order to be able to write the letters’, Robinson summed up), yet the two went on haggling for months about quarterly instalments, payment on account, and even a Christmas advance. By late 1818 John’s combined income from the Times and the newsletters was no more than it had been in 1816, and he gave way on Vincent Square too, taking a ‘comfortable . . . tho’ small & dark’ house in Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street (HCR Diary, 14 October 1818). The first year of John’s marriage saw the expiry of the Critical Review, which, as Robinson had predicted, had contributed little to the young couple’s earnings. Its last number (June) followed close on the birth of their first child, Mary Frances, at Vincent Square, on 27 May 1817. John may have been for the first time in his life in some debt, from the honeymoon, the depredations of the faithless housekeeper, and extravagances like a piano for Mary Louisa and his own rariora.116 In the next eighteen months, therefore, he sought outside work with at least four periodicals: Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, Archibald Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine, Colburn and Shoberl’s New Monthly Magazine, and Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts. His contact for the last two was an old family friend, Frederic Shoberl. Shoberl (1775–1853), the miscellaneous writer, translator, printer, and publisher, always inspired John’s affectionate memories. He had been ‘very kind & useful to my father, when he wanted help—even pecuniary’ and had introduced John Dyer to the Wyatt brothers and later John Payne to Colburn and Ackermann; when a boy (about 1805–06, he wrote elsewhere) John Payne ‘was taught something of German’ by Shoberl, ‘and I should have learned a good deal more, if I had been as industrious as my master . . . was painstaking and capable’.117 Crabb Robinson, who knew Shoberl through the Colliers, recalled his humble beginnings as a porter for Longmans who married the family cook, ‘and having worked his shoulders long enough, thought he could transfer the labour to his brains’; but he was ever ‘a very worthy man’, and when in April 1818 a partnership had been mooted between Shoberl and John Dyer to operate the Cornwall Gazette, a conservative newspaper issued at Truro, Robinson thought it a much better plan for John Dyer than farming again. But this project fell through, and Shoberl in June le London for Truro to edit and publish the Gazette by himself.118

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116. The piano was purchased from James Kenney, who on 25 May 1818 wrote from Paris asking for payment of the balance (Folger MS Y.d.341 [94]). Collier later recalled of this period that ‘I found myself a little short of money’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 114). 117. JPC Diary, 27 and 30 January 1881; OMD, ii:10. 118. Robinson’s portrait of Shoberl, written in 1848, is in his Reminiscences, i:350. He suspected that an agreement concerning the Gazette could not be reached because John Dyer wished too great a share in the profits; HCR Diary, 22 April 1818.


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Before departing, however, Shoberl troubled himself considerably on John Payne’s behalf. He recommended the younger man to Henry Colburn, who had co-founded with him the New Monthly Magazine, and he arranged for John to take over his own editorial duties on Rudolph Ackermann’s colour-plate monthly, the Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, &c. Little came of the first introduction: as Collier wrote to his friend on 10 August, Colburn ‘talked to me one day [in June] somewhat definitely, but a erwards it dropped away. The next month he sent for me & offered to let me do the Provincial Intelligence, which of course I would not undertake, indeed I could not have done it if I would, for I get no country papers’.119 One review by ‘J. P. C.’ found its way into the NMM, however, ‘On the Poems of Richard Lovelace’ (September 1818, but dated 8 June). This brief notice corrected some ‘deficiencies’ in the recent edition of Lovelace by S. W. Singer, whose Playing Cards had been flayed in the Critical Review: John was spoiling, one must think, for a literary vendetta, or at least tempting reprisal.120 The Repository assignment went well from the outset, Collier rather highhandedly finding ‘the subject of the fine arts . . . much neglected & very injudiciously, & this is a matter I am striving to remedy’—although ‘any hints from your experience’ (of nine years, in fact) would be helpful. ‘The Printer (Harrison) and I go on very smoothly at present & I do not see any reason why any roughnesses should occur. As for Ackermann I have not had a glimpse of him since you le town . . . I believe however that he will not be dissatisfied with what I have done.’ Collier’s gratitude, at the close of this letter—the earliest by Collier we know—seems unfeigned: ‘I assure you, Shoberl, I am very much obliged by the interest you took in my concerns, & the pains you took to forward them’. Shoberl remained in Truro for seventeen months, during which time John Payne may have edited the Repository single-handed for Ackermann,121 while reporting Parliament for John Walter II and managing the newsletters a er John Dyer’s move to his farm (mid-1818). To the Repository he also contributed several essays under more than one pseudonym in 1818–19, and others in 1820–21, a er Shoberl had resumed his old office. These were for the most part sketchy and brief, lightly annotated extracts from old popular literature, sometimes no more than reprints of selected extracts already made by Egerton

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119. JPC to Shoberl, 10 August 1818, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (176). 120. Many years later Collier mentioned Singer’s edition to W. C. Hazlitt: ‘Ritson is accuracy itself compared with Singer. I have followed the latter through many of his editorial attempts & always found him miserably careless. I, too, collated his ‘‘Lovelace’’, and never trust him for a single line’; 24 September 1863, BL Add. MS 38,898, fols. 220–21. 121. The magazine’s ‘notes to contributors’ during this period include several messages to ‘Antiquarius’, who was certainly Collier, but these may be nothing more than an attempt to inflate the list of correspondents.


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Brydges in Restituta.122 As ‘Antiquarius’ Collier provided four slight retrospective articles in 1818–19: on costume in the reign of Elizabeth (‘I happened the other day at the British Museum to be turning over a collection of old public documents’); on a ‘perfect Blue Beard’ of Prague, who murdered eighteen wives by witchcra ;123 on the celebrated hog-faced lady, Tannakin Skinker; and on ‘Early Travels in France’. The last piece consists of extracts from Dallington’s A Method for Travel, simply copied from Collier’s longer essay in the Critical Review for November 1816.124 Similarly, as ‘P’s & Q’s’ the stand-in editor recycled his jeu d’esprit in the British Lady’s Magazine for July 1815 as ‘Remonstrance against Large Bonnets’ (November 1819), while as ‘L. W.’, a er Shoberl’s return, he would adapt another 1815 BLM piece as ‘St. Valentine’s Day’. Other unsigned contributions may be Collier’s too, but he prudently refrained from publishing his own verse: those of his poems signed ‘Humphrey Gubbins’ that appear in the Repository all date from 1821, when Frederic Shoberl was back in the chair.

Criticisms on the Bar The Repository piece-work may be trivial, but it was innocuous and it paid. Necessity, however, proved the mother of some less auspicious invention by Collier in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, 1818–19. This project of twenty periodical essays, which John later called ‘foolish, flippant, and fatal to my prospects, if I ever had any’,125 originated in his law-court reporting for Walter, Perry, and Bartholoman of York, and along with his stigmatized newspaper activities, blighted (he thought) his intended legal career. ‘For a few guineas weekly’ Collier engaged to supply Hunt’s liberal but muck-raking journal with profiles of thirty celebrated barristers, describing their mannerisms, appearance, and personality

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122. The latter are principally the nine pieces signed ‘D. Wr’, appearing between August 1818 and June 1821, which have so little original matter in them that attribution is undemonstrable (Bibliography, page 1398). But they coincide with Collier’s other contributions and mirror his ‘touchstones’: James Howell (3), Thomas Heywood (2), Anthony Munday, et al. 123. This five-column account, with extracts—supposedly based on ‘a curious old pamphlet’ of 1622, A Discourse of News from Prague in Bohemia—is certainly a fabrication: no such title is known (nor are the ‘French and German copies’ it is said to follow), nor is the case elsewhere recorded. 124. Collier’s own file copy of this is marked up passage by passage as setting-copy for the 1819 version. 125. As he wrote on the flyleaf of his own copy. Collier’s son, John Pycro, copied this and two other comments by his father into a second copy of the book (FF); one, dated 1860, reads: ‘J. Payne Collier is very sorry that he ever wrote this poor book: it has stood in my way ever since. It would not be forgiven, and I do not wonder.’ In yet another copy presented to Frederic Ouvry, Collier remarked that the book proved ‘to have always been a Bar to my progress in the [legal] profession’ (Ouvry sale, lot 313; FF).


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as well as their eloquence, examining techniques, and the success rate of their causes. These appeared as ‘Criticisms on the Bar’ over the pseudonym ‘Amicus Curiae’ between 27 July 1818 and 3 January 1819, and were collected in one stout duodecimo volume published by Simpkin and Marshall in 1819. Clearly they were inspired by the ‘Parliamentary Portraits’ of Thomas Barnes, writing as ‘Criticus’ in the same organ four years before, or at long range by Barron Field’s ‘The Law Student’ in Hunt’s Reflector, 1810–11. But the true carrot was money, as Collier claimed: ‘I was tempted beyond bearing to put my pen to paper in that way for the sake of earning a few guineas weekly. I never regretted it but once’, he told J. W. Ebsworth in 1875, ‘and that has been, as they say, ever since.’ 126 The pay was finally not insubstantial, or so Collier says: £100 for the series, and a further £100 from the book, its text slightly augmented.127 Why such casual if mildly supercilious essays caused so much trouble—when Barnes’s similarly provocative ‘sketches of the public character of some of the most distinguished speakers in the House of Commons’ scarcely impeded his rise at The Times—Crabb Robinson, once again, may explain. Reading in October 1818 ‘a large number of Examiners, chiefly for the sake of John Collier’s criticisms on the Bar’, Robinson was unequivocally severe: ‘These did not by any means please me—not that the criticisms were on the whole ill done, but that the thing itself ought not to have been done at all. It seems an impertinent intrusion of public censure where there is no right whatever to play the part of a critic. Actors, public performers of every kind & authors, invite criticism . . . but the Barrister, tho’ he acts before the public, does not act for the public, and it is scandalous to bring forward the infirmities of body & mind to amuse an idle & malignant public’ (HCR Diary, 17 October). Of course Robinson reacted like the lawyer he was, subject to the same intrusive impertinence; John himself never regarded his ‘criticisms’ as personally scurrilous. ‘To be merely a Reporter’, he acknowledged, ‘was enough against me [in the Law], but to criticize the leaders of the profession I was just entering was absurd and injudicious almost beyond possibility’ (JPC Diary, 10 July 1881). Still he went on to perpetuate the ephemeral series as a book, albeit with some details so ened or cut,128 and he remembered the result as ‘liked by most people’ and met by ‘a considerable sale’. ‘I was wrong in ever consenting to write the essays’, he conceded at last—though politically and practically, not morally or artistically wrong, he implied—and he

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126. 8 September 1875, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (37). 127. JPC Memoirs, p. 114, probably a considerable exaggeration. 128. For example, a comment on James Topping (‘his mental as well as his bodily vigour are impaired’) is deleted in the book version. However, no changes were made to the portrait of Sir John Gurney, which Robinson found ‘particularly offensive, and also unjust’, and there is an added slur on the personal appearance of Charles Wetherell (p. 235).


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reserved his deepest regret for the betrayal of his prized anonymity. ‘Upon the title-pages of some copies . . . my name was surreptitiously inserted’, and ‘the addition of my name was calculated to do me harm’.129 The recklessness of this episode, which Collier persistently attributed to ‘want of judgement . . . the great deficiency of my life’ (JPC Diary, 10 July 1881), may remind us more forcefully of other ad hominem gestures in print by the young antiquarian critic. John had by now twice baited Singer, dismissed Dibdin and by implication all ‘black-letter’ bibliophiles, and condescended to the late, revered Edmond Malone; in 1818–20 he would add George Steevens, Isaac Reed, Edward Capell, Richard Farmer, Richard Hurd, George Chalmers, Dr. Johnson, Thomas Warton, Thomas Campbell, and August Schlegel to his blacklist of faint praise or censure, with scarcely a scholar or critic in his field to prefer as a worthy ally. Mercifully for him there seems to be no evidence of retaliation by the law-court grandees he had chosen to spite; nor, for that matter, is there much record of reward from those he had praised.130 Collier’s favourites included Sir Samuel Romilly, Serjeant William Draper Best, Henry Peter Brougham (later Lord Chancellor), Thomas Denman (later Lord Chief Justice), John Lens, and Charles Warren. Best (1767–1845, later Baron Wynford) was ‘one of the principal ornaments of this court [of Common Pleas]’, whose ‘qualifications as an advocate before a jury . . . are probably more eminent than those of any other man now practicing in Westminster-hall’. He ‘possesses perspicuity and acuteness, if it do not amount to subtlety’—Collier was never given to unqualified praise—‘in a very striking degree’, he was a forcible and energetic speaker (yet not always ‘fluent’), and his ‘action’ (i.e., rhetorical gesturing) was ‘varied without pretence’ (although ‘perhaps he uses his right hand too much—or . . . his le hand too little’). As ‘a man of considerable gallantry’ Best ‘always seems to treat the so er sex [as witnesses] with peculiar lenity’, but this was ‘an error on the right side’, as ‘great consideration is undoubtedly due to a female in such an unwonted situation’, and ‘it much too frequently happens, that witnesses of this sex are treated with needless rudeness, if not with wanton coarseness’. These are among Collier’s principal criteria in Criticisms on the Bar: eloquence or the lack of it in court, learning, fairness, civility and quick-wittedness, and a record of victory (‘let him be assisted by a junior council, who can answer

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129. OMD, iv:95. We have not found this in type, but we have in contemporary MS (FF), and a remainder issue of 1839 was advertised by J. Templeman as by ‘J. P. Collier, Barrister at Law’. Collier further remarked that ‘aer I had been called to the Bar of the Middle Temple [in 1829] it was oen thrown in my teeth’; JPC Memoirs, p. 116. 130. More than thirty years later Collier successfully asked Lord Brougham to support his application for a government pension; JPC to Brougham, 7 and 9 June 1850, UCL Brougham Papers MSS 726 and 709.


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formal objections, and success is very possible in a bad, but almost certain in a good cause’). Best’s ‘talents and his prudence’ won John’s admiration, not ‘his general information regarding literature, the arts, and matters of taste’, which was no better than ‘instinctive’, nor ‘his political conduct and opinions’, with which ‘I have nothing to do, and I am glad of it’. Serjeant Lens, the celebrated political independent, impressed Collier above all with his propriety of deportment and speech (‘a vulgarism seldom or never escapes his lips . . . and his sentences are usually full and complete’), his mild manner, unquestioned learning, straightforwardness, and dedication to the cause at hand. Unlike many successful advocates, he behaved ‘with equal respect towards his inferiors, his equals, and his superiors’, no doubt a trait particularly attractive to the thin-skinned reporter. Sir Samuel Romilly (1757–1818) was already and untimely dead when Collier’s estimate of him appeared, but ‘the benignity of his nature’, his clearheadedness, sincerity, and the ‘nervous and forcible eloquence, in which he has never been exceeded, I doubt if ever equalled, by any lawyer in any age’, led Collier to unabashed eulogy; he had himself hoped to edit Romilly’s speeches in Parliament ‘with a selection of those delivered in his professional capacity’, but ‘was discouraged by the little interest that seemed to be taken by the public . . . a er his decease’. Brougham (1778–1868), another M.P. with ongoing business in the lawcourts, was well enough known to require only a perfunctory character, but his formidable ‘intellect . . . industry . . . acuteness and judgement’ earned Collier’s respect, if Brougham’s oratory did not: ‘his voice and manner are not the happiest: the first . . . o en very impoliticly commences in so high a key, that he is exhausted before he arrives at his conclusion’. The account of Thomas Denman, which first appeared in the book version of Criticisms, allowed Collier to recall ‘the difference in the behaviour of the English and Irish students when dining in the hall of the Middle Temple’, and to admire ‘the warmth of feeling and generosity of disposition’ of the latter, while disapproving their ‘flippant flourishes’ and ‘unrestrained self-confidence’. Denman’s learning and delivery elicited Collier’s hearty approval: he was ‘much better than a mere lawyer’. Among those to whom Collier awarded mixed reviews were James Scarlett, later Baron Abinger, whom he had encountered seven years before, at York (ingenious if abrupt, unpretentious but well-educated—‘false quantities . . . are never heard from him’); the Attorney General Sir Samuel Shepherd (he was hard-of-hearing, took too much snuff, and while candid, fair, and ‘a gentleman’, lost too many cases); the solicitor general Sir Robert Gifford; Sergeant Copley (Baron Lyndhurst, the son of the painter: an ‘ambitionist’); and John Gurney (‘a tolerable criminal Lawyer, and nothing more’). Sir John Vaughan employed language ‘the coarsest and most vulgar’, with ‘a share of low humour’; the popu-


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lar Oxford circuit-court barrister Philip Dauncey had quickness and cunning, but was ‘little more than a mere talker’; on the northern circuit—York again— Jonathan Raine was the best man for a horse cause or one of shipping insurance (he is ‘up to the tricks of the trade’) but was roughly spoken and addicted to puns. Sir John Bosanquet had good family connections but ‘no commanding talent’, and would make a good judge; Sir John Richardson was learned and experienced, but ‘his voice and manner are both unfortunate—the one is asthmatic, and the other spasmodic’, and like Raine he indulged in ‘bad puns and coarse jokes’. Collier’s targets for all-out dispraise number at least six. Sir Arthur Piggot, the former Attorney General, died in September 1819, a year a er Collier described him as illogical, phlegmatic, repetitive, and trifling. ‘I do not know any man who practises in the same Court [of Chancery], who has less pretensions to any thing approaching the ornaments of rhetoric’, John declared, and as for ‘action’, ‘he looks more like an automaton than a living creature, and never directs his eyes toward the individual he is addressing’. No better was Samuel Marryat, ‘one of the most clumsy, negligent speakers that ever opened his lips’; he was zealous but obtuse, physically repulsive, and ‘of wit or humour . . . has not a particle’. About languages other than English ‘he seems to know nothing, and to care less: in the true spirit of John Bull, he apparently despises all foreigners but those that happen to be his clients’. Other barristers were ‘unintelligible’ (William Harrison, K.C.), ‘destitute of sound judgement’ (William Wingfield, K.C.), ungentlemanly, vulgar, and given to intimidating witnesses (James Topping, K.C.), while Charles Wetherell (K.C., knighted 1824) was insufferably long-winded, tedious, illogical, ostentatious, and vain. We hear in passing of ‘the laborious and mindless Sugden and Preston’, characters to which one nineteenth-century annotator took violent exception,131 and of one ‘Mr. Peel, a young man of overrated abilities, who will never do better than he has done, nor attain a higher rank than that of a debater’ (p. 172). The last imprescient sneer Collier must have particularly regretted, as in the 1830s he would seek Robert Peel’s patronage, without tangible success. But injudicious, harsh, and condescending as many of the Criticisms are, the book is not all caricature, nor worthless as social or political commentary. Collier’s well-turned general reflections on the decline of courtroom oratory, on the high cost both to the government and to private litigants of long prosecutions, and on the treatment of witnesses by barristers possessed value in their own time, and his account of prevailing courtroom procedures, as well as the inti-

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131. ‘Of all men, Sugden (aerwards Ld. St. Leonard) least deserved this epithet which shows too plainly the incompetency of Mr Collier to judge by any other test that than of success’; note in FF copy 2, p. 102.


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mate biographical data in each sketch, are of independent interest to students today. How damaging the publication really was to the ambivalent careerist— who seems to have blamed his failure in the law upon everything but his own efforts—we cannot be sure: Barron Field, a er all, survived a no less impertinent breach of decorum as ‘the Law Student’ of Leigh Hunt’s Reflector in 1810–11. And the anonymity that John claimed was broached by unscrupulous enemies could have been more cautiously guarded, had he cared to do so: who else, a contemporary might ask, would lace modern law-court vignettes with quotations from Marlowe, Webster, and Chapman among dramatists, Churchyard, Surrey, Spenser, Hall, Wither, and Donne among poets, and Feltham, Nashe, Browne, and even Anthony Stafford’s Niobe among essayists of the pre-Restoration? The signposts were there, and writ large, even to the epigraph that Collier supplied for his 1819 title-page: ‘‘‘I have done in this nothing unworthy of an honest life and studies well employed’’.—Milton, Preface to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.’

The Edinburgh Magazine John’s final periodical project in 1818 involved Archibald Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine, an old monthly journal (the Scots Magazine) newly renamed—not to be confused with Constable’s more famous quarterly Edinburgh Review, nor with the Edinburgh Monthly Review (1819–23), nor with Blackwood’s rival Edinburgh Magazine, known as Blackwood’s. Its antiquarian bent and what Blackwood’s regarded as its ‘dullness’ may have derived from its original co-editor, the Register Office copyist Thomas Pringle, who went on to emigrate and become the first ‘South African’ poet writing in English; its budget for original contributions was punitive, and save for Hazlitt, who from Constable’s pages could growl back at Blackwood’s, few distinguished writers are found here.132 Collier told Shoberl on 10 August of his engagement (‘I have . . . had an offer from one of the Edinburgh Magazines which is advantageous and respectable’), and between December 1818 and December 1819 he supplied six articles ‘On the English Dramatic Writers Who Preceded Shakespeare’, with three more, concluding the series, between June 1820 and February 1821.133 These were once again ‘retrospective’ essays, devoted to reviving sixteenth-century plays that Shakespeare’s had eclipsed, and while they embody significant revaluations—

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132. Barbara J. Dunlop in Sullivan 1983, pp. 133–37, notes that in 1819 only £15 was budgeted for all the contributions to each quarter’s three issues. 133. JPC to Shoberl, 10 August 1818. See Wellens 1993, but in fact there are only nine articles by Collier, not ten (cancel that for February 1821), and the letter cited in Wellens’s note 9 refers to copies of Collier’s Poet’s Pilgrimage, not to periodical contributions.


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hardly at Shakespeare’s expense—they come with claims and counter-claims against earlier critics that border on the shrill. Collier later described the articles as ‘impertinent and self-sufficient’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 122), and the roll-call of his victims is impressive, if ominous: Malone was again patronized as ‘selfconceited’ and ‘one whose chief, if not only, merit is to discover facts’; Bishop Hurd and Richard Farmer were among ‘ridiculous’ commentators; and the now-fashionable August Schlegel, whom Robinson admired, ‘knew nothing of any body but Shakespeare . . . in other words, he was totally ignorant of the production of any of his contemporaries’, and this want of knowledge led him into ‘gross errors’, like many before him. And the great Thomas Warton, while ‘almost the only man . . . who joins a correct and delicate taste to a profound knowledge, and as deep a love of his subject’, nonetheless seemed ‘to speak as if no author had preceded Shakespeare who had written a play upon a similar system’. As if swatting flies Collier proceeded to patronize Samuel Johnson’s iconic Prefaces to Shakespeare, citing as its ‘only really good part’ its ‘justification, upon principle’, of the old English playwrights’ flight from the unities.134 As for the plays and playwrights under consideration, Collier gave short shri to the early mysteries, moralities, and interludes, concentrating instead upon Marlowe (Tamburlaine, Edward II ), Greene ( James IV ), and Peele (Edward I ), the ‘classical’ Misfortunes of Arthur, and the problematic Taming of a Shrew. But anyone who dismissed Malone’s chronological scholarship did so at his own risk, and one essay found John confidently misrepresenting Sir John Oldcastle (1599) as a source, not an echo of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V. Another, on The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York (1595), presented the vexed ‘bad quarto’ of 3 Henry VI as a work indubitably by Marlowe—a speculation in fact introduced by Farmer and Malone, though Collier credited only George Chalmers—and treated it as Shakespeare’s inspiration.135 William Godwin read this provocative argument (December 1818), decoded the initials, and on 7 February 1819 wrote to Collier enquiring where Chalmers’s argument had appeared, and ‘whether Christopher Marlow’s name appears at full length in the title-page to the said play’. It does not, needless to say. Nor does Collier’s reaction sur-

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134. Edinburgh Magazine, December 1818, p. 527 (Malone, Warton, and Johnson); February 1819, p. 127 (Schlegel and Malone); April 1819, p. 350 (Hurd and Farmer). 135. Although aware only of the 1600 and 1619 reprints of the True Tragedy, Malone by 1790 was persuaded (at the suggestion of Richard Farmer) that it was the work of Christopher Marlowe, and that Shakespeare had earlier adapted it (Shakespeare [1790], i:280; cf. Boswell-Malone, ii:313 ff.). In 1799 George Chalmers first described his own unique quarto of 1595 (A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers, pp. 292–300) and further endorsed the Farmer-Malone hypothesis. Collier misleadingly implied that Chalmers had revealed a new text, not merely a new edition, and that Malone, Steevens, et al. knew of neither, much less of Marlowe’s ‘authorship’.


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vive, but Godwin called on him in Bouverie Street three times in the next six weeks, and when, later on in the series, Collier acknowledged the recent edition of Marlowe by Godwin’s friend James Broughton, he did not reiterate his—or Chalmers’s—misattribution.136 Like his father’s since 1806, John Payne’s household was from the start an extended and busy one. Emma Pycro , who had accompanied the couple on their honeymoon, moved into 27 Vincent Square on their return, and apparently remained en famille without intermission over the next forty years. Children materialized in short order: the birth of Mary Frances Collier, nine months a er the wedding, preceded that of the first son, John Pycro , by less than two years (22 April 1819), and that of William Proctor by four (8 May 1821). Mary Louisa meanwhile suffered from ill health, wrote Robinson (HCR Diary, 22 December 1817), and her husband had long been subject to bouts of quinsy, perhaps a complication of childhood tonsillitis; Jane once told Robinson that she had kept John, when young, in flannel waistcoats ‘next his skin’ all winter long.137 The near-suburban atmosphere of west Pimlico may thus have suited the family, but not John Walter II, and their retreat to 3 Bouverie Street, a few doors from the highly trafficked Fleet Street, cannot have done them much good. Between addresses they rented a ‘pleasantly situated’ house for the summer in Windsor Street, Putney, near the Pycro s, where Robinson visited them in July 1818, going out on the river in Captain Pycro ’s boat.138 John seems always to have been happiest in riverside homes. By the late summer of 1818 John Dyer Collier had converted his father’s legacy into another dream of agricultural self-support, leasing a 300-acre farm, Smallfield Place, near East Grinstead, Surrey. Into this enterprise he drew Jane’s nephew, Robert Proctor, a twenty-year-old with an adventurous streak, who was now courting Mary, the second Collier sister, while his brother George courted the elder, Jane. George and Jane married on 2 September 1818, saving

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136. See Donald H. Reiman in Cameron et al., vi:770–72, publishing Godwin’s letter, with commentary. James Broughton, who had edited five plays by Marlowe in 1818, was probably the ‘impertinent friend’ who suggested Collier as the author of the Edinburgh article, and may have asked Godwin to investigate; see Seyler 1975 and Reiman 1976. In February 1821 Collier wrote that no more extracts from Marlowe were necessary, as ‘all the dramatic pieces attributed to Marlow have been reprinted, and . . . are thus easily accessible’; Edinburgh Magazine, p. 148. 137. HCR to Thomas Robinson, 15 January 1807, HCR Correspondence: ‘John had several years a long winter cough which made her & Mr C. very apprehensive of its affecting his lungs.’ 138. HCR Diary, 6 July 1818. In his letter to Shoberl of 10 August Collier said he had ‘removed my wife & family (how paternal & dignified) a little way out of town and . . . taken a furnished house until next quarter day [i.e., Michaelmas, 29 September] when it is probable that some other houses will be vacant’.


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her from a return to the farm,139 but Mary accompanied her father, mother, and suitor to Smallfield Place. Paterfamilias and prospective son-in-law soon fell out (they ‘agree so ill that in the nature of things they never can well agree’, Jane told Robinson; and although John Dyer worked hard the farm turned no profit, and Jane suffered from John Dyer’s temper.140 ‘She is the scapegoat to bear all’, Robinson wrote, ever partial, but he could not effect a division of the land between the quarrelling partners, and on 21 December 1820 Robert Proctor married his Polly and le Smallfield Place, John Dyer, and the increasingly ‘wretched’ Jane to themselves.141 He went briefly into the ‘stock broking’ business with the feckless Richard Collier,142 and in late 1822 set off with his bride and infant son on a financial mission to Peru. Robert and Mary Proctor and oneyear-old Robert crossed South America from Buenos Aires to Lima by horsecart and occasional ra , traversing the dangerous high passes of the Andes on mule-back, and spent the next year in and about Lima. On his return to England Proctor too joined the literati with a lively Narrative of a Journey across the Cordillera of the Andes, which John Payne helped him to publish. Richard Collier did not join his father’s farming household in summer 1818, having already le home to share quarters with his old chum Hatton Stansfeld (HCR Diary, 6 May 1818). Richard’s sole support now, save a little agency work at the Stock Exchange, was the newsletter business, from which he perhaps drew more than he deserved, and his situation was complicated by a secret marriage to his pregnant mistress in October 1820. William too, underpaid by but in thrall to The Times, needed somewhere to live, and may have moved in with John from mid-1818 onward. At least Robinson met him constantly in Bouverie Street in 1818–20, where they o en played chess, the game John had abandoned. And Robinson, once again, became ‘family’: on the rustication of John Dyer and Jane he arranged to take his meals out of term with John Payne in Bouverie Street, ‘as I did with his father. Tho’ I do not feel towards the young people as I did toward Mrs C., yet I have great comfort in being thus relieved from the necessity of providing for myself ’ (HCR Diary, 29 October 1818). He contributed one guinea a

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139. A graduate of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, George Proctor (1795–1881) was ordained just before the wedding and was created a doctor of divinity in 1829. He served as master of Lewes Grammar School and rector of St. Michael’s, Lewes (1820–29), and as master of Elizabeth College, Guernsey (1829–31); he later conducted his own school at Brighton and from 1846 to 1860 was the incumbent at Monken Hadley, Middlesex. 140. HCR Diary, 13 April 1819. ‘Twice the money and twice the stock of cattle, horses, etc. could not have made it profitable’: JPC Memoirs, p. 141. 141. HCR Diary, 17 September and 31 December 1819. 142. HCR Diary, 21 December 1820, doubting that this would result in substantial earnings for Robert.


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week toward his keep, which Jane—unhelpfully—once told him was ‘too much’, but Henry scrupulously insisted on paying (HCR Diary, 13 April 1819).

‘The Scrape’ For The Times and John Walter II, John Payne Collier’s work in 1817–20 seems never to have been so demanding that his parallel activities—the family newsletters, the literary projects, and the independent editorial tasks—greatly suffered. His earlier duty was to report the law courts, the King’s Bench in particular (whence much of his Criticisms on the Bar), although ‘I agreed to aid the parliamentary department if either House sat later than 10 oClk’.143 A er August 1818 he served principally as parliamentary reporter, and in that capacity he experienced one trial of his own, in which his courtroom experience paid unforeseen dividends. The details of this incident deserve recounting, especially as it has since been represented as a case either of fabrication and deliberate dishonesty on John’s part, or of false arrest and cynical prosecution by political hypocrites.144 Neither was really so: what occurred was as follows. On 8 June 1819 Collier reported, as usual, from the lower House, covering a debate on taxation. Joseph Hume, the great radical advocate of the underclass, made a strong speech decrying (in the words of The Times) ‘a military mania prevalent that cost the kingdom incalculable sums’, with ‘bands trapped in scarlet and gold . . . daily paraded about the streets, as if to mock the squalid poverty of the lower orders’. When the last words were met by ‘(laughter, from the ministerial benches)’, Hume turned on his mockers, declaring: ‘Ministers might laugh, but let them look at the other side of the picture’; and then, according to The Times, his counter-attack became personal: ‘let them survey the miseries of the poor laborious industrious wretches at Carlisle, or even of the unhappy beings they meet in our streets, and . . . there would be found but one man among them who would still keep a smile upon his countenance, and that would be a smile of self-congratulation from a right honourable gentleman (Mr. Canning), that by habitually turning into ridicule the sufferings of his

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143. JPC Diary, 4 September 1878. He noted that at the Hone trials (17–19 December 1817) ‘I had no assistance & it was very hard work’ (Diary, 23 September 1881), but also that in compensation Walter gave him a bonus of £20 (29 May 1877). 144. It was tendentious of E. K. Chambers (1891, p. 24) to blend the events of June 1819 with his general account of Collier’s forgeries; Donald H. Reiman hinted at the same connection in Cameron et al., vi:771, as does S. Schoenbaum (1991, p. 246). Morison (i:128–29) badly garbled the story, and Ganzel (pp. 25–26) converted it into a case of ‘the establishment’ vs. Collier, which is equally inappropriate. Collier’s subsequent career is not mentioned by Michael MacDonagh, who devoted a chapter of The Reporters’ Gallery (1920) to the event (pp. 330–36, ‘A ‘‘Times’’ Reporter at the Bar’).


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fellow creatures, he had been able to place himself so far above their unhappy condition (continued cheers).’ Now this last thrust—Hume apparently naming Canning, and the evidence of ‘continued cheers’ from the opposition—was political dynamite. Hume flatly denied introducing the Prime Minister’s name or any reference to his career, and wrote so to the editor of The Times, now Thomas Barnes. Barnes published a retraction and a ‘correct’ version of the speech on 14 June, and attempted to call on Hume personally to apologize, but was denied access. Canning himself on the same day ‘raised the question of a breach of privilege’ (i.e., a violation of the grace to report parliamentary proceedings), and although Hume admitted that he had rejected Barnes’s conciliation, the House, on the motion of Charles Watkin Wynn, summoned the printer of the paper to its bar.145 Charles Bell’s statement on 15 June was brief: ‘he had received the paragraph complained of from John Payne Collier’. He withdrew, and Collier was called in and examined.146 Collier’s position was difficult, but by virtually all accounts he acquitted himself well. He took full responsibility for the misrepresentation, and disclaimed any malicious intention. Owing to ‘the confusion and disorder which sometimes prevail in the gallery’ he had been unable to hear clearly some of Hume’s remarks, and, ‘anxious to collect what had occurred during the confusion . . . I asked a stranger who was placed before me, and from him I received, if not in exact words, at least the point which I a erward embodied in my report’. The ‘stranger’ could not now be identified, and Collier’s original shorthand notes had vanished, ‘though I have used every diligence in looking for them this morning . . . the reason, perhaps [for their disappearance] . . . [is] that being occupied in other pursuits, I o en write upon the slips which I have used in taking my short-hand notes’. He declared that the text as printed in The Times was ‘a correct one’, precisely what he had submitted, thus exonerating Barnes and Walter from any part in the offence. He maintained that he had good reason to believe that Hume meant to evoke Canning as the scoffer at poverty (‘I had a strong feeling that allusion was made [here] to Mr. Canning by the hon. member . . . from the frequent allusions which, in my opinion, were made to him during the whole of the hon. member’s speech’), but having since read Hume’s own version of the relevant passage, he acknowledged that no specific mention of Canning was made there;147 the text that Hume provided a er the fact was, however, ‘the

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145. Morison, i:129 (misdating the retraction as 7 June). Watkin Wynn was the good friend and patron of Robert Southey and the dedicatee of his Madoc. 146. Unless otherwise indicated quotations are from Hansard’s ‘official’ Parliamentary Debates, the text of which differs in some details from the Times version of the proceedings. 147. The version provided by Hume to The Times and published on 14 June (‘from the most


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only circumstance which induces me to think that I was mistaken’. All things having been said, he hoped that the House ‘will now allow me to express my sincere, but manly contrition, for having in misrepresenting, however unintentionally, any thing that occurred, committed this error. I had no intention but to give the most faithful account in my power’, he asserted, saying that ‘this is the first time during the 10 years I have been engaged in reporting, that any objection has been made against any report that came from my hands’. Incidentally, he added, the gallery conditions did make a difference: reporters covered the debates in relays, and ‘from want of proper accommodation’ as well as ‘from the circumstance of one gentleman [replacing a colleague] in the middle of a speech’, misunderstandings were bound to take place: ‘allusions are o en made to what occurred before the individual gets into the gallery, and which, even when he hears, he cannot always understand’. Similar misunderstandings of ‘what has occurred in debate [take place] . . . even among honourable members’, he remarked with some courage, ‘and of course the difficulty of hearing must be greater to those who write’. Having assumed sole responsibility for the offending paragraph, given a plausible if unprovable explanation of its origin, and submitted a formal apology to the House, he was temporarily excused. The ensuing debate among the members reveals some of the partisan aspects of the complaint against The Times, and may reflect a personal animosity between Canning and John Walter II. Although Collier had testified unequivocally, Wynn remained firmly convinced ‘that the publication in question could not be the result of a mistake’. Clearly he had hoped to implicate Walter and Barnes, but even without their complicity ‘nothing . . . could make him believe that it was anything but a gross and libellous publication’; a er a precedent or two, indicating that any report of personal reflections made by one member upon another in the course of a debate was ‘a high breach of the privileges of the House’, he moved ‘that the said paragraph is a scandalous misrepresentation of the debates and proceedings of this House, a calumnious libel on the character of one of its members, and an aggravated breach of its privileges’. Most of the members who spoke to the motion felt that its wording, and the punishment which its wording must prompt, were too strong. Some, like Charles Bragge Bathurst, suspected Collier’s account of ‘circumstances . . . singularly co-incident’—the commotion, the fortuitous stranger whose ‘offensive’ account was accepted on faith, the loss of the rough notes—and wondered, understandably, ‘that the name [Canning], with the addition of cheers, should

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authentic source’) differs not only from that reported by Collier on 9 June but also from the Hansard text, which would have been compiled from newspaper reports and ‘corrected’ by Hume before publication.


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have been inserted in a parenthesis’, that is, typographically set apart. Others regarded the defence as ‘ingenuous, rather than . . . ingenious’ (George Philips), and thought that John’s conduct at the bar ‘recommended him to [our] most favourable consideration’ (James Abercromby). Thomas Brand felt that ‘a clear statement, [and] a manly apology had been made’ and the majority may have agreed with Christopher Hely-Hutchinson, who ‘believed the witness had not been influenced by the malignant feeling, or desire, to insult the right hon. gentleman’. Hutchinson went so far as to state that ‘as he could not keep intention out of his view . . . he could not join in any vote, the almost necessary consequence of which would be a commitment to Newgate’, but this would not wash. The meticulous Lord Castlereagh had reminded his colleagues to address the offence, which was indisputably a breach of privilege and a gross libel, and suggested that any extenuating arguments from the defendant be considered only in a subsequent petition for leniency; and the mover Charles Watkin Wynn returned to insist that the terms of his original motion of complaint were correct. Wynn made much of the published phrase ‘(continued cheers)’—‘a circumstance’, as he pointed out, that ‘the reporter could not possibly mistake’, and a detail that ‘he certainly considered as giving a character and colour to these proceedings’. Even Abercromby had thought these words ‘a sort of scenic description which heightened [the] effect’ of the ‘untrue account of what had been said’, and the House was persuaded to pass Wynn’s resolution. Much later in the session, and too late to help Collier, the ‘Burdettite’ William Williams remembered that on 7 June he had sat behind Hume and heard him begin his discursion with the words ‘The right hon. gentleman [i.e., Canning] and the hon. gentlemen around him, may smile’, and that ‘soon a er this there certainly were several cheers’.148 Pretty clearly the members realized that The Times of 9 June had not misrepresented Joseph Hume’s rhetorical intentions at all: Hume had meant to bait Canning and his ministry, and apparently drew some applause. What The Times had done wrong was to spell out the slur, especially when Hume, as is probable, had kept it properly oblique. What Collier wrote was not so much a falsification of the Commons debate as an ill-judged embroidery, whatever its source: the parenthetical identification, and the ‘scenic description’, he could not resist. That is technically fabrication, of course, but in this instance by no means misleading in spirit, as John’s contemporaries seemed willing to accept and excuse it. Perhaps the unlucky defendant was thought of, by many, as having violated a privilege which Parliament and its members did not really deserve. It now fell to the House to consider John’s punishment, and the inexorable

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148. The Times account of 14 June, however, says that Canning was not present at the time.


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Wynn moved ‘that Mr. Collier be committed to Newgate’—‘a very short term’ might suffice, but a precedent must not be set by excusing the culprit. Here however the moderates made a stand, Brougham recognizing ‘that the House in general believed [Collier’s story] . . . as to the origin of the gross mistake’, and proposing that Collier be committed ‘to the custody of the serjeant at arms [of the House of Commons] instead of to Newgate . . . [for a] term as short as possible’. Some haggling over precedent ensued, and Wynn actually suggested that Collier might prefer Newgate, whose lodgings were free, while the attentions of the serjeant at arms would cost money. To this William Smith, the distinguished liberal M.P. from Norwich, finally spoke: he ‘knew the young man personally, and could assure the House that he was a person of respectable connexions, of good education, and of excellent behaviour. There could, therefore, be no doubt that he would prefer the punishment of being taken into the custody of the serjeant at arms to the degradation of being committed to Newgate’.149 Two other members spoke of the defendant’s ‘education’, ‘refined feelings’, and ‘literary talents’, and Wynn capitulated ‘to the general wish of the House’. It was ordered ‘that John Payne Collier, for his said offence, be committed to the custody of the serjeant at arms’. Crabb Robinson called on the prisoner at once, finding him ‘in good spirits’, with ‘Mrs C.’ (probably Jane) already present. Walter and Barnes soon came along, and Robinson’s concern ‘lest this might hurt C. with Walter’ turned to relief, for Walter was in fact pleased with John’s conduct: ‘by his gentlemanly behaviour he raised the character of the reporters and he completely relieved W. from the imputation of having altered the article’. Perhaps the visitors had taken in the remarks of Sir James Mackintosh late in the session, when that distinguished liberal had ‘fully acquitted [Collier] of wilful intention’, praised his ‘talent and education’ and his ‘demeanour . . . at their bar’, and gone on to ‘express his opinion in favour of the generally improved character of the public press’, saying that ‘he never recollected a period in which their columns exhibited more general decorum, more general ability, more exemplary abstinence from attacks upon private life. . . . This great and valuable improvement in the public press had arisen from the superior talents, judgment, and character of the proprietors, and the improved advantages and better condition, in every respect, of the gentlemen employed under them’. Music, no doubt, to John Walter’s ears: he later made Collier a present of £50 (as Mary Louisa told Robinson; John himself reported £100), saying that he ‘need not return the surplus a er

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149. This defense of John may owe something to an earlier episode involving the two men: in March 1817 Smith had attacked Robert Southey in the House for having turned his back on his youthful political views as expressed in Wat Tyler, and Wynn had replied on his friend’s behalf.


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paying the fees [only £14 or £15 in fact], & hoped it would be some compensation for the inconvenience he had suffered by his imprisonment’ (HCR Diary, 23 June 1819). Robinson thought this ‘very generous certainly’ and grumbled that John had been ‘very foolish & inconsiderate’; but John Walter II would have realized that he himself and The Times were Canning’s targets, not the careless report. For Walter’s relations with Canning were prickly indeed at this period, as the newspaper moved steadily away from supporting Lord Liverpool’s government. The Peterloo Massacre two months later would bring it into outright opposition, and this ‘insult’ may have served to accelerate the conversion.150 Walter initially wished John to remain in custody until the end of the term, four weeks away, as some kind of symbolic victim, but Robinson sensibly dissuaded him, and helped to prepare John’s petition. The next day William Smith presented the petition, stressed Collier’s respectable character and avowed good intentions, and moved to discharge. Discussion was brief, though Sir Francis Burdett (who had not been present at the previous hearing) perversely tried to re-open the case, arguing ‘that the words used were nearly similar to those reported, and that there were cheers about the same time (Cries of ‘‘No, no’’)’. He questioned the very right of the House to accuse and also judge, and he maintained that ‘where there was no ill intention there could be no crime’, and that therefore the House could not punish at all. Several exasperated members protested, Lord Castlereagh pointing out that Burdett was doing his own ‘client’ an injury with these arguments, and that Collier had acknowledged his guilt. Thomas Peregrine Courtenay (an amateur Shakespearian) rose to observe that intellectually capable persons like Collier bore an increased, not a diminished, responsibility for their public actions, and ought not to be excused because of the talents or superior capacities they abused; but he would give him the benefit of the doubt. Hely Hutchinson reported that he had conversed with the prisoner and found him credible and penitent, but also that the controversial ‘cheers’, which he had investigated, were illusory (‘not a single cheer had been given’). The motion to release Collier passed unopposed; a reprimand (‘in strong unmeaning words’, Robinson wrote) was administered, and he was discharged from custody. What with Walter’s largess and the chorus of approval for his conduct at the bar, the event ended in a sort of triumph for John, although the hazards he ran were not inconsiderable. In later years he referred to it as a ‘scrape’ and no more, never including it among the causes of prejudice against him in legal endeavours.151 Nor did it lead him to lament his

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150. ‘The Times never forgot the insult’; Morison, i:129. 151. OMD, iv:88; JPC Diary, 4 September 1878: ‘I got ‘‘the Times’’ into a sad scrape by misreporting ( pitching it too strong was the gallery phrase) what passed in the H. of Commons’.


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dependence ‘upon the whims of powerful men’, nor had he been ‘intimidated, unjustly accused, and humiliated to satisfy the ambitions of others’.152 In fact he had done rather well: even Canning, in later years, remembered his ‘manly’ defence with approval, and bore him no ill-will for the slur.153

The Poetical Decameron Eight months a er his thirtieth birthday, John Payne Collier projected his first ‘antiquarian’ book. ‘It occurred to me that I might make an agreeable book by supposing three or four friends meeting together and conversing cheerfully, unostentatiously and unpedantically upon such subjects’, that is, literary history and rare books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; on 6 September 1819, halfway through his series of pre-Shakespearian essays for the Edinburgh Magazine, he wrote to Constable’s, offering ‘as tempting as I could make it . . . what I meant to be a dignified 4to volume’. Robert Morehead, Pringle’s successor as editor, countered that ‘such a subject could be more saleably treated in small 8vo’, and Collier ‘readily agreed’.154 The Scottish firm promised him £100 for two volumes, and he set to work forthwith.155 By 22 March 1820 production at the Whitefriars press of Thomas Davison was well under way, and finished copies of The Poetical Decameron could be purchased for 21s. on 15 April. Although apprehensive that it would never appeal to a wide readership, Morehead and Constable’s especially liked the title of Collier’s book. Of course ‘The Poetical Decameron’ is no more than a conscious echo of The Bibliographical Decameron, T. F. Dibdin’s grossly elegant collection of bibliophile gossip, published in three formidable quarto volumes in 1817. Everything that Collier professed to dislike about Dibdin’s Typographical Antiquities and his coterie of ‘black-letter’ enthusiasts could be multiplied in this expensive production, the ‘high-water mark of the Dibdinian bibliomania’;156 but echo its title he did, perhaps with ‘poetical’ intended as a deliberate corrective for ‘bibliographical’. In fact Collier’s two modest octavo volumes are even more bibliographical, in the strict sense, than Dibdin’s. The pretext and structure of The Poetical Decameron are simple, and like-

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152. Ganzel, p. 26. 153. So Collier reported in OMD, iii:86; in the same passage he also referred to Sir James Mackintosh, ‘who had also taken some sort of fancy to me’. 154. JPC Memoirs, pp. 122–23, stating that he had begun the book while living in Vincent Square. Copies of outgoing letters to Collier and to the printer are in the Constable Papers at the National Library of Scotland, MSS 790 (p. 653) and 791 (pp. 20, 31, and 58). 155. As he oen appears to have done, Collier in later years would double the figure: he claimed £100 in his diary, 16 January 1878, but £200 in the Memoirs. 156. W. A. Jackson 1965, p. 31.


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wise reminiscent of Dibdin: conversations on literary topics among old friends, real persons in pseudonymous disguise expressing characteristic differences of opinion, but summoned primarily to excuse the telling of tales about old books. Whereas Dibdin’s more than two dozen interlocutors may be identified (among others) as Heber, Bindley, Bolland, Chalmers, Haslewood, Drury, Sir Walter Scott, and Dibdin himself, Collier’s cast of just three are modified characters of himself (‘Bourne’, the leading speaker who generally has the last word), Thomas Amyot (‘Morton’, a countrified antiquary inclined to agree with Bourne’s dicta), and Henry Crabb Robinson (‘Elliot’, the modernist of the group, who ‘had been much abroad’, and who remains sceptical of the more arcane revaluations). The first setting for the dialogues is in a sailing wherry on the Thames, starting (as John might have done) from Westminster Bridge. The ten conversations of The Poetical Decameron treat many old friends among books and writers, for Collier reworked into his text material from the British Lady’s Magazine, the Critical Review, and even the ongoing series for the Edinburgh Magazine. Heywood, Wither, Harington, Lodge, Marston, Nashe, and notably Churchyard are discussed and extracted, though not Churchyard’s mock-poem from the Critical Review. Stafford’s Niobe returns from the Critical (i:244 and ii:45), as do Philip Stubbes (ii:235–39), Fleming’s Virgil (i:105–11), and The Actor’s Remonstrance (ii:323–26). Newer subjects include Charles FitzGeffrey and the pioneers of blank verse, while the precedence of early English satirists bulks large. Bishop Hall and his famous boast of being the ‘first’ are inspected in the third conversation, with his rivals Donne, Lodge, and Nashe (but not Surrey), and his immediate successors Marston, Middleton, Parrot, Goddard, Brathwaite, and Breton (conversations IV–VI). Perhaps Thomas Warton’s old History of English Poetry led Collier to concentrate on these minor lights, and to consider their relationships, but the appraisals by Bourne o en strike us as fresh and persuasive; likewise the brief account of anti-theatrical tracts and their wittier replies (conversations IX and X) could not easily have been bettered in 1820. The Poetical Decameron did provide rival students of ‘golden age’ verse with critical novelties and not a few signposts, although few who came a erward ever acknowledged its service. Less creditable were Collier’s renewed affronts to his own scholarly precursors. He nailed his colours to the mast of non-obligation: ‘the author . . . knew that the chief recommendation of his work, a er all, would be its originality . . . and it has therefore been a principle with him to avail himself as little as possible of other men’s labours’. Such a declaration of independence permitted him, he may have believed, to display contempt for Malone (yet again, ‘a punctilious puny’), George Steevens (‘self-worshipping . . . self-conceited . . . an uninformed mass [and] a chaos of confused quotations and pedantic allusions’), Johnson,


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Warburton, and old Lewis Theobald (‘a dull dust-raking drudge’). These harsh opinions in the mouth of Bourne met with Morton’s ‘Have some forbearance towards the dead’, but Elliot was made to say in reply: ‘If they are dead, that is all the good that may be said of them’; mercifully, in real life, Henry Crabb Robinson did not know he was figured as Elliot. Contemporary commentators fared little better: Nathan Drake’s ‘pretence of learning was almost offensive’, for he drew all his evidence from modern (and uncited) anthologies, and Henry John Todd, the veteran librarian and editor, was subjected to nearly four pages of lo y ‘correction’.157 Praising none of his predecessors, Collier was almost equally stingy about living friends. ‘In executing this task’, he announced in his preface, ‘the author has been chiefly indebted to his own industry aided by good fortune, which, as a reward for his early and zealous attachment to the pursuit, seemed to throw in his way valuable relics and sources of information that others . . . had not enjoyed. He was unknown to the literary world; and though, had he stated any important object, the libraries of many collectors would no doubt have been freely thrown open to him, yet . . . he was unwilling to ask a favour’. Hence, necessarily, he relied on institutional collections, on his own small accumulation of texts, and on the library of ‘one gentleman . . . , equally distinguished for his enterprise in purchasing and his liberality in lending his rarities’.158 The last was James Perry, Collier’s formidable former employer, whose equivocal regard for the younger man may have mellowed with his own failing health. From Perry’s remarkable library Collier chose at least two star books to describe, Thomas Middleton’s Microcynicon and Lodge’s Alarum against Usurers (1584). But his source is never identified: ‘The name of this gentleman’, he assured his readers, ‘is only not inserted because he would think a public acknowledgement one of the worst returns for an act of private friendship’. One other provider, never acknowledged, was John Bellingham Inglis, who must have supplied Barnaby Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession, also a very rare book in any edition.159 Novelties, bibliographical and critical, were ever the pursuit of the ambitious scholar, as the personae of The Poetical Decameron all find understandable. In an exchange about Steevens and a putative source for The Puritan, a pseudoShakespearian play, Bourne remarks: ‘When I first read that play, and observed the correspondence [with Peele’s Jests], I imagined that I had made a discovery’. Morton, the sceptic, moots that ‘perhaps you made another, viz. that your dis-

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157. Poetical Decameron, i:vi–vii, xxv–xxviii, xxx–xxxi (Drake), and 291–94 (Todd). 158. Ibid., p. ix. 159. Years later Collier noted this loan in a letter to David Laing: ‘It is many years since I had his ‘‘Farewell to Military Profession’’ of 1606, in my hands: the copy I used was borrowed, I think, from Mr Inglis’; 14 July 1835, EUL MS La.IV.17.


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covery was not new?’, and Bourne diffidently admits that ‘Steevens refers to the point in a note—that is to say, he hazards a conjecture’. Subsequently the interlocutors bandy about, for some twenty-six pages, an argument for Barnaby Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession as the source of Shakespeare’s Twelh Night; this was a viable suggestion, and apparently new in print at the time, but Collier may not have unearthed it himself.160 Reference to the dedication of a manuscript by Thomas Lodge as ‘written and signed in the author’s own hand’ stems from original material then in Collier’s possession, which has attracted latter-day scrutiny (see QD A3.1), but there are no otherwise questionable data in the two published volumes. Reactions to The Poetical Decameron were scattered and civil, if unenthusiastic. Reviews found it ‘heavy and useless’(Monthly Review) and ‘too much out of the beaten track’, though ‘the author . . . has exposed in a favourable light many rare and hitherto unknown productions of our elder poets, of considerable intrinsic value’ (Gentleman’s Magazine). In a letter of 16 May 1820 Charles Lamb thanked John for a gi of the volumes, with a characteristic palimpsest of reservation and praise: ‘I have not such a Gentlemans-book in my collection: it was a great treat to me, I got it just as I was wanting something of the sort—I take less pleasure in books than heretofore, but I like books about books’.161 John must have sensed what ‘the sort’ meant, coming from Lamb. Crabb Robinson, the unacknowledged original of Elliot, seems not to have examined the work until 1824, when he read two dialogues only and found them ‘thoroughly uninteresting and unreadable—talk of books valuable only for their antiquity and scarcity, soon fatigues’.162 The publisher Archibald Constable, initially enthusiastic, paid John his promised fee promptly (20 March 1820), but remaindered some of the original 750 or more copies a er 1824, ‘& the book [was] then found on every stall’. John expressed himself bitter, fi y years later, about that: ‘The greediness of Publishers o en does the Author great injury’, he wrote in his diary; ‘they buy the book but tell him it will not sell and therefore can only print

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160. Poetical Decameron, i:48 (Peele) and ii:133–41 and 145–63 (Riche). On the latter, see Freeman and Freeman 1993, p. 6 and note. 161. Folger MS Y.d.341 (101); printed in OMD, iv:85–86; and in E. V. Lucas, ii:275. Lamb’s lightly annotated copy is now at Houghton. 162. HCR Diary, 21 July 1824; he concluded, perhaps with some implicit credit to Collier, that he then ‘read 3rd vol of Arabian Nights—This work also drags’. But even the copy that Collier presented to his son John Pycro (FF) was largely unopened until recently. In 1832 and 1835 Collier told David Laing he was ‘thoroughly ashamed’ of most of the book, which he regarded as ‘ill-conceived and ill-digested’ (JPC to Laing, 9 July 1832 and 14 July 1835, EUL MS La.IV.17); in late life he reconsidered, remarking that ‘the two small octavo volumes shewed a good deal of out-of-the-way reading & that at all events I was an industrious & capable young struggler’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 124).


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500 copies of it. The fact is that it costs them very little more to print 1000 copies than 500. They sell the 500 directly, perhaps; and a erwards 100 or possibly 200 more: thus they have still 300 on their hands: those 300 they sell for a comparatively small sum in ready money . . . such was the case with my first book the ‘‘Poetical Decameron’’ 2 Vols sm 8vo 1820. Such is constantly the case, though Constables were most respectable publishers: they cleared their warehouse & put ready money, perhaps £50, in their pockets’.163 163. Diary, 19 September 1877.


part two

1821–31

‘I began reading J. P. C.’s allegorical poem’, wrote Henry Crabb Robinson in his diary for 15 November 1820, ‘but it did not much please me and I soon desisted.’ He had been sampling, with a beady eye, Collier’s only sustained literary enterprise of an imaginative nature—a mini-epic in four cantos which saw print in 1822 and 1825 as The Poet’s Pilgrimage, an Allegorical Poem. In later life Collier came to regard it as his principal achievement in any form, and his best claim to remembrance, the work ‘by which, if at all I shall live’. ‘I thought, and think, that I never wrote anything else that was half as good’, he told J. W. Ebsworth in 1879: it is ‘a trifle . . . of which I am not ashamed’. ‘Too bad, perhaps, for praise’, he wrote elsewhere, as if soliciting contradiction, and ‘too good to quite destroy’.1 Although Robinson had been unimpressed in 1820, Lamb two years later was generous, and so (supposedly) was Wordsworth; at least one contemporary reviewer admired the poem, forecasting ‘posthumous fame’ for the author ‘if Mr. Collier will continue to write’. And indeed, although The Poet’s Pilgrimage was scarcely so precocious a performance as Collier would claim, it has its graces and handsome passages, and a central conviction that may carry some readers further than Robinson. Had he persisted in his youthful ambition, John Payne would probably now be considered a minor Romantic poet of the generation of Keats, perhaps of the stature of John Hamilton Reynolds, Thomas Pringle, or Caroline Bowles Southey. That he is not is no critical injustice, however, for his ‘allegorical poem’ on its own does not raise him past promise, nor do his shorter effusions outshine those of most amateurs in the periodical press. Despite his dedication to poetry itself (‘I can bask with transports in its beams’), John’s devotion to writing it may seem less than heroic: he was unapt to suffer repeated rejection in the name of his art. But at least once, risking the kind of condescension he could and did mete out to other beginners, he chanced his own hand.

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1. JPC to J. W. Ebsworth, 1 May and 12 August 1879, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (75 and 86); Collier’s 1879 inscription to ‘Miss Lassell’ in the Folger copy of the 1822 issue (W.a.174). An inscription to Frederic Ouvry three years earlier in a copy of the 1825 issue employs almost the same words (FF).

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The genesis of The Poet’s Pilgrimage, and the history of its publication, are characteristically mystified in the author’s reminiscences. ‘I began it in 1807’, he wrote, late in life, ‘& did not finish it till 1813 or 1814. Then I laid it by for years’, in fact until 1821, when, ‘adding some stanzas & changing the preliminary matter’, he published it privately (1822).2 Elsewhere he stated that it was ‘composed between years 1808 and 1814’, and again, that ‘the four cantos (and more that I a erwards destroyed) were written between the ages of eighteen and twentyfour [i.e., 1807–13], a er I had just read Spenser’ (OMD, iii:111 and i:8). What he ‘a erwards destroyed’ he identified in another context: ‘This [the published text of four cantos] is only one third part of my original design, [a] good part of which I had at one time executed, but in a fit of vexation & despondency I destroyed various other Cantos, which I had composed or sketched out under the titles of ‘‘The Poet’s Purgatory’’ and ‘‘The Poet’s Paradise’’. The whole would thus have consisted of three Books, divided into Twelve Cantos.’ 3 One further canto, perhaps the fi h, ‘was very critical’, Collier told the Rev. Richard Hooper in 1858, as ‘in it I gave the characters & characteristics of many poets—especially modern’.4 The loss of this, if indeed it existed, we must surely regret. That sequels to The Poet’s Pilgrimage were projected is clear, as the preface to the 1822 volume confirms: ‘though Purgatory and Paradise yet remain, the portion now printed is complete in itself, and people may be found to get through four cantos who would be loathe to undertake twelve’. That these were ever completed may be moot, for Collier compares himself to Davenant, who ‘broke off his great poem [Gondibert] in the middle of the third book’, much as ‘the author [i.e., Collier] has stopped short in his voyage, merely because it was his pleasure’. But if the tale of suppressed matter is believable, the dates of original composition that John provides are not, unless the revisions of ca. 1820 were so drastic as to constitute virtually all of the poem as we know it. Collier, as we have already seen, habitually exaggerated his own precocity, in this instance representing what is probably the work of his years twenty-nine through thirty-two (1818–21) as that of eighteen through twenty-four (1807–13), slightly touched up. John’s true Lehrwerk in poetry indeed may go back to 1807 or even earlier, but it is quite different in both manner and design.

Early Verse and The Poet’s Pilgrimage

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‘I began authorship before I was sixteen’, wrote Collier in 1872, ‘but when about two years older I looked back with scorn at the unredeemable rubbish I had put 2. Note in Collier’s own copy, FF/K. 3. Note in ibid. 4. Note in a copy of the 1825 issue inscribed to Hooper, 1 June 1858, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.


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upon paper. I adopted Walter Scott as my first model, and composed a poem, in four or five cantos, upon a story in some respects resembling the ‘‘Alonzo and Imogine’’ of Monk Lewis. Still earlier I had written some ballads . . . [and] a comedy, in which, I recollect, an Irishman played a prominent part . . . a tragedy on a merely-invented fable . . . [and] the words of an opera, in which my principal singer was imprisoned, and (of course) freed by his mistress’ (OMD, iv:81–82). Of the latter performances ‘no trace . . . remains in my memory, nor, I sincerely hope, anywhere else’, but in his eighties John published what he said were verse juvenilia of 1805–10: a fragment of a melancholy ballad (OMD, iv:82), four eightline stanzas from ‘some hundred’ of an epic on Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s American discoveries (OMD, iii:96–97), and various amatory or whimsical songs ‘in the old style, which even then I affected’ (OMD, i:1). To 1807 or 1808 he assigned ‘A Rustic Love-Song’:5 Seest thou yonder blushing flower, Peeping from forth the thicket bower, Still glistening with the dewy shower, Ere the hot sun’s invading? Such and so fair is my Dorilace, Such is her beauty, and such her grace, . . . By 1809–10 ‘I was pretty well acquainted with the character of our older lyrical poetry, and was fond of imitating it’; hence ‘A Bachelor’s Lyric of Life’ (OMD, iv:6–8): Fields, fields, the green fields, With all the country yields, And trees to lie under at leisure: Birds, birds, joyous birds, And the lowing of the herds, That fill all the welkin with pleasure. Eight similar stanzas conclude with:

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Wife, wife, a pretty wife?— No, no, upon my life; And yet I would not be too lonely: I so dote on all the sex, That the rest I would not vex By living but for one, and one only. 5. A Few Odds and Ends for Cheerful Friends (1870), p. 16. Collier’s annotated copy, in which he inserted dates of composition and other remarks, is now Huntington PR 1125 C6 vol. 17 (see A170).


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This ‘was written, of course, before I was married’, like ‘The Remembrance’ (‘Why so scornful, lady fair?’), which was addressed not to Mary Louisa, but to ‘the sister of a friend in the Foreign Office’, of whom we hear no more (OMD, i:1–2). Of roughly the same date, supposedly, was ‘Song of the Shepherdess’, again an Elizabethan-Jacobean pastiche:6 ’Tis not the Court nor City fine Can give to me the true delight That among the fields is mine, Happiness from morn till night! Cities are Rich and fair, But such wealth we well can spare. By 1811, as we have seen from his early diary, John was moonstruck with poetry, reading Milton for the first time, alongside Shakespeare, Cowley, and Thomson, and translating a little Martial. His earliest verse that survives unreconstructed—for the specimens quoted above have certainly been subject to retouching—is found here, a ‘Mock German Ode, written about a year ago’, which the diarist has ‘just pitched upon’ (Early Diary, 30 October 1811). This is a heavy-handed parody of the gothic verse-tale, evoking ‘Monk’ Lewis’s Tales of Terror and its imitations or send-ups more than any German precedent, and what literary satire may have been intended is simply embarrassing: [the corpses of the enemy:] Tears of blood their dead eyes weep And on the floor below Streams half congealed of blood do flow Clotted with gangreen flesh that in their wounds did grow. [the barbarous victors:] Quick as the clammy draught they quaff Bursts the unrestrained laugh ... They wheel about In hideous rout Their spears they clash The skulls they dash With mighty crash

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6. Stanza 1 of four, A Few Odds and Ends, pp. 11–12. Collier has annotated his copy ‘Original, as far as it deserves the epithet . . . written . . . perhaps in 1809 or 10’. The metrical design seems to imitate Donne’s ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star’.


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[the weeping captive:] Her lovely eyes cerulean blue Were bloodshot & distended Her cheek had lost its wonted hue With spattered gore ’twas blended ... But hark! What means that dismal yell Re-echoing from the Vaults of Hell? Still, it may have been good fun as recitative, and John’s high spirits are evident. He was, however, already twenty-one or twenty-two, and no Chatterton. Over the next five years he persisted with short narratives and gallant lyrics,7 publishing for the first time in the British Lady’s Magazine for February 1815 (‘Three Sonnets of the Vision of Ambition and Hope’); by now his verse was formally smooth and semi-professional, if undistinguished in subject matter. He had been caught up in the new vogue for sonnets, sending a selection from France to Crabb Robinson at the end of 1814 (HCR Diary, 30 December), and addressing one to a friend of his own age, William Pitt Eykyn. Eykyn (b. 1790) was a fellow student with John at the Middle Temple from 1815 onward, called to the bar in 1821; in An Old Man’s Diary Collier called him ‘my first and dearest’ friend, who ‘went blind at thirty, and died before he was forty’.8 About 1814 (‘eleven years since’, said John in 1825) I wrote A sonnet to you, long perhaps thrown by, Where Milton’s sacred words I dar’d to quote, That ‘something which the world would not let die’, Or not at least resign it ‘willingly’, He thought to pen —and so had Collier, projecting what was to become The Poet’s Pilgrimage.9 Another ‘final’ sonnet bade farewell to the muse ‘just before I married on 20 August 1816’, hardly a promise kept, but symptomatic of John’s apprehensions about practising law, and perhaps about imminent marital responsibility. He made it the last poem in his collection A Few Odds and Ends for Cheerful Friends (1870), where it is dated 1815:

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7. ‘To Fairest Cynthia’, ‘Cupid’s Hiding-Place’, and ‘Woman’s Constancy’, A Few Odds and Ends, pp. 47–48, 24, and 22. 8. OMD, ii:117–18. The friend is identified by Collier as Eykyn in two annotated copies of OMD, Folger W.b.505 and Houghton *65J-270. 9. ‘To W. P. E.’, The Poet’s Pilgrimage (1825), p. vi.


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Farewell Sonnet Farewell, I o have said, to verse and song! Farewell, each noble, each harmonious line, That which men call, and justly call, divine; Thou hast consumed my youthful hours too long. And come, ye graver studies of the mind, The endless labyrinths of tangled law: Within your intricacies I must wind; From you the means of living I must draw, To live by tangling error, making flaw! Oh, base invention of our modern wit, An insult vile to the ethereal soul! O en as thus I said, or thought of it, My heart has spurn’d the mercenary dole, And smil’d at want, than in such wealth to roll. But this is a conventionally insincere sonnet of renunciation, like Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Leave Me O Love’, and the muse would soon tempt him again. There is a music far beyond the sound Of instruments, though touch’d with featliest skill; Harmony breathing from the heav’n-blest ground, As wavering vapours from the dewy hill: It feeds the heart and eyes when all is still; More felt than seen, and more, I ween, inspires Than sounds that through the moon’s blue beams distil On the far ear from high monastic quires, Lighted at midnight hour with dim religious fires. (The Poet’s Pilgrimage, I.viii)

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It is always possible, as Collier repeatedly claimed, that the idea of The Poet’s Pilgrimage and some written-out form of it began in 1807 or so, and that it was ‘finished and laid by’ in 1813–14, only to be revived, cut, and polished in 1820–21. But if so, what survives reflects later attention so much that one may best take the poem as the product of John’s mid- to late twenties, with all the resonance of the secondary Romantic period (Shelley in particular), rather than that of the early Wordsworth or of Coleridge before Christabel. The form of The Poet’s Pilgrimage is entirely Spenserian, the nine-line stanzas of The Faerie Queene—with their distinctive concluding Alexandrine—assembled into four cantos of 58, 58, 54, and 59 verses respectively; Spenser’s ‘six books’ of 1590–96 contain twelve cantos each of approximately the same num-


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ber of stanzas, or about eighteen times Collier’s gross output. That John consciously emulated Spenser from an early age we know from his own testimony, although he played down his debts to other poets, especially the moderns: ‘As far as regards the stanza and some few points of the general design’, he wrote in his 1822 preface, ‘the author is an imitator;—‘‘one who steers by other’s maps, and can therefore make no new discoveries’’, but in other respects he follows no precursor, and ‘‘sails in untried seas’’.’ The matter of the poem, like that of his first sonnets for the British Lady’s Magazine and many of his diary daydreams, is the poet himself, his response to his calling and his dedication to its demands; it is here presented as an allegorical overland journey, through varied and difficult terrain, with and without a companion or guide (pilgrim, fellow wanderer, disgruntled hermit, et al.). Dante provides one obvious precedent for the expedition: H. F. Cary’s complete translation of the Commedia had appeared in 1814, but John, who had already met Thomas Barnes, was later at pains to cite Dante in the original Italian (Poet’s Pilgrimage, pp. 118–20). The only modern writer to figure in the ‘Notes’ to the 1822 text is Wordsworth, and Collier’s immediate debt to The Excursion, though unacknowledged, is heavy indeed, both for language and for matter: Collier’s guiding Pilgrim clearly reflects Wordsworth’s ‘Wanderer’, as Collier’s hermit in canto III does Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary’. Verbal parallels could be adduced from beginning to end, but the beginning will do: High in the east the sun of July shone, Upland and valley steaming with the heat . . . (The Poet’s Pilgrimage, I.1.1 2) ’Twas summer, and the sun had mounted high: Southward the landscape indistinctly glared Through a pale steam . . . (The Excursion, I.1 3)

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The Excursion had been published in August 1814, a date that sorts well with John’s announcement to W. P. Eykyn in the same year that he ‘breath’d the same hope’ as the young Milton, of composing ‘ ‘‘something which the world would not let die’’’. Another contemporary spur, if more a challenge to outdo than a pattern to follow, was Southey’s part-allegorical poetical journey, reviled by John in the Critical Review for May 1816. Loath as Collier would have been to admit it, his Poet’s Pilgrimage owes at least its title to Southey’s Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, and Southey’s smooth but vapid Spenserian cadences may have inspired the hot critic to counter with his own. Coleridge is perhaps to be glimpsed in the deliberate richness of the rhetoric—epithets more ‘gorgeous’ than Wordsworth would have chosen—the incantatory rhythm of the narra-


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tive, and its occasionally obtrusive medievalism. Perhaps by 1821 Collier had absorbed a little Keats too, to the same effect, though we find no direct evidence of it; of Shelley, on the other hand, there seems to be an audible echo early in the first canto: O en and o en have I watch’d this stream . . . Have thought its murmur its blithe spirit’s song (I.3.1, 4; emphasis added) If this is a conscious or accidental appropriation of a famous phrase in ‘To a Skylark’ it must be a late one, for Shelley’s poem was not generally available to British readers until mid-1820.10 Collier’s subsequent attitude toward Shelley bordered on the condescending: in 1844 (B194) and in An Old Man’s Diary (1872) he called attention to three passages ‘almost verbally borrowed from Shakespeare’, which cannot ‘tend to establish his originality’. ‘I do not mean for a moment to say that he wished to copy without acknowledgment’, he added, ‘but his mind was perhaps imbued with Shakespeare, and he wrote down almost mechanically the expressions that first presented themselves, not recollecting at the time where he had found them. Such has been the origin in other authors of many imputed plagiarisms, perhaps some of my own’ (OMD, iv:39– 40). A more revealing self-assessment vis-à-vis Wordsworth would be hard to imagine. It is difficult to suggest the merits, such as they are, of The Poet’s Pilgrimage by extracting passages, for the lapidary effects—imagery and description, the sort of ‘fine detail’ Collier admired in Christabel—are on the whole much less impressive than the sum of the parts. The narrative—consecutive perils, treacherous weather and footing—rattles along at a good pace, with enough variety to keep most readers engaged. What may defeat them, however, as they may have bored Robinson, are the implicit presuppositions that the narrator matters, that his pilgrimage is meaningful, even that the pursuit itself of poetry as a calling is important. All these Collier appears to have assumed his readership shared as données, and he never sought to establish or confirm them by argument or even hyperbole. In particular the significance of the pilgrim-hero requires some pleading at least, and in its absence the whole action of the poem may seem all but pointless. At worst it will also seem pompous and egotistical, the very qualities Collier discerned and derided in Southey. Technically, the verse of The Poet’s Pilgrimage also betrays what Collier found objectionable in other workaday poets like Byron and Southey—the haste (despite years, as he claims, of ‘putting it by’) in original composition, and no doubt

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10. The lines show no revision in the manuscript used as printer’s copy in 1822 (Dyce 2314).


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some impatience in revision. The vocabulary mingles archaic and up-to-date terms, sometimes to ridiculous effect; inversions can be appalling (‘A few almost invited were to seize / Whatever most their wayward choice would please’), and clearly dictated by rhyme, which is the weakest part of the prosody: many convey the impression that the poet has selected his rhyme halfway through the line that requires it. Lord Byron may also be guilty—too o en—of the same laziness, but his adroit currente calamo solutions to a rhyming quandary usually rescue the day. Whenever John began The Poet’s Pilgrimage, it was finished enough to show to Crabb Robinson in November 1820. The manuscript itself, which John later presented to Alexander Dyce, had been fairly copied on paper mostly watermarked 1818 (a few sheets in cantos III–IV have an 1817 mark), although there are revisions and additions throughout, which may have occurred at any time before publication; some further additions (e.g., stanza 49 in canto I) appear in the printed text but not in the extant manuscript—which is also the printer’s copy—and were presumably made in proof in 1821–22. For in 1822 Collier paid for the publication himself, having perhaps been rejected by a ‘thriving tradesman’ among publishers, who callowly suggested that it be re-written in prose. Keen to explain away his descent into vanity, Collier later declared that it ‘would never have been printed, if a poor compositor had not asked me to give him a job’, and that ‘I gave the job of printing the Poet’s Pilgrimage to a poor man in 1821’.11 The ‘poor man’ or ‘struggling typographer’ (OMD, i:7–8) represented as seeking work, however, was Launcelot Harrison of 373 Strand, the well-established printer of Ackermann’s Repository, active in his profession from at least 1807 to 1842. Collier would have known him from his editorial stint with Ackermann’s, during Shoberl’s absence, but there is no evidence that Harrison was hard up in 1821. The press-run was certainly modest, although again Collier’s account is unreliable: he alternates estimates of ‘one hundred’ with ‘only fi y’ copies struck off (‘I am not sure’, he wrote in his own copy, ‘I think it was fi y’) and claims he destroyed ‘many’, and even that ‘I burned 50 [of 100] upon the spot’.12 We know in fact that at least ninety copies were available on 24 September 1822, when John offered them to Archibald Constable in Edinburgh. Constable replied on

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11. JPC to W. Wardlaw Reid, 17 June 1859, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (162); notes in Collier’s own copy. 12. JPC to an unidentified correspondent, 25 June 1880, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (127). John Martin was probably reporting Collier misinformation when he asserted that ‘of the one hundred copies originally printed, eighty-five were destroyed’; A Bibliographical Catalogue of Books Privately Printed (1834), p. 535; repeated in his second edition (1854), p. 287.


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4 October, excusing the firm gracefully: ‘we would accept your offer with pleasure but the fact is we are at present changing our place of business, and are in such confusion that . . . your 90 books would be lost sight of ’. They ‘would recommend your putting them into the hands of a London Bookseller’, but ‘at the same time we doubt you easily getting a publisher, from the number being too limited’.13 The last phrase must have stung: here the ‘exclusivity’ that Collier the critic had censured in Sir Egerton Brydges’s reprints had come home to haunt Collier the poet. Having printed his own poem, however, John was apparently chary of distributing it. He had prefaced the main text with four new sonnets (not in the Dyce manuscript), one addressed ‘To Young Poets’, and one ‘To William Wordsworth’, and to Wordsworth (he said) he sent a copy, as he did to Lamb on 12 December 1822, with a presentation sonnet in manuscript.14 Crabb Robinson and John’s parents must have received copies, but none from the 1822 issue was publicly sold, and the book is now very rare.15 Such diffidence elicited no public reviews, and what private opinion Collier reports is not altogether credible: Wordsworth, he wrote in 1871, ‘highly praised the first two cantos, which he had finished just before writing to me’ (but no such letter survives); and ‘Lamb wrote me word that, while reading it, ‘‘he almost forgot he was not reading Spenser!’’ ’ (OMD, i:7). The last may not be untrue, although again the evidence is lost, but it may also be a little tongue-in-cheek: for Robinson noted in his diary on 8 January 1823 that Lamb ‘spoke respectfully of an allegoric poem John Collier has written’, praising its style as ‘remarkably good’, but adding that ‘ ‘‘it is like a collection of the duller parts of Spenser, and not quite so good’’ ’. Robinson himself, who had put down the manuscript unfinished, thought Lamb’s character ‘not a strong recommendation and yet no mean praise’, and now found that the poem ‘has a merit in versification and in plan etc., and it adds to my respect for [John], tho’ it has no great poetical merit, nor can be ever popularly interesting. . . . I envy J. C.’s power in doing this, but with so much power would rather have translated a masterpiece.’ John himself recalled in 1871 that Robinson ‘was ‘‘sure it must raise me in the opinion of all my relations and acquaintances’’ ’, praise that sounds cautious enough. Kindhearted as ever, in spite of his ‘Spenserian’ quip, Lamb had also reported receipt of the book to John Dyer Collier

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13. Constable Papers, NLS MS 791, pp. 625–26. 14. Another sonnet, ‘To the Dissuaders from Poetry’, may again echo Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’: ‘I saw an eagle on a mountain high, / While in his noonday glory Titan shone . . . His broad sky-scattering pinions flapp’d in scorn: / Then upward flew with far-resounding wing, / Directly upward’. 15. Lamb’s copy is now at Houghton. In our own search for copies, we have seen only three and had a report of one more (Crabb Robinson’s, at the University of Indiana).


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(6 January 1823), in a letter thanking the Smallfield farmer for his gi of a Christmas pig. ‘John Collier Junior has sent me a Poem’, he wrote, ‘which (without the smallest bias from the aforesaid present, believe me) I pronounce sterling’.16 But there remains no trace of approval from father to son. It seems curiously unprofessional of John to have printed The Poet’s Pilgrimage and then virtually to have suppressed it, although Constable’s recommendation of ‘a London bookseller’ may have led him to an unwelcome encounter a er 1822. He told Alexander Smith in 1868 that the poem ‘was not widely circulated because I was chilled in the undertaking, when a man to whom I read Canto I said, ‘‘Aye, aye; that is all very well & very true, but might it not have been just as well said in prose’’?’ 17 And in An Old Man’s Diary (iii:107–10) is a wry poem about the episode, ‘The Poet and the Publisher’, confusingly dated 1821. The philistine praises the applicant for choice of subject, and ‘some good sense’ which ‘your real poets very seldom deal in’, but sums up market considerations as ‘That’s the best poetry that pays the best’. ‘‘You author-folks write too much poetry. You think yours fine: perhaps it is: excuse me; I mean not to disparage, or decry What you have read: it really did amuse me. Try it in prose, good sir; I recommend it; And bring it to me when you have re-penn’d it.’’ The poet’s response to this casual banter is bitter indeed, an unrelieved complaint about his bondage to ‘verse! sweet verse! ah, much deluding verse . . . the blessing of my life—my heaviest curse’, and the ‘cause of my poverty—my children’s ill’. ‘Why’, he demands, ‘did I thwart my father’s wise intent, In giving me a lucrative profession, Where powers of speech, which some call’d eloquent, Perhaps had led ere now to wealth’s possession? I shipwreck’d all friends’ hopes by strength of weakness, And if I now submit, ’tis not in meekness.’ Again we conclude ‘farewell, verse! for ever farewell’, as John had done before marriage, but now—and surely ‘The Poet and the Publisher’ was written long a er 1821—the prizes of a career in the law seem long lost: he is ‘oustripp’d by all my friends’, some of whom ‘have ascended the judicial chair, / And most have wealth which industry attends’. All this, we may note, a er rejection by a crass

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16. PML MA 1151; printed in E. V. Lucas 1935, ii:360–62. 17. JPC to Smith, 14 April 1868, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (180). This age-old quip was just what Collier himself had used against Southey’s Pilgrimage.


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bookseller, ‘a drudge, without a soul or sense, / Who weigh’d the worth of Poetry by pence’. John’s ambivalence about his poetic calling, if such it seemed to him, is expressed over and over again in poems about poetry, or rather about being a poet, and his vacillation over distributing The Poet’s Pilgrimage reflects the same uncertainty. Having printed a tiny (and anonymous) edition and having given away only a few copies, having failed to interest Constable and perhaps others in publishing it, he decided in 1825 to reissue the remainder, this time with his name on the title. By then he was commercially involved with Septimus Prowett, a publisher in Old Bond Street, and Prowett’s name appears in the revised imprint as ‘printed for’; but in fact the sheets of the poem are simply what had survived from the 1822 project, with the first four leaves stripped away and replaced by a new title, a reprint of ‘To the Reader’, and three new prefatory offerings. Gone were ‘To Wordsworth’ and the three other sonnets of 1822;18 in their place were a translation from Ariosto ‘printed by the author in the first number of the New Series of the London Magazine [January 1825]’, the sonnet to W. P. Eykyn describing the genesis of the poem ‘eleven years’ before, and the dedicatory sonnet to Charles Lamb that John had written into Lamb’s copy in 1822. This last, with its somewhat presumptuous familiarity (‘Charles, to your liberal censure I commit / This book’) may have seemed to call in a favour or to lend the reissue merit by literary association; but Collier was not the only author so to pursue Lamb. Copies, from the number remaining, were sent out for review, and four very decent notices were received, from the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Literary Chronicle, the New Monthly Magazine, and (oddly) the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register.19 All were anonymous, but the first promised that ‘they who will peruse his Poem will be amply repaid by the overflowing sweetness of his numbers, instinct with the spirit of the mighty masters, and will feel no slight desire that he who can so purely feel and so elegantly express poetical ideas, should never be destined to feel alone, nor to sing in vain’. Although the phraseology was ‘occasionally somewhat remoter than the antique . . . we dare predict for it an abiding reputation, when more noisy and more talked-of productions are forgotten. Like the immortal Milton, our poet may not find ‘‘fit hearers’’ in his own generation; but if we mistake him not, he is of a temperament that can commit the claims of genius to posterity, in proud anticipation of his reward.’ The Asiatic Journal found The Poet’s Pilgrimage ‘a work which discovers the genuine spirit of poesy . . . imbued with the spirit of the great masters, enlivened by a ray of intelligence which it is not in their power to impart. . . .

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18. Another reason, perhaps, to be sceptical about Wordsworth’s supposed enthusiasm for the first two cantos. 19. For references to the reviews, see A7.


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If Mr. Collier will continue to write for posthumous fame, we think he stands a fair chance of acquiring it’. Reviews like these should have pleased John mightily, but he continued to blow hot and cold over distribution. The publication (as Prowett’s, presumably) was advertised ‘once’, and ‘3 copies were sold before I recalled it’, he wrote in his own copy.20 ‘In this way it got to Oxford, Cambridge, & the Brit. Mus.’ In fact only the latter two deposit libraries possess copies now, and more likely received them by gi . Collier’s alternation between pride in his poem and despair of its success (the Asiatic Journal had told him that he was unlikely to earn much from poetry), or its abject failure to sell, may account for its being once more withdrawn; over the next sixty years he gave copies away, and most now seen bear some sign of presentation. Doubts about his talent and performance never ceased to nag him, though ‘the following lines [are] composed in a different and much more healthy spirit [than that of ‘The Poet and the Publisher’]’: Am I a poet? Then, no mortal power Can make me more; nor can it make me less. Am I no poet? I’ve well spent my hour: To love the Muse has been my happiness! Nor of that happiness can Fate deprive me, Though not one syllable I wrote survive me. (OMD, iii:111) One hopes, for his sake, that the last sentiment was sincere.

Hammersmith, 1821–25 On 8 May 1821 a third child, William Proctor Collier, was born to John Payne and Mary Louisa, and near the end of September the family of five, with Mary Louisa’s sister Emma, changed quarters once again. Abandoning the insalubrious Bouverie Street rooms, so convenient to the Times office, they took Hope House, a cottage on the Thames at Hammersmith, ‘at the end of what was called Hammersmith Terrace’ (OMD, ii:88). Within fi y yards lived, in retirement, the celebrated actress and singer Mrs. Rosomon Mountain; a garden ran down from Hope House to the river, the Colliers’ rent was £70 per annum, and ‘four happier or idler years I never spent’, John remembered (OMD, iv:89–90). He rowed and sailed with his children and read constantly, even on the water, his boat loaded with books. He studied ‘as far as I did study it’ Italian, and ran through the poets—Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and Pulci—‘together with as many of the

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20. Collier may have been referring to the presence of the title in the May 1825 list of forthcoming works in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, p. 629.


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novelists as I could lay my hands upon; for I had then resolved not to look into any book that was not in the language of the garden of earth and heaven— of flowers and poetry’.21 On 4 November Robinson, le behind in the City (‘I am condemned to dine at chop houses’), walked to Hammersmith and ‘found [John] in a very comfortable house there and his family around him, even enviably’ (HCR Diary, 16 February 1822 and 4 November 1821). If by his retreat John antagonized John Walter once more there was no immediate sign of it, nor did the idea of his taking on added work at the Star, as a translator, seem to bother the proprietor of The Times. To Robinson’s surprise, Walter ‘did not think the situation incompatible with Collier’s engagement with him’ and ‘expressed himself more kindly about Collier than he had ever done before’ (HCR Diary, 4 November 1821). Perhaps in retrospect Walter’s benevolence, or indifference, would seem ominous. John did not take up the position on the Star (it was ill-paid, and a prospective editorship was not in the offing), but he continued to eke out his Times salary with piece-work. For the Edinburgh Magazine he concluded his ‘English Dramatic Writers’ in February 1821, and banked a belated payment from Constable in October 1822.22 To Ackermann’s Repository he contributed at least three short essays in 1820, and six more in 1821, as well as four verse translations from the Italian, signed ‘Humphrey Gubbins’. And of course he was preparing The Poet’s Pilgrimage for the press, and the family newsletters, with their £150 stipend to John, did not write themselves. Scarcely ‘idle’, but for once doing much as he pleased, John’s first two years in Hammersmith may indeed have seemed blessed. Even being sacked by The Times in August 1823 did not quite dash Collier’s Hammersmith idyll, for he was soon re-employed. But given his eight years of steady work for the newspaper—not to mention seven prior years, 1806–12— the firing requires some explanation. Robinson first heard about it on 6 August, at the Times office, and was ‘vexed . . . somewhat’ that ‘Alsager & Barnes have dismissed John Collier—I suspect not without sufficient reason tho’ I know nothing of the circumstances’. Dining with John Walter II on 15 November he accepted the proprietor’s word that ‘J. P. C. was dismissed because he shirked his duty, which I believe to be true’. Indeed Walter had complained to Robinson more than two years earlier about Collier’s ‘shirking’, and ‘was very bitter in his

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21. Several of the fourteen verse translations from the Italian gathered up in Beinecke Osborn MS d.199 undoubtedly date from this period: one is on paper watermarked 1822, six on paper of 1824, and two on paper of 1825 (the paper of the remaining five is unwatermarked). An introductory note on a translation from Boccaccio suggests that Collier entertained his family with readings from his work (‘following the example set on a previous evening, [I am about] to give some specimens of Boccaccio’s Italian prose turned into English verse’), but of the extant translations only one saw print, The Happy Man’s Shirt, privately published by Collier in 1850 (A76). 22. Constable to JPC, 4 October 1822, NLS MS 791, p. 626.


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statements’; this was shortly before John’s removal to Hammersmith, and when Robinson had warned John about Walter, John ‘seemed mortified’ and wrote a letter explaining himself. That appeared to mollify Walter at the time (HCR Diary, 27 May 1821), but provocations continued to accumulate: John’s dolce far niente on the riverbank, no doubt; the ongoing newsletter business; and now even the underpaid presence of John’s brother William in Printing House Square. Walter told Robinson that William (whom he also soon dismissed) was ‘a burthen to the concern’, and Robinson accepted this too. John’s old fallingout with his mentor and friend, whatever its cause, probably tipped the balance, for it was Thomas Barnes as editor, with his close associate Alsager as manager, who actually sacked him. Walter ‘denied all personal interference’, and ‘denied also that there was any personal hostility on the part of Barnes toward Collier’, but of the last protestation Robinson, who knew John’s side of the story, thought otherwise (HCR Diary, 15 November 1823). So did Mary Louisa, who ‘feels bitterly and not unreasonably against Barnes’ (HCR Diary, 7 December 1823), and so certainly did John, whose lifelong resentment of his treatment, which we have sampled above, invariably held Barnes, and not Walter, to blame for it.23 Within two months, however, John had been re-hired as a parliamentary reporter by his employers of 1813–15. The Morning Chronicle of 1823 was not quite what he had le , although its mixture of political journalism with theatrical and literary reviews, and its editorial commitment to Whig principles, remained largely unchanged. James Perry had died in December 1821, and his executors sold the newspaper, which in 1789 had cost him £150, to William Clement for £42,000. Clement, ‘a mere tradesman, without literary training or political knowledge’, was already the proprietor of two other weekly papers, the Observer and the Englishman, and soon would initiate the racy Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle.24 He did not interfere, however, with the administration of the editor of his new daily, who since 1817 and the retirement of James Perry had been John Black. Black (1783–1855) was the orphaned son of a Perthshire pedlar and a poor

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23. Whatever the main cause of Collier’s departure from The Times, it certainly was not what Dewey Ganzel (pp. 32–33) stated it to be. Ganzel cited and quoted from ‘an anonymous article, ‘‘The Periodical Press’’, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review in May 1823’, believing that it was by Collier, and that its caustic remarks on the management of The Times cost Collier his job (‘Walter quickly discovered the identity of the author and fired him on the spot’). But as everybody then knew, especially Barnes and Walter, the article was by William Hazlitt: see Morison, i:492, giving Barnes’s reply to the article; and cf. HCR Diary, 6 December 1823 (quoted in Morley 1938, i:299). Ganzel’s misattribution would appear to stem from his confusion of the Edinburgh Magazine and the Edinburgh Review. 24. Charles Mackay, Through the Long Day (1887), i:54. Mackay was with the Chronicle from 1834 to 1844.


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farm girl, who survived a bellicose youth (he is said to have delivered a dozen challenges before he was thirty) and came to London with literary ambitions in 1810. There he translated Goldoni and Schlegel and Humboldt for booksellers, and Perry hired him onto the Chronicle, where he met John Dyer and John Payne Collier, and William Hazlitt, who may have patterned his own Scottish divorce on Black’s miserably unsuccessful precedent.25 Like Perry and like John Payne, he was a book collector from an early age—he shared with both men a particular love of facetiae and jest books—and his library, when sold in 1844, numbered some 30,000 volumes; but although there is a stray record by Robinson of his dining at Hammersmith (HCR Diary, 2 March 1821), Black is conspicuously absent from Collier’s own memoirs. His best-known columnists on the Chronicle were Albany Fonblanque, Thomas Campbell, James Mill, and the young John Stuart Mill, who contributed his first work to the paper in the year of Collier’s return. Some contemporaries thought Black dull if unswervingly principled, and politically inconsistent (he bearded the government over the Peterloo Massacre, but annoyed ‘liberals’—and lost circulation—by rejecting Queen Caroline’s cause); Mill admired him, however, and called him ‘the first journalist who carried criticism and the spirit of reform into the details of English institutions [i.e., law, police-court reporting, freedom of the press on matters of religion]’ (DNB). Collier’s silence about Black cannot count him out of the younger man’s life: Black hired him when Barnes sacked him, and for some twenty years John worked under Black as his editor. For the alternation of Times and Chronicle in John Payne Collier’s newspaper career was now over (Times 1806–12, Chronicle 1812–15, Times 1815–23); although he would appeal unsuccessfully to Walter in 1846 for another chance with The Times, he remained with the Chronicle from 1823 until his retirement from newspapers in 1848. And Black remained there as well nearly all of this time, under Clement’s proprietorship as under Perry’s, and under a third, John Easthope’s, when the paper was re-sold in 1835. At sixty, in 1843, Black was persuaded to step down. Twenty-six years at the dailies is an era, as Collier well knew. John’s salary from the Chronicle was £270 per annum—about five guineas a week, perhaps more than John Walter II had latterly allowed him. He still needed supplementary income, and gained some by writing for Clement’s Observer and Bell’s Life in London.26 Poetry remained cheap, but he approached Thomas Campbell at the NMM on 22 December 1823, noting that magazines

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25. P. P. Howe 1928, p. 308, is wrong in saying that Black ‘emerged with success’ from the undertaking. On Black, see also Robert Harrison in DNB (1885), and Charles Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections (1877). 26. JPC Memoirs, p. 77. Bell’s began publication on 3 March 1822, but we have not identified any pieces clearly by JPC.


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now were not only ‘much more respectable’ than formerly, but ‘they pay better than they used to do’, and suggesting a series of articles ‘consisting chiefly of translations from the Opere burlesche of the most celebrated Italian Poets’. These he would supply ‘if it should appear worth your while to make it worth mine to send them’, and they would be purged of ‘all the indecencies, grossness & impieties which such pieces commonly contain’, while preserving ‘the wit, salt & spirit of the original. I am not aware that this ground has yet been at all trodden in English, and about two or three pages might make an agreeable variety in the publication you conduct.’ 27 Campbell, whom Collier had not yet met, appears to have declined the offer, and over the next year John’s verse-translations (from Ariosto, Gabriello Chiabrera, Benedetto Menzini, Goethe, and Schiller) appeared in Taylor and Hessey’s London Magazine instead. There at least he was warmly received, his ‘clever translation’ of Menzini’s Cupid’s Revenge being praised by the editors in January 1824 as ‘at once light, simple, and fanciful, without owing anything to the poor hard used flowers and dews, and roses of the every-day Muse. The translator [who signs himself ‘‘N. O. H. I.’’, i.e., ‘‘JOHN’’ anagrammatized] is a stranger to us’ (p. 4). But the critical articles that John mooted to Campbell, along with his translations of rime burlesche, would wait ten years to be aired.

The Freebooter Episode On 1 November 1823 Crabb Robinson estimated John’s total resources at £480 yearly, with £270 from the Chronicle, £60 from Mary Louisa’s inherited capital, and £150 from the family newsletters. The last may have come under threat of redistribution, with William Field ‘in daily fear of being dismissed’ by The Times, leaving only his share of the newsletters to sustain him. On 8 February 1824 the fourth Collier child, Jane Emma, was born a er Mary Louisa’s ‘dangerous’ pregnancy’ (JPC Diary, 22 April 1880). The curious affair of John’s part in a rogue periodical may reflect the uncertainties and the demands of this period. Far in spirit from the respectable New Monthly Magazine, the Freebooter was a shabby, ephemeral weekly, notable mostly for an original lithograph vignette on each title-page, and with its miscellaneous contents o en filched from its rivals, as its name and motto (‘Ex rapto vivens’) cheerfully suggested. Its first number appeared on 11 October 1823, its twenty-eighth and last on 1 May 1824. Among its short and breezy antiquarian articles were several on theatrical history, ‘antient drama in England’, early actresses, and old lyric poetry and ballads. Izaak Walton was the subject of two notices and some correspondence: in the

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27. Letter bound in Houghton *57-1874, a copy of The Poetical Decameron.


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second number (18 October 1823) a two-column piece headed ‘Izaak Walton’ and signed ‘Ed.’ described ‘a manuscript in the Lansdowne collection of the British Museum which throws some light upon the early life of Izaak Walton’, followed by an account of a dedicatory poem to Walton by S[amuel] P[age] in his Love of Amos and Laura (1619).28 The alleged Lansdowne manuscript, in ‘hand-writing . . . evidently of about the time of the Revolution’, was said to establish Walton’s place of education (Stafford), his removal to London and apprenticeship ‘to one Homes, ‘‘a sempster’’, with whom he lived until he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old’, and his marriage ‘before he was twenty-four years old, and while he held a shop near the Exchange’. The account was supposedly ‘written in a rough, sketchy style’, and consisted ‘rather of biographical hints and anecdotes than of events relating to any of the persons mentioned in the volume, of which the notice of Walton forms a very small part’; but the memorialist also ‘speaks of [Walton] as a ‘‘very sweet poet in his youth, and more than all in matters of love’’ ’. This last would appear to confirm a mysterious allusion by Page in 1619 to ‘thy verse [in which] no ill thing can be clothed’, although no surviving body of poetry by Walton was or is known. And by extension, the other new biographical particulars in the Lansdowne manuscript would seem the more credible. Waltonians were territorial scholars, and it is not surprising that the manuscript cited in the Freebooter provoked scepticism. The industrious and prolific antiquary Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, editing The Complete Angler in 1836, reported that ‘considerable trouble has been taken to discover the MS. alluded to; but no trace of it can be found in the British Museum; and it is presumed that the article [in the Freebooter] is a mere fiction. . . . If such an interesting account of Walton really existed in a collection so well known and so fully catalogued as the Lansdowne MSS., it is impossible to suppose that it would not long since have been brought to light’ (i:iii). And ‘one of the few facts stated in it can be disproved’, namely, that Walton married before he was twenty-four: in fact he was married at the age of thirty-three (this had emerged since 1823 and the Freebooter), and no prior wife was ever then mentioned. Nicolas did not see fit to pursue the perpetrator of the ‘mere fiction’, but in 1860, at the height of the Perkins Folio controversy, Thomas James Arnold attempted to pin it on Collier: About thirty-five years ago, Mr. Collier is said to have been the editor of a periodical called The Freebooter. . . . In the number for October 18th, 1823, appeared a paper signed ‘Ed.’, giving some particulars relative to the life of

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28. Page’s work is part of STC 4276, but his verses addressed to Walton do not figure in the earlier edition of 1613; see Thomas Corser, Collectanea Anglo-Poetica (1860), i:24.


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Izaak Walton. . . . It soon a erwards transpired that this was a fabrication; that there were no such particulars among the Lansdowne manuscripts. This matter gave rise to much remark in literary circles at the time; but it passed over as such things will do, and was forgotten; and although it was to some extent revived in 1836, when Sir Harris Nicolas . . . referred to the particulars, but without any personal allusion to Mr. Collier, it was not placed prominently enough before the public to occupy their attention for any length of time.29 Collier replied promptly to Arnold’s charge, thirty-seven years on, acknowledging that he had been somehow involved: ‘The reader may remark also the most unfair manner in which an attempt is there made to connect me with a disreputable paper called The Freebooter, not merely as a correspondent, but actually as the editor of the publication in which an improper use was once made of my name’. For this ‘improper use’, he declared, ‘the real editor a erwards endeavoured to make amends. . . . The transaction occurred so long ago, 1823, that it had quite escaped my memory; . . . The whole matter was explained to the late Sir H. Nicolas, and to Mr. Pickering, his publisher’.30 Collier thus seems to have known the identity of the editor (and Arnold may well have extrapolated that Collier edited the periodical from the offending contribution’s having been signed ‘Ed.’), but in fact Collier’s name never appears in the Freebooter.31 If therefore the editor apologized to Collier for some ‘improper use’, it was of something other than his name—perhaps his text, his ideas, or his hoax. For what Arnold in 1860 did not indicate, or realize, is that the Freebooter’s account and text of Page’s (genuine) dedicatory poem to Walton followed closely The Poetical Decameron of the previous year (ii:109–12), where ‘Bourne’ had preened himself upon rediscovering the verses—‘rather strange, recollecting the unremitting pains taken within the last twenty or thirty years to collect the minutest facts regarding Walton’.

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29. T. J. A., ‘The Old Corrector’, Fraser’s Magazine 61 (February 1860), p. 187. 30. Reply to Hamilton (1860), p. 7n. Both Nicolas and Pickering were by then dead, but Pickering had by no means been convinced by Collier’s explanation, if ever he was given one: in his own copy of the separate issue of Nicolas’s Lives of Walton and Cotton (now in the Beinecke Library), he wrote, beside the note on p. iii, ‘This Article was fabricated & furnished to the Editor of the Freebooter by John Payne Collier Esq.’ 31. The first seven numbers of the Freebooter were printed for William Oxberry, the actor and theatrical publisher, before publication was taken over by Benjamin Johnson of 2 Herbert’s Passage, Strand. Johnson caused ‘the early numbers’ (at least nos. 1 and 2) to be ‘reprinted, in consequence of numerous applications for complete sets’ (notice in no. 8 [29 November 1823], p. 128), but a comparison of the Johnson reprints of the first two numbers (BL and FF copies) with the Oxberry originals (HRC) reveals no alterations in the Walton article; there is no reference to Collier by name in either.


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Half the article in question, then, was at least based on Collier’s research, and the fraudulent half seems predicated upon the Page-Walton evidence; and the prose style of ‘Izaak Walton’ in no. 2 of the Freebooter is not unlike Collier’s. Still, it is possible that the editor, whoever he was, merely took the hint or notes for the item directly from John. For John’s input is nowhere else to be divined, despite the suggestive antiquarian topics in later numbers: an extract from Paul Hentzner’s Travels in no. 6; ‘Ancient Theatres in London’ in no. 4; ‘Antient Dramatic Entertainments in England’ in nos. 8, 10, 13, and 17; selections from Lyly, Carew, Ben Jonson, and a Shakespeare-related ballad, ‘The Frolicksome Duke’ (genuine!), as well as verse-translations from Boiardo and others. These are stylistically and structurally unlike anything by Collier we know, and not up to his critical or scholarly standards. But ‘Izaak Walton’ well could be his through and through, as T. J. Arnold thought, and as a last scrap of gossip also suggests. Shortly a er Arnold’s published imputation Alexander Dyce wrote to Frederic Madden, ‘I have a very decided impression that Collier once confessed to me, long ago, that he forged as a joke, that Walton paper; but, a er the lapse of so many years, I could not swear to his having so confessed. I am, however, sure that Thomas Rodd, on the first appearance of the (Ellesmere) Southampton letter [another questioned document], said to me, ‘‘Why should not Collier have invented it, since we know that he invented a Walton paper?’’ ’ Dyce was by then no friend to John, nor was Madden, but the tale has a credible ring to it.32

Family, 1820–25 John Dyer Collier’s second experiment with farming turned out no more successful than his first. By the beginning of 1820 he owed Robinson £100 over and above his original loan, £170 to his future son-in-law Robert Proctor, and £230 to his mother. The farm itself was worth £1,900 without crops, Robinson thought, but John Dyer refused to consider selling it, despite the entreaties of his wife, his son Richard, and Robinson too. Jenny’s husband, George Proctor, advised Robinson not to lend John Dyer any more money, as he felt the farm would soon be lost (HCR Diary, 18 June 1820), but on 6 July before going on tour the long-suffering creditor sent him a further £70. Another £70 followed in March 1822, which ‘I ought not to grant but know not how to refuse’ (17 and 30 March 1822). The children continued to defect: Richard, who had never come down to

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32. Dyce to Madden, 24 March 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 252–53. In his diary (2 July 1859) Madden noted that the matter was first brought to his attention by Henry Ellis, who apparently said that ‘Mr C. was always suspected to have forged it!’; and a second letter from Dyce to Madden includes Dyce’s recollection of having once told the story to Ellis, ‘to whom, indeed, it was no novelty’(26 March 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 257–58).


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Smallfield Place, secretly married his mistress in October 1820; and on 21 December Polly wed Robert Proctor and moved away. George Proctor became master of Lewes Grammar School and rector of St. Michael’s, Lewes, in mid-1821 (HCR Diary, 21 May); and William and John Payne remained busy in London. Only Jane stayed on, ‘increasingly wretched’ with John Dyer’s ‘very bad temper’, but unwilling yet to abandon her husband. In May 1822, visiting John Payne and Mary Louisa, ‘she grew angry, and cried when she complained of the want of sympathy in her children, who say she must leave the farm—and this she says she cannot survive!!!’ (HCR Diary, 5 May). By the end of November, however, she was considering flight, and over the next sixteen months she vacillated and sought advice from Robinson and others. John Dyer had by now become ‘very religious’, conducting family prayers at Smallfield Place daily; but while Jane lived on in hope of persuading him to relinquish the farm, he would not budge. In mid-April 1824, a er another opportunity to sell had slipped by (HCR Diary, 8 February), Jane renewed her resolution, came to London, and took yet more advice. This time John Dyer was difficult, ‘bitter’ and ‘absurd’ thought Robinson, attempting to distrain her income, and everyone in the family offered a view: Robinson, who as ever played peacemaker, found ‘nearly as many different opinions as there were persons’ among them (HCR Diary, 14 July 1824), with John Payne, perhaps surprisingly, taking John Dyer’s side. A form of ‘capitulation’, but not of ‘surrender at discretion’, was worked out by Robinson, ‘more than Jane [Proctor] or her mother liked, and hardly enough for J. P. C., who leans most of all to his father, though he is very considerate and kind’. A reconciliation materialized, and by November Robert Proctor and Polly indicated a willingness to ‘take the farm off their hands’. This transaction became a reality in December (HCR Diary, 2 November and 7 December 1824). The Robert Proctors had returned from Peru earlier in 1824, and by December Robert had completed his lively Narrative of a Journey across the Cordillera of the Andes. Although Robinson found Proctor ‘ignorant of botany, geology, mineralogy, history & politics—in short of almost everything which could have contributed to enrich his narrative’, he thought the book ‘readable’, which it certainly still is (HCR Diary, 23 May 1825). John Payne may have helped polish the text for his brother-in-law, and he negotiated terms with his Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable on Proctor’s behalf;33 but Proctor’s gesture of taking over the cursed farm at East Grinstead constituted more than a fair recompense. In the same month old Mrs. Collier died, leaving a providential annuity of

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33. Copies of Constable’s letters to Collier, 18 December 1824 to 5 February 1825, are in NLS MS 792; on 10 June 1825 Constable, lamenting that the book had not sold very well, asked Collier if he could ‘manage some short article on it in some one of the morning papers’.


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£300 to John Dyer, among other bequests. John Dyer promptly settled his old and new debts to Robinson, paying him £436 15s. 16d.—full principal with interest—on 22 January 1825, an action which, with his recent behaviour toward Jane, Robinson found ‘has added greatly to my feeling and respect for him’. John Dyer was now ‘poorly’ in health, at age sixty-two, and he and Jane set off on a three-and-a-half-month tour of Switzerland, northern Germany, and France. They departed on 27 June, met Robinson in Geneva on 31 August, reconnoitered at Interlachen on 15 September, and returned with him via Berne, Basel, Kehl, Metz, Reims, Douai, and Lille, reaching London a er a Calais–Dover passage on 9 October.34 Although ‘in excellent health & spirits’ abroad (HCR Travel Diary, 31 August 1825), John Dyer again fell seriously ill in November, and called in Crabb Robinson to alter his will. He was obsessed with reducing Richard’s share of the family newsletters in favour of William—an adjustment that both Robinson and John Payne had opposed—and when Robinson put him off until consultation with John Payne ‘tomorrow’, he replied: ‘Tomorrow—that may be ages.’ These were his last words that Robinson heard: John Dyer Collier died on 27 November 1825, aged sixty-three. At his burial on 2 December, at Bunhill Fields near his forebears, eight mourners were present: his three sons, Robert Proctor, William Field, Robinson, Joshua Collier’s son-in-law Edward Jones, and the Rev. Thomas Madge of Essex Street Chapel, who had presided over John Dyer’s father’s interment in 1816 and would preside over Jane’s in 1833.35

Septimus Prowett and Dodsley’s Old Plays John Payne Collier’s stay by the river at Hammersmith (1821–25) may seem to have been blighted by family irruptions and upheavals in his newspaper employment, but his memories of the period were rosy. Aside from poetry, books, summertime boating, and family life, he seems genuinely to have enjoyed the routine of his day-to-day work and its casual rewards. ‘I o en did not get away [from] the M[orning] C[hronicle] office till 12. 1. 2. 3. or 4. in the morning’, he wrote nearly sixty years later (JPC Diary, 30 December 1880), ‘a er all the stagecoaches had long le the White-horse-Cellar, and when I was therefore obliged

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34. HCR Travel Diary, 9 August–20 October 1825. 35. John Dyer le his household goods to Jane, whom he considered ‘amply provided for by her marriage settlement’, and divided the remainder of the estate (sworn under £1,500) equally among the five children; as executors, Robinson and John Payne respectively received a painting and 100 guineas (PRO PROB 11/1706). At the death of Mary Dyer Collier in December 1824, John Payne had come into full possession of Woodford Mill at Witney, which he let in November 1826—presumably when the previous lease expired—for £30 per annum (Ashby Papers, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.1455, p. 117).


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to walk home, six miles from the M. C. Office. I was never very tired and when I sometimes did not reach home till a er daylight I did not go to bed or even lie down on it, but on a temporary resting-place on pillows &c. made up by my dear little Wife, & there I laid for 2. 3. or 4 hours sleeping most comfortably. I then woke up greatly refreshed, &, having washed & dressed, I took a good breakfast & by noon I was in my garden or in my boats close at hand. Then I almost invariably took my children on the water, and a erwards dined and was ready to be off again to my duties in London at 3. 4. 5. or 6 o’Clock, as the case might be. I never had a day’s serious illness’. But upon the death of John Dyer and a small but enticing inheritance from both father and grandmother, John Payne reconsidered his life-style and residence. By Christmas he had removed himself, his wife, her sister, and four infant children to 23 Hunter Street, Bloomsbury, back in the heart of professional London. Literary piece-work remained John’s necessary resource, and the publisher Septimus Prowett (1797–1867) entered his life in 1824. Many years later Collier dismissed him and his brother Richard as ‘sons of a country clergyman’ who ‘might have done well . . . [but] did not understand money’.36 Their ambitions were not inconsiderable, however, and Septimus is best remembered for the grand project of John Martin’s Paradise Lost (1823–27), ‘one of the most sumptuous and complicated schemes ever undertaken by a publisher’, as Martin’s biographer calls it.37 This entailed commissions in advance of no less than £3,500 for the celebrated mezzotints, and such an outlay may seriously have overextended Prowett. Like all publishers he was hit by the financial panic of December 1825, when such giants as Whittaker, Hurst and Robinson, Constable, and Ballantyne went under, and as Charles Knight recollected, ‘the publications of 1825 would no longer sell in 1826; the new works projected, written, half printed, advertised, must wait for a more propitious time’.38 Writing to John Murray in February 1827, Crabb Robinson spoke of Prowett’s ‘failure’, but Prowett was still in business in Pall Mall a year later, and John was still providing him with copy. By late 1832, however, his failure had been noted again, this time in print, and he seems to have stopped publishing new works in 1830. Collier’s editorial projects for Prowett did suffer from these vicissitudes, as apparently did his purse, but for four productive years and twenty-one volumes their two names are linked. Prowett’s forte was book illustration, and it was probably his idea to pub-

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36. JPC Memoirs, pp. 137–38; their father was in fact a London grocer and tea merchant (see Hanley, Cooper, and Morris 2000). As ‘R. & S. Prowett’ or ‘S. & R. Prowett’ the brothers published together at Worcester in 1820 and in London from 1821 to 1823; among their works was Tyrwhitt’s Chaucer in five volumes (1822), issued in conjunction with William Pickering. 37. Thomas Balston, John Martin, 1789–1854 (1947), pp. 96–97, with some further account of the Prowetts. 38. Passages of a Working Life, during Half a Century (1864–65), ii:43.


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lish the fashionable illustrations to Schiller by Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch with a bilingual text of two poems. Retzsch (1779–1857) had gained an international reputation with his meticulous ‘outlines’ to Goethe’s Faust, first published in 1816 and re-engraved for the English market by Henry Moses for Boosey and Sons in 1820. Similar illustrations to Shakespeare, Schiller, and Bürger followed, and in 1824–25 Prowett procured Moses to render twenty-four of Retzsch’s illustrations to Schiller’s Fridolin, oder der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer and Der Kampf mit dem Drachen.39 Collier’s metrical translation was evidently well in hand by 18 February 1824, when Robinson recorded that ‘J. P. C. called—he brought his Ballad of Fridolin which I went over with him—an agreeable exercise’. Later he added that Collier ‘has made under my correction a translation of Schiller’s Fridolin for Retsch’s Outlines’ (HCR Diary, 11 March 1824)—a further indication that the project began with the artwork—and Collier acknowledged Robinson’s assistance ‘here and there’ (OMD, ii:11). Mary Louisa, whose German was ‘of essential use’ to Collier, cannot but have helped too, but the translation is much clumsier than John’s Italian attempts, partly because he chose to replicate Schiller’s metre and rhyme scheme in tight ballad-stanzas, while the narrative, which is really the point of the exercise, takes a back seat. Reviews were mixed, the NMM finding Collier’s rendering ‘flowing and easy’, while Blackwood’s dismissed it as ‘very unequally executed. In the attempt to be very close and literal, the meaning has o en been missed. . . . Some of the verses are well; but on the whole, the translation is feeble’. The first part of Fridolin was published on 5 March, and six days later Robinson reflected that Retzsch’s ‘outlines [are] not so fine as those to Faust’ (HCR Diary, 11 March 1824); the second part was ‘just published’ by 15 May. Collier’s part in the completed volume was fully signalled on the title-page, where he is identified as ‘Author of the Poetical Decamerone’. At the end of the bilingual facing text came a nine-page prose commentary, ‘Remarks on Retsch’s Outlines to Fridolin’, which is probably Collier’s as well, given its passing quotations from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Luigi Pulci. An incidental puff for the recent translation of Faust by Lord Francis Leveson Gower may strike us as uncharacteristically generous, but prescient, for nine years later Leveson Gower would inherit the Bridgewater House library that sustained Collier’s researches for well over a decade. The following year Prowett published, again in two instalments, The Fight with the Dragon, with sixteen more Retzsch-Moses outlines. Collier was still ‘Author of the Poetical Decamerone’ on the title-page, suggesting that he had

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39. Boosey and Sons issued a rival edition of the latter in 1825, and a third (with translation by J. W. Lake) was published by Ackermann and Tilt in 1829; see Robert Pick, Schiller in England 1787–1960 (Leeds, 1961).


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little to do with the proofreading, but his verse—twenty-five twelve-line stanzas this time, less balladic—is a little smoother. These two picture books, Collier later remarked, ‘were sufficiently popular & profitable’, and indeed are by no means uncommon on booksellers’ shelves even now. ‘I had only £10 for my work’, he complained, but no magazine would have paid him more for five hundred lines of undistinguished translation.40 And on the strength of the new relationship, presumably, Prowett put his name to the 1825 reissue of The Poet’s Pilgrimage. In less than two years John’s name had appeared on the titles of three volumes of verse from a respectable publisher, in a stable with Thomas Tyrwhitt, Canova, and John Martin’s Milton: the money itself cannot have been that disappointing. A more important result of the Prowett-Collier relationship, however, was editorial. In 1825–27 the publisher issued a new edition, in twelve volumes, of the anthology of pre-Restoration English drama known as ‘Dodsley’s Old Plays’, having engaged John to re-edit it. Collier’s contributions varied in quality and quantity among the sixty dramatic texts and the prefatory matter involved, and he would later belittle his efforts; but this was his maiden editorial task in a career largely devoted to such work. His own scholarly standards, his methodological practice, and in some measure his literary taste all are exhibited distinctly, if embryonically, in the 1825–27 Dodsley, a work whose service and influence have long been underestimated. To appreciate the Prowett-Collier project one must understand something of its prior history. Robert Dodsley (1703–64), poet, playwright, and publisher, first conceived of his Select Collection of Old Plays as a mere reprint of ‘the best and scarcest of our old Plays’, for which he would ‘search out the several Authors, select what was good from each, and give as correct an Edition of them as I could’. Having access to the Harleian collection of more than six hundred out-of-print plays, many of them already known to be very rare, he hoped ‘to snatch some of the best pieces of our old Dramatic Writers from total Neglect and Oblivion’ by means of republication. Dodsley solicited subscriptions to such a series of reprints, in ten volumes, in 1743; the eventual result (12 vols., 1745–46, though dated 1744 throughout) was eked out with modest introductory and explanatory notes, some rudimentary collation, and what seemed to him necessary emendation. He had thought originally to preserve the old style of his copy-texts, but abandoned that idea as ‘plainly impossible, unless I could have [always] met with the first editions; for in every Edition the Orthography was generally adapted to that then in use. I also consider’d, that tho’ this might 40. Note in one of his copies of An Old Man’s Diary (Houghton *65J-270), ii:11.

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have been entertaining to the Curious, to the Generality of Readers it would have been very disagreeable’ (i:xxxvi). Thus A Select Collection began its long life dedicated in part to ‘the common reader’, a tradition continued by Isaac Reed in 1780, John Payne Collier in 1825–27, and finally William Carew Hazlitt in 1874. Dodsley’s most enduring achievement was perhaps the selection itself, his choice of sixty-one plays from ‘between 6 and 700’ that he confronted in Lord Harley’s collection.41 He eliminated authors widely available in collected editions (Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher) and a few plays, like Doctor Faustus and The Duchess of Malfi, known from individual reprints or adaptations. He ‘generally preferr’d Comedies to Tragedies’, but he gave the first modern editions of The Spanish Tragedy, The White Devil, The Malcontent, and Edward II, and his canon, though modified by his successors, exercised great influence on both readership and revival. Over the next thirty-five years only three attempts were made to build on Dodsley’s selection. At Dublin in 1750 William Rufus Chetwood brought out an ill-edited compilation of six additional plays (including Fair Em and Blurt Master Constable), impertinently appropriating Dodsley’s own title word-forword. In 1773 Thomas Hawkins of Magdalen College, Oxford, published fourteen early plays in three volumes, as The Origin of the English Drama. Three of these had been in Dodsley, although Hawkins gave a much superior text of The Spanish Tragedy (‘almost a different work’) and maintained that Gorboduc, ‘being printed by Dodsley from a surreptitious copy, has hardly a single speech the same with the present edition’ (iii:xvi). On the other hand there was little point in repeating Gammer Gurton’s Needle, which both Dodsley and Hawkins took from the late Kirkman quarto of 1661. Hawkins’s major contributions are his early texts (Everyman, the Digby Massacre of the Innocents, Supposes, Cambyses), but he is also the first editor of George Peele (David and Bethsabe) and of Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda. In 1779 George Steevens, by far the most deeply-read of eighteenth-century dramatic commentators, added Six Old Plays on which Shakespeare Founded his ‘Measure for Measure’, ‘Comedy of Errors’, ‘Taming of a Shrew’ [sic], ‘King John’, ‘Henry IV. and V.’, and ‘King Lear’. They are presented as ‘Shakespeariana’, but of course widen the range of non-Shakespearian drama in reprint. By now Robert Dodsley had died, and at the behest of his brother James, the genial antiquary Isaac Reed took on the task of revising Dodsley’s Old Plays for a sec-

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41. See Solomon 1996, pp. 93–96. The contents of Dodsley’s original collection and of those discussed below are detailed (with some inaccuracy) in W. C. Hazlitt, A Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays (1892), pp. 267–73; the 1830 ‘White’ edition of The Old English Drama is also imperfectly described there.


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ond edition in twelve volumes.42 While preserving most of Dodsley’s apparatus, Reed in 1780 corrected errors and expanded the annotation with footnotes of his own, as well as those of his friends Steevens, Samuel Pegge, and Thomas Tyrwhitt, and his publisher, John Nichols. The format thus began to resemble the ‘variorum’ editions of Shakespeare that Dodsley might now seem to complement, a group-project further suggested by Reed’s acknowledgement of help from Thomas Percy and others on individual points. Reed took some pains to improve the 1744–46 text, although much still remained for his successors to ‘purify’, and he supplied eleven new plays while deleting a dozen. The casualties were in part ‘lately published in a complete edition of one author’ (i.e., five plays by Massinger), in part late adaptations, and the rest ‘are such as have been thrown out by the advice of a gentleman, whose sentiments concerning them must be confirmed by every one who will afford them a perusal’ (i:xxi–xxii). This arbiter was probably Steevens, whose abundance of annotation throughout the new collection practically denotes him a co-editor with Reed. The eleven novelties are all happy replacements, including The Jew of Malta, Chapman’s All Fools, The First Part of Jeronimo, and others by Dekker (The Honest Whore, both parts), Thomas Heywood, and Davenant. ‘Reed’s Dodsley’ remained canonical, for both selection and text, for nearly half a century. During the next twenty-five years Reed himself gathered notes toward a subsequent revision, but without publishing one. On his death (1807) his markedup set of Dodsley passed to Octavius Gilchrist, the editor of Richard Corbet, who added his own notes and in 1814 apparently printed, but never circulated, proposals for publishing a new edition ‘in 15 vols., 8vo, with Biographical Notices Critical and Explanatory’. A. H. Bullen, in DNB (1889), wrote that ‘the scheme was abandoned owing to the appearance of [Charles Wentworth] Dilke’s ‘‘Old English Plays’’’, but this is hard to understand, as Dilke had restricted himself to ‘non-Dodsley’ plays, and curtailed his project in anticipation of Gilchrist’s revision (Dilke, Old English Plays [1814–15], i:xxii). Perhaps Gilchrist had intended to incorporate some of the twenty-four plays chosen by Dilke in his own Dodsley, and gave up in disappointment; but Dilke’s editorial work is hardly imposing, and Dodsley itself was long out of print.43 More than likely Gilchrist, whose antiquarian work consists mainly of personal advice (to Gifford and to Boswell and Malone) and pamphlets or reviews of other editors’ performances (Henry Weber’s Ford, Jones’s Biographia Dramatica, Chalmers and others on Jonson

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42. See Tierney 1988, p. 508. 43. William Blackwood, writing to James Crossley on 9 August 1821, was ‘sorry I have no copy of [it]—it is scarce and a new edition has been long promised’; Crossley Papers 7626, Manchester Central Library.


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and Shakespeare) never summoned the energy to finish the task. He also made proposals for an edition of Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, with no result, although again Collier may have been the beneficiary of his notes.44 He died from a longstanding consumptive complaint, aged forty-four, in 1823, and at the sale of his distinguished library (5–11 January 1824) the annotated Dodsley fetched no less than £29 10s. Septimus Prowett acquired it, and set about to republish it. Prowett’s new editor approached his task much as Reed had done forty-five years before, by considering redundancies and omissions. Since 1780 the corpus of pre-Restoration drama in reprint had been extended by anthologists like Sir Walter Scott, Dilke, and the anonymous editor of The Old English Drama (1824– 25). Scott’s three-volume Ancient British Drama (1810) was no more than hackwork for William Miller—the texts of the fi y-seven plays are all taken from Dodsley and other modern sources—but Dilke (1814–16) had avoided mere repetition, and the 1824–25 editor had revived eight more plays, including The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, and Marlowe’s Dido.45 John Ford’s plays had been edited by Henry Weber in 1811, and a new edition by Gifford was in progress; Gifford also had undertaken a collected James Shirley, although he would not live to complete it, and Prowett and Collier therefore eliminated Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and three plays by Shirley. In their place were to be a play each by Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and George Peele, none of whom had figured in Dodsley’s or Reed’s canon. Prowett’s ‘Prospectus of a New Edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays’ as published in 1825 (and clearly written by Collier) also projected ‘a Supplement upon the same plan, including first-rate specimens, never reprinted and only in the hands of collectors’, as well as ‘a volume of Masques and Pageants, of which neither Mr. Dodsley nor Mr. Reed furnished any examples, and which, independently of other attractions, include some of the best lyric poetry in our language’. ‘Correctness of text will be the first great object’, promised Collier, and while additional notes and illustrations would be admitted, ‘the Editor will be especially careful not to burden the page with useless annotations and ‘‘the ostentation of vain learning’’.—If a word require explanation it can usually be given as well by one apposite reference to a contemporary author, as by a hundred’, he added, no doubt reflecting on the variorum editors of Shakespeare, especially Steevens and Malone. Biographical matter would be ‘short but full, and accurate, omitting nothing of importance that modern research or the diligent reading of the Editor can supply. In the volume now printed’—that is, volume 2, where the

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44. See McKerrow 1958, v:158. 45. The plays were most likely edited by the publisher, Charles Baldwyn, but the collection has at times been credited to Collier: see below, p. 1395.


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‘Prospectus’ appears—‘will be found some matter new even to the most industrious of our literary antiquaries.’ As in Reed’s 1780 apparatus, notes would be credited to earlier editors, and although Collier himself was never named in the ‘Prospectus’ or on the twelve title-pages of 1825–27, notes ‘added by the present Editor’ were to be signed ‘C.’ Prowett had hoped to complete publishing his Dodsley, in twelve volumes, within one year, ‘a volume being regularly delivered to the public every month’. Volume 2 was the first from the press (the ‘Prospectus’ that begins it is dated 30 April 1825), and volume 1 ‘has been reserved [to the end] for the purpose of rendering the preliminary matter as complete as possible’. In the event, publication dragged on until early 1827 (see A8), and although a version of the supplement of ‘first-rate specimens’ appeared in 1828–29, the promised volume of masques and pageants never materialized. For the shortcomings Collier later blamed Prowett, while minimizing his own role in the project: in 1842 he described it as ‘excepting . . . some scattered notes’ restricted to editing ‘six additional plays, then inserted for the first time’,46 and in 1873 he told W. C. Hazlitt that he had ‘very little to do with’ the text itself. ‘I was to have had £20 per vol.’, he then explained, ‘but the failure of Prowett caused me only to be rewarded with a mere trifle, and I could not work for nothing, so the book was mangled. . . . As it is, I look back to D. O. P. with great dissatisfaction.’ 47 Collier’s retrospective diffidence may have been genuine, and perhaps the curious omission of his full name from the work may reflect his qualms at the time, while a cash shortfall may explain some insouciant annotation in the last two or three volumes. But Collier cannot have thought himself altogether cheated, for he went on to supply Prowett with independent copy in 1828–29 (Punch and Judy, two editions, and five supplementary plays). Nor was his editorial participation as casual as he suggests. All but five of the sixty-two plays contain notes by ‘C.’, ranging from half a dozen ‘illustrations’ to extensive commentary and textual remarks.48 Despite his disclaimer to Hazlitt, Collier did concern himself with the text as printed by Reed, for most of the plays embody his corrections of the 1780 text from ‘old copies’, with notes calling attention to Reed’s mistakes, and in several instances he claimed to have employed significant unconsulted originals (Q3 of Gorboduc, Q1 of 1 Honest Whore, Q1 and Q2 of The White Devil ) and to have collated a range of early texts afresh. Thus

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46. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless’s Supplication to the Devil (Shakespeare Society, 1842), notes to pp. xvi and xxxi. This may be the source of Ganzel’s statement (p. 35) that Collier’s work was limited to the last six volumes of Dodsley. 47. JPC to Hazlitt, 27 February 1873, BL Add. MS 38,901, fols. 380–81. 48. There are really only sixty-one plays, as Collier retained a four-page ‘spoken poem’ by Lydgate in vol. 12 simply because Dodsley and Reed had included it; Hazlitt in 1874 cut it out.


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1 Honest Whore is given from the first quarto of 1604, ‘collated with those of 1615, 1616 and 1635’; Ram-Alley from both the 1611 and 1636 quartos; and Reed’s hybrid text of The Merry Devil of Edmonton is corrected, perhaps gratuitously, from a 1655 quarto that Reed spurned as ‘unworthy’. Not all these collations have proved thorough,49 but Collier’s texts were certainly better, by virtue of his comparisons, than those of Dodsley and Reed. In Reed’s Damon and Pythias ‘not less than fi y important variations and errors have been detected, consisting of words omitted, and words accidentally inserted, independently of errors of the press’; casting bread on the waters, Collier noted that ‘an Editor was not responsible’ for the last. In The White Devil ‘more than a hundred [gross errors] have been discovered and corrected in this edition’, largely because ‘the former reprint was made from the most corrupt of old copies’, and Collier had utilized the earliest and best. These achievements are by no means slight, although Collier’s treatment was inconsistent, and some commentary is essentially incomplete (e.g., May’s The Old Couple, with not a note in the last three acts), while a few other play texts, notes and all, are virtually untouched. His editorial principles are indeed admirably conservative, and usually lead him to rely on the earliest copy, but he shared with his contemporaries some ambivalence about unreconstructed originals: the use of a 1657 sixth quarto of Lingua (first printed in 1607), for example, or the 1655 Merry Devil of Edmonton, is hard now to justify. But usually Collier preferred what was oldest—even if ‘corrupted’ by ignorant printers who seemed to have misread or mis-heard—to arbitrary improvement by latecomers: in this sense he is very much a ‘modern’ textual editor, though not so conscious of his own rationale as to reject every temptation to vary. Faced with what he calls ‘nonsense’ he will suggest emendation, but he is comparatively punctilious in recording the original reading, and his conjectures are on the whole persuasive. An impressive proportion of them remain enshrined, in footnotes at least, in more recent editions of the Dodsley playwrights and plays. In addition to textual notes Collier provided stage directions, generally helpful (Reed and Dodsley were stingy with these), and a modicum of ‘illustrations’, glosses, and parallels beyond those given by Reed and Gilchrist et al. Again the quantity varies from play to play, but most of Collier’s contributions have to do with the writers, the early editions, and the history of the stage. Biographical notices of Collier’s favourites—Dekker, Marston, Heywood, Marlowe, Chapman, and Webster—are much enlarged, and of course the lives of Nashe, Greene, Lodge, and Peele are all new to Dodsley. Beyond this, six literary nov-

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49. For criticisms, see, e.g., The Merry Devil of Edmonton, ed. William Amos Abrams (Durham, 1942), pp. 53–54, and Lordling Barrey, Ram-Alley, ed. Claude E. Jones (Louvain, 1952), pp. xxv–xxvii.


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elties, scattered over five volumes, deserve special notice as the kind of ‘matter new even to the most industrious of our literary antiquaries’ that was promised in Collier’s ‘Prospectus’. One of these, perhaps the most striking, appears in a prefatory footnote to the first published play in the work, Gammer Gurton’s Needle (ca. 1560?), which Reed (a er Hawkins) called ‘the first performance which appeared in England under the name of a Comedy’. Collier describes the recently-discovered play Ralph Roister Doister, which had been edited in 1818 from a unique quarto then presented to Eton College, and then from unassailable contemporary evidence reveals its author: Nicholas Udall, by coincidence the master of Eton. Udall died in about 1557, so that ‘we may decide, almost with certainty, that ‘‘Rauf Roister Doister’’ is older than Gammer Gurton’s Needle’, and is hence the earliest regular comedy in the English language. This dual revelation, which Collier later called ‘my first literary discovery’, remains widely accepted (the attribution entirely so; the priority of the two plays is still sometimes debated), and its importance in literary history is indeed ‘not inconsiderable’, as Collier proudly remarked (BARB, i:v)—although modern editors have been reluctant to credit him properly.50 Two de-attributions are also important. In a prefatory note to Marlowe’s Edward II Collier was the first to point out that Marlowe could not have been responsible for the text, as it stands, of Lust’s Dominion (published in 1657 as ‘written by Christofer Marloe, Gent.’): a passage in act I, scene 3 is unquestionably based upon a pamphlet of 1599, six years a er Marlowe’s death. This observation scored neatly on the recent anonymous editor of Hero and Leander (1821)—in fact the captious dilettante T. G. Wainewright, although the series editor was none other than Collier’s old target S. W. Singer—who felt that one ‘can hardly fail to observe [in Lust’s Dominion] the variety and melody of Marlow’s versification’; it might also have scored on C. W. Dilke (had Collier bothered to notice him), for whom ‘Lust’s Dominion is a much better play [than Doctor Faustus]’.51 A year later George Robinson, editing Marlowe’s Works in three volumes for Pickering, reprinted the play but accepted Collier’s demonstration as ‘pretty clear . . . that it is the composition of a later writer’; and since then no

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50. Among them, Chambers, W. C. Hazlitt, J. Q. Adams, J. M. Manley, and A. W. Reed; see Freeman and Freeman 1993, also pointing out a few discrepancies in Collier’s later account of the discovery. 51. Dodsley’s Old Plays, ii:313; Hero and Leander, ed. Wainewright, p. xxix; C. W. Dilke, Old English Plays (1814–15), i:91. Wainewright had gratuitously savaged The Poetical Decameron in his preface: ‘a more undiscriminative, prolix piece of verbosity about antiquarian trifles, quisquiliae, scarcely could have graced or disgraced the heaviest of those periodicals from which it is compiled. How Mr. Dibdin must chuckle when he glances his eye from the Templar’s Decameron to his own brisk publications!’ (p. xxi).


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scholar has seriously claimed Lust’s Dominion for Marlowe.52 Another dismissal is the seventeenth-century bookseller’s attribution of The Thracian Wonder to John Webster and William Rowley, Collier considering it ‘unworthy [of ] both or either of the authors to whom it is assigned’ (vi:208), and suggesting that a poem on the same matter by William Webster (1617) might have inspired the mistake. Dilke had reprinted the play in 1815 as veritably Webster’s, and Collier, who had ridiculed the attribution in The Poetical Decameron (i:260–69), now repeated his arguments in Dodsley. Again he seems to have been the first to repudiate it, although Alexander Dyce—who himself did not cite Collier in his 1830 edition of Webster—has been credited with the rejection.53 Three more short texts, all important and all subsequently controversial, involve Chapman, Marlowe, and Greene, and even Shakespeare at one hearsay remove. At iv:107–08 Collier reprinted ‘for the first time’ the dedication of Chapman’s All Fools in a sonnet ‘To my long lov’d and honourable Friend, Sir Thomas Walsingham’. The leaf containing this printed text was found, Collier said, ‘in a copy [of All Fools] in the possession of Mr. Rodd, of Great Newport Street’, which subsequently passed to the editor. Walsingham’s famous diffidence may have accounted for its cancellation, for the Rodd-Collier copy of All Fools, now at Texas, is the only one known to contain it.54 Collier himself reprinted the unique leaf sometime in the next fourteen years (in modern types on wove paper), and the existence of such a reprint, as well as the mistrust to which all Collier’s novelties were later subjected, has led to some doubt about the genuineness of the original or, latterly, its relevance to All Fools rather than ‘some other book of the time’ (Greg, no. 219). Ironically, the first to denounce it as a forgery was a pestilent latter-day forger himself, T. J. Wise, but there is really no reason to suspect it (see QD A8.3). Similar qualms have attached to the ‘curious MS. fragment of one quarto leaf ’ of Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, ‘which came into the hands of Mr. Rodd of Newport-street not long since’ and was also acquired by Collier before 1831. This now-famous relic, first published in Dodsley (vii:244–45), has drawn fire ever since, scholars having severally described it as (a) Marlowe’s autograph preliminary dra of a scene; (b) a scribal variant of un-

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52. Marlowe, Works, ed. George Robinson (1826), i:xii. A century later a revisionist editor quibbled that only eighty-six lines in the text are incontrovertibly post-1599; Lust’s Dominion, ed. J. LeGay Brereton (Louvain, 1931), pp. xv–xvii. 53. J. L. Brereton, ed., Lust’s Dominion (Louvain, 1931), p. x: ‘Dyce, who leads the pack upon [Kirkman’s] trail, bays out the story’; F. L. Lucas, however, did name Collier (1927, iv:246). The article in the Retrospective Review, 7 (1823), 87–120, probably derives from Collier’s Poetical Decameron and at any rate is later: ‘we cannot conceive that Webster could have written anything so bad, and indeed Rowley is also vastly superior to it’ (p. 119). 54. Even if the dedicatory sonnet is part of another book (e.g., May-Day or The Widow’s Tears), it survives nowhere else.


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known provenance; and (c) a modern forgery by Collier. It is certainly not (c) and probably not (a); see QD A8.2. In 1825 Collier made no claim whatever ‘that it is in the hand-writing of Marlow’, and again he seems to have made a fair case for his evidence. A third prefatory note has caused as much or even more controversy. At iii:3, Collier wrote that ‘a copy of this play [George a Greene, or the Pinner of Wakefield (1599)] was in Mr. Rhodes’s collection’, bearing the inscription ‘in a hand writing of about the time when it was printed, ‘‘Written by . . . . a minister who acted the piner’s pt in it him selfe. Teste. W. Shakespeare. Ed. Juby saith it was made by Ro. Greene’’.’ 55 Such evidence may seem too good to be true, giving us as it does a glimpse of Shakespeare as theatrical gossip, and for many years the quarto itself (RhodesThorpe-Heber-Devonshire-Huntington [duplicate]-Folger) was regarded with deep suspicion. W. W. Greg, who began by distrusting it, reversed himself later, and in 1931 identified the handwriting as that of Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels under Elizabeth and James I. Despite Greg’s palaeographical authority doubts lingered, and a summary as recent as 1973 was typically cautious: ‘The MS notes . . . were first discovered by Collier, so the possibility of forgery must be added to the uncertainties about the notes themselves.’ 56 But physical forgery (by Collier, at least) is again out of the question, for Collier took his citation— indeed slightly miscopied—from the auction-sale catalogue of William Barnes Rhodes (Sotheby’s, 18 April 1825), where it is printed in full, and more accurately in fact than by McKerrow or Greg. Whatever its origin the quarto was so inscribed while Rhodes—who died a year a er his sale—possessed it; Collier, incidentally, never did. Once more there is nothing misleading about his footnote in Dodsley, properly pointing to the Rhodes catalogue, where his latter-day doubters never bothered to look.57 It is not unreasonable, given later disclosures, to be sceptical about ‘novelties’ in Collier’s Dodsley; but in fact there appears to be nothing seriously suspect in the entire work. One might raise an eyebrow at one last gratuitous nugget, a fragment of an unknown book printed by Wynkyn de Worde, yet another find ‘very recently discovered by Mr. Rodd, of Newport Street’. ‘It is the last leaf of a tract’, Collier wrote, ‘the running title of which is ‘‘Ragmannes Rolle’’, [and which] purports to be a collection of the names and qualities of good and

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55. This is also alluded to at vii:168, as ‘sold in 1825’, Collier by then having identified Ed. Juby as ‘an actor and author’ and having attempted to resolve the contradictions in the two statements. 56. See Greg 1911d and 1931c; and William Nestick, ‘Robert Greene’, in Logan and Smith 1973, p. 82. 57. Alan H. Nelson canvassed the controversy in 1998 and found the inscription authentic; his evidence is entirely persuasive.


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bad women in alternate stanzas’; from it Collier printed (xii:307–08) a versified colophon by Wynkyn, eight lines headed ‘Lenvoy of the prynter’, beginning ‘Go lytyl rolle, where thou arte bought or solde’. This charming little poem remains, we think, unrecorded elsewhere, and the fragment itself cannot now be found. Collier’s speculations about ‘Ragman’s Roll’ (repeated briefly in HEDP, ii:223) indicate however that he was as yet unaware of the fi eenth-century manuscript of this poem at Bodley, printed in 1844 by Thomas Wright (Analecta Literaria, pp. 83–88) and in 1864 by W. C. Hazlitt (Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England, i:68–78). More to the point, and exonerating the editor of Dodsley once more, Hazlitt identified the de Worde fragment (‘one leaf only is known’) from its pre-Dodsley source—‘See Rodd Catalogue for 1825’—and there it is.58 Of course Collier would have been mad to designate the scholarly Rodd, one of the most respectable booksellers living, as his alibi for a fabrication (or three). Rodd deceased would be, however, a different matter. Collier later would claim credit only for six new texts in Dodsley, those he himself edited for the first time. The original design of substituting a play each by Lodge, Greene, Nashe, and Peele for one of Ford and three of Shirley allowed him to supply the earliest modern editions of four pre-Shakespearian (or at least ‘pre-mid-Shakespearian’) specimens, and he chose significant ones. The Wounds of Civil War, a Roman tragedy, is the sole independent drama by Thomas Lodge, the polymath ‘university wit’ and physician whom Collier later presented (unacceptably) as actor and stationer. As copy-text for Dodsley, vol. 8, Collier may have relied on a quarto purchased or borrowed from Thomas Thorpe, who had paid £4 10s. for Rhodes’s in April 1825 (lot 1542), for Dodsley differs in some readings from the Garrick–British Museum quarto.59 Collier’s apparatus is unimpressive (his quotation from Gosson’s Plays Confuted at vii:3 is garbled, and he missed the echo of Tamburlaine in act III); perhaps he was hurried. In the same volume appears Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, again ‘for the first time inserted’, a good text from which Alexander Dyce later adopted two notes, while disputing one emendation—and never naming its editor. In volume 9 Collier presented what may be his best editorial novelty, the first modern reprint of Summer’s Last Will and Testament, a complicated comedy by Thomas Nashe now best known for its plague-time lyric (‘Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss . . . Brightness falls from the air . . . Lord have mercy on us!’). The preface and notes are extensive, and many of Collier’s illustrations

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58. Thomas Rodd, Supplement to a Catalogue of Books for 1825, no. 8428: ‘Ragmannes rolle, 7s. Imprinted at London in the Flete-strete, at the signe of the Sunne, by Wynkyn de Worde: a fragment of the last leaf of a singular Poem unknown to any Bibliographer’. 59. Collier certainly owned a copy of the play by 1852 (letter to David Laing, 15 May, EUL MS La.IV.17). This is presumably the one bought by Ellis for £14 5s. in the Ouvry sale, lot 995.


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and readings engaged the attention of the fastidious R. B. McKerrow, though with minimal acknowledgement.60 Peele’s Edward I was, and remains, an editor’s nightmare. Collier in volume 11 thought it ‘hardly possible that any play should have been worse printed . . . in 1593; and the copy of 1599, though it makes a few corrections of the grosser blunders, yet introduces several new ones, and implicitly adopts others’. In 1888 A. H. Bullen concurred (‘the text throughout is vile . . . the labour of the treadmill is child’s play to the editing of it’), and in 1911 Greg found 1593 ‘representing a very corrupt text . . . mutilated . . . [with] possibly some scenes altogether excised’.61 Faced with all this, Collier, the first to take on the editorial task, did remarkably well, supplying a readable text that makes sense even of such mangled or misplaced passages as lines 1671–86 and 1949–57.62 Edward I requires more emendation than most editors will find comfortable, and although Collier remained conservative with the old readings, he was never so slavishly principled as to let gibberish stand unchallenged. Occasionally he admitted defeat, as have most of his successors (e.g., at lines 1937–56), but many of his conjectures have proved enduring. Alexander Dyce, for example, who sniffed in private that Collier’s text was ‘very badly edited’,63 in fact publicly acknowledged ‘the editor of Dodsley’ as his own source for no fewer than twenty-five substantive emendations, while disputing only seven others; and he compounded his flattery by adopting some fi y-five more without credit bestowed.64 Later editors such as A. H. Bullen and Frank S. Hook have perpetuated many of these. Collier’s last original contributions to Dodsley come in volume 12, with the new texts of Apius and Virginia and The World and the Child. The former ‘tragicall comedie’, by one R. B., written about 1564, is not to be confused with John Webster’s play of the same name, some sixty years later. It is indeed ‘uncouth’, as F. L. Lucas described it, and Collier’s edition, nearly bare of annotation, was the first since the original quarto of 1575. ‘Probably our earliest extant dramatic production publicly represented’, he thought it, and ‘curious as holding a middle

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60. Nashe, Works (1958), iv:416–44 and v:158. Collier may also have intended to edit the Nashe-Marlowe Dido, Queen of Carthage, despite its presence in The Old English Drama (1825), for in his copy of George Robinson’s 1826 Works of Christopher Marlowe (FF) the text of that play is elaborately collated with the 1594 quarto; Collier has noted that ‘the errors are now & then important as on p. 369, where three lines of the original are omitted’. 61. Peele, Works, ed. Bullen (1888), i:xxxii; Greg 1911c, p. v. 62. Line numbering from the Malone Society reprint (Oxford, 1911); the play is not divided into acts and scenes. 63. Dyce to Philip Bliss, 30 May 1827 (BL Add. MS 34,569, fol. 427), repeating a comment first made some weeks earlier (10 May, letter bound in Folger PR2731 D8 copy 2 As. Col., vol. 1 [Dyce’s 1828 Peele]). 64. The Works of George Peele, ed. Dyce (1828; 2d ed., 1829).


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station between the old Moralities and historical plays’ (xii:339). Preston’s Cambyses might already have challenged for priority, but John Bale’s Kynge Johan had not yet been discovered. The World and the Child (or Mundus et infans, a characteristic morality play of 1500–20) is also little more than a bald reprint by Collier, who described the unique original quarto (Wynkyn de Worde, 1522) only as ‘discovered in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin’ a er 1812— the date of Dibdin’s second volume of Ames. He did not mention his own immediate source, which demonstrably is the Roxburghe Club edition of 1817, Earl Spencer’s gi to his bibliophile confrères.65 Volume 12 of Dodsley, with its appendices of supplementary notes, chronological list of the plays, glossarial index (‘especially enlarged in the biographical matter’), and errata for all volumes, appeared in April 1827, and brought Prowett’s original project to a conclusion. Publication had been regular up to a point, volume by volume at monthly intervals from April through December 1825, each advertised in the Literary Gazette (vol. 9 was ‘just published’ on 17 December), but with the banking and bookselling crisis in that month Prowett’s agenda was capsized. Volume 1, planned to be ‘reserved’ until the end, is in fact dated 1825 on its title, and contains Collier’s ‘Advertisement’ subscribed January 1826; and although he speaks here of the contents of the final three volumes as if already in print, they were not. On 7 February 1826 John presented a set as it stood—presumably of volumes 1–9 only—to Henry Crabb Robinson, who fretted about its cash value in difficult times: ‘This is an expensive work— more than £5—and it distresses me how to make a return for it’ (HCR Diary). Although Prowett would surely have found Dodsley easier to sell when complete, the last two or three volumes proved awkward hurdles: Knight’s memory of ‘new works projected, written, half printed, advertised’ which ‘must wait for a more propitious time’ might apply literally to this series. Volumes 10 and 11 are dated 1826 on their titles, while 12 trailed into 1827, and no announcement of any of these appeared in the Literary Gazette—one more publisher’s economy? An advertisement issued by Prowett in April 1827 finally reports the ‘New Edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays’ as ‘just completed in twelve volumes’.66 ‘Beautifully printed upon yellow laid paper, crown octavo’, a full set would now cost £5 8s., or £8 9s. on large paper, ‘uniform with Gifford’s Ben Jonson’ or the Boswell-Malone Vari-

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65. Comparison of Collier’s text with the Roxburghe version and the original as re-edited by J. M. Manly (1897, i:354 ff.) demonstrates this dependence, even to words and lines omitted. See also the interesting account by Ian Lancashire (1973) of the the and return of the original. 66. The advertisement (‘Important works recently published, by Septimus Prowett, 62, Paternoster Row.’, 8 pp.) notes that the first part of the third volume of Canova ‘was published on the 31st of March’, while the third part of Outlines from the Ancients ‘will be published on the First of May’; FF.


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orum. As Robinson remarked, this was an ‘expensive work’, although Collier’s gain from it may have been ‘a mere trifle’, and the supplements of new plays and masques, which would have earned him prestige at least, remained unachieved. No doubt in the cold bookselling climate of 1827–28 Dodsley stuck on the publisher’s shelves like Martin’s extravagant ‘Milton’ (at twelve or twenty-four guineas a proof-set), but Martin at least had his fee in advance. Collier’s sense of mistreatment, rather than bad luck, would still rankle fi y years on. The 1825–26 panic le few unaffected, and although Collier seems to have lost nothing directly—sixty or seventy banks failed in six weeks, but John and Mary Louisa were spared—his profession, like Prowett’s, suffered when the public were poor. ‘Literary employment’, what John required to eke out his newspaper income, became elusive, and for two years Crabb Robinson’s diary recites a litany of concern over the fortunes and prospects of the burgeoning Collier family. Despite his inheritance of £300 or £400 at his father’s death in November 1825, and the economical move to Hunter Street in December, John was struggling. Rare-book purchases amounting to nearly £23 at the sale of W. B. Rhodes in April 1825 may have anticipated Prowett’s ‘twenty pounds a volume’ for Dodsley—or half that, if Collier’s habitual exaggerations are considered— and may later have seemed badly mistimed; a fi h child, Emma Letitia, was born to the Colliers on 21 May 1826. ‘John is not prosperous’, recorded Robinson in July 1826; ‘John and his family are well, but not the most prosperous’, echoed Jane Collier to Robinson in October, adding, ‘I wish he had more worldly wisdom’.67 In November John leased out the Witney mill he had inherited from his grandmother for £30 per annum, but simultaneously he borrowed £100 from Robinson; within less than a year he owed Robinson £250 more. On 27 November 1827 Mary Louisa gave birth to their sixth and last child, Henrietta Anna Robinson Collier, but Robinson, who regularly agonized over John’s improvidence and the plight of the Collier dependents, never mentions the compliment of this double namesaking. ‘John has suffered respectable talents to divert him from pursuits by which he might have improved his fortune. Had he had no literary abilities he might have become a lawyer and would have had a fair chance at the bar’, he wrote on 17 August 1827. But if ruefully parochial, he never was mean: ‘I fear he will not be able to pay [the debt of £350] . . . however I shall never distress him by demanding it and I trust my brothers will not do so should the debt ever become theirs.’ In this deepening slough, John’s search for outside work met with little success: he ‘cannot find literary employment’, Robinson reported in the spring of 1827, thinking him ‘hardly able to live as he does’ (HCR Diary, 17 May). William 67. HCR Diary, 27 July 1826; HCR Correspondence, 10/11 October 1826.

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Gifford, the all-powerful chief of the Quarterly Review, had died in December 1826 with his edition of James Shirley unfinished, and Robinson and Amyot recommended John to complete it. Collier was indeed well versed in Shirley, and had always treated Gifford in print with tact bordering on obsequiousness. He was probably the best man for the job, but Gifford’s publisher, John Murray, let a week pass without answering Robinson’s letter. ‘This was what I might have expected from the character of the man’, fumed the diarist, and eventually the Shirley project was given to a new editorial presence in London, the Rev. Alexander Dyce.68 Six years elapsed before the Gifford-Dyce Shirley was finally published, the first and last modern collected edition. Collier’s published allusions to Gifford, as editor of Jonson, Massinger, and Ford, turned almost at once from the gratuitously laudatory to the gratuitously sharp: it is hard to find John gainsaying an opinion of Gifford before the latter’s death, or endorsing one a erwards—until Gifford proved a stick to beat Dyce with, in 1833. Original verse and translations—in the London Magazine and in the annuals of 1827–28, The Amulet and Shoberl’s The Forget-me-not—remained ill-paid, and Robinson’s estimate remained cheerless: ‘A forenoon lounging over books’, he recorded on 10 December 1827, ‘Collier’s Translations from Casti—a sort of labour which nothing but perfection can render tolerable and even then—in the words of Johnson ‘‘if we leave him only his merit, what will be his praise?’’ ’ Two short pieces sold to William Hone for The Table Book at the end of 1827, published in 1828, were likewise more honorific than remunerative. In this bleak arena at least Prowett remained, and whatever he thought of his experience with Dodsley, John filtered the rest of his editorial work of 1825–28 through the same firm, or through its copyright-holding successor, Thomas White. The proposed supplement to Prowett’s Dodsley, advertised in 1825, was to have contained ‘first-rate specimens [of the drama], never reprinted and only in the hands of collectors’, and clearly Collier prepared several texts accordingly. Although Dodsley was offered as ‘completed’ in 1827 without any such additions, by 1828 Prowett apparently had sufficiently recovered from the 1825–26 crash to renew this project, and a prospectus announced eight plays ‘with illustrations and notes by J. Payne Collier, Esq.’, to appear monthly, ‘the size and general appearance of the work [corresponding] with the last edition of ‘‘Dodsley’s Old Plays’’’.69 In the event, however, only five of them were published by Prowett in 1828–29, the two-part Robin Hood plays of Anthony Munday (The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, with Henry Chettle), the early Senecan tragedy The Misfortunes of Arthur, and two

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68. HCR Diary, 29 January–8 February 1827. Robinson’s letter, dated 1 February, is in the Murray archives. 69. Copy bound in Dyce Collection 7561.


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comedies by Nathan Field, A Woman Is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies. Le out were William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abingdon, and The Valiant Welshman by ‘A. R.’, although Englishmen for My Money was rescued for Thomas White’s series. Prowett sold the five reprints singly, but a er his second and terminal failure they were reissued together by William Pickering (1833) as Five Old Plays, Forming a Supplement to the Collections of Dodsley and Others, with Collier’s name on the title, and a half-title reading ‘Old Plays | Volume XIII’. Collier later called these ‘5 as excellent Old Plays as are to be found in our language’, and remembered that the project of ‘a continuation of Dodsley’s Old Plays’ had stalled when ‘the publisher [i.e., Prowett] could not afford to go on’.70 Each play was edited for the first time, and Collier’s biographical notes on Munday, Chettle, and Field are of some value; he gave also a pioneering account of the famous virago Mary Frith (‘Moll Cutpurse’ in Amends for Ladies), and discussed Francis Bacon’s share in The Misfortunes of Arthur. W. C. Hazlitt’s texts of all five (Dodsley, 1874) are little more than reprints of Collier’s, prefaces and all. If Prowett’s supplementary booklets of 1828–29, at 2s. 6d. apiece, represented a come-down from Dodsley in twelve volumes, ‘beautifully printed upon yellow laid paper’, the last echo of the original project was yet less imposing. By 1830 Thomas White, the printer of Dodsley and the five supplementary plays, had acquired the copyright of the former (at least) from the defunct Prowett firm.71 White himself was an enthusiast of the early drama, and in 1830–31 he printed and published, in an uncharacteristically nasty small format, eighteen pre-Restoration plays from various sources, as The Old English Drama. More like Oxberry’s cheap reprints of popular plays than the antiquarian projects of Prowett or Pickering, White’s series aimed well below theirs, his ambition ‘to do by other dramatic poets what has been done by Shakespeare: viz. to publish their chief works at such a price as shall render them accessible to every class’. The plays were to appear fortnightly, stereotyped, at sixpence each, although the price rose to 9d. a er three numbers, and finally to a shilling—the last hike necessitated when demand had not ‘as yet extended to 500 copies’. During 1830 White issued seventeen numbers, with an eighteenth following in 1831, but the nineteenth (and presumably the last) play in the series, Dekker’s Old Fortunatus, was printed by Charles Frederick Pitman, of Gutter Lane, Cheapside. Vol-

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70. Notes in Collier’s copies of OMD (Folger W.b.507, p. 92) and Five Old Plays (BL 11775.bbb.5, flyleaf). 71. In a note to one of the plays in his Old English Drama (Peele’s Edward I, p. 11) White referred to himself—‘the proprietor’—as owning the copyright to Dodsley. He may also have owned the stock, and Pickering may have obtained the sheets of the Five Plays aer White’s death or retirement.


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ume titles issued by White assign the first sixteen plays to four volumes, but sets of The Old English Drama are found variously assembled, the most complete having the extra three plays inserted.72 To this unprepossessing little series Collier contributed more, perhaps, than he cared later to recall. ‘One or two plays with notes by me, & meant to follow the 5 in 8vo, were put forth by White, the printer, in 12mo’, he wrote in about 1878. ‘The only one of which I remember the title was ‘‘Englishmen for my Money’’.’ 73 Corresponding with J. O. Halliwell in 1841 about another one— Ralph Roister Doister, the comedy he had correctly attributed to Udall in 1825— he was also unsure of his role: ‘As to editing it for White’s Old English Drama, I do not think I touched it . . . but it is so long ago that I cannot remember distinctly’.74 A close look, however, at the text and notes of Ralph Roister Doister leaves no doubt of Collier’s participation, and Englishmen for My Money was of course le over from the Prowett proposal. Illustrations and textual notes in several other plays have a strong Collier ring to them, especially when compared to those clearly by White: the textual correction to Gifford in Jonson’s Volpone, i.3.57, for example (an old reading restored which is now canonical), and the further rejections of Gifford’s new readings in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and throughout The Broken Heart. The text of Lyly’s Mother Bombie in White’s version follows the first quarto (correctly),75 whereas the only prior modern edition, by Charles Dilke, followed the second, so we expect John was probably responsible for the improvement: here both the introduction and notes sound like his also. The introduction, if not the notes, to The Seven Champions of Christendom bears comparison with Collier’s account of John Kirke in his History of English Dramatic Poetry (1831). White himself credited Collier for help with Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One: ‘It has been suggested by the editor of the English Plays to read sin be at heart; and here the proprietor of this collection begs to acknowledge to have freely borrowed from that gentleman’s notes on this comedy’.76 White also employed Collier’s Dodsley text and some notes to Edward I, the Historia Histrionica, and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, and he helped himself to all Collier’s work on both Field plays, A Woman Is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies. In other instances White appropriated Dilke’s text and notes (Doctor Faustus, Women Beware Women), and he appears to have gone elsewhere for The Lover’s Melancholy, A Fine Companion, Epicoene, and (if this is White’s work, printed 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

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These were, besides Old Fortunatus, Lyly’s Mother Bombie and John Day’s Isle of Gulls. Notes in OMD, iv:92 (Folger W.b.507). JPC to JOH, 3 December 1841, LOA 34/13. See, e.g., line 815. The Old English Drama, iii:64.


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by Pitman) for Old Fortunatus. One specimen of the forthright manner of the printer-turned-commentator (as well as a characteristic sally at Pickering) appears as a footnote to line 8 of Peele’s Edward I, that bedevilled bad text, and bears quoting: ‘Minutes are hours’: The 4to. of 1593, reads ‘Minutes and hours’. The reverend editor [i.e., Alexander Dyce] of the beautiful edition of our author’s works, published by Mr. Pickering, still however retains the reading of the old copy! Nonsense. The proprietor of this series of our Old English Drama knowing that the text of the edit. just noticed had been, with extraordinary care, collated with the old copies, and being anxious to refer to it, was refused the loan of it at the publishers, on the ground that the notes were private property. To insure correctness the work was obtained, when, by Jupiter, it was discovered that there was scarcely a single note— most of them acknowledged certainly—which had not been filched from Dodsley’s Old Plays, the copyright of which series happens, at this moment, to belong to the parties who met with the refusal in question.77 It would be pleasant to imagine that Collier’s involvement with White proceeded from his belief in making old literature ‘accessible to every class’, as his early grumblings about Brydges’s costly reprints and his subsequent zeal for antiquarian republication might suggest. But the shabby production standards of The Old English Drama cannot have satisfied him at the time, and his part in it may have been only casual, if commissioned. Indeed he may not even have chosen to preserve his own set, as none appeared in the sale of his library a half-century later.

Punch and Judy Amid all his editorial labours of 1825–30, one diversionary work by Collier for Septimus Prowett remains his best-known, and in terms of republication the most enduring performance of his entire literary career: a small anonymous octavo titled Punch and Judy, with Illustrations Designed and Engraved by George Cruikshank, ‘accompanied by the dialogue of the puppet-show, an account of its origin, and of puppet-plays in England’. Collier’s later accounts of the gene-

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77. Ibid., iv:11. Collier indeed may have put White up to this observation—it is true that Dyce pillaged the notes in Dodsley, frequently without citation—but the language (‘by Jupiter’) is certainly not Collier’s, and he had no need to purchase a copy of Dyce’s Works of George Peele (1828–29). Dyce had given him a copy, and fieen years later Collier remembered the gesture with unfeigned affection (JPC to Dyce, 24 November 1843, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 [32]); he also praised the Peele edition in HEDP, iii:191.


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sis of this celebrated volume are substantially in agreement with Cruikshank’s.78 Both record that Prowett mooted the project to Cruikshank in the autumn of his perilous year 1827, and subsequently approached Collier to provide the text. Cruikshank says that Prowett ‘engaged’ him, and that Cruikshank himself ‘obtained the address of the Proprietor and Performer of that popular Exhibition . . . an elderly Italian, of the name of Piccini, whom I remembered from boyhood’. Collier remembers that Prowett sought him out, having obtained from the artist some ‘wonderfully comic sketches’ of incidents in the Punch-play, because Collier was known once to have composed ‘a sort of mock drama [of Punch], with the various songs’, later resurrected and ‘read to my children at Christmas’. Prowett reportedly offered to buy Collier’s juvenile work (written ‘while staying with my Uncle at Brighton . . . when a mere boy, by following the Show at Brighton from street to street’), but John dissuaded him, as ‘the Dialogue . . . was very extemporal, and the Songs quite imperfect’. Prowett then changed his design, arranging to accompany Collier and Cruikshank on a morning’s expedition to the King’s Arms in the Coal Yard, Drury Lane, where Signor Piccini lodged with his wife, his stand, and his puppets. The old showman (he was then eighty-two, one-eyed, ‘a little thick-set man, with a red humorous-looking countenance’, who ‘always carried a rum-bottle in his pocket’)79 erected his portable stage upstairs in the inn, and gave his three paying visitors a private performance. Cruikshank recalls that he himself ‘stopped it at the most interesting parts to sketch the Figures, whilst Mr. Collier noted down the dialogue’, presumably in his habitual shorthand. ‘I never had a more amusing morning’, Collier wrote fortyfive years later, recollecting the ‘dirt, darkness, and uncouthness of [Piccini’s] abode’, ‘the forbiddingness of the appearance of Mrs. P., . . . an Irishwoman, and he an Italian’, so that ‘the jumble of languages in their discourse was in itself highly entertaining’ (OMD, iv:79). Cruikshank soon completed twenty-four coloured drawings, of which twenty-three were engraved on metal for Prowett, along with four supplementary vignettes on wood.80 Collier’s task was probably more extended, although he later claimed that it took ‘no more than three weeks’, for which Prowett paid him £50 (or £100: as usual the sums vary in retrospect). First, the Punch-play itself, which is certainly a combination of Piccini’s original spoken dialogue with

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78. Cruikshank’s account, provided for the catalogue of the 1863 exhibition of his work at the Exeter Hall (London), appeared in editions of Punch and Judy from 1870 on. Collier’s published account is in OMD, iv:77–80; further details are provided by two versions in JPC Memoirs, pp. 136–37 and a three-page unnumbered ‘patch’ at the end. 79. Speaight 1990, pp. 199–200, quoting descriptions from the Literary Speculum (1821) and Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861), iii:57. 80. The originals, the last of them never used, survive in the Theatre Collection at Princeton University; they are reproduced in McPharlin 1937.


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Collier’s literary invention:81 this ‘cost me a good deal of trouble, especially as to the completion of what I may call . . . the parodical songs’, and clearly John supplied what Prowett required as appropriate. But Collier’s principal achievement for Punch and Judy was his 72-page ‘Introduction’, tracing the history of puppetry and the Punch-play from Italy in the late sixteenth century to England in the present day, with shrewd critical notes on ‘the character of Punch’ and the moral implications of the Punch-plots.82 Approaching his ostensibly lightweight subject with the same discipline and gravitas now accorded the early popular stage and traditional poetry, John treated Punch as Professor William Richardson of Glasgow had treated Falstaff, Richard III, and Hamlet—a ‘philosophical character’—and he was not shy of citing Voltaire, Pascal, and Johnson for opinion, or Ariosto, Swi , Fielding, and the Elizabethans from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Jonson and Dekker for parallels. Puppetry is of course no less intrinsically subject to such study than balladry (Percy), sport and pastimes (Strutt, Douce), or cards and card-play (Singer), and the reviewers of Punch and Judy did not make fun of its preface. ‘An extremely clever and ingenious paper’, the Literary Gazette called it (9 February 1828), and the Gentleman’s Magazine cautioned its readers ‘not [to] hazard their wisdom by ridiculing the notion of a puppet-historian, for the author has brought a whole phalanx of artillery of the greatest calibre into the field to support him’ (May 1828). Yet Collier was never the bone-dry antiquary, as hostile readers of The Poetical Decameron supposed him, and there is certainly an element of whimsy to some of the ‘artillery’ here. If not quite conscious self-parody, there are tonguein-cheek passages in the text that suggested to Paul McPharlin a ‘waggish design’ on Collier’s part ‘of tying a mock-scholarly apparatus of introduction and footnotes to the little play, as Fielding had done with The Tragedy of Tragedies’; although this, he thought, ‘was forgotten as he excavated parallel allusions in earnest’. George Speaight too believed that ‘Collier treated the whole thing, with its pompous array of footnotes and literary comparisons, as something of a satire on literary scholarship’, but that ‘what may have started as a joke became a serious study’.83 Mixed purposes may account for mixed results, for John indeed generated, in less than a month, a serious and straightforward ‘study of Punch’, but he also deliberately and unabashedly introduced fabrications. Since 1816 and Thomas Churchyard in the Critical Review his work had been pure of these (the Freebooter perhaps excepted), but now in writing for Prowett, anonymously, he

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81. George Speaight (1990, p. 186) noted that ‘I cannot help suspecting that part of it was written by Collier himself ’, but Cruikshank regarded it as ‘a faithful copy and description of the various scenes represented by this Italian’. 82. A reference to performances ‘west of the Andes’ clearly came from Robert Proctor. 83. McPharlin 1937, p. ix; Speaight 1990, p. ix.


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reverted to mischief. The two versions of Collier’s introduction (one revised for the second edition of March 1828) are salted with small literary-historical fictions—transparent and innocent jests, if we don’t really mind them, misleading canards if we do. Some may indeed survive from a ‘waggish design’ of mingling scholarship with frivolity, but others came with revision, and their nature is more difficult to assess. In the first edition of Punch and Judy (January 1828), Collier devoted more than six pages to a ballad titled ‘Punch’s Pranks’ which ‘affords evidence of the connection between the stories of Punch and Don Juan; and (like the old ballads of ‘‘King Lear and his Three Daughters’’, ‘‘The Spanish Tragedy, or the lamentable murder of Horatio and Bellimperia’’, &c.) was perhaps founded upon the performance, by one who had witnessed and was highly gratified by it’ (pp. 46– 47). Collier probably derived the idea of Punch and Don Juan from William Hone’s Ancient Mysteries Described (1823), to which he referred slightingly;84 but his ballad is supposed to pre-date Hone, ‘being extracted from a curious collection of comic and serious pieces of the kind, in print and manuscript, with the figures 1791, 1792, and 1793, in various parts of it, as the times, probably, when the individual who made it, obtained the copies he transcribed, or inserted in their original shape’. Footnotes pedantic to the point of absurdity are supplied, however, which might have furnished hints to the wary: a Spenserian source, coupled with ‘we regret that so pleasant an effusion should be anonymous’; a gloss on ‘his’n’ (rhymed with ‘prison’) indicating that what ‘sounds like an ignorant vulgarism . . . is, in fact, only an abbreviation, per ellipsin, of his own’ (further illustrated in the second edition with an example from Chapman); and the sly explanation that Punch’s ‘killing the devil’ at the end of the ballad is comparable to ‘cacciar il Diavolo nell’ Inferno’ in Boccaccio—a rare, if muted, excursion by John into the risqué. Four decades later Collier as much as claimed authorship of these 112 doggerel lines, writing in An Old Man’s Diary that ‘the best thing in the letter-press of the book is, I humbly think, the mock-ballad headed ‘‘Punch’s Pranks’’ ’ (OMD, iv:79). ‘Punch’s Pranks’ may have been harmless and even a transparent jeu d’esprit, but the account of a Punch-play at Margate in 1813 has caused some anguish to later puppet historians. At pp. 57–59 John inserted ‘the only printed account we ever saw of the plot of one of Punch’s exhibitions . . . which differs from the story of any of the numerous shows we have witnessed. It is given’, he declared with aplomb, ‘as a sort of theatrical criticism in a letter from a watering-place, and was published in the Morning Chronicle of 22nd September, 1813.’ What follows is nothing else but a reprint (slightly abridged, and misdated by twelve months)

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84. William Hone, Ancient Mysteries Described (1823), p. 230; Punch and Judy, p. 45.


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of Collier’s own juvenile newsletter from Margate in the Morning Chronicle for 22 September 1812, reporting an imaginary Punch-play with far-flung episodes and extravagant allegorical meanings. Its anonymity at the time—indeed in 1828 even Crabb Robinson may have forgotten its source—enabled Collier to treat the report with becoming scepticism: ‘We do not see, exactly’, he commented, ‘how the whole of such a plot could have been made out in a puppet-show, and we cannot avoid thinking, that the critic, like many others, has here found out ‘‘meanings never meant’’, and which could never have entered the head of any ordinary exhibitor.’ But ‘only supposing that the writer has a little disturbed the ordinary course of the events for his own purpose’, he concluded—one must hope he was smiling as he wrote—‘the whole is very easily explained and understood’. And indeed much of the fabrication, including the imprisonment by the Spanish Inquisition, the escape with a ‘golden key’, and the ‘allegorical’ interpretations, is still repeated in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (16th ed., 1999) in a standard paragraph on Mr. Punch. George Speaight, the distinguished historian of Punch and Judy, combed the Morning Chronicle for six months either side of 22 September 1813, found nothing, and determined that the passage was no more than ‘Collier’s fanciful allegory’.85 Had he located the anonymous original he might have granted it independent authority, credible or not; as it happens, fortuitously, he was quite right. The first printing of Punch and Judy sold briskly, and for a second edition (within two months) Collier supplied many changes in the text of the dialogue, and revised several parts of his introduction. Originally he had alluded, vaguely, to ‘a manuscript’ into which ‘some amusing songs and parodies were introduced’ (p. 74), and which he had employed in eking out Signor Piccini’s oral version; now he elaborated that ‘we have been favoured [with the manuscript] by a gentleman who undertook, about the year 1796, to perform the task we have now executed, by giving the unwritten, if not strictly extempore, dialogue of ‘‘Punch and Judy’’ a permanent and tangible shape’ (2d ed., p. 91). With the authority of the 1796 manuscript (never since seen), Collier introduced a new song, several lines of dialogue, and two entirely new short scenes, none of this credited to Piccini, and probably all Collier’s invention. The introduction and the apparatus are padded out with anecdotes, notably one of Sir Francis Burdett ‘kissing Judy and the child, and soliciting Mr. Punch for his vote’, with a paragraph of dialogue supposedly taken from that performance, and with new parallels with Richard II, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida. But the most provocative novelty of the second edition is a ‘Sonnet to Punch’, ‘by no less a man, if we are rightly informed, than the poet, among whose latest works it was to 85. Speaight 1954, p. 32.

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continue and vary the story of ‘‘Don Juan’’. It is highly characteristic’, Collier assures us, ‘of the author, and of the representation it celebrates with so much truth and vivacity’ (p. 84). The wretched quatorzain which follows (‘Triumphant Punch! with joy I follow thee’) can hardly have been intended to deceive with any confidence. Even John, whose low opinions of Byron we have noted, could not expect contemporaries to accept as Byron’s lines like ‘Whether thou kills’t thy wife with jolly glee’, rhymes of ‘refuse’ and ‘noose’, or the callow last couplet, ’Tis such delight To see thee cudgel his black carcase antique, For very rapture I am almost frantic! Charitably, this is parody, if not much to the point. No editor of Byron seems ever to have taken the attribution seriously, although Speaight remarks that it ‘is still quoted [as Byron’s] to this day in puppet histories’, and an 1836 translation of Punch and Judy into French proudly featured in its title ‘lord byron, Sonnet à Polichinelle’.86 Whatever his original design, Collier’s texts of 1828 preserve a strange admixture of credible scholarship and report, conscious whimsy and undeclared fiction. Once again anonymity may have seemed best, for John (he said) stipulated to Prowett that he not be ‘required to put my name to the small volume, because my materials were few and disjointed’ (OMD, iv:78); his name indeed remained off the title-page for a century, but his responsibility for the preface was an open secret from the beginning.87 And the book did sell and sell, not least because of Cruikshank’s wonderful engravings, which Prowett also issued as proofs in portfolio. Collier’s text, though sometimes curtailed—he revised no edition a er the second—remained enduringly popular too: there were seven British reprints or reissues in his own lifetime and many more new editions since. Its authority in its particular sphere was long almost unchallenged, and has been pervasive, for better or worse (witness Brewer). In a generous if rueful summing-up, George Speaight acknowledged its niche-carving importance: faults, falsehoods, and all, ‘Collier’s historical introduction has provided the basic foundation for every history of puppets in England that has been written since—including this one’.88 On 11 January 1829 John Payne Collier turned forty, a time for reflection, if he could spare it. His small rented house in Hunter Street now accommodated nine souls: John, Mary Louisa, maiden aunt Emma Pycro , and six children aged be-

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86. Speaight 1990, p. 188; McPharlin 1936, p. 386. 87. He was named in the London Weekly Review notice (9 February 1828, p. 88). 88. Speaight 1990, p. 186.


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tween one and eleven. The two boys were of school age, and John Pycro would soon be boarded with his uncle in Guernsey; but quarters were close, and Crabb Robinson was probably wise to resist Jane Collier’s plan to move him back in (HCR Correspondence, 18 May 1828). Extramural responsibilities continued for John, though Jane, now sixty, divided her time between her two daughters, and Richard Collier, the black sheep, was ‘hardly to be considered a member of the family’: separated again from his wife, as Robinson learned, ‘he keeps a mistress and has a natural child by a third woman’. Poor brother William, preparing assiduously for the bar, had his bad leg amputated ‘a er suffering a very painful operation’ in the summer of 1828, and was bed-ridden still in November.89 John too had been ill and convalescent in the winter of 1828–29,90 but his affairs, as he entered his fi h decade, seemed more hopeful than two years before. A er the low ebb of 1826–27, when he laboured on Dodsley, Jane told Robinson that ‘John’s employments . . . have increased’ and ‘have set [the family] completely at ease, so that I think there could be no anxiety in pecuniary matters’ (HCR Correspondence, 18 May 1828). Of course this was meant to reassure Robinson in his quest for dependable lodgings, but John did earn more fees from Prowett, and at some point in the late 1820s he began to review plays on a regular basis, anonymously, in both the Observer and the Morning Chronicle. Precisely when his reviewing commenced is uncertain, although Thomas Noon Talfourd sought a notice from him in February 1829; eleven years later it would occasion a crisis with the volatile William Macready.91 Most significantly, however, a er seventeen years of prevarication or resistance, and two months shy of his birthday, John made up his mind to be called to the bar. A ‘long letter’ from Jane proved decisive, and John gave ‘a short answer’ on 26 November: ‘I have determined to be called & that very much at your instance’, he wrote. ‘Whether I shall do any good is another question. If other people could be persuaded to think as well of me as you do in your maternal partiality, I should be sure of success; & if I thought better of myself I should no doubt improve my chance of it—I am going about it this morning.’ 92 On 7 February 1829, troubled with a sore throat, John was admitted to the bar alongside his recuperating younger brother. Robinson spared them no flattery: ‘I am very sure [John] will never have the perseverance necessary to success’, he pronounced, later regarding the

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89. HCR Diary, 2 April, 1 July, and 5 November 1828. 90. HCR Diary, 8 December 1828, 30 January and 1 February 1829. 91. Talfourd to JPC, 28 February 1829, FF MS 347. 92. JPC to Jane Collier, 26 November 1828, FF/K MS 604. On the same day Robinson, though sceptical of Collier’s success, recorded the effect of the female campaign: ‘His wife wrote to me to beg I would not discourage this undertaking, and his mother made the same request to me— There is no danger of my doing this’.


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call itself as ‘equally a failure to both, but from very different causes. John had talents & qualifications far superior to those of very successful men—Could he have withdrawn himself from literature and devoted himself to the necessary study he might have been anything in the law’ (HCR Reminiscences, iii:110). John took chambers for a time with his friend Charles Clark, at 2 Pump Court, Middle Temple, but his desultory legal career largely fulfilled Robinson’s augury. The admission of 1829 remained inalienable, however, and fi y-four years later his death certificate provided, under ‘occupation’, only ‘Barrister at Law’. John’s capitulation to the law, no matter how unrewarding it turned out to be, may have meant more to him than a sop to his age and circumstances. The symbolic choice he had once offered himself between art and practice was now made, and with the decade itself his ambitions for a poetical career effectively expired; there were still modest lyrics and occasional translations to come, and light or mock-antique ballads to be circulated privately or passed off for what they were not, but The Poet’s Pilgrimage and all serious verse enterprise were behind him. Still, the devotion to ‘literature’, which Robinson blamed for inhibiting John’s worldly success, remained as strong as ever, and if anything more sharply defined. At forty, Collier was now ‘the author of the Decameron’, ‘the editor of Dodsley’s Old Plays’, and, to the knowing, the anonymous historian of the puppet theatre. With the deaths of Reed, Malone, Chalmers, and finally William Gifford the old order of scholar-critics and editors may have seemed at an end, with no new cadre of dramatic specialists yet arisen to match Collier’s credentials. Singer, Brydges, and Joseph Haslewood were dabblers or dilettantes; Henry John Todd concentrated on Spenser and Milton; others—George Robinson, James Brook Pulham, Charles Wentworth Dilke—would contribute a text or two and then vanish. Only the newcomer Alexander Dyce could seem a fit rival, or perhaps worthy colleague, in reviving and reinterpreting the great parerga of Shakespearian drama and poetry, and the history of the old English stage; and Dyce was very much Collier’s junior. The time was ripe, if John could seize it, for a demonstration of mastery.


part three

The 1830s (I)

The History of English Dramatic Poetry Just when John Payne Collier began to envision his research into the ‘old’ English drama and theatre as matter for a new book is unclear, but certainly his reading and much of his writing had pointed toward such a work for over a decade. From the retrospective essays in the British Lady’s Magazine, the Critical Review, and the Edinburgh Magazine, to the ninth and tenth conversations on theatrical performance and theatre historians in The Poetical Decameron, and the commentary, play by play, in his Dodsley, Collier had published more about the early stage and its dramatists than anyone since Reed and Malone. In the preface to The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare (June 1831) he claimed that he had ‘commenced my researches nearly twenty years ago’, a figure he had stretched a little, a year earlier, in telling John Murray that his manuscript was ‘the produce of twenty years of zealous and industrious enquiry’. To William Upcott he more plausibly declared that ‘I have been engaged in the work for the last fi een years’, a figure that Upcott’s colleague and Collier’s kinsman William Maltby, librarian of the London Institution, might confirm.1 The project was at any rate specifically formulated by March 1829, when Collier spoke of ‘my projected Hist: of the Stage & Dramatic Poetry in this country’ as in progress, but ‘at present comparatively so little advanced’.2 In December Jane Collier reported to Robinson that ‘John goes on with his book, but has not offered it to any bookseller yet; he has not yet completed it’, and indeed when in February 1830 John sent his preface to Murray, with an offer of ‘specimens of the execution of any or all parts of my undertaking’, he was still far from finished.3 Examination of primary material continued virtually into the

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1. JPC to Murray, 2 February 1830, John Murray archives; JPC to Upcott, 27 August 1830, Huntington MS UP 137. 2. Undated letter to Frederic Madden, BL Egerton MS 2838, fols. 7–8. Collier mentions in the letter that he had been introduced to Madden by Amyot ‘Thursday week’; this may have been at the meeting of the Society of Antiquaries on 26 February, when Robinson noted that Collier was present as Amyot’s guest. The first dated letter from Collier to Madden is 1 July 1829. 3. HCR Correspondence, 27 December 1829; JPC to Murray, 2 February 1830.

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proof-stage of production, and the active tasks of record-searching and writing probably occupied about two and a half years, from late 1828 (a er Punch and Judy and the last volumes of Dodsley) until early May 1831. For what HEDP embodies in three stout volumes, this is no dilatory pace of work—conducted simultaneously with full-time reporting, theatre reviewing, and whatever legal employment followed John’s call to the bar.

New Faces in the Circle: Dyce, Devonshire, and Egerton The concentrated purpose of Collier’s new project, as much as his earned reputation as ‘the editor of Dodsley’, brought him a wealth of new friends and associates. Outstanding among them, and possibly the earliest of the crop, was the young Rev. Alexander Dyce, a newcomer to London in late 1825.4 Over the next forty years the volatile relationship between Collier and Dyce would prove mutually rewarding and mutually painful; at the outset, however, it seemed easy and warm. The Scotsman, nine years Collier’s junior, shared Collier’s passion for literature and the stage, but little else in background or circumstances. Dyce’s lineage was military and colonial, his father an officer in the East India Company’s service, his mother a sister of Sir Neil Campbell, a West Indian campaigner, later Napoleon’s ‘commissioner’ at Elba, and finally governor of Sierra Leone. Both parents returned to India when Alexander was only a year old, but his upbringing by two Aberdeen aunts seems to have le him no scars. At Edinburgh High School he took more to sport and play-going than to study, but at Exeter College, Oxford (1815–19), he discovered classics and bookstalls, and in 1821 he published, at his own expense, a small volume of blank-verse translations from the Greek of Quintus Smyrnaeus.5 By now he had declined to follow his father into Indian service, and agreed instead to take holy orders (1821). Few ‘literary clergymen’ have seemed less churchly, however, and a er brief curacies in Cornwall and Suffolk, Dyce moved to London and never again troubled

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4. In the biography prefaced to his edition of Dyce’s Reminiscences (1972, p. 6), Richard J. Schrader expressed uncertainty about the date of Dyce’s arrival in London, despite John Forster’s testimony that it was 1825; writing to David Laing from Aberdeen on 7 October 1825, Dyce indicated that he would be moving to London in six weeks (EUL MS La.IV.17). 5. Dyce originally planned to translate the whole of Quintus’s supplement to the Iliad, projecting to David Laing on 24 November 1820 a book of about 300 pages. An error by Forster is perpetuated in DNB, namely that ‘shortly before he took his degree he had edited, in 1818, Jarvis’s Dictionary of the language of Shakespeare’(John Forster, ‘Alexander Dyce: A Biographical Sketch’, in South Kensington Museum, Catalogue of the Printed Books and Manuscripts Bequeathed by the Reverend Alexander Dyce [1875], p. xiv); in fact his edition of Swynfen Jervis’s Dictionary appeared in 1868.


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the pulpit. Legacies from his aunts le him comfortably off, and for the rest of his life he was able to socialize and sojourn, read, write, and collect without any hint of financial constraint.6 Indeed he seems to have subsidized most if not all of his own editorial publications, a fact that in part accounts for their handsome appearance, and their meticulous and expensive revision in proof.7 In person Dyce was imposing, a ‘gentle giant’ of six feet five inches—this is Collier’s figure, and Collier himself stood six feet tall. A dandy when young, affable and urbane, a keen diner-out (though curiously slack in reciprocal entertaining), and much given to gallantry, he numbered Fanny Haworth, Fanny Kemble, and Mary Russell Mitford among his earliest literary allies.8 In 1825 he published Specimens of the English Poetesses, which he described as the first verse anthology ‘entirely consecrated to women’, and in 1827 he saw Miss Haworth’s anonymous tales, The Pine Tree Dell, through the press. Like Crabb Robinson however, Dyce never married, and his bachelor chambers in time filled with ‘books and manuscripts . . . pictures, paintings, drawings, miniatures, antique rings, and curiosities’, all eventually bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum. His collection of English books was particularly rich in Tudor and Stuart dramatic quartos, but much less so in popular prose, minor verse, and ‘reference’, for Dyce was by no means in love with antiquarian research for its own sake. Nor was he taken with the ‘ ‘‘minora sidera’’ of literature’, as he considered them, ‘little twinkles . . . scarcely visible even in their own dark times’,

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6. In a note about Dyce possibly connected with his 1880 Memoirs, Collier said he was ‘wonderfully careful of his money and died, I think worth 17 or 18,000£’ (Houghton MS bMs Eng 1106.1); the probate figure was in fact ‘under £25,000’. 7. Forster delicately suggests this about Pickering’s early arrangements with Dyce (‘So limited the sale for [an edition of Collins, 1827] and so exacting [Dyce’s] necessary requirements in regard to printing and other points of production, that it was a liberality [on Pickering’s part] merely to share the venture’ (‘Biographical Sketch’, p. xv); but Dyce himself was quite clear about the funding of his Peele (1828–29), telling John Mitford that ‘dissatisfied with the first ed. of Peele, I reprinted it at my own expense (nearly £200)’ (24 December 1833, Dyce Collection, MS 86.Y.100 [26]). Collier in 1876 asserted that Dyce, ‘being a man with money, ran part of the risk [for his Shakespeares of 1857 and 1864] in both instances. Towards his ‘‘Beaumont & Fletcher’’ he had contributed £400, as I heard from Moxon the publisher of it. This fact has been kept quite in the back-ground, but John Forster knew it: so of other works by Dyce’ (JPC Diary, 30 March 1876). 8. On the evidence of Crabb Robinson’s diary and other contemporary memoirs Dyce rarely hosted ‘parties’; but his accommodation—at 72 Welbeck Street, Marylebone; in Gray’s Inn Square; and finally at 33 Oxford Terrace, Paddington—was never spacious. In OMD, iv:101–03, Collier reproduced a poem by Dyce accepting an invitation for a Sunday dinner, while admitting that (in Collier’s words) ‘he had recently, and I may say sulkily, regaled himself on a turkey and game sent to him by his friend Sandby, without inviting anyone to partake of them’. Dyce’s excursions into occasional verse were, incidentally, less uncommon than Collier thought (‘I never saw any rhymes by Dyce excepting in one of the ‘‘annuals’’, I entirely forget which’); there are in fact several, not much worse or much better than Collier’s.


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a predilection for which, in Sir Egerton Brydges, he lamented,9 and might also have perceived over the years in Collier. But his long run of Brydges’s Lee Priory Press reprints—the costly collector’s editions that offended Collier so much— is remarkable. So are his dozen or more John Payne Colliers, nearly all presentation copies, including the manuscript of The Poet’s Pilgrimage: like most of Dyce’s modern books, they are in impeccable original condition, as if read with gloves on. Collier, in his last bitter reflections upon his lost friend, suggested that Dyce’s bibliophily had its dark side, saying he would not return a Swi letter lent by Collier: ‘he did not want to find it . . . he is very close-fisted when once he has got anything into his hand’.10 ‘I gave Dyce several old Plays and other curious Books’, he complained elsewhere, ‘but he never gave me one book excepting such as he himself had edited’.11 Collier met Dyce well before 30 May 1827, when the younger man alluded to him as ‘a brother Editor’ with some condescension, in a nervous but impenitent letter to his crony Philip Bliss: ‘I recollect that in a hastily written letter . . . I mentioned ‘‘Edward the first’’ as being very badly edited in the new Dodsley: I do not mean at all to retract what I wrote, but wishing to be charitable toward a brother Editor, I request that you will form your own opinion of the merits of that reprint, & that what I expressed may not be quoted to its prejudice.’ 12 Their paths may have crossed earlier, at plays—Dyce had attended John Philip Kemble’s farewell performance in June 1817, and that of Sarah Siddons two years later, events John was unlikely to have missed—or at book auction sales or in booksellers’ shops. Soon enough a er settling in London, Dyce entered the charmed circle of breakfasters with Samuel Rogers,13 and met the similarly unclerical clergyman John Mitford, book collector and later editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Through Mitford he met Wordsworth, and through Rogers the young lion William Harrison Ainsworth, as well as Thomas Campbell, Edward Lytton Bulwer, and John Forster. Through either Rogers or Mitford he found Pickering and Edward Moxon, his publishers-to-be, and Collier furnished him Henry Crabb Robinson, and with that Robinson’s own personal network.14 Yet for a time John Payne Collier himself was the apple of Alexander Dyce’s roving eye: they were ‘kindred souls’ with a similarly arcane taste

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9. Dyce to William Wordsworth, 17 June 1830; printed in de Sélincourt, v:292. 10. Houghton MS bMS Eng 1106.1. 11. Collier’s annotated OMD (Houghton *65J-270), ii:3. Dyce made fun of himself on this account (and perhaps also of Collier’s expectations of him) in a charming epistolary ‘play’ sent to Collier in 1834; FF/K MS 590. 12. BL Add. MS 34,569, fols. 426–27. 13. Dyce’s best-known book is his Table Talk of Samuel Rogers. 14. HCR Diary, 6 April 1832, calling Dyce ‘an agreeable man’.


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in old English drama, and ‘I like you better than anyone in London’, Dyce wrote in April and May 1830.15 But from the very beginning of their acquaintance and friendship, rivalry bristled between Dyce and Collier, and if Dyce was already preparing an edition of George Peele, the appearance in Collier’s Dodsley of Peele’s Edward I might account for his outburst to Bliss. Not that Dyce was himself innocent of spleen: ‘He has all the spite’, once wrote John Mitford, his great friend, ‘of a school-girl who means to tell her governess that Miss Tottileplan in going upstairs, took two steps at once, for which there is a heavy punishment at Kensington Gore and the Hammersmith seminaries.’ 16 Collier certainly ‘took two steps at once’ on more than one occasion, and Dyce clearly took pleasure in informing the governess. In the first five years of their jostling, Dyce was certainly more the aggressor. He pounced on Collier’s one dubious sidelight on George Peele, probably a misunderstanding which Collier unwisely fobbed off on Malone,17 and his citations of ‘the Editor of Dodsley’ in footnotes to Peele’s Edward I (1829) were disingenuously selective, even grudging, while flowery compliments to such genteel antiquaries as Sir Egerton Brydges, H. J. Todd, John Mitford, Philip Bliss, and Nicholas Harris Nicolas festoon his pages. In Dyce’s Greene (1831) Collier was treated more graciously,18 although again Dyce drew more from Collier’s text of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay than he acknowledged, reserving one of his three footnotes to Dodsley simply to reject an unadopted emendation. And of course the Gifford-Dyce Shirley, delayed from 1827 to 1833 through the mutual diffidence of Dyce and John Murray, was a project that Collier himself had coveted, to no avail. Collier’s retaliation, if it can be viewed as such, came in footnotes of his own, somewhat subtler than Dyce’s. A favourite trick of his was to praise an authority with apparent candour, perhaps not quite for what the authority intended, and with equal ‘openness’ mitigate the praise by finding a flaw. Personal animus

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15. Dyce to JPC, 30 April and 14 May 1830, Folger MS Y.d.341 (54) and (55). 16. Letters and Reminiscences of the Rev. John Mitford, ed. Matilda C. Houstoun (1891); quoted in Schrader 1972, p. 11. The remark (ca. 1854–55) is clearly whimsical, in a context otherwise of admiring respect. 17. Dodsley, xi:5; Dyce, in his 1829 Works of Peele, i:xx, noted: ‘I feel convinced that no such poem [a dialogue between two shepherds on the return of Drake and Norris to England] ever existed.’ 18. For good reason, perhaps, as at one point Dyce seems to have intended collaborating with Collier: on 14 May 1830, however, he begged off (‘I have come to the resolution not to have any partner in the work’), explaining that ‘an association with anyone would fidget me to death, & I should be unable to fiddle faddle with it in my own peculiar Dycean style, however accommodating my coadjutor might be. . . . Don’t be offended, nor dream that I slight your assistance’; Folger MS Y.d.341 (55).


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seemed then out of the question: this is a time-honoured strategy of mildly hostile book-reviewers, as Collier well knew. In HEDP he took pains to praise all Dyce’s editions of the playwrights, but there is inevitably a sting in the tail of each compliment. Thus Webster was an ‘excellent edition’, and one illustrative parallel from it was presented as ‘apposite’—but, Collier added, ‘nothing could be easier than to multiply proofs to the same effect, were it necessary’.19 The Works of Greene, a ‘beautiful edition’ by ‘my friend the Rev. A. Dyce’ (iii:148), seemed to misdate the first part of Greene’s Mamillia by ten years (in fact the second part is ten years earlier than either Collier or Dyce realized), and while Collier ‘usually’ followed Dyce’s text ‘as furnished with scrupulous exactness’, he could not resist concluding that ‘I wish that [Dyce’s] author had been more worthy of his learned and tasteful labours’ (iii:157). Peele, too, ‘in two beautiful post 8vo. volumes’, Collier had gratefully employed (iii:191), choosing the corrected 1829 reprint; but a final footnote proposed to emend one word in David and Bethsabe, and called Dyce’s (valid) reading from the original quarto ‘almost the solitary verbal blemish of his edition’ (iii:204). Superficially all this sparring was amicable, however, and Dyce and Collier habitually exchanged presentation copies of their books, Collier resurrecting a set of The Poetical Decameron, and giving away the manuscript itself of The Poet’s Pilgrimage along with a copy of the book; Dyce reciprocated with copies of his Peele (1828–29), his Webster (1830), and his Greene (1831).20 But when John forwarded to Dyce a precious large-paper copy of his HEDP (one of only six printed) Dyce’s response was equivocal at best. ‘I found the size of your large Paper Stage History irreconcilable with the size of my trunk’, he wrote from Aberdeen, heartlessly, having le it behind in London. The ‘sunny view of the matter’, he continued, was that the book would always be valuable, but ‘now for a little shade: I think that only antiquarian readers will ever dream of perusing it, that by what is called ‘‘the general reader’’ not two pages of it could possibly

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19. HEDP, i:401–02. Collier had also briefly puffed Dyce’s Webster in the Morning Chronicle of 4 March 1830, calling it ‘a valuable addition to the dramatic literature of this century’, and remarking that its ‘four volumes . . . range precisely with Mr. Dyce’s edition of Peele’s Works, one of the most accurate books in English’. But he particularized only a misleading reference to his own Poetical Decameron: there ‘Mr Collier does little more than mention that [Academiarum examen] had been attributed to [Webster], without at all asserting the correctness of the imputation’, but ‘Mr. Dyce was resolved to have a contest, [and] he created for himself an adversary’. 20. JPC sale, lots 527, 389, and 859. Thanking Dyce for the gi of a fine-paper copy of his Skelton, Collier recalled the pleasure with which he had received Dyce’s first such offering, the Peele: ‘That is a few years ago now’ (24 November 1843, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 [21]). In OMD, ii:50, Collier claimed that Dyce had ‘resumed possession’ of a gi copy of Specimens of the British Poetesses, ‘which he published five years ago, before I knew him, and of which he has lately oen told me he is really much ashamed’. But in fact Collier disposed of a copy in 1854, among literary discards auctioned by Sotheby’s on 26 January (lot 1157).


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be swallowed. . . . Murray will never get back his money for it’. Collier’s reply must have offered some kind of protest, for Dyce parried with more faint praise and censure: ‘all I meant was, that its circulation must inevitably be confined to a few antiquarian readers; that it was excellent in its kind, but that I could not help thinking the style a little heavy. . . . I have in my eyes, as an opposite to yours, the very elegant but not too ornate style of Warton in his H[istory of ] E[nglish] P[oetry], which I agree with Mitford in thinking the most agreeable book (at least in modern times) of poetical criticism’.21 How wounded Collier may have been we cannot now know, but he seems to have let matters rest. Simpler and sweeter was Collier’s brief relationship with the antiquary and collector Francis Douce (1757–1834), author of Illustrations of Shakespeare (1807), a model of scholarship yoked with arcana. John approached the eccentric septuagenarian on the strength of an acquaintance with James Haywood Markland, a Roxburghe Club member and the son-in-law of Post Office reformer and book collector Sir Francis Freeling. He also dropped Thomas Amyot’s everavailable name, and Douce welcomed him, exhibited his library and cabinet of curios, and lent him, toward HEDP, several books of great value and rarity. These included the unique copy of Bale’s Temptation of Christ (HEDP, ii:239– 41), Bale’s rare autobiographical Vocacyon to the Bishoprick of Ossorie and his Interlude of Youth (ii:313–16), and Tarltons News out of Purgatory.22 In December 1830 John returned to Douce certain ‘fragments’, no less important, explaining that he had retained them while awaiting proofs from his printer ‘to which they relate, in order that I might be able to correct the proofs by the originals’.23 Among these were William Baldwin’s novella Beware the Cat, from which Collier transcribed two full pages (i:152–53), remarking that Richard Heber’s copy, the only perfect one known, was ‘of course, now inaccessible’, and the last eight leaves of the earliest known edition of Everyman (Pynson, ca. 1515, still unique). Collier took some delight in using this to refute T. F. Dibdin’s statement that ‘the existence of any play printed by Wynkyn de Worde or Pynson, must be doubtful’, and recorded its variants.24 He also printed long extracts from ‘a single leaf of an interlude’ owned by Douce, which is now known as Temperance (ii:370–71). While Collier, with Douce’s blessing, published several of Douce’s unique texts for the first time, it is clear that the old man knew very well what he owned.

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21. Dyce to JPC, 5 July and 21 August 1831, Folger MSS Y.d.6 (91) and Y.d.341 (56). The second letter is quoted by Ganzel (p. 50) with the misreading ‘factual’ for ‘poetical’. 22. Referred to without credit to Douce at iii:379 and 381; but Collier later told J. O. Halliwell that Douce had lent it him (31 October 1842, LOA 23/56). 23. 12 December 1830, Bodl. MS Douce d.29, fol. 153. 24. Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities, ed. T. F. Dibdin (1810–19), ii:565.


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In repossessing his loans in December 1830 he was no doubt mindful of the bequest he had decided upon in that year: a visit to the Bodleian Library with Isaac D’Israeli had so pleased him that he willed all his books, manuscripts, prints, and coins to Oxford, and all the works mentioned above—except the fragment of Temperance, which somehow passed into the Duke of Devonshire’s collection, and is now at the Huntington Library—remain there.25 Douce made Collier a present of his Illustrations, however, and John reciprocated in June 1831 with the published HEDP. Douce’s response to the last was characteristically gracious and generous: ‘best thanks’ for ‘an extremely valuable present, to which I had not the slightest claim; whilst yours to the pleasure and admiration of a discerning publick is very considerable. I most heartily wish every just & possible Success to your excellent work’.26 From June 1829 to October 1831 Henry Crabb Robinson remained away on an extended tour of the Continent. In his absence, Collier’s intimacy with Thomas Amyot seems to have increased, with John regularly submitting his ideas and projects to the older man for approval, and taking Amyot’s opinions rather more seriously than ‘Bourne’ had taken those of ‘Morton’ in The Poetical Decameron. Amyot kept in close touch with HEDP, and John at first planned to dedicate the work to him; in the end he singled him out as ‘unquestionably among the very first in [my] obligation’ (i:xvi) for sympathy, encouragement, and ‘for many unacknowledged suggestions’ (ii:194), some of them clearly reflecting Amyot’s superior philological learning (ii:146). ‘To him I am indebted, not only for much valuable knowledge, but for the means of information, by most serviceable introductions, and for the kindest aid throughout my undertaking. To all who are acquainted with him’, Collier concluded, perhaps remembering Amyot’s generosity toward the hoi polloi, ‘this tribute will appear quite unnecessary (i:xvi).’ The culmination of Amyot’s generosity was to re-channel John’s dedicatory intentions. ‘The Duke of Devonshire has had John introduced to him thro’ Amyott’s kindness’, wrote Jane Collier to Robinson, and ‘Mr Amyott has been kindly urging John to alter the dedication of the book from himself to the Duke’.27 John ‘resisted, the last time I heard’, she added, but he had in fact

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25. Collier is unlikely to have stolen it, as he identified it as Douce’s in HEDP. One other fragment, a sheet from G. Ellis, The Lamentation of the Lost Sheep (1605), passed from Douce to Collier, presumably as a gi, for Collier identified its source in Heber IV, lot 728: see BARB, i:149. This is now at Folger. 26. 30 June 1831, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.14, fol. 5. Collier’s letter of thanks for the Illustrations is Bodl. MS Douce d.29, fol. 152; the book itself appeared as lot 156 in his 1884 sale. 27. HCR Correspondence, 20 June 1830. This meeting took place sometime before 16 Febru-


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already capitulated, and beneath the Devonshire arms on its second leaf HEDP is finally inscribed ‘To his Grace the Duke of Devonshire, K.G., Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty’s Household . . . with Permission’.28 The relationship that Amyot had so forwarded, between Collier and William Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, would be one of the most important in Collier’s life. For the moment, acquaintance with the bibliophile ‘bachelor Duke’ meant for Collier access to an unparalleled private dramatic library, for in 1821 Devonshire had acquired en bloc the collection of John Philip Kemble, comprising some four thousand early quartos and forty volumes of playbills, and was ready and willing to build upon strength. ‘He gets John to make purchases of old plays for him’, Jane told Robinson in June, ‘spends mornings with him in his library’, and—the seductions of high life begin!—‘sends his carriage for John when there is any meeting appointed between them’. Soon Collier’s attendance on Devonshire would ripen into employment as ‘a sort of librarian’, and his infatuation with the ducal aura of Devonshire House and later of Chatsworth would fuel his hopes and his fantasies for decades; but in 1830 the availability of open-shelf privileges pleased him most. ‘I have enjoyed unrestricted access to that most valuable collection of plays commenced by the late John Philip Kemble, and continued by his Grace, until it now forms a complete English Dramatic Library’, he boasted (HEDP, i:xiv), crediting ‘his Grace’s matchless dramatic library’ as a principal influence ‘in the completion’ of HEDP (dedication). Well might Dyce envy him: ‘I am jealous’, he wrote from Aberdeen on 14 May 1830, ‘of your intimacy at Devonshire House . . . because you have a facility there of using volumes which I cannot finger.’ 29 And indeed the individual citations of Devonshire’s books in HEDP are impressive. Among early interludes Collier was able to consult and extract Godly Queen Hester (ca. 1561, unique), Robin Conscience (ca. 1565, unique fragment, but in fact a dialogue, not an interlude: STC 5366), Abraham’s Sacrifice (a transcript of the unique quarto at Bodley), and Albion Knight (unique fragment); an account of the last occupies six pages in HEDP, Collier ‘terming it a most remarkable production, without any parallel in English, and . . . rejoicing in having been the means of rescuing it, even in its imperfect state, from total oblivion’ (ii:376). Also from Devonshire’s shelves came Collier’s reading copies of the very rare Gorboduc (datable to 1570), Arden of Feversham (1599), Dekker’s Patient

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ary 1830, when the duke noted in his diary that ‘C. Greville with Mrs. Arkwright & Collier’ visited Devonshire House ‘to see my books & drawings’; Chatsworth MS 767.454. 28. The duke accepted the dedication on 7 May, saying ‘I shall be most anxious to read it, for I feel sure that if the subject can be satisfactorily treated it will be so by you’; FF/K MS 639. 29. Collier may have soon put in a word for Dyce, however, who thanked Devonshire in the preface to his edition of Greene.


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Grissel (1603), Samuel Brandon’s Virtuous Octavia (1598), and probably Fedele and Fortunio (1585, one of two copies then known, both privately held). Notices likewise appear of the duke’s 1603 Hamlet (then considered unique); his Misfortunes of Arthur (1587), which Collier had recently edited from the Garrick copy, the only other one known; his ‘Waterson’ 1592 edition of Daniel’s Delia; and finally there is an account of the remarkable Italian sketch-book of Inigo Jones (1614–15), of which Devonshire had only months before commissioned, through Collier, an elegant lithographic facsimile. These literary contributions toward HEDP were substantial indeed, as Collier avowed; but Devonshire, who was nothing if not straightforward with his largess, also gave John a present of £100 for the dedication itself—a fittingly old-fashioned gesture of patronage. Like Devonshire, Lord Francis Leveson-Gower (later styled Lord Francis Egerton; Earl of Ellesmere a er 1846) would become increasingly important to John as time passed.30 Second son of the wealthy land-holding second Marquess of Stafford (latterly Duke of Sutherland, for a few months), Leveson-Gower had cultivated poetry at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, entered parliament in 1822 eighteen days a er his twenty-second birthday, and in the same year married the daughter of Charles Greville the diarist. An articulate, dedicated liberal conservative of the Canning school, he rose quickly in government, and by the age of thirty, when Collier probably met him,31 he had already held office as a lord of the treasury, under-secretary of state for the colonies, chief secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, and secretary at war, as well as privy councillor and privy councillor for Ireland. More in Collier’s line, he had published through Murray a translation of Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s Song of the Bell (1823), and Translations from the German and Original Poems (1824). These did not excite widespread admiration at the time, but in a note to his own Fridolin (1824, p. 35) John had providently overpraised the first: ‘Perhaps it is not too much to say’, he had observed, ‘that to the celebrity that dramatic poem [Faust] thus acquired in Great Britain, we are very mainly indebted for the translation recently published by Lord F. L. Gower’. In 1829 Lord Francis inherited property estimated at £90,000 per annum from his uncle, the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, and he was also the immediate heir of the Bridgewater ducal estates, including the fabulous Egerton-

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30. The nomenclature here can be confusing. On the death in 1833 of his father, the second Marquess of Stafford and first Duke of Sutherland, Leveson-Gower inherited by reversion the estates of his great-uncle, Francis Egerton, third and last Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803), and at that time assumed the surname and the arms of his Egerton benefactors. In 1846 he was created first Earl of Ellesmere; his correspondence is oen signed ‘Egerton Ellesmere’. 31. In OMD Collier credits the introduction variously to Amyot and to Charles Greville, dating the latter version ‘October 29 1832’ (iv:26 and ii:79); but clearly he had met Leveson-Gower a year or two earlier.


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Bridgewater family library. By the will of his great-uncle, third and last Duke of Bridgewater, all these would descend to Lord Francis by reversion, on the death of the old Marquess of Stafford, his father. In 1830 this was three years away, and Bridgewater House and its contents were still the Marquess’s property, but Leveson-Gower supplied the key Collier sought. ‘With the liberality which belongs to his rank in life and in letters, he afforded me every facility in the inspection of many volumes of the utmost rarity’, John wrote in his preface to HEDP, and thenceforth the Bridgewater library would prove one of his richest preserves for unexamined books and uncalendared manuscripts. For the moment, however, he chose to describe just one ‘most rare play’ at length, Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), known otherwise only at the Bodleian Library and in Richard Heber’s sequestered collection, while parenthetically citing the Bridgewater copy of Sir John Oldcastle (1600; HEDP, iii:246), almost equally elusive.32

The Society of Antiquaries Tireless in his friend’s behalf, Thomas Amyot continued his introductory services, and John pursued each new entrée for all it could yield. Through Amyot came Devonshire and possibly Egerton, and (with Crabb Robinson) Collier’s publisher-to-be John Murray; also Sir Henry Ellis of the British Museum, and James Henry Markland, the editor of the Chester mysteries; and through Markland, and Amyot again, Francis Douce.33 A formidable contact indeed was Sir Robert Peel, then home secretary, who, ‘through my friend Mr. Amyot . . . gave me admission into the State Paper Office’, and obligingly ‘anticipated my purpose by ordering a collection to be made of such documents as related to the stage’ (HEDP, i:14). Collier may not yet have met this great man face to face, but he presented Peel with one of the six large-paper copies of HEDP on publication, no doubt hopeful of patronage.34 On 26 February 1829 (HCR Diary) Amyot first brought his protégé to a weekly meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, the elite if o en fussy club of literary, historical, and archaeological enthusiasts which since 1717 had promoted, sanctioned, or censured virtually all scholarly exploits in its declared orbit. Fellows (‘F.S.A.’ carried a weight of its own) enjoyed self- and mutual esteem,

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32. HEDP, iii:226. Collier collated a copy of the original quarto, presumably the Bridgewater, with the 1825 collected Marlowe (JPC sale, lot 1160; now FF). 33. Collier thanked Markland for a reference in 1831; HEDP, ii:173. 34. Peel thanked him and subsequently acknowledged two further gis, probably New Facts and New Particulars (Folger MS Y.d.341 [127–29]); but Collier seems not to have reaped any further benefits.


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although some (like Henry Crabb Robinson) seemed scarcely qualified to belong, and several meritorious antiquaries seem either to have been excluded on social grounds (trade connections, low birth) or to have spurned invitations. John Payne Collier, however, at forty, was an appropriate guest, and seventeen months later an appropriate fellow, elected on 9 December 1830, with Amyot and Douce as his sponsors. From John’s initial visit of February 1829, one meeting above all would prove fateful, and again Amyot provided the introduction. Young, sharp-witted, and sharp-tongued Frederic Madden, the rising assistant keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, was amiable and forthcoming enough to begin with; over the next forty-four years he would be friend, colleague, and critical adviser to Collier, and finally his mordant adversary. But now John lost no time in seeking access, through his acquaintance of one evening, to relevant manuscripts in the Harleian, Cotton, and supplementary collections under Madden’s care, and in tapping Madden’s palaeographical expertise.35 Other librarians, scholars, and private collectors may have entered John’s circle by way of the society. One fixture of its old guard was John Caley (1763– 1834, F.S.A. since 1786), a secretary of the ill-managed Record Commission and the Cerberus of countless historical records in the public domain. Before the dissolution of the commission in 1837 ‘applicants for historical documents had to apply at Caley’s private house, whither they were brought in bags by his footman’ (wrote Gordon Goodwin in DNB, 1886); ‘from the offices, described at the time as ‘‘dirty and dark’’, the public was rigidly excluded; the contents were kept in a state of the utmost disorder, the only clue to them being the indexes in Caley’s possession at his private house [in Exmouth Street, Spa Fields]. No access whatever was allowed to the indexes’. Caley has also been accused of removing wax seals from many of the documents in his care, perhaps temporarily, to make casts of them for his own use, but not (yet) of misappropriating the material in his charge. Collier in fact found him nothing but helpful, especially with the archives at the Chapter House, Westminster, which Collier employed extensively in HEDP. Several specimens later in Collier’s personal possession, however, seem to derive from that chaotic repository, and raise further questions of Caley’s administration. Robert Lemon II (1770–1835), son and father of distinguished public archivists, was effectively keeper of all the state papers not in Caley’s domain, and when Sir Robert Peel’s gesture of ordering for Collier ‘a collection . . . of such documents [in the State Paper Office] as related to the stage’ fell short of

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35. Two undated letters from Collier to Madden have been assigned by cataloguers to March 1829 (BL Egerton MS 2838, fols. 7–9). In the first Collier mentions that Amyot introduced him to Madden ‘Thursday week’.


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total effect, ‘my object was zealously seconded by Mr. Lemon’ (HEDP, i:xiv). Davies Gilbert (1767–1839), president since 1827 of the Royal Society, supplied John with his unpublished work on Cornish miracle plays (ii:140–41), and at least four of the Society of Antiquaries’ most distinguished collectors lent him valuable books and manuscripts. Hudson Gurney, M.P. (1775–1864), the vicepresident of the Antiquaries, ‘at the instance of my friend, Mr. Amyot’, gave John free access to the important Macro Moralities and the manuscript of The Castle of Perseverance, with its famous description of medieval staging (i:23; ii:196). Several manuscripts consulted, and one quoted extensively by Collier, ‘were in Mr. Craven Ord’s collection’ (i:20) or were ‘lately in the collection of Mr. Craven Ord’ (i:26), so that Collier may have seen them before January 1830, when Ord (1756–1832, F.S.A. 1775) sold up at auction and went abroad for his health. John Delafield Phelps lent him Robert Willis’s Mount Tabor (1639), with its eyewitness account of morality plays in sixteenth-century Gloucestershire (ii:273–75), though perhaps not Peter Beverley’s unique Ariodanto and Jenevra (1575).36 And the whimsical Joseph Haslewood passed along important data on Richard Burbage from his impressive collection (i:430) and gave Collier the use of a manuscript of six unpublished plays by William Percy (ii:351–52). Haslewood also appears to have offered the new fellow antiquary a volume of ‘Collections for the Stage’, mainly relevant to the post-Restoration; John returned it on 25 April 1831, finding with ‘some satisfaction . . . that I had nearly everything you have noted of an earlier date’, save a quotation from The Stage Player’s Complaint (1641), ‘very useful, [as] I had mistaken the date of it from never having seen the original’ (FF MS 340). This last may have furnished Collier his long footnote at ii:106, but the book is still misdated ‘during the plague of 1625’; and the Fillingham copy, the only one cited, is there described as ‘disposed of [by Longmans] to a great collector, in whose close custody it now remains’—that is, inaccessible. The ‘great collector’, in this instance, was George Daniel (1789–1864), whose celebrated library John did not penetrate until a er 28 June 1831;37 unlike Haslewood, Daniel was stingy with his treasures, and forty years on Collier damned him roundly: ‘Daniel is a great pretender, talks bad English and mispronounces it, and has no real knowledge of the inside of books, but gossips with great confidence about them and their contents. He buys books, etc., to sell again’ (OMD,

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36. At i:248 Collier described this as from the Gordonstoun sale (1816)—which we know he viewed closely—recording that ‘it was bought by Mr Phelps for £31 10s.’ But Phelps in fact bought it on behalf of Richard Heber; see Hunt 1996, p. 95. The book resurfaced in the fourth part of the Heber sale, lot 90. 37. In a letter of that date (bound in Huntington RB 106588) Collier thanked Daniel for an invitation to look over his books.


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iii:74). The far greater private library of Richard Heber was also frustratingly off-limits to John, but with other collectors his success seems remarkable. Haslewood and Phelps were original ‘Roxburghers’ (like Devonshire, Stafford, and Markland), and another Roxburghe Club member behaved with signal generosity toward John: Peregrine Towneley ‘with alacrity placed in my hands a series of Miracle-plays, long preserved in his family, older than any other manuscript of the same description in English’. The priceless Towneley manuscript of what we now call the Wakefield Plays—Collier preferred ‘Widkirk’—provided him with ninety pages of matter in HEDP, and one of its principal novelties of description; that John, a comparative stranger, was allowed to take such an artifact home speaks eloquently for the credit of his friends and sureties. Two usually cautious collectors were also open-handed with Collier, Benjamin Heywood Bright lending him the manuscript of The Play of Wit and Science, then unpublished and undescribed (HEDP, ii:342–45), and Sir Thomas Phillipps, ‘whose collection of manuscripts is well known’, attracting ‘my hearty acknowledgements’—though for just what is unclear.38 Another manuscript fanatic, William Upcott, had perhaps tried to help, and John Bowyer Nichols, the printer-antiquary and custodian of the Bowyer archives, was helpful in fact, lending the manuscript of the Chester cycle plays (ii:227–29). But Richard Heber, far and away the predominant bibliophile in Collier’s domain, proved otherwise. We do not know how hard, if at all, John tried to approach ‘the bookcormorant’ in the run-up to HEDP, but clearly he had not gained personal access to the vast Heber collections by 1831. He would later have a kind of revenge, in cataloguing (and sometimes transcribing) many of Heber’s choicest old English books; but his latter-day claims to intimacy with the library in Heber’s lifetime are certainly exaggerated, if not fictitious. Collier’s trawl of new friends in and outside the Society of Antiquaries finally gave his research for HEDP an archival direction. Before 1829 he cannot really have dealt much, if at all, with unpublished historical records and literary manuscripts; his scholarly discoveries, like that linking Udall and Ralph Roister Doister, all arose from reading old printed texts and drawing conclusions—o en shrewd, sometimes novel. But now, with a project whose daunting extent must have become clearer as he worked, Collier could not merely reread what his predecessors had known, adding a few new texts, and expect to supersede their conclusions. Malone, Steevens, and Chalmers were still the authorities, however disorganized their work may have seemed, and in seeking to place a formal History of English Dramatic Poetry alongside Thomas Warton’s

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38. Perhaps the Craven Ord manuscripts, many of which were bought by Phillipps.


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standard History of English Poetry, John would have to follow Warton’s example, and delve into records afresh. Through Frederic Madden the collections of the British Museum became increasingly accessible to John, notably the Cotton MSS in Madden’s special care (for the diary of Henry Machyn, but also for unpublished letters of John Field and Thomas Nashe, and a poem of John Heywood), the Harleian MSS (the diaries of John Manningham and Sir Humphrey Mildmay, and some royal inventories), the Royal MSS (where lurked two unpublicized masques of Ben Jonson), and the recently catalogued Lansdowne MSS, or ‘Burghley Papers’. Through Robert Peel and Robert Lemon came access to the State Paper Office, with its Blackfriars documents; through Charles Greville, access to the Privy Council Registers and the collection of printed proclamations in the Privy Council Office; and through old John Caley, access to a wealth of undescribed material at the Westminster Chapter House, including records of Henry Medwall, Thomas Wylley, and Samuel Daniel. In January 1830 Henry Ellis recommended John to the master of Dulwich College, in whose archives the Alleyn and Henslowe papers, first investigated by Edmond Malone, still remained, and John capitalized on that introduction in the spring.39 Lambeth Palace, probably approached through the Rev. George D’Oyly, made available Archbishop Laud’s correspondence (ii:36). The Society of Antiquaries itself yielded a few relevant manuscripts and broadsides, and in January 1830 John visited the Bodleian Library for the first time—examining printed books chiefly, if not exclusively, for no Bodleian manuscripts are described first-hand in HEDP. The generosity of private collectors—Towneley, Bright, Haslewood, Ord—has been mentioned, and a few booksellers—Thomas Thorpe, ‘the enterprising bookseller of Bedford-Street’ (iii:275); Thomas Rodd; and William Pickering—proved helpful too. Collier’s own private accumulation, however modest in its origins, supplied at least seven manuscripts, ranging from slight dra s of financial accounts to such literary revelations as a monologue by George Peele (i:284–88), poems by William Alabaster (ii:431–33) and Sir Geoffrey Fenton (i:xxv), and a leaf of Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris (iii:133–35). Typical of these specimens rescued from oblivion by the keen scholar-collector was a fragment of ‘what I have no doubt once formed part of Henslowe’s Diary’, which Collier ‘not very long since . . . bought at an auction’, found in the middle of a volume of old plays, ‘used as an index to keep a place’ (iii:89). Slips cut from the Dulwich manuscript had long circulated in the book world, and one might think that John—

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39. Collier asked Ellis for an introduction on 23 January (Folger MS Y.c.1055 [207]); four days later Ellis addressed the master, John Allen, saying that Collier was ‘very desirous to see the Manuscripts which formerly belonged to Philip Henslow’ (Dulwich College Library, MSS Box E28).


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so recently a reader there—would hardly have purloined such a scrap and then advertised its origin, but that sequence of events seems to be not impossible. Collier’s correspondents outside this immediate circle of antiquaries offered support of mixed value. W. Brownlow Waight of Pentonville sent him a list of ‘Old Plays up to 1700 in the library of the British Museum’, which Collier returned with thanks on 6 July 1829, asking further particulars about two entries; these would not in fact help him at all.40 William Hamper of Highgate, near Birmingham, ‘politely’ communicated extracts from rolls in the possession of Lord Stafford of Stafford Castle (i:18). And Crabb Robinson put John in touch with the distinguished German poet and Shakespearian Ludwig Tieck, who wrote in 1829 to suggest plays for a supplement to Dodsley; but while Collier was flattered by the approach he did not ‘altogether agree’ with Tieck’s opinions.41 ‘I shall buy tomorrow his book on the precursors of Shakespeare’, he told Robinson a er Christmas, with a view to being ‘on corresponding terms with such an enthusiastic lover of the old English drama’.42 But in the event he was unimpressed by Shakespeares Vorschule, devoting only one footnote (iii:148) to dismissing its character of Robert Greene; and no further exchanges between Tieck and Collier are known. With a flurry of archival research in late 1829, and a blitz of reorganizing and rewriting his notes in the light of new information, John thought his task nearly finished in February 1830. He then approached Murray with his preface, heard nothing for three weeks, and stiffly requested its return; he received Murray’s encouragement instead, and forwarded what he said was about twothirds of the text on 2 March.43 Murray offered him £100 a volume, and having now ‘very nearly completed the whole’, John found that ‘I cannot bring it within less than 3 vols 8vo of the size of the last Edit of Roscoe’s Leo X’ (21 April). On 10 May ‘two volumes, and 3/4 of the third, might be put into your printers hands tomorrow morning’, but Murray was maddeningly slow to respond. ‘You have in your hands the labours & collections of full fi een years’, John complained, ‘without the slightest acknowledgement on your part of the receipt of them. . . . [This is] not a fit state of things’ (12 August); and matters reached a flash point when Murray went off to Scotland without answering, or paying John the advance he requested, of fi y percent. Indeed seven months passed with HEDP still in proof, but much of the blame lay with Collier: it was ‘nearly ready’ on 2 May 1831, but with part of the index yet to prepare, and ‘there are four places

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40. JPC to Waight, 6 July 1829, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (202). 41. Tieck to JPC, 6 August 1829, Folger MS Y.d.341 (1); see OMD, iv:90, misdating the letter. 42. HCR Correspondence, 27 December 1829. 43. All the letters cited here are retained in the John Murray archives.


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which I must cancel, but the Printer is not in fault. Two arise from the acquisition of subsequent information—one is a place where I have altered my mind a er consideration; and the fourth is a mistake of my own.’ On 16 May Murray paid John the final £200 for his copyright, and on the evening of 6 June 1831 six copies of the finished book were in the hands of the author. But ‘the labels are all wrong, and must be changed’, he protested (7 June), vainly as it turned out. ‘The chief subject of the book is not ‘‘Annals of the Stage’’ but ‘‘the History of Dramatic Poetry’’, and therefore it was I altered the title. The sooner this is amended the better, as it tends to give buyers an inferior notion of the undertaking.’ Enough was enough for the Murrays, however, and the original cloth binding of Collier’s magnum opus is found only with the offending spine-labels. At least it was ‘out’. One thousand copies of HEDP were printed by Clowes for Murray, whose cost for them, including John’s £300, approached one pound a set. John received first six, and finally fi een copies, in addition to six special copies on ‘drawing royal paper’. He told Shoberl that he had so many obligations that he had to purchase ten more.44 Of the large-paper copies one of course went to Devonshire, another to Sir Robert Peel, one to Amyot, one—a flyer?—to the bibliophile Philip Augustus Hanrott (whose Christian names John seemed not to know), one to the sceptical Dyce, and the last John retained. Sales of the regular issue were slow, and two years later Murray still had more than 660 copies on hand; he then remaindered 625 to Thomas Tegg, at three shillings each. ‘Murray will never get back his money for it’, Dyce had knowingly assured Collier in July 1831. In December 1838 Murray’s terminal account for the publication puts his loss at £534 3s.45 The final form of HEDP, like the misleading labels themselves, betrays signs of its hectic completion. Despite ‘the labours & collections of full fi een years’, most of the physical preparation and much of the research had in fact occupied less than twenty-four months. The structure of the work is curiously tripartite, with ‘Annals of the Stage to the Restoration’ occupying the first volume and a quarter of the second; ‘The History of English Dramatic Poetry’ (which ends with Shakespeare, while the ‘Annals’ go half a century further) the next 625 pages; and ‘An Account of the Old Theatres of London’ (again, to the Restoration) the last 190. Inevitably the treatment of some plays and persons is divided or duplicated among the three disjunct treatises, and the process of incorporating new discoveries or revisions made in 1830–31, without reworking large areas of text, resulted in much unintegrated detail and many discursive foot-

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44. 4 November 1831, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (178). 45. Dyce to JPC, 5 July 1831 (Folger MS Y.d.6 [91]); Murray archives, Accounts Ledger C, p. 210.


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notes. But Collier’s object was less to provide a coherent account of a literary genre and its historical embodiment in performance than to set out clearly a mass of old and new data—biographical, bibliographical, socio-historical, and archaeological—in a manageable compass. His critical estimates of the drama as literature are neither shy nor unworthy, but the first purpose of HEDP was factual: Collier saw himself, o en all too zealously, as the castigator of past scholars’ errors and the champion of a new canon of evidence. Nor did he worry overmuch about the challenge HEDP posed to the general reader, or about the ‘style a little heavy’ that Dyce would contrast, unfavourably, with Warton’s. ‘With regard to the modes of making it public & its pretensions as a popular work, I can only say that if it be not popular I do not think it is my fault. To have treated the subject more lightly, would have been to spoil what I hope is a good book and such as ought to (& in due time will) find its way into every mans library who has any pretension to education. This has been my chief aim.’ 46 And for certain of his contemporaries Collier’s aim was fulfilled. Leigh Hunt at once gave HEDP ‘very kind & handsome notices’ in the Tatler over no fewer than six issues (nos. 241, 243–45, and 247–48, 11–20 June), for which John thanked him initially on 14 June.47 John’s letter indicates that their old acquaintance was too slight for him to count on a conventional puff—‘I re-made your acquaintance in one respect at an unlucky time . . . because many might think (I hope you do not) that I was in some degree influenced by a wish to secure a favourable critique in the Tatler’—so that Hunt’s praise was welcome indeed; equally welcome may have been his disparagement of Collier’s forerunners, ‘the Reeds and Ritsons’ with their ‘pamphlets’—compared with Collier’s ‘three thick volumes . . . full of the most conquering corrections of [his] predecessors’—of Ritson’s and Gifford’s unwarranted ‘airs’, and, best of all, of Malone, who ‘turns out to have been a lax fellow in comparison with Mr. Collier,—culpably careless in his decisions, and immoral in his dates’. Of course Hunt’s antipathy toward Gifford and Malone had political origins, but his estimate of HEDP was one John could be proud to receive: ‘a work long wanting, [which] will unquestionably take its stand above all others, as the standard book of reference upon all subjects connected with the stage history of England’. A er that, the inevitable qualifications (‘we miss . . . something more of entertainment . . . and a grappling with the spirit as well as the letter of the geniuses who founded our drama . . . and we have been mortified, in what criticism there is, to find not even an allusion to those excellent critics of later days, Messrs. Lamb and Hazlitt’) might seem tolerable.

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46. JPC to John Murray III, 7 June 1831, Murray archives. 47. BL Add. MS 38,109, fols. 79–80.


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The popular press may have offered HEDP the kind of encouragement due a fellow newspaperman,48 but other periodicals stressed, perhaps unnecessarily, the limited audience such a work must address. The Literary Gazette called it ‘a publication of vast research and great ability’, abounding with ‘solid information’—which for the earlier period ‘may not, it is true, come under the denomination of light reading’; ‘more general amusement we must . . . seek in the anecdotes and stories which increase as the narrative descends the stream of time’. These sentiments were echoed in the Gentleman’s Magazine (September– October 1831), which questioned ‘what success this excellent work will find’ in a world preoccupied with contemporary politics. ‘Quietly disposed people’, it allowed, ‘may find agreeable relief in the curious and amusing archaeologicals of these elaborate and copious volumes.’ So Jane Collier confirmed to Henry Crabb Robinson on 23 September: ‘John’s book is too much for antiquarians to be fit for the general taste, but I have heard & seen it well spoken of ’ (HCR Correspondence). J. A. Heraud, reviewing the book for Fraser’s in July 1832, admitted that ‘though we descry much undaunted enthusiasm of research, we lack, we think, much apparent sympathy with the essential attributes of the most sacred of all arts’, for a poetical critic ‘should have a heart, as well as a head’. Comparing HEDP with a contemporary pot-boiler (John Galt’s Lives of the Players) might seem gratuitous, but at least two reviewers chose to do so. The New Monthly Magazine for August 1831 found Collier a paragon of ‘learning, taste, and judgement’, who ‘has so thoroughly si ed and discussed the subject as to have le little or nothing to reward the labour of future inquirers’, but these were marginal compliments, as it turned out. The central section of Collier’s text, with its extracts and critical estimates, was ‘by far the most pleasant and profitable portion of the work’; otherwise HEDP seemed a fundamentally antiquarian work, and ‘the pleasure which the antiquary takes in the prosecution of his studies is [one] . . . into the spirit of which the fewest of mankind can enter’. By contrast Lives of the Players is ‘very agreeable and amusing’ and ‘will be, and ought to be, extensively read’. Galt’s light theatrical biographies were ideal for the country retreat or the seaside ‘during the present season’ (a reminder that Collier’s three bulky volumes trickled from the press at the onset of a torrid London summer). The reviewer for Ballantyne’s weekly Edinburgh Literary Journal, however, pairing the same works, dismissed his countryman Galt with contempt, and praised not only Collier’s ‘acute, laborious, and persevering research’ but also—uncommonly—his ‘just and critical discernment’ which had ‘enabled him to winnow

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48. Collier himself inserted anecdotal extracts from the book in more than one of his theatrical columns for the Observer.


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the chaff from the wheat—to attribute to every particle of information its due importance’ (2 and 9 July 1831). The most substantial and serious notice that HEDP elicited was that in John Murray’s own quintessentially establishmentarian Quarterly Review. Its unnamed author was Henry Hart Milman,49 who may or may not have remembered a derisive account of his own play Fazio, sixteen years earlier, by the unnamed John Payne Collier in the Critical Review. In January 1832 Milman devoted no fewer than forty dense pages to a documented summary of HEDP and its principal concerns, paying special attention to the medieval cycles, to the Ralph Roister Doister discovery, and to Collier’s account of Marlowe and his pre-Shakespearian contemporaries; but the critical evaluation was completed a page from the start: Had Mr. Collier displayed equal skill in the arrangement and distribution of his materials, as he has zeal and diligence in obtaining them, his work might have been, what it professes to be, a history of the English drama. At present . . . it is rather a series of historical dissertations than a history; it is not one, but three separate works . . . Annals of the Stage, Annals of Dramatic Poetry, and an Account of Theatres and their Appurtenances . . . a sort of historic trilogy, but without any continuous interest; with three beginnings, three middles, and three ends. . . . It might be difficult, but the increased popularity of his volumes would, we are persuaded, amply repay Mr. Collier for the trouble of recasting his whole work . . . into one consecutive narrative, with its episodes skilfully interwoven, and some of the very curious documents, particularly the accounts, withdrawn from the text (where they arrest and detain too long the common reader,) and thrown into an appendix. Unless Mr. Collier shall thus condescend to render his book more attractive, he must content himself with the praise of having made useful collections for the history of the drama, rather than of having adequately filled that chasm in our literary history of which he justly complains.50 Friends to whom John had presented copies were expectably polite, Douce gracious, even George Daniel complimentary—but in the context of requesting a favour 51—and Sir Walter Scott replied with characteristic generosity, although

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49. On 22 June 1830 Milman had asked the publisher: ‘Would your book on the Early History of the Stage, Collier, do for the Review?’; Murray archives. 50. Quarterly Review 46 (January 1832), 477–518. Incomprehensibly, Ganzel (p. 47) described this strict but judicious review as one of ‘almost unqualified commendation’. 51. Daniel to JPC, 20 October 1832 (Folger MS Y.d.341 [33]), praising HEDP and asking if Collier could give Daniel’s farce, Sworn at Highgate, a notice in the Morning Chronicle.


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John had to nudge him.52 Scott, in his last illness, took time to praise Collier’s intentions, although clearly he had not yet read the book thoroughly, and to encourage him ‘not only to republish the ‘‘Annals of the Stage’’, but to meditate a complete history of our English Dramatic Poetry’, to replace those ‘snatches of intelligence which have been gleaned together for the illustration of Shakespeare’.53 Collier treasured this letter, but it may have puzzled him slightly: what Scott urged him to attempt he might say he had done. What Scott in fact recommended, however, was ‘a general history [drawn] out of the Annals which you have collected with such uncommon diligence’, i.e., a digested, chronologically ordered history of the English drama both as literature and theatre, rather than the raw annals and itemized entries of HEDP. Independently Scott thus concurred with Milman’s later advice in the Quarterly, a journal long edited by J. G. Lockhart, Scott’s own literary apostle. We have no record of any reaction to HEDP from Lamb, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, or Coleridge.54 One gratifying response, if fi een months a er publication, came from Collier’s old comrade Barron Field, now Chief Justice of Gibraltar. Field wholeheartedly supported the design of HEDP against the quibbles of the Quarterly and others: ‘as for weaving these three volumes into a popular story for the Family Library . . . it is impossible. An antiquary’s history it is, and such it must remain. A populace [sic] history of the Stage must be le to such easy writers as my dear friend Horace Smith, who in his ‘‘Festivals and Games’’, tells us that the O. P. [i.e., Old Price] Row happened on the opening of the Covent Garden Theatre in 1792, instead of the new Covent Garden Theatre in 1809. There’s a stage-annalist for you’. Field went on to urge John to edit Shakespeare for Murray (‘omitting one half of the rubbish of Johnson & Steevens, Warburton, Malone & Reed’, and prefixing his own Annals), and offered to present him with his set of Reed’s twenty-one-volume edition ‘with MS. notes by myself, Leigh Hunt & Professor [James] Scholefield (not that there is much in any of these)’, along with other manuscript notes, that John might ‘cut them up, as they richly deserve. I shall be very happy to rid my library of this Commentatorship, which the longer I live the less I estimate, the appropriateness of which I have long doubted, and of the inaccuracy and superficiality of which, even on the part of Malone & Ritson, you have convinced me.’ 55 John’s heart must have swelled.

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52. JPC to Scott, 24 August 1824, asking if Scott had received HEDP and saying, ‘I sent it purely as a testimony of my admiration & respect’; NLS MS 3919, fol. 49. 53. Scott to JPC, 27 August 1831, Folger MS Y.d.341 (141), printed in OMD, iv:99–100, and in Grierson, xii:481–83. 54. Coleridge’s copy (now BL C.182.aa.1) is annotated by Ludwig Tieck, notably in the sections discussing Marlowe and Kyd. 55. Field to JPC, 8 September 1832, EUL MS AAF 23.


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How important a book is HEDP, in terms of literary history, scholarship, and criticism, from the perspective of one hundred and sixty years? It is easy to overstate its originality, as Collier himself did (‘we are [until now] without any history of English dramatic poetry’; i:v), and as one recent biographer puts it, extravagantly: ‘The systematic study of English drama as a genre began with [HEDP ’s] publication . . . before Collier, drama was thought to be ‘‘serious’’ literature only when it was written in verse and it was usually considered as poetry, not as drama. English drama, it was assumed, began with Shakespeare and apparently ended with him too. Collier’s book changed that.’ 56 Such a simplification ignores not only the critical range of Malone and his Shakespearian predecessors (Capell, Steevens, Farmer, and Reed above all) and the comparative judgement implicit in Langbaine and his revisers (Charles Gildon, William Oldys, David Erskine Baker), but even such specialized works as Thomas Hawkins’s Origins of the English Drama (1773),57 and the independent commentary on Jonson (by John Upton, 1749), Beaumont and Fletcher (by John Monck Mason, 1798), Massinger (Thomas Davies, 1789) and Ford (Henry Weber and his colloquists, 1811–12). Bishop Percy had discussed mysteries and moralities in his Reliques (1765), followed by Hawkins and Warton himself (who also treated Marlowe and Kyd); Collier’s way with the earlier drama was likewise smoothed by his friend J. H. Markland’s dissertation on the Chester Plays (Markland’s notes of 1818 appear in the Boswell-Malone Variorum of 1821) and by others he cites (e.g., Gilbert Davies), or deliberately does not (e.g., William Hone’s Ancient Mysteries Described, 1823). But for the study of drama as drama, and the broadening of the field to give Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries their due, Collier’s most obvious precursors—as Leigh Hunt was aware— were Lamb and, even more visibly, William Hazlitt. Hazlitt’s lectures on the ‘neglected’ dramatists of the age of Elizabeth, given at the Surrey Institution late in 1819, cover in no hasty manner fi een writers from Sackville and Norton to Jonson and Ford, and carry on to discuss nine ‘single plays’ such as John Heywood’s The Four PP, Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, The Return from Parnassus, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, and George a Greene.58 His estimates may not have

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56. Ganzel, p. 43. No such claim of originality has been mooted for HEDP in the sphere of stage history. Malone’s Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage, and of the Economy and Usages of Our Ancient Theatres (1790) occupies over four hundred pages in Boswell’s 1821 Shakespeare Variorum, consolidating more than a century of theatrical reminiscence and scholarship (Flecknoe, Wright, Downes, Steevens, Reed), and latterly George Chalmers and John Nichols had extended Malone’s survey. 57. Especially the ‘Preface’ in vol. 3. Collier annotated a copy: JPC sale, lot 419. 58. They were first published in 1820 as Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. Collier may have attended the series, but is not mentioned in Robinson’s account


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influenced Collier greatly (The Spanish Tragedy, like The First Part of Jeronimo, was ‘an indifferent piece of work’, and Lyly was positively admired), but if credit is to be given for priority in taking the non-Shakespearian drama ‘seriously’, it is Hazlitt’s, not Collier’s. Nonetheless HEDP does present, for the first time, an extended and coherent overview of the drama adjacent to Shakespeare, and in that respect it is arguably the fount of a latter-day flood. It may also lay claim to many innovations, both critical and scholarly, which deserve acknowledgement. Collier’s account of the rise of ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ in the sixteenth century, from traditions both native and classical, religious and courtly, had not been anticipated in any such detail as he gave. His insistence on conflating ‘mystery’ with ‘miracle’ plays, while rejecting the former term, has not proved enduring, but his distinction of both from ‘moralities’ is more clearly perceived, and stands up. Most of all, as a literary critic Collier stressed the merits and singularities (independent of Shakespeare) of Shakespeare’s most talented predecessors and contemporaries. While reminding us that Shakespeare himself was a child of his time, and must have learned from his fellows, Collier was principally concerned to allow them lives of their own, and merit other than as Shakespearian fodder, or as perpetrators of the ‘illustrations’ beloved of Shakespearian commentators. This purpose was not in itself startling by 1831—Lamb and Hazlitt having led the way, Dyce was now firmly upon it—but Collier’s old enthusiasm for the unexploited seems to have matured. His character of the dramatic work of John Lyly, for example, as ingenious and stylish but essentially inferior to that of his own imitators Greene and Lodge, is judicious, and his rejection of Malone’s idea ‘that Lyly’s plays, compared with his pamphlets, are free from these [i.e., Euphuistic] affected allusions’ cannot be disputed (iii:173). His championing of Thomas Kyd as a poet ‘of very considerable mind’, superior in many respects to Lyly, Greene, Lodge, and Peele, was audacious and innovative as well: Lamb—echoed by Hazlitt in 1819—had thought only the post-Kydian ‘additions’ to The Spanish Tragedy worth preservation as poetry; but Collier discerned the ‘force and character’ of the original blank verse, and considered Kyd’s second only to Marlowe’s ‘among the predecessors of Shakespeare’ (iii:207). His appraisal of the old play itself as ‘a very powerful performance’ seems prescient indeed, as do his enthusiasm for Marlowe and his re-estimation, play by play, of such workaday toilers as Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle. The scholarly novelties of HEDP were however what Collier piqued himself upon most, and they are numerous, if chiefly because of his access to untapped

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(Morley 1938, i:218–20). See also Garrett 1964, demonstrating Hazlitt’s use of the six-volume Dilke Old English Plays (1814–15).


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archival repositories. Perhaps the best known of them remains his discovery of the true date of Twelh Night in Manningham’s diary, whence also came gossip about Jonson, Marston, and Burbage. From other sources, public and private, Collier was able to summarize several ‘new’ texts of plays, such as Thersites, Queen Hester, Robin Conscience, Wit and Science, and Misogonus; and there are some dozen or more theatrical records of varying significance unrecorded before. If displaying these for the first time were all Collier had achieved, his work would remain permanently useful, and so in that respect it has done. But among the revelations of HEDP are at least fi een equally new fabrications or forgeries—biographical, literary, socio-historical—through which John Payne Collier escalated his mischief from whimsical journalistic hoaxing to solemn scholarly fraud. Here begins, in effect—despite abundant prefigurations—Collier’s spectacular double career as a scholar (astute, conscientious) and forger (calculating, impenitent). Given the moral outrage the latter aspect now attracts, it will require our wondering why it began when it did, and how it might strike a contemporary.

A Digression on Forgery Writers about literary fabrication and forgery tend to stress the spectacular.59 Most old accounts focus on conspicuous episodes or notorious perpetrators, o en involving a single genre or subject: racy tales of fraud, credulity, and exposure, with edifying verdicts of shame on the guilty. Moral indignation seems inevitable (‘impudent’ and ‘unscrupulous’ are the usual epithets), alongside a sometimes perfunctory curiosity about motive, although a hint of admiration for the hoaxer may intrude, especially when his offence appears victimless. More recent scholars have turned from detection and judgement to contextualizing and overview, exploring the ideological implications of this perverse but hoary activity, distinguishing and categorizing its varieties, and seeking to appreciate its artistic or technical merits, if not quite to decriminalize it.60 Long-term ‘traditions’ of textual fakery have been adduced, suggesting similarities of motive

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59. Here and hereaer we will ordinarily use ‘forgery’ to mean physical forgery (e.g., handwriting that imitates the ancient), and ‘fabrication’ to mean text or testimony that is invented, but not necessarily forged. ‘Fakery’ encompasses both activities. Ruthven (2001, pp. 34–62) also summarized recent efforts to refine or modify the terminology and typology of literary forgery, although many of the distinctions drawn by him and others remain less than helpful for the close study of material like ours. 60. Traditional studies include Chambers 1891, Farrer 1907, and, latterly, with emphasis on the psychology of crime, Cole 1955; see also the overview by Nicolas Barker in Mark Jones 1990, pp. 22–27. The new school is represented by Ian Haywood (1986), Anthony Graon (1990), Nick Groom (1993/94), Paul Baines (1999), and K. K. Ruthven (2001).


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and design over centuries, even millennia. The relationship between fakery and art, and its effect or dependence upon cultural history, now bear reconsidering: thus Robinson Crusoe may be viewed as a conventionally faked travelogue, Sigonio’s ‘Ciceronian’ Consolatio as pseudo-classical homage, and ‘Ossian’ and ‘Rowley’ as avatars (or by-products) of the Romantic movement. Broad strokes in the traditionary portrait are fashionable. Reasonable as it is to identify a tradition of literary fabrication and forgery, and to place Collier within it, too broad a pattern will not really help us with Collier himself: we cannot profitably link HEDP with the Epistles of Phalaris, the Donation of Constantine, or Mandeville’s Travels. A century is long enough to survey, and the tradition we infer from a sequence of literary events will mean little, and clarify less, if the participant himself would not recognize either the tradition or the events. For that largely biographical reason we prefer to distinguish certain categories and magnitudes of forgery/fabrication, which ‘broad stroke’ accounts need not do; we seek precedents that an acting forger/fabricator could perceive as his own historical context. Major literary inventions, for example—a long text, a mass of interrelated data—may not differ in principle from brief or scattered impostures, but there is a practical difference between them so great that the scholarly hoaxer, guilty of a sly interpolation that corrupts an old text, would probably not appreciate his affinity with the creator of ‘Ossian’, nor (what is important) have drawn his inspiration from so bold an inventor. But the names of Lauder or Steevens, or even of the irreproachable Thomas Warton (did he know), ought indeed to elicit a smile or a wince from him—by the electricity of kinship-recognition. Traditions of fakery must reflect such subtle distinctions if they are to explain subtle practitioners. Large-scale literary fabrications form a class of their own. In the early eighteenth century the great questioned literary text, well known to Collier, was certainly Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood (1728), a play Theobald claimed to have discovered and ‘revised and adapted’ from three earlier manuscript ‘copies’ (none now known), at least one of them somehow attributed to Shakespeare. Double Falsehood in Theobald’s modernized version ran successfully on the Drury Lane stage, and was then published as ‘written originally by William Shakespeare’; but no serious scholar in the eighteenth century quite believed that: Richard Farmer thought the old author almost certainly Shirley, and Malone nominated Massinger, while others leaned toward John Fletcher. Only Isaac Reed, among early specialists, argued that Theobald himself had composed the play from scratch, a view that Theobald’s old enemy Alexander Pope had first encouraged, and then seemingly denied; Gifford, who admired Double Falsehood, never doubted its antiquity, and remarked that ‘Pope, and his little knot of criticks (without seeing the honour they did [Theobald]), affected to


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believe [the text] his own’.61 Scholarly opinion is still very much divided,62 but Theobald’s account of his source remains hard to accept, and in Collier’s day Double Falsehood stood out as a puzzlement, with Theobald’s credibility as the pre-eminent Shakespearian authority of his own day held in question, if not in contempt. The tradition of large-scale literary fabrication, real or suspected, blossomed afresh in the 1760s with James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ and Thomas Chatterton’s ‘Rowley’. Like the Defoeian novel itself, however, whose conventional profession of veracity has le us uncertain about not a few eighteenth-century texts,63 these impostures had by Collier’s time already assumed the status of literature, and controversy over their authenticity would seem latterly pointless.64 Chatterton, at least, was admired as a poet, though his escapades as a forger and his suicide may have attracted more critical attention, then and now, than his work really merits. But another ‘marvellous boy’, William Henry Ireland, was a deliberate hoaxer with little to recommend him save his precocious ingenuity. His physical forgeries of Shakespearian papers and documents, and fragments of ‘Hamblette’ and ‘Kynge Leare’, designed to impress his bibliophile father, deceived a few credulous devotees at the outset, but most experienced literary antiquaries shrugged them off. Malone’s magisterial exposure of 1796, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers (of which Collier possessed

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61. Cf. Lounsbury 1906, p. 151; and Bertram 1965, p. 182. Pope originally attributed some questionable lines to Theobald (Bertram, p. 184n., citing a publication of 1728), but later told Aaron Hill that they were ‘of that Age’, i.e., Shakespeare’s; Pope to Hill, 9 June 1738, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), iv:102. Gifford’s remark occurs in his edition of Philip Massinger’s Plays (1805), iii:154. 62. Few, however, would concur with Haywood (1986, p. 186) that it is a ‘Shakespearian counterfeit’ like W. H. Ireland’s Vortigern; for further discussion see Seary 1990, pp. 219–20. This is not the place for a judgement of Double Falsehood: the point is that most contemporaries suspected it, and all doubted the Shakespeare attribution. At the same time, few or none dismissed it altogether. 63. While Robinson Crusoe is clearly fiction, even if based on Alexander Selkirk’s experience, many other narratives have been variously designated fiction and non-fiction over two centuries: to name a few, Defoe’s own Robert Drury’s Journal of Madagascar (1729) and the reports of Richard Castleman (1725), Matthew Bishop of Deddington (1755), Thomas Pellew or Pellow in Barbary (1751), and Thomas Anbury in America (1789). Some of the more obvious fictive works are treated by Philip Gove in The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (New York, 1941); others largely in passing in Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (Berkeley, 1962); but the whole range of these deserves fuller investigation. Is it at all clear, for example, whether the account of Ascension Island in the journal of a perished Dutch sailor (An Authentick Relation of the Many Hardships and Sufferings, 1728) is genuine? 64. The same might be said of specimens of a Welsh ‘bardic tradition’ championed as ancient by Edward Williams (‘Iolo Morganwg’), which are now recognized as his own compositions; see Prys Morgan, Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 1975), esp. pp. 75–91; and (in Welsh) Ceri W. Lewis, Iolo Morganwg (Caernarvon, 1998).


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Malone’s own marked-up copy), seemed to some rival contemporaries a pompous or cocksure production, though its learning and methodology set new standards in the analysis of questioned documents; the ‘Ireland Controversy’ of 1796–99 was in fact less about Ireland’s impostures than about rivalry among strong-willed commentators.65 Malone, Ritson, Chalmers, James Boaden, and the elder Ireland, among others, traded insults by way of disputing each other’s expertise, and Charles Lamb’s friend James White published a parody of the original ‘papers and instruments’ as Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, again a book John Payne Collier possessed and knew well.66 Meanwhile Ireland compounded his audacity by fabricating (but not forging) two complete plays of Shakespeare, Vortigern (acted once, and jeered off the stage) and Henry the Second (unacted). These deceived no one, and by 1805 Ireland found it more profitable to confess and claim credit for his own youthful inventions; he spent much of the rest of his life transcribing his forgeries, as forgeries, for autograph collectors, turning the episode into an industry. A few faked inscriptions in printed books turn up still, and may cause some trouble; but ordinarily Ireland’s grandiose claims (mostly for Shakespeare), unconvincing script, and incredible orthography render him harmless. Collier was unamused, late in life, by Ireland’s scapegrace activities: ‘I do not like the man, nor his attempt at imposition’, he crisply informed a correspondent who had offered him (tongue-in-cheek?) an oil-portrait of the trickster.67 Rounding out a quartet of boy-forgers with literary ambitions are two younger contemporaries of Collier, the high-spirited Manchester youths James Crossley and William Harrison Ainsworth. Aged respectively seventeen and twelve, in 1817 they began a five-year spree of hoaxes in various British journals, publishing specimens of imaginary sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems and plays in Arliss’s Magazine, the Imperial, the New Monthly, and the Edinburgh Magazine, where Collier’s dramatic essays had just been appearing. These ranged from lyrics and verse passages by ‘William Aynesworthe’, ‘Richard Clitheroe’, ‘Cheviot Ticheburn’, and ‘Thomas Hall’, to extended extracts of a tragedy, ‘The Famouse Historie of Petronius Maximus, with the Tragicall Deathe of Aetius . . . Now Attempted in Blanke Verse by W. S.’, supposedly from a printed quarto of 1619.68 Forty years later Crossley would at-

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65. The most recent account of the controversy, unsatisfactory in many respects, is Kahan 1998. There are no adequate published biographies or bibliographies of Ireland. 66. Lamb, who may have helped to write the book, was fond of giving copies away: see An Old Man’s Diary, iv:5, although Collier himself ‘cannot see the drollery and refined humour in [the Original Letters] that C. L. discovers’. 67. JPC to unknown correspondent, 18 April 1878, FF MS 325. 68. See Freeman and Freeman 1993, pp. 14–23; and Ellis 1911, ii:347–53.


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tempt to father the last of these juvenile fabrications upon Collier himself. Ainsworth turned his fictive imagination to novel-writing, with great contemporary success, and Crossley acquired a measure of fame as the true author of a Thomas Browne fake. This, the well-known ‘Fragment on Mummies’, deceived Browne’s editor Simon Wilkin in 1836, and though discredited within twenty years it has attracted the idiosyncratic admiration of several twentieth-century enthusiasts.69 None of the above examples provides a blueprint for long-term success in deception, should a forger require one, if only because they are too vulnerably extended, and subject to too many tests, aesthetic and philological. A discrete sub-tradition, that of faked old popular balladry, offered more scope. Ballads were simpler, stylistically primitive, repetitious, and, in most descended texts, already corrupt or debased, so that a new-minted example could nearly always stand up to comparison with something deemed ancient. The celebrated Scottish example Hardyknute, composed about 1719 by Sir John Bruce and/or Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, ‘passed as a genuine relic until a sufficient number of scholars developed a tact for discerning the real folk product’, and Allan Ramsay thought nothing of doubling its length in 1724, as he had earlier ‘expanded’ Christ’s Kirk on the Green.70 Only when John Pinkerton contrived an entire ‘second part’ of Hardyknute (1781), which he said he had reconstructed from ‘the memory of a lady in Lanarkshire’, was the great watchdog of scholarly fraud, Joseph Ritson, aroused.71 Ritson waged war against Pinkerton’s genteel fabrications for more than a decade, and against Bishop Percy as well, for what he perceived as textual restorations verging on fakery. Percy’s reliance in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) upon his own ‘folio manuscript’ of seventeenthcentury ballads drove Ritson to suspect more than his editorial judgement. ‘It is a very common, but at the same time, a very unreasonable practice in commentators and others’, he scathingly wrote, ‘to bid their readers see this or that scarce book, of which it is, as they well know, frequently impossible for them to procure a sight. But never was this absurdity carryed to such an extent of mockery as it is in [the Reliques]; where the learned prelate very coolly orders us to inspect a poem, only extant, as he is well assured, and has elsewhere told us, in a certain folio ms. in his own possession, which, perhaps, no one ever

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69. Geoffrey Keynes called it ‘a literary forgery which, judged purely on its own merits, could ill be spared’ (Bibliography of Browne [1924], pp. 235–36), and reprinted it in his edition of Browne’s Works (1928–31), v:459–63; an American critic, Robert M. Gay, thought it contained ‘a passage that has always seemed to me one of the greatest in English prose’ (quoted in Kane 1933, p. 274); and for Graon 1990, p. 137, the whole piece was ‘splendid’, and its fabrication seemed ‘almost to have been a rational career move’ by Crossley. 70. Friedman 1961, pp. 159 and 137–38; cf. Farrer 1907, pp. 250–67. 71. See Haywood 1986, pp. 116–17; and Bronson 1938, i:114–22 and 198–200.


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saw, and which (if it really exist) he will, for his own sake, take effectual care that no one shall see.’ 72 Ritson’s contempt for sequestered documentation, and his suspicion of what might be called ‘custodial fraud’, could apply, with some justice, to a host of Collier’s publications from HEDP forward. As it happens, Percy’s folio manuscript did exist, and Percy had taken no seriously dishonest liberties with its texts,73 but the scepticism of his adversary reflects a state of affairs in the ballad world that encouraged no blind faith. The respected Stamford antiquary Francis Peck, for instance, included in a manuscript collection of ballads dated 1735 one of ‘Robin Whood turned Hermit’, which J. C. Holt has shown is a modern invention, and Peck’s solemn commentary suggests that he himself was its author.74 Fragments of a crude satirical ballad on Sir Thomas Lucy, the deer-farming magistrate of Charlecote, near Stratford, had figured in Shakespearian literature since Rowe, but at some time before 1790 John Jordan, a wheelwright and Shakespeare enthusiast of nearby Tiddington, claimed to have discovered the manuscript of a complete version ‘in a chest of drawers, that formerly belonged to Mrs. Dorothy Tyler, of Shottery’. It seems clear that this was Jordan’s own handiwork, but Malone printed it (1790, 1821), while firmly declaring: ‘the whole is a forgery’.75 Many other less provocative ‘old’ ballads have been questioned as modern, including those in the collections of John Smith (Gaelic Antiquities, 1780), Edward Jones (Musical and Poetical Relics, 1784), and ‘Iolo Morganwg’, and even the celebrated ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ had its doubters; in the next century the great canonizer Francis James Child was not immune to mistaking a literary for a folk ballad,76 nor were his contemporaries, including Collier. Collier himself, with an affection for balladry that went back to his boyhood, would consciously imitate and (at last) fabricate popular ballads all his adult life. In that sense he inherited the tradition of Bruce, Peck, and Pinker-

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72. Remarks on the Last Edition of Shakespeare (1783), p. 167; see Bronson 1938, ii:543–53. 73. Some ballads were greatly amplified from modern versions, but Percy did not conceal this; see Groom 1999. Haywood 1986, p. 106, accused Percy of ‘dissembling’ when he stressed the folio MS as the source of the poems in Reliques, as only 45 of the 176 poems in the first edition were taken from it; but this is hardly fraud. Percy’s own long ballad, The Hermit of Warkworth (1771), may be viewed as a ‘conventional’ imitation, and there is no evidence that contemporary readers thought it ancient. 74. Holt 1989, pp. 180–84 and 200n. 75. See Chambers, WS, ii:291–95 and 380–82, with references to earlier publications of the ballad. In 1844 Collier (Shakespeare, i:xcv) mentioned its appearance in Malone, saying that the ballad ‘is evidently not genuine’, and implying, slyly, that Malone had not appreciated that fact. 76. Child no. 137 is a Collier fabrication: see A. Freeman 1993, pp. 10–12. For the nineteenthcentury ballad-inventions of Allan Cunningham (published by R. H. Cromek) and Robert Surtees (which fooled Sir Walter Scott), see H. B. Wheatley, ed., Percy’s Reliques (1886), i:xliv–xlviii.


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ton, as in his youthful jeux d’esprit (Churchyard, Punch and Judy at Margate) he may seem to have followed the literary lead of young Chatterton and W. H. Ireland, as did Ainsworth and Crossley independently. But historical fabrication or forgery is another sort of activity, and still another—again a sub-species—is editorial or commentarial fakery. Both have their own British traditions in the years before Collier, and their recognized exponents, both clever and clumsy. Perhaps the cleverest of them was unknown as such to Collier, or to all but a few of his fellows, for Charles Bertram’s audacious faking of a medieval account of Britain by one ‘Richard of Westminster’,77 replete with unrecorded or relocated Roman place names and a purportedly fourteenth-century road map, escaped widespread exposure for over a century. This extended concoction (the text ‘transcribed’ by young Bertram in Copenhagen, the map and a few lines of forged tracery submitted only as ‘rough copies’) victimized first William Stukeley and his fellows at the Society of Antiquaries (1747–56); then, as published in 1757, it took in nearly every historian of Roman Britain until 1869, when evidence of its anachronistic Latinity and derivations from late sources were finally gathered to sink it. Bertram’s DNB biographer (Henry Bradley, 1885) thought him ‘the cleverest and most successful literary impostor of modern times’, although Stuart Piggott asserted that Bertram’s success afforded ‘a startling commentary on the decay of historical studies by the middle of the eighteenth century’, it being ‘inconceivable that such a forgery could have succeeded sixty years earlier, when the palaeographical acumen of [Humfrey] Wanley and his colleagues . . . would have been brought to bear upon it’.78 Collier himself was of course no such scholar, and in reviewing J. A. Giles’s Six Old English Chronicles (1848), which piously translated Bertram alongside Ethelwerd, Asser, Gildas, and Nennius, saw no reason to suspect Richard: he complained only that his chronicle was ‘disfigured quite as much as [those] of older writers by barbarism, ignorance and credulity’, and that Giles had not reproduced the (faked) map, which was ‘still the most curious and interesting record of the kind and age in existence’.79 Bertram’s hoax may have benefited in 1757 from its recourse to Latin, as from its apparent absence of motive: no financial and little vainglorious profit, save the non-resident fellowship in the Society of Antiquaries that Stukeley procured him. Less arcane, and perhaps less seriously examined, were the literary inven-

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77. Converted, by the unwitting cooperation of William Stukeley, to the historical monk Richard of Cirencester. 78. Piggott 1985, p. 138. 79. Athenaeum, 18 March 1848, p. 290; for a further account of Bertram see Piggott 1985, pp. 126–38; and Piggott 1986. Bertram is unconsidered or overlooked by Haywood 1986 and Graon 1990.


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tions of Philip and Charles Yorke, part authors of the obviously fictitious Athenian Letters; but Philip’s spoof newsletters of the Armada era (English Mercuries Published by Authority in Queen Elizabeth’s . . . Time [1744]) gained some credence, and seemed to require formal exposure as late as 1839.80 In a climate of some uncertainty about historical ‘facts’ and the bona fides of scholars, even Gibbon was suspected of twisting evidence about the effects of Christianity on Rome, and Archibald Bower’s History of the Popes was bombarded with attacks on the historian’s veracity.81 Perhaps there was less mischief abroad than ideological opponents might wish to impute, but in antiquarian circles fabrication never seemed beyond possibility. And like historical novelties, the geographical reports of eighteenth-century travellers met with sceptical receptions: the exposure, a er initial acceptance, of a completely imaginary account of Formosa by George Psalmanazar (1704) put all eighteenth-century readers of voyages on guard. Dr. Johnson may have been whimsical to deny the news of British victory in Canada, but a host of disbelievers greeted the honest five-volume Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile by James Bruce (1790) with outright incredulity.82 As a small boy like any other John Payne Collier read his travel-fiction as fact, and came to ‘utter dismay . . . when first I found that the whole story of Robinson Crusoe was invention, and not reality . . . it really was one of the saddest days of my early life’ (JPC Diary, 31 and 27 November 1881). Editorial or commentarial fraud—the fabrication or forgery of citations and sources, alternative readings with a bogus cachet, old provenance, reports of ‘lost’ texts, and the like—is really a sub-species of literary and historical fakery, but one little studied in its own right; it is of course especially relevant to John Payne Collier. Because it is usually brief, at least item by item, and o en scattered amidst authentic testimony or text, it can be far more difficult to identify than large-scale imposture, and more likely to persist to corrupt and distort. Cumulatively, its effects may be devastating, for the multiplication of instances of false evidence through editorial descent—sometimes centuries long—cannot be spiked without tracing back (or forward, as we try to do with Collier) its o en silent transmission. For an early and still pestiferous example, we return to Double Falsehood and

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80. See Levin 1989, pp. 80 and 93–94n. Another anonymous satire in the form of a newly discovered classical text is Some Account of the Roman History of Fabius Pictor, from a Manuscript Lately Discover’d in Herculaneum (1749), which deserves further notice. 81. An out-and-out hoax of a similarly religious cast was the spurious Book of Jasher, concocted in 1751 by the maverick printer-scholar Jacob Ilive to supply a lost biblical text. It has been largely passed over in histories of forgery, but attracted believers well into the next century. 82. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (1934), i:428; J. M. Reid, Traveller Extraordinary: The Life of James Bruce of Kinnaird (New York, 1968).


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‘Warburton’s cook’. Champions of Lewis Theobald’s Shakespearian claims for the play have suggested that one of his sources may have been a manuscript, now perished, in the collection of John Warburton, Somerset herald (1682– 1759). Warburton himself le a list of fi y-six titles, many of them now unknown in any form, and a laconic note that has piqued readers since well before Sir Walter Scott: ‘A er I had been many years Collecting these MSS Playes, through my own carlesness and the Ignorace of my S[ervant] in whose hands I had lodgd them they was unluckely burnd or put under Pye bottoms, excepting ye three which followes. J. W.’ 83 The supposed losses included plays by Shakespeare (two, one unnamed), Marlowe, Greene, Dekker, Chapman, Tourneur, Ford, Massinger, and others, and the list proved irresistible to at least one hoaxer, who in 1818 published extracts from The Noble Convert by ‘Marlowe and Fletcher’, a charred survivor of a similar incineration.84 Nowadays we all doubt Warburton’s story, and that any of the ‘lost’ plays existed in his day, but the charitable reconstruction of events by Sir Walter Greg would excuse Warburton as an absent-minded antiquary who confused notes about manuscripts with their physical embodiment, rather than a deliberate hoaxer.85 William Lauder’s Miltonic fabrications of 1747–50 were discredited almost at once, and indeed confessed to by the perpetrator, but their original publication constituted a massive commentarial fraud. In An Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns (1747) Lauder strove to prove Milton a plagiarist by setting out dozens of short passages of early seventeenth-century Latin verse— attributed to Hugo Grotius, Jacob Massenius, Caspar Staphorstius, and Friedrich Taubmann, among others—which seemed to parallel quite literally lines in Paradise Lost. But what Lauder had done was to interpolate among a few genuine quotations from his avowed sources a large number of imaginary ones, deliberate Latin paraphrases of Paradise Lost, and even extracts from William Hog’s Latin translation of the epic (1690), so that Milton was effectively made to echo himself. Dr. Johnson, whose ambivalence toward Milton may have blunted

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83. See Greg 1911a; Scott referred to the incident in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). 84. Edinburgh Magazine 3 (October 1818), 318–21. We believe that the hoaxer, who (like the discoverer of Petronius Maximus) signed himself ‘T.’, was probably James Crossley; see Freeman and Freeman 1993, pp. 20–21. 85. Greg’s ‘own idea of what happened is somewhat as follows. Warburton in the course of his antiquarian researches came across a few manuscript plays and grew interested in the subject. He collected notes, probably from various sources . . . and compiled a list of the titles of such pieces as he thought it might be possible to recover in addition to those of the plays he already possessed. . . . The collection and list were then laid aside, a few manuscripts finding their way among the rest of the collector’s archaeological litter, the bulk, however, within reach of the parsimonious fingers of Betsy the baker of pies. Long aerwards her master discovered his loss, and no longer in the least remembering either the extent of his collection or the nature of his list, added in a fit of natural vexation the famous memorandum’ (1911a, pp. 258–59).


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his sceptical instincts, lent Lauder his support at the outset, and was later suspected, to his mortification, of complicity in the hoax. Lauder’s recantation (A Letter to the Rev. Mr. Douglas, 1751), in part dictated by Johnson, mitigated its penitence in an ‘Epilogue’ by suggesting that the uncritical admirers of Milton deserved such a practical joke, and a year or two later Lauder was back on the attack: Milton had borrowed or stolen from some ninety-seven authors (Delectus auctorum sacrorum Miltono facem praelucentium, 1752), and—worse—had personally caused a prayer from Sidney’s Arcadia to be inserted in Eikon Basilike, for which he had then taken Charles I harshly to task (King Charles I Vindicated . . . and Milton Himself Convicted of Forgery, 1754). Lauder was a driven man, whose motives still defy simplification, but it is worth pointing out that the initial thesis of An Essay has retained currency: Milton did read, and was influenced by, the Adamus exul of Hugo Grotius (1601), as Lauder was the first to point out. But the value of Lauder’s demonstration stops there, for of the twelve passages he ‘selected’ to show Milton’s dependence on Grotius, no fewer than ten were his own fabrications.86 William Rufus Chetwood (1688?–1766), long-term Drury Lane prompter, bookseller, and best-selling novelist, made no claims to strict historicity in the earlier details of his General History of the Stage (Dublin, 1749), a work largely concerned with the modern theatre. Here the tale about Sir William Davenant as Shakespeare’s natural son was first published, although it was no new invention; an imaginary ‘preface’ by Christopher Marlowe to The Jew of Malta, quoted in praise of the actors John Mason and Joseph Taylor, is however a bogus novelty. Edmond Malone thought (probably wrongly) that Chetwood was responsible for a manuscript history of the stage, written between 1727 and 1730 and now apparently lost, ‘full of forgeries and falsehoods of various kinds’, while George Steevens is said to have dismissed the old trouper as ‘a blockhead and a measureless and bungling liar’; but while Chetwood’s testimony has rarely been employed without caution, echoes of it—especially from The British Theatre, Containing the Lives of the English Dramatic Poets (Dublin, 1750)—have long contaminated the traditional history of the stage.87 The British Theatre seems in-

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86. A good short account is in Farrer 1907, pp. 169–74. See also Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill and Powell (1934), i:228–32; Clifford 1974; Marcuse 1978; and Baines 1999, pp. 81–102. 87. For Malone’s conjecture of 1790, see Chambers, WS, ii:257–78 and 377–78; Steevens’s oquoted slur appears in the DNB article on Chetwood (by Joseph Knight, 1887), but its source has eluded us. Steevens did however warn readers of his own annotated copy of Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691; now in BL), that William Oldys had been victimized by Chetwood’s British Theatre, ‘which abounds with a thousand false dates and forged titles’. Arthur Freeman’s extended account of Chetwood (together with the ‘Macklin’ letter and the Cibber-Shiels Lives of the Poets discussed below) is forthcoming in The Library in late 2004.


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deed to embody the first large-scale bibliographical forgery of Shakespeare, listing dozens of imaginary quartos with fanciful titles and dates, to the frustration of early collectors such as Edward Capell and David Garrick; and one specimen of Chetwood’s editorial fabrication was more ingenious, if ultimately easier to confute. In his brief life of Shakespeare (pp. 8–17, taken mostly from Rowe, and eliminated in the 1756 reworking of The British Theatre titled Dramatic Records) the compiler quoted five lines relating to Shakespeare from Robert Armin’s rare play Two Maids of Moreclacke (1609): Green [the comedian playing the Clown] answers, I prattled Poesie in my Nurses Arms, And born where late our Swan of Avon sung In Avon’s Streams, we both of us have lave’d, And both come out together The other [a country girl] takes him up short, He the sweetest Swan, & thou a cackling Goose. Alas, the eye-catching passage ‘born where late our Swan of Avon sung / In Avon’s Streams, we both of us have lave’d’ is not to be found in the original quarto or anywhere else. Other deviations from old text in The British Theatre may be innocent mistakes (Chetwood was in debtor’s gaol at the time, with no easy access to reference), but this one can hardly be other than calculated, and cynical. Six years later the aging prompter laced his Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Ben Jonson with fabricated ‘contemporary’ verse and anecdote, which no one since has bothered to sort out and condemn, not even the Grand Inquisitor of Jonsonian commentary, William Gifford. Chetwood may also have been involved with the so-called Macklin letter of 23 April 1748, a cunningly deceptive invention which links Shakespeare, Jonson, and John Ford in the authorship of a most unlikely play, and which Schoenbaum has nominated as ‘the first Shakespearian forgery, unless one puts Theobald’s Double Falsehood in the same class’.88 Steevens, who ought to have known better, half-credited the original speculation, which appeared anonymously in the General Advertiser at the time of a Drury Lane revival, but Malone in 1790 devoted a 28-page essay to demolishing it and branding its main evidence (a supposed contemporary pamphlet, lost at sea in the 1740s) a fabrication. Doubt still lingers, however, about the fabricator, and Chetwood—whose knowledge of theatrical history and versifying ability far outmeasured those of his friend, the comedian Charles Macklin—has attracted renewed attention as the possible culprit.

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88. Schoenbaum 1991, p. 129.


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An interpolation similar to Chetwood’s ‘Swan of Avon’ passage, but more inexplicable and insidious, has long been charged to Robert Shiels (d. 1753), Samuel Johnson’s amanuensis and friend. In a brief life of Ben Jonson for The Lives of the Poets—a compilation revised for the press by Theophilus Cibber in 1753, and misattributed to ‘Mr. Cibber’ by the celebrity-seeking publishers— Shiels supposedly added a bitter, and wholly spurious, sentence to the account of Jonson by the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, Fifeshire, whom Jonson visited in 1619. Thus Drummond is made to conclude a summing-up of Jonson’s nature by contrasting his guest with Shakespeare, as ‘in his personal character the very reverse . . . as surly, ill-natured, proud, and disagreeable, as Shakespeare, with ten times his merit, was gentle, good-natured, easy, and amiable’. For this alleged fabrication—which appears nowhere in the published or unpublished texts of Drummond’s Conversations—Shiels has suffered the sort of obloquy accorded only to scoundrels like Lauder. Collier himself was well aware of the crux, and had considered its implications in some detail, though perhaps not quite so carefully nor for so long as he claimed. Thanking David Laing on 9 July 1832 for ‘the present you made me through my friend Dyce of extracts from the Hawthornden MSS. and of a complete copy of Ben Jonson’s Conversation with Drummond’, he remarked: ‘I was curious to see whether in the latter anything was contained to warrant at all Shiel’s forgery (if it were his) upon which much of the personal charges against Jonson had [sic] been founded. It is singular that long before Gifford wrote his able vindication I had marked the passage in ‘‘Cibber’s Lives of the Poets’’, and had noted that the conclusion, in words and turn of expression, was apparently very modern—I cannot assign any adequate motive on the part of the posthumous calumniator.’ 89 For once, however, all the blame is misplaced—unless Shiels’s hearty dislike of Ben Jonson is itself blameworthy—and the case is a cautionary one. For the apocryphal passage is indeed modern, as Collier was right to remark, and Shiels made no attempt to disguise that, nor to explain how Drummond would know anything at all about Shakespeare’s personal character, for the simple reason that he never intended it to be part of the quotation. A glance at the original text makes it clear that the offending last sentence is Shiels’s commentary, which runs on smoothly to the next sentences, and which only misplaced inverted commas have rendered as Drummond’s own words. Nor is even the typographical blunder the fault of poor Shiels: Theophilus Cibber, Shiels’s ‘revisor’, and their publisher, Ralph Griffiths, bear the responsibility for that. We cannot see any reason why it should be deliberate, or intended to deceive.

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89. EUL, MS La.IV.17. Gifford had first exposed the ‘interpolation’ in his 1816 edition of Jonson.


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George Steevens and Thomas Warton George Steevens (1736–1800), whose editorial achievements Collier undercut and disparaged almost as o en as he did Edmond Malone’s, may be said to have courted distrust, if not disbelief, over a long and truculent literary career; Gifford’s sobriquet, ‘the Puck of Commentators’, has stuck to him, with good reason, although Isaac D’Israeli thought ‘there was a darkness in his character many shades deeper than belonged to Puck’.90 Steevens’s hoaxes, some of which remain in debate, included the famous tombstone of King Hardicanute—a rare physical forgery 91—and the report of a certain ‘upas tree’ in Java, which poisoned all life within fi een miles;92 but most of his scholarly impostures were directed specifically toward chosen victims, notably Richard Gough, Samuel Pegge, and Peter Le Neve, his friends Dr. John Berkenhout, Bishop Percy, and Richard Heber,93 and (according to Boswell) his rival Malone.94 His modus operandi was generally to plant a canard in a newspaper or journal and await its discovery, but he may not have scrupled to imitate or forge William Cole’s handwriting in bedevilling Gough.95 Arthur Sherbo has argued that Steevens’s hoaxes ‘were intended to amuse, sometimes to vex people, and usually to expose ignorance, vanity, or scholarly credulity’, and that o en ‘Steevens deliberately le clues for those with the requisite knowledge to detect the impostures’, but that

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90. Curiosities of Literature, 2d ser. (1823), iii:37. 91. Though not executed by Steevens himself: Thomas White, the collector and dealer, admitted to carving the inscription, but Steevens made sure that Richard Gough and Samuel Pegge fell for it; see D’Israeli, Curiosities, iii:49–53; and Sherbo 1990, pp. 59–60. Another specimen, called to our attention by Arnold Hunt, was directed at the book collector James Bindley: Steevens wrote to Isaac Reed on 20 February 1786 (BL Evelyn Papers, UP4, fol. 81), saying, ‘I restore your Hoddesdon’s Poems [i.e., Sion and Parnassus, 1650], and have put into the book an imitation of an aqua-fortis proof of the Head. It is insidiously stained &c so as to give it somewhat like the hue of antiquity. If Bindley can be induced to suppose it an original (which with a little management may be brought about) he will bid high for it.’ But Reed resisted the temptation, and when the book was sold aer the death of both Steevens and Reed, the fakery was identified as ‘portrait a fac-simile, Drawing, by George Steevens’—and rewarded by a good price (Reed sale, 1807, lot 6918; £1 11s. 6d. to Sancho). 92. An invention that took in Erasmus Darwin and Coleridge; Sherbo 1990, pp. 61–62. 93. See the Morning Chronicle obituary of Heber, probably written by Thomas Hill (23 December 1833): ‘Heber has oen acknowledged that Steevens would now and then play upon him a wicked and a waggish hoax; and if he happened to be found out, for he was an arrant coward, he would effect a reconciliation by presenting Heber with a rare book. We know that there are several gems at [Heber’s house in] Pimlico, which were gis from Steevens, aer an attempt at a satirical Hoax.’ 94. ‘The late Mr. Boswell told me, that Steevens frequently wrote notes on Shakespeare, purposely to mislead or entrap Malone, and obtain for himself an easy triumph in the next edition!’; D’Israeli, Curiosities, iii:38. 95. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (1812), i:712n.


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might be claimed for Lauder as well. A particularly elaborate invention, which on its own constitutes literary fiction, was the outline of an eastern romance, ‘The Boke of the Soldan, Conteyninge Straunge Matters Touchynge His Lyfe & Deathe & the Wayes of Hys Courte, in Two Partes’. Steevens gave this to his friend Isaac Reed before 1780, who then noted: ‘written by George Steevens, Esq., from whom I received it. It was composed merely to impose on ‘‘a literary friend’’, and had its effect; for he was so far deceived as to its authenticity that he gave implicit credit to it, and hath himself put down the person’s name in whose possession the original books were supposed to be. I. Reed, 1780’. The ‘literary friend’ was Bishop Percy, and Sherbo maintains that Steevens’s ‘joke . . . was a private one, shared with Reed’, but Reed implies that Percy published a notice of the MS as genuine.96 From an early age Collier would have known of Steevens’s hoaxes, most likely by reading Isaac D’Israeli, the third series of whose Curiosities he reviewed for the Critical Review in 1817. Those concerning the early drama he would take care to reject, notably the fabricated letter from George Peele to ‘Henrie Marle’ about Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Edward Alleyn, and Hamlet at the Globe Theatre, ‘1600’ (when Peele was already dead), which appeared in the Theatrical Review (1763) and later in the Annual Register (1770) and John Berkenhout’s Biographia Literaria (1777).97 He would also certainly have been aware of Steevens’s lesser commentarial jests in his editions of Shakespeare, the citations of the nonexistent clergymen ‘Mr. Collins’ and ‘Richard Amner’, whose contributions are solemnly and risibly lubricious. The famous long footnote by ‘Collins’ to Troilus and Cressida, v.2.56 (‘fry, lechery, fry’), in which citations of St. Thomas Aquinas, Apicius, Suetonius, and Chaucer, followed by thirty-three literary instances of the potato as aphrodisiac, combine to show ‘how o en dark allusions might be cleared up, if commentators were diligent in their researches’, is in itself a libertarian classic, but John Payne Collier, something of a prude—in print at least—may have been unamused.98

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96. Sherbo 1990, pp. 62–63. See the note in the sale catalogue of Reed’s books (King, 2 November 1807), lot 8708, cited in part by D’Israeli, Curiosities, iii:40. Steevens’s manuscript, later in Heber’s collection (sale, Part XI, lot 1376) and still later Phillipps MS 13,553, is now Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.244, fols. 17–28; it contains not only the outline of ‘The Boke of the Soldan’ (brief summaries of the thirty-five chapters of a 68-page quarto supposedly printed by Thomas Berthelet in September 1539) but also that of ‘The Boke of the Deedes & Actes of the Gyaunt Blamarant, Sonne of the Cruelle Tyraunt Astrager Who Slewe the Soldan of Persia’ (thirty-three chapter summaries from a book supposedly printed in London in 1544). According to the manuscript, both books were in the possession of ‘W. Williams, arm[iger]’. 97. Chambers (WS, ii:379–80) leaves open the possibility of Berkenhout’s responsibility, but Sherbo (1990, p. 58) thought ‘the chances are excellent’ that Steevens wrote it, ‘planting two errors which plainly marked the letter as not authentic’. 98. See Sherbo 1990, pp. 5–6; and Sherbo 1986, pp. 58–71.


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Steevens’s irreverent manipulation of evidence, however whimsical, and his contempt for his dupes may stand in spirit behind Collier’s fabrications in HEDP, but a closer and more deceptive eighteenth-century precedent was set by a literary scholar we might never suspect: Thomas Warton. The universally respected author of the seminal History of English Poetry—the work that Collier consciously sought to extend, and that Dyce and Mitford thought HEDP fell short of matching—salted his own magnum opus with fabrications no less deliberate or deceptive (if only less numerous) than any of Collier’s, which for more than a century were taken largely as gospel. Warton’s HEP inventions fall into two main groups, the first relating to the diary of Henry Machyn, a London ‘furnisher of funerals’, which covers 1550–63, with some unique evidence of theatrical exercises at the time. This was a Cotton manuscript (Vitellius F.V), and John Strype had already copied and published much of it before it was damaged in the Cottonian Library fire of 1731; but Warton took advantage of what appeared to be incontestable lacunae by adding eight substantial passages to the text that survived. He claimed the authority of Strype’s pre-1731 transcript of the diary, subsequently lost, and credited a dead friend with providing it; but every one of the novelties has now been discredited, and it is quite clear whose fabricating hand is responsible for them.99 Collier, however, like most of his contemporaries, accepted them all, so that Warton’s accounts of lost entertainments, progresses, masques, a 1559 ‘Christmas Prince’ at St. John’s College, Oxford, and a 1556 court play, ‘Holofernes’, are trustingly canonized in HEDP.100 Warton’s second and more audacious cluster of fabrications evokes the ‘dispersed library’ of ‘my lamented friend William Collins’, the poet. Collins was said to have possessed and shown Warton ‘at Chichester, not many months before his death’, a play by John Skelton called The Nigramansir (i.e., ‘Necromancer’), ‘printed by Wynkin de Worde in a thin quarto, in the year 1504’. Warton gave an extended title (‘a morall Enterlude and a pithie written by Maister Skelton laureate and plaid before the king and other estatys at Woodstoke on Palme Sunday’) and a full précis of the action, with cast of characters and a few stage directions, accompanied by lavish footnotes.101 No such book, nor any record of such a performance, has ever surfaced again, and scholars now dismiss more or less out of hand ‘the suspiciously circumstantial account of that remarkable drama’.102 In 1831, however, Collier remained cautious, if not

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99. See Blakiston 1896. Warton also published these passages (serially amplified and accounted for in contradictory ways) in two works prior to HEP. 100. All of these are rejected by modern theatrical historians: see Chambers 1903, ii:196n.; and for ‘Christmas Prince’, Boas 1914, pp. 7–8, both crediting Blakiston. 101. History of English Poetry (1778), ii:360–63. 102. R. L. Ramsay, ed., Skelton’s Magnyfycence, EETS Extra Series, 98 (1908); cf. Chambers 1903, ii:440 (‘Almost certainly a fabrication of Warton’s’) and Paula Neuss, ed., Magnificence


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credulous, reproducing in HEDP (i:52–53) the whole of Warton’s description of The Nigramansir, and while noting Ritson’s ‘entire disbelief ’ he concluded that ‘those who are not prepared to charge Warton with deliberate and elaborate forgery must be convinced, that The Nigramansir once had existence, and probably still exists, although it has entirely disappeared’. Twelve years later Dyce only reprinted, without comment, the same descriptive passage from Warton (Skelton, i:xcix–c), but by the time of his final revision of HEDP (1879) Collier himself chose to delete the disputative conclusion of his original note. It is tempting to think that Collier at last knew or suspected that he had been hoaxed by his eminent predecessor, but more likely the words ‘deliberate and elaborate forgery’, even denied in this context, caught his eye and seemed dangerously suggestive. Also ‘in the dispersed library of the late Mr. William Collins’ Warton ‘saw a thin folio of two sheets in black letter, containing a poem in the octave stanza, entitled Fabyl’s Ghoste, printed by John Rastell in the year 1533’. A summary (HEP, iii:81–83) relates this supposed text to the Jacobean comedy The Merry Devil of Edmonton, but the two-sheet folio itself has not come to light. Another fugitive Collins volume was ‘a Collection of short comic stories in prose, printed in the black letter under the year 1570’, and ‘ ‘‘sett forth by maister Richard Edwardes mayster of her maiesties reuels’’ ’ (iii:292–95). In ‘an irresistible digression, into which the magic of Shakespeare’s name has insensibly seduced us’, Warton detailed an apparent source for the gulling of Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, which has busied Shakespeare scholars since 1781. There are many extant precedents or analogues for Shakespeare’s dramatic forepiece, but ‘Edwardes’s Jests’ of 1570 has never turned up, and Collier was one of its hapless pursuers: his discovery in 1841 of ‘The Waking Man’s Dream’ he took to be a version of one part of it. Warton’s report of William Collins’s theory of a direct source for The Tempest (iii:478) in ‘an Italian novel’ (apparently Giovanni di Fiori, Historia di Isabella et Aurelio) more likely reflects Collins’s own hazy conjectures than Warton’s Collins-credited mischief,103 and the misdating and attribution to Christopher

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(1980), p. 1n. David Fairer, the recent editor of Warton’s correspondence, prints a letter to David Garrick of 11 February 1778 in which the play is mentioned (‘I once saw another of Skelton’s Moralities shewn me by Collins the poet, entirely unknown to the literary Antiquaries. I luckily took an Account of it; for at his Death, which happened soon aer, his books were dispersed. It was called the Nigramansir (Necromancer), dull enough, but a Curiosity.’). Fairer concludes— astonishingly—that the letter ‘shows [the idea that Warton fabricated the title] to be too easy an assumption’, as if Warton were incapable of deluding his friends as well as his reading public (1995, pp. 401–03). 103. See Baine 1970 and Fairer 1995, p. 330, printing a letter to George Steevens (3 December 1773) mentioning the information he had been given by Collins.


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Marlowe of an English version of Colluthus, De Helenae raptu (iii:433; cf. STC 24296), is as likely to be an honest if careless mistake. But the ‘puritanical pamphlet without name, printed in 1569, and entitled, ‘‘The Children of the Chapel stript and whipt’’ ’, with its anti-theatrical extracts (iii:288), is certainly a canard, which served its purpose one hundred and fi y years later in bamboozling E. K. Chambers himself.104 The reception of Warton’s fictions in HEP illuminates some curiously circular attitudes toward literary fraud, linking generalized moral censure (or approval) with particular blame. Warton was not only B.A., M.A., and B.D. (Oxon) and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford (1751–90), but also the university’s Professor of Poetry (1758–68) and Camden Professor of Ancient History (1785–90), and the nation’s Poet Laureate (1785–90), albeit between the poetasters William Whitehead and Henry James Pye. His critical achievements were admired by nearly every contemporary from Warburton and Johnson in the 1750s to Gray, Percy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and countless later readers of HEP, his commentary on Spenser, and his incomplete edition of Milton. He was also a convivial smoker and quaffer, fond of taverns and the company of Oxford watermen, a prankster and practical joker par excellence. Hence when the cantankerous Joseph Ritson assailed him in 1782, in Observations on The History of English Poetry, Warton’s many friends were bound to regard Ritson’s strictures as ‘merely malignant’, and to dismiss the 116 errors with which Ritson tasked him as ‘far from inexcusable in a work compiled from notes taken under all sorts of difficulties’.105 And when Ritson questioned, almost politely, the very existence of The Nigramansir, and later hardened his accusation (‘it is utterly incredible that [Skelton’s] ‘‘The Nigramansir’’, described, in Mr. Wartons ‘‘History of English poetry’’, . . . ever existed, any more than several editions, he quotes, of

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104. ES, ii:34–35, misunderstanding Macray, Annals of the Bodleian, pp. 211–12: the imaginary book was never ‘catalogued’ as Tanner’s. This is not the moment to pursue another more literary forgery, but in recent years it has been demonstrated that Thomas Warton and his brother, Joseph, themselves wrote the poems which they published in 1748 as by their father, the Rev. Thomas Warton (ca. 1688–1745). Attributing their own verse to their schoolmaster father may have been in some respects pious, but the effect on literary history of back-dating ‘pre-romantic’ sonnets and odes cannot be discounted: Collins and Gray, for example, appear to be imitating the elder Warton, when in fact the younger Wartons were echoing Collins and Gray. And Thomas Warton compounded his fabrication of literary tradition by reporting (in his edition of Milton’s Poems upon Several Occasions (1785, revised 1791) that his father had given Alexander Pope his first taste for Milton, a claim that now seems highly unlikely: see the delightful article by Arthur H. Scouten (1987). 105. Blakiston 1896, p. 282. Warton’s carelessness sometimes verges on dyslexia: throughout HEP, for instance, he cites both ‘Gorboduc’ and ‘Gordobuc’.


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other pieces’), a closing of ranks was to be expected.106 William Herbert in 1785 had congratulated Warton on his ‘ingenious description’ of the volume, without mentioning Ritson, and in 1812 Dibdin duly repeated the entry under the productions of Wynkyn de Worde, and le open the debate: ‘Either Warton must have committed a gross mistake, or fabricated a ‘‘splendid fiction’’—or Ritson must be the boldest and most impudent of critics.’ 107 Philip Bliss a year later remained confident in a fellow Oxonian: ‘I have so frequently seen and handled volumes mentioned by Warton and denied to exist by Ritson, that I have no doubt as to the authenticity of the account.’ 108 And two decades on, Richard Heber still trusted Warton’s authority: ‘The Nigramansir . . . is now, I fear, no where to be found—though, that it existed I cannot permit myself to doubt’,109 a pious belief echoed as recently as 1970.110 Well may we ask why Warton’s critics have been so reluctant to blame him. Sidney Lee in DNB (1899) struck a familiar note, recording Blakiston’s revelations about Machyn’s diary, but so ening the inference: ‘there is unhappily reason to believe that some of the documents alleged to date from the sixteenth century were forgeries of recent years. Although a strong case has been made against Warton in the matter, his general character renders it improbable that he was himself the author of the fabrications. He was more probably the dupe of a less principled antiquary’. Blakiston, be it noted, pretty well disposed of the last possibility, and Lee apparently knew nothing of the other inventions in HEP. Clarissa Rinaker, the first modern biographer of Warton, also ignored the non-Machyn evidence, and pleaded that Warton’s good-natured carelessness would make him an ‘easy victim’ for ‘a malicious practical joker’: ‘in the absence of conclusive evidence for so grave a charge [of fabricating the diary entries], great weight must be given to the character of the accused. It must be shown that such a deception is quite in keeping with his character’, which Rinaker thought out of the question, given Warton’s zeal in prosecuting Chatterton. ‘His openminded and scholarly treatment of the facts in this matter [of the Rowley poems] . . . seems to make improbable to the point of impossibility any deliberate tampering with facts in an historical treatise’. A less credulous apologist was David Nichol Smith, for he well understood that Warton himself was

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106. Bibliographia Poetica (1802), p. 106. 107. Herbert, Typographical Antiquities (1785), i:141; Dibdin, Typographical Antiquities, ii:119, no. 164 (1812). 108. Bliss’s edition of Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (1813), i:53. 109. Heber to Alexander Dyce, 25 November 1832, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.3 (108). 110. See Baine 1970. Despite the rejection of the title by all twentieth-century editors of Skelton, a modern literary historian may still be gulled: see King 1982, pp. 287–88 and 351, citing parallels from ‘Nigramansir, a lost interlude by John Skelton’, with references only to Warton.


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responsible for the impostures in HEP. ‘Let us admit at once that Warton shared in some degree the weakness of other great English scholars—George Steevens, for instance, and Payne Collier’, Smith conceded, ‘but it would be wrong to end on this note. The statements that cannot be verified are such as supply details, or round off the narrative, but do not affect conclusions; and they are embedded in great masses of honest work. In comparison with the sound matter that is first collected for us in The History of English Poetry, the doubtful matter is almost negligible.’ 111 Are these exculpatory remarks special pleading, or was Warton’s conduct qualitatively different from Lauder’s (say), or Chetwood’s, or even Collier’s? At the moralizing extreme, Lee and Rinaker seem to be arguing that (1) fabrication is dishonest and/or wicked, (2) Warton was himself honourable, and (3) therefore he cannot be personally guilty. Dibdin stands ready to consider the episode ‘splendid fiction’—if and when Warton is convicted—and Nichol Smith seeks to dismiss the mischief as proportionately insignificant. But overridingly the images of Thomas Warton as an eminent and ensconced scholar-critic, an academic patrician, and even as a companionable chap, seem a priori to shield him from obloquy, much as the ability of an educated Elizabethan offender to read out his Latin ‘neck-verse’ might save him from the gallows. No such tempering of judgement has been accorded ‘contemptible’ Lauder (his ‘character was of the meanest’—Lee, in DNB), or ‘liar’ Chetwood, or the wrongly vilified Shiels, for these were ostensibly graceless offenders, and lower-class scribblers to boot. Turning back to the gentlemen, we recall that Lord Hardwicke’s reputation has never been taxed with his Armada impostures, and that James Crossley’s fabrications earned him bouquets, not brickbats, from modern Browneians. There is no reason now to pass harsher judgement on Warton or Crossley, but only to reexamine our standards in tolerating one class of fraudster or fraud while we censure another. Let Warton himself speak of Chatterton, whose poems he exposed in HEP, ii:164: ‘It is with regret that I find myself obliged to pronounce Rowlie’s poems to be spurious. Antient remains of English poetry, unexpectedly discovered, and fortunately rescued from a long oblivion, are contemplated with a degree of fond enthusiasm: exclusive of any real or intrinsic excellence, they afford those pleasures, arising from the idea of antiquity, which deeply interest the imagination. With these pleasures we are unwilling to part. But there is a more solid satisfaction, resulting from the detection of artifice and imposture.’ And what of the perpetrator? ‘Let us add Chatterton’s inducements and qualifications for forging these poems, arising from his character, and way of living. He was an adventurer, a professed hireling in the trade of literature,

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111. Rinaker 1916, pp. 72–73; D. N. Smith 1932, p. 97.


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full of projects and inventions, artful, enterprising, unprincipled, indigent, and compelled to subsist by expedients’ (ii, ‘Emendations and Additions’, sig. i3v– 4r). One who furnishes such a ‘character’ for another may deserve little mercy himself. But blame and pardon will not help to explain what happened to Warton, and why. Going back to the moral syllogism implied by Lee and Rinaker, may we not say instead (1) that Warton was fundamentally honourable in his works, (2) that he perpetrated a number of literary fabrications, and (3) that therefore fabrication is not, or was not in his time and in his conscience, a strictly dishonourable activity? Or at least that literary fabrication cannot have seemed so vicious in 1780 that a man of Warton’s sensitivity and perceived decency would regard it as blasting the work of a lifetime? This is not to excuse or mitigate the behaviour of eighteenth-century fakers—nor does tradition itself, or the prevalence of an activity ‘justify’ anything—but to suggest with what moral predisposition a scholar of that day might enter upon hoaxing his readers. Warton and Steevens cannot have felt deeply that what they did, when they fabricated literary evidence, was fundamentally wicked, although they did limit themselves to a more manageable corpus of deceptions than Collier did in a more vigilant century. But each could seemingly live with his conscience (as presumably could Macpherson and Bertram and the boy-forgers, especially Crossley), and of none has it been said that his actions or attitudes, apart from the one common penchant, were criminal or vicious, or even hard-hearted. Remorse is normally predicated on feeling oneself guilty, not on being accused or convicted of guilt, and none of Collier’s immediate antecedents—to the best of our knowledge—ever expressed his remorse. We shall monitor Collier’s career closely for any sign of it. The search for motivation has always inspired writers on forgery, if only to declare that some forgers’ reasons, like Iago’s, defy inquiry. As a peg in a criminal case they demand some kind of definition, the simpler the better from the prosecutor’s viewpoint. The defendant, however, to the dismay of the defence, may find them o en too complex for words—Iago, again. Simplifiers, especially those who are ‘charitable’ (i.e., they suspect and imply something nastier), have made a contradictory hash of many such cases. Lauder, for example, was said by the author of The Progress of Envy (1751) to have acted ‘from poverty’, whereas E. K. Chambers thought his forgeries ‘sprang out of the hatred of a Jacobite and Tory for the genius of the Puritan Milton’. J. A. Farrer traced the animus to a more arcane provocation, which Lauder himself provided in his confession: the reputation of the Scot Arthur Johnston as a Latin poet, dear to Lauder, had been fatally undercut by two lines in The Dunciad that magnified Milton, and ‘on this occasion it was natural not to be pleased, and my resentment seeking to discharge itself somewhere was unhappily directed against Milton. I resolved to


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attack his fame.’ Boswell, whose opinions were certainly derived from Samuel Johnson’s, preferred generalized pride: ‘to this hour [1791] it is uncertain what his principal motive was, unless it were a vain notion of his superiority, in being able, by whatever means, to deceive mankind’. And just two hundred years later a popular account refined Lauder’s own explanation in modish psychobabble: ‘a psychologist would describe Lauder as the victim of a delusional system. This mode of life allows its victim to behave quite rationally, so long as such behaviour serves to maintain an absurd and obsessive fiction. Lauder was acting as though to hit at Milton would make good every setback he himself had ever suffered’.112 Anthony Gra on’s provocative essay Forgers and Critics (1990) suggests halfa-dozen classes of motive for literary fabrication and forgery over nearly three millennia, not altogether discrete nor mutually exclusive, but worth itemizing: (1)–(2) ‘ambition or greed’; (3) ‘impulses to play jokes’; (4) ‘exuberant desires to see the past made whole again’; (5) ‘serious wishes to invoke divine or distantly historical authority for particular spiritual or national traditions’; and a curious catch-all, (6) ‘hatred’.113 To these we may add (7) ‘impress my father, schoolmaster, et al.’, not really covered by (1)–(2). Numbers (4) and (5) may be qualifications of the same idea, but we can surely combine these choices to suit most of our subjects: Steevens, for example, will betray (3) and (6)—‘hatred’, or some milder form of it, for his selected victims—while W. H. Ireland calls up all but (5) and (6), and Macpherson probably resists (3), as well as (6)–(7). The point in assessing a fabricator’s motives is that combinations or admixtures are necessary, for motives or provocations are no more singular and pure than moral premises are uniform. Of course the latter affect the generation of the former: Dr. Johnson, had he forged, might have been agonizedly spurred by (3)–(5), but probably not by (1), (2), or (6); and Ritson, had he, might have eliminated (5) and added (7). John Payne Collier’s motives, which we must continue to adduce, will probably span the whole lot: from ‘jokes’ (with a touch of ‘impress my father’) for the whimsical early ones—Punch and Judy, Churchyard, Byron, and Walton—to ‘ambition’, ‘greed’, and the rest a er 1830, informing a

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112. Chambers 1891, p. 31; Farrer 1907, p. 164, quoting Lauder’s letter of confession to John Douglas, 29 December 1750; Life of Johnson, ed. Hill and Powell (1934), i:229; Newnham 1991, p. 35. 113. The first five motives are itemized on the front jacket flap; the sixth is discussed by Graon at pp. 39–40, unfortunately exemplified by an improbable case. Another interesting attempt at discriminating motives is Cole 1955, esp. chap. 3, ‘Forgers: Psychological Cases’, with its emphasis on ‘feeling[s] of inferiority, frustration and jealousy’ (p. 40) turning to ‘hatred’ (p. 49), as well as ‘love of intrigue and mischief for its own sake’ (p. 51), and desire ‘to prove some cherished theory’ when ‘concrete proof which will convince others is lacking’ (p. 55).


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half-century’s dogged proliferation. To these dedicated and sober fabrications of evidence, and indeed physical forgeries created to sustain them—the first of Collier’s serious transgressions in each category of malfeasance—we now must return.

HEDP: Questioned Data More than forty instances of fabrication and forgery in Collier’s HEDP have been suspected, since 1848, in published critiques, and a dozen more might reasonably now be proposed. Only some fi een of all these, however, are clear enough as impostures to require mention here.114 They fall into two categories: inventions pure and simple for which no documentary evidence survives, and fabrications for which evidence, in the form of physical forgeries, is cited by Collier and remains extant. In the former group belongs a substantial ‘Ballade in praise of London Prentices, and what they did at the Cock-pitt Playhouse in Drury Lane’, printed at i:402–04. This ‘circumstantial account’ of a historical riot in March 1617, when a mob invaded the Phoenix or Cockpit Theatre and attempted to pull it down, Collier gave ‘from a contemporary MS.’, unlocated, and never since seen.115 As we remarked earlier, popular balladry is an easy target for faking, as no great art went into composing the originals, and transmission o en degrades or modernizes their text. But even so the language and metrical practice of this ballad are unbelievable as early seventeenth-century (Collier had a penchant for enjambment or run-ons that no genuine old balladeer shares, and lines like ‘ ‘‘Lead, Tommy Brent, incontinent’’ ’ or ‘Within this lane of Drury’ are no more persuasive than Lord Byron’s ‘Sonnet to Punch’), and the theatrical detail is far too good to be true. Playbooks by Heywood, Middleton, Day, and ‘Tom Dekker’ are said to have been incinerated by the marauders,116 and their well-known names are followed by a sly mystification: ‘Immortall Cracke was burnt all blacke, / Which every bodie praises.’ Tempering his revelations with ostensible bewilderment, Collier footnoted the puzzling word ‘Cracke’: ‘Regard-

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114. All those suspected are discussed in A16; for a guide to interpreting our conclusions there, see page 1063. 115. See Bentley, i:161–63. 116. That playbooks and costumes were destroyed in the riot Collier may have learned from John Chamberlain’s letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, 8 March 1617. Although this was not published, to the best of our knowledge, until 1848, Collier did make use elsewhere of the Birch transcripts of Chamberlain’s letters in the British Museum (see his note in HEDP, iii:309), and John Nichols’s partial transcript of this 1617 letter (Progresses of James I [1828], p. 252) might have alerted him to its potential. If so, he deliberately omitted to cite it, despite its theatrical evidence, evidently preferring to incorporate this in his own ‘circumstantial account’.


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ing this person or play, whichever it might be, I can give no information.’ The same technique in aid of defusing suspicion—posing an enigma and pleading helpless to explain it—will recur frequently. Collier milked the Cockpit ballad for ‘evidence’ regarding the dates of John Fletcher’s play Rollo, Duke of Normandy and Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, and as the players’ wardrobe losses included ‘False Cressid’s hood, that was so good / When loving Troylus kept her’, he allowed himself to conjecture that Shakespeare’s play might have been ‘acted surreptitiously at the Cockpit’, although—the judicious sceptic again, as in Punch and Judy—‘possibly it was a different play on the same subject’. All these historical inferences, like the Cockpit ballad itself, have been dismissed long since by scholars. A more enduring imposture—or at least so we consider it—appears at ii:23–24. From Sir Henry Herbert’s memoranda we know that in November and December 1629 a troupe of French actors visited London and performed ‘a farse’ at the Blackfriars (4 November), later playing ‘a daye’ at the Red Bull (22 November) and ‘one a ernoone’ at the Fortune (14 December); on the last occasion Herbert remitted half of his twopound licensing fee ‘in respect of their ill fortune’.117 From another contemporary source (William Prynne’s Histriomastix, 1633) we learn that this company introduced actresses on the public stage, apparently for the first time: ‘some Frenchwomen, or Monsters rather in Michaelmas Terme 1629. attempted to act a French Play, at the Play-house in Black-friers: an impudent, shamefull, unwomanish, gracelesse, if not more than whorish attempt’ (Ggg3v); elsewhere (Ee4) Prynne alludes to ‘the French-women Actors, in a play not long since [sidenote: In Michael. Terme, 1629.] personated in the Blacke-friers Play-house, to which there was great resort’. Now Malone had suggested (1821 Variorum, ii:230) that Prynne’s words ‘great resort’ related to the innovation of women actors, and that ‘attempted to act’ did not imply interference or prevention; nor did he link Herbert’s compassion for the ‘ill fortune’ of the troupe with the actress experiment. But Collier trumped Malone with ‘the following extract from a private letter, written by a person of the name of Thomas Brande, which I discovered among some miscellaneous papers in the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth. It does not appear to whom it was addressed, but probably to Laud while Bishop of London, and it bears date on the 8th November, fixing the very day when the female performers made their first appearance in England.’ The letter describes the French players ‘and those women’ as ‘vagrant’ and ‘expelled from their owne contrey’ (untrue, as far as we know), and their ‘attempt . . . to act a certain lascivious and unchaste comedye, in the

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117. J. Q. Adams 1917, pp. 59–60.


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French tonge at the Black-fryers. Glad I am to saye they were hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the stage, so as I do not thinke they will soone be ready to trie the same againe.—Whether they had licence for so doing I know not, but I do know that if they had licence, it were fit that the Master [of the Revels Collier’s brackets] be called to account for the same.’ This lively episode is certainly a nugget of theatrical history, and Collier’s ‘extract’ has been quoted, virtually unquestioned, by dozens of commentators from his day to ours, without any significant attempt to trace ‘Thomas Brande’ or his original letter.118 Suffice it to say that it does not now exist among Laud’s well-catalogued correspondence at Lambeth Palace, nor is it listed in any of the Lambeth catalogues of manuscripts. No one named Thomas Brande, selfassured enough to be ‘glad’ about a public disturbance, and to ‘know’ that the Master of the Revels should be chastised, appears in a sampling of official correspondence of the period. Some of the language of the letter (especially the fanciful ‘pippin-pelted’, which OED finds no earlier than 1835—in an allusion to this very passage) might put us on our guard; and G. E. Bentley, who surprisingly cast no doubt on the ‘Brande’ letter itself, ‘doubt[ed] if this letter applies to the Blackfriars performance’, although ‘I cannot prove that it does not’ (vi:23). Bentley’s point is that the Blackfriars audience was far more sophisticated and permissive than those of the Red Bull and the Fortune, so ‘if the French were hooted from the Blackfriars stage, how did they dare risk [the others]?’ (vi:226). It is simpler, certainly, to regard the Brande letter as unsubstantiated testimony, if not a probable fabrication; given the context (HEDP) and the provocation (Malone) one must incline to the latter. It remains possible, of course, that the Brande letter will someday turn up, and such hopes—perhaps even more forlorn—have been entertained about two very early English interludes, ‘The Triumph of Love and Beauty’ by William Cornish, and ‘The Finding of Troth’ by Henry Medwall. Collier gave an account of these (i:63–65) from ‘a singular paper folded up in [a] roll’ in the Chapter House archives, the latter being a genuine list of expenses for Revels performances at Calais and Richmond in 1514–15 (now PRO Misc.Bks.Exch., T.R. 217). Collier’s ‘singular paper’, extracted with a facsimile of the supposed signature of ‘Williame Cornysshe’, describes in atypical detail two lost plays performed before Henry VIII at Christmas 1514, Cornish’s ‘Triumph’ by the Children of the Chapel, and Medwall’s ‘Troth’ by the King’s Players. In the first ‘Venus and Bewte dyd tryumpe over al ther enemys, and tamyd a salvadge man and a lyon, that

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118. Ibid., p. 59; Bentley, i:25 and vi:23 and 225–27; Harbage 1936, p. 20; E. Howe 1992, pp. 22–23; and Orgel 1996, p. 7. A lone sceptic was Shirley Graves Thornton (1925, p. 190), who while seeming more anxious to condemn Brande as a ‘careless and prejudiced writer’ than to reject the document itself, cautioned that the letter was ‘not above suspicion’ until ‘the original is recovered’.


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was made very rare and naturall, so as the kyng was gretly plesyd therwyth, and gracyously gaf Mayster Cornysshe a ryche rewarde owt of his owne hand, to be dyvydyd with the rest of his felows’. The refrain of a duet sung by Venus and Beauty, ‘lykyd of all that harde yt’, is given next, beginning ‘Bowe you downe, and doo your dutye’. The second interlude, by Medwall (the author of Fulgens and Lucrece), was ‘so long yt was not lykyd’: ‘The foolys part was the best, but the kyng departyd befor the end to hys chambre.’ Again, this is attractive theatre history, especially as the document ‘appears to be in the hand-writing of Cornyshe himself ’, which may explain the reflections on Medwall’s effort. But while the roll from which Collier quotes royal household expenses for Christmas 1514–15 survives and is perfectly genuine, nothing more is known of the ‘singular paper’ supposed to have been ‘folded up’ with it, and Collier’s testimony has long been disbelieved.119 Recently, however, a new champion has come forward to credit the two titles as (essentially) ‘innocent until proven guilty’, an odd substitution of Anglo-American criminal court practice for scholarly policy (‘unaccepted until proven true’).120 Similarly unsubstantiated is ‘a valuable letter . . . from the Mayor and Corporation of Chester’ which ‘I found . . . among the unarranged papers of [Thomas] Cromwell in the Chapter-house, Westminster’ (i:114–16). This purports to describe a lost play, ‘King Robert of Sicily’, which is known to have been staged at Chester in 1529 (on the event itself Collier quotes Daniel King’s Vale Royal [1656]: ‘1529. The play of Robert Cicill was played at the High Crosse’), and which may be identical with, or derive from, a ‘Ludus de Kyng Robert of Cesill’ acted at Lincoln in 1453.121 But Collier’s letter (‘in part . . . destroyed by damp, so that it has no name or date . . . [and] it cannot be ascertained to what nobleman in the Court of Henry VIII it was addressed’) provides welcome details: Kynge Robart of Cicylye ‘is not newe at thys tyme, but hath bin bifore shewen, evyn as longe agoe as the reygne of his highnes most gratious father’; it ‘was penned by a godly clerke, merely for delectacion [sic: this seems a doubtful usage], and the teachynge of the people’. The plot is summarized briefly, and the writer asks his ‘Lordshyppe’ to approve a performance intended for ‘Saynt Peter’s day nexte ensewing’; otherwise ‘theis pore artifycers’ (an odd term for town players) will

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119. See Nelson 1980, p. 1n., with references to earlier studies, in particular Reed 1919. Lancashire 1984 twice lists Collier’s ‘singular paper’ as a forgery (nos. 1331 and 1795). 120. W. R. Streitberger (1986b, p. 13): ‘There is no evidence, other than the circumstantial evidence of Collier’s forgeries, that the document he quoted is a fabrication. The account of how he discovered it is perfectly plausible to anyone familiar with research in primary documents.’ See also Streitberger 1994, p. 85. 121. Chambers 1903, ii:151, credited Collier’s letter as ‘contemporary’ with the Chester event, and so called the play ‘revived’; he also observed that the letter indicates (casually) the reign of Henry VII, which began thirty-two years aer 1453.


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abandon their project. Once again Collier’s original manuscript has vanished, and the authoritative modern edition of Chester dramatic records reprints the ‘alleged letter’ only from the 1831 printed text.122 However, the irresistible detail ‘Saynt Peter’s day’ (29 June) may be fatal to its credit, for the performance at the High Cross in 1529 is also recorded in three early manuscript ‘Mayor’s Lists’ for Chester, two of which were already in the British Museum in Collier’s time (MSS Harl. 2133 and 2125; a third, Add. MS 29,777, was acquired in 1875), but which he must not have consulted, or if he did, he misunderstood. All these agree that ‘Robert of Cicell’ was performed at the High Cross (which had been ‘newe guilt with gould’: Harley 2133) in the mayoralty of Henry Radford, which began in October 1529. Daniel King did not bother to mention this in Vale Royal; hence the fabricator’s mistake. Also at the Chapter House, Collier unearthed ‘a volume of the receipts and expenditures of the Earl of Northumberland in the 17th and 18th years of the reign of Henry VIII’ (in fact 29 September 1525 through 28 September 1526), ‘in a state of melancholy mutilation from the damp to which it has been for some centuries exposed’ (i:85–87). From this he professed to have transcribed five items of expenditure, including payments to ‘Willm Peres my lordes Chaplen for makyng of an Enterlued to be playd this next Cristenmas’ (13s. 4d.), two pounds ‘to my lorde of Suffolkes players for two plays bifore my lorde’, and a shilling ‘for eggs, brede, drynke and oranges for my Lorde, into my lorde of Burgaynes chamber when theye were there a maskyng before the king’ (17 February 1526). Collier made a great point of the perishability of his source—‘In many places the damp has entirely obliterated the ink, and in others the paper is so frail, that it falls to pieces with the gentlest touch’—and gave six further entries from the manuscript simply as ‘worth preserving’, since ‘it seems impossible that the book, in its present state, should exist long’. These involve ‘my lord’ in tilting at Eltham, purchasing a ‘Valentyne’ from a goldsmith in London, paying a friar and a priest for requiem masses, and discharging the yearly salaries of five, and then six more ‘trompetts’. Collier’s account of the parlous condition of the manuscript may long have shielded it (and him) from critical cross-checking, and it was not until 1980 that Ian Lancashire re-examined it, and questioned the majority of the HEDP extracts (indeed, he dismissed them as ‘at times ludicrous’).123 The 1525–26 accounts (now PRO E.36.2210, pp. 241–57, and in fact rather distressed from old damp)124 are in fact exclusively for major

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122. Clopper 1979, p. 533. Glynne Wickham (iii:56–57) wanted to believe the letter genuine, in spite of its ‘suspicious’ characteristics; David Mills (1998, p. 128) did not. 123. Lancashire 1980, p. 13n. 124. They have been trimmed around the text and inlaid since 1830, and parts of some leaves are still brittle, but the section discussed by Collier is to all appearances consecutive and complete, with no evidence of loss of pages or significant portions of pages.


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receipts and outlays in the management of the Earl’s extensive estates (rents, annuities, yearly and half-yearly salaries), and never for small household items like ‘eggs, brede, drynke and oranges’, ‘my lords drynking a er the Tylte’ (2d.) or ‘my lordes breakfast’.125 Exactly three of the eleven extracts printed by Collier are now found in the Northumberland manuscript, namely those for the salary of the trumpeters (two, both dated 7 October 1527 by Collier, though in fact they are for 11 May and 6 July 1526, pp. 250 and 256), and a twenty-pound quarterly fee ‘paid to Mr. More chauncellor of the Dewchey’ on 11 May (not 26 April, as Collier has it). The remaining eight are simply not in the manuscript, which as it stands provides no evidence whatever of theatrical activity (‘trompetts’ don’t count) in the household of the Earl of Northumberland in 1526–27.126 And of course the inferences about William Peeris’s dramatic career (i:87–88) are by extension groundless. A much lesser (putative) fabrication, of no really perverse effect, but a warning of others to come, is at iii:236. The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissel, a collaboration (we know from Henslowe’s diary) between Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton, was thought by Collier to have been initiated by Chettle, while Dekker and Haughton ‘at a subsequent period, may have made additions to it, for the sake of giving it variety and novelty, and rendering it more popular when it was revived’. As casual evidence toward this hypothesis Collier mentions a copy of the 1603 quarto ‘sold not long since’, ‘on the titlepage of [which] . . . was written, in a contemporary hand, ‘‘By H. Chetill’’, as if he alone were the writer of it’. Now in fact Patient Grissel (1603) is a very rare book, and today just four copies are known to survive, none of which has, or seems ever to have had Chettle’s name ‘in a contemporary hand’ on its title.127 What then did Collier mean to signal in 1831 as a copy ‘sold not long since’? 125. This sort of petty-cash expense is probably covered by bulk payments to agents or servants-in-charge, unspecified save as ‘by his papers’ (i.e. vouchers) or ‘in my booke’ (i.e. another account book, but not this one: for this is a ‘cofferer’s book’, a key to the whole financial operation of Northumberland’s estates). 126. Seven of the presumed spurious dates of Collier’s extracts are not matched at all by transactions in the text, but there is a genuine entry for 31 October 1525 that does not include any payment to ‘Willm Peres’ for ‘an Enterlued’; neither Peres nor any of the other named recipients in the eight suspect entries (Jasper Horsey, Mr. Carewe, Bonett, Yerd, Parker) appears elsewhere in the accounts. 127. The Samuel Ireland–Roxburghe–George III copy (in the King’s Library of the British Museum, but unknown to Collier in 1841, when he edited the play for the Shakespeare Society); the Kalbfleish-White-Folger copy, its early provenance unknown; the imperfect Kemble copy (with its title in quasi-facsimile by George Steevens), then in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire; and the Heber copy, acquired by him at the Inglis ‘Old Plays’ sale in 1826 for thirteen guineas. When Devonshire purchased the Heber copy in 1834 (sale, part II, lot 4376), he made a present of his defective quarto to Collier, and this is now at the University of Texas, in the Pforzheimer Collection of early English literature (no. 181).


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Unless one has vanished (and at a value of some thirteen guineas that would be surprising), it was probably the Inglis copy sold in 1826, then inaccessible to Collier in Heber’s collection. But when Devonshire later acquired it, and Collier subsequently edited the play (from that very copy, the only complete one he knew), it clearly did not bear the ‘H. Chetill’ inscription. This manuscript note he now (1841) fathered on ‘one of the remaining copies of the play’, having already stated that only the Bodleian (sic, for the British Museum) among public libraries held a copy, that Devonshire’s was the only ‘complete’ copy in private hands, and that Devonshire’s defective duplicate was now on Collier’s own shelves. Where the ‘H. Chetill’ copy came from or went to he would not specify, and although this is a minor invention, an invention it does seem to be. In Collier’s own day the secrecy of private collections provided some cover for a claim of this sort; a er a century and a half the redistribution of rarities and the intensity of bibliographical pursuit of books like Patient Grissel render ‘escapees’ more improbable. The six instances above are all of suspect texts for which there apparently exist no physical originals to examine and assess. For the nine that follow, the manuscript originals cited by Collier do survive, and may be judged by criteria other than, and in addition to, the literary and historical standards we have heretofore applied. Opinions about the ‘genuineness’ of old documents may sometimes be more impressionistic than scientific, but they can be debated scientifically, and in some cases the physical characteristics of an anachronistic piece of writing prove it, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be a forgery. Here we will touch only on the more obvious examples of what seem to be fabrication-cumforgery, not on the forensic means of challenging their physical embodiment.128 At i:231, Collier published ‘an old satirical epigram . . . copied on the flyleaf of a book, published a few years before the expulsion of the actors from London into the Liberties [i.e., 1575]’. Six trimeter triplets, headed ‘The Fooles of the Cittie’, lament the driving forth of ‘eche poor plaier . . . From Troynovaunts olde cittie’, mentioning specially ‘Wilson and Jacke Lane’, and suggesting that the authorities wish that ‘Not one shall play the foole / But they’—which is ‘the cause & reason, / At every tyme & season, / are worse then treason’. Collier identifies ‘Wilson’ with Robert Wilson, a celebrated comedian and later a playwright, and moots that ‘Jack Lane may either be a different performer, or John Laneham [another well-known actor], with his name abridged for the sake of the rhyme’. Not much credit has attached to this bit of doggerel, and even Collier for128. ‘Scientific demonstration’ of forgery—that mirage of conclusiveness beloved of the press, the law courts, and detective fiction—is mercifully no part of our programme, largely because it has rarely, if ever, seemed necessary. Traditional techniques of judging ink, paper, and penmanship are discussed in a later section; see also pages 207–10 and Appendix I.


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bore to reprint it in later notices of Robert Wilson (Five Old Plays, Memoirs of Actors, etc.), while most stage historians (e.g., Chambers) simply ignore it. The principal exception has been F. G. Fleay (1890, pp. 49–50), who convinced himself that Collier had not understood the text of the poem (which Fleay himself had, emending it accordingly), and argued from this that Collier’s ignorance proved him guiltless: ‘this want of insight into the real state of the case . . . convinces me that in this instance (unlike so many others) Mr. Collier has given us a genuine old ballad’. Fleay made no converts, however, and as Collier did not identify or locate his source, ‘The Fooles of the Cittie’ would normally remain a fabrication suspect. But the book does exist: it is Abraham Fleming’s handbook for letter-writers, A Panoply of Epistles (1576), a copy now in the Folger Library, with the poem on the verso of ¶6, facing πA1. An old owner’s name has been largely erased from the title-page, leaving an initial ‘J’ which resembles that of Collier in his own signature. The hand of the poem imitates the generic Elizabethan ‘secretary’, but by no means skilfully, and perhaps for that reason—or because of the slightly jarring date of the imprint—the volume was jettisoned at some later date, without attention being called to the embellishment. It does not figure in the Collier or Frederic Ouvry sales of 1882–84, but at Folger the verses were rediscovered, and judged by Giles Dawson to be in ‘J. P. Collier’s forging hand’ (note in volume). Their resurfacing suggests that not all Collier’s uncited sources need be imaginary: perhaps some were laboriously prepared as physical specimens, deemed unsafe to bear scrutiny, and suppressed. Also from Collier’s personal collection, but this time confidently noted as such, came ‘an enumeration, as early as the year 1516, under the title of ‘‘Garments for Players’’’, quoted in full at i:80–82. This interesting inventory of comparatively luxurious clothing is certainly for dramatic use (‘xv pleyers garments of silke, olde’, ‘cappes of divers fassions for players . . . xviii of satten & sarcenet’, etc.), and Collier pointed to two items that ‘tend to show that the performances for which they were used were Miracle-plays, or at least pieces in which certain scriptural characters were mixed up with the allegorical impersonations of Morals’. One was ‘a long garment of cloth of golde and tynsell, for the Prophete upon Palme Sonday’, with ‘a capp of grene tynsell to the same’, and the second was ‘a littill gowne for a woman, the virgin, of cloth of silver’. But in the latter entry ‘the words ‘‘the virgin’’ are interlined in the original copy with a different ink, if not by a different hand, to that by which the rest of the inventory was made out: another word seems to have followed, perhaps ‘‘Mary’’, but the paper is extremely rotten, and precisely in this place it is defective’ (i:81n.). Now Collier’s costume inventory survives, along with many other theatrical manuscripts and scraps that he sold to his nephew by marriage, Frederic Ouvry (BL MS Egerton 2623; Ouvry sale, lot 530), and is a perfectly genuine sixteenth-


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century document, torn at the foot and slightly stained at the top, but certainly not ‘rotten’. We have no reason to question the main body of the text, nor (with a few minor misreadings) Collier’s transcript; but the interlineation ‘the Virgin’ and the thinning of the paper beyond it—by abrasion, not rot—are suspicious. The ink and the hand are ‘different’, as Collier disarmingly states, but jarringly so, and the subsequent weak spot looks more like an erasure than a natural flaw. More to the point, the handwriting of the main document is unmistakably that of the mid-sixteenth century, and the improbably early date Collier assigns to it stems from an inscription at the head, ‘Ao. VII. Henr. VIII.’ (as he transcribed it). This inscription, which again looks modern to us, is in fact interrupted by a small paper repair, so that it now reads ‘Ao. VII. he[n] [blank] iij.’: the absence of the ‘V’ or ‘v’ in what supposedly once was ‘Viij’ or ‘viij’ may have been caused by damage and paper replacement, or (more likely) was a deliberate omission, meant to ‘date’ the inscription prior to the not-very-ancient paper-mend. If the affixed date is discounted, the handwriting and the contents of the list of ‘Garments for Players’ point to about 1550 and probably to the Revels Office, for which such inventories were made and preserved in multiple copies, and which used the term ‘players garments’ as a specific wardrobe category.129 The gown and cap ‘for the Prophete upon Palme Sonday’ might seem inappropriate for the Revels costumers, but ‘the Prophete’ is in fact not a personification in a formal religious play, but a traditional figure in church-door pageantry, o en played by boy singers, and a Revels inventory of 1547 does include ‘j Gowne of Tawny Tilsent [i.e., tinsel] newe for a Boye to pley the profett’, along with ‘a prophettes cappe of Tilsent’, just like that on Collier’s list.130 The distinction between new clothing and ‘olde’ is likewise common to the ‘1516’ inventory and many Revels accounts, but what would never figure in any Revels wardrobe would be a costume for the Virgin Mary. And that detail, interlined and palaeographically suspect, is the only one linking Collier’s inventory with parochial or municipal rather than court entertainments. The document in Egerton 2633 has apparently been fraudulently altered and dated.131 The manufacture of the two (supposed) forgeries above need not have been surreptitious, as both were additions to privately owned objects, a book and a manuscript leaf; and the same is probably true of the most audacious of all

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129. Cf. Feuillerat 1914, pp. ix, 193. 130. Ibid., p. 14. See Chambers 1903, ii:5; and the costumes recorded in Lancashire 1984, nos. 59 and 1407: ‘Children with hired playing garments and six pair of gloves played the prophets on Palm Sunday [in Southwark, 1555]’; Lancashire no. 1407. 131. Lancashire 1984, no. 956, compounded the error by listing this as of A.D. 1491–92 (apparently by misreading 7 Henry VIII as 7 Henry VII), and misrepresents ‘iii garments of damask & satten for women, olde’ (cf. ‘xv pleyers garments of silke, olde’) as ‘garments for . . . three old women’.


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the HEDP impostures, housed though it soon came to be in a public institution. At i:227–28, Collier prints a petition from the inhabitants of the Blackfriars Precinct to the Privy Council, objecting to the Burbages’ project of converting certain rooms there into an indoor theatre, because of the commotion, ‘annoyance and trouble’, and ‘general inconvenience’.132 This genuine document Collier carelessly misdated 1576 (it is in fact November 1596), confusing the ‘first’ and ‘second’ Blackfriars Theatres, but by i:297 he had corrected himself— without, however, amending his earlier description—causing thereby no end of confusion among later scholars striving to cope with what followed. For Collier then described and transcribed (i:297–300) ‘a much more curious paper—a counter petition by the Lord Chamberlain’s players, entreating that they might be permitted to continue their work upon the theatre, in order to render it more commodious, and that their performances there might not be interrupted’. The ‘more curious paper’, found ‘appended’ to the residents’ petition, was said to be ‘not . . . the original, but a copy, without the signatures, and it contains, at the commencement, an enumeration of the principal actors who were parties to it’. These eight petitioners included Richard Burbage, John Heminge, William Kempe, William Sly, and of course William Shakespeare, whose name came fi h in the list, ‘seven years anterior to the date of any other authentic record, which contains the name of our great dramatist’, and so the record ‘may warrant various conjectures as to the rank he held in the company in 1596, as a poet and as a player’. Collier implicitly claimed credit for unearthing the document, which ‘has, perhaps, never seen the light from the moment it was presented, until it was very recently discovered’. In subsequent years the authenticity of the players’ petition would be hotly disputed, as indeed would that of the residents’ petition itself, which went temporarily missing, but resurfaced in 1869. The players’ petition remained in the State Paper Office where Collier claimed he had found it, and was examined by believers and sceptics alike over the next several decades (an acrimonious investigation which we shall relate in its place), until five prominent ‘experts’ declared it a forgery in 1860. As we shall see, their grounds were largely orthographical and palaeographical, but as Collier had claimed it only as a contemporary ‘copy’, and the handwriting is not the worst of secretary imitations, debate might still rage had not the forger made one understandable, but fatal, mistake. This ‘1596’ document asserts that ‘in the summer season your Petitioners are able to playe at their new built house on the Bankside calde the Globe’, while ‘in the winter they are compelled to come to the Blackfriers’. In 1831 no theatrical

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132. SPD cclx, no. 116; modern transcripts in Chambers, ES, iv:319–20; and Irwin Smith 1984, document 22.


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scholar would have questioned the first detail, for Malone had argued persuasively in 1796 (Inquiry, pp. 86–87) that a bond dated 22 December 1593, between Richard Burbage and the builder Peter Street, related specifically to work on the Globe, and so dated its first construction. ‘This may fix the building of the Globe Theatre to the year 1594’, wrote Malone, ‘and probably it was opened in that or the following year’, a belief that Collier himself repeated at iii:296. But unfortunately for the forger of the players’ petition, Malone was mistaken, and the Globe Theatre could not have been built until a er December 1598, as James Orchard Halliwell conclusively demonstrated in 1874.133 Thus the allusion to the Globe in a document of ‘1596’ proves the latter an out-and-out fake. That Collier himself faked it remains, strictly speaking, unproven, but the ‘experts’ of 1860 are vindicated. Forging the players’ petition, as somebody must have done prior to 1831, was a considerable performance, as writing out twenty-two long lines of text on blank seventeenth-century paper would require both patience and privacy— homework, certainly—whereas smuggling the finished product into the loose files of the State Paper Office would never have been difficult. Less time and less cover were available, on the other hand, for the pen-and-ink adulteration of three manuscripts already in the British Museum and at Dulwich College. We have already noted in passing that Thomas Warton gra ed fictitious episodes onto the diary of the mid-sixteenth-century undertaker Henry Machyn, which passed scrutiny for over a century as passages destroyed in the Cottonian fire of 1731; Warton did not of course risk making physical forgeries to back up his inventions. But the source of Collier’s disclosure at i:180, of ‘the earliest instance of a subject from the Roman history being brought upon the stage’, is indeed physical, if in only one word. Machyn gives a glowing account of a grand masque performed somewhere in London on 1 February 1562, with a hundred and fi y masquers ‘gorgyously be sene’ and two hundred trumpeters, drummers, and torchbearers, ‘and so’ (i.e., a erwards) ‘to the cowrt, & dyvers goodly men of armes in gylt harnes, & Julyus Sesar [smudged]’. In the manuscript as it now survives the smudged ‘Sesar’ is followed by ‘played’—as if to explain what was meant to be written—in a different ink, and a strikingly different hand, whose letter-forms are eccentric indeed.134 Without ‘played’ one would tend to

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133. Illustrations of the Life of Shakespeare . . . Part the First, pp. 25–27 and 43. Malone himself came to realize this, annotating his copy of the book: ‘The Globe was not built till a later period 1599’ (BL C.45.e.23, owned by Collier before 1841, but unappreciated by him); Malone credited a ‘paper in Hist. of Stage marked G. T.’ for the correction. The discrepancy does not appear to have been appreciated by anyone earlier than Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1913, p. 176); ten years later Chambers relegated the information to a note, saying the players’ petition ‘could not be genuine in substance, since it refers to the Globe, which did not exist in 1596’ (ES, ii:508n). 134. The ‘p’ is crossed as if for the abbreviation ‘per’, and the ‘a’ takes the form of Greek alpha.


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think ‘Julyus Sesar’ simply one of the masquers, but with the addition in place Collier permitted himself to posit a ‘historical play . . . acted at court, called Julius Caesar’, the first English work of its kind, staged two weeks a er Gorboduc (which itself is the first English ‘regular’ tragedy). Collier’s transcript of this passage, ‘played’ and all, is unusually faulty, and several of his mistranscriptions were corrected by John Gough Nichols, in his still-standard Diary of Henry Machyn (Camden Society, 1848): there Nichols remarked that ‘The word played has been added in another hand, and though resembling the old, may be an addition and not contemporary’ (p. 276). John Payne Collier was the treasurer of the Camden Society and a good friend of Nichols, who made no further imputations, nor any reference to HEDP. A little more complicated, but no less suspicious, is the record, taken also from Machyn, of ‘a play called Jube the Sane, performed at the marriage of Lord Strange to the daughter of the Earl of Cumberland . . . in the reign of Edward VI’ (i:146). The curious title has been duly registered in Harbage, Schoenbaum, and Wagonheim’s Annals of English Drama, under 1549, as ‘lost’; Collier conjectured that ‘perhaps [the play] was scriptural, on the story of Job’, and the Annals offers ‘Job the Saint?’ as a possible gloss on ‘Jube the Sane’. All this proceeds from Machyn’s report of the entertainment following the wedding, which included (in Nichols’s transcription) ‘a grett dener’, a ‘tornay on horsbake with swordes’ and finally ‘a er soper Jube the cane, a play, with torch-lyght and cressett-lyghtes . . . and a maske, and a bankett’. As Nichols pointed out in 1848, however, ‘Jube the cane’ was not a stage-play, but ‘Juego de Canas [i.e., cañas], or tilting with canes, a sport introduced by the Spaniards’ (p. 82, the date of 7 February 1554/5 misprinted as 12 February); elsewhere he noticed Stow’s version of the term in a description of the same event, ‘a goodly pastime of Juga cana by cresset lyght’, and Ian Lancashire has subsequently relegated Collier’s apparent misreading to ‘Doubtful Records’, without suggesting that any mischief was intended. But a look at the original manuscript reveals that ‘a play’ (following ‘Jube the cane’, the ‘c’ of which may have been altered in ink to make ‘sane’ a plausible reading) is interlined above the mysterious sporting term, which readers before Nichols, like Collier, simply did not understand.135 What is more, we can easily compare ‘a play’ with the provocative ‘played’ a er ‘Julyus Sesar’, and find that they closely resemble each other, especially in the use of the otherwise unusual (or incredible) ‘alpha’ for ‘a’. Nichols, for whatever reason, did

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135. John Stow, The Summarie of English Chronicles (1566), cited by J. G. Nichols, The Diary of Henry Machyn (1848), p. 343; Lancashire 1984, no. 1806. Strype, who listed all the other aspects of the entertainment, le out ‘Jube the cane’ between the ‘soper’ and the ‘mask’, presumably from incomprehension; but if ‘a play’ had been visible to him in 1721 it is hard to believe he would not have included it; see Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford, 1822), iii/1:332.


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not signal ‘a play’ as an insertion, and what may have looked like an innocent error seems now more like a deliberate forgery, founded in and tripped up by philological ignorance. Collier gained access to Machyn’s diary through the good offices of his new friend Frederic Madden, who had only recently completed reassembling its partly burnt fragments.136 Another much less explored diary in Madden’s care —a Harleian manuscript—was that of Sir Humphrey Mildmay (1592–1666?), an Essex landowner with a penchant for London pleasures, including the theatre. Collier was the first to abstract and publish Mildmay’s records of playhouse attendance, along with some of his more licentious escapades, but only one Mildmay entry in HEDP is seriously suspect.137 Collier printed two payments of 31 May and 4 December 1633 ‘To Mr. Shakespere, his man Jo’ and ‘To Jo, att Mr. Shakespers’ for ‘one per of spurres with bosses’ and ‘one per of spurres’, remarking that these were ‘particularly curious, in connexion with the family and name of Shakespeare’. ‘There are many notes in the margin of this account book’, he continued (which is true: Mildmay added details of many expenses, e.g., ‘my wife’), ‘and opposite the first of these [Shakespeare] entries are placed these remarkable words, ‘‘No player now’’; as if the Shakespere here mentioned had once been a player, or at least had had some connexion with players’. He went on to identify ‘Mr. Shakespere’ as the royal bit-maker John Shakespeare (cf. Chambers, WS, ii:370), who was dead by 1637, and who may have been related to the playwright. ‘No player now’ does appear in the margin of Mildmay’s account-book (fol. 180), a side-note unlike any other in the manuscript, and in a hand different from Mildmay’s—not glaringly, but certainly. E. K. Chambers dismissed it in 1930 (‘This seems to me a clear forgery’; WS, ii:387), and G. E. Bentley described it as in ‘a modern hand, slightly disguised’ (ii:674). The last three instances of fabrication-cum-forgery to be considered here all appear in one manuscript, the celebrated ‘diary’ of accounts, inventories, contracts and performances (1592–1609) compiled by Philip Henslowe, rival to the Burbages as theatrical entrepreneur.138 One of the great primary sources for the history of Elizabethan drama, it was bequeathed by Henslowe’s son-in-law Edward Alleyn to Dulwich College, and first systematically quarried by Edmond Malone. Malone borrowed it from the college and kept it for nearly three decades, during which he published extracts from it relevant to his history of the

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136. Madden Diary, 2 December 1829: ‘Finished the arrangement of Vitell.F.5, a labor the compiler of the Cotton Catalogue [David Casley] confessed himself unequal to.’ 137. HEDP, ii:41–42. See Bentley, ii:673–81, for all the theatrical records, ‘about one third of them’ noticed by Collier; and the general selection in Ralph 1947. 138. Our principal discussion of the diary is in Part Five.


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stage, and also had prepared for his use a literal transcript of part of the text, as Henslowe’s handwriting and orthography are notoriously irregular, and the diary by no means easy to follow. A er Malone’s death in 1812 the diary was returned to Dulwich, where Collier, through the introduction he procured from Sir Henry Ellis, examined it in 1830. He made abundant use of Henslowe in HEDP, rarely failing to point out in his own extracts what Malone had overlooked or omitted to publish, and many of the diary entries saw print for the first time in 1831. Several, however, are highly suspect. At i:307 appear three Henslowe payments (‘It is to be remarked, that Malone published none of them’), relating to the scandalous lost play The Isle of Dogs, whose performance led to the restraint (briefly) of all playing in London in 1597, and perhaps to the imprisonment of Ben Jonson. The first (14 May 1597) advances ‘twentye shellinges more’ to Thomas Nashe ‘for the Iylle of Dogges, which he is wrytinge for the companey’; the second (23 August) finds Nashe ‘nowe att this tyme in the flete for wrytinge of the Eylle of Dogges’, and lends him ten shillings, ‘to be payde agen to me wen he cann’—a most uncharacteristic act of generosity from tightfisted Henslowe; and the third (27 August) rewards a messenger from the Revels Office ‘for newes of the restraynt beyng recaled by the lordes of the Queenes Cownsell’. These three entries, which incidentally provide the only evidence that Nashe was ever imprisoned over the affair, appear precisely as Collier has transcribed them, on folios 29r and 33r–v of the diary itself, in an ink that G. F. Warner (1881) thought ‘plainly doctored to give it a fictitious appearance of age’, and in a hand that scholars since Warner (e.g., Greg 1904–08, McKerrow 1910, and Chambers, ES) unite in condemning as modern. Greg called the third entry ‘the most clumsy forgery in the volume’ (i:xli), and it really looks nothing like Henslowe at all. At iii:101, Collier noticed ‘the name of Webster . . . interlined in different ink’ over a record of buying cloth for ‘a cloek, for the Gwise’. Henslowe’s title ‘the Gwise’ (i.e., Duke of Guise, the villain of St. Bartholomew’s Day) very possibly relates to Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris or some later adaptation, but in 1623 John Webster named ‘Guise’ among his own tragedies, and the interlineation on folio 94r, if genuine, would provide a surprisingly early date (November 1601) for that lost play. Indeed it would be the earliest record of Webster’s literary career, but it has been universally condemned. Warner in 1881 called it ‘a spurious modern addition’, and noted (p. xlii) that ‘it seems to have been the result of a second attempt, for below the line are unmistakable traces of an erasure, so carefully made and smoothed over as scarcely to be detected except from the thinness of the paper’ (we may recall the erasure a er ‘Virgin’ in Collier’s costume inventory); and Greg pointed out that the name ‘Webster’—indeed written small, but quite legible—does not appear in Malone’s transcript of ca. 1790, which faith-


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fully renders the rest of the text (1904–08, i:xlii). R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, the modern editors of Henslowe, add that the caret-mark over which ‘Webster’ is written, as well as the interlined word itself, ‘both seem to be modern forgeries’ (1961, p. 183). Finally, the more substantial entry—four lines—recording a payment of twenty shillings to Thomas Dekker on 20 December 1597 ‘for adycyons to Fosstus . . . and fyve shellinges more for a prolog to Marloes Tamburlan’ (HEDP, iii:113; Henslowe, fol. 19v) is likewise missing from Malone’s transcript, although its content would strongly attract any student of the drama. Rather superfluously, Collier cited this testimony as ‘decisive’ in attributing Tamburlaine to Christopher Marlowe, a considerable exercise in HEDP (iii:112–26), which more than one reviewer singled out for special praise: even without the spurious evidence Collier’s case was convincing, and Marlowe’s authorship of Tamburlaine has rarely been questioned. That the entry in Henslowe is an out-and-out forgery has been even less subject to doubt, but only since 1876, when Clement Ingleby first took it to task. Collier himself would later republish it, and by implication defend it, while distancing himself from the question of ‘corruptions’ in the text of the diary. In 1831 Henslowe’s novelties, like all the impostures above, enjoyed the trust of a comparatively uncritical, or not hypercritical, audience. Why would anyone invent such arcana? Why would anyone risk his reputation for a pittance? And by the same token, why should anyone trouble to check?

Evidence

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How certain can we be that the suspect examples above are indeed fabrications, when there is no known physical form of them, or fabrications-cum-forgery when there is? And how certain can we be that John Payne Collier was responsible for any or all of them? The first group of six, each published by Collier for the first time, and now untraceable to any documentary source, we have condemned because they sound anachronistic, because they sound ‘too good to be true’, because Collier’s cited originals fail to provide support for them as promised, and because some of their historical details appear to be contradicted by other trustworthy sources. These are all critical criteria familiar to Collier and his contemporaries, for whom Edmond Malone’s Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796) served as a textbook on forgery and its detection. In dealing with William Henry Ireland’s faked Shakespearian letters and documents, Malone was usually addressing physical forgery as well as fictitious text, but his principles of testing apply equally to text known only from transcript or report. Malone’s principal tests for genuineness are (1) ‘Orthography’


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(pp. 31–74), (2) ‘Language and Phraseology’ (pp. 74–82), and (3) ‘incongruous circumstances’ (i.e., historical contradictions, incorrect conventional forms, etc.; pp. 82–103); for physical evidence he could add handwriting (pp. 103–16) and paper (pp. 310–13—watermarks he particularized, and the size and sources of old paper he considered)—but not, notably, ink (yet unstudied) or pens (quill-pens were still common, and the new metal nibs were not known to leave tell-tale traces). Ireland’s jejeune impostures made no extravagant demands on the skills of Malone, on any of these counts—An Inquiry virtually ignores his full-length play Vortigern, fabricated without any physical ‘original’—but the aroused scholar applied his clear legal mind to spelling out his criteria of judgement, and thirty years later there was still nothing better for an investigator (or a forger) to start with. Long a er Malone’s death the investigator of allegedly ancient materials would look for violations of Malone’s principles of authenticity; the forger would seek to avoid them. ‘Orthography’ was perhaps the weakest of Malone’s touchstones, though young Ireland’s eccentricities—double terminal ‘d’s, ‘n’s, and ‘t’s, grotesquely elongated spellings—were indeed silly enough to be condemned on that ground alone; but apologists like Samuel Ireland and George Chalmers were o en able to point to genuine instances of spellings, and indeed of usage and terminology, that Malone said could not exist. Elizabethan orthography, as Malone certainly knew from his Henslowe, could be madly chaotic, and while a scholar steeped in the period might think himself certain that some spellings were all but impossible, better tests were of ‘language and phraseology’, that is, misuse of terms, modern meanings (Malone concentrated on ‘pretty’, ‘ourself ’, and ‘amuse’), or the introduction of anachronistic words and conventional phrases. Finally, Malone’s ‘incongruous circumstances’ were the best index of fraud, especially in revealing contradictions of dates, places, and forms of personal address, like ‘Deare Willem’ from the Earl of Southampton to Shakespeare. To avoid instant detection, he further suggested, the ‘fabricator’ (i.e., W. H. Ireland) of a breadand-butter exchange between Shakespeare and Southampton must deliberately omit any mention of the specific ‘bounty’ involved, because ‘some inquisitive researcher, like myself, [might] happen to be possessed of documents that ascertained this bounty to have been very different from the sum fixed upon’ (Inquiry, pp. 168–69). The fabricator of the 1529 Chester ‘Robert of Cecill’ letter would have been well advised by Malone’s hint to avoid mentioning ‘St. Peter’s Day’, but on the whole the suspect extracts in HEDP avoid orthographic blunders and obvious neologisms. But early ‘language and phraseology’, taken in their larger sense to include poetical conventions (rhyme, internal rhyme, metre, fashions of imagery, and rhetorical argument) are much more difficult to imitate, arising


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as they do from a contemporary writer’s real immersion in his own language and literary cra . Hence the awkwardness in the Cockpit ballad, about which Malone might have insisted, impressionistically, that ‘the proofs of fraud are so numerous, that they produce conviction on the first view’ (Inquiry, p. 171). He was claiming ‘the orthography, the phraseology, and hand-writing’ in aid of his rejection of two spurious letters; we may be restricted to ‘phraseology’ alone in some of the above, but our conviction, in the examples provided, is firm and considered—for now. If any of the missing evidence turns up—Thomas Brande’s letter, a fugitive quarto of Patient Grissel, shreds of a missing leaf from the Northumberland cofferer’s accounts—we would obviously need to assess each instance anew. Likewise if any corroborating report is found—Henry Medwall’s Finding of Troth elsewhere witnessed, indictments of Johnny Cory and Tommy Brent for rioting in Drury Lane—even the undocumented records of other events would deserve new respect. But until such new testimony emerges, the highly suspect entries must be judged fabrications; Occam’s razor (they are vs. they are not—which is less unlikely?) will prevail. And as to Collier’s personal responsibility for these, considered one by one on individual demerits, we must remember that no one but Collier ever professed to have seen the evidence for what he reported and published, before or a er HEDP. With the nine or so fabrications-cum-forgery we are on surer grounds, at least as regards their genuineness. A physical forgery that may be impugned as neatly as the Blackfriars players’ petition, for referring to events two years in the future, leaves us in no doubt about its fraudulence. The ‘Fooles of the Cittie’ verses are sufficiently unbelievable, as contemporary composition and script, to condemn an already dubious text. If the Machyn, Mildmay, and Henslowe diary insertions did not now exist, we would be sceptical of the records Collier printed; but as they do exist and as they are physically unconvincing, we can be virtually sure that their substance is spurious. What we cannot quite stipulate is that Collier himself forged all these ‘originals’ with his own practised hand. In subsequent chapters we will encounter a range of disclaimers and defenses, braced with arguments about opportunity, capacity, motives, and common sense. Was the British Museum Reading Room sufficiently unsupervised? 139 Could anyone forge so much, undetected, at Dulwich? Was not much of this work beyond Collier’s learning and skills? And (again and again) what stood he to gain at such terrible, repeated risk? Hence alternative scenarios have arisen, of unknown forgers at work in the stacks, leaving a trail of false evidence for Collier to stumble upon in good time. These last have been, of necessity,

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139. From 1829 to 1838 the Museum Reading Room, accommodating 120 readers, was located at the south end of the King’s Library; both printed books and manuscripts were consulted there, and only very valuable works were restricted to use within the departments themselves.


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favourites of Collier’s apologists, and even Collier himself sometimes allowed that an unscrupulous, mischief-making predecessor (Steevens? Malone?) might have taken him in. Each instance of falsification laid to Collier can be disputed at some level, and each charge against him must stand on its individual merits. But there are no substantial examples of such scholarly man-traps still in place and unsprung a er Collier’s trawl of his source libraries and archives, and again we have virtually perfect coincidence between opportunity and disclosure—the now-discredited literary novelties in HEDP, and the faked documents or manuscript additions to documents in public institutions first reported by Collier. The case against both aspects of imposture in HEDP, unsubstantiated fabrications and fabrications related to forgeries, seems formidable, even closed. Doubt shed on the veracity of so many passages in HEDP has inevitably overflowed onto others, and dozens more of Collier’s representations have been periodically challenged. Most of them are blameless; several do involve innocent mistakes, like the misdating of the construction of the Globe Theatre (iii: 296–98), based upon Malone’s faulty arguments, although this will also have led, elsewhere, to the telling error in the forged Blackfriars players’ petition. Thomas Warton’s fabricated account of The Nigromansir, recommended (i:52– 53) to ‘those who are not prepared to charge Warton with deliberate and elaborate forgery’, is not Collier’s fault, nor is the misattribution of A Godly Exhortation and Fruitful Admonition to Parents (1584), by ‘R. G.’ (STC 11503), ‘probably’ to Robert Greene, any worse than a bad guess (iii:149: Collier had never seen the book itself, which is actually by Richard Greenham). At iii:384, Collier accepted as genuine a printed playbill for The Humorous Lieutenant (1663) which is in fact a quasi-facsimile of ca. 1820, probably intended as a keepsake rather than a saleable fake, by the actor-publisher William Oxberry. The playbill was exposed as spurious as early as 1854, and Collier himself admitted as much in 1879; but such is the contagion of suspicion that he has since been charged with manufacturing it.140 There has never been a shred of evidence that Collier attempted typographic forgery of any kind, although his optimistic description of this playbill (as ‘sold among the books of the late Mr. Bindley’, with no given location) does suppress the fact that he himself owned a copy of it, very likely James Bindley’s.141 In the 1950s Sydney Race, an indefatigable correspondent of Notes and Queries, challenged the authenticity of at least fourteen more of Collier’s docu-

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140. See QD A16.53. Collier also discussed the playbill in his theatrical column for the Observer on 3 July 1831. 141. It is pasted to p. 262 of his unpublished manuscript continuation of HEDP, Harvard Theatre Collection MS 13.


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ments, questioning the very existence of ten that certainly now exist, and the authenticity of others that had been in place for a century before HEDP. Race’s irresponsible hit-and-run tactics, though extreme to the point of tediousness, prefigure or typify much dismissal of Collier’s testimony by lazy or paranoid scholars. George F. Warner’s reasonable but too-famous warning in DNB (‘none of his statements or quotations can be trusted without verifying, and no volume or document that has passed through his hands can be too carefully scrutinized’) has led others to cast casual doubt on statements in HEDP and elsewhere ad libitum, as a matter of common consent, without taking a reasoned stand on each one—a degree of scepticism which is necessary, if literary history is to be served. Among the traditionally questioned articles in HEDP is ‘a MS. poem, in blank verse . . . fallen into my hands’—‘a speech supposed to be delivered by a Hermit to the Queen, on her first arrival at Theobalds’ in 1591, when she was welcomed by Lord Burghley with an entertainment in several movements (i:284–88). This has long been subjected to doubt among Peele scholars (Collier identified the signatory ‘G. P.’ with George Peele, and wrongly asserted that the handwriting matched Peele’s), but the manuscript itself, and its text, seem quite genuine.142 At ii:431–33 a long note about Spenser and William Alabaster, the Catholic poet, quotes from a manuscript which ‘I have . . . containing seventeen original sonnets, entitled Divine Meditations, by Mr. Alabaster’, in addition to ‘sermons by Dr. Donne, Dr. King, &c., &c.’ The very existence of this collection was once questioned by Donne’s editors, and the portion of the manuscript devoted to Alabaster has apparently gone missing, but again there is no good cause to reject Collier’s account of it (see QD A16.36 for a complicated history of borrowing, mishandling, and loss). A holograph annotation by Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels under Elizabeth and James I, has been undeservedly suspected, and another one cited by Collier at Bridgewater House (i:374) has drawn fire, but its text was published eighteen years before HEDP by William Beloe. More difficult to disentangle from analogous dubia are two further references to Henslowe’s diary at iii:106 and i:335. Collier mentioned among the names of Henslowe’s payees a er 1597 ‘Robert Lee’ and ‘ Hawkins’, and Greg could find neither, and thought them inventions. But ‘Robarte Lee’ does turn up on folio 44v, selling ‘a boocke’ —that is, playbook—and ‘Hawkins’ may be a pardonable misreading of one of Henslowe’s many versions of ‘Haughton’, that is, William Haughton. The most persistent crux in all Henslowe, however, is the interlineation on folio 64v (HEDP, i:335) of ‘mr mastone’ over ‘lent unto mr maxton the new poete in earneste of a booke’. Collier transcribed this as ‘Mr. Marstone’, and theorized 142. For further discussion of this and the following cases, see A16 below.

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that the correction was added ‘when the old manager was better informed, that the name was not Maxton, as he had first written it’, but rather [John] Marston, and that Henslowe’s payment ‘very possibly’ concerned the ‘booke’ of Marston’s tragicomedy The Malcontent. Greg initially dismissed ‘mastone’ as an interlined forgery like ‘Webster’, and assumed that Collier had deliberately mistranscribed it; but unlike ‘Webster’ (and Dekker and Marlowe, for that matter), the interpolation is found in Malone’s transcript, and Greg later came around to it. Foakes and Rickert regard it as both genuine and in Henslowe’s own hand, and Collier’s perception that ‘the new poet’ of 1599 was not ‘maxton’ but indeed Marston has been widely accepted. The interlineation itself, for the time being, seems to be safe; it may also have inspired the trying-out of ‘Webster’ some thirty leaves later. And it is not unlikely that some data like this, based on physical evidence still in dispute, will be re-impugned on reinvestigation—less unlikely, perhaps, than that much will be reinstated.

Devonshire and ‘A Sort of Librarian’ William Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire (1790–1858), was probably the most important figure—apart from family, and the familial Henry Crabb Robinson—in John Payne Collier’s life. Born a year a er John to great wealth and a tradition of public service, the ‘bachelor Duke’ is best known for his cultivation of cultural resources—books, paintings, sculpture, Chatsworth House, and its gardens and grounds. He was a tireless traveller, diplomat, collector, and host, a pioneer Russophile, an intimate of kings, politicians, artists, and writers (Byron and Thackeray) and glamorous women (Princess Lieven, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Caroline Norton).143 Among Devonshire’s special graces were his unsnobbish respect for talented service, and his willingness to patronize it on a personal basis. Joseph Paxton, his miracle-working head gardener at Chatsworth, remained in Devonshire’s life-long employ even a er a knighthood and national celebrity, and Collier, always wary of condescension and prickly about credit, never in thirty years’ acquaintance with the duke, or in recollections some fi een years later, spoke of him without deference and respect. For his part Devonshire appears genuinely to have liked John, as he clearly appreciated Collier’s help with his library. Familiarity had its limits, however, and the single-minded scholar could seem gauche and exasperating at times, even ‘simple and vulgar’, ‘over-anxious’, or wearisome with his ‘incessant talking’; their relationship was certainly never as equal, intellectually or socially, as Collier depicts it in his Old Man’s Diary (1871–72). But it was probably Devonshire’s intention, and surely to Devonshire’s credit, that Collier sensed little of that. 143. See Lees-Milne 1991.


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Over the long term the duke’s principal importance to John lay in his bookowning, his book-buying, and his occasional ventures into publishing, but in 1830–32 he seemed to hold out chances of political patronage as well. Politics, however, were never a passion with John, despite a lifetime of knowledgeable parliamentary reporting, and opinionizing in print. These were heady days of reform, with the English electorate by 1831 felt to be in a mood closer to overt rebellion than at any time since the mid-seventeenth century; and during the legislative commotion surrounding the three votes on the First Reform Bill John’s newspaper duties intensified.144 Charles Greville wrote famously that in March 1831 nothing was ‘talked of, thought of, dreamt of, but Reform . . . from morning till night, in the streets, in the clubs, and in private houses’;145 but this is precisely when John Murray was dilatory, Collier thought, in marshalling HEDP through the press, and there is scarcely a word about this civil crisis in OMD or in Collier’s extant letters and reminiscences. Despite his liberal background and radical contacts, his old scrape with the Commons hardly reflected political convictions, nor had Criticisms on the Bar taken an overtly partisan stance: while we may imagine that Collier’s position on Catholic emancipation and on West Indian slavery (to name two issues that Devonshire cared deeply about) were liberal, like Devonshire’s, we have no direct evidence of this, and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that such matters were not central to John’s thinking. A dozen years later Crabb Robinson said as much: ‘the truth is that Collier so exclusively devotes himself to Shakespeare, that he is indifferent to everything going on in the present day however important its political bearings and is equally regardless of religious controversies’ (HCR Diary, 26 October 1844). To the extent that he cared about party politics, however—and it would be absurd to suggest that he was indifferent to the social issues themselves at this date—his creed was compatible with Devonshire’s, and his advancement need not have worried the duke. But Devonshire’s involvement in government, at its zenith in 1826–30, declined in the years following the death of George IV, and although he served William IV faithfully as Lord Chamberlain in the critical period 1830–32, illness and his own disinclination to participate in Sir Robert Peel’s Tory government effectively terminated his official career in 1834. With that his influence— as far as Collier’s office-seeking ambitions were concerned—also lapsed.

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We have already mentioned John’s first encounters with Devonshire, his use of some of the rare plays at Devonshire House for HEDP, and his subsequent dedication of that work to the duke. By May 1830 Collier’s visits to 144. Jane Collier, writing to Robinson on 23 September 1831 (two days aer the third reading of the Reform Bill passed), said, ‘He has been so engaged with his business in the Commons, that he has yet nothing else on the stocks’; HCR Correspondence. 145. The Greville Memoirs, ed. Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford (1935), ii:125.


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Devonshire’s London residences had become regular (‘Collier so useful about my plays’, Devonshire noted at Chiswick House on 3 May, and ‘very busy with Collier & my plays’ at Devonshire House, 30 June).146 An invitation to Chatsworth soon followed. John arrived there on the evening of Friday, 8 October, and remained for the week.147 Other guests included the high-spirited young water-colourist George Cattermole, and Collier may have felt awkward: on Sunday, the duke found his company trying (‘I was le alone with Collier. He is very well in London, but here it’s impossible, he is so simple and vulgar’), and although the next day ‘Mr Collier becomes a shade better as he gets at his ease’, nonetheless ‘I could never submit to his society, poor man’. On the following Tuesday the duke was bitten by a mastiff and worried about rabies; he drove out to his ancient seat Hardwick Hall, taking Collier for lunch, and thought him ‘much better today, or perhaps my gratitude to him for incessant talking which diverted my thoughts may have made him seem so. He had no suspicion of my state of mind.’ John’s state of mind, on the other hand, cannot have benefited from having le his luckless brother William terminally ill back in London. William died on 9 October, one day into the visit to Chatsworth. Did John learn of this there? We assume that he returned to London with the duke on Friday, 15 October, and ten days later he ‘came cataloguing’ once more to Devonshire House.148 Collier’s attendance on Devonshire continued over the autumn and winter, not always to the satisfaction of the latter. ‘Collier writing as usual in my library’, the duke grumbled on 18 February 1831, ‘a vulgar, clever, not intelligent man’. And three weeks later: ‘Bother with Collier who is over anxious’.149 But in happier moments Devonshire presented the scholar with £100 in November 1830, presumably in appreciation for the dedication of his HEDP, and just before Christmas set him two new literary tasks: ‘I gave Collier the Chiswick papers

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146. Sixth Duke’s diary, Chatsworth MS 767.454. 147. The dates in Devonshire’s diary are off by one day during this period, and we have adjusted them to conform to the fact that Sunday (when ‘I went to Church’) fell on 10 October in 1830. 148. Collier’s own description of what was clearly his first visit to Chatsworth (and perhaps only, until the mid-1840s) is in OMD, i:94–101, where it is dated June 1832. According to him he arrived on Saturday evening, went to church with the duke and others on Sunday, and le (with Devonshire) on Friday, sleeping en route to London. His description of ‘another’ visit—he called it his second—to Chatsworth in ‘Sept. 1832’ (OMD, ii:47–52) is undoubtedly based on the same 1830 trip, and is probably a more truthful version of it, for instead of the grand guests mentioned in the first entry, Collier said there were only a few people in the house (conforming to Devonshire’s account), and he specifically mentioned a drive to Hardwick Hall, where he and the duke lunched. Collier gave a description of yet ‘another’ visit in OMD, iv:62, dating it to November 1833, but included few details; we have found nothing to corroborate his account. 149. Chatsworth MS 767.455.


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to settle and my Inigo Jones memoranda book’ (23 December 1830). The latter, a charming small sketchbook kept by the architect and scene-designer during his second Italian tour (1612–15), was described by Collier in HEDP as ‘full of spirited and elaborate drawings in pen and ink, from pictures and statues . . . a most remarkable and highly valuable relic’ (i:392–93). Although the idea of publishing a lithographic facsimile may have been Collier’s (OMD, ii:110–11), it was the duke who communicated his specific instructions on 10 January 1831: ‘I wish to have Inigo Jones’ Sketch book engraved on stone for £50’, he informed Collier, with ‘an additional leaf a er the titlepage imitated from my handwriting and presenting the copy to each person—we will arrange this when I come to town’. The stones were to be destroyed a er taking off ‘a very few copies . . . 50—or 100’.150 Collier duly oversaw Devonshire’s project, which was a good deal more demanding than either might have anticipated. Jones’s sketches were ‘very free in style and were drawn in an ink which varied in tone’, Michael Twyman has noted, and ‘the task of reproducing such work must have been a formidable one’.151 Despite the technical difficulties, the high standards that Devonshire’s commission implied were met, and the result is a conspicuous success. To print the facsimile Collier employed George Edward Madeley, of 3 Wellington Street, Strand—an address shared with Sotheby’s auction rooms—and ‘carefully watched its progress through the hands of the lithographer’.152 Mercifully the duke’s idea of a leaf ‘imitated from my handwriting’ was abandoned—Devonshire’s handwriting is difficult, to say the least—and copies of the facsimile are normally inscribed in ink in the duke’s name as gi s, but in Collier’s more readable holograph. The 128-page book was bound up in vellum, with green silk ties, in close imitation of the original manuscript. There is no letterpress, and Collier’s name nowhere appears in it, but he took pride in the finished product, which was ready by Christmas 1831. Devonshire initially refused to yield a copy to the ‘musty’ Society of Antiquaries, and when Collier finally elicited one (uninscribed) he told Amyot that he ‘should like in some way or other to be connected with the transaction as I had the pleasant trouble of getting up the fac-simile’, a claim he repeated in the society’s Archaeologia. His pride seems now not misplaced, for as Twyman remarks, the volume ‘has to be seen as an astonishing production for its period’.153 By mid-January 1831 Collier considered his services to Devonshire as nearly

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150. Folger MS Y.d.6 (43). 151. Twyman 1990, p. 204. 152. ‘Sketch-Book of Inigo Jones’, Archaeologia 24 (1832), 354–56; reprinted in John Martin, Privately Printed Books (1834), pp. 291–93 (and second edition [1854], pp. 409–12). 153. JPC to Amyot, 19 December 1831, BL Add. MS 37,907, fols. 203–04; Twyman 1990, p. 208.


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formalized. ‘I have been acting lately, while he has been in London, as his private secretary, arranging his papers &c.’, he wrote to Robinson (18 January 1831)— these latter presumably ‘the Chiswick papers’. And hope of political advancement, even of escape from the drudgery of the daily press, swelled in him: ‘I am upon such terms that if he should happen to have (as Lord Chamberlain) anything to give away, I do not stand a bad chance of obtaining it.’ As Lord Chamberlain, one office that Devonshire oversaw was that of Licenser or Examiner of Plays, a powerful and moderately profitable position, with a lifetime term of appointment: the Licenser read and censored all new plays, operas, and entertainments intended for the public stage, imposing his own standards of decency and civil order upon each submission, and exacting a set fee from each applicant. He had no such responsibility for old drama revived—absurdly, the bawdiest restoration comedy could freely be staged at the two London ‘Theatres Royal’, while any novelty might be blue-pencilled into extinction—but his personal sensibilities could dictate in considerable measure the course of contemporary theatre. John Larpent, the Methodist Licenser who had died in 1824, imposed an effective ban on political and religious controversy in new plays during nearly a half century; and his successor, George Colman the younger, proved even more strict about stage language.154 Colman’s regime was no doubt something of an embarrassment to the liberal Devonshire, but his post was secure, and Collier’s hopes for it—the most appropriate preferment that the duke might one day offer— would depend on Colman’s resignation, incapacity, or death. Incapacity seemed possible when in August 1831 the gouty incumbent went abroad for his health, and Devonshire appointed John to replace him pro tempore. Jane Collier told Robinson that ‘should anything happen’ to Colman ‘I dare say John would have his place’. It was worth, she thought, no more than £400 per annum, and ‘he must give up reporting’, but ‘he would have more time for writing, which I hope would turn to account’ (HCR Correspondence, 23 September 1831). John served as Colman’s substitute for two months (‘without emolument’ he declared at the time),155 but Colman returned in October and resumed his duties.

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154. See Ganzel 1961. Colman’s fanatical squeamishness, especially rich in a writer earlier notorious for lewd comic verse, led to suppressing ‘all reference to the deity, every form of prayer or hymn, and even such modified forms of apostrophe as ‘‘O Lord!’’ and ‘‘demmee’’’ (DNB, 1887); he even struck out words like ‘heaven’ and ‘providence’, and once famously refused to permit a character to refer to his beloved as ‘an angel’. 155. Report of the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature (1832), p. 30: ‘it was very little trouble for me, and quite in the way of my own pursuits at that time’. One application to him survives in a letter from Richard Brinsley Peake, asking Collier to read a sketch by Thomas John Dibdin and ‘forward the license immediately, as we wish, if possible, to perform it on Thursday evening’; 6 September 1831, bound in Harvard Theatre Collection TS 940.6, iv:60.


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Collier’s short stint in office, along with his reputation as historian and reviewer, led to a summons in June 1832 from a new parliamentary body, the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature. Formed under the direction of Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton), the rising ‘silver-fork’ novelist and reforming M.P., this committee meant to address the ‘wretched’ state of a contemporary theatre languishing between restrictive literary constraint, inadequate copyright protection for aspiring playwrights, and an effective monopoly on serious production at just two London theatres. Collier testified twice, mainly in favour of abolishing the exclusivity of the Theatres Royal (their productions were prohibitively costly, their vast playhouses o en hard to see in or hear in) and legitimizing the smaller, more intimate venues; Colman, who followed John onto the stand, remained firmly committed to the traditional monopoly. On the matter of censorship Collier was no libertine, calling for the drama to be kept as ‘wholesome’ as food, and thereby implicitly endorsing the Licenser’s office he coveted, and the Licenser’s moral authority. When one later witness declared that even political matter might be tolerated in plays, the committee was provoked into clearing the room, and John seemed even more shocked than the members. ‘Some expectation was felt that the Committee would order the evidence . . . expunged’, he reported in the Chronicle the next day, ‘but those who wished it (and none wished it more than the true friends of the Minor Theatres [i.e., Collier himself ]) were disappointed’.156 Despite this 1831–32 flirtation with office and officialdom, Collier’s dream of a sinecure went the way of his other dashed hopes.157 Colman was not to be hurried or shaken, even by a desperate offer from Collier that if he would resign the office in Collier’s favour, John would turn over to him ‘every farthing of the income the place produced, while he lived’. The old man refused, though he acknowledged that John was ‘quite right in asking’. Collier tells the tale of his interview with no sense of animus toward Colman, whose mysterious refusal (‘I give you no reason’) was firmly approved by his ‘lady’, the aging actress Mrs. Gibbs. It may have been somehow political; Colman was ‘such a staunch old Tory’, Devonshire warned his protégé, ‘that he would grant nothing to a Whig Lord Chamberlain’ (OMD, i:71–73). A er this failure, Devonshire’s influence itself slipped away, the duke resigning as Lord Chamberlain in December

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156. Ganzel gave a good account of this episode in Fortune and Men’s Eyes, pp. 51–54; see also Ganzel 1961. Collier testified on 15 and 18 June (Report, pp. 21–36 and 41–42). Thirteen letters from Collier to Devonshire give a running account of the proceedings (21 June–2 August 1832, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence). 157. Thirty years later Collier would claim that for ‘professional reasons’ he had in 1832 ‘declined the office of stipendiary magistrate’ (preface to The Works of Edmund Spenser, pp. vi–vii), and this story is repeated in the 1865 and subsequent editions of the biographical dictionary Men of the Time. We have found no evidence to confirm it.


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1834. Colman died less than two years later, and the new Lord Chamberlain, the Marquess of Conyngham, appointed Charles Kemble. Henry Crabb Robinson admired John’s ‘unexpected fortitude’ on learning the news, and reflected that it need not have ended so: ‘Lady Blessington remarked that had the duke thought proper to say to the Marquis: My Librarian has lived for years in the expectation of this place, will you give it him, if it fall vacant during your time, there can be no doubt he would have readily given the place to Collier. But delicacy would not permit the D. to ask the favor’.158 Apart from the licensing fiasco, the relationship of John with ‘his Duke’ (as Jane Collier called Devonshire) remained literary, working, and guardedly social. No further invitations to Chatsworth ensued, but in February 1832 Devonshire and the Earl of Mulgrave sponsored Collier for membership in the newly formed Garrick Club. John became its twel h member, and the affiliation would mean much to him over many decades.159 And on 14 February 1832 Devonshire recorded in his diary that he had ‘appointed Collier to be a sort of librarian with 100 a year’.160 ‘I have received a letter from Messrs Snows in which they tell me that they have been instructed to pay me £100 a year from Christmas last’, John wrote a week later, in half-hearted protest. ‘If the first paper was ill-merited’—i.e., Devonshire’s gi to him of £100 for HEDP—‘this is positively unmerited: if every body is to be paid so liberally who deserves so scantily, your Grace must have many other claimants of the same kind.’ Reassured, he accepted what he could hardly afford to forgo, although ‘long ago I resolved not to accept anything more of your Grace in the way of a pecuniary gi ’—for ‘ ‘‘oaths are straws’’ and as has been o en remarked ‘‘every man has his price’’ ’.161 John’s light duties, really an extension of his unsalaried practice for the previous two years, included recommending purchases (Devonshire ‘gets John to make purchases of old plays for him’, Jane had written to Robinson in June

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158. HCR Reminiscences, iv:128 (written 1853). In February 1840 Kemble resigned the post in favour of his son. 159. Collier thanked Devonshire for the ‘useful honour’ of the proposal on 27 February (Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence). There are constant references to attendance at club dinners in OMD. Canon Richard Barham, one of the original members, described Collier in a manuscript register of his colleagues as ‘Librarian to the Duke of Devonshire; author of a history of the early English stage, and dramatic critic to the Observer and Morning Chronicle newspapers’ (Barham 1896, p. 19); in the club’s own Rules and Regulations . . . with a List of the Members, 1833 (1834) he figures as ‘Collier, John Payne, Esq. F.S.A. Barrister’. Collier also belonged to a second London club, the Literary Union, founded by Thomas Campbell in 1829; it was dissolved in 1834 and reconstituted as the Clarence Club. 160. Chatsworth MS 767.456; the figure was originally entered as ‘200’, but altered. 161. JPC to Devonshire, 21 and 27 February 1832, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence.


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1830) and organizing the library at Devonshire House. In that capacity he had earlier tried to interest the duke in a large collection of modern manuscript plays (1737–1823) retained by John Larpent, the Licenser before Colman, which Collier and Thomas Amyot had purchased from Larpent’s widow in 1830—avowedly for £180, although how the outlay was shared is uncertain. This was clearly a joint speculation at the time, even if later Collier represented it as made ‘with a view to the Continuation of his History of the Stage’.162 Devonshire lukewarmly considered buying the collection in July 1830—whether before or a er Collier and Amyot acquired it is not clear—but declined it in January 1831.163 He had already supplied John with ‘two lists, one of the printed plays wanted, and one of the imperfect copies in my possession’, adding that ‘I think I must exclude MS plays—it would be endless’,164 wherea er additions to the dramatic library came in apace: one surviving memorandum in Devonshire’s private account book (July 1832) includes £50 to Collier for ‘current purchases’ and another is specifically marked ‘towards plays’ (£50, November 1832), and with the Heber dispersal of 1834–36 many more followed. Another £50 went to ‘Mr. Collier for plays’ on 12 May 1834, and £250 in five payments between 21 May 1835 and 30 June 1836, possibly all this toward ‘great acquisitions’ at the Heber sales, including ‘the lost edition of the Spanish Tragedy’, for which the duke particularly thanked his agent in September 1834.165 Collier’s activity on behalf of his new patron no doubt gave him vicarious pleasure (and some useful leverage with booksellers and auctioneers), but we have not attempted to work out details of his day-to-day purchases. One early and major transaction, however, deserves special notice, both as exemplifying Collier’s zeal in extending the Devonshire collections, and as a bibliophile’s tangled tale of its own.

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162. Madden Diary, 4 March 1850, recording Collier’s proposal that the British Museum purchase the collection for the price paid by Collier and Amyot. 163. On 4 July 1830 he agreed that Collier should look at the plays and give him an opinion of them, although ‘I suppose that most of them must be in my possession and I do not care about the MS notes and anecdotes much’ (FF/K MS 650); on 10 January 1831 he declined to purchase the plays (Folger MS Y.d.6 (43)). Collier’s own account of the transaction in OMD, i:49–50, is entered under the date 11 March 1832 and records that he and Amyot paid £400 for the plays, which they were ‘hardly worth’. 164. Devonshire to JPC, 16 March 1830, FF/K MS 648. 165. Chatsworth MS 767.458, diary entry for 21 June 1834; and Devonshire to JPC, 1 September 1834, FF/K MS 658. The ‘lost edition’ was almost certainly the 1603 edition with expanded text, now known in two copies. In Heber II (June 1834), lot 3222, it lacked its title-page, and bore the autograph of the essayist Owen Feltham. Now in the Huntington Library, it sports a title from the previous edition (1602), which has led to its description by most editors as ‘1602–1603’; but as the title was clearly supplied—by Collier?—aer June 1834, that ‘double date’ (W. W. Greg’s term in the Malone Society reprint of the 1602 edition [Oxford, 1949]) can be dispensed with.


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The Troublesome Affair of Kynge Johan Kynge Johan, a bitterly political two-part verse-play of about 1539 by the Protestant firebrand John Bale, has o en been described as the earliest surviving specimen of a great literary genre, the English history play (i.e., one dramatizing post-mythological English history, like Shakespeare’s Plantagenet cycle and his own King John); it also marks a watershed between the traditional fi eenthcentury morality play, with abstract virtues and vices struggling to dominate an allegorical action, and its typical Elizabethan successor, offering personalized characters in a recognizable historical context.166 Kynge Johan is now signalled principally for its ‘importance’, and certainly more studied than read; but before 1832 it was no more than a title. ‘Pro Ioanne Anglorum rege’ is the fi eenth in a list of twenty-two vernacular ‘comoedias . . . in idiomate materno’ that Bale listed among his own writings in his Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum . . . summarium (1548); in HEDP (ii:238, silently following Baker’s Biographia Dramatica) Collier rendered this as ‘Of King John of England’, one of the lost miscellaneous plays with ‘curious titles’. In January 1832 Frederic Madden, visiting the collector Dawson Turner at Yarmouth, was shown a manuscript belonging to an unnamed friend of Turner’s, which he identified as ‘a Morality, called King John, written at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign’, and he recorded his intention to ‘write to Mr Collier about it’ (Madden Diary, 25 January 1832). Turner’s friend, who had lent the manuscript to him for an opinion six years earlier, was William Stevenson Fitch of Ipswich, a self-taught Suffolk antiquary, and—in an era of light-fingered amateurs—a remarkably brazen rogue. The early provenance of Kynge Johan does not really concern us here, but as Fitch cheerfully acknowledged to Turner (who informed Madden and Collier), it had not long since been removed from the chest or storehouse of the Corporation of Ipswich: Fitch asserted that the archival custodians considered it ‘useless lumber’ and gave it away ‘to the late Mr Seekamp, one of our Magistrates . . . with a large quantity of loose papers’.167 Initially Madden thought to borrow the manuscript, or to purchase it cheaply on behalf of Viscount Clive (later second Earl of Powis), as a prospective Roxburghe Club publication—Clive had asked him to nominate one. Fitch, whose sense of literary importance and cash-value could be erratic (he virtually gave away the entire haul of Elizabethan broadside ballads now known as ‘Britwell’ and ‘Huth’), was on this occasion aware of market potential, and the particu-

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166. Modern estimates of the place of Kynge Johan in the evolution of English drama are summed up in Barry B. Adams 1969, pp. 55–65. 167. See J. I. Freeman 1997; Kynge Johan is discussed at pp. 100–09, and a few details are corrected here.


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lar cachet of unpublished material: ‘I should have no objection to Lord Clive or Mr Madden having the loan of it’, he wrote to Turner, but he would just as soon sell. ‘I do not think Ten Pounds would be an extravagant price for it unless I prove it to be in the Autograph of Bale’—he had long suspected Bale’s authorship, and was now ‘more than ever convinced’ of it—in which case ‘it would be Cheap at double that price’.168 Turner communicated the gist of Fitch’s letter to Madden, without naming a price, and suggested that Madden ‘make him an offer either for Lord Clive or the Museum’; but although Madden consulted with both Collier and the learned bookseller Thomas Rodd, and satisfied himself that Bale was certainly the author, he balked at buying the original. ‘When I mentioned it to you as desirable to be printed for the Roxburghe Club, I did so with the impression that the gentleman to whom it belonged set no particular value on it’, he complained, adding, ‘I doubt whether Lord Clive will spend more than he can help in his volume’. Furthermore (and incomprehensibly, save that the provenance may have seemed too dodgy for a public institution), ‘The Museum does not purchase such articles’. Still, he advised Turner that ‘the second hand in your MS. is that of Bale himself ’, and that Collier, to whom he had mentioned it, thought it worth at least £20.169 Indeed the availability of Kynge Johan clearly excited the new ducal librarian, and whatever qualms Madden may have expressed about the Ipswich Corporation chest provenance did not put him off. Collier told Devonshire about the manuscript on 13 February, and twelve days later wrote to Madden that the duke would willingly buy it, if Lord Clive should decline. Unseen, he could not judge its worth, but ‘you mentioned £15 to me, and as some guide to you, with my strong interest on the subject, I do not think I should scruple to give twice that sum for the relic but not more’. Meanwhile, Fitch was lowering his own sights: ‘Regarding the Morality, if any one were to offer me 5 Pounds for it, I should not hesitate about taking it’, he told Turner; ‘why I mentioned the Sum of £10 was because Collectors of these articles are generally Men of Fortune, and if they keep a Hobby they generally pay well for riding them’.170 But Turner was too shrewd a businessman or too good a friend to let Fitch—deeply in his debt— surrender to panic, and he forced Madden to re-open the matter. ‘You say nothing more of the Bale’s Morality. Has the possessor changed his mind, or does he still feel a wish to dispose of it?’ Madden wrote, a month later, and apparently

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168. Fitch to Turner, 3 February 1832, TCC O.14.8 (30). 169. Turner to Madden, 6 February 1832, BL Egerton MS 2839, fols. 16–17; Madden to Turner, 21 February 1832, TCC O.14.8 (51). 170. JPC to Devonshire, 13 February 1832, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence; JPC to Madden, 25 February 1832, BL Egerton MS 2839, fols. 32–33; Fitch to Turner, 27 February, TCC O.14.8 (55).


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received no satisfactory reply, for on 30 June Collier himself was obliged to approach Turner directly. Representing himself as ‘the author of the Annals of the Stage and History of Dramatic Poetry’, and leaving Devonshire and his wealth out of it, he was ‘anxious, should the price at all come within the means with which I am furnished, to obtain a MS. Play by Bale’.171 Turner’s swi answer must have come as a shock, for the price demanded was now £50, and Collier wrote back that this was ‘certainly far above both my expectations and my means’, and that ‘I shall relinquish all hopes of obtaining it’, albeit with regret. He reminded Turner that his offer had been a blind one, taking the condition, the size, and even the contents of the manuscript ‘upon trust’. ‘My conjecture was that £20 would be the utmost I should be required to give, and I certainly could not afford more than £30’, he protested, although later he would confirm what Turner suspected, who the true purchaser was to have been.172 Turner prudently backed down, and on 19 July John applied to his duke for that sum (‘I need not say now that I have not always £30 to spare by me, and I know it is not your Grace’s wish that I should be in advance’), whereupon the manuscript was dispatched to Hunter Street.173 Fitch was delighted, telling Turner that ‘the price is really six times more than I calculated upon and indeed I must add considerably more than I could conscienciously [sic] have asked for it’.174 The transaction appeared now to be complete, but Fitch, whose anonymity Turner had protected throughout the negotiations, had one trick up his sleeve. Collier had indeed made the purchase ‘upon trust’ regarding condition and completeness, and when six years later he came to edit the play he was aware of ‘some confusion or omission’ prior to the beginning of the second part; he then conjectured that ‘one of the additions made by Bale, and intended by him to separate the two parts of the drama, has been irrecoverably lost’.175 Modern scholarship has established that in fact four leaves were missing from the manuscript that Collier received. Two of these are still unknown, but in 1847 the other

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171. Madden to Turner, 20 March 1832, and JPC to Turner, 30 June, TCC O.14.8 (65) and (138). 172. JPC to Turner, 11 July 1832, TCC O.14.9 (18). 173. JPC to Devonshire, 19 July 1832, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence; Devonshire accounts, May–July 1832 (noting a total payment to Collier of £80, of which £30 was for the play and the remainder for ‘current purchases’). Collier had received the MS by 23 July (‘a greater curiosity of the kind I have never had the good fortune to see’), when he urged Devonshire to publish it, perhaps for the Roxburghe Club: ‘I shall never forgive your Grace (pardon the expression) if you do not consent to print this play—if for more general circulation than among the Members of the Roxburghe Club, so much the better—but certainly for that. I should like to see it done under your Grace’s especial eye and care; and how happy, not to say proud, I should be to associate my knowledge on the subject, your Grace can imagine’; Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence. 174. Fitch to Turner, 1 August 1832, TCC O.14.9 (38). 175. Kynge Johan, A Play in Two Parts, ed. J Payne Collier (1838), pp. 68 and xi.


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two came to light, still in the possession of the wily marchand amateur. Perhaps despite his £30 windfall Fitch deemed them a fair levy from such a ‘Man of Fortune’ as Devonshire, although he had told Turner at the outset that ‘if [the play] is worth printing, have it done so entirely. I hate mutilated things’. Perhaps— but this seems less likely—they had come adri earlier and been somehow misplaced, and, as they contain passages apparently cancelled, seemed a harmless souvenir. At any rate, Fitch deliberately retained them, and with characteristic cheek bound them into a copy of Collier’s 1838 edition, ‘to make his book more valuable’, as he is said to have boasted.176 In 1845 he showed his enriched volume to a visitor, James Brook Pulham of Woodbridge, a friend of John Constable and an India House colleague of Charles Lamb. Pulham, whom we have encountered before as the editor of an occasional old play, advised Fitch to cede the two leaves to Devonshire, and Fitch let him take them away, but proposed to demand a copy of Claude le Lorrain’s Liber veritatis in exchange.177 Uncomfortable about this, and uncertain of his legal position, Pulham did nothing for two years, and only when Fitch asked for the material back did he call on Madden at the British Museum for advice. Madden thought the whole business ‘a piece of rascality’, reserving his contempt mostly for Fitch (‘A pretty sort of scoundrel this Mr Fitch must be! His name should be Filch’), while Collier registered ‘my opinion, I do not say belief . . . that [Pulham] & Mr Fitch are in concert to lay the Duke of D. under an obligation’ or that ‘each [is] endeavouring now to make the Duke think he is indebted to them for rescuing the missing MS’.178 Alerted by Madden, a er some protracted negotiations Collier apparently procured the extruded leaves from Pulham or Fitch without compensation. On 1 January 1848 Madden recorded in his diary Collier’s success ‘in obtaining out of the hands of Mr Fitch of Ipswich, the two leaves of Bale’s Play of Kyng John, so shamefully abstracted from the MS’. But this serpentine progress has a last twist or two, by no means altogether creditable to the duke’s vigilant librarian. Collier indeed passed along what he had recovered, assuring Madden in January 1848 that the two missing leaves ‘were now in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, united to the MS.’, but soon borrowed them back—perhaps toward a new edition of Kynge Johan or some kind of supplementary appendix.179 And far from remaining ‘united to

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176. Fitch to Turner, 3 February 1832, TCC O.14.8 (30); Madden Diary, 18 February 1847, reporting J. B. Pulham’s account. 177. A fashionable and expensive collection of prints, then costing upwards of £40. 178. Madden Diary, 18 February 1847; JPC to Madden, 26 February, BL Egerton MS 2844, fols. 213–14. 179. On 24 January, writing from Brighton, the duke apologized for not having sent them already: ‘they are locked up in my drawer in London and cannot be got at till I go there . . . as soon as I can you shall have the leaves’; Folger MS Y.d.6 (49).


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the MS.’, the leaves languished apart: for whatever his intentions in 1848 nothing further was published, and Collier never returned them. Devonshire cannot have pressed his librarian, and a er his death in 1858 the seventh duke would have been unaware of the loan—if by now John regarded it as a loan, not a gi . The two leaves were found among Collier’s own books and papers in 1883, and restored by his son John Pycro Collier to the seventh duke in July 1884.180 On a wrapper that then contained both, John Payne Collier had written, in his very late hand (1870s–80s): ‘The M.S. Copy of the Play which I bought for the Duke of Devonshire many years ago was deficient of these ensuing leaves which I have recently obtained from a Mr Pulman [sic] who was a friend of Mr Fitch. In fact they ought to have formed part of the Dukes MS, from which they had been abstracted before I bought it.’ Such memoranda were o en added by Collier to his own books and manuscripts in his last years, as he became fearful that his heirs would not recognize their significance. In this instance—although there is no indication whatever that the Dukes of Devonshire should expect their return—his notes ensured that the fugitive leaves rejoined their matrix, if over a half-century late.181 The death of William Field Collier in October 1830 diminished the extended Collier and Pycro households for the first time since John Dyer’s passing. William had married in 1829, however, and now le a widow and an infant daughter;182 all three had lodged with the Pycro sisters in Putney, and during William’s terminal illness John, Mary Louisa, and two of their daughters stayed there as well to help care for him, John in particular being needed to li and carry his brother.183 Meanwhile John’s two sons were boarding with their schoolmaster uncle George Proctor in Guernsey, but when the Proctors moved to Brighton in October the boys, now twelve and ten, transferred to the new King’s College School in the Strand, as day students living at home.184 Jane Collier too paid her regular visits, though sometimes she felt insufficiently cosseted: Mary Louisa ‘has lately assumed a pertness to me not at all agreeable’, and John ‘cares little for me & she cares less. Parents are fonder of their children than 180. See J. I. Freeman 1997, p. 109. 181. They remain together as Huntington Library HM 3. Most of the text of the two additional leaves was marked for deletion by Bale, and it can be safely assumed that this was also true of any text on the other two missing leaves, possibly retained by Fitch, but still unlocated. 182. Jane Collier objected strongly to William’s marriage to Emily Caroline Phillips, but was reconciled by 27 December 1829, when she told Robinson that the couple were living at Putney on an income of £600 per annum. Their daughter, Emily Frances, was born 19 May 1830. 183. Jane Collier to HCR, 21–26 September 1830 and 16 January 1831. The cause of death was a brain tumour, diagnosed in mid-1830. 184. A remark in one of Amyot’s letters (13 September 1831, BL Add. MS 33,963, fols. 39–40) suggests that he may have helped secure them places.


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children of their parents’, she observed, mingling wisdom with petulance; ‘not that John does not love me, but he is deficient in those minor attentions that amount to much when put together’.185 ‘Heaven be praised’, John himself had told Robinson at the very same time, ‘I, who am the poorest of the set [of relations], have no prospect of any more brats’; and Robinson, whose return from two years on the continent coincided with that of the two Collier boys, chose not to crowd himself in at the small Hunter Street house. Robinson was no sooner back than he was lending more money, this time to Robert Proctor, an initial £150 on 21 October, with a promise of £350 more ‘which John Collier has, when he repays it, which I understand he means to do soon’. Indeed John cleared his long-standing debt by disposing of the old woollen mill at Witney, his legacy from his paternal grandparents seven years earlier. Jane told Henry that the sale made £800,186 and with Murray’s last £200 for HEDP (May 1831) and the new Devonshire honorarium (February 1832), John’s circumstances would appear to have eased.187 The Morning Chronicle was now paying him over ten guineas a week,188 and he was increasingly busy with play-reviewing for other newspapers, ‘especially those published Sunday’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 140). In February or March 1833 the family abandoned 23 Hunter Street, a er seven years’ rental, and moved a few blocks westward to 25 Euston Square.189 On 6 April John hosted a house-warming dinner for Robinson, Amyot, Dyce, John Hamilton Reynolds, and the playwright James Sheridan Knowles; Robinson found it ‘a very agreeable a ernoon’, with the talk ‘literary and desultory’, including gossip of Thomas Holcro and a scandalous article on Hazlitt’s last hours. Reynolds, re-encountered a er a falling-out many years past, ‘seemed to-day an agreeable man’, and Dyce, met for the first time, likewise—although later Robinson would consider him ‘by no means good natured . . . a critic, and too apt, as critics o en are, to treat bad taste as bad morals’. Knowles, who had a new play in rehearsal with prologue and epilogue by Charles Lamb, began ‘very flat and poorly—he said he was ill’, but was soon ‘roused by brandy and water, and then he became rather noisy’.190 But all was not well with Collier in the counting-house, new expenses as ever 185. Jane Collier to HCR, 16 January 1831, HCR Correspondence. 186. HCR Correspondence, 23 September 1831; John owned Robinson £350. 187. At least enough for the family to spend six weeks at Brighton in September and October 1832; see Alexander Dyce to John Mitford, 29 October 1832, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.100 (21). 188. Or so John would recall in 1880; Memoirs, p. 145. 189. Both houses have since been pulled down. The new London and Birmingham Railway was extended to Euston in mid-1835; Philip Hardwick’s grand station was completed in 1839, at about the time the Colliers moved to South Kensington. 190. HCR Diary, 6 April 1833; see Morley 1938, i:424–25, also quoting from HCR’s Reminiscences, iii:426.


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running ahead of his income. The cost of the Euston Square move cannot have been inconsiderable, and keeping pace with his wealthy new friends might well have tasked a journalist’s purse. The yearly subscription to the Garrick Club alone was £6 6s., even if, as Robinson thought, Devonshire himself ‘will no doubt provide for him on the first occasion [i.e., the entrance fee of ten guineas]’ (HCR Diary, 19 February 1832), but the cost of rare books no doubt loomed largest. Later John claimed to have shared the cost of Larpent’s play-scripts (£180) with Amyot, and we have seen that he at least coveted the manuscript of Kynge Johan for himself. His principal spending would have been directly with dealers like Rodd and Thorpe, but he was no stranger to the salerooms of Evans and Sotheby. Remarkably enough for an underpaid invalid, William Field Collier had assembled a collection of antiquarian books, mainly Spanish, and at his posthumous sale (Sotheby, 15 April 1831) John purchased 61 of the 254 lots for £19 5s. 6d., about thirty percent of the total, and more than family piety demanded.191 At the Caldecott and Haslewood sales in 1833 John represented Devonshire on some major items, but also spent at least £12 on his own account. And like all truly ‘bit’ bibliophiles he was reluctant to part with any of his books in this period, unless by exchange, gi , or the odd extrusion of an out-of-field curiosity. Moreover, if the pattern of his future dispersals held true at this early date, he drove anything but a hard bargain and would have been horrified to be thought a deliberate profiteer. Financing such habits, while supporting a family of eight, made short work of the 1830–31 windfalls. Robinson soon learned from the Proctors that John had ‘borrowed of Miss [Emma] Pycro all her ready money’, and, worse, he had ‘anticipated all he should receive from his mother’.192 Jane Collier indeed was now very ill, bedridden at the Percival Street home of Robert and Mary Proctor since at least April 1833. London’s terrible cholera year, in which young William Godwin had perished (‘the first person I ever knew who has fallen’, wrote Robinson in September), had found John convalescent with another ‘quinzy’ in February and Mary Louisa ‘very ill’ from mid-December to the end of January 1833;193 but Jane’s affliction was dropsy. She died at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, 20 October, with John at her side: ‘The only person at whose Death I was present was that of my dear Mother. . . . I heard the last rattles in her dear throat and I alone was present watching for her death’; ‘she slipt out of life & did not move a finger, or distort a muscle of her countenance’, he wrote to her most loyal friend.194 At 191. The three-day sale was advertised as the property of ‘W. F. Collier, Esq., Barrister, deceased, to which is added another valuable collection’; William’s books accounted only for the first day. 192. HCR Diary, 31 October 1833; he repeated the latter charge on 4 November. 193. HCR Diary, 19 February and 16 December 1832, and 30 January 1833. 194. JPC Diary, 11 November 1881; JPC to HCR, 15 October 1833, HCR Correspondence.


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her burial in Bunhill Fields six days later the Rev. William Madge read to ten men—sons John and Richard, sons-in-law George and Robert Proctor, and relations and friends William Field, ‘Field the apothecary’, Edward Jones, Samuel De Zoete, one of the Pycro s, and Henry Crabb Robinson.195 ‘No one else will ever feel for me the friendship she did’, Robinson wrote in his diary (22 October), and to Dorothy Wordsworth he described his loss as ‘the severest . . . I have sustained for many years’ (HCR Correspondence, 24 October). ‘She was neither the handsomest nor the cleverest woman I have ever known’, he later summed up; ‘she was by no means a blue stocking but she was altogether most loveable. With great beauty in her youth, a handsome fortune and nearly all the external advantages of life, she was above all other qualities most remarkable for a happy temper’. Not so John Dyer, who ‘with many good qualities had a trying temper’ and was ‘repeatedly unfortunate in business’, and whose ‘vanity was a source of calamity’. ‘Late in life’, Robinson concluded—and you can hear his heart crack—‘she lost to a great degree the early attachment to her husband’ (HCR Reminiscences, iii:341). Jane’s simple will, proved on 6 November, divided her worth equally among her four living children and her infant granddaughter, taking into account prior ‘presents of unequal amount’.196 Richard, the most desperate legatee, received £830, and John £900. Dewey Ganzel (p. 57) thought such a sum ‘a boon which financed, among other things, a spate of scholarly publications, pamphlets, and several drama reprints’ in 1835–37, but Robert Proctor told Robinson on 29 November 1834 that ‘John has [already] spent as well what he had from his grandfather [i.e., the Witney mill] and his mother’ (HCR Diary). Jane’s bequest was in effect the last trace of the old Collier-Payne wealth that John Payne Collier would know, and Jane’s death also cut his last link with family scrutiny—John Dyer’s silent disapprobation, Jane’s unthinking support. In the future John’s income would depend entirely on his own wits and performance, and his reputation upon friends and readers of his own making.

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195. Jones was Joshua Collier’s son-in-law; his own son would marry John Payne’s daughter Henrietta in 1860. Samuel De Zoete was an old friend, and joined the extended family in 1849 when his daughter married John Payne’s eldest son. 196. PRO PROB 11/1823, with estate valued at £3,000; the executors were John Payne, Robinson, and Robert Proctor.


part four

The 1830s (II)

Literature—essays and reviews and some periodical verse, as well as book-length critical and editorial projects—by now constituted for John both a calling and a necessary resource, supplementary to the chores of newspaper journalism, the more welcome Devonshire ‘librarianship’, and whatever small fees he could command from his fledgling practice of law. In December 1831 he submitted to Fraser’s Magazine a ‘Christmas Interlude’ in verse, ‘written upon the plan of our old English shews’. This was allegedly ‘prepared for representation, and is to be performed, at the house of a nobleman in Dorsetshire [sic] on Jany. 6th next’; but Fraser’s, pressed to find space for it no later than in its January number, declined it.1 With Colburn and Bentley’s New Monthly Magazine Collier fared better, placing five articles in the first six months of 1832. Edward Lytton Bulwer, the novelist and reformer now doubling as editor of the NMM, accepted what his predecessor Thomas Campbell had turned down long since, a two-part account of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poesie giocose (the so-called rime piacevole or burlesche), with illustrative translations. Titled ‘Italian Humorous Poetry’ and signed ‘C. R.’, the articles appeared in January and March, a striking reminder of John’s self-taught expertise in a field other than English.2 His facile commentary on ‘a class of poems, of which comparatively little is known in this country’, surrounds specimen translations of Francesco Coppetta (who may have inspired Rochester’s ‘Upon Nothing’), Firenzuola, Grazzini, Burchiello, Bertini, Salvetti, Della Casa, and Gigli in part one; and Murtola, Marino, Berni, Mauro, and Pignotti in the sequel. Bulwer waxed even more enthusiastic about articles on John Philip Kemble 1. JPC to ‘The Editor of Frazer’s [sic] Magazine’, 3 December 1831, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (124). This may refer to ‘The Contention of the Seasons’, intended for performance at Chatsworth, but abandoned because of ‘the want of two female performers, who could sing’ (OMD, ii:114–15, with one specimen song). Ganzel’s reference (p. 55) to an offer of the interlude to the Quarterly Review for its January 1833 number appears to be an error. 2. Bulwer politely asked Collier’s permission to delay the second from February to March, because of an editorial ‘inconvenience’ (Bulwer to JPC, 2 January 1832, Folger MS Y.d.6 (167)). Collier identified himself as the author in a letter to Devonshire (27 February 1832, Chatsworth, uncalendared correspondence of the sixth Duke of Devonshire).

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and David Garrick as playwrights, which appeared in the numbers for February and June. These were based almost entirely on material in the Larpent manuscript collection purchased by Collier and Amyot, and contained unashamed puffs for its resale, now that Devonshire had declined it (‘it is out of the question for anybody to pretend to write a history of theatres, actors, and authors, during that period [i.e., 1737–1824], without resort to these authorities’, etc.). Amyot, who probably served as John’s conduit to Bulwer and the NMM, reassured him that publishing extracts from the Kemble and Garrick papers would not harm their chances of selling the originals: ‘So far from thinking that you are depreciating our property, I am of opinion that you are enhancing their value by advertizing them’. Bulwer for his part told John that his ‘Poetical and Literary Character of the Late John Philip Kemble’ seemed ‘capital—& as the Booksellers say ‘‘quite the thing’’ ’; and the Garrick essay (‘New Facts Regarding Garrick and His Writings’) appeared in June, praised by Amyot as ‘better even than the Kemble one’.3 Indeed the latter offered a provocative estimate of the actor, as more original in terms of his cra than Shakespeare in his: Garrick was sui generis ‘the inventor of an entirely new style of acting’, one based on ‘nature’, whereas ‘our great poet had many models before him, which at first he was content to follow, and which, subsequently, he only improved’. The last assertion was by now a trademark of Collier’s historical criticism, intended perhaps more to exalt the obscure than to diminish the great. Although most of the ‘new facts’ consist of new Garrick text, Collier could not resist a codicilliary disclosure, four unpublished lines from Sheridan’s ‘Monody on the Death of Garrick’ (1779), which ‘were judiciously omitted in the recitation as weakening the effect of the composition’. However, ‘recollecting that they are the production of such a man as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and that they relate to such a man as David Garrick, they are worth preserving’, Collier maintained; the rough dra itself belonged to the Duke of Devonshire, ‘with some few other MSS. . . . bound up in his Grace’s marvellously perfect collections of printed English dramatic productions’. In fact the source was also a Larpent manuscript, namely the scribal text submitted by Sheridan’s father Thomas to the Lord Chamberlain’s office on 10 March 1779. Perhaps Collier and Amyot gave or sold it to Devonshire as a foretaste of the Larpent offer—to no effect, as it turned out; it is now reunited at the Huntington Library, via the Kemble-Devonshire plays, with the rest of the Larpent manuscripts.4 3. Amyot to JPC, 14 February 1832, BL Add. MS 33,963, fols. 54–55; and Bulwer to JPC, Folger MS Y.d.6 (167), pencil date 2 January 1832. Other letters from Amyot about Larpent or the NMM articles are contained in the same BL volume (15 March 1831, fols. 37–38, and 13 September 1831, fols. 39–40) and in Add. MS 37,907 (December 1831, fols. 207–08, with the remark that Bulwer ‘also approves, you will see, of the Kemble article as far as he has gone in it’). 4. Cecil Price, ed., Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford, 1973), ii:453 and


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Finally, also in June, came a two-page notice of ‘A New Life of Milton’, ostensibly a review of the Rev. John Mitford’s edition of Milton’s Poetical Works for William Pickering’s ‘Aldine Poets’. Bulwer had found this less than compellingly topical—he held it over from January—and in fact John was mainly concerned to re-float an old and improbable attribution of The Six-Fold Politician (1609, by ‘I. M.’) to Milton’s father; to reclaim the ‘J. M. S.’ lines on Shakespeare in the 1632 Folio for Milton (‘infinitely too good for Jasper Mayne, to whom Malone, in his guess-work, would assign them’); and to call attention to a document in the Chapter House subsidizing an amanuensis for Sir Henry Wotton (‘to show what may possibly be discovered in such places’). Mitford himself was accorded ritual praise for his thoroughness, immediately undercut by qualifications about ‘vain learning’ (i.e., superfluous commentary), unfamiliarity with London archival repositories (‘we believe [he] resides in Suffolk’), and his estimate of Milton’s place in the history of ‘undramatic’ blank verse. Collier did insert an allusion to ‘the very careful and able Lives of Pope and Shakespeare’ by Dyce, in the same Aldine series, but his professed uncertainty about Mitford’s circumstances was at least disingenuous—for by now the two men were well acquainted.5 Mitford (1781–1859), a dedicated classicist, naturalist, bibliophile, and editor of English poets, had ingratiated himself with Jane Payne Collier well before January 1832, when he wrote at length and delightfully to her about her own gi of bulbs, plants, and ‘little Guernsey worms’, discussing Gilbert White’s Selborne and Wilson’s American Ornithology, and recounting an exchange with John in the pit of the Adelphi Theatre ‘when we parted last’. John (‘poor dear Soul! he is a good Creature’) had shaken Mitford’s hand ‘in his affectionate manner . . . tipping an orange into my hand at the same time’—and begged him ‘don’t forget your theological studies’. ‘I heard him say in a low voice to Mrs Collier [i.e., Mary Louisa]—‘‘I could wish him not to lose sight of the Concordance, for he is not very strong in Divinity’’ ’, added Mitford, concluding with a whimsical account of his efforts to pursue a course of theology, although ‘surely Collier did not mean to involve me in such inextricable Metaphysics’.6 For his part, John wrote of Mitford that ‘I do not believe there is a particle of envy in the composition of his mind’ (OMD, i:57), and in 1835 he was loyal enough to reject from

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461. Collier himself failed to observe that this license-seeking manuscript omits the last twenty lines as finally published, leading him to the false claim that ‘in the printed editions’ the ‘Monody’ ends with the line ‘And to his worth—’tis all you can—be just’. No printed edition ends there. 5. ‘A New Life of Milton’, NMM, 2d ser., 34 (June 1832), 581–82. 6. Mitford to Jane Collier, 9 January 1832, FF/K MS 617. Dyce wrote teasingly to Mitford: ‘I don’t know what your success may be among the younger part of the fair sex, but among the old ladies you carry all before you. You have positively thrown a spell over Mrs Collier, senior: There was never such a man as Mr Mitford! When she got to the end of your letter, she was quite vexed there was no more of it!’; 1 February 1832, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.100 (16).


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George Daniel a presentation copy of The Modern Dunciad inscribed with a scurrilous reference to his friend.7 And presumably Mitford remained oblivious of the authorship of the NMM notice—or found the cavils against his Aldine Milton tolerable—for he dedicated his subsequent three-volume Poetical Works of Jonathan Swi ‘To John Payne Collier, Esq. of the Middle Temple . . . with those feelings of esteem which his virtues and talents justly command’.8 Payment for his literary work was by now more important than ever to Collier: by February 1835, when it was clear that Devonshire could not or would not provide him a government sinecure, he asked Shoberl for piece-work, noting that ‘if I can add (however triflingly) to my income in any proper way I am ready to undertake the labour’. Still, ‘I will undertake nothing to which I think myself absolutely unequal’, and he declined what Shoberl had already suggested (‘I do not feel myself competent to the subjects mentioned by you’), preferring ‘matters of taste & criticism’.9 Fourteen months earlier he had felt confident enough to refuse mean terms from William Pickering for contributions to the ‘re-generated’ Gentleman’s Magazine, just then beginning a new series under the editorship of John Mitford. ‘While the New Monthly will pay me 12 guineas a sheet I cannot write even for you for £5’, he protested, outlining enticingly what he would have provided, if properly rewarded;10 a year later, however, it was John’s turn to swallow his pride and approach Pickering, proposing a new series of essays without raising the issue of fees. Meanwhile, modest but steady work at two kinds of reviewing helped to sustain him. John’s semi-acknowledged position as dramatic reviewer for the Observer, a weekly newspaper owned by the proprietor of the Morning Chronicle, William Clement, brought him a little pay, a little recreation, and more than a little power; he seems rarely if ever to have abused the last, although a few skir-

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7. According to Dyce, Daniel had written in Collier’s copy that his book had ‘been abused by a Scotch Professor [i.e., John Wilson] & By an English Parson, his equal in tippling and blackguardism’, and Collier had returned it, protesting that ‘he could not in his conscience retain it with such an allusion to Mr M. who was an intimate acquaintance of his’; undated letter to Mitford, assigned by cataloguers to 1835, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.100 (30). 8. First edition, 1833–34; inscription dated from Benhall (Suffolk), 10 October 1833. It is just conceivable, if unlikely, that John wrote his notice of Mitford’s Milton before meeting him in person, as Bulwer referred to having ‘the Milton’ in hand on 2 January 1832; but if so he made no effort to alter it between January and June. 9. JPC to Shoberl, 13 February 1835, BoPL MS Ch.H.3.63. The work referred to was undoubtedly reviewing for the Foreign Quarterly Review, which Shoberl edited from March 1835 to January 1838, but we have not found any published notices attributable to Collier. 10. JPC to Pickering, 19 December 1833, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (153). Cyrus Redding, a longstanding contributor to the NMM, confirms the standard rate of twelve guineas for a sheet of sixteen pages; Fiy Years’ Recollections (1858), ii:222.


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mishes with authors and performers were inevitable. Other periodicals may also have engaged him on an ad hoc basis, but as theatrical notices were normally unsigned, even with initials, just which and how many were Collier’s will remain speculative.11 Similarly, book reviews in the periodical press seldom bear signatures, and while John probably turned out his share, we can be certain about only a handful. The use of the anonymous review to settle old and new scores was time-honoured, of course, and some of Collier’s must have combined personal satisfaction with profit: in June 1833, for instance, he offered to review for John Murray’s Quarterly Review the massive and somewhat inchoate compilation of the Rev. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (10 vols., Bath, 1833), in ‘an amusing & not uninstructive article of about 20 or 30 pages without quoting much & scarcely anything from Mr Genest’. Collier stressed his credentials (‘I am as well acquainted with the subject as any man & I have made very extensive & original collections on the subject’), but the Quarterly Review declined (Collier in fact never breached its high-Tory pages), and his long unsigned review appeared instead in the Athenaeum for 19 October. Although Collier knew very well who the author was— ‘Mr Genest of Bath, who does not put his name to it’, he had informed Murray— he chose now to profess ignorance: ‘The author (whoever he may be) has given us no preface’, ‘the work is anonymous’.12 In publishing a vast quantity of theatrical record in a form even more undigested than Collier’s in HEDP, Genest had not really pre-empted a continuation of the latter, but John must have felt that any ongoing project to do so was now compromised. How many extended accounts of the old English stage could the reading public absorb? ‘Collier on Genest’ fairly bristles with resentment of a workable subject spoilt by mechanical presentation (save for chronology, ‘there is no attempt at arrangement’), superfluous detail (‘four volumes out of the ten might have contained every syllable that was worth remembering, either for information or amusement’) and repetitions of ‘what everyone knows’ (plotsummaries, contents of anthologies, critiques of non-theatrical drama—‘a more remarkable instance of waste of time and paper we never remember’). Genest is chided for his ignorance of early-theatre scholarship a er Chalmers and Malone

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11. A. W. Ashby’s examination suggested to him that Collier was reviewing for the Observer as early as the 1820s, continuing perhaps until he le London in 1850 (Ashby papers). Some items obviously his include a laudatory review of Lord Egerton’s translation of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (performed at Bridgewater House on 27 May 1831; ‘Theatricals in High Life’, 29 May 1831) and his Catherine of Cleves (20 November 1831), and others that embody references to the Larpent plays or HEDP, Devonshire’s collecting, etc. Collier also contributed theatrical notes to the Morning Chronicle, including in 1829 a review of Richard Butler’s Follies of Fashion (OMD, i:20, and note in Folger W.b.504). 12. JPC to Murray, 28 June 1833, John Murray archives.


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(he had clearly not read or acknowledged HEDP), for his ‘liberal notions’ (‘anecdotes, incidents, or observations, which savour of that indecorum for which theatres . . . have been remarkable’), and—rather unfairly, in a work devoted to the period a er 1660—for ‘concentrat[ing] all he has to say about Marlow, Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood, Dekker, Shirley, and their numerous and admirable contemporaries, in the twenty-fi h part of a single volume!’ Genest had ‘evidently visited London at intervals, and cursorily gone over the collections in the British Museum’, Collier lo ily allowed, but he appeared to be unaware of ‘some of the most important sources of dramatic intelligence, such as the collection of plays from the earliest date, belonging to the Duke of Devonshire’. Surely it was disingenuous of Collier to add that Devonshire’s books and playbills, ‘by the courtesy of his Grace, have been always accessible’ to researchers; Dyce might disagree, and in any event Genest’s chosen period was not Devonshire’s strength. But Collier would not even allow him his choice (‘we could well have spared all that he supplies a er the year 1800, which would have saved us and him more than the whole of his two last volumes’). Faint praise was granted ‘the most useful portion of his work’, the calendar of known parts played by each eminent actor and actress over a hundred and seventy years. ‘In executing this task he has generally been very faithful’, but ‘it is a piece of drudgery few would have undertaken’. Some readers of HEDP said as much about that laborious work, and Genest’s Some Account is not, a er all, enlivened by fictions. Modern students will hardly seek out Genest for a coherent account of the post-Restoration stage (Collier’s ‘unreadable’ is harshly correct), but it remains a laborious, serviceable, and comprehensive work, and above all ‘trustworthy’.13 The reviewer’s fine scorn was at least partly that of a rival. John Payne Collier never met John Genest—a sixty-six-year-old invalid clergyman, dwelling at Bath, who died in 1839 ‘a er nine years of great suffering’—and no repercussions followed his contemptuous article.14 But Alexander Dyce suffered provocations less meekly, and a notice in the Literary Gazette for 12 January 1833 of his long-promised Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley enraged him. This was the project le incomplete on William Gifford’s death, for which Amyot and Robinson had unsuccessfully recommended Collier; six years a er Dyce had won out it was finally published in six octavo volumes. To John Murray, their common publisher, Dyce complained of the ‘unfair critique’,

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13. Joseph Knight, DNB (1889). 14. Genest in fact convinced himself that his friend the Rev. Edward Mangin of Bath was the culprit, and nothing Mangin could do—including the procurement of a letter from Charles Dilke, affirming that the reviewer was ‘resident in London’—could dissuade him. Mangin has le a MS account of the misunderstanding (FF MS 739), which caused a considerable stir in Bath literary society in 1833–34, and le Mangin furious with his doubters.


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which he assumed was by Collier; at some later date he told Murray that ‘I wrote an angry letter’ to Collier about it, which has seemingly perished.15 Collier (for it surely was he) devoted most of his praise to the ‘critical acumen, good taste, and instinctive as well as acquired knowledge of the subject’ of William Gifford alone. Gifford’s first achievement had been, he wrote glowingly, ‘to clear away the rubbish by which former editors had obscured and encumbered their author’—and he would have done the same for Shakespeare had he lived to edit his works—while dealing with bewildering copy-texts (‘we know of no old plays worse printed than those of Shirley’) that sometimes ‘involve the sense in almost impenetrable obscurity’: here the first editor was said to have exhibited ‘almost miraculous . . . acuteness in penetrating the mystery of the author’s meaning’, and his ‘proposed alterations of the deformed and distorted text are like the unexpected sun-light breaking in upon darkness’. Collier’s estimate of Gifford’s scholarship had oscillated wildly since 1818, but with the opportunity to score (again anonymously) on a living rival the scapegoat of 1826–30 became an icon of editorial passion and grace. ‘In one particular’, namely, a penchant for overvaluing his authors, ‘Mr. Dyce is the very opposite of his deceased coadjutor’: Dyce ‘seems never to have been warmed into admiration by any of the many striking scenes and beautiful passages of the dramatist of whose works he was speaking’, and although such coolness ensured that ‘the reader will proceed to the perusal of the plays with a mind quite unbiased by any preliminary and partial criticism’, it let down both Shirley and his readers. Lesser flaws were meticulously enumerated: Dyce had mistaken the date of Kirkman’s ‘Drolls’ by some eleven years; he had called Shirley and Heywood (with thirty-two and twenty-three extant plays respectively) the most prolific of dramatists, overlooking Shakespeare himself, with his canonical thirtysix; and—unforgivably—‘in vol. vi. p. 132, he has copied one of his longest notes, without the slightest acknowledgement, from Mr. Collier’s History of Dramatic Poetry, vol. iii. p. 203, a work to which he has elsewhere been indebted’. Furthermore, Dyce’s comparison of The Cardinal to Webster’s Duchess of Malfi was anticipated ‘some years ago by writers in the Critical Review and in the London Magazine’, namely, Collier’s own five articles on Shirley (never cited by Dyce) of 1816–17 and 1820. The last particulars, if nothing else, would certainly have confirmed Dyce’s suspicions, in spite of the reviewer’s overall approbation: ‘We look upon this edition of Shirley as a model, in many respects, of the manner in which the writings of our old dramatists ought to be explained and illustrated’. In one of his letters

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15. The undated Dyce letters (John Murray archives) are docketed ‘5 January 1833’ and ‘1833’— the first in error, as the review appeared on 12 January and Dyce refers to ‘today’s Literary Gazette’.


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to Murray Dyce parried three of the shrewdest attacks, though not very persuasively, reducing Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays to thirty,16 pooh-poohing the error in the date of Kirkman (‘I merely gave the date of the edition I possessed: what matters it to the readers of Shirley, when Kirkman’s Collection was first published?’), and insisting that his footnote at vi:132 owed nothing directly to HEDP. The last point is moot, and both scholars may have reached the same unremarkable conclusion independently, but Collier certainly published it first.17 Perhaps in response to Dyce’s complaints, John did moderate some of his reflections in a ‘Second Notice’ of Shirley for the Literary Gazette two weeks later, offering ‘to do more justice than, from want of space, we were able to do in our preceding number, to the editorial labours of Mr. Dyce, who has already established his reputation in this department by his editions of the works of Robert Greene, George Peele, and John Webster’ (26 January 1833, pp. 54–56). But his thrust was still far from complimentary to the co-editor, and he concluded by emending, quite absurdly, a stanza in Narcissus that had ‘puzzled Mr. Dyce’. Of course this ticklish review was no more than part of the Collier-Dyce flyting, another episode of which had erupted in the Literary Gazette only six months before (see below), and if other specialist reviewing contributed significantly to John’s income we have not unearthed it. One project of 1832 might have been profitable, but it quickly proved abortive. Thomas Campbell, the celebrated poet of The Pleasures of Hope and Gertrude of Wyoming, had begun a new biography of Mrs. Siddons, for which the great actress herself had furnished him documentary materials. According to Collier twenty-two years later, Campbell, ‘knowing, as he did, that I was in possession of many particulars of the career of Mrs. Siddons and of her family’—from the Larpent collection, he later explained—‘applied to me to lend him assistance in his undertaking’. This came down to ‘two propositions: either that I should sell my materials to him or that I should myself, under his inspection, interweave them with his manuscript. For various reasons, I was much averse to the first proposition,—and the second went off mainly on a question of authorship. He told me that he expected 400£ for the copyright, if the book were published with his name, and he was very willing to mention me in the Preface as a contributor to it. This course I declined; and I never saw the work again till a er it was printed’ (Athe-

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16. By calling two (Titus Andronicus, 1 Henry VI ) ‘certainly spurious’ and declaring that four (2 and 3 Henry VI, Pericles, and Taming of the Shrew) ‘contain only a few touches from the great poet’s hand’. 17. In a concluding paragraph Collier added ‘as a trifle to the biographical notice’ the news that ‘there is reason to believe that one of [Shirley’s] sons became an actor aer the Restoration, and was a member of the king’s company when they began their performances at Drury Lane in 1663’. This speculation is repeated in the MS continuation of HEDP.


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naeum, 29 July 1854, p. 944). Much later John adjusted his story: Campbell had offered him a quarter of his fee, and he had at first ‘rather reluctantly’ agreed to the arrangement, but on visiting Duke Street and viewing the ‘vast masses, of unarranged materials . . . all confused and undigested’, realized that his task was virtually to do ‘all the work’. At which point ‘I at once civilly declined’, and ‘the matter was thus broken off . . . without any ill-will on either part, for I a erwards saw Campbell several times during the progress of his undertaking, and never refused to give him hints as he proceeded’ (OMD, i:43, iii:2–3). In fact the negotiations dragged on for three months, on the evidence of four letters from Campbell that John himself carefully preserved.18 In July 1832 Campbell seemed mainly concerned about whether both names were to appear on the title page (‘can we both be supposed to speak at the same time?’ he asked) and about possible conflicts of ‘appreciation’ (Campbell ‘cannot compromise’); he insisted that Collier not advertise his involvement until the book was complete, and then only ‘in the event of our joint names appearing’. They nonetheless reached some kind of preliminary arrangement, for on 26 July Campbell was ‘happy to agree to any manner of announcement . . . which you may think fit, confident that you will not . . . place me in the light of transferring to you the whole onus of responsibility of the work’. Five days later the deal seemed to be struck, but on 31 October the poet acknowledged its breakdown: he regretted that John felt himself ‘in a cle stick with regard to our proposition’ (which nevertheless did not seem to imply financial differences), and confessed that he could not envisage ‘any more than yourself the chance of our junction’.19 What went amiss is impossible to say, but on an earlier occasion it had been John who proffered his literary talents to Campbell, not Campbell who sought them, in a lengthy submission of projects in 1823 to the New Monthly Magazine—of which nothing had come. And John’s personal opinion of the great man was already jaundiced in 1829, when he characterized him to Robinson as ‘a dandy in person and mind’, and ‘in terror lest he should knock down the cardhouse temple of his fame’.20 In later years he retailed several memories of Campbell drunk and obstreperous, making a fool of himself in the company of poets and critics, and it is certainly more than possible that the 1832 Siddons episode influenced such recollections (OMD, ii:18–19 and iii:67–69). Remarkably, Alex-

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18. Folger MS Y.d.341 (15–18), the first undated and the others dated 26 and 31 July and 31 October 1832. 19. By then Collier had already told Devonshire that the project had ‘cooled off’; letter of 13 October, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence. 20. HCR Correspondence, 25 December 1829. This bears an uncanny (or perhaps not) resemblance to Walter Scott’s famous observation that Campbell ‘is afraid of the shadow that his own fame casts before him’; J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837), iv:93.


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ander Dyce in 1844 remembered another version of Campbell’s struggle to complete the Life of Mrs. Siddons: because of his ‘very slight acquaintance with stagehistory’, Dyce averred, Campbell offered him one-half the publisher’s royalty ‘if I would become his coadjutor’, and Dyce ‘refused the money, but promised him all the assistance in my power’ (Literary Gazette, 22 June 1844, p. 401). Rather as Collier claimed he had done, Dyce provided Campbell with suggestions and notes, although later he found the book ‘crammed with mistakes of every possible description’, and largely devoid of his painstaking notulae. Campbell may well have dangled a prospect of co-authorship at more than one literary handyman before settling down to produce what he had already been paid for, unsatisfactory though it would be.

The Books of Richard Heber As a publishing scholar with both specialist and popularizing ambitions, John Payne Collier’s forte had long been novelty of information, and such novelty depended above all on its sources. At the outset of his career a personally acquired or borrowed rare volume might serve, but by HEDP the importance of untapped institutional archives dwarfed the odd reading discovery, while the private resources of antiquarian friends continued to give Collier an edge on some less well-placed rivals. Loans from Douce, Bright, Towneley, and Haslewood had enlivened his HEDP text; Devonshire’s library had proved enduringly fertile; the Larpent manuscripts yielded a few publishable nuggets; and soon the Earl of Ellesmere’s collections at Bridgewater House would provide a host of new revelations, genuine as well as suppositious. Some indication of the avidity with which John sought out fresh facts, and what hazards could attend the competition for priority, may be seen in an episode of mid-1832. David Laing of Edinburgh (1793–1878), a second-generation bookseller and literary antiquary, had sent Collier through their common friend Dyce what must have been a proof or pre-print of his ‘Extracts from Conversations between Drummond of Hawthornden and Ben Jonson in the year 1619’, read before the Scottish Society of Antiquaries on 9 January 1832. Collier thanked him for it on Monday 9 July, but on the preceding Thursday he had already forwarded to William Jerdan’s Literary Gazette—albeit anonymously—a choice sample of it ‘about Ben Jonson & young Raleigh’.21 Over the week-end, however, he seems to have learned (prob-

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21. JPC to Laing, EUL MS La.IV.17. This relates to the famous anecdote about Jonson as ‘governor’ of Walter Ralegh’s high-spirited son, when young Walter carted him dead-drunk through a French town in 1613 as ‘a more Lively image of ye Crucifix then any they had’ (Herford and Simpson, i:140). Gifford, relying on a version in Aubrey that misdates the episode, declared it apocryphal, but Drummond’s report vindicates it completely. Laing unearthed the Drummond


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ably from Dyce) that ‘the book from which I quoted is not yet published by the Ant: Soc: of Edinb., although it has been sent to me; and it would be most unfair to anticipate any part of its contents’. Writing hastily to Jerdan he ‘rejoiced that it did not appear on Saturday [7 July] as I must have got into a terrible scrape . . . therefore, if you please, put my anonymous letter into the fire’.22 Later Collier and Laing became good friends, and indeed worked closely together on the 1842 Shakespeare Society edition of Drummond’s Conversations; but at this date they had not yet met. What potential embarrassment Collier skirted may well have been more Dyce’s fault than his own, as indeed it was Dyce’s original indiscretion(s) that set off the sequence, but Dyce could be cutting indeed about his friend’s print-seeking propensities: ‘Don’t mention [a story about a regimental mutiny] to any one’, he warned Mitford in October 1832: ‘if I had told Collier, it would have been in The Chronicle ere now’. And again, regarding his payment from Murray for the Shirley edition (£52 10s.), ‘Collier is dying to know what sum I received, but I shall not tell him, & request that you will not mention it’.23 Some of these tweaks may remind us of the tattling schoolgirl in Dyce, but their thrust is familiar enough. A few years later the Garrick Club Committee rebuked its founding ‘twel h member’ for publishing in the Chronicle an account of a testimonial club dinner given for Charles Kemble, a clear breach of privilege. Collier’s co-culprit at the time was

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text and prepared it for publication with the rest of his ‘Extracts’, showing Dyce his discoveries before 8 August 1831, when Dyce wrote to Collier that the Jonson-Ralegh anecdote was ‘a positive fact’, which ‘I shall use in my Life of [Jonson] for the Aldines’: ‘I have got this from unpublished Drummond M.SS.’, he explained, sending also the text of a Drummond sonnet ‘you may not give . . . by any channel to the press’ (Folger MS Y.d.341 [56]). Nor did Collier disobey at the time, but in the Literary Gazette for 5 May 1832, p. 284, there appeared an ‘Extract from a Letter from a Correspondent at Edinburgh’, which gave the gist of the story. Further correspondence (12 May and 19 May, the latter from one ‘D. A.’, who claimed to have seen the Drummond MSS ‘many years since’ in the Advocates’ Library) led to a protest from Dyce (19 May, published 26 May) about ‘your correspondent from Edinburgh . . . and the gentleman who signs himself D. A.’, believed to be ‘one and the same person’: Dyce clearly knew how the leak came about, and derided the ‘imperfect recollection’ of ‘your correspondent, [who] was fortunate enough to peruse [the MS] many years before it was found’. Writing to Laing on 12 June, Dyce was relieved that Laing had seen this reply, for the indiscreet Edinburgh correspondent was in fact ‘a friend of mine’, who ‘had heard me mention the Raleigh story &c., and as every thing turns to print now a days . . . immediately wrote a garbled account of the circumstances to Jerdan, pretending that he had seen the Drummond M.S.S.’ 22. JPC to Jerdan, 9 July 1832, EUL MS Gen. 1730.c/23. Laing’s ‘Extracts’ were published in Archaeologia Scotica 4, part 2 (1833). What exactly Collier intended to add in July to the published exchange is unclear, as is the very existence of the ‘Correspondent at Edinburgh’—but Dyce may have blabbed to more than one confidant. ‘D. A.’, it may be observed, is ‘A. D.’ reversed. 23. Dyce to Mitford, 29 October 1832 and 5 February 1833, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.100 (21) and (22).


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again William Jerdan of the gossipy Gazette, who resigned from the club over the reprimand.24 Casting about in the 1830s for ‘scoops’ of all kinds, John sought access to unexplored private collections with the network of recommendations now at his command. Some, like George Daniel’s and B. H. Bright’s, seemed initially promising, but yielded him little. The Aladdin’s cave of them all, however, had long been Richard Heber’s library of early English poetry, drama, and popular literature, an incomparable assembly of printed rariora, though part only of a vast accumulation of 150,000 volumes (plus pamphlets and manuscripts) shelved in eight houses at home and abroad. Heber’s favourite English books lay mostly in London, at his Pimlico residence or in a kind of repository in York Street, Westminster; and the collector had dealt generously with scholars and editors, at least those he personally knew. Understandably, however, he denied unsupervised access to his treasures, and his own absence from England between July 1825 and July 1831 le would-be applicants frustrated indeed. Collier was certainly one such—witness his remark in HEDP that a copy of Baldwin’s Beware the Cat had been ‘bought by Mr. Heber, and is of course, now inaccessible’— although in mid-1833 he appears to have borrowed a few rare Skelton volumes, and in later years he laid claim, improbably, to some intimacy with the library during Heber’s lifetime. The sudden death of Richard Heber on 4 October 1833 set off a chorus of anticipation among rival collectors (‘What is to become of the books?’ were Earl Spencer’s first words on hearing the news), and the quest for the collector’s misplaced will, discovered eventually by Thomas Frognall Dibdin behind books on a high shelf in Pimlico, has become part of bibliophile folklore.25 No special provision for the library was included, and, faced with crippling encumbrances on the family lands, his executrix and life-heir chose to sell off what she could—all the books—aware though she must have been that prices were down, and that for decades Heber himself had virtually ‘made the market’ in some areas of collecting. Rejecting a grand plan for dispersal by categories, offered by Dibdin, who considered himself and Heber’s library equally betrayed, the heir chose to sell off the stock helter-skelter, largely according to where it currently lay. The books from the Pimlico house (and presumably those shelved in York Street) were offered in eight multi-day sales (‘Parts’ I–VIII) between 10 April

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24. See Ashby’s account in Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.1455, p. 169 (source untraced). The dinner took place on 10 January 1837; on 23 January Egerton responded evasively to Collier’s request for details of his own speech on the occasion; FF MS 751. 25. Spencer to Dibdin, 6 October 1833, Houghton MS Eng 1171.1 (4). On the will, see Dibdin, Reminiscences (1836), i:445–45; this was, however, not the only copy (see Hunt 1996, p. 107). Dr. Hunt has kindly shared his research on Heber, Dibdin, and others with us.


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1834 and 29 February 1836, while the books that Heber kept at Hodnet Hall, Shropshire, formed Parts IX and X (April–May 1836), and a specialist sale of manuscripts from both sources (Part XI) took place between Parts VII and VIII, on 10–19 February 1836. Le overs from Pimlico and the ‘Books from Holland’ constituted Parts XII and XIII (1836–37); and there were three further sales of books housed abroad, during 1835–36, in Paris and Ghent.26 Three London auctioneers shared the Augean task: Messrs. Sotheby and Son, R. H. Evans, and the newish firm of Benjamin Wheatley; Payne and Foss, the legendary rare-booksellers of 81 Pall Mall, were engaged to prepare the lengthy catalogues,27 William Nicol of the Shakespeare Press to print them, and Sotheby’s to lead off the selling. Haste, chaotic sequencing, and indiscriminate lotting-up may partly explain what ensued. Part I, 7,486 lots of books from the Pimlico house, took place from 10 April to 9 May 1834, beginning just three months a er the discovery of the will, and from the start prices were alarmingly low: Sotheby’s took in only £5,615, an average of 15s. per lot. Part II (5 June to 3 July) included most of Heber’s old English drama, with no fewer than fortyeight Shakespeare quartos; but despite a prefatory harangue (‘so complete an assemblage of plays . . . was never before brought to the hammer’) the average for 6,590 lots rose to only 18s.28 Matters did not improve with Part III (10 November): 5,055 lots of mostly continental books sank to just over 8s. on average, and for Part IV the strategy and the venue were changed. Robert Harding Evans, the urbane and literate specialist book auctioneer of Pall Mall, stepped in for Sotheby’s, and he or John Thomas Payne (whose initials are affixed to the preface) brought in John Payne Collier to help.29

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26. See De Ricci 1930, p. 103; Munby 1962, pp. 89–90; and Hunt 2001. 27. Dibdin, Reminiscences, ii:939, commending (perhaps with a trace of irony) their ‘celerity of dispatch’; at p. 897 he notes: ‘To a lover of bokes, there must necessarily be no place like London; and in London, no place like No. 81, Pall Mall.’ They had already collaborated with Evans, as cataloguers, in the distinguished Sykes (1824) and Guilford (1828 and following) sales. 28. Dibdin’s statistics, at i:366 of his Reminiscences, agree with those in marked sets of the catalogues prepared by Payne and Foss aer the completion of the Heber sales (examples in the British Library and Bodley); neither Dibdin nor the auctioneers, however, seemed to count in add-lots (which we have done for Part IV; see below). At first Dibdin attributed the results to presentation and impatience in the midst of a book-price slump (blamed on cholera and Reform in his Bibliophobia, 1832); but on subsequent reflection other causes suggested themselves: the condition of some books, the shabby bindings, multiplication of copies, even of rarities (Reminiscences, ii:840), to say nothing of their unmanageable bulk, the strain on the individual credit of active buyers, and the economic climate itself: ‘Book property is becoming very ticklish’, the apostle himself had confessed to Lord Spencer on 13 January (BL Althorp G.337). Just what these cheaply sold volumes of 1834 had cost their late owner is impossible to estimate closely, but by the end of the Heber dispersal it would appear that only between a third and a half of his cash outlay, over forty years of bullish connoisseurship, had been recovered. 29. Evans, himself something of an antiquary, was the son of a more distinguished bookseller-


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‘Heber Part IV’ was to be the most memorable of the sales in the greatest dispersal of books of its time (and perhaps any time), and it was hoped that the catalogue would be worthy of its unparalleled contents.30 From Pimlico the old English drama may have already been skimmed, but the early poetry and the ‘popular’ English prose, alongside romances, ballads and broadsides, and residual plays, remained in breathtaking abundance. Even the barest list of the principal books could not fail to arrest, but Evans and Payne rightly appreciated that some kind of descriptive apparatus, especially for the more unusual of the works, must be furnished, if high prices for the minora sidera were to be expected. For such a task Collier, with his appetite for discovery and taste for the arcane, was an inspired bookseller’s choice—if he himself did not proffer his services. For it seems that Collier had already provided Sotheby or Payne with a few lines of trenchant advice: the majority of Heber’s best plays, in Part II, had been listed so mechanically and so carelessly that selling-points were overlooked, editions misdescribed, bibliographies misused, and even contemporary inscriptions—for which Heber had paid dearly—were ignored in the laconic entries. Among the preliminaries, however, are two pages of ‘Corrections and Additions’ (pp. xi–xii), clearly not by the compiler of the main text (‘2972* The Note is not correct . . . 3807 The note is incorrect’); and from their language, their citations of Collier and Dyce only among critics (and of Devonshire’s library among the few locations for copies), their opinions, and even their tell-tale mistakes, these are almost certainly Collier’s work. He remains unacknowledged, in the usual manner of sale catalogues, but there would have been no reason for him to boast of his assistance. Nor was Collier’s participation in Heber Part IV advertised, initially, by the auctioneer, nor by Collier himself at the time;31 only a reissue of the sheets of the catalogue, published later in the year by Edward Lumley of Chancery Lane, gives him away. This was re-titled A Catalogue of Heber’s Collection of Early English Poetry, and presented as a kind of bookman’s vade mecum (the saleroom schedule omitted, a named price-list added), ‘with notices, by J. Payne Collier

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antiquary, Thomas Evans, whose principal compilation, Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative (4 vols., 1784; revised and enlarged by his son, 1810), was well known to Collier. 30. Dibdin’s praise (Reminiscences, i:366) is deserved: ‘Of all these ‘‘parts’’ . . . the fourth is doubtless the most attractive—both from the character of the books (chiefly poetry) and the copiousness of their description’, although elsewhere (ii:717) he congratulated himself, undeservingly, on having ‘more or less noticed’ every rarity in one of his own earlier books. 31. There is no correspondence on the subject—save a deliberate obfuscation in a letter to Laing about Heber’s manuscripts (‘I have looked over Heber’s MSS’, he wrote on 14 July 1835, EUL MS La.IV.17, adding hastily: ‘I mean that I did so some time ago’, suggesting that it was in Heber’s lifetime)—and no mention of the sale in Collier’s late memoirs or diaries.


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Esq.’, and so Collier’s name has been linked with Heber Part IV ever since. It would be surprising, however, if Collier encouraged or even knew in advance of the byline: puffing an auction was not, a er all, a gentleman’s employment, especially when the effect might be to raise prices against friends and patrons. One cannot imagine Thomas Park, Thomas Hill, George Daniel, or Dyce, for all their hob-nobbing with booksellers, so formally assisting a book auctioneer; even Dibdin, had he gone on to ‘categorize’ Heber’s collection, might have been chary of lending his hyperboles to the sale.32 In later years, indeed, Collier would minimize his own contribution to the catalogue of Part IV, especially when taxed with making copies of some rare and subsequently unavailable texts. A correspondent of Notes and Queries who asserted in 1864 that ‘the fourth portion of the Heber Catalogue was compiled by Mr. John Payne Collier’ drew an immediate denial from Collier: ‘In no sense of the words did I compile the fourth portion of the Heber Catalogue; I contributed to it some notes on the rarer English books only, a few of which notes I had drawn up, in substance, some years before’.33 And indeed it is unlikely that he participated in the drudgery of transcribing short-titles, or even of describing condition and completeness, or bindings, or indicating traditional references. But the informative notes, those embodying historical, biographical, or bibliographical detail, or critical judgement, number nearly 550 in Part IV, affecting about a tenth of the titles,34 and of these Collier (we think) supplied about three hundred—certainly more than half of the total, and by far the most significant portion.35 Ranging from a phrase or two to nearly a page in length, his commentary is characterized by easy command of literary and theatrical history, rhetoric, and versification; familiarity with jests, drolleries, plays, and playwrights; a special interest in Italian poetry and burlesque, Spenserian echoes, plagiarism, and imitation; and a particular delight in re-attributing or re-dating individual works. Printing history and early presswork concern him, and he displays his close acquaintance with the private collections of Perry, Douce (lots 728, 3031),

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32. He had, however, contributed initialled descriptions to the earlier Alchorne sale, and perhaps helped with the Merly library catalogue (both 1813); W. A. Jackson 1965, pp. 27–28. 33. B. S., ‘Daniel’s Black-Letter Ballads’, 3 September 1864, p. 192; Collier, ‘Daniel’s BlackLetter Ballads’, 10 September 1864, p. 215. 34. Including books lotted up with others, unnamed historical tracts, and volumes of boundup pamphlets, chapbooks, ballads, and other broadsides, there were over 5,000 ‘titles’ in Part IV, divided into 3,077 lots (3,067 numbered, 9 ‘starred’ extras, and one additional undescribed lot at the end); by contrast, Part II had offered only about 160 notes for 6,590 lots. 35. Note by note, only internal evidence will suggest which are Collier’s, but about 275 seem ‘very likely’, and about 60 ‘likely’; others are either too slight to judge, or are specifically attributed elsewhere (mostly to Heber himself, whose meticulous notes made the task easy), are ‘out-of-field’ for Collier, contradict his known opinions, or recite errors he would scarcely have made.


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Devonshire (145, 534, 1806), Egerton, and, inevitably, with his own shelves and the institutional holdings of the British Museum and the Society of Antiquaries. As ever, he could not resist scoring off rival bibliographers, Ritson above all, but Herbert and Dibdin egregiously, Steevens (lots 2869–70), Malone (372), and most expectably Dyce, whose editions of Peele, Greene, and Webster are repeatedly—and very politely—revealed as deficient. Collier’s own publications went largely uncited,36 but the shortcomings of modern reprints like E. V. Utterson’s, Brydges’s, and Haslewood’s, Park’s Heliconia (lots 110, 163, 2446), and the Auchinleck Press were exposed whenever occasion arose: from a bookseller’s viewpoint, of course, this kind of scholarly sniping might enhance the price of the mistranscribed originals. Less useful, perhaps, but visible in about ten of the notes, is a gratuitous (and heavy-handed) jocularity, which reminds us that Collier was now a regular in the slightly raffish club world of London.37 Collier’s Heber IV notes concentrate, as he himself later pointed out, on the ‘rarer’ books in the sale, chiefly those of the minor poets between 1570 and 1630, and the semi-literary parerga of popular prose: Churchyard, Gascoigne, Googe, and Breton; Lodge, Nashe, Greene, and Dekker (as pamphleteers, not dramatists); quirky favourites like Samuel Rowlands, William Goddard, Thomas Jordan, and some of the vast run of John Taylor; Michael Drayton at length; and dozens of odd poems and tracts by such out-of-the-way figures as Thomas Fenne, George Ellis, Henry Lok, Samuel Sheppard, Thomas Feylde, Francis Sabie, Richard Niccols, William Warren, Thomas Lovell, Henry Parrot, and Thomas Beedome and his aptly named plagiarist Henry Bold. John did not put much effort into the ‘greats’ like Spenser and Milton, who could take care of themselves, although Donne might have gained from some bibliographical attention: three copies of his rare Anniversaries (‘An Anatomy of the World’) are all but lost under the name of the deceased addressee, Elizabeth Drury, and fetched a pittance (lots 668–70).38 Nor did he treat any but a few of the earlier books, so that Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower, and Langland were outside his orbit, as were Hawes, Lindsay, and (surprisingly) Skelton; and with the exception of two

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36. There were few opportunities; but he did cite The Poetical Decameron in lot 744, and Heber himself referred to it in his MS note in lot 1494. 37. See condescending notes to verse by Anne Dowriche (lot 583) and the author of Eliza’s Babes (1652, lot 688), and to an early sixteenth-century dialogue, Man and Woman (lot 1406). Other mild jokes appear at lots 81, 105, 1300, 1370, 1615, 1808, and 2452, on editorial delicacy (‘Dr. Dibdin . . . prints the word ‘‘horse’’, for one of a much less innocent meaning’), on large families in straitened circumstances (at the end of Lodowick Lloyd’s Hilaria, ‘having nothing else to give, he makes a present to King James of his ten children, as well as his books’), and on plagiarism and slapdash bookmaking. 38. Apparently no one appreciated that lot 203, the second edition of Anne Bradstreet’s Poems, was printed in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1678. Nine shillings seems cheap.


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titles by Drayton and Samuel Daniel, volumes in folio format—perhaps because usually the least perishably rare—were le alone. More curiously, the residual drama from Pimlico reached its sale-point virtually untouched by the resident expert: despite the dispersal in Part II, there remained no fewer than 178 lots of early, and o en very valuable plays, masques, and pageants, but in Part IV little attempt to describe them was made, save as ‘rare’, ‘very rare’, ‘very beautiful’, or ‘imperfect’. One signal exception, lot 2024, the pseudo-Shakespearian Taming of a Shrew (1594), prompted a half-page note arguing its right to be considered ‘the first idea of his play’ or ‘the first draught of his Comedy’, but this was simply reprinted literatim from the Inglis catalogue of 1826, when Heber had bought it for £21. Evans reckoned A Shrew to be the prospective star lot of the whole of Part IV, and Payne singled it out in his preface, reporting that it had disappeared a er one citation by Pope, ‘until Mr. Collier procured the use of it [from Heber] for his ‘‘History of English Dramatic Poetry’’ ’. Would not Collier himself have found something to add to the Inglis description? Perhaps so, but perhaps not to the advantage of the vendor, for his own conviction was that Shakespeare’s version ‘was acted about 1602’ (HEDP, iii:98), and that this was by no means a ‘first draught’, but an anonymous source for The Shrew. Nonetheless the InglisHeber quarto remained seriously desirable, ‘unquestionably of the highest literary interest and curiosity in a Shakespearian library’, as the auctioneers put it, and Collier may have had another reason for withholding his commentary: in the event, Devonshire—or Devonshire’s librarian, bidding discreetly through Rodd—paid £94 for it, the second-highest price of the session.39 Many of the books Collier chose to annotate were old friends from The Poetical Decameron and the magazine retrospectives, but many more would have been new to him now. A few discoveries were almost inevitable, though in neither number nor nature outstanding: that ‘Lustie Humfrey’, the ‘King of the Tobacconists’ and dedicatee of Thomas Nashe’s satirical Lenten Stuffe (1599), was in fact Henry King, a catchpenny pamphleteer, appears to have been news (lot 1205), as may have been the survival beyond 1570 of John Heywood, the venerable poet and paterfamilas, ‘a fact stated by no other authority’ than one Lemeke Avale (lot 43). One Shakespeare allusion (lot 3033, Peter Woodhouse) is probably fresh, though another is simply proverbial (1399, Middleton’s Black Book).40 Most of the seemingly new attributions of authorship had however been anticipated, if only by Collier himself, although the annotator piqued himself on one novelty, that Edward Gosynhill wrote (and later ‘replied to’) the 39. It was exceeded only by Heber’s set of forty-two Roxburghe Club books (lot 2438, £120). Rodd also bought Webster’s unique Monuments of Honour for Devonshire (lot 1638), as Collier revealed in New Particulars Regarding the Works of Shakespeare (1836), p. 29. 40. See Munro 1932, i:145 and ii:463, wrongly crediting the discovery of the first to Grosart (1877) and rightly dismissing the second.


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mid-sixteenth-century misogynistic verse tract The School House of Women (lot 790).41 Perhaps more important were the revelations of unnoted verse by Michael Drayton (2463: fully endorsed by J. W. Hebel), Thomas Churchyard (two new stanzas), and ‘a long poem by George Whetstone, hitherto unknown, and one of the very best specimens of his authorship’. Both the Churchyard and the Whetstone stem from one remarkable volume, Richard Edwards’s famous miscellany The Paradise of Dainty Devises, but survive only in the second printing, of 1578. To this enlarged and corrected edition, which he believed ‘probably unique’, Collier devoted a long enthusiastic note, and the auctioneers cooperated by separating the lot (726) from the run of other editions of The Paradise (1776–80). Despite its imperfections—two or three leaves missing at the end, and four in the middle—the book fetched the strong price of £7 at the sale, and from Collier himself. Without his passionate advocacy it might well have been his for ten shillings. When his curiosity or his pedantry was aroused, John indeed proved a formidable puffer of books, and undoubtedly a blessing to the vendor. Few if any old auction catalogues (and certainly none of Evans’s) can match notes like Collier’s on Henry Fitz-Geffrey, Certain Elegies (1618, lot 723), signalling allusions to ‘Dekker, Parrot, Taylor, Davies, Rowlands, Breton . . . Goddard, Webster, Peachum, Wither, &c.’, as well as a dialogue that sheds light on the Blackfriars Theatre ‘just a er the death of Shakespeare’, and a ‘character of John Webster, under the name of Websterio’. Pasquils Jests (1604, lot 1794) were ‘selected from various sources, English and foreign. Not a few are from Domenichi’s Collection of Italian Facetie, motti e burle, others from Sir J. Harington’s Epigrams, turned into prose, one from Bishop Latimer’s Sermons, and one from Peele’s Jests, with some considerable alterations to avoid easy detection’. John Tatham’s Ostella (1650, lot 2658) has selling-points galore: ‘The Ode to Col. Lovelace on his being in Holland has not been quoted. It must have been written before his Marriage. The Prologue on the removal of the Red Bull Players to the Cockpit has not been hitherto noticed, and on the next page (111) is a mention of a play called ‘‘The Whisperer, or what you please’’, of which this is the only record and that unknown to all the compilers of dramatic lists.’ Bibliographical nuance or close reading might also have served the salesmen: the quarto first edition of Sidney’s Arcadia (1590, lot 2467) exhibited ‘in41. Collier returned to the ‘Gosynhill flyting’ in BARB, i:325–26, making the same point in greater detail, as if ‘never yet’ given in print. Clearly, Gosynhill himself did ‘claim’ The School House in his own contradictory Praise of All Women, as Collier pointed out, but his authorship has been challenged by Beatrice White (1931); Harold Stein (1934) regarded the de-attribution as one of ‘complete finality’, but W. A. Jackson in the Pforzheimer Catalogue (1940), ii:401 ff., found it ‘not wholly convincing’, and took Gosynhill’s claim more or less at face value. STC 12104.5 retains Collier’s attribution, noting ‘authorship disputed’.


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numerable’ variations from the 1598 folio text, which ‘gives the quarto a peculiar value independent of its mere scarcity’, while for Nicholas Breton’s Small Handful of Fragrant Flowers (1575, lot 110), the presence of ‘at least 160’ errors in Thomas Park’s Heliconia reprint could not but exalt the original. And while it was not strictly profitable to point out, of R. L.’s sonnet-sequence Diella (1596, lot 1329), that Ritson had mistaken one of its prose sources, correcting the old bibliographer’s count of twenty-eight sonnets (‘there are thirty-eight of them’) did offer potential purchasers more for their money.42 All in all, Collier’s notes, even those ‘drawn up, in substance, some years before’, make Heber IV what it is: among auctioneers’ catalogues of its era, the most enduringly informative and—even today—the most frequently cited.43

William Henry Miller The sale of Heber Part IV, held between 8 December and Christmas Eve 1834, may have seemed to the vendors an improvement upon Parts I–III, but the collector’s acquisitive audacity again proved greater than that of his peers and successors. A total of £7,248 10s. 6d. was raised, or a per-lot average of £2 7s., but many prize items went cheap: Narcissus Luttrell’s five-volume collection of poetical broadsides (1678–88, lot 2486), for which Heber had paid £231 at the Bindley sale ten years earlier, fetched but £79 16s.; and the magnificent series of sixteenth-century ballads, purchased privately from George Daniel through Thorpe in 1832 for £273 10s.,44 was split up into ten more manageable lots, but made only £122 17s. 6d. in total. Individual high-spots from early sales (Steevens, Reed, Roxburghe, Brand, J. B. Inglis, White Knights) mostly kept up their values, but those from the bullish 1820s (Perry, Boswell, Bindley, Sykes, Dent, and Jadis) took a beating, sometimes of fi y percent.45 42. This is not to say that Collier’s bibliography is beyond reproach: Malone’s copy of FitzGeffrey’s Certain Elegies was just what he claimed, a reissue, not a new edition, as Collier insisted; the long argument about precedence of editions for Samuel Rowlands, Humours Ordinary (lot 2420), sounds persuasive but is wrong. The biographical note on Richard Robinson’s son, the player (2412), is a careless confusion that Collier would not repeat, nor would he have been likely to re-assert that T. B.’s A New Dialogue between the Angel of God and the Shepherds was ‘in fact a miracle-play, and ought to be included in dramatic lists’. 43. Aer Part IV a low-key Part V was auctioned by Benjamin Wheatley, and Evans returned for Parts VI–VIII and the concurrent Part XI (manuscripts). Part VIII (February–March 1836) contains material that may have been excluded from Part IV by accident or design, and a number of lots seem to bear Collier’s notes: we estimate fieen to twenty. And Collier certainly worked on the English literary manuscripts in Part XI, where some sixty notes are very much in his manner: see C4. 44. For the earlier history of these, see J. I. Freeman 1997, pp. 72–77. 45. The Payne and Foss marked sets indicate that 1,786 lots for which Heber’s cost was known (£5,749 5s. 6d.) made £4,519 10s.


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One problem above all had already become apparent: not only was Heber himself out of the game, but his principal competitors, who helped set his costs, had been falling away at a pace. The enthusiasts Joseph Haslewood and Thomas Caldecott died in 1833, and Douce just a er Heber in 1834; Francis Freeling had two years to live and collect, and George Hibbert three, but they, like the wide-ranging Thomas Jolley, the more finical and less affluent Philip Bliss, or the fastidious Thomas Grenville, would not covet enough of the rare English poetry to support the whole session.46 More hope was offered by such as George Daniel (who would not, however, buy back his own ballads at half-price), and by the obscure but omnivorous B. H. Bright, but it is really to only one man that the books of Part IV owed their market survival. William Henry Miller of Craigentinny and Britwell Court (Buckinghamshire), hard-line Tory M.P. for Newcastle-under-Lyme, was the unforeseen hero. He was Collier’s age—to the month—and had quietly accumulated voyages and travels, and English and Scottish literature, since at least 1816.47 In the space of two weeks in December 1834, however, he became a major collector of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury poetry, acquiring through Thomas Thorpe no fewer than 718 of the 3,077 lots in Heber Part IV, and virtually sweeping the Elizabethan and Stuart minor lights among the verse there. Miller seems earlier to have been discouraged by the price of old English plays, and chose poetry as his domain; hence his activity in Heber Parts I–III would not have prepared anyone for his performance in Part IV. For while his outlay was by no means enormous—the 718 lots from Thorpe came in at £1,294 13s. 6d., plus commission 48—the single-minded, meticulously-prepared pursuit of the Heber poetry, with particular attention to what was unlikely to recur on the market, le little, among the conspicuous rarities, for others.49 His costliest lots were mainly texts of the mid-sixteenth 46. Bliss did covet more than he could afford: see his note in his own copy of Heber Part V (now Houghton), which records that out of sixty lots bid on, ‘I purchased one lot only, for one shilling’; quoted in Walsh 1965, p. 507. 47. He was active in the Gordon of Gordonstoun sale, and in the same year Heber referred to him as ‘generally very polite in accommodating me, when we clash as is sometimes the case, in voyages and travels’; Heber to John Delafield Phelps, 30 March 1816, bound in Folger Z997 G67 Cage. 48. Only forty-nine cost £10 or more, and nineteen cost the minimum bid of a shilling; Miller’s careful tally of old sales-records ensured that he rarely overpaid, and indeed he seems to have le behind some appropriate lots on principle, as exorbitant. But over the next decade Miller did pursue and recover much of what had eluded him, notably Collier’s own purchases. 49. Miller’s marked set of the Heber catalogues (FF) reveals an astonishing level of pre-sale preparation. His famous concern for size of copies (in sixteenths of an inch: he was widely known for this foible as ‘Measure Miller’) led him to record measurements and other details of condition, completeness, etc., for hundreds of books he did not buy, as well as those that he did; he reminded himself of earlier prices for these and comparable copies, and occasionally suggested quite sophisticated bibliographical points untreated in the catalogue.


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century, unique or nearly unique, although he paid his highest price (£31 10s.) for a poetical miscellany of 1593, The Phoenix Nest by S. R., with contributions by Peele, Lodge, Watson, and others. This had been lovingly endorsed by Collier (‘in the reprint in Heliconia, vol. 2, there are several hundred errors . . . and six stanzas entirely omitted’), and indeed Miller seemed responsive to Collier’s hyperbole, paying over the odds for some of the most written-up articles in the sale—such as John Tatham’s Ostella (lot 2658, £2 11s.) and Thomas Lovell’s Dialogue between Custom and Verity (1354, £10). He did not shrink from high prices for Gascoigne, Googe, and Lindsay, nor from John Taylor’s fashionably expensive light verse, but with hindsight Miller’s shrewdest purchase was that of the Daniel-Heber ballads. Leaving aside two lots (386, of which the per-item cost of three, one of them defective, exceeded all others; and 388, unattractive and ‘passed’, but later acquired), he obtained seventy-eight mostly unique specimens of sixteenth-century popular verse for £116 11s. 6d. For Collier, looking on in his dual capacity of saleroom consultant and (unfunded) rival collector, the emergence of so determined a new power must have prompted mixed feelings. The Heber rarities were dispersed, but not scattered, and although Collier’s brief access to them had now passed, if Miller were minded to cooperate in the future, what might not be worked out? The alternative—another dark sequestration, like Heber’s, of unapproachable text—was a grim one, and what Miller would never have known at the time is that Collier had already anticipated that mischance. Miller’s coup at Heber Part IV, and in subsequent sales, has been viewed by some historians of book collecting as providential, in keeping intact a nucleus of rarities first assembled by Heber, which in the Britwell Court sales of 1916– 27 would largely pass—as if roused from a ninety-year sleep—to the Huntington Library. But one wonders if anyone in 1834 could have predicted how long a reader might have to wait to consult Lovell, or Constable’s Diana, or Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror once again. For what Heber had done more or less by neglect, Miller and his heirs did by design, to remove from circulation a considerable body of old English literature, and effectively to render it ‘lost’. Why this should have been so remains mysterious: despite his eccentricities, Miller was a moderately sociable bibliophile, a member of the Roxburghe, Bannatyne, and Maitland Clubs, and a firm friend of his Edinburgh countryman, the booksellerantiquary David Laing.50 He was willing to lend books to Philip Bliss, Henry

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50. In 1849 an Abbotsford Club reprint of Sire Degarre (Heber IV, lot 556), probably edited by Laing, was published ‘as a pleasing memorial of [Miller’s] devoted attachment to our Early Poetical Literature’ (Goudie 1913, p. 189); and in 1865 Laing’s reprint of a book by Stephen Hawes derived in part from a Britwell Court original. Miller’s cousin and heir, Samuel Christie-Miller, also allowed Laing to use his copy of Lodge’s Defence of Stage Plays in 1853 for the Shakespeare


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Jadis, and Bolton Corney, and to supply collations from his books for Thorpe, Rodd, and John Delafield Phelps; and at the time of Heber VIII (March 1836) he reminded himself ‘to bring up Hinds Eliosto [John Hind, Eliosto libidinoso, 1606, a volume described in detail in BARB, i:388–91] for Mr Collier’.51 But subsequent efforts by Collier and his associates to borrow books or to elicit information from Miller appear to have met a brick wall. In March 1841, for instance, Thomas Amyot, having written twice to Miller with no reply, regretted that there was ‘no chance’ of obtaining a transcript of Lodge’s Defence of Stage Plays; this episode led a reviewer in the Athenaeum to stigmatize ‘the possessor’ as one who, ‘not satisfied with the rarity of the original, determined on keeping the contents sacred to himself ’, and Collier himself to refer to him as ‘an individual who, for some unexplained reason, is unwilling that the work should be republished’.52 This ongoing rebuff may have something to do with Collier’s unsanctioned publication of nineteen ‘Heber Ballads’ in 1840, but Miller was no more forthcoming to others, even to Dyce, with whom he maintained cordial relations.53 He was ‘known to be a very strange sort of person’, Madden reported (Diary, 24 October 1836), and even a er his death in 1848 the Britwell Court library remained ‘practically inaccessible to scholars’ and hence all but unknown to them.54 His principal heir, Samuel Christie-Miller, did finally allow David Laing to transcribe Lodge’s Defence and Collier to use Drayton’s Idea’s

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Society reprint. In his biography of Laing (p. 270), Gilbert Goudie implied that the archive of Laing correspondence now in the Edinburgh University Library included 294 letters from members of the Miller family (1816–77), but these seem never to have been part of the EUL collection. 51. Among Miller’s pencilled memoranda on the pastedowns of his Heber catalogues appear ‘The book Dr Bliss borrowed’ (Part VI); ‘To leave book at Rodds for Mr Jadis’ (Part VII); ‘Bring Necessary Doctrine 4to from Britwell for Mr Thorpe’ (Part VI); ‘To look at T. A.’s Massacre of Money—To collate for Rodd’ (VIII); and ‘To collate—Barksdales Nympha Libethris for Mr Phelps’ (VII). Corney thanked Miller for his assistance on 4 July 1844; FF MS 13. 52. Amyot to JPC, 15 March 1841, Folger MS Y.d.341 (3); Peter Cunningham, Athenaeum, 5 June 1841, pp. 436–36, reviewing the Shakespeare Society reprints of Gosson’s School of Abuse and Heywood’s Apology for Actors; JPC in Shakespeare Society Papers 2 (1845), 159. Collier wrote to Laing on 28 January 1852 that Miller ‘told me that he had [Lodge’s Defence], & promised to lend it to me—but he never did’, and eleven years later he remarked that ‘I despair of being able to get at any of Miller’s books, but I can do without them’; JPC to Laing, 5 February 1863; both EUL MS La.IV.17. 53. Dyce to Miller, 23 and 30 May 1845, FF MSS 35 and 36. Dibdin, a fellow ‘Roxburgher’, seems never to have seen Miller’s treasures, but admired them by report: ‘Thorpe’s account of your English poetry astounds me’, he wrote to Miller on 5 January 1841; FF MS 28. 54. De Ricci 1930, p. 110. In 1898, for example, John S. Farmer reprinted William Goddard’s Satirical Dialogue (1615) from what he believed was the unique original at the British Museum, and recorded Goddard’s other two books of verse as (1) ‘only to be found in the Bodleian’, and (2) known from the Worcester College and Bridgewater copies. In fact all three titles—all from Heber—were at Britwell Court, and now Huntington.


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Mirror for an 1856 Roxburghe Club publication; on two occasions a catalogue of the books was begun, but while Christie-Miller was hospitable enough to fellow collectors and to at least one bibliographer,55 meaningful scholarly and editorial access to the Heber-Miller and other Britwell rarities began only with their dispersal in 1916–27. John Payne Collier himself was by no means an inactive bystander at Heber Part IV. With his mother’s bequest but four weeks in hand—plus whatever, if anything, Evans and Payne paid him for his notes—he spent £115 10s. on 44 lots, and no doubt bid on a great many more.56 Among these at £7 apiece were the imperfect Paradise of Dainty Devices, which he had puffed to his cost, and Henry Fitz-Geffrey’s Certain Elegies, the subject of another encomium. Eighteen lots came in at £1 or less (including Shelley’s The Cenci, 1819, for 5s.), but two well-advertised mid-sixteenth-century poems by the printer Robert Copland made £16 17s. between them, and two very rare tracts thought to be—and now known to be, though Collier was doubtful about one—by Thomas Middleton cost £10 3s.57 His dearest purchase was the unique 1608 Cobbler of Canterbury, at twelve guineas; in his own catalogue Miller had crossed through ‘fine copy’.58 William Goddard’s rare Mastiff Whelp and Richard Johnson’s Nine Worthies of London (1592) were £5 5s. each, Covent Garden Drollery (1672) £3 12s., and the unique Pasquil’s Jests, again masterfully ‘noted’, a stiff £4 6s.: indeed Collier’s average outlay on 44 lots was higher than Miller’s on 718, and certainly he outbid (and underbid) Miller on several occasions. Miller does not o en indicate a rival buyer in his own catalogue, but ‘Collier’ appears beside seventeen lotnumbers, and as usual, Miller’s curiosity was anything but idle. Nine of these, totalling £46 17s. on the hammer, turned up later at Britwell Court, and as Miller and Collier were hardly on corresponding term in the 1840s,59 it seems likely that the exchange came near the time of the sale itself. Collier ceded both the ex-

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55. See Barker 1977, p. 302, regarding a visit from the twenty-sixth Earl of Crawford in 1887. Twenty years earlier W. C. Hazlitt acknowledged his ‘uniform and untiring liberality’ in supplying descriptions of rare books—if not the books themselves; Handbook, p. xii. 56. The printed price list credits ‘Collier’ with forty-three, but the marked file copy shows that he also bought lot 510, The Cobbler of Canterbury, which is assigned (‘ditto’) to the purchaser of lot 509, one Cotton. 57. In his edition of Middleton (1840, dedicated to Collier) Dyce assigned both Father Hubbard’s Tales and The Black Book ‘with little hesitation’ to Middleton. Collier wrote in the margin of his copy: ‘These were mine & I gave Dyce transcripts of both’ (i:xviii; FF). 58. Heber had paid £18 for it at the Graon sale in 1815; Miller bid only £4, as the headlines were ‘cut into’. 59. In 1844 Beriah Botfield procured for Miller a copy of Collier’s reprint of Gaulfrido and Barnardo, stipulating that ‘you will be indebted to him in the sum of nine shillings’, and suggesting ‘a Post Office order’; Botfield to Miller, 19 April 1844, FF MS 7.


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pensive Coplands, The Hye Way to the Spittell Hous and Jyl of Brentford’s Testament, Dekker’s Villanies Discovered (£3 11s.), Greene’s Ciceronis Amor, and Goddard’s Mastiff Whelp—Miller by now having acquired both of Goddard’s other satirical rarities, and clearly having been outbid at £5 5s. for this one. Johnson’s Nine Worthies (£5 5s.), Francis Lenton’s rare Inns of Court Anagrammatist (£4), a scarce Skelton (lot 2357, £4 10s.), and John Taylor’s Late Weary Merry Voyage (£1 16s.) rounded out the transaction, which reduced Collier’s extravagance by about forty percent, or more, if he made Miller give him a turnover profit. What John kept, for his trouble and risk, would provide fodder for future editions, like that of the 1578 Paradise of Dainty Devices, and for future adumbrations: Tomasso Garzoni’s Hospital for Incurable Fools (1600, lot 1140) is a title that appears in Frederic Ouvry’s collection inscribed ‘in a contemporary handwriting at the back of title . . . ‘‘Tho. Nashe had some hand in this translation and it was the last he did as I heare. P. W.’’ ’ 60 The Middleton pamphlets clearly were favourites with Collier, like the over-dear Covent Garden Drollery (1672), the unique Pasquills Jests (1604) and The History of George Lord Fauconbridge (1605), Samuel Rowlands’s Greene’s Ghost (1602, £1 7s.), and the Inglis copy of Nathan Field’s A Woman Is a Weathercock (1612, £1 18s.; £3 13s. 6d. in 1826). He may have resisted Miller’s overtures for lot 2630, the Roxburghe-Sykes copy of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1586, £3 3s.; more recently £1,200 in the Arthur Houghton sale, 1980), for Miller ticked it, as he did the slightly imperfect but attractive poem Loves Complaints (1597, £3 4s.), which Collier was to treat as unique in BARB, i:494–96 (STC 16857). But one of the most interesting books cost John only ten shillings, despite another of his own cataloguing disclosures. Lot 1415, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, completed by Chapman (1629), is a late edition, but ‘the MS. notes in this copy . . . are very remarkable . . . . In them we are told that [Marlowe] was an Atheist; that he was stabbed at about thirty, swearing; that he had a friend at Dover, whom he made an Atheist, but who was obliged to recant, &c. At the back of the title-page is a Latin Epitaph on Sir Roger Manwood, by Marlow, which has never been printed.’ Saleroom response was tepid, however—and indeed contemporary annotation, unless firmly attributed, added little to most prices in Heber’s dispersal—so that Collier came away with the book very cheap. He mentioned it in passing in his Bridgewater Catalogue of 1837, where the ‘particulars of Marlow’ are said to be ‘in the hand-writing of Gabriel Harvey’,

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60. Ouvry sale, lot 702, now at University College, London (Ogden A 585). McKerrow, though discounting the attribution, thought that the inscription—which is not mentioned in the Heber catalogue—seemed genuine (1958, v:140), but apparently did not realize Collier’s connection with Ouvry. The hand employed is similar to that seen in some of the forged documents from Bridgewater House.


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although by 1844, when he first published the Latin verse-epitaph (Shakespeare, i:xliv) he had dropped that unlikely claim; a full transcript of the biographical particulars appeared later, in BARB, i:523–24. Meanwhile Dyce had reprinted the poem in his edition of Marlowe (1850, iii:308), and Edward F. Rimbault— a good friend of Collier—had identified the source as ex-Heber, and enquired ‘In whose possession is the copy?’ and ‘Has the Rev. Alex. Dyce made use of the MS. notes?’, without eliciting a published reply.61 And C. M. Ingleby in 1861 set off a witch-hunt by going back to the Bridgewater description, with its bad guess about Gabriel Harvey, demanding: ‘Where is this copy? Does it really exist? If so, whoever has it now should at once submit the writing to a palaeographic scrutiny’.62 By now in fact the volume may have belonged to Collier’s nephew by marriage, Frederic Ouvry, at whose sale (1882, lot 1031) it was again described as ‘Gabriel Harvey’s copy’, a claim Collier had re-perpetuated in 1869.63 The bibliographer W. C. Hazlitt then paid just £1 1s. for it, and by 1885 it had passed to Col. W. F. Prideaux of Calcutta, who confirmed its existence in Notes and Queries in April 1885 (pp. 305–06) and again in July 1910 (p. 24). It next appeared in Prideaux’s own sale (14 February 1917), where it fetched £26 to Dobell, but it has since dropped from sight, and this disappearance has of course compounded suspicion among sceptics of Collier’s reports. Already in 1885 (and without seeing the originals) A. H. Bullen had described the manuscript notes as ‘questionable’, whereas the Manwood epitaph ‘has every appearance of being genuine’ (Works of Marlowe, iii:309 and i:xii–xiii), and although Prideaux pointed out mildly that they were all in the same hand, later editors found it simpler to discount the epitaph as well. C. F. Tucker Brooke omitted it from his 1910 Oxford Works ‘because the evidence in favour of [its] authenticity seems inadequate’, and it is not even mentioned in L. C. Martin’s edition of the Poems (1931). In 1935, however, Mark Eccles demonstrated that the manuscript material in the missing quarto closely matched that in two commonplace books of Henry Oxinden (1608–70), a Kentish minor poet, diarist, and early collector of English plays, and it now seems obvious that the Heber-Collier copy of Hero and Leander

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61. N&Q, 9 March 1850, p. 302. One must assume that Collier replied personally, or that someone pointed out to Rimbault that in 1844 the book was clearly described as ‘in our [i.e., Collier’s] possession’. 62. A Complete View, p. 314; Ingleby in May 1885 (N&Q, p. 352) said he ‘merely suggested a doubt’, and only about the hand’s being Harvey’s, but he was disingenuous to claim that he ‘had a right’ to suspect something ‘with the disappearance of a book and a MS. mentioned by Mr. Collier’; the article had not in fact disappeared, and Ingleby had no reason to suppose that it had. 63. In the Athenaeum of 4 September 1869: ‘I have in my hands the very copy of [Hero and Leander] which belonged to Gabriel Harvey, with notes personal as well as critical.’


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was originally Oxinden’s too.64 Oxinden’s testimony is credible enough for its period, and the Manwood epitaph has been completely rehabilitated;65 indeed it is now considered the only surviving specimen of Marlowe’s Latin poetry— no minor ‘novelty’ even in 1834. Only Collier’s bad name, as Eccles appreciated, cast doubt on what seemed otherwise straightforward, and in this instance an accumulating presumption of fakery has proved grossly misplaced. Despite his trawl of rare books, it could be said that John’s principal acquisition from the Heber dispersal was free access, for the first time, to the famously unbrowsable library. On New Year’s Eve 1834 he wrote to Pickering, proposing a series of six articles on Heber’s books for the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘if you will give me £15’. ‘All the English poetry went through my hands’, he declared, ‘and much that is curious I extracted & abstracted’, adding in a postscript: ‘one way or the other, do not let this matter go further’.66 In the event only two such pieces appeared, both about Heber’s English facetiae (prose and verse: B175), and projected sequels ‘Upon Old Poets & Poetry’, ‘Upon Romances’, and two ‘Upon Heber’s Ballads’ (here Collier confided that ‘I have copies of all the most curious’) proved unrealized. That all this material was copied or ‘extracted & abstracted’ during the run-up to auction would seem from this letter implicit, but in later years Collier hotly denied it. ‘B. S.’, the correspondent of Notes and Queries (1864) who alleged that Heber IV was compiled by John, went on to state that ‘while the [Daniel-Heber] ballads were in his keeping he took or had a transcript made of them, and published twenty-five of them in the first volume of the Percy Society publications’. Collier gave him the lie: As to the statement that, while the Ballads were in my keeping, I took or had a transcript made, that is a mistake also. I copied them, with

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64. See Eccles 1935, copied with inadequate citation by Bakeless 1942, i:116 ff. and ii:161–63; on Oxinden’s collection see Hingley 1998. Both Eccles and Bakeless describe the trail as going cold with Dobell. It is however possible that the book passed to H. F. House, a retired Indian civil servant and collector and student of early English drama, who was at the time Dobell’s best customer (and commissioner) for such material. House died suddenly in April 1923, and his fine library was catalogued by Dobell for Sotheby’s (sale, 21 January 1924), though Hero and Leander does not appear. But a feature of House’s will that gained some notoriety at the time was that all his own writings, including his annotations in books—‘his priceless collection of Shakespeare editions with his M.S. notes’ ( Justice of the Peace, 9 January 1923, p. 639)—had to be burned, a condition that legal counsel upheld and his sister and heir reluctantly obeyed: see M. H. Spielmann’s letter to The Times (21 April 1923) and articles in the Bookman’s Journal for May and October 1923. Can Hero and Leander have somehow been included in the incineration, either by accident or because House had annotated it further? 65. E.g., Fredson Bowers, ed., Complete Works of Marlowe (Cambridge, 1973), ii:534–35 and 540. 66. Bodl. MS Autogr.d.4, fol. 38.


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Mr. Heber’s express permission, before his death, and I have still in my hands my own transcripts of some of them, made in an interleaved copy of Ritson’s Bibliographia Poetica,67 which, at his request, I carried to his house in order that he might see what manuscript additions I had made to it. He knew my zeal upon the subject, and pleased, perhaps, with my industry, he produced his Ballads, and gave me leave to transcribe a few of them on the spot. He a erwards lent me many curious books, of which I will specify only two, Soothern’s Poems, 1584, and Jyl of Brentford’s Testament.68 This history of friendship with Heber, and of familiarity with his library in his lifetime, Collier repeated again and again, when accounting for his use of a very rare book. Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1594), which in 1850 ‘has disappeared from sight, and we fear . . . that it is now many thousand miles from the country to which it properly belongs’, Collier could extract because Heber ‘kindly lent it to me before his death’.69 Lodge’s Phyllis, like other rarities ‘actually in my possession for only a few hours’, was ‘kindly lent to me by the late Mr. Heber, near the commencement of my bibliographical studies’; and Wilkins’s prose version of Pericles (1608) ‘went through my hands (by the favour of the late Mr. Heber) many years ago’.70 And the Percy Society edition (1843) of A Proper New Boke of Armony of Byrdes was made possible only because ‘before his death [Heber] gave us permission to copy it, with a view to a reimpression: his notion was, that the value of the original copy of a tract was not lessened by its being rendered accessible, but he was influenced, besides, by higher and better motives than mere pecuniary considerations’. ‘Into whose hands it devolved on the dispersal of Mr. Heber’s library we are not informed’, Collier sniffed, but ‘we have good reason to know that [Heber] felt none of that literary dog-in-the-mangerism, which interferes with the employment of others of what of the possessor cannot himself enjoy’.71

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67. Presumably lot 922 in Collier’s 1884 sale, ‘interleaved to 4to size, with extensive MS. additions and notes by J. P. Collier’; £3 to B. F. Stevens but untraced by us. 68. N&Q, 3 September 1864, p. 192; the ballads were sold as lots 377 and 380–88. John Southern’s Pandora (1584) is described in BARB, ii:367–70, from ‘the only perfect copy . . . belonging to Heber, which we have used’: in the sale (lot 2609) Miller paid £12 for it. Copland’s Jyl of Brentford’s Testament (lot 517), analysed in BARB, i:152–55, from an uncited copy, came also to Britwell Court, but at the Heber sale Collier himself bought it. 69. Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., 34 (September 1850), 262–65. The unique perfect copy, now at Huntington, was then still at Britwell Court. 70. Athenaeum, 23 March 1867, pp. 387–88, and 28 March 1857, pp. 406–07. 71. The Harmony of Birds (1841), p. vii. For once the buyer was not Miller, but Sir William Bolland, Dibdin’s ‘Hortensius’; Miller bought it at Bolland’s sale, and it is still unique at Huntington (STC 3368.2).


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Collier’s debt to the Heber collections did not stop with Drayton, Lodge’s Phyllis, Wilkins’s Pericles, and the Armony of Byrdes. Both of the extant copies of Lodge’s Defence of Stage Plays had been Heber’s, ‘and during his lifetime he lent me one of them, from which, with his leave, I made some extracts’. When Miller refused access to one original (Collier and his friends believed, mistakenly, that he possessed both of them; in fact one had gone to Bodley), those extracts appeared in the Shakespeare Society’s Papers (2 [1845], 156–65). Two unique poetical tracts, The Pain and Sorrow of Evil Marriage (ca. 1530) and Charles Bansley’s The Pride and Abuse of Women (ca. 1550), went from Heber Part IV to Britwell Court, but Collier reprinted them both (without indicating the whereabouts of the originals) for the Percy Society, in 1840 and 1841. In 1844 he added A Dialogue between the Common Secretary and Jealousy, professing not to have followed the Heber copy, but another one ‘in the hands of a gentleman, who has liberally allowed it to be reprinted’; in fact only the Heber-Britwell-British Library copy is now known. Similarly, Copland’s Complaint of Them That Been Too Late Married, which Collier reprinted in 1863, was clearly from Heber’s unique copy, although Collier implied it was not.72 And as late as 1865 articles in BARB display ‘extracts and abstracts’ of Heber uniques, like Thomas Feylde’s Controversy between a Lover and a Jay, and the manuscript of William Basse’s Polyhymnia (Heber Part XI, lot 70), which ‘was lent to us nearly forty years ago by its then owner, Mr. Heber’ (i:55). The greatest levy upon Heber’s unrepublished poetry, however, involved the sixteenth-century broadside ballads that Miller had swept. ‘I have copies of all the most curious’, Collier told Pickering—certainly more than ‘a few’ transcribed while Heber looked on; and for the Percy Society in 1840 he published no fewer than nineteen. Only one of these is identified as ‘in the Collection of the late Mr. Heber’, but the text of nearly a quarter of Miller’s purchases was now effectively in the public domain.73 Was all or any of this wholesale reprinting activity undertaken with the implicit blessing, as Collier insisted, of Heber himself? It is hard to believe so, and equally hard to accept Collier’s version of their lifetime relationship—with its friendly exchanges, easy visiting terms, access to the ballads in situ at Pimlico,

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72. In correspondence, however, he virtually admitted it, telling Laing that ‘my transcript of ‘‘Too Late’’ was made 30 years ago’; 8 January 1863, EUL MS La.IV.17. 73. Collier’s first use of a Heber-Britwell ballad was actually five years earlier, when he published six lines of ‘A Mournful Ditty’ (Heber IV, lot 382, quoting half the relevant text) in his New Facts Regarding the Life of Shakespeare (1835, p. 37n.). ‘The original’, he wrote, ‘was in the collection of Mr. Heber, one of the last acts of whose life was to copy it out for me. I have since compared it with the original.’ He quoted the Shakespeare allusion again in his Shakespeare (1844; i:cxciv). The original is STC 7589, reproduced in Herbert L. Collmann, Ballads and Broadsides . . . Now in the Library at Britwell Court (1912), no. 45.


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and casual loans of pet rarities.74 To begin with, Heber’s own vexed later career would scarcely have allowed Collier time to cultivate such a footing: from July 1825 to July 1831 the collector was abroad, and at his return he confronted a sexual scandal that le him ostracized by many of his old friends (see Hunt 1993). Even Dyce, to whom Heber was unfailingly generous, primly told Collier that ‘into society he can never again be admitted—I mean, even if he were guiltless, which his returning leads one to suppose: there will always be ‘‘a something’’ about him, which people can’t easily forget’.75 Could Collier have been profitably acquainted with Heber before July 1825, ‘near the commencement of my bibliographical studies’? Although he sketched Heber’s face at the Gordon sale (1816), Collier by 1831 had been unable to penetrate his collections (Beware the Cat was ‘of course unavailable’; HEDP), and Heber’s name does not appear among those thanked for help. In the preface to Heber IV, J. T. Payne makes an elaborate point about Heber’s unique Taming of a Shrew having ‘disappeared’ a er a citation by Alexander Pope, ‘until Mr. Collier procured the use of it for his ‘‘History of English Dramatic Poetry’’ ’. Payne does not say that Heber provided that use, however, and the relevant passage in HEDP suggests only that Collier glanced at it prior to the Inglis sale in 1826.76 Negative evidence like this accumulates in HEDP: if Collier really knew Heber’s library well, why did he not copy this title more accurately, especially when such a point was to be made of it? Why did he not realize that Peter Beverley’s Ariodanto and Jenevra belonged to Heber, and not to John Delafield Phelps (i:248)? Why was he unaware of Heber’s Dido, by Marlowe and Nashe (iii:226)? No correspondence between Collier and Heber appears to survive, nor any copies of Collier’s books presented to Heber; and there are no records of any meeting between them in the diary or correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, a fellow member, with Amyot and Heber, of the Athenaeum Club. A er

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74. Dibdin, a close enough friend of Heber, records very specifically that neither he ‘nor anyone else’ had ever been admitted to Heber’s private chambers in his lifetime, ‘so choked, so suffocated with books’ (Reminiscences, pp. 434–47). Belief in Collier’s claims has led one recent commentator to contend, absurdly, that Collier ‘carried the keys of Heber’s house and library in his pocket’ (Cummings 1989, p. 147). 75. Dyce to JPC, 21 August 1831, Folger MS Y.d.341 (56). A month later, however, Dyce had resumed contact with Heber, and ‘nearly made up my mind that such an obliging gentleman could not be guilty of any thing atrocious’ (see Hunt 1993, p. 206); and in November Heber provided Dyce with ‘sundry small editions of portions of Skelton prior to 1568 . . . rare & costly, [which] may assist in completing your bibliographical notice’ (Heber to Dyce, 25 November 1832, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.3 [108]). 76. The title, ‘given . . . at length, because it was unknown to Malone, Steevens, and the rest of the modern commentators’ (iii:77), betrays the haste of the transcriber, because only part of the imprint actually follows the 1594 quarto. The orthography of the rest matches the 1607 quarto, as rendered by Steevens et al.


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July 1831 there is but one independent indication of a contact, in a letter from Dyce, in Aberdeen, to Collier, less than three weeks before Heber’s death. ‘The works [by Skelton] which you mention Heber lent you, are doubtless very curious’, Dyce wrote admiringly (or perhaps ironically),77 and Collier would have been rash to claim such intimacy, if untrue, to an inquisitive common friend. By 1865 and BARB, Heber was coupled with Miller as private collectors whose ‘liberality’ Collier acknowledged (i:x), but there are no references whatever to him in OMD, and in the manuscript memoirs he is mentioned only as a ‘bookcormorant’ whom John sometimes managed to outbid. On the positive side, Heber was conspicuously willing to lend books to ingrates, including Richard Porson, who returned one volume, formerly ‘quite spotless’, and now ‘perfectly beastly’, and Campbell, who ‘used to send back to me my precious little tomes, tumbled loose into a dirty bag, and when I took them out, I had to brush off the bits of straw that were sticking to them’.78 And the subsequent history of two rare English books does imply some interaction between collector and scholar before Heber’s death: Henry Constable’s Diana (1592), sold as ‘probably unique’ in Heber Part IV, lot 513 (= BritwellHuntington), apparently belonged to Collier in 1831 (Dyce, Greene, i:xxxvii); and the otherwise unknown pamphlet by William Rowley, A Search for Money (1609), was apparently Heber’s, from the Isaac Reed sale. Rowley’s Search did not however appear among Heber’s books sold at auction, and Collier, who reprinted it for the Percy Society in 1840, later explained that ‘Heber parted with it for a rarity he more valued’.79 Perhaps some kind of trade, presumably weighted in favour of Constable’s poem, took place between gentlemen; at any rate, two irreplaceable books changed hands. But whatever Collier’s relations with Heber (alive) may have been, his accumulation of material for reprints and abstracts must have come in part—or indeed in large part—from the auctioneers’ working atelier. Evans and Payne gained from Collier a star sale-catalogue, and Collier took back a wealth of old text as his hire.

The Bridgewater House Library: New Facts, New Particulars By the beginning of 1835 Collier’s acquaintance with Lord Francis LevesonGower (now styled Lord Francis Egerton) had blossomed into friendship. Eger-

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77. Dyce to JPC, 18 September 1833, Folger MS Y.d.341 (57). 78. Alexander Dyce, quoting Heber; see Schrader 1972, pp. 166 and 193. 79. BARB, ii:300–02. In 1840 Collier distinguished the copy ‘we have employed’ from that formerly in Reed’s collection, but twenty-five years later said that the two were the same. In January 1861 he sold the book to J. O. Halliwell, and it went with other Halliwell books to the British Museum the following year.


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ton, who before 1831 had provided John with limited access to the Bridgewater House library of his father, the Marquess of Stafford, had inherited the house and the books, pictures, and family archives in 1833,80 and at once assumed philanthropic trusteeships in Oxford, London, and Aberdeen: these in addition to his considerable responsibilities in Parliament and at Whitehall, and his own literary ambitions. The last had been flattered by Collier in 1824 (Faust) and in 1831 (‘Lord Francis Leveson-Gower is himself a poet . . . [with a high] rank in life and in letters’), and would be again in 1836;81 although in old age John remarked, bitterly, that Egerton ‘was a man of no originality of mind, or real independence of character’ (JPC Diary, 19 March 1879). What brought Egerton and Collier closer in 1835 was certainly not their poetical affinity, however, but rare books and a mass of old manuscripts, known to few. Egerton was no antiquary of his uncle’s field-working stamp, but he took a keen interest in his collections, and encouraged research based upon them, with a strong sense of cultural responsibility. The Bridgewater library in particular he sought to restore, following an earlier, and ill-advised, extrusion of sixteenthand seventeenth-century ‘duplicates’, so that Collier was commissioned to buy back whatever appeared on the market, and to help build ‘a separate library, especially devoted to the illustration of Shakespeare and our early Stage’ (BARB, i:viii). Needless to say, John found these duties ‘most agreeable’, and took special pride in recovering for ‘that gi ed, enlightened, and liberal nobleman . . . the finest copy of the Sonnets of Shakespeare (4to., 1609) that has ever been seen’;82 other such relics, mostly those marked by John Egerton, first Earl of Bridgewater (1579–1649), were systematically repossessed regardless of price, and John concluded (in 1865, even a er a crisis of loyalty in an unrelated affair) that ‘there never, perhaps, existed a more confiding or bountiful patron’. Now, in 1835, clearly in a position of trust and respect, and perhaps more caressed by Egerton than by Devonshire, John made free with the Egerton books, and began what

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80. By the will of his grand-uncle, the third and last Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803), these reverted to Francis, instead of his elder brother, George (d. 1861). There was more than enough money to go around, Francis having in 1829 inherited £90,000 per annum from his childless uncle, Francis Henry, eighth and last Earl of Bridgewater (1756–1829, the family historian and the donor of his own ‘Egerton Manuscripts’ to the British Museum); while George, the principal heir of their father, Stafford (known as ‘the Leviathan of Wealth’), succeeded to his father’s titles as Baron Gower (1826), Earl Gower, third Marquess of Stafford, and second Duke of Sutherland (1833). Second son Francis had to wait until 1846 for a title (first Earl of Ellesmere). For a popular account of the family, see Falk 1942. 81. Collier wrote notices in the Observer of Egerton’s Hernani and Catherine of Cleves (1831) and a review in the Carlton Chronicle of Egerton’s translation of Michael Beer’s Paria (1836). 82. BARB, i:vii–viii. This is the Chalmers-Ellesmere-Huntington copy; Collier paid £105 for it in Part II of the Chalmers sale (1842).


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would be a formidably descriptive account of the early English rarities, the tall quarto Bridgewater Catalogue of 1837. But the first returns of his intimacy with a new library resource came once more from its manuscripts, the Egerton family archives and retained papers of state. In particular those of Sir Thomas Egerton, first Baron Ellesmere (1540?–1617), Solicitor General, Master of the Rolls, and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth I, Lord High Chancellor to James I, would attract the dramatic historian. New Facts Regarding the Life of Shakespeare, a fi y-six-page booklet presented as ‘a Letter to Thomas Amyot, Esq., F.R.S. . . . from J. Payne Collier, F.S.A.’, confronted the world of scholarship with no fewer than twenty-one new, or newly interpreted, documents of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, relating to Shakespeare’s career, milieu, and contemporaries among actors, playwrights, and poets. Nine of these, among them virtually all of the most glamorous novelties, came, or were said to have come, from the Bridgewater House archives. The less striking ones might be expected there: a legal opinion of 1580 (p. 9), submitted by Chief Justices Sir Christopher Wray and Sir James Dyer, held ‘in favour of the claim of the City [of London] magistrates’ against theatrical performances in the Blackfriars precinct, and was passed on to Sir Thomas Egerton. Collier only summarized this document, as well as a similar opinion of Sir Henry Montagu in July 1608, docketed by Egerton, for the resolution appears to have been that ‘the Citie of London hath not any jurisdiction within the Blacke Fryars, but that it is a place exempted from it’ (pp. 20–21). These two papers shed some light—but not much—on the activity of James Burbage’s pre-Shakespearian players in 1580, and the resumption of use of the great indoor theatre in Blackfriars by the King’s Men of Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in August 1608. The genuineness of the first has been questioned, but both remain credible. Four further Blackfriars-related documents from the Bridgewater library, however, do not. A certificate dated November 1589, with a list of sixteen early sharers in James Burbage’s company, contains Shakespeare’s name—the earliest physical record of his theatrical activity, by a full seven years—and ‘seems to me to give a sufficient contradiction to the idle story of Shakespeare having commenced his career by holding horses at the playhouse door’ (pp. 10–11). A ‘minute and curious account’ of 1608, ‘showing the precise interest of all the principal persons connected with the Company’, including Shakespeare himself, reveals Shakespeare to be worth more than £1,400, by virtue of his share of the whole, and ‘the Wardrobe and properties’ which were ‘exclusively his’ (pp. 21–25). A warrant of James I, dated 4 January 1609/10, appoints Shakespeare and three others (Robert Daborne, Nathaniel Field, and Edward Kirkham) ‘to provide and bring upp a convenient nomber of Children who shall be called the children of her Maiesties Revells . . . and them


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to instruct and exercise in the quality of playing Tragedies Comedies &c. . . . within the Blacke fryers in our Citie of London or els where within our realme of England’ (pp. 41 ff.). And finally, an amazing epistle (marked ‘Copia vera’, so that the handwriting is not represented as that of the signatory, one ‘H. S.’) pleads with Egerton ‘to be good to the poore players of the Black Fryers’ in their struggle with the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City, describing ‘two of the chiefe of the companie’ as Richard Burbage (‘our English Roscius, one who fitteth the action to the word and the word to the action most admirably’), and William Shakespeare (‘my especiall friende, till of late an actor . . . and writer of some of our best English playes, which as your Lordship knoweth were most singularly liked of Quene Elizabeth’). Burbage and Shakespeare ‘are both of one countie, and indeede almost of one towne’, and ‘bothe are right famous in their qualityes . . . both maried and of good reputation’. Collier thought it obvious that Egerton’s correspondent H. S. was Shakespeare’s patron the Earl of Southampton, and called attention to his evident familiarity with Hamlet, iii.2 (‘Suit the action to the word’, etc.), ‘which contains in one short sentence the whole art and mystery of dramatic personation’ (pp. 31–34). The last discovery seemed indeed almost too good to be true, as a contemporary review in the Athenaeum remarked—without going further—and these four documents, professedly found among the Egerton muniments, were the first of all Collier’s impositions to attract widespread suspicion. There was more Bridgewater House material detailed in New Facts, however: the autograph manuscript of Ben Jonson’s Expostulation with Inigo Jones (pp. 49–50),83 and a letter of Samuel Daniel to Egerton on his own Civil Wars (pp. 52–53);84 both of these are perfectly genuine, but a second letter from Daniel to Egerton (pp. 48– 49), mentioning ‘M. Draiton, my good friend’ and ‘one who is the authour of playes now daylie presented on the public stages of London’ (i.e., Shakespeare), is not. Eleven years passed, a er the publication of New Facts, before independent scholars—Joseph Hunter and J. O. Halliwell, and later N. E. S. A. Hamilton and Frederic Madden—finally began to examine the Bridgewater documents published or cited by Collier, and their assessment was almost unanimous. Today the four key Blackfriars papers and the ‘Shakespearian’ Daniel letter are universally regarded as fakes—and not very skilful ones. Once more we may ask—though the question may seem increasingly rhetorical—whether John could have been taken in by a mischievous interloper,

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83. The poem had been published by Peter Whalley, from a transcript, in 1756, and Collier cited the autograph manuscript principally to score off Gifford’s edition of Jonson; Collier’s contentions here seem quite correct. 84. This had been published by Sir Francis Egerton in 1798 (The Life of Thomas Egerton, Lord Chancellor of England, p. 57), but has nonetheless attracted suspicion (see QD A22.15).


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a forger with access to Bridgewater House or the family seat at Ashridge Park, whose sport was to intercalate the Egerton archives with spuria, le there for a future victim to happen upon. Collier’s much later account of finding the manuscripts is unfalteringly circumstantial: The moment I discovered them and had hastily read them over, I carried them to the Earl of Ellesmere (then Lord Francis Leveson Gower) and read them to him. At his Lordship’s instance I copied them, and le both originals and copies with his Lordship. Going again to Bridgewater House (I think it must have been on the very next day, for I was all eagerness to pursue my search) I overtook his Lordship about to enter the door, having just alighted from his horse. He told me that he had seen Mr. Murray, the publisher, who offered to give me £50 or £100 (I believe the smaller to have been the sum) if I would put the documents into shape and write an introduction to them. I declined the proposal at once, saying that I could not consent to make money out of his Lordship’s property. Lord Ellesmere appeared a little surprised at my hyper-squeamishness, and replied, with his habitual generosity, that the documents were as much mine as his, for though I had found them in his house, but for me, they might never have been discovered till doomsday.85 Collier cannot have been conscious, we suppose, of the irony inherent in the last declaration. Ellesmere was by now (1860) dead, as were Murray, the former Bridgewater librarian H. J. Todd (‘with whom I once conversed about the papers’, having found in one relevant manuscript ‘part of the direction of a letter [to him] . . . between the leaves to keep the place’), and the learned bookseller Thomas Rodd: ‘From Bridgewater House I took all the papers, originals and transcripts, to Rodd’s . . . where we examined them carefully’. He exhibited the H. S. letter (he said) at a meeting of the Council of the Shakespeare Society in 1843 or 1844, and returned all the originals to Egerton ‘a er 1845’ (Reply to Hamilton, p. 43). With Rodd in 1835, John agreed to commission a small edition of New Facts ‘at my own expense’, of which ‘only a few [copies] were passed over Rodd’s counter to his customers’ 86—Murray’s alleged offer of £50 having been spurned. The finished product was available early in June, and page-for-page it constitutes the most densely corrupt publication of Collier’s entire career: of twentyone manuscripts cited or quoted, only nine now appear to be extant and hon-

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85. Reply to Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton’s ‘Inquiry’ into the Imputed Shakespeare Forgeries (1860), p. 35; for Egerton’s own 1842 account of Collier’s ‘discovery’, see below, pages 434–35. 86. Reply to Hamilton, p. 36. This claim is not strictly true; on the limitation and sale of the book, see A22.


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est. Four of the latter came from Bridgewater House, one from the Cottonian MSS—discovered long since by Samuel Ayscough 87—one from Devonshire’s Inigo Jones sketchbook, one from the Chapter House, Westminster,88 and two from Collier’s own shelves, obtained since HEDP.89 The twelve suspects include the five physical forgeries at Bridgewater House and portions of two fabricated and forged ballads that appear for the first time (pp. 18–20 and 34–35), from a volume ‘collected, as I apprehend, in the time of the Protectorate’. The five remaining novelties, for which no source or location is given in New Facts, have never been seen since their report in 1835, and posterity has judged them to be fabrications: a Privy Council order of 23 December 1579 concerning Leicester’s Men at the Blackfriars Theatre; a 1605 memorandum naming William Kempe and Robert Armin as players there; a verse-epitaph on Richard Burbage by Thomas Middleton ‘which I found in a MS. miscellany of poetry belonging to the late Mr. Heber’; and two manuscripts ‘in my possession’. These last are ‘an original survey of some part of the [Whitefriars] precinct’, with a paragraph regarding the ruinous condition of the Theatre, and ‘a MS. in the hand-writing of the Poet [Samuel Daniel] of the Fi h Book of his Civil Wars’, from which is quoted a stanza ‘le out’ of the 1609 edition—but indeed printed, with no significant variation from Collier’s text, in the 1602 folio. Although two ballad forgeries and five non-Shakespearian fabrications pad out the diversity of mischief in New Facts, it was the five forged Bridgewater documents that gave the booklet its modest éclat. Henry Crabb Robinson accepted a copy from John on 28 June, describing its contents as ‘documents about Shakespeare from Lord Francis Egerton’s muniments’, and the reviewers of course concentrated upon the immediately Shakespearian data. John Mitford praised New Facts for the Gentleman’s Magazine in September, questioning nothing; the Mirror of Literature (4 July) found it ‘throughout a delightful piece of epistolary writing’, the novelties ‘of a most authentic kind, and of considerable importance’; and the Athenaeum a ‘labour of love, for which [Collier] is deserving the best thanks of the public’, with results ‘fortunate almost beyond

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87. It had been published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in May 1792 (vol. 62, p. 412). Collier wrote that the document ‘did not come to my hands until some time aer’ the writing of HEDP, and while he added to Ayscough’s account the Museum pressmark, he did not credit the discoverer (New Facts, pp. 7–8). His unacknowledged use of GM articles includes also the BurbageHamlet episode in Ratsey’s Ghost (1605), detailed here at pp. 30–31 and earlier in HEDP, i:333, which he had clearly lied from GM vol. 92 (September 1822), pp. 204–06, a notice by Joseph Haslewood (‘Eu. Hood’) of the unique copy at Althorp. 88. Shakespeare’s contract with Hercules Underhill, now in the PRO and reproduced in Schoenbaum 1981, plate 23, without citing Collier. 89. See QD A22.4 and A22.9.


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hope, and certainly beyond all reasonable expectation’.90 To this chorus of approval John responded, in six months, with a sequel of similar diffidence and design, New Particulars Regarding the Works of Shakespeare, in a Letter to the Rev. A. Dyce (‘in the press’ by 30 December 1835, issued in January 1836). New Particulars multiplies the biographical and historical revelations of New Facts, and again draws on Bridgewater documents, but its substance is more literary than before, and its sources, or alleged sources, more varied. The major novelty this time was quite genuine, for Collier had come upon the theatregoing diary of the Elizabethan physician and astrologer Simon Forman, whose summaries of three plays as performed at the Globe Theatre in 1611 remain ‘the only eyewitness accounts preserved of Shakespeare on the professional stage in his own lifetime’.91 The manuscript of Forman’s little ‘Bocke of Plaies’ probably first attracted the attention of antiquaries in 1832, for it was then that William Henry Black, cataloguing the Ashmolean manuscripts at Bodley, ‘made a transcript of this curious article . . . for my friend J. P. Collier, which he designed to print’, and then that Joseph Hunter asserted that he learned of it from ‘my friend Dr. Bliss, to whom everything of this kind at Oxford is perfectly familiar’.92 But Collier, to whom certainly belongs the priority in printing and discussing Forman’s notes, may have been painting the lily in his version of their rediscovery: ‘six or seven years ago’, he wrote (p. 6), ‘I heard of the existence, in the Bodleian Library, of a Manuscript containing notes on the performance of some of Shakespeare’s plays, . . . [which] would have been a great prize to me’, but ‘the fact is, that I was accidentally put upon a wrong scent’, and found nothing. For the eventual find he did credit ‘a gentleman of my acquaintance, of peculiar acquirements’, namely, W. H. Black, who ‘instantly forwarded a copy . . . to me’, yet he could not resist registering his own vaguely anticipatory claims. So much for Black’s generosity. Collier’s brief analysis of the Forman reports was in fact both ingenious and persuasive. He readily appreciated that Forman’s ‘Richard 2’ was not Shake-

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90. 13 June 1835, pp. 443–45. At one point the reviewer all but ominously opened the matter of the H. S. letter as ‘a copy . . . is it a contemporary, or a modern copy?’—something which with ‘other questions, we should feel bound to ask, if we were examining the question as one of evidence; but Mr. Collier’s name is our trust and security’. 91. Schoenbaum 1981, p. 3. Cymbeline is not specifically linked with the Globe, and the performance is dated (in error?) ‘1610’, but it seems likely that all—plus a non-Shakespearian Richard II —were Globe productions of the spring of 1611. Forman’s summaries also raise ‘many problems’, and their evidence has oen been undeservedly impugned, as Forman’s life and character have undergone hostile scrutiny; but few now seriously question their authenticity (see QD A24.1). 92. Schoenbaum 1981, p. 19, quoting Black’s marginalia in the Ashmolean Catalogue; Joseph Hunter, New Illustrations of Shakespeare (1845), i:413. Collier privately named Black as his source in 1846 (letter to J. O. Halliwell, 12 March, LOA 24/24).


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speare’s play, and he reconstructed the lost rival version in a way modern Shakespearians cannot much improve. Fleshing out his portrait of Forman, he found a relevant letter at Bridgewater House (subsequently questioned, but quite genuine), and quoted eight lines of silly doggerel from ‘a MS. in the possession of the late Mr. Heber’ (p. 8), which have never resurfaced, and may be considered highly suspect. A manuscript of ‘the whole proceedings by and against the Earls of Essex and Southampton’ (pp. 12–13), belonging to ‘Mr. Rodd, of Newport Street’—the publisher, once again—cannot be imaginary; and two slight poems by Thomas Dekker ‘in my possession’ (pp. 46–47), though challenged in our century by a French scholar who thought them ‘perdues’, have survived and seem both authentic and autograph. Nothing is wrong with the Bridgewater manuscript of Middleton’s play A Game at Chess (p. 49); and a letter from the Earl of Pembroke to Viscount Mandeville (pp. 49–50, now BL Egerton MS 2623, fol. 23), about the controversial production, is likewise physically beyond suspicion, although Collier’s account of its whereabouts raised grave doubts in the witch-hunting 1860s: ‘preserved in the State Paper Office’ it was not, at least then, although ‘discovered there only recently’ may have a grain of truth in it. One of the most provocative among the attributional novelties of New Particulars has experienced its own modern revival, in which the scholarship of Collier’s era has been ignored, to the embarrassment of the revivalists. Among the Bridgewater manuscripts (and now at the Huntington Library) is a masque by John Marston, written for production before Lord and Lady Huntingdon and the Dowager Countess of Derby, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, probably in the summer of 1607. H. J. Todd had published extracts in his edition of Milton (1801) and noticed, but not transcribed, ‘a loose sheet . . . on which are written fourteen stanzas of six and four verses, each stanza being appropriated to a different Lady, and exhibiting a complimentary address to Lady Derby’.93 Nor did Todd record an apparent signature with initials at the bottom of the leaf, which Collier and many others would find highly suggestive. ‘It is subscribed W. Sh. as I read it’, Collier declared (pp. 61–62), with a great show of circumspection, ‘but there is a slight indentation of the last stroke of the letter h, which gives it something of the appearance of a k’. This irregularity, however, ‘I take . . . to have been produced by a trifling want of firmness in the hand that held the pen’, and ‘the main body of the production seems to me to bear a resemblance to the writing of Shakespeare, as we have it in the only extant specimens, although the signature [sic] is different’.94 ‘Supposing the signature to be W. Sk.’, he speculated, ‘there is no known author of the time to whom such

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93. Milton, ed. Todd (1801), v:154. The notice by J. B. Nichols in Progresses of James I (1828), ii:145–52, is simply a reprint. 94. Sir Thomas More had not yet been mooted as partly in Shakespeare’s autograph.


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an abbreviation can apply’, and only one contemporary poet other than Shakespeare whose initials were W. S., namely, Wentworth Smith. ‘The versification is certainly that of a practised writer, and it possesses as much merit as can well belong to a piece of the kind’—a sort of parlour-game of poetical fortunes bestowed on each lady—so that Shakespeare’s authorship cannot be dismissed out of hand: ‘I see no reason for disbelieving it to be his’, he concluded, though admitting to ‘some hesitation in assigning [it] to Shakespeare’, for indeed ‘we really know so little about him that it is almost impossible to arrive at what even approaches certainty upon any point’. Repeated and explicit cautions (Shakespeare ‘appears from early life to have devoted himself to the theatre only’ and is unknown to have written such strictly occasional verse), along with the disarmingly inconclusive report of ‘W. Sh.’ versus ‘W. Sk.’, might alert us to a confidence-trick familiar from Punch and Judy and HEDP—the setting-up of one’s own fictitious evidence, to (all but) knock it down with sceptical severity, leaving it for the reader to decide. The poem, which Collier printed for the first time, is indeed ‘certainly worth preserving . . . whether [it] be or be not Shakespeare’s’, and is clearly authentic, but the presence of a signature overlooked by Todd thirty years earlier may seem suspect, to say the least. In this instance, however, Collier was a faithful, if wishful, reporter: he could hardly have realized that ‘W. Sk.’ was no slip of the pen, and that a ‘known author of the time’ very neatly fills out the initials. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who supplied Collier with a useful reference to Thorpe’s Custumale Roffense (p. 13n.), received a copy of New Particulars ‘with the Author’s best thanks’, and beside Collier’s words (‘Supposing the signature to be W. Sk. there is no known author’, p. 62) jotted in pencil ‘Sr Wm Skipwith’; and thereby the flyer on Shakespeare effectively perished—or should have, long since. Skipwith, a Leicestershire worthy, a friend and near-neighbour of the Derbys, was well known as a specialist in this kind of verse-making (‘fit and acute epigrams, posies, mottoes and devices [and] impresses’, itemized Thomas Fuller in 1622), and modern scholarship has come to regard the Derby verses as almost certainly his.95 Hunter pointed this out to Sir Frederic Madden before mid-June 1837, when Collier thought it well to back down (‘upon this matter, I dare say that Mr Hunter is quite right, as he usually is . . . I said in the ‘‘New Particulars’’ that the ‘‘W. Sh.’’ did not look unlike ‘‘W. Sk.’’—this puzzled me a little’);96 Madden published a note on the subject in his Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere (1838, p. 17), stating that ‘Mr. Hunter clearly proves . . . that the

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95. For discussion see James Knowles 1992. 96. JPC to Madden, 19 June 1837, BL Egerton MS 1841, fols. 172–173. Collier defended his ignorance of Skipwith (‘The lines may be [his], but at all events, they are the first by him (that I am aware of) ever printed’), but Hunter gave examples in New Illustrations, ii:336–37.


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author is not William Shakspere but Sir William Skipwith’, and Hunter made the same point on his own in New Illustrations of Shakespeare (1845), graciously calling attention to Collier’s ‘great fairness’ in describing the tell-tale letter-forms (i:75–76). Quite sensibly Collier never therea er adverted to the Ashby Castle posies— his optimistic attribution having been, a er all, an honest mistake—but one hundred and fi y years on they were news once again. Peter Levi, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, resurrected the claim in 1988, and headlines in the British and American daily press on and about 23 April vied for priority in proclaiming the ‘discovery’. The lackluster text was republished in a bijou edition, marred however by risible mistranscriptions throughout, such as the incomprehensible ‘But those that I gave lost mine own’ for the perfectly legible ‘But since that I have lost myne oune’. Levi’s publishers were not shy in trumpetting their coup (Lord Stockton of Macmillans described the booklet as ‘the literary event of the decade’), but neither they nor Levi seemed to be aware of Collier’s and Hunter’s definitive discussion.97 The 1988 episode may remind us that Collier’s yearning for novelties, even those anticipated in print by his predecessors, has its parallels in our own time. Had these been all the ‘particulars’ Collier presented to Dyce in 1836, his sixty-eight pages would shrink to about forty-seven.98 But there are two more forgeries and a fabrication to fatten the booklet, one of the former—the last of the Bridgewater intercalations—again ‘found’ among the Egerton papers (pp. 57–59). This is a record of expenses incurred by Sir Thomas in July and August 1602, ‘in entertaining Queen Elizabeth and her Court for three days at Harefield’, and includes a payment of £10 ‘to Burbidge’s players for Othello’; twice signed ‘Arth. Maynwaringe’ and docketed ‘Maynwaringes account’, it survives among

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97. Levi’s preface stated that ‘at the last moment’ he had learned that Collier had ‘attributed [our] manuscript to Shakespeare’, but chose only to cloak his oversight by defending, quite gratuitously, its unquestioned authenticity: ‘these few poems [i.e., all those relating to the Marston masque] were beyond [Collier’s] capacity, and too subtle for him’, and Collier neither ‘wrote nor interfered with the poems’—as if anyone had raised that possibility. In correspondence with Arthur Freeman, Levi later asserted that he had known about Collier’s priority ‘for a year or two’ and had credited Collier ‘both verbally & in print’. But no such specific acknowledgement appears in the 1988 edition, and given the plethora of misreadings in Levi’s text—all of them more or less correct in Collier’s version—it is hard to believe that Levi consulted New Particulars at all. See Arthur Freeman 1988 for an account of the episode. 98. We can leave as ‘problematic’ the report on pp. 66–67 of eighteen lines from a commonplace book in the University of Hamburg Library, ‘subscribed W. S. and . . . dated 1606’, communicated by ‘the late English Professor at the University of Heidelberg’. The verses also appear, without ‘W. S.’, in John Dowland’s First Book of Songs or Airs (1597) and in England’s Helicon (1600), and were later edited by Collier in Lyrical Poems Selected from Musical Publications (1844), without mention of any Hamburg manuscript.


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records of household outlay compiled by Egerton’s agents over a few midsummer weeks. Although Queen Elizabeth did indeed visit Harefield for three days, and was lavishly entertained there, as the Egerton accounts and other records confirm,99 the leaf with the payment to Burbage (and to ‘Mr. Lyllyes man which brought the Lottery-boxe to Harefield’, and ‘for Lotterye gui es’) is transparently bogus. Its ‘indisputable’ record of Othello’s being acted at Harefield in 1602 enabled Collier to dismiss Malone’s conjecture of its date (1604) and to place it at least two years earlier than all other evidence suggests; the less circumstantial invention of a ‘Lottery-boxe’ and ‘lotterye gui es’ he revived with circular effect in his account of the Ashby posy-production: ‘it seems to have been a species of lottery, and possibly the very one the box for which, we have seen, was brought to Harefield by ‘‘Mr. Lyllye’s man’’ . . . when the company of actors to which Shakespeare belonged played one of his own dramas. The connexion, therefore, between our great Poet and Harefield is obvious’ (p. 63). Incidentally, ‘Mr. Lyllyes man’ provided R. W. Bond with evidence (he thought) to attribute the genuine Harefield Entertainment of 1602 to the court poet and playwright John Lyly.100 One of the more enduring of Collier’s biographical fabrications—for it recurs in many of his own works, and in many others of the nineteenth century— first appears at pp. 27–34 of New Particulars, a list in verse of twenty roles played by Richard Burbage during his stellar career. The anonymous and now famous ‘Elegy on Burbage’, first published by Joseph Haslewood in 1825 and curiously misquoted by Collier in HEDP (i:430), had listed four of the great actor’s chief parts, as characters who ‘have now forever died’ with their creator on the stage: young Hamlet, ould Hieronymoe Kind Lear, the greued Moore, and more beside. Collier, to whom Haslewood had voluntarily communicated two manuscript versions of the ‘Elegy’,101 now claimed to have ‘met with a third copy . . . in which

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99. For the event, see Chambers, ES, iv:67–68; and Jean Wilson 1986. The two lines with which Collier claimed the ‘Othello’ leaf was headed (‘31o. July et 1o. et 2o. Augusti 1602’, etc.) actually head a discrete account of foodstuffs purchased for the visit; see Collier’s Egerton Papers (1840), p. 340. 100. Chambers, ES, iv:68. The entertainment is in fact the work of Sir John Davies; see Robert Krueger’s edition of the Poems (Oxford, 1975), pp. 207–16 and 409–11. 101. Joel H. Kaplan (1986) has shown that Haslewood provided Collier with a collation of two MS texts (which Collier formally acknowledged in HEDP), neither of them reading ‘creuel Moore’ or ‘King Lear’, as HEDP renders the lines (see the references in QD A24.4). The former misreading had allowed Collier to wonder if Burbage’s part might have been Aaron in Titus Andronicus and not Othello (New Facts, p. 24), although in HEDP he settled ‘probably’ on Othello, and now claimed in New Particulars (p. 27) that ‘some time aer the publication of my book, the late Mr. Heber [again!] showed me a MS. of the same Elegy in his possession, which decided the point,


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the list of characters is enlarged from four to no fewer than twenty’, including nine more Shakespearian leads, and seven in plays by Marlowe, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, Heywood, and Webster. He quoted twenty-one couplets, whose roughness (he remarked, deprecatingly) may owe something to transmission: ‘Bad as these verses must have been originally, they certainly have been made worse by time. The MS., from which I copied them, was written at the latter end of the reign of Charles I., and, besides omissions, errors had no doubt crept in from frequent transcriptions’ (p. 31). No manuscript version of the Burbage elegy containing these unlikely additions has ever turned up, and the consensus of modern scholarship regards them as Collier’s invention. In New Facts Collier had published two extracts from ‘a volume of MS. ballads . . . collected, as I apprehend, in the time of the Protectorate’, one titled ‘Tarlton’s Jigge of the Horse-loade of Fooles’, the other ‘The Tragedie of Othello the Moore’. From the latter he gave only the concluding two stanzas; he would have offered the whole, ‘as well as some others connected with Shakespeare’s productions . . . but it would lead me too far from my present purpose, and I shall reserve them’ (p. 35). Now, however, he took the space to print ‘Othello’ at large, and gave a list of the ballads in the volume, thirty in number, with brief remarks on their text (pp. 44–57). ‘I apprehend that most . . . were copied from printed originals, many of which are now lost, while others are yet preserved in public and private collections’, he observed, hoping ‘some day or other to be able to venture upon the expense of printing the volume entire’. ‘At present’, however, ‘I find so few who take an interest in such productions, or indeed in any productions that are at all antiquarian, that I cannot afford to incur the risk.’ And he deliberately held back the second of the ballads ‘intimately connected with Shakespeare’, with which he had already teased readers in New Facts: ‘The Enchanted Island, subscribed R. G., possibly Robert Greene, and on the same tale as Shakespeare’s Tempest’. This tantalizing volume, with fourteen of its items ‘not printed’ and most of the others ‘imperfectly printed’ or ‘with many additions’ or ‘in many respects different from any known copies’, was to provide many surprises for Collier’s audience, and for his trusting fellow editors. It was purchased by the British Museum at Collier’s posthumous sale, and it is one of the three or four truly large-scale forgeries associated with his name. Surprisingly, the ‘Protectorate Manuscript’—as we may call it, to avoid confusion with other ballad collections

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for there ‘‘the grieved Moor’’, and not ‘‘the cruel Moor’’, was spoken of ’. This was a particularly ungrateful snub of Haslewood, both of whose manuscripts had properly read ‘greued’; ‘creuel’ probably began as a mistake on Collier’s part, but was now elevated to a variant.


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once in Collier’s possession—has attracted minimal study, and an account of it may be desirable.

The Protectorate Manuscript In terms strictly of physical extent—and hence susceptibility to extended scrutiny—the two most ambitious forgeries to surface in Collier’s career are of popular ballads.102 The second and larger, to be discussed later, is the so-called Hall Commonplace Book, with its freight of eighty-three poems spanning 163 pages; the earlier, effectively the trial balloon, is Collier’s ‘Protectorate Manuscript’. Although announced in 1835 and partly calendared in 1836, it received no fuller description by Collier until 1858, in a footnote to the second edition of his multivolume Shakespeare,103 and not until 1884, when the British Museum acquired it, had anyone but its owner had the opportunity to consult it in extenso.104 Yet as an artifact it was painstakingly concocted, and clearly designed to impress any independent witness, at least one of moderate expertise. British Library Add. MS 32,380 was lot 214 in Collier’s sale, described laconically as ‘Ballads, &c. MS. Common-place Book filled with a Collection of Old Ballads, a Diary, Extracts, &c., vellum, Sæc. XVII ’, together with ‘Transcripts and descriptive particulars of the Ballads, in the handwriting of J. P. Collier’ (now Add. MS 32,381). The materializing of this long-sequestered treasure may have surprised some scholars with equally long memories, for except in his 1858 footnote Collier had never described its eccentric appearance. It is primarily, as he then noted, an untitled manuscript of the famous Eikon Basilike of Charles I (published before 13 February 1649), a small quarto measuring 184 × 140 mm, whose available blank pages have been filled up with thirty ostensibly sixteenthand seventeenth-century popular ballads.105 The prose text began a er three

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102. To avoid cumbersome qualifications we will treat the ballad-text of the Protectorate Manuscript as a forgery conceived and executed by Collier himself, although there is a remote chance that someone else (before 1835) perpetrated it as an elaborate hoax. He, she, or they would have required a remarkable knowledge of literary and theatrical history, as well as a particular intimacy with unedited broadside ballads in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, and been simultaneously undesiring of fame and dedicated—for no visible profit or motive—to gulling one man. Conspiracy theorists may start here. 103. ‘The MS. . . . is written in a small 4to. volume, which also includes a copy of the Ikon Basilike: the Ikon Basilike fills one side of each page, and various ballads . . . are written on the other side of the page’ (Shakespeare [1858], vi:8). 104. There is some ambiguity in the original announcement of the manuscript in New Facts, p. 17 (‘I have now before me’, etc.), so that by 1886 H. H. Furness assumed it to have been part of the Bridgewater House MSS adverted to on p. 6 of that work (New Variorum Othello, p. 398), as others may also have done. Clearly, it never was. 105. This is a very curious text in itself, though in no way suspect as a contemporary arti-


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blank leaves (or so we must assume, for the British Museum rebound Collier’s ‘vellum’ in institutional three-quarter calf over cloth boards), with Eikon Basilike occupying folios 4–130, written on the rectos only. The original scribe then skipped three leaves, and finished his task with a three-page meditation headed ‘Of Gods first purpose toward his reasonable creatures’, again written only on the rectos of folios 134–36,106 and le the last seventeen leaves of his book blank (137–53). No indications of provenance before 1835 remain here, or anywhere else in the volume. The wealth of blank paper tempted more than one subsequent owner, however, and a late seventeenth-century scribbler turned over the book and began from the back with an idiosyncratic meditation on James 1:14.107 This was aborted in mid-sentence a er three consecutive pages (i.e., fols. 153v, 153r, and 152v), leaving the rest of the available space for the ballad-copyist to employ. This third text sorts oddly with its pious fellows, and the copying hand seems equally odd: while it clearly must post-date the mid-century italic of the Eikon scribe, and the even later text hand of the incomplete meditation, it follows the same generic mock-Tudor secretary script we have seen in the Blackfriars petition and in other documents purporting to date from the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. By Collier’s numbering in New Particulars (pp. 45–48), ballads 1–25 occupy the versos from folio 151 all the way back to the beginning of the book, whereupon the volume was turned over again, and on the rectos of folios 1–3 (le as blanks by the scribe of the Eikon) appear nos. 26–27. Finally, the balladscribe went forward to the blank rectos of folios 137–52 and filled these with items 28–30. All but three blank rectos (fols. 131–33, between the Eikon and ‘Of God’s first purpose’) were now put to use, and the Protectorate Manuscript was complete, in 170 pages.

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fact. Eikon Basilike was first published within two weeks of the death of King Charles, so that no pre-publication manuscript tradition seems possible, and with at least thirty-five editions widely available by the end of 1649, there was hardly any compelling need to hand-copy it; nor is this manuscript handsome or elaborate enough to suggest a labour of Royalist piety. Edward Maunde Thompson, who first described Add. MS 32,380 in 1885, collated the text and thought it ‘a copy from [the first] edition, probably made by some Royalist admirer who did not anticipate the rapid succession of editions of the king’s book, and who therefore went to the trouble of transcribing it in default of securing the printed text’—which is about as far as one can go. The original MS, autograph or not, is famously lost, giving rise to the controversy over its authorship; and only one other (partial) MS copy is listed by Falconer Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike (Oxford, 1950), p. 114n. Hence it is somewhat odd that Collier did not consider it any more useful than as a host for his forgeries, but he may not have appreciated how unusual it was. By 1884 the auctioneers of his library had no inkling of the prose text (‘MS. Common-place book’), and Maunde Thompson in 1885 appears to have regarded his identification of the Eikon as a discovery. 106. The Museum’s pencilled foliation, which we follow, omits one leaf torn out aer fol. 32 (probably a deliberate mutilation by Collier). 107. The hand is new, and we would guess ca. 1680–1700.


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One technical fillip, however, remained, and suggests that the finished product was intended at first for display: two leaves were deliberately mutilated, sacrificing text of the forgeries as well as of the Eikon, and one more was removed altogether. Thus the manuscript was made to exhibit realistic wear and tear, and the fabrications themselves to seem less neatly conceived than they might: the missing folio 33 of the Eikon need never have contained any ballad-text on its verso, but Collier was enabled to remark that his no. 19, ‘A New Ballad of a Pennyworth of Wit, and the Answer’, ‘is imperfect’. Leaf 48, with the text of ‘The Cruel Uncle’ on its verso, is torn diagonally down the page—twenty lines of the text itself have clearly been interrupted—and Collier reproduced, literatim, only the fragmentary remainder in his own so-called transcript of the ballads. But a similar trick at folio 130, where a quarter-page mutilation affects nine lines of no. 5, ‘The Girl Worth Gold, by Chettle’, may have seemed an unbearable loss to the forger-poet, for he undid the effect in his transcript, preserving its text in full and indicating with outward brackets what was now missing. Had he ever published the ballad, he might then have explained the damage to the original as subsequent to his transcript, or more likely have offered the nine lines as conjecturally reconstructed; but in this instance the mutilation seems at cross-purposes with its follow-up.108 Collier described his manuscript in New Particulars as an assembly ‘collected, as I conjecture, about the date of the Protectorate, when old broadsides were becoming scarce, and new ones far from abundant, as the Puritans set their faces against anything like popular amusements’;109 he supposed that ‘most of those in the volume were copied from printed originals, many of which are now lost’ (p. 44). Indeed, fourteen of the thirty are based directly upon printed sources well known to John, and another has a manuscript source.110 Five are by Thomas Deloney, the dean of Elizabethan balladeers, and are to be found in Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (1619, 1626, etc.) and Strange Histories (1607), both available in the Bridgewater House library, as well as in modern compilations by Ambrose Philips (1723–25), Thomas Percy (1765), Thomas Evans (1777), and others. ‘The Fight of Flodden’ (Collier’s no. 2) offers ‘additions’ to the version in Jack of Newbury, where ‘The Weaver’s Song’ is said to be ‘printed imperfectly’

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108. It is possible that the post-forgery mutilations reflect blunders in the forged text, or that the damage to ‘The Cruel Uncle’ was deliberate, as the transcript suggests, and that to ‘The Girl Worth Gold’ was an aerthought. But of course the complete manuscript was never published, and had it been, these contradictions might easily have been reconciled. 109. Collier’s point about Commonwealth suppression is valid; see Rollins 1923, pp. 21 ff. 110. ‘The Green Willow’, by ‘J. H.’, is a somewhat modernized version of a song by John Heywood; Collier’s source was a manuscript owned by B. H. Bright, which he used during the writing of HEDP (now BL Add. MS 15,233). His transcript in original spelling is BL Add. MS 38,813, fols. 5–6; cf. B192.


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(no. 7, with four stanzas added by Collier); from Strange Histories we have ‘King Henry’s Children drowned at Sea’ (no. 24), ‘The Courage of Kentishmen’ (no. 30), and the ubiquitous ‘Fair Rosamund’s Overthrow’ (no. 10, ‘materially differing in every stanza from the printed copy’). Collier was to reprint the last three in 1841, from the unique Bridgewater quarto (see A40), and his copy of Evans’s Old Ballads (second edition, 4 vols., 1784), which gives very defective texts of these and six other ballads out of Strange Histories, is collated against the original and corrected by Collier in pencil throughout.111 Three more ballads are variants of those in Percy’s Reliques—‘Jeptha and his Daughter’ (no. 3, ‘not imperfect’), ‘Mary Ambree’ (no. 15, ‘a different version, with many additions’), and ‘The King and the Beggermaid’ (no. 28, ‘with important differences’)—and a fourth, ‘The Cruel Uncle’ (no. 17), is a version ‘with many variations’ of the traditional ‘Children in the Wood’. Another four of the ballads in the Protectorate Manuscript derive from printed broadsides in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, all unique specimens, although a reprint of one (also unique) was in Heber’s collection. ‘How to wive well, by Lewis Evans’ (no. 9) follows Lemon’s no. 45 (Catalogue of a Collection of Printed Broadsides in the Possession of the Society of Antiquaries, 1886), and ‘A Maid that would marry a Serving-man, by Thomas Elmley [sic, for Emley]’, Lemon no. 19; Collier was to reprint both these texts from their broadside originals in his first Percy Society collection, Old Ballads, in 1841 (pp. 37–41 and 21–25). Number 26, a ‘Dialogue between Queen Elizabeth and England, by W. Birche’, described as ‘only the conclusion of a ballad printed soon a er Elizabeth came to the throne’, is in fact the last two stanzas of Lemon no. 47, ‘A Songe betwene the Quenes Maiestie and Englande’, by William Birche (1564), copied almost word for word. And no. 6, ‘The Lark and her Family, by A. Bower, twice printed before 1590’, is probably a copy from the unique broadside headed ‘A worthy Mirrour, wherin ye may marke, | An excellent Discourse of a breeding Larke’ (Lemon no. 59, now dated 1577?), signed in type ‘Finis. Arthur Bour.’ Collier’s mistaken conversion of ‘Bour.’ to ‘Bower’ indicates that in 1836 he did not yet appreciate what Ritson had pointed out in 1802 (Bibliotheca Poetica, p. 137), that ‘Arthur Bour.’ is simply a short form of Arthur Bourcher or Bourchier, the contributor of a poem to The Paradise of Dainty Devices, and of commendatory verse to Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586). Somewhat puzzlingly, when John came to reprint this poem too in Old Ballads he employed the text of the second edition of 1589, from Heber’s unique exemplar, now in William Miller’s close keeping, instead of the readily available first printing.112 But for the Pro-

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111. Evans, Old Ballads, i:34–39, 48–53, 62–67, 77–80, 257–69, and 277–84; Collier’s copy is FF. 112. His note there (p. 92) further misleads us, by implying that his source was another copy of 1589, and stating that Heber’s was an ‘earlier impression’; see QD A32.2.


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tectorate Manuscript he must also have looked over the latter, for ‘Arthur Bour.’ appears only there, not in Heber’s dated reprint.113 Finally, no. 21, ‘The Spanish Tragedy, by T. K., ( forsan Thomas Kyd)’, is listed as ‘printed, but in many respects different from any known copies’; this is the sole more or less genuine ballad relating to a contemporary play. Collier could have taken his text from either of the two extant Roxburghe broadsides (ca. 1620), had he gained access to the originals,114 or more effortlessly from Thomas Evans’s compilation of 1784 (iii:184–92). Nowhere but in Collier’s manuscript, however, are the tendentious initials ‘T. K.’ to be found; indeed even the play itself, in twelve quartos between 1592 and 1633, remained unascribed. That Thomas Kyd did write the tragedy we now know, from evidence internal and external; but no instance of a dramatist’s composing a catchpenny ballad on his own play is recorded, or has seemed worth conjecturing. Collier’s imagination clearly now was aroused by the notion of narrative ballads relating to individual plays, much as ballads relating to theatrical history had tempted his pen in HEDP: seven of the sixteen unpublished pieces in the Protectorate Manuscript are ‘on the same story’ or ‘[follow] very closely’ the plots of extant or lost plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Ben Jonson, and others. Genuine ballads like these are in fact very uncommon, even in late printings, and their relationship to extant or lost plays is not always obvious.115 Some may be sources of plays, direct or indirect, or traditional analogues—like Robin Hood episodes, or ‘The Children in the Wood’, or old tales like ‘Jill of Brentford’ or ‘Gernutus the Jew’;116 and some may have been intended independently to

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113. By the time he was preparing his own ‘modern transcript’ of the Protectorate Manuscript for publication, Collier was aware of Ritson’s identification of ‘Bour.’ with Bourchier, ‘which may be the fact’, and, making a virtue of necessity, treated the erroneous ‘Bower’ of his manuscript merely as contrary evidence: ‘[the spelling] ‘‘Arthur Bower’’ does not seem to support the conjecture’; BL Add. MS 32,381, fol. 19. 114. See Arthur Freeman 1967, pp. 135–36; STC 23012 now regards the two Roxburghe exemplars as identical. 115. Nor has the study of them, distinguished from other genres, been at all comprehensive: Rollins’s Analytical Index discusses only a few in terms of the plays they may or may not mirror, sometimes presenting guesswork as fact; e.g., the 1596 ‘Newe Ballad of Romeo and Juliett’ (no. 2321, lost) ‘was suggested by Shakespeare’s tragedy’, and the 1594 ‘Storye of Tamburlayne the Greate’ (no. 2529, also lost) is ‘summarized from Marlowe’s tragedy’. No special attention has been devoted by modern ballad historians to examples with ‘play-plots’, and historians of the drama and of theatrical conditions have for the most part considered each specimen outside of its generic context. The fullest account of ballads interacting with performance, C. R. Baskervill’s masterly The Elizabethan Jig (1929), does not cover the narrative broadsides at all. 116. Ballads of ‘The Children in the Wood’, for example, no doubt lie behind one plot of Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (ca. 1594–1601); the Thomas Merry murder-ballads of 1594 probably supplied the detail of his second, as they may also have done for a lost play by Day and Haughton, recorded by Henslowe in 1599. ‘Gillian of Bramford’ (Rollins no. 960) may relate to


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exploit newsworthy or sensational events.117 Others seem linked to plays only by coincidence or casual allusion.118 But the most interesting ones, in theatrical terms, are those that appear to summarize, in easy diction and tunefully memorable rhyme, the action of plays on the stage—perhaps as a cheap alternative to two hours’ attendance, or perhaps, if hawked outside the playhouse, as a crib for the slow-witted, or an enticement to the hesitant. They might simply attest to the popularity of a play, in season or between runs, but might also preserve Henslowe’s lost Friar Fox and Gillian of Branford, but the anecdotes are hoary; Robin Hood is a quagmire of rival literary and oral traditions. ‘A New Song, Shewing the Crueltie of Gernutus a Jew, Who Would Have a Pound of Flesh’ (ca. 1620; STC 11796.5) certainly relates to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and may have capitalized upon the latter’s popularity, but in all likelihood it represents an independent narrative tradition, as does ‘The Frolicksome Duke, or the Tinker’s Good Fortune’, a version of the induction to The Taming of the Shrew (Percy, i:238 ff.). The early ballads on Troilus and Cressida (Rollins no. 595 [1581] and 1124) may relate to a pre-Shakespearian version of the play, but they seem non-dramatic. 117. Many of the relevant sensational broadsides are now known only from entries in SR, but in the nature of news-mongering they probably preceded their playhouse equivalents: three or four ballads on Page of Plymouth certainly precede the lost play by Jonson and Dekker (1599), and those on Luke Hutton, ‘the black dog of Newgate’ (1595), anticipate another project for Henslowe by Day, Hathway and Smith (1602/03). The Miseries of Enforced Marriage by George Wilkins (1607) and The Yorkshire Tragedy by ‘W. S.’ (1608), as well as a lost play by Chapman (Sibley no. 182), all treat the violent story of Walter Calverley of Calverley, Yorkshire, and a lost ballad of 1605 may have suggested these plots; but on this occasion there is an extant prose tract, generally accepted as the source of at least the first two plays. Two decades later, a pamphlet, two ballads, and two lost plays vied to exploit a murder in Whitechapel, and surviving records of an intricate libel action allowed C. J. Sisson to reconstruct the rival attempts (‘Keep the Widow Waking’; Sisson 1936, pp. 80–124): here the balladeers and dramatists were neck-and-neck. But William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker (1636) clearly depended, for one of its two plots, upon the popular ballad of Young Bateman, entered in 1603 and re-entered in 1624, though its text is known only from a later impression (Bentley, v:1045). Other instances could probably be adduced, although interplay between ballad and dramatization may not always be demonstrable; see Bentley, and Marshburn 1971. 118. The most recent editor of John Day (Robin Jeffs [1963], p. xiv) argued that The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green, Day’s earliest surviving comedy, ‘does not closely follow the Blind Beggar ballads’ (i.e., Rollins nos. 210–11). Some titles of lost ballads evoke the titles or substance of plays: ‘The Devell of Downgate and His Sonne’ (Rollins no. 569) was entered by Edward White on 5 August 1596 alongside his ‘Newe Ballad of Romeo and Juliett’, and Sir Henry Herbert licensed a play of this title in October 1623. Katharine Lee Bates (1917, p. 140) suggested that ‘The Prowde Mayde of Plymouthe’ (entered 1595; Rollins no. 2215) ‘may possibly have suggested Bess Bridges’, the heroine of Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, and at least here we have a rival for Collier’s own fabricated ballad ‘The Girl Worth Gold’. A ballad titled ‘The Widdow of Watling street’ (Rollins nos. 2957–58: ent. 1596, 1624) might appear to relate to the Shakespeare-apocrypha play The Puritan Widow (1606), the title-page of which reads ‘The Puritane | or | The Widdow | of Watling-street’, but whose headlines are ‘The Puritan Widow’ or ‘The Puritaine Widdow’. The plot of the ballad has no place at all in the play, however: did the publisher of the latter simply tack on ‘of Watling-street’ to capitalize on a familiar, mildly salacious history?


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evidence of lost or variant text, cuts made in performance, or unindicated but traditional details of actors’ stage-business. These play-ballads—broadside narratives of what could be taken in at the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playhouse—are what appealed to the dramatic historian, and perhaps to the collector, in Collier. Original specimens, he would have learned early, are frustratingly elusive: no more than a handful survive, even by way of notice in contemporary records. ‘The Spanish Tragedy, Containing the Lamentable Murders of Horatio and Bellimperia’ (note the stress on sensational crime) is a worthy example, twenty-eight six-line stanzas ‘to the tune of Queene Dido’ (Simpson 1966, pp. 587–89), divided as usual into two parts. Presented as a monologue by Hieronymo (or his ghost, for by the penultimate stanza he has killed himself), it even provides one small gloss on the action of the play—at least as perceived by a contemporary 119—and Collier may have found it irresistible as a pattern. Similar to this is ‘The Complaint and Lamentation of Mistress Arden of Feversham’, also edited from the Roxburghe original by Thomas Evans for Old Ballads: the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Feversham (ca. 1592) had been revived and reprinted in 1633, and the ballad, once thought to be a source of the play, clearly is a post-theatrical invention, ‘entirely dependent on one of the [two] earlier editions of the play’.120 Its forty-eight four-line stanzas are in two ‘parts’, to the familiar melody of ‘Fortune my Foe’, a stately tune traditionally suited to grim narratives. Marlowe’s plays seem to have inspired three ballads, only one of which has survived, in a comparatively late text. On 16 May 1594, just one day before Nicholas Ling and Thomas Millington procured a license to print ‘the famouse tragedie of the Riche Jewe of Malta’, their rival John Danter obtained one for ‘a ballad entituled the murtherous life and terrible death of the riche jew of Malta’ (Rollins no. 1844). The timing can hardly have been coincidental, but neither the play as then printed nor the broadside survives. Neither does Danter’s submission of 6 November 1594, ‘the storye of Tamburlayne the great’ (Rollins no. 2529), nor ‘a ballad of the life and deathe of Doctor Ffaustus the great Cunngerer’, entered first on 28 February 1589 by Richard Jones (Rollins no. 1498). This last, however, is probably related to a Faust ballad entered in 1624 and 1675 (Rollins nos. 615, 1336), which has come down in several late seventeenthcentury printings, again to the tune of ‘Fortune, my Foe’.121 Shakespeare too had his balladic parasites, Danter once more registering both the play of Titus Andronicus and (for an additional 6d.) ‘the ballad thereof ’ on 6 February 1594 (Arber ii:644), while Edward White entered ‘A newe ballad of Romeo and 119. See Arthur Freeman 1967, p. 96n. 120. M. L. Wine, ed., Arden of Feversham (1973), p. xxxviii; ballad text at pp. 164–70. 121. See Goldstein 1961.

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Juliett’ on 6 August 1596. The Titus ballad was re-entered in 1624, 1656, and 1675, and survives in broadsheets of ca. 1625 and ca. 1628 (it must be distinguished from the independent late seventeenth-century ‘Lamentable Ballad’, also reprinted by Geoffrey Bullough at vi:71–76); like the Arden, Faustus, and Spanish Tragedy ballads, Titus Andronicus is presented as a monologue from the grave by the dead protagonist—inevitably, once again, ‘to the Tune of, Fortune my Foe’. Collier himself took an odd view of the lost ‘Romeo and Juliett’, suggesting that the entry ‘may possibly have been [for] the tragedy . . . though called only a ballad’;122 there seems no doubt whatever in this instance that the ‘ballad’ was a ballad indeed. These constitute, to the best of our knowledge, all the genuine evidence— four extant texts, three records of what probably were others—for the genre of narrative ballads based upon early plays, which Collier was so to exploit in the Protectorate Manuscript and in subsequent publications.123 It may seem much more limited than usually described, for every specimen relates to a play first staged in a single decade (ca. 1588–97), and records of what may be similar (lost) ballads on later plays are so sparse as to suggest no thriving tradition.124 And the much later versified summaries of Shakespeare’s plays by the actor and ‘City Poet’ Thomas Jordan, which Collier extracted in New Particulars while affecting to disparage them as ‘abundantly bad’ and ‘sad doggerel’, are essentially literary recapitulations, with no sign of having been circulated in broadside form.125 The near-tripling of the corpus of extant play-ballads may come as a surprise then, for Collier produced in his ‘Commonwealth’ compilation no fewer than seven

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122. Shakespeare (1842–44), vi:370–71. 123. Richard Levin, in a recent article (2000) on the ‘pairing’ of ballads with other publications in SR, has suggested three more candidates, all registered by John Danter in 1594–95: ‘Bellin Duns Confession’, ‘a knacke howe to knowe an honest man from a knave’, and ‘the madd merye pranckes of Long Megg of Westminster’. If these ballad-titles (all lost) indeed reflect contemporary plays, they might well suggest, as Levin proposed (p. 67), ‘some kind of arrangement between Danter and Henslowe or the players’—albeit not a long-standing one. A fourth justpossible title, conceivably relating to The Taming of a/the Shrew, is ‘the coolinge of curst Kate’, entered to Thomas Gosson and Joseph Hunt on 16 October 1594. 124. Apart from a few mentioned above as perhaps tangential (e.g., The Blind Beggar), we note only a flurry of lost ballads that may relate to Richard Brome’s The Northern Lass in 1629; Bentley (iii:83) felt that these ‘seem to indicate efforts to capitalize on the success of the play’. 125. New Particulars, pp. 36–44; Collier reprinted the entire volume in which these appeared, with a more flattering introduction, in 1866. Hyder Rollins (1923, p. 14) describes Jordan’s ballads in A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie (1664) as ‘mere summaries of the Merchant of Venice, Philaster, and other popular dramas [including The Winter’s Tale and Much Ado]’. The same may probably be said of Richard Johnson’s third-person ‘Lamentable Song of the Death of King Leir and his Three Daughters’, in his Golden Garland of Princely Pleasures (STC 14674, unique at BL). Collier mistook this for a reprint of Johnson’s ubiquitous Crown Garland (BARB, ii:172); cf. Percy, i:231 ff.; and Chambers, WS, i:469.


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new texts, two relating to Shakespeare, three to Heywood, one ‘probably’ to the lost play on Page of Plymouth, and one to the Tudor comedy of Tom Tyler and His Wife. ‘The Tragedie of Othello the Moore’, a third-person ballad in 204 lines (which bears an uncanny metrical and stylistic resemblance to Collier’s translation of Fridolin) is Collier’s no. 8 in the Protectorate Manuscript, ‘anonymous, but following Shakespeare’s tragedy very closely. Not printed’. It was ‘founded upon the play in consequence of its popularity, and not the play upon it’, Collier declared (truthfully enough), and in the manuscript ‘the word ‘‘Finis’’ was originally followed by the name of the author, which has been erased so as to leave no trace’ (New Particulars, pp. 48 and 57). Although he had once thought Thomas Jordan a plausible candidate, ‘on reconsideration . . . I cannot help thinking that it is much too good, and somewhat too old, for him’ (p. 57). Unlike any of the play-ballads hitherto known, ‘Othello the Moore’ concludes with observations on performance, specifically praising ‘Dicke Burbidge, that most famous man’, who ‘with this same part [i.e., of Othello] his course began, / And kept it manie a yeare’. Collier permitted himself to puzzle over ‘his course began’, and its implications about Burbage’s career, concluding—with his usual judiciousness— that this was ‘a mere guess, and not a happy one’. Item no. 12 is ‘The Enchanted [later ‘Inchanted’] Island, subscribed R. G., possibly Robert Greene, and on the same tale as Shakespeare’s Tempest’, another third-person narrative similar in length to ‘Othello’; this too would be deemed ‘posterior’ to the play, and the flyer on ‘R. G.’ would be abandoned by 1839. Less noteworthy plays inspired no less lengthy play-ballads: no. 5 is ‘The Girl worth Gold, by [Henry] Chettle; on the same story as Heywood’s play, The Fair Maid of the West’; no. 14 is ‘The London ’Prentice’s Tragedy, by Thomas Heywood, probably the foundation of some unknown play’; and no. 20 is ‘The Cripple of Cheapside, by T. Dekker’, of which ‘the story is similar to Heywood’s play, The Fair Maid of the Exchange’. In the last instance the attribution may have been an a erthought, as ‘T. Dekker’ appears in the manuscript in a different ink from the rest, and not at all in Collier’s ‘modern’ transcript. A ballad on the Page of Plymouth affair, ‘Mrs. Page’s Lamentation and good Night, by Horton’ (no. 18), is perhaps to be linked with ‘a play, now lost, regarding the murder she committed’, namely, the Henslowe commission of 1599 to Dekker and Ben Jonson; and ‘Tom Tiler and his Wife’ (no. 23) addresses ‘the same story as the old play first published in 1578, and again in 1661’. The five non-Shakespearian play-ballads of the Protectorate Manuscript, though laboriously conceived and not unconvincing in diction, were never printed by Collier or anyone else. Two other theatrical-gossipy ballads, however, found their way into print more than once: no. 11, ‘Tarlton’s Jig of the Horse-load


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of Fools; no doubt as written and sung by him originally at the Curtain Theatre, prior to 1588’; and no. 22, ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’, an audaciously piquant account of the career of Christopher Marlowe, ‘probably written and printed [sic] soon a er the poet’s death in 1593’. Unpublished remain no. 1, ‘The Wiltshire Tragedy, by T. Deloney, relating to a murder committed by Lord Stourton’ (cf. Marshburn 1971, pp. 23–30); no. 16, ‘The Fair Maiden from Scotland, by Shawe’; no. 19, ‘A new Ballad of a Pennyworth of Wit’, and its (deliberately imperfect) ‘Answer’; and no. 25, ‘The Mad Maiden’, which likewise ‘seems imperfect’. Finally, there are two spurious ballads on Robin Hood, a great favourite with Collier, who in about 1832 also presented the Duke of Devonshire with a ballad of ‘Robin Hood’s Leap’—although this was a jeu d’esprit with no claim to antiquity.126 ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlars’ (no. 4), ‘a very spirited ballad, and not printed’, has been canonized by Francis J. Child and taken seriously by modern authorities, and no. 29, ‘Robinhood and the Tanner’s Daughter, by T. Fleming’, has enjoyed some printed currency as well. Collier’s use of his Protectorate Manuscript in the 1830s and a erwards was atypically selective, and as a result only a few of its thirty ballad texts have undergone long-term scrutiny. At first he seemed ambitious of publishing the entire compilation (New Particulars, p. 45), and with that probably in mind he produced a ‘transcript’, in modern spelling, of twenty-four of the ballads, and at some latter date wrote brief introductions to at least the first six, now preserved mostly in the form of small slips.127 The transcript itself may reflect a form of the project earlier than the forgery, however, for ‘The Inchanted Island’ is altogether absent, and parts of the text seem to antedate that in the Protectorate Manuscript, or derive from earlier dra s of its contents.128 Certain variants arrest us: the attribution of no. 20, ‘The Cripple of Cheapside’, to ‘T. Dekker’ is missing

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126. Written sometime aer Collier’s visit to Chatsworth, and published in his Athenaeum review of J. M. Gutch, Robin Hood (1847). 127. BL Add. MS 32,381. The ballads included were nos. 1–11, 13–24, and 27 from the New Particulars list. 128. E.g., in stanza 19 of ‘Mrs. Page’s Lamentation’, the transcript reads: ‘my hate to him was aye so firmly seated’, with ‘firmly’ corrected to ‘deeply’—and ‘deeply’ (which seems impossible to misread as ‘firmly’) is the reading of the MS itself. Other interlineations or minor corrections in the transcript in nos. 3, 13, 14, and 17 also point to a modern text preceding the ‘antiqued’ text of the MS; but the evidence of the (deliberate) mutilations is double-edged: the transcript clearly precedes the loss of parts of nine lines in no. 5, ‘The Girl worth Gold’, where the torn-away words are recorded and subsequently bracketed in Collier’s holograph; but it as clearly follows the tear to fol. 48 in no. 17, ‘The Cruel Uncle’, where the text of the transcript gives precisely the text of the damaged MS—which one could never predict before ripping off half the leaf. Simultaneous or alternating compilation of transcript and manuscript seems indicated.


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from the transcript but present in the manuscript (in new ink; an a erthought?) and in the New Particulars list; while the name of the author of ‘Othello the Moore’, ‘erased so as to leave no trace’ in the manuscript (New Particulars, p. 57), is plain and clear in the transcript: ‘Anth. M.’, that is, Anthony Munday. Never in subsequent publications (1835, 1844, 1858) of his ballad ‘Othello’ did Collier see fit to record this plausible by-line; perhaps it seemed simply too risky. No general publication of the Protectorate Manuscript ensued, although as late as 1867 Collier was still being solicited for texts of the announced titles or an edition of the celebrated whole. Individual play-ballads, however, began to appear in print, with ‘Othello the Moore’ in 1836 (New Particulars) and ‘The Inchanted Island’ in 1839 (Farther Particulars). Both Shakespearian analogues, put forward with calculatedly modest claims, convinced or at least failed to provoke the suspicions of Collier’s contemporaries, and Collier reprinted them in the second edition of his Shakespeare (1858). He there continued to so -pedal the evidence about Burbage’s career in ‘Othello’ (‘it is evident that the writer spoke at random’), and he returned to a speculation, all but dismissed in Farther Particulars (p. 56), that Robert Gomersall (‘R. G.’) ‘may have written what is not much in his style, but what would do no discredit to him or any other versifyer of that day’. ‘Tarlton’s Jig of the Horse-load of Fools’, a dismally lame skit that Collier helpfully asserted ‘contains so much satirical drollery, and presents such curious pictures of the manners of the time’ (New Facts, p. 19), advanced from extracts— eight stanzas in New Facts, four of them repeated in Collier’s first Shakespeare (1844)—to a solemn full text of thirty-six stanzas in James Orchard Halliwell’s Shakespeare Society volume on Tarlton. Halliwell took his text from a transcript provided by Collier in November 1843, with leading remarks: ‘It is certainly one of the most remarkable and clever relics in our language’, the perpetrator brazenly told his young friend, ‘unlike anything hitherto known or seen’.129 John went on two months later to point out that ‘Goose son, as we call him’ in stanza 7 was an allusion to the playwright turned puritan Stephen Gosson, and shared his ‘opinion’ that the fools introduced by Tarlton to his audience were ‘probably puppets suitably dressed’.130 A sly further allusion to ‘the familie of Love’ in stanza 8, le unexplained by Collier, may just have escaped Halliwell, who did not accord it a note.131 He did seem however to have appreciated how excruciat-

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129. Tarlton’s Jests, and News out of Purgatory, with Notes, and Some Account of the Life of Tarlton (Shakespeare Society, 1844), pp. xx–xxvi; the entire jig was reprinted in a review of the book in the Athenaeum. 130. JPC to JOH, 22 November 1843 and 31 January 1844, LOA 20/45 and 17/84; Tarlton’s Jests, p. xx. 131. Collier meant—and perhaps meant to be ‘discovered’ by someone else—a reference to the


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ing the performance might seem to the modern reader, who ‘must recollect that none of the recorded witticisms of [Tarlton’s] times are very brilliant’ (Tarlton’s Jests, p. xxvi). Some of the diction of ‘Tarlton’s Jig’ defies credibility (the quack doctor in stanza 19, for instance, ‘makes dying quite a pleasure’, and the poet of stanza 15 got ‘the redd carrott nose . . . with drinking sacke and canarie / At the Hat or the Rose’), but like the Shakespearian play-ballads this piece makes relatively slight claims on literary history. Rather more daring is ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’ (no relation to Tourneur’s play), which in twenty-four quatrains recounts the career and death of one ‘Wormal’ (anagram!), his creatures Faustus and ‘blaspheming Tambolin’, and his dissipated ‘friend, once gay and greene’ (Robert Greene). Wormal is stabbed to death ‘through the eye and braine’ by a rival in lust (Collier followed Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements), and a hitherto unknown detail of his early life has him breaking a leg ‘upon the Curtaine stage . . . in one lewd scene’. Again Collier printed only an extract of this ballad in New Particulars, four stanzas (pp. 47–48), enlarged to six in the introduction to his Shakespeare (1844, i:cxii–cxiii), and le the embarrassing task of publishing the whole to a gullible contemporary. On this occasion it was none other than Alexander Dyce, who credited the broken-leg story in his Marlowe (1850, i:vi), and gave the entire ballad, with notes, ‘from a manuscript copy in the possession of Mr. J. P. Collier’(iii:349–52). Collier’s two Robin Hood ballads complete the half-dozen to have been printed from the Protectorate Manuscript, once again by a grateful acquaintance and dupe. In 1847 John Mathew Gutch published his ambitious collection of Robin Hood records and texts (A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, with Other Ancient and Modern Ballads and Songs Relating to this Celebrated Yeoman, 2 vols.), and recorded his gratitude to Collier, who had supplied transcripts of the two novelties ‘with that kindness and liberality which this gentleman always extends to those who apply to him for assistance in the elucidation or extension of literary pursuits’. Gutch was thus ‘enabled to add, very unexpectedly, two more ballads to the Robin Hood cycle’, and found his informant’s liberality ‘doubly gratifying’.132 He reprinted Collier’s description of the manuscript from New Particulars, mentioning the publication of ‘Othello’ alone (he seemed unaware of ‘The Inchanted Island’), and devoted ten pages to ‘Robin Hood and the Tan-

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Anabaptist sect founded by Hendrik Niclaes in the Netherlands, but mainly prevalent in England from the 1550s onward. 132. Gutch, ii:344. Gutch’s Lytell Geste was originally proposed as a Percy Society publication in 1841, while Collier was still active in the administration of the society; see the reports of the first and second annual meetings, 1841–42.


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ner’s Daughter’ and ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlars’.133 F. W. Fairholt, a Percy Society stalwart, supplied each ballad with an attractive vignette. Only six ballads published meant twenty-four unrealized opportunities, a circumstance (as far as we know) unique up to this point in Collier’s fabricating and forging career. He did in fact allude casually to no. 5, ‘The Girl worth Gold’, in his edition of Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West (Shakespeare Society, 1850, p. ix), and his friend Barron Field mentioned no. 20, ‘The Cripple of Cheapside, by T. Dekker’, in his introduction to the quasi-Heywood Fair Maid of the Exchange (Shakespeare Society, 1845, p. ix), but only from Collier’s citation in New Particulars. More significant, perhaps, were the occasions on which Collier and his coterie did not refer to ballads in the Protectorate Manuscript, when such a reference would have seemed highly appropriate. In his Percy Society Old Ballads from Early Printed Copies (1841), Collier published Lewis Evans’s ‘How to Wive Well’ and Thomas Emley’s ‘A Maid that Would Marry with a Serving Man’ from unique broadsides in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, without mentioning the ‘variant’ versions of each in his manuscript (nos. 9, 13); and his edition of Thomas Deloney’s Strange Histories (Percy Society, 1841) includes texts of three ballads (nos. 10, 24, and 30) of which again he possessed ‘variants’, again buried in silence. Nor did his fellow Percy Society editor William Chappell cite no. 26, ‘The King and the Beggermaid, by Richard Johnson . . . with important differences’, in his edition of the poem in Johnson’s Crown Garland (1842, pp. 45–49, 83). And while the Bridgewater Catalogue (discussed below) fairly bristles with references to Collier’s own manuscripts, we find at pp. 104– 07 no word about all his provocative Deloneys, five of them ‘variants’ and one ‘not printed’; nor are they mentioned in BARB (1865, i:212–17), which elsewhere recycles many early impostures. Collier’s 1848 Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, where many of the forged ballads in his later (and more deceptive) Hall Commonplace Book are printed as illustrations of selected entries, records the submission in 1562/63 by Thomas Colwell of ‘Tom Tyler’ among various ‘ballattes’ (p. 74), and duly discusses the extant play of Tom Tyler and His Wife—but not no. 23 in the Protectorate Manuscript, ‘Tom Tiler and his Wife . . . the same story as the old play’. These omissions can hardly have been accidental, and a reluctance to circulate the majority of the inventions must lie behind them—at least a er Collier abandoned his project of publishing the whole spurious volume. His cau-

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133. Lytell Geste, ii:345–55. Collier’s own critical applause for this ballad, in his transcript, is worth marvelling at: ‘In subject & stile it is quite as good as any of those included by Ritson in his elaborate assemblage, and better than most of them’; BL Add. MS 32,381, fol. 11.


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tion was probably wise, for so voluminous an assembly would certainly have attracted more critical attention than six texts in five different books, spaced out over fourteen years. Even in 1867, when Collier’s loyal friend William Thoms asked if he might purchase the manuscript, or print the unpublished ballads in Notes and Queries ‘upon terms which might be arranged between us’, the owner-author was quick to recoil, and the matter was dropped. Indeed, had Collier ever published the Protectorate Manuscript in its entirety, he could have counted on trouble from Frederic Madden, who called it (in his copy of New Facts), ‘a remarkable volume that ought to be looked at very critically’.134 Collier’s discretion, and his prudence in giving out only transcripts to applicants, was to some extent rewarded by trust, for the murmurs of doubt over the Bridgewater documents (beginning in the 1840s) never spread to the ballads until the exposure of other forgeries inspired a more widespread inquiry. Although Halliwell, for one, was by 1853 already suspicious that ‘some remarkable ballads are compositions of comparatively recent date’—this in the context of flatly calling the Bridgewater Shakespearian manuscripts ‘modern forgeries’—he had allowed ‘The Inchanted Island’ a two-page summary in his folio Shakespeare, endorsing it as ‘the oldest piece, in English, indisputably formed either on [George Turberville’s prose version in Tragical Tales (1587)], or on the play [i.e., The Tempest]’.135 Thirteen years later, however, in volume 15 of his Shakespeare (1865), the ballad of ‘Othello the Moore’ went unmentioned. In between had come N. E. S. A. Hamilton’s sceptical appraisal both of ‘The Inchanted Island’ and of the manuscript volume itself (unseen by Hamilton, who expressed ‘grave doubts’ about the script on the basis of Halliwell’s facsimile of five lines), and his invitation to Collier to do ‘good service to the cause of truth and literature, by bringing the volume in question before a competent tribunal’.136 Collier frustrated his adversaries by refusing anyone a sight of the Protectorate Manuscript. In 1876, again without access to the ‘original’, Clement Ingleby

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134. Folger PR2951 C64 As. Col., p. 18. ‘I should not be surprised if the MS. of Ballads should prove to be a forgery altogether!’ he wrote in his diary, 25 October 1859. 135. Halliwell, Shakespeare, i:312–13, printed earlier in 1853 than Curiosities of Modern Shaksperian Criticism, from which the passage on ‘some remarkable ballads’ is quoted (p. 20). Halliwell’s account of the ballad is perhaps double-edged, however, and one might even think some parts of it tongue-in-cheek had he not given it so much solemn attention. He provided a woodengraved facsimile of the title and first stanza, remarking that ‘the date of the volume may possibly be ascertained from the accompanying facsimile, the tracing of which was very kindly sent me by the owner’. Can this be ironic? He went on to observe that ‘the diction seems to belong to a somewhat recent period’, but pointed out that ‘ballads were frequently modernized in the process of transcription’. This is an oddly ambiguous estimate, clearly reflecting some ambivalence. 136. Hamilton, pp. 103–04.


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persuasively discredited the two Shakespeare play-ballads on grounds of language and style, cleverly noting the similarity between ‘Othello the Moore’ and Collier’s translation of Schiller’s Fridolin, which had just been reprinted in 1875; but once more this was less than a firm proof of forgery.137 Only upon Collier’s death was a physical examination of the Protectorate Manuscript made possible, and Edward Maunde Thompson, the palaeographer now best remembered for his studies of Shakespeare’s autograph and The Book of Sir Thomas More, pronounced a judgement upon the handwriting that has never since been questioned: ‘not a line of it, I will venture to say, was penned before the nineteenth century. . . . The writing is by a modern hand imitating an older style . . . it is, I repeat, by a modern nineteenth-century hand, imitating one of the seventeenth century’. And though refraining from naming the perpetrator, Maunde Thompson concluded that the writing ‘is of the same cast, and undoubtedly by the same hand, as certain fabricated documents and entries, professing to be of the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, and connected with the history of Shakspere and the English stage, which have been interpolated among the MSS. at Bridgewater House and Dulwich College’.138 All the contents of the Protectorate Manuscript have by now been repudiated, although some of the impostures survived a long time. ‘Othello the Moore’ was still being reprinted as ‘written possibly about 1625’ in 1886, a year a er Maunde Thompson’s dismissal; and ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’, having victimized Dyce in 1850, drew from A. H. Bullen in 1885 a discreditation (‘I have little hesitation in pronouncing the ballad to be a forgery’) but also a full reprint.139 ‘Tarlton’s Jig’ should fool nobody, having been knocked on the head by Hyder E. Rollins in 1920 (‘clearly fabricated to fit an erroneous idea of what a jig actually was’); yet F. G. Fleay still thought it credible in 1891, and although Baskervill appreciated in 1929 the ‘strong probability’ that this was a Collier forgery, he nonetheless devoted a paragraph to its substance.140 Strangest of scholarly reactions, however, was that of F. J. Child, in his magisterial English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), to the Robin Hood fabrications. Child, a long-

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137. ‘The first line of [the eleventh] stanza might have been suggested by the second of Retsch’s outlines to Schiller’s Fridolin’ (Ingleby 1876, p. 313). Collier’s American loyalist, H. H. Furness, credulously reprinting ‘Othello the Moore’ in his New Variorum Othello (1886), took a whimsical view of Ingleby’s internal-evidence arguments: ‘That a scholar so eminent and a critic so keen should, with apparent gravity, give us this hypothetical pluperfect subjunctive might have been, aer whetting our appetites for a downright perfect indicative was, lay beyond my comprehension, till my eye caught the date of the Number of The Academy—the First of April!’ (p. 402). 138. Thompson 1885, p. 170. 139. Bullen, Works of Marlowe, i:xiv; iii:303–07. Bullen’s endearing character of Collier, ‘who did so much to enlighten scholars, and so much to perplex them’ (i:xiv), might serve as an epitaph. 140. Rollins 1920b, pp. 220–21; Fleay 1891, i:163 and ii:258; Baskervill 1929, pp. 103–04.


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term correspondent of Collier and the unacknowledged source of much that is worthy in Collier’s Spenser (1862), held no illusions about Add. MS 32,380; ‘the forged manuscript formerly in the possession of J. Payne Collier, containing thirty ballads alleged to be of the early part of the seventeenth century’, he rightly described it in no. 168, ‘Flodden Field’); and he dismissed by deliberate omission ‘Robin Hood and the Tanner’s Daughter, by T. Fleming’, which Gutch had first printed. But ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlars’ somehow bemused him: even though Maunde Thompson had assured him that ‘all the ballads are in a nineteenth century hand’ (Child, iii:170n.), Child found ‘no particular reason for regarding this particular piece as spurious’, and though the literary quality was low, ‘[I] accept it for the present as perhaps a copy of a broadside, or a copy of a copy’ (no. 137). A little window like Child’s ‘for the present’ could lull his successors into trust, and the pre-eminent student of Robin Hood in our time, J. C. Holt, devoted respectful transcription and analysis to ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlars’ (‘a splendid story . . . which the pedlars as packmen with ballads in their packs, must in all probability have helped to spread’) as recently as 1989.141

The Bridgewater Catalogue Collier’s principal enterprise in behalf of Lord Francis Egerton, and still one of the best-known of his books, was an imposing Catalogue Bibliographical and Critical of 280 printed books housed at Bridgewater House. Unsurprisingly, he restricted his selection (‘a small portion only’ of the library) to early English literature, ‘a department which, though less understood than some others, has of late years attracted much attention, both in this and in foreign countries’. The family hoard, rich in dedication or presentation copies to Sir Thomas Egerton (1540–1617) and his son John (1579–1646), with ‘not a few’ unique volumes among them, supplied most of the inspiration; the lavish catalogue, commissioned and published in quarto by ‘the present possessor’, gave Collier scope for extended description whenever he chose. The concise puffs of Heber IV and the conversational squibs of The Poetical Decameron swelled to essay-length sketches of pet authors and texts—little short of a periodical piece, in some instances—eked out with extracts, facsimiles of inscriptions and woodcuts, and notices of other extant copies, o en Collier’s own. Old favourites like Daniel and Drayton, Lodge, Nashe, Riche, Dekker, Samuel Rowlands, and John Taylor the Water Poet were plentifully represented at Bridgewater House, and there were opportunities in cataloguing works by Chapman or Churchyard or Parrot or Sir John Davies to air new discoveries or to reiterate points buried in HEDP.

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141. Holt 1989, pp. 168–69, 182; cf. Arthur Freeman 1993, pp. 10–12.


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The Heber catalogue, for example, had failed to identify Donne as the author of An Anatomy of the World, but now Collier knew better (pp. 9–10); the inscription in the Heber Locrine, overlooked in Collier’s corrigenda to Part II, was now clearly, and correctly, attributed to Sir George Buc (p. 41). In a 1639 edition of Munday’s romance Palmerin of England Collier found a commendatory poem by John Webster, rightly identified it as ‘the earliest production of that distinguished dramatist’ (Palmerin having first appeared in 1602), and published the twelve-line text, which had been ‘unnoticed by bibliographers’ (pp. 205–06). Indeed Dyce had missed it in his Webster (1830), a fact that Collier gallantly (and for once) omitted to signal. The Bridgewater Catalogue (as it is usually cited) formed the basis of Collier’s later Bibliographical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (1865), which reprints every entry with little or no revision; hence its descriptions have come into widespread currency, o en independent of the Bridgewater copies, nearly all of which are now in the Huntington Library. There are mercifully few ‘questioned data’ here, although sceptics might concentrate their fire on the reports of material away from Bridgewater House, much of it— though not so indicated—in the possession of the bibliographer himself. For John seized the chance to record, in this imposing cuckoo’s nest, such treasures of his own as Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe, 1595 (imperfect, but still one of three copies known, pp. 108–09); Love’s Complaints, 1597 (ex-Heber, pp. 174– 75); the 1629 Hero and Leander with its ‘particulars of Marlow’ (also ex-Heber, p. 190); and the manuscript of Thomas Lodge’s ‘The Poor Mans Comfort’ (sic, p. 170), which he had owned since at least 1820, and perhaps since 1816.142 The unique and heavily extracted ‘black-letter ballad by W. Turner’ (dated 1662, yet ‘written in the reign of James I’), mentioning the actor John Shanke and four pre-Restoration London playhouses, could very well raise eyebrows, especially as its title is given here as The Common Cries of London Town, and in the revised HEDP (1879) as Turner’s Dish of Stuff, but it is also genuine, and also from Collier’s collection.143 Father Hubburds Tales (1604), another plum from Heber Part IV, served for comparison, at some length, with the Bridgewater copy of The Ant and the Nightingale (1604), which Collier convinced himself was an abridged second edition, under a new title, of his own prize (pp. 199–200). The

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142. Collier mentioned the manuscript in The Poetical Decameron, calling it ‘The Poore Mans Legacie’ (the correct title is ‘The Poore Mans Talentt’), and saying that he had purchased it at the Duke of Norfolk’s sales (1816–17); if so, it was not named in Evans’s catalogues. The manuscript is now in the Folger Library; Collier’s claim that the covering letter is in Lodge’s autograph has been rejected, but this was probably an (optimistic) honest mistake all along (see QD A3.1). 143. It passed from Collier to Frederic Ouvry and remains unique, teste Wing. The two titles are for parts I and II.


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Ant is in fact the earlier of the two versions, as Dyce, to whom John gave a transcript, demonstrated in 1840 (Middleton, v:549); but the additions in Father Hubburd are indeed the most interesting part of the text. Collier’s other Middleton rarity, The Black Book (1604), rated a mention (p. 200), as did his 1604 Pasquill’s Jests (p. 227) and the satires of William Goddard (pp. 194, 226), although the last had presumably by now passed to William Henry Miller, and no great fuss was made over it. What excited suspicion, however, or may yet deserve it, were descriptions of seven other items, only one of which was demonstrably in Collier’s possession. Most of these must be genuine, like the Derby masque by John Marston (pp. 192–93; now Huntington MS EL 34 B9), the letter of Sir Francis Bryan (p. 298, ‘preserved’, but not at Bridgewater House), and the six lines of laborious verse by William Lithgow penned in the Egerton copy of his 1623 Painful Peregrination (pp. 168–69).144 All are illustrated in the Bridgewater Catalogue with woodengraved facsimiles of their holograph text—we may recall Collier’s insistence to John Murray on such work for HEDP—and we can appreciate, from the process, that the engraver required tracings of the originals, or the originals themselves: nearly all of them, to the best of our knowledge, came from material at Bridgewater House or in Collier’s personal possession. Thus the presentation copy of Chapman’s Homer Prince of Poets (the first twelve books of the Iliad, 1609?), with its ten-line inscription to Sir Henry Cro s reproduced at p. 53, has provoked some curiosity, if not disbelief, for the volume itself has proved hard to locate.145 An ‘extant letter’ of the courtier-poet Sir Edward Dyer (envoi, p. 294) is not immediately to be found, but is not otherwise suspect; and an inscription by the drab-age poet George Turberville facsimiled ‘from the title-page of a copy of Sir Thomas More’s Works, fol. 1557, which had once belonged to him’ (p. 262), was unavailable to W. W. Greg in 1932. Greg conceded, however, that ‘it seems to be in the same hand’ as another acknowledged Turberville autograph.146 He may have overlooked (for he does not mention) Collier’s own later profession of doubt, as expressed in BARB (ii:453), where the inscription is described as ‘in the handwriting of a George Turbervyle’, with a note that ‘Turberville . . . is not an uncommon name in the west of England’.147 144. The last looks at first highly suspicious, but it matches almost precisely the embellishment in the British Library copy of the same book (1045.b.28), so that the ‘new point in [Lithgow’s] history’ adduced by Collier, and still in 1865 awaiting use ‘by a highly competent authority in Scotland’ (BARB, i:464), ought to be taken seriously. 145. The book had appeared at auction in 1834, however, and the style and appearance of the inscription remain heavily in its favour. Collier owned it himself; see QD A27a.2 for further discussion. 146. Greg 1932, no. 98, recorded only from the Bridgewater Catalogue tracing. Collier inserted the title-page itself in his extra-illustrated 1879 HEDP, and it is now Folger MS X.d.459 (16). 147. A different sort of challenge emerges at p. 63, from a note on the Bridgewater copy of


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There remains one serious problem, itself a new sort of forgery. Collier’s casual attributions of works signed with initials (like ‘W. S.’ for Shakespeare, otherwise Skipwith) were for the most part presented as speculative. But in the Bridgewater Catalogue the case for another trio of works commands some scrutiny, as it was more aggressively made. In HEDP (iii:151–53) John had described and extracted a unique black-letter poem at Bridgewater House, The Debate between Pride and Lowliness by ‘F. T.’ (1577?), from which, as he rightly observed, Robert Greene took more than a few hints toward his prose satire, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592). Collier overstated his case against Greene somewhat in 1831 (A Quip was, ‘in a great degree, a plagiarism from [the] older poem’), and in ensuing notices of The Debate went even further: Greene was ‘a mere plagiary, having borrowed the whole design, much of the execution, and some of the very words of [the poem]’ (Bridgewater Catalogue, p. 313), and finally, ‘a more wholesale or barefaced piece of plagiarism is not, perhaps, to be pointed out in our literature’.148 Commentators on Greene have reacted against so dismissive a characterization of A Quip, which is a er all amusing and lively, while The Debate is comparatively tedious,149 but Collier was bent here on magnifying his own novelty (‘this unique and excellent poem’), not on doing justice to Greene. Although anonymity is always unappealing, he did not hazard a guess about ‘F. T.’ in HEDP; six years later, however, the attribution was there for the making: ‘on the title-page . . . beside the printed F. T., are the initials F. Th. Thomas Churchyard’s Good Will (1604): Collier mentions in passing ‘another piece by Churchyard, dated, like the present, 1604’, as the old versifier’s penultimate publication, A Blessed Balm to Search and Salve Sedition. This description, repeated in BARB, i:139–40, corresponds to no listing in today’s STC, and sceptics might accuse Collier of an invention. But in fact A Blessed Balm (1604) was recorded by William Oldys as among the Harleian pamphlets, together with another now-unknown pamphlet, A Paean Triumphal (1603), both with ‘written by Thomas Churchyard, Esq.’ on their title-pages (Harleian Miscellany [1813], x:461; Oldys’s no. 526); and although neither pamphlet may now be extant, Oldys’s description of the first was echoed by Ritson (Bibliotheca Poetica [1802], p. 168), by Bliss (twice, Athenae Oxoniensis [1813] and Bibliographical Miscellanies [1813], p. 45), by Lowndes (1857), and by Hazlitt (1867). A. G. Chester (1937, p. 182) dismissed all the records from Ritson onward as ‘sufficiently precise to prove the existence of [both] books’, but not to attribute them to Thomas Churchyard. Yet Oldys’s original description, which Chester apparently never consulted, leaves no doubt that both effusions were Churchyard’s (Oldys quotes an autobiographical passage in the preface to A Blessed Balm), and although they are now ‘lost’, their eighteenth-century reports—from which Collier’s notice obviously derives—remain honest. 148. The Debate between Pride and Lowliness, ed. Collier (Shakespeare Society, 1841), p. vi. The accusation is reiterated in BARB, ii:427–32; in Collier’s edition of A Quip (1867); and in the revised HEDP (1879, ii:525–28). It is echoed by Charles Hindley in his own reprint of A Quip (1871) and in The Old Book Collector’s Miscellany (1873). 149. Edwin H. Miller (1953) thought that ‘Collier’s statements must be drastically qualified’, but still conceded (in a bewildering mock calculation) that ‘forty percent of Greene’s tract is directly attributable to his predecessor’s poem’; i.e., in the 92 pages of Grosart’s edition of A Quip (Works of Greene, 1881–86) there are parallels on ‘only’ 36 pages.


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in the hand-writing of Francis Thynne, the antiquary and herald; and there is no doubt that the volume was his property, and little doubt that it was [of ] his authorship’ (p. 311). Now it is just possible that in 1831 Collier did not connect the entry ‘F. Th.’ with Thynne—a notable legal-literary worthy well treated by Bliss in his Athenae Oxoniensis—and came only later to compare its hand with that of a dedicatory manuscript by Thynne in the Bridgewater archives (reproduced, p. 312); but the inscription did pass unrecorded in HEDP, and scholars have long doubted its authenticity. W. C. Hazlitt in 1867 noted that ‘the [MS] appears to be in a modern hand, attempting an imitation of old writing’, and F. J. Furnivall in 1875 did ‘not doubt that it is a modern forgery’.150 Having established with ‘little doubt’ that The Debate was Thynne’s work, Collier rashly endowed his new poet with two more Bridgewater books: a ‘clever and entertaining production’ called News from the North (1585), ‘collected and gathered by T. F. Student’ (pp. 217–19); and an anonymous Pleasant Dialogue or Disputation between the Cap and the Head (1575). His arguments were lighthearted indeed, with ‘Student’ supposedly referring to Thynne’s place at Lincoln’s Inn, and the signatory initials described, arbitrarily, as ‘reversed’. The Cap and the Head, on no external evidence whatever, was characterized simply as ‘very much in Thynne’s manner’—a manner established only by the two prior attributions. By 1841 Collier would attribute News from the North to Thynne ‘without any hesitation’, while a ‘strong similarity of style’ still linked The Cap and the Head to his putative oeuvre; and in 1865 a new, firm attribution joined them: ‘We feel so confident from the initials F. T., and still more from the style and character of this production’, he wrote, ‘that we have not hesitated to put it under his name’ (BARB, ii:432–33), claiming for Thynne a humorous dialogue on worldly misfortunes, clumsily titled The Case Is Altered. How? Ask Dalio and Millo (1604). None of these increasingly interdependent attributions has convinced posterity, and they remain characteristic examples of Collier’s lifelong enthusiasm for pinning names to initials. But if the title-page inscription ‘F. Th.’ on the Bridgewater Debate is indeed Collier’s physical forgery, it is also the first of a new breed, inspired perhaps by such genuine scribbles as Sir George Buc’s on George a Green and Locrine. These will always be brief—unassuming in style, slight in content, and quick and easy to produce—and inevitably controversial: nightmares, no less, for latter-day investigators to approve or condemn. Simultaneously with his work on the Heber books and the Bridgewater archives and library, Collier pursued several independent projects. Chief among

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150. Hazlitt, Handbook, p. 607; Francis Thynne, Animadversions upon . . . Chaucer, ed. G. H. Kingsley, rev. F. J. Furnivall (EETS, 1875), p. cxxvii. Furnivall went on to say that ‘the imitator was no doubt the forger of the other notorious Bridgewater-Library documents’.


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them, extending his claims on the English drama both forward and backward, were a continuation of HEDP to about 1723, and a series of private editions of pre-Elizabethan scriptural plays. Collier’s history of the late Commonwealth and Restoration stage, which survives in two manuscript dra s, one of them more or less final but still fairly rough in appearance, has never been published.151 Some of his notes toward it are on paper watermarked 1830, and one stray insertion is dated 10 March 1840, but if John ever initiated plans to print it with Murray or anyone else, we are unaware of them: earlier we speculated that the publication in 1833 of John Genest’s ten-volume Account of the English Stage . . . 1660 to 1830 in effect pre-empted the modest market for such a chronology. It is not our primary task to identify pitfalls in an unpublished work, but had this ‘Continuation’ appeared in its time, a number of fabrications would be added to those we discuss: Hazleton Spencer in 1927 showed that at least two of the theatrical poems of the 1660s offered here have been revised between dra s, in a manner betraying their authorship—a reminder of the incautious Churchyard fabrication of 1816—and other statements and reports, including a repetition of the Shirley father/son canard, are rendered highly implausible by contemporary evidence. A ‘dra agreement in my hands’ between Thomas Killigrew and three actors is described in two contradictory ways, and has never been seen, while ‘some wretched doggerels [on Nan Marshall] . . . which I detected upon a loose piece of paper . . . at Bridgewater House’ are likewise unlikely and lost, as is a ballad of 1671 ‘in my possession . . . shewing how one Tim Twiford, a player of the King’s company was carried to the Marshalsea, for money he owed to his Laundress, and what he did there’; this last is described by Collier as ‘one of the most disgusting productions in point of grossness ever written’, and represented only by its innocuous conclusion. We have noted, but not sought to authenticate or discredit, indifferent verses on Thomas Betterton (‘the original is in my possession . . . [and] not ill written’), on King Charles and Moll Davies (‘which I met with among a quantity of unexplored M.S.S. at Bridgewater House’), on Nell Gwynn (‘among the miscellaneous manuscripts belonging to the family of the Duke of Sutherland’, which ‘I found’), on Aphra Behn (‘from my M.S.’), and on William Mountfort, the actor-playwright (‘the original is in my possession’).

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151. Collier’s incomplete manuscript was lot 299 in his 1884 sale, probably ending then, as now, in mid-sentence. It is today in the Harvard Theatre Collection (MS Thr 13; bequest of Evert Jansen Wendell, 1918). There is one fairly finished section, which is duplicated in part by a dra that ends with text concerning events of autumn 1663; some portions of this have been cut out and pasted to the later version. Both MSS are written on the rectos only of unwatermarked bifolia, with notes and other additions on pasted-on slips. The pillaged dra is paginated 1–105 (some pages are missing), and the fair copy—which is itself mutilated in parts—is paginated 1–471, again with some pages missing.


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Collier’s copy of The Stage-Beaux Tossed in a Blanket, corrected and annotated (‘judging from a comparison of hand-writing’) by its target, the arch-enemy of the stage Jeremy Collier, has not subsequently turned up, but may of course have embodied a genuine commentary optimistically ascribed. In 1835–36 Collier edited and had privately printed, by the younger Frederick Shoberl, four English plays of the fourteenth and fi eenth centuries, and one earlier dialogue. His choice fell upon hitherto unpublished texts, mostly from manuscripts noticed in HEDP, and he imposed the label ‘miracle plays’ upon all of them, as he had done four years before, deliberately parting terminological ways with his predecessors Warton, Percy, Thomas Hawkins, and Malone.152 The first, issued in January 1835, was The Harrowing of Hell from BL Harl. MS 2253, not really a play at all, but a mid-thirteenth-century dialogue he had known at least since March 1829, when he asked Frederic Madden for some palaeographical help with it.153 This was followed in the same month by The Betrothal of Mary from the Coventry or N-town cycle (Collier called it The Marriage of the Virgin), again based on a British Museum manuscript, Cotton Vespasian D. VIII; and by 5 March he had added, from the great Wakefield manuscript lent him by Peregrine Towneley, the Secunda Pastorum or ‘Second Shepherds’ Play’, which he titled The Adoration of the Shepherds. In November–December he issued The Advent of Antichrist, employing the Duke of Devonshire’s manuscript of the Chester mystery cycle, and finally, in April 1836, the so-called ‘Dublin’ Abraham and Isaac (Collier’s The Sacrifice of Abraham), a mid-fi eenthcentury Northampton play whose original, in Archbishop Ussher’s library at Dublin, was transcribed for Collier by David Laing, and checked by the Trinity College librarian James H. Todd. To the last text Collier adjoined a general title (Five Miracle Plays, or Scriptural Dramas), a brief introduction, and a four-page glossary, so that the few possessors of sets of the five could now bind them together. The significance and usefulness of this five-part exercise is open to debate. True, each text was set in print for the first time, and the publication of one of them, the Secunda Pastorum—probably the best-known, today, of all cycle plays —was something of a literary event. But the context of the cycles is wanting, and for that of Secunda Pastorum a full edition of the thirty-two-part Towneley Manuscript was already well under way: James Gordon produced this for the 152. HEDP, ii:123–24. Collier’s use of ‘miracle’ (rather than ‘mystery’) as a generic term for early English religious drama—not simply for the corpus of saints’ plays—retained currency as late as A. W. Pollard’s anthology of 1890; but now we would probably revert to ‘mysteries’ for four of them, and ‘dialogue’ (or ‘estrif ’ or ‘débat’, as in Chambers 1903, i:81) for the fih. 153. JPC to Madden, BL MS Egerton 2838, fol. 9. In HEDP Collier called this the ‘oldest MS. of a Miracle-play in English’; there are in fact several other more obviously dramatic versions of The Harrowing, all a century or more later than the dialogue Collier prints.


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Surtees Society in 1836, only months a er Collier’s private edition of the star piece. James Orchard Halliwell and Thomas Wright would provide the same for the entire Ludus Coventriae and the Chester cycle within five and ten years respectively, and David Laing knew of a second manuscript of The Harrowing of Hell in Scotland, which he edited at once, and obligingly printed off in a format uniform with Collier’s, ‘so that both might be bound together’.154 Nor was Collier’s editorial expertise with such early material quite what it might have been: Madden, offended by the ‘many errors’ in The Harrowing of Hell, sent him a long list of corrigenda, and was further outraged when Collier pertly defended himself. ‘I can easily forgive a man’s carelessness’, Madden fumed, ‘but when a man adds ignorance and obstinacy to it—I cannot forgive it. . . . It is really disheartening to find men like Collier so self-opinionated as not to acknowledge a mistake & feel obliged to the man who has in the most friendly manner, pointed it out’ (Madden Diary, 24 January 1835). The Keeper’s principal point was that Collier had badly misdated the Harleian manuscript, and that Laing’s parallel edition of the Auchinleck manuscript compounded the offence by repeating Collier’s opinion, with the ‘false assertion, that the Auchinleck MS. was the more ancient’. ‘I feel quite angry, & quite sick of pseudo-antiquaries!’ he complained on 21 November; ‘It is of no use wasting one’s time and knowledge upon blockheads, who neither appreciate the information given, or have candor enough to make use of it.’ Madden’s habitual, o en near-hysterical intolerance of error or contradiction should not altogether blast Collier’s achievement in Five Miracle Plays; but their texts, uncharacteristically archaic for Collier, indeed betray ignorance of both matter and script. All might still be excused had their publication effected what Collier told Amyot and the Society of Antiquaries he desired to do, namely ‘make apparent to those not conversant with a subject which has occupied so much of my attention’ the value and importance of ‘that singular & neglected department of our literature’.155 The manner of publication, however, raises doubts of its own. Collier chose, for the first time in his life, to emulate the exclusive programmes of Egerton Brydges, Haslewood, Utterson, and their like— he who had as a young man bitterly complained about the cost and artificial scarcity of the Lee Priory Press publications and Dibdin’s luxurious volumes— limiting each of the five separata to ‘only twenty-five Copies printed’, and therefore the assembled Five Miracle Plays to no more, and inevitably somewhat 154. See the preface to Laing’s edition, from the Auchinleck Manuscript in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh. On 23 November 1835 Collier thanked Laing for twenty-three copies, saying, ‘I have been sending about copies of it to such of my friends as had before received my impression from the Harleian MS.’; EUL MS La.IV.17. 155. JPC to Amyot, in a letter presenting the first play to the Society of Antiquaries, 5 January 1835, bound in the society’s copy, Cab.Lib.F.


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fewer, than the initial press-runs. It is true that he seems never to have sold copies—as he had the Bridgewater House booklets, through Rodd—and that he paid for his whim, perhaps from the last of Jane Collier’s legacy: ‘a trifling expence’, he told Amyot at first, although he terminated the series, reluctantly, for not being ‘a little richer’.156 Yet his stingy circulation of his labours could hardly have been expected to influence the general public or elicit other than private response. No reviews of any of the individua or of the 1836 collection are known to us, and Thomas Amyot quite rightly reproved his friend for his petulant ‘reproach’ of April 1836. ‘Only twenty-five copies of each of the Dramas have been printed’, Collier had written in a two-page Introduction printed with The Sacrifice of Abraham, and even this very limited impression has been found more than equal to the demand in this country, from any interest taken in the important and curious subject. The Editor will, therefore, have it in his power to comply with the wishes of several foreign universities, especially in Germany, where the origin and progress of English Dramatic Poetry is considered an inquiry worthy of zealous, learned, and accurate investigation. ‘I don’t like querulousness in general’, Amyot replied, declaring this particular specimen quite uncalled for. What proof have you that in this Country there is no ‘demand’ for copies of a work privately printed? Had they been published for sale, & the publick had not bought them, the remark might have been called for. But in this case how can it be ascertained? Are parties who may be anxious to possess Copies to beg you to supply them? Surely you would think them impudent Beggars, more especially if they were Strangers to you, the Impression being known to be so limited! Even your Friends may not like to ask for them, thinking that you would give them Copies, if you wished, or found it convenient to do so. I think I could name at a breath at least twenty five Collectors, & Book Antiquaries, who would be delighted beyond measure to divide your twenty five Copies among them. They would each say ‘try me’, if they dared! You surely underrate the value of your own labours, & the estimation in which they are held by those who have the good luck to benefit by them! 157

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156. JPC to Amyot, 4 August 1836, PML MA 3428. Clearly, copies went to the Society of Antiquaries, Dyce, Amyot, Madden, Egerton, and Devonshire; Collier still had copies of all five to give Halliwell in January 1840. Only one copy of the assembly was listed in Collier’s 1884 sale (lot 507, now British Library). 157. Amyot to JPC, 6 August 1836, BL Add. MS 33,963, fols. 47–48.


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Just why Collier passed up a chance of publishing his collection for a readership wider than friends and fellow clubmen remains puzzling, although of course he may have explored the possibility and found no encouragement: Amyot’s ‘Collectors, & Book Antiquaries’ may not have been, a er all, his idea of an audience. But in 1859 he described Five Miracle Plays to a correspondent as ‘really the most valuable of my privately printed books’ 158—was ‘valuable’ an unintentional ambiguity? One of his despairing concessions to ‘foreign universities’ may have reached an appropriate reader, however, by 1838. The obscure William Marriott of Basel (‘Ph. Dr.’) in that year published the first anthology (saving Collier’s own private assembly) of English mystery or scriptural plays, A Collection of English Miracle-Plays or Mysteries . . . to Which Is Prefixed an Historical View of this Description of Plays (Basel, 1838).159 He complimented Collier above all others on pioneering the study of such drama (‘though his remarks are unfortunately too much scattered in his excellent work’), and apparently copied his text of the Chester Antichrist from Collier’s. But lamenting the scarcity of Philip Bliss’s Bibliographical Memoranda (1816), published in one hundred copies, he expressed a complaint that a younger John Payne might have shared: ‘it is much to be regretted that this custom of reprinting only a very limited number of scarce books, oen only twenty-five [our italics], prevails so generally, as it tends to make these works excessively expensive, and very difficult to procure’ (p. lxiii). Lesser endeavours in the mid-1830s included a paper on Sir Francis Bryan, the sixteenth-century poet and courtier, delivered to the Society of Antiquaries on 10 December 1835 and published in Archaeologia the following year. This short essay, which cogently explained a passage in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s satire ‘How to Use the Court’ as relating to Sir Francis Bryan and his first marriage, was John’s first contribution to the society’s ultra-respectable journal. None of Bryan’s biographers, Collier asserted, was aware of his early marriage to the wealthy but superannuated widow of John Fortescue, evidence for which was ‘contained in an original document in my hands’, a pleading of 1526 against Bryan in Chancery.160 Neither the document nor Collier’s inference about Wyatt’s allusion has ever been questioned (see Hyder Rollins’s edition of Tottel’s Miscellany [1965], ii:220), for nothing in the former seems suspiciously

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158. JPC to W. Wardlaw Reid, 22 June 1859, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (164). 159. He is mentioned, with no detail, by J. O. Halliwell in his Coventry Mysteries (Shakespeare Society, 1841). 160. The document was part of the Ouvry sale, lot 1082, and is now item 8 in BL Egerton MS 2603. Collier’s rendering of the claimant’s surname is correct; the British Museum cataloguer mistranscribed ‘ffiloll’ as ‘Scholl’.


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provocative. But Bryan’s marriage to the widow Fortescue was not quite a discovery: it had been known from another contemporary source since the publication in 1778 of Philip Morant’s magisterial History of Essex (ii:117). Reviews there were no doubt many, though as ever anonymous and ephemeral. A severe account of the Bodleian catalogue of Edmond Malone’s books in the Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1836 upset Philip Bliss, who ‘conjectures [it] to be written by Collier’, Madden reported on 9 May—and indeed Collier’s autograph dra of the review survives (Folger MS W.b.67 [17–33]). Collier questioned, quite rightly, several principles of presentation (no alphabetical record of titles by initialized authors, no note of what is in verse, no consistency in listing printers and publishers), objected to the awkward format (folio) of the catalogue, and the long delay (twenty years) in its preparation, and aired an embarrassing number of attributional howlers; Bliss ‘accused him of acting very unfairly, since previous to the Catalogue’s being printed off, Dr Bandinel had corresponded with Mr C. on the subject, and had offered to add any corrections he might take the trouble to point out’ (Madden Diary, 9 May). But of course Malone was a favourite target for John, and if scoring off the Oxford cataloguer meant scoring off the donor-collector (‘it is very possible that too much reliance has sometimes been placed upon the information contained in the MS. notes inserted in the volumes’), he might well have relished the opportunity. A similarly harsh ‘retrospective review’ of Thomas Park’s Heliconia (1815), itemizing his errors in reprinting The Phoenix Nest (1593) and supplying the six original stanzas omitted by Park, appeared two years later in the same magazine (September 1838). Collier had first mentioned these editorial lapses in Heber IV, but now gave them in merciless detail, this time over his initials, ‘J. P. C.’ More positive were brief notices in the Morning Chronicle of two poems by Leigh Hunt, although Collier professed to take no pride in such work: ‘I am ashamed always of my newspaper criticism’, he told Hunt in September 1837, ‘but many are fathered upon me for which I am not responsible. The clauses respecting bastardy in the new Poor Laws [i.e., that mothers were principally responsible for maintaining children born out of wedlock] are of no use to me. I am obliged o en to keep other peoples illegitimates’.161 Such anonymous notices in the Chronicle and the Observer were essentially puffs, although an element of criticism might enter in: Hunt’s poem ‘Blue Stocking Revels’, for example, was ‘playful’, ‘graceful’, ‘familiar and sprightly’, ‘but we cannot help lamenting that a man of Leigh Hunt’s real and admitted genius for poetry of the best kind should

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161. JPC to Hunt, 3 September [1837], BL Add. MS 38,524, fols. 151–52; see also Collier’s letter of 16 July, Add. MS 31,109, fols. 178–79.


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have employed his time—we must out with it, in spite of all reproach—upon persons and works in some instances, we think, unworthy of his pen’ (Morning Chronicle, 7 July 1837). They were also clearly space fillers between news and other commentary or advertisements, and subject to being cut when challenged by text more emergent—so that early editions, now perished, may have contained what surviving runs do not preserve. On 17 August 1840, for example, Crabb Robinson recorded ‘a very puff by Collier’ in the Chronicle of his laborious Exposure of Misrepresentations Contained in the Preface to the Correspondence of William Wilberforce, ‘tolerably well done, indeed very well done as a puff—a little fault would have been an improvement’, but this is not to be found in extant file-copies consulted by us. Collier may also have carried out his intention of writing for one of Frederick Shoberl’s periodicals, for on 5 March 1835 he promised, ‘You shall have the Theatrical Article on Monday’; but we have not identified this in print.162 But undoubtedly the most curious venue for his literary journalism in the mid-1830s was the Carlton Chronicle, a hard-line Tory weekly of 1836–37 that aspired to unite ‘sound Conservative doctrines’ in politics with ‘fair critical opinion’ in literature, like the legendary Anti-Jacobin of 1798–1810. At least two pieces by Collier appear in its short-lived run: an obsequious review of Lord Francis Egerton’s translation of Beer’s Paria (13 August 1836),163 and an extended (anonymous) article ‘On the Rime Burlesche, or Piacevole of the Italians’ (12 November 1836), which essentially recycled the NMM article of January 1832. Collier did add one fresh verse-translation, from Giovanni Mauro’s ‘In lode delle menzogne’, and revised most of the others, notably the whimsical couplets of Giovanni della Casa ‘on the subject of names’—which may have seemed newly relevant to the anonymous and ageing translator: ‘His name was Giovanni, or John, which in Italy has even a more common sound and more vulgar application than in England’, wrote Collier, ‘where it is certainly common and vulgar enough. The bishop [i.e., Della Casa] seems to have been of the opinion of Socrates, as cited by Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (we have lost the particular reference), that it was a serious duty on the part of parents to give their children well-sounding names.’ John Payne at forty-seven, the son of John Dyer and grandson of the apothecary John, renders ‘John’ Della Casa of the sixteenth century as follows:

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162. FF MS 239. An article headed ‘Present State of Theatricals in France and England’ appeared in vol. 15 of the Foreign Quarterly Review (July 1835, pp. 266–88), but does not sound as if it was written by Collier; neither does he appear to be the author of a discussion of several volumes of ‘outlines’ designed and engraved by Moritz Retzsch (ibid., vol. 18 [October 1837], pp. 63–88). 163. Collier acknowledges this in a note written on a letter from Egerton dated 19 December 1836, Folger MS Y.d.6 (100).


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If I were younger by some twenty years, I would be re-baptized, beyond a doubt, To change a name which every where one hears. My business I can hardly go about, In fact I cannot any where be seen, But five or six at least will bawl it out, And when I turn, it is not I they mean. ’Tis quite a nuisance to have such a name, And a disgrace too, and has always been, Nightmen and scavengers have just the same, Link boys and chimney-sweepers, shoeblacks, too; And though ’tis mine, yet how am I to blame? I’d rather be a German, or a Jew, Esteeming it by far a less disgrace: I should rejoice to be Bartholomew, Matthew, or Simon with a hatchet-face, Or any thing but what I am, in short. John, John, John, John! how cruel is thy case! Those who baptize us, really, should not sport With children’s future peace in such a way, But be discreet and choose their names from court. All ye that love me truly, never say My name is John, or by it to me speak: Oh, call me any name but that, I pray! Some may insist ’tis taken from the Greek, Latin, or Hebrew: I their pains commend, But what avails the etymon to seek, When ’tis a name that must all ears offend? And no man willingly, methinks, would choose To have it own’d by relative or friend. Abridgement makes it worse: whiche’er you use, Johnny or John, or Jacky, or plain Jack, It matters not; and well may all abuse What only fits this world’s poor drudge or hack.164

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164. The NMM text (which may go back to the early 1820s) is now considerably altered and improved, and the incipit (‘If I were younger by some twenty years’) takes on a more personal significance. The final four lines, with their strikingly appropriate conclusion, had read (1832): ‘You can’t abridge it; and whiche’er you use, / Whether you make it Johnny or plain Jack, / ’Tis only worse; and well may all abuse / What only fits some miserable hack.’ Another, very different anonymous rendition of Della Casa’s verses appeared in Leigh Hunt’s Monthly Repository in August 1837, pp. 152–53.


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‘Poor Drudge or Hack’ Indeed Collier’s newspaper responsibilities had increased and diversified since the Reform Bill and HEDP. Under the laissez-faire proprietorship of William Clement the Morning Chronicle had lost ground to its rival dailies for more than a decade, until its circulation in 1834 was estimated (admittedly by a hostile witness) at not more than eight hundred. In the spring of that year Clement, who had paid Perry’s executors £42,000 for the paper, disposed of it for £16,500 to a consortium headed by John Easthope, a successful stockbroker and rising Whig politician. Easthope proved a conspicuously hands-on proprietor, with every intention of restoring the Chronicle to its liberal ascendancy under Perry, and he soon shook up the business as well as the staff. Some £10,000 was expended by 1838 on machinery and workspace,165 and in January 1835 a thriceweekly ‘branch paper’, the Evening Chronicle, was established: The Times and the Morning Herald already had similar ‘sisters’.166 While Easthope retained dour John Black as chief editor through ten uneasy years, he worried about keeping reporters ‘up to the mark’, and hired a number of new faces, mostly with literary credentials, to work with, or challenge the veterans.167 Among the earliest recruits were Charles Mackay, later a best-selling poet and author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions; 168 and Thomas Beard, a self-effacing young journalist, who in November 1834 brought in his friend Charles Dickens to join him, at five guineas a week, among the cadre of twelve parliamentary reporters. Dickens had served his apprenticeship in the gallery in 1831, with his uncle John Barrow’s weekly Mirror of Parliament, but this was his first taste of an ‘annual engagement’, and his first stint with a daily newspaper.169 A contemporary admirer declared that within a few months at the Chronicle Dickens was ‘universally reputed to be the rapidest and most accurate shorthand-writer in the gallery’ (Ackroyd 1990, p. 157), but mythopoeia may be at work here, and the opinion

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165. So says James Grant, in The Great Metropolis (1838), pp. 42–43, and the conditions certainly needed improving: in November 1832 an article on ‘Newspaper Reporting’ in the Metropolitan (vol. 5, pp. 178–80) described the parliamentary reporters’ workroom at the Chronicle as particularly malodorous, with a ‘pestiferous stench . . . which exceeds that of a dissecting room’, made up of ‘the effluvia of a steam engine, a gasometer, and the two furnaces belonging to them . . . the only window by which [the reporters] are ventilated, or receive direct light, opens over an uncovered drain’. 166. The Evening Mail and the Evening Herald. Other evening papers were the Sun, True Sun, Globe, and Courier (all Whig or Liberal) and the Tory Standard; see Charles Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections (1877), i:78; and Bourne 1887, ii:95–96. 167. See Bostick 1979, p. 52. 168. Mackay’s memoirs of the Chronicle in this period (Forty Years’ Recollections and Through the Long Day [1887]) are informative but somewhat undependable in terms of sequence and date. 169. See Ackroyd 1990, p. 159, quoting a ‘bitter’ reflection of Charles’s father.


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of the old hands, like Collier, has not been recorded. At about the same time (autumn 1834) Easthope engaged George Hogarth of Edinburgh, a reputable music critic and composer, to head up the theatrical and musical department of the Chronicle, and by January 1835 had installed him as editor of the new ‘Evening’ edition, with a brief to print ‘original . . . articles of a political or literary character’.170 Hogarth sought contributions—commissioned above and beyond the Chronicle’s stipend—from Dickens as ‘Boz’, and the two became friends; Beard, ‘who always ran in harness with Mr. Dickens whenever there was special or extraordinary work’, remained intimate; and when in April 1836 Dickens married George Hogarth’s daughter Catherine (and, some would say, his daughter Georgina as well), Beard served as best man.171 Collier of course knew his gallery fellows, and remained useful to Dickens a er the novelist parted ways with Easthope late in 1836. What he thought of Hogarth, however, in his ‘theatrical and musical’ capacity, or Hogarth of him, remains unknown, and that is a pity. The internal organization of the Chronicle, traditionally flexible, turned almost chaotic under Easthope’s early proprietorship, when abrupt changes in the working hierarchy reflected, or seemed to do, his own turbulent personality. In particular the post of ‘sub-editor’, the effective manager of the paper in its nightly production, rotated among a number of candidates, none obviously qualified. This was a ‘place of great trust and responsibility’, as Thomas Noon Talfourd described it, whose occupant ‘had the power of ruining [the newspaper] irretrievably if he thought fit’; such a man should be at the office (a printer deposed) ‘early in the a ernoon, at the latest seven in the evening, and the earliest time he should go away was two or three o’clock in the morning’.172 John Hill Powell, in whose civil action against Black and the Chronicle these testimonies emerged, was among the parliamentary reporters of 1833, advancing to co-sub-editor by December 1834. From April to September 1835 he served as sub-editor on his own, but was then abruptly discharged on grounds of ‘misconduct’—in effect irregular and untimely attendance, particularly on Sunday nights, when he had to be fetched from Goodwin’s oyster shop in a state ‘as if he had been aboard a steamboat and enjoying himself ’, and required soda-water to ‘bring him round’. A Court of Common Pleas jury awarded Powell £147 (fourteen weeks’ salary) in damages for breach of engagement, but his place as sub-editor was taken by Hogarth, who had also shared with him the co-editorship of the Evening Chronicle at its inception. Hogarth in

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170. Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections, i:78, misdating this to the summer of 1837. 171. See ibid., p. 82; Walter Dexter, ed., Charles Dickens to His Oldest Friend (1932); and Ackroyd 1990, pp. 153–54. 172. From the report of the action of John Hill Powell against John Black in the Court of Common Pleas, 9 July 1836 (The Times, 11 July); see also Carlton 1948.


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turn was ‘displaced under somewhat mysterious circumstances’, Mackay recollected, ‘which I was never able to understand’,173 and returned to his specialities of music and drama, later following Dickens to the Daily News. Another Scot, Thomas Fraser—subsequently ninth and last Laird of Eskdale, Inverness—took over the vexed post in September 1836, and held it for about a year before transferring to Paris as the Chronicle’s long-term correspondent there.174 Charles Mackay, Fraser’s assistant throughout his term, replaced him in the autumn of 1837, supposedly beating out Thackeray for the job (so he said fi y years later, which seems impossible). But Mackay was still only twenty-two years of age, and by October the chairs changed again. On 16 October 1837 Crabb Robinson called on Collier at the Chronicle office, and recorded in his diary that John ‘is become now Sub-editor to the Chron: and writes a good title. This is an advance in his situation. Perhaps he may one day succeed to Black.’ That Collier was now the successor to Mackay, Fraser, Hogarth, and Powell, the fi h sub-editor in two fraught years at the Chronicle, seems indicated, although Robinson’s terminology may be imprecise.175 John had described his own improved circumstances in a letter to his friend two weeks earlier, as ‘another partial change in my situation at the M. C. office’, without mentioning the title or its traditional executive responsibilities: ‘They have found out that I can write a little, & in a style not very usual in the paper, & accordingly my business is daily (when a fit subject offers) to give them something of my penmanship. You are aware that these matters are never talked of out of the office, & excepting to yourself (and more generally & again vocally to Amyot) I have mentioned the matter to nobody but my wife. . . . Do not think I make a needless fuss or secret about this matter, but at the office they are very particular in keeping their secrets’ (HCR Correspondence, 2 October 1837). Perhaps by mid-October John’s promotion to sub-editor was confirmed, but clearly what ‘they’—Easthope and Black—now required of him was his ‘penmanship’, not his administrative presence till two or three o’clock every morning.176 Indeed the fiery proprietor had already made political use of his man, taking Collier to Brighton to canvass with him in March 1837, when Robinson reported that ‘J. P. C. . . . is in favour’ with

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173. Through the Long Day, i:56. 174. Dickens, Letters, i:166n. 175. On 27 September 1836, while visiting Ramsgate, Robinson had walked with ‘Mr. Jones’ (very likely Edward Jones, the husband of one of Joshua Collier’s daughters), who ‘tells me that John C: is made Sub-editor of the Chronicle & as this must add to his income I rejoice at it’. Either Collier’s appointment was very temporary indeed—this was at the time when Hogarth gave way to Fraser—or Jones was confused. 176. In fact Collier wrote to Amyot on 2 October that while ‘I have more writing to do and more responsibility to incur . . . I get home at rather better hours than formerly’; Bodl. MS Eng.lett.d.219, fols. 57–58.


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‘his Master Easthope’; and by October ‘Easthope has so much friendship for J. P. C. that he has supplied means for apprenticing William [now aged sixteen] to be a civil engineer’, while John Pycro , aged eighteen, was engaged to ‘go into the gallery’ at about the same time, on a respectable £100 yearly (HCR Diary, 12 March and 26 October 1837). John Payne’s new politicization, campaigning for Easthope and turning out leading articles (unsigned) for the Chronicle—he later estimated that in two years he wrote ‘from 400 to 500 columns’ of these 177—did cause him concern on a social front. ‘My position is an odd one’, he told Robinson in November, ‘writing as I do for the M. C. (though under some trammels which ‘‘cramp my genius’’) and going in & out of such a high Tory’s house as Lord Francis Egerton’. Courageously, he made a clean breast of his activity to Egerton, admitting that ‘I was now politically connected with the M. C.’, and to his gratification Egerton did not seem to mind: indeed ‘it has made him rather more cordial than before’ (HCR Correspondence, 22 November 1837). John’s salary rose to £450 per annum, or eight guineas a week;178 and what with John Pycro ’s contributions, Devonshire’s stipend, and Egerton’s ad hoc largess, the Collier family income for once seemed almost satisfactory to Robinson, who kept a close watch on such matters.179 But as suddenly as he rose in the Chronicle hierarchy and pay-scale, John fell again, as mysteriously as Hogarth had done, and perhaps the victim of the same sort of proprietary caprice. At the outset of his advancement he had worried about Easthope’s volatile patronage: ‘I foresee that I shall have no easy task of it’, he confided to Robinson; ‘I wish to Heaven he would either not think for himself or think better. Besides, he is very opinionated’ (HCR Correspondence, 22 November 1837). Despite Easthope’s early gestures of friendship toward Collier’s family, the task evidently proved impossible, Robinson noting in June 1839 that John ‘has not maintained his political post on the Chronicle as triumphantly as I could have wished’ (HCR Diary, 30 June); and in 1846 Collier told John Walter that ‘Sir John Easthope [made a baronet in 1841] . . . dislikes me for controlling his ungovernable temper’.180 In fact Collier’s role as sub-editor (if 177. JPC to John Walter II, 3 September 1846, Walter Papers 300, TNL Archive. 178. This may be moot: see Ganzel, p. 63, dating Collier’s advancement to September 1836; and Robinson’s diary entry of 27 January 1841, noting that Collier’s salary had been reduced from eight to five guineas per week; in his memoirs Collier claimed that by March 1839 he was earning more than ten guineas a week from the Chronicle, in addition to his income from other papers. 179. This was not, of course, in the class of John’s tough-minded brother-in-law Robert Proctor, who in January 1837 told Robinson that his worth was £10,000 (with an annual profit of £2,000); by September 1839 he was worth £12,000, and as ever ‘the prosperous one of the family. Neither John nor the Doctor [i.e., George Proctor] are. John cannot, and the Doctor will not’; HCR Diary, 29 January 1837 and 22 September 1839. 180. JPC to Walter, 4 January 1846, Walter Papers 292, TNL Archive.


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ever he really filled it) was over within a few months, Thomas Fraser reassuming the title by May 1838.181 John was still furnishing his ‘penmanship’, but to a colder reception: ‘some people who write in the M. C.’, he told Robinson glumly, ‘get third persons to talk up their articles to the Proprietors & others . . . whereas some of my best (as I estimate them) have been passed over without notice of any kind—I mean by the Proprietors, but this I can partly explain and understand’ (HCR Correspondence, 7 May 1838). If a pattern of raised and dashed expectations had once more asserted itself, Collier again seemed to take it in stride, and he buried his resentment, for the time being, in literary enterprise. But the wheel of his journalist fortunes had yet another downward turn le in it: in January 1841 Robinson learned that ‘my friend Collier has suffered both a loss and a humiliation. He is reduced to a clerical office, from eight to five guineas a week, and is forced to go into the gallery again’.182 At age fi y-two, a er eighteen steady years on the Chronicle, he was back to where he had begun, on a neophyte’s wages. Collier’s society in the mid and late 1830s spanned family, bookish patrons and fellows, and, for what he could make of it, the world of his Chronicle colleagues. Of the traditional dozen parliamentary reporters on the newspaper staff, few if any were intimate friends;183 but he thought well of William Hazlitt (the essayist’s son),184 and William Durrant Cooper, a young Suffolk antiquary intermittently in harness, and would have at least crossed paths with the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin, Jeremy Bentham’s secretary James Harefield, and the dipsomaniacal but famously talented Irish writer on angling, Edward FitzGibbon.185 Dickens, of course, was to be the celebrity in their midst, and cor181. In January 1838 Collier blamed the Chronicle ‘sub-editor’ for delaying publication of an article by Robinson, and described to HCR that individual’s onerous duties: ‘to insert all the news—all the advertisements & all the leaders & articles contributed, especially at this time of year when Parliament furnishes such a quantity of must-be-printed matter’; HCR Correspondence, 25 January 1838. 182. HCR Diary, 27 January 1841; Ganzel (p. 65), while citing the correct date for this entry, dated Collier’s reversal of fortunes to late 1839. 183. That number suffices for turns of three-quarters of an hour, returning to the office with notes, writing up, and returning to Parliament: so prescribed by the 1832 author of ‘Newspaper Reporting’ (see note 165 above). 184. Collier maintained a correspondence with Hazlitt into the 1860s; Hazlitt 1897, ii:21–22. 185. Hodgskin and FitzGibbon were among ten parliamentary reporters on the Chronicle who in July 1833 signed a rejoinder to Daniel O’Connell, who had accused them of slanted reports (Morison, i:315n.). Collier did not sign, but he had faced prosecution on such grounds in 1820, and his name may now have seemed superfluous. Cooper joined the parliamentary corps in about 1837. Other literary figures of this period on the staff (mentioned by Mackay, James Grant, and the editors of The Letters of Charles Dickens) include the novelists Thomas Gaspey, W. B. MacCake, and Angus Reach, and Leigh Hunt’s protégé Albany Fonblanque (a desultory contributor).


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respondence of January 1837 does indicate a cordial relationship between Collier and himself in the term of his Chronicle service. Following Dickens’s resignation in November 1836, Easthope and the budding novelist had exchanged written recriminations, and the proprietor remained ‘offended’; Dickens now sought a Chronicle notice of his ‘Sketches by Boz’ (as appearing in Bentley’s Miscellany), and applied to Collier, perhaps as sub-editor, deliberately bypassing Easthope. Collier saw to inserting a prompt and generous review—although it is not clear that he wrote it himself—and Dickens thanked him profusely. ‘I am very anxious that you should now see the letter Mr. Easthope complains of ’, he added, ‘and the Epistle which produced it. I am chained to Mr. Pickwick just now, and cannot get away, but on Tuesday Morning I hope to be at liberty, and shall take the chance of finding you at home.’ 186 If reconciliation with Easthope was pursued by either Dickens or Collier, however, nothing is known to have come of it.187 Collier preserved this gracious bread-and-butter letter all his life, but an earlier specimen is known only by Collier’s report. In OMD (iv:iv–v and 12–15), he was to claim that John Barrow, Dickens’s journalist uncle, approached him in July 1833 to help find employment for Dickens, who ‘wished above all things to become one of the parliamentary reporters of the Morning Chronicle’. John ascertained the lad’s mixed qualifications (Gurney shorthand, experience on the radical daily True Sun, writing ‘puff-verses’ for Warren’s shoe-blacking advertisements, and being ‘cheerful company and a good singer of a comic song’),188 and engaged to dine with him ‘before I committed myself by recommending him to a newspaper as a competent reporter’. Three days later, a er a lively family evening, he heard the candidate sing both ‘The Dandy Dog’s-meat Man’ (‘much in vogue with the lower classes’) and ‘an effusion by Dickens himself ’, beginning ‘Sweet Betsey Ogle’, of which he quoted the first clumsy verse. ‘We were all very merry’, he reports, ‘if not very wise, unless merriment be taken as another sort of wisdom.’ And although Dickens ultimately came to the paper ‘not . . . by my recommendation’ but by that of ‘some more influential person [who] had also spoken in his behalf ’, he ‘subsequently sent me a kind note of acknowledgement, which I fear I destroyed, not guessing the eminence at which the writer a erwards arrived’. This biographically attractive episode has been widely credited by Dickensi-

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186. Letters, i:220, there conjecturally dated 5 January 1837, but redated to 20 January by J. Don Vann (1977). 187. Collier himself claimed (OMD, iv:v) that ‘he [Dickens] got me to explain the matter to [the Proprietors]’. 188. Collier dismissed the True Sun loily in 1872 as ‘a newspaper which, strange to say, I had seldom seen’, but he certainly knew it: W. J. Fox was its editor, and its dramatic critic since midsummer 1832 was John Forster.


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ans,189 but there are reasons to doubt it. Although Collier played down, with characteristic diffidence, ‘the trifling part I took’ in obtaining Dickens his job, he clearly implies that it came through at once, on the recommendation of the ‘more influential person’; whereas Dickens in fact did not join the Chronicle until November 1834, put forward (modern biographers agree) by young Thomas Beard, and only a er several interviews with John Easthope. Beard can hardly have seemed ‘more influential’ than Collier, especially to Collier himself, so that W. J. Carlton has proposed to identify the sponsor as Joseph Parkes, the Whig activist, who had apparently introduced Beard to the paper.190 If so, Parkes is surprisingly absent from any correspondence or published recollection by Dickens, and there remains the hiatus between Collier’s dinner (27 July 1833, as he records it) and Dickens’s appointment to be explained.191 Equally awkward are the quotations Collier provides of four doggerel lines on Warren’s shoe-blacking (‘very laughable and clever for the purpose’) and the first verse of ‘Sweet Betsy Ogle’ (‘I remember no more, though he sang it twice . . . [it] ran nearly, or quite, as follows’). For we know now that An Old Man’s Diary is not a real diary of the 1830s at all, but a reconstruction made in the 1870s, and it is impossible to believe that Collier’s memory could supply him such confident souvenirs of a bibulous evening forty years earlier, especially from a youth whose future eminence he did not then guess at, and whose even later ‘kind note of acknowledgement’ he did not think to cherish, for that reason. The same ‘diary’ account preserves an anecdote which has proved biographically and iconographically infectious: Dickens, successfully hired by the Chronicle and out for a stroll in a new hat and a very handsome blue cloak, with black velvet facings, the corner of which he threw over his shoulder à l’Espagnol. I overtook him in the Adelphi, and we walked together through Hungerford Market, where we followed a coal-heaver, who carried his rosy but grimy child looking over his shoulder; and C. D. bought a halfpenny worth of cherries, and, as we went along, he gave them one by one to the little fellow without the knowledge of his father. C. D. seemed quite as pleased as the child.

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189. E.g., Carlton 1926, p. 98; Ackroyd 1990, p. 147; and Dickens, Letters, i:31, giving a synopsis of the ‘destroyed’ letter. 190. Carlton 1926, pp. 98–99. 191. Ackroyd’s version is that ‘Collier either could not or would not help Dickens in his journalistic progress’, a claim that simply contradicts Collier’s unambiguous account—and if so, why accept the rest of it?—while other biographers, begging the same question, refer to Collier’s ‘unsuccessful attempt’. Ackroyd’s apocryphal account (p. 113) of Collier as ‘working for The British Press’ in 1826 and writing about Dickens’s shorthand skills, rests (apparently) on a mistranscription from Carlton (1926, p. 25): this was not Collier, but Samuel Carter Hall.


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The image of this comic procession has been formalized by F. W. Pailthorpe (in F. G. Kitton’s Dickens in Pen & Pencil ), with an imaginary portrait of a smirking John Payne Collier, ‘in his prime’, trailing mischievous Dickens, behind the plodding coal-heaver and conspiring infant. But in the end all may be another Collier fiction, an enduring Dickensian sketch of his own; we will never be sure. ‘I do not o en interfere in this way’, Collier’s latter-day diary proclaimed about Dickens’s quest for employment with Easthope, ‘the only other instances I can recollect being in favour of Douglas Jerrold and William Thackeray, when they were at one time sadly in want of literary work’ (OMD, iv:12). Of Thackeray this was essentially true, if condescending and anachronistic: in April 1835 the future novelist, in Paris, applied for what he believed was to be a Chronicle appointment, that of correspondent in Constantinople, and asked Collier, as a fellow member of the Garrick Club, ‘to speak a word or two in my favour’. Nothing more came of it. At some point Thackeray briefly thanked John for an invitation (‘I should have been delighted’) but declined it, and in December 1839 he had ‘Collier of the M. Chronicle’ to a dinner with three other guests.192 Collier ‘has pufft me’, Thackeray explained, recording nothing else of the occasion save that a erwards ‘we smoked segars in the drawing room’.193 Between puffery, gossip-gathering, and political advocacy at the service of others, a newspaperman’s reputation might betray him at times. John’s delicacy in forwarding Easthope’s opinions and his candour with Egerton attest to a journalistic conscience more developed than most of his fellows’, but still he could tap a close friend: ‘As you mix very much with politicians’, he hinted to Robinson, ‘& hear what they say, among other things, of the M. C., your information will be useful [to me]’ (HCR Correspondence, 7 May 1838). The slap on the wrist by the Garrick Club Committee (January 1837), for leaking details of a private event, no doubt was warranted, even if Collier’s co-journalist William Jerdan resigned in protest about it. London club protocol remained strict toward unsanctioned publicity, although some members of the Garrick clearly thrived on it, and leeriness of the press was widespread.194

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192. Ray, i:281–82 (letter of 22 April 1835, addressed to ‘J. P. Collyer’ at the Garrick Club) and iv:319 (undated note of [1837–40]). 193. Ray, i:398; letter of 16 December 1839 to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth. 194. Robinson recorded one incident in his diary on 5 March 1844, saying that at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries ‘J. P. C. talked well without pretence or effort. . . . Yet Kn: Bruce spoke of the newspapers as the hostes humani generis, which Collier seemed to feel, but his literary works make persons quite forget his character as a reporter.’ Ganzel, p. 91, misinterpreted this as a reference to Collier’s friend John Bruce; the speaker was in fact Sir James Knight-Bruce, Vice-Chancellor and member of the Privy Council.


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Qualms about just such behaviour, or distrust of the profession in general, may have affected Collier’s candidacy in 1835 for another far larger and more formidable sodality: the Athenaeum, the new cultural Valhalla of clubland.195 Membership here, restricted before 1830 to one thousand ‘Literary and Scientific men, and followers of the Fine Arts’,196 had been enlarged in 1830 by two hundred new ‘supernumerary’ recruits, including Sir Henry Ellis, Frederic Madden, John Murray II, and Thomas Barnes of The Times, as well as T. B. Macaulay and John Stuart Mill; but normal entry required filling a vacancy among the original thousand, and the usual hiatus between nomination and coming up for a club-wide vote was about six years. Jumping the queue was always possible, and as Collier’s proposers were Thomas Amyot—the spirit behind the famous club library, and a member of the Election Committee in 1836–37— and Ellis, one might think Collier’s chances good: through Amyot he presented the club in 1836 with copies of The Poetical Decameron, HEDP, and New Facts. But on 10 March 1836 Henry Crabb Robinson (himself brought in by Amyot and Richard Heber in 1824 on what he considered a fluke—‘my known distinction as a famous German scholar’) recorded a setback: ‘I am sorry that some scrupulous persons have found a difficulty in electing either [Thomas Noon] Talfourd or John Collier or [an unidentified] Captain Black’, he complained, ‘on the ground that only first-rate men ought to be brought in by the Committee— a scrupulosity that annoys me on the present occasion and that I think absurd.’ But the great power in the Athenaeum was its founder, John Wilson Croker, with whom Amyot and Robinson were somewhat at odds (HCR Reminiscences, iii:119–20), which cannot have helped Collier; and how much support he could have counted on from Murray and Madden and Barnes, or for that matter Philip Bliss (elected 1834), is hard to determine. John’s company in this initial defeat was at least more than respectable, for Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd, barrister, poet, friend and biographer of Charles Lamb, and dedicatee of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, must have found the snub even harder to fathom. They were certainly known to each other, Talfourd having sent Collier his verse-tragedy Ion in 1835, to which Collier replied with a ‘trifle’ of his own (probably New Facts) and a warm letter of praise.197 But Tal-

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195. Entry dated 23 January 1835, numbered 1271, listing him as ‘a Barrister’. We owe special thanks to Sarah Dodgson, Librarian of the Athenaeum, for kindly searching the club archives and advising us on the procedures involved. 196. J. W. Croker to Sir Humphry Davy, 13 March 1823; see Ward 1926, pp. 9–10. The earliest prospectus defines persons eligible for membership as ‘Authors known by their scientific or literary publications; Artists of eminence in any class of the fine arts; and Noblemen and Gentlemen, distinguished as liberal patrons of science, literature, or the arts’ (Ward, p. 11). 197. ‘The language is the language of a poet. You must have used hard compulsion to make yourself a lawyer. I never could, though only a lover of poets and a dabbler in verse. Here & there


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fourd’s eclipse was momentary, and in 1837 he became one of four inductees ‘of distinguished eminence’ elected under the club’s ‘Rule II’, while Collier’s application languished. In 1838 the club again eased its restrictions, extending full status to the remaining 160 ‘supernumeraries’ of 1830, and offering, in a onetime membership drive deplored by many of the old guard, instant admission to a complementary 40, to be chosen by the all-powerful committee from the old nominees and a new slate of prospects. At this juncture Collier apparently chose not to join in the scrum, perhaps worried that his forwardness might revive old prejudices, although sponsors of both old and new candidates could on this special occasion re-nominate their choices and canvas for them. He ‘declines making a push for the Athen[aeum]’, Robinson wrote (HCR Diary, 22 May 1838), ‘fearing not to be elected. [Thomas] Per[egrine] Courtenay thinks he ought to be elected tho’ he knows of his having been a reporter.’ The so-called forty thieves who benefited from the 1838 window included Charles Dickens (resigning, not for the last time, from the Garrick Club) and Dickens’s friends Macready and George Cattermole, Richard Monckton-Milnes, George Grote, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, and Charles Darwin; so Collier may have been right to fear defeat through inadequate support or even blackball—which in the event he never risked. Five years later he abandoned his candidacy, writing to Amyot: ‘You are the best judge, but is it not best to take my name off the Athenaeum books at once? This matter I will leave (with your leave) entirely to you.’ 198 He was withdrawn on 9 February 1843. Back at the Garrick, intra-club contretemps, especially involving the press, could blow up into feuds, like the celebrated later quarrel between Edmund Yates, Thackeray, and Dickens. The importance to his theatrical confrères of Collier’s reviews and reports led to resentment, as well as anticipatory cosseting, even when, as he had complained to Leigh Hunt, ‘many are fathered upon me for which I am not responsible’. Hotheaded William Macready, the preeminent tragedian of his day, chatted and dined with John civilly enough in 1833–36, save when ‘criticisms’ were at stake: ‘I should, if alone, have touched him on his criticisms’, Macready told his diary, ‘but if I could I would prefer buying his praise, though I think him a fool’; yet two days later, when a damaging paragraph (presumably about Macready’s famous fist-fight with Alfred Bunn) appeared in the Chronicle, and a mitigation was sought, it was Collier, through John Forster, whom Macready chose to approach.199 On the day before ChristI noticed a defective line, but in general the versification is rich harmonious and vigorous. . . . You are almost the only lawyer who ever made a Portia of his Muse. I hope you will not give up her Society even when you are Chief Justice, as I shall see you one of these days’; 9 June 1835, Huntington MS TA 20. 198. JPC to Amyot, 17 January 1843, Bodl. MS Eng.lett.d.219, fol. 74. 199. Diaries, ed. William Toynbee (1912), 28 April 1836 (i:301) and 30 April 1836 (i:304).


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mas 1837 Macready objected to another ‘passage’ in a newspaper ‘by that foolish man Collier’, and ‘wrote a very civil request that he would say what he had written’—which suggests that Macready was not really sure.200 Collier’s (lost) note in reply came with ‘a dramatic piece by Lord F. Egerton’, which Macready smugly declared ‘will not do’, for whatever its purpose, and Collier ‘excused himself from dining on Saturday’.201 Two weeks later and throughout the next year they appear to have been back on even terms, but in late October a newspaper notice upset the ultra-sensitive actor: ‘Forster came to dinner, and brought with him an Observer, in which that very absurd, mischievous and contemptible person, Collier, continues his false assertions respecting me’.202 That Collier’s hand lay behind the persistent ‘attacks’ in the Observer Macready appears to have learned from John Forster (‘Forster told me that Collier had been again attacking me in the Observer’, he recorded on 26 August 1840), and this seems to have led to a permanent ri , for it is the last direct reference to John in Macready’s published Diaries (1833–51). But the Garrick, unlike the august Athenaeum, sheltered newspapermen in some abundance, of whom Collier was hardly the most indiscreet. As well as Jerdan and himself there were Thomas Gaspey of the Sunday Times (‘a lowbred, vulgar man, brought in by Jerdan’, Canon Barham described him)203 and James Duncan, once a foreman at John Murray, and since 1834—with Easthope and his son-in-law Simon McGillivray—a co-proprietor of the Morning Chronicle. Editors, publishers, contributors, and occasional correspondents included Thackeray and Dickens, Richard Bentley, Thomas Hill, Theodore Hook, and Macready’s ‘toady’, young John Forster.204 Forster in fact had been guilty of the same breach of club privilege as Collier and Jerdan, three years before them, when ‘he narrowly escaped expulsion, from publishing an account of a dinner at the Garrick in a newspaper to which he was a reporter’.205 Barham, who loathed him, reported that ‘the Committee wrote him a letter on the occasion expressive of their disgust, which would have caused any other man to retire’. Forster’s 200. Ibid., i:434. This almost certainly alludes to a paragraph in the ‘Dramatic Intelligence’ column of the Observer (24 December 1837) reporting an intended legal action by Macready against Bunn, and suggesting that it would be regrettable. If the columnist was indeed Collier, he had written at least three earlier notices of the quarrel (1 May, 8 May, and 15 May 1836), all relatively flattering to Macready, as well as an unrelated encomium on 20 October 1837: ‘We have the highest possible opinion of him, both as a public and a private man’. It is hard to see what Macready was complaining about. 201. Ibid., 3 January 1838 (i:437). 202. Ibid., 27 October 1839 (ii:28). See also i:441 and 451, ii:20. 203. The Garrick Club: Notices of One Hundred and Thirty-five of Its Former Members (New York, 1896), p. 31; printed from a manuscript written by Barham ca. 1838. 204. Barham’s term, p. 31, but also used in an American notice of him; see Davies 1983, p. 83. 205. Barham 1896, pp. 30–31; Davies 1983, p. 81, quoting Macready’s report of 5 February 1834 (Diaries, i:98).


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inveterate meddling and talebearing were well-known to his fellow members,206 but if Collier realized that Forster had shopped him to Macready, he never said so. Later Forster would attempt, unsuccessfully, to reconcile Collier with Dyce, and correspondence and gi s between the two, well into the 1870s, speak for overall friendly relations. But in extreme old age Collier turned harshly against the memory of Dickens’s ‘Podsnap’, whose letters he annotated with bitter and snobbish adversaria. In the 1830s Forster was not yet the serious collector of rare books and manuscripts he became—his marvellous eighteenth-century library now adjoins that of his friend Dyce, at the Victoria and Albert Museum—but others in the Garrick Club shared Collier’s expensive passion. Besides Devonshire and Egerton there were Hill, Freeling, and Mitford, and Philip Augustus Hanrott, to whom Collier gave a large-paper copy of HEDP.207 John dined and gossiped with the literary middleweights—Hook, Barham, James Smith (of Rejected Addresses), John Poole (of Paul Pry), John Hamilton Reynolds, and James Sheridan Knowles 208—and became friendly with the actor Charles Kemble, to whom he lent a Larpent manuscript in 1831.209 Between Macready’s diary and John’s own exuberant records of evenings in the 1830s (the nominal limits of OMD, 1832–33, reflect events throughout the decade) we can summon up a full calendar of club life and, from Robinson’s records, the occasional dinner party at 25 Euston Square. Guests at home included Knowles, Reynolds, Dyce, and Amyot (HCR Diary, 6 April 1833); Mitford, the bookseller Henry Foss, and Dyce again (8 March 1835); John Black and William Durrant Cooper of the Chronicle, and Dyce, ‘who said nothing’ (18 March 1837); but probably not the playwright and Garrick Club stalwart J. R. Planché, who told Madden in 1860 that John was ‘the meanest person that he ever knew’ (Madden Diary, 27 April 1860). Dyce, with his notoriously precise hospitality, might fill the bill better: ‘Such a noisy party at Gray’s Inn, last Sunday night!’ he told Mitford in May 1832. ‘Collier, Harness, John [Mitchell] Kemble, &c. &c., & how they ate! Soirees really grow expensive’.210 Home life for the Colliers, since Jane’s death in 1833, remained little changed,

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206. See, for example, Macready’s note of 27 July 1839: ‘[Laman] Blanchard . . . spoke of Forster’s unpopularity and meddling’; Diaries, ii:20. 207. Perhaps also Henry Perkins (1778–1855, brewer): see Barham’s ‘Appendix’, which also lists Hanrott. ‘Little seems to be known [of Hanrott]’, remarked De Ricci (1930, p. 100); his very substantial library was sold in 1833–34, but Hanrott himself (a solicitor) lived on for two decades, dying aged eighty in late 1856. 208. OMD, i:74 75; ii:18–19 and 31–33. 209. OMD, i:41; JPC to HCR, 18 January 1831, HCR Correspondence; Amyot to JPC, 15 April 1831, BL Add. MS 33,96318, fols. 37–38. 210. Letter of 26 May, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.100 (18).


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with a household of three elders (John, Mary Louisa, and Aunt Emma Pycro ) and six growing-up children. Robinson in mid-1838 was ‘struck with the appearance of [Collier’s] sons—they are promising young men—the family of girls also amiable’ (HCR Diary, 15 July 1838), though we hear little else of the four daughters for several years. John Pycro had entered King’s College, London, in October 1835, but le without taking a degree, and by the autumn of 1837 he was a part-timer on the Chronicle parliamentary staff.211 A year later he had procured another post at the Stamp Office, a clerkship with ‘£50 to start but rising to £100; only works six hours a day, so can still write for Chronicle’. And sixteen-yearold William, a er four years at the King’s College School in the Strand with his brother, was now training to be a civil engineer on the Great Western Railroad, where ‘he goes daily’—this through the intercession of John Easthope (HCR Diary, 18 November 1838). Despite his ostensibly improved circumstances under Easthope’s regime, and another small family legacy, John moved house again in March 1839, from central St. Pancras to the comparative hinterlands of Brompton Square, south of Hyde Park.212 Number 24 was a comfortable establishment (it still stands), but less grand than the Euston Square house, perhaps in anticipation of lessened use. Robinson, who applauded the move as ‘a proof of prudence’, also supposed that ‘the boys will soon maintain themselves’.213 The shelf-space too was reduced, or economy dictated a cull, for John asked Thomas Rodd by ‘to look over such books as I want to part with before I move’, and in the event sold a large number.214 ‘Our house is smaller but still a nice one’, he informed Dyce defensively, ‘& I am not troubled with more than half my books’. An appropriately modest housewarming proposal promised ‘boiled beef Sunday’ at ‘½ past 4 . . . Come if you like us or boiled beef. Busses pass the end of the Square very frequently’.215

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211. The college records for this period show only his entrance on 1 October 1835; Robinson mentioned him as one of ‘a young party . . . from Kings College’ that he entertained on 28 January 1838 (HCR Diary). 212. John apparently received some further portion of the old Collier money on the death of Mrs. Joshua Collier in early 1839; HCR Diary, 9 and 14 February 1839. 213. HCR Diary, 30 June 1839. Collier’s change of legal chambers in 1838, from 2 Pump Court to 2 Middle Temple Lane, may or may not have been another economy move; in 1841 he moved again, to 4 Brick Court, but by the middle of the decade ‘John Payne Collier, barrister’ was no longer appearing in London directories. 214. Undated note, bound in BoPL G.3920.1 (large-paper copy of New Particulars). 215. JPC to Dyce, 14 and 22 March 1839. Dyce clearly did not take this up, and proved obstinately reluctant to visit, though frequently importuned: a letter from Collier of 16 November 1841 suggests that he had still not been to Brompton Square; Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (9), (10), and (14).


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Farther Particulars The last of Collier’s three Shakespearian booklets of the 1830s, Farther Particulars Regarding Shakespeare and His Works, in a Letter to the Rev. Joseph Hunter, F.S.A. (‘1839’, i.e., January 1840), though similar in format and presentation to New Facts and New Particulars, had almost nothing to do with Lord Egerton and Bridgewater House. John would go on to edit a bulky selection of Egerton’s historical papers for the newly formed Camden Society in the same year, but that project belongs to our next chapter; Farther Particulars, with its informal epistolary approach and unambitious press-run (‘the impression of this tract has been limited to fi y copies’), wound up the series on a subdued note, without further resort to the Bridgewater rarities, genuine or supposititious. ‘I have reason to think’, John wrote glumly to Hunter (p. 5), ‘that the general readers of Shakespeare care less about particulars regarding him and his works, and about matters connected with our early stage-history, than I imagined some years ago’, yet the temptation ‘to illustrate a few more of the plays of our great dramatist’ and to address his findings to a like-minded (if rival) researcher, had prompted their publication—‘if the word can apply to so very limited an impression’.216 And indeed the novelties are themselves somewhat subdued, mostly suggestions of analogues, allusions, and sources that few ‘general readers of Shakespeare’ would care for. The only biographical datum concerns Shakespeare’s will, which ‘I examined for the first time a few weeks ago’, having ‘till then . . . taken it upon trust that Malone and other biographers had given a correct account of it’. Malone (and his predecessors) had mistakenly read ‘Februarii’ for ‘Januarii’ in the dra superscription—deleted and altered, by the original scribe, to ‘Martii’—and so ‘if the will were made in contemplation of death, Shakespeare’s illness was of longer duration than has been hitherto supposed. Everybody who has followed Malone’s biography has fallen into Malone’s error’ (pp. 66–67). Now this is hardly a revelation on a level with Shakespeare-as-sharer, or an intimate letter of ‘H. S.’, nor are four slight improvements to the texts of Twelh Night and Lucrece (pp. 64–66); but they do have the virtue of being honest, original, and correct. ‘I have rarely opened and read . . . a book of about the age of Shakespeare’,

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216. Shoberl in fact billed Collier for seventy ordinary and fieen ‘quarto’ or large-paper copies (see A30). A cancelled introduction and statement of limitation apparently contained stronger remarks, to which Thomas Amyot seems to have objected. Responding to Amyot’s ‘remarks and advice’, Collier noted on 10 December 1839 that he had already ‘sent the page to be cancelled, leaving it, I am sure, quite inoffensive. I feel confident that you are right, & that your distinction about personal querulousness and querulousness for Shakespeare is just’; Bodl. MS Eng.lett.d.219, fols. 59–60.


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Collier concluded, ‘without finding something more or less to illustrate his productions’; the findings ‘may appear trifles . . . but I repeat that I consider nothing a trifle which in any way bears upon Shakespeare and his works’.217 Indeed some of the Farther Particulars betray the gleaner’s propensity, and his nil alienum bravado. A silly jest in Robert Chamberlain’s Jocabella (1640: in fact first printed under a different title in 1639) may be mildly interesting in terms of Shakespeare’s mid-century reputation, but a version of the ubiquitous fleshbond theme of The Merchant of Venice in another jest book of 1674 was hardly worth copying out. Echoes of Love’s Labour’s Lost and an allusion which ‘I cannot understand’ to Hamlet, in John Clarke’s Paroemiologia Anglo-latina (1639), have proved rather more interesting than they sound here, but Collier’s analysis of them was hasty.218 A generic source for the chastity-wager in Cymbeline, itself ‘almost as widespread in folk-lore and literature as the ‘‘terrible bargain’’ of Measure for Measure’, in a fourteenth-century mystère—transmitted from Paris by ‘my friend, Mr. [Thomas] Wright’—is proposed at pp. 24–29, and Collier returned to it in Shakespeare’s Library (1843). But there are many more likely direct antecedents of Cymbeline (Bullough, viii:12 ff.), and John’s slender knowledge of medieval and renaissance literary history led him to overstress this unlikely candidate. Similarly, the case for an Italian source of Twelh Night found Collier out of his depth. John Manningham, whose unpublished diary of 1602–03 had served HEDP handsomely, remarked in February 1602 that ‘a play called ‘‘Twelve night, or what you will’’’ was ‘much like the commedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni [i.e., Deceivers]’,219 and John had ‘searched in every direction for the Italian play entitled Inganni . . . for the last eight or nine years’, to no avail. Just three months before, mercifully, he had come upon Gl’Inganni, ‘comedia del Signor N. S’. in a Venetian edition of 1582, and now sought to demonstrate its affinity to Shakespeare’s Twelh Night. His arguments (pp. 10–24) are coherent and modest enough, for he would not insist that Shakespeare knew the text of Gl’Inganni directly, although he threw out conjectures ‘that our great poet understood enough of Italian for his purpose’, and may possibly have even visited Italy—‘it was not

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217. Farther Particulars, pp. 67–68. This declaration is a sublimely unconscious echo of Malone, who in the preface to his 1790 Shakespeare wrote: ‘I scarcely remember ever to have looked into a book of the Age of Queen Elizabeth, in which I did not find somewhat that tended to throw a light on these plays’ (i:lvi–lvii; quoted in Martin 1995, p. 116). 218. Farther Particulars, pp. 67–68. Munro 1932, i:438, fails to credit Collier for the Chamberlain note, naming Halliwell and W. C. Hazlitt instead; for the Clarke reference, see Munro, i:432–33; and the New Variorum Love’s Labour’s Lost (1904), p. 15. 219. See Sorlien 1976, p. 48.


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unusual with the poets of the time’. He admitted ignorance of ‘Signor N. S.’ (Niccolò Secchi) and of the original date of the play (1562)—even Dibdin could have told him both, from Haym’s Notizia or Bibliotheca Italiana—and, what is even more slipshod, he overlooked the alternative Italian ‘sources’, Gl’Ingannati (1537, translated into French and Spanish) and Gl’Inganni of Curzio Gonzaga (1592).220 All these titles were easily accessible to a more thorough scholar, or one more willing to consult with another, and Collier’s own dedicatee gave a perfectly satisfactory account of them six years later, in New Illustrations of Shakespeare (i:391–99), rather pointedly not mentioning Collier at all on the matter. But Hunter was also fussed about having anticipated Collier’s ‘discovery’ of Manningham’s diary in 1828, and a propitiatory footnote by John (Farther Particulars, p. 10), acknowledging that Hunter had been first to identify the diarist by name—‘if I remember rightly’—may have seemed insufficient. Casual as it is, however, Collier’s demonstration of parallels between Twelh Night and the Italian ‘Inganni’ tradition is the earliest in print. On native and solider ground, Farther Particulars offered extracts and analysis of a prose tale ‘founded upon Shakespeare’s Pericles’, which John thought ‘the only instance that has yet been discovered of a novel professedly taken from an old play’ (pp. 33–54). What was thought to be the unique copy of this catchpenny romance, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608), has had a curious and somewhat puzzling history, before and a er 1839. Heber purchased it (through Thorpe) at the sale of George Nassau in 1824 (Part II, lot 745), for £22 11s. 6d., and in Part VI of Heber’s sale (1835, lot 3223) it again fetched £21 from Thorpe. At that time the auctioneer’s note asserted: ‘From this Romance History of Pericles, Shakespeare certainly borrowed his Play, all the chief characters are the same in both’—this in spite of its printed sub-title, ‘being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented’. Collier of course spotted the contradiction, and ‘concluded from the title, as given in the Catalogue, that the fact could not be as stated in the note’, namely, that the novel was ‘certainly borrowed’ from the play, not vice-versa. ‘And so I found it on examination’, he declared (p. 38). Now Collier’s examination must have been thorough indeed—perhaps Evans let him borrow it to show to Devonshire or Egerton—for by his own testimony neither he nor any friendly collector acquired it. Twenty years later John recalled that he himself had bid on it, but ‘it was bought, as I was informed, by a gentleman who was not likely to allow it to be further circulated’ (Athenaeum, 28 March 1857, p. 406); and although he may have believed that the culprit was William Miller, as usual, it was fact George Daniel, who could play the biblio-

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220. Bullough, ii:270 ff.


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taph as obstinately as anyone else when he chose. And so he did, and no more was heard of it until 1850, when a second and third surfacing revived Collier’s involvement. But meanwhile, with no further access to the volume itself, John was able to publish not only elaborate comparisons between play and novel, with accurate extended quotations from the latter, but a quasi-facsimile of the title-page that features a tolerably exact reproduction—from a careful tracing, no doubt—of the central woodcut. None of this can have been achieved during saleroom inspection—a full transcript must have been made—and although Collier would claim in later years that he copied the Heber-Britwell rarities during Heber’s own lifetime, on sufferance and loan, in this instance he specifically dated his ‘examination’ of the book as subsequent to its cataloguing for sale. Had he long since borrowed it and dealt with it so fully, the inspection and reevaluation of 1835 would hardly have been necessary. But the version of such events in Farther Particulars, unprocurable as that publication became, seemed amenable to revision in 1857. In correspondence in the Athenaeum over a newly discovered copy of the book, Collier claimed to possess ‘a considerable fragment’ of The Painful Adventures (which has never turned up), and asserted that the Nassau-Heber-Daniel copy had been ‘lent to me . . . many years ago, by the favour of the late Mr. Heber’ (Athenaeum, 28 March 1857). Three months later (27 June) he again claimed to have borrowed the quarto from Heber ‘more than twenty years ago’. This turnabout does seem to present a clear case of Heber-mythmaking by Collier, and of his appropriating text from saleroom exhibits. But the use he made of The Painful Adventures in 1839 almost excuses him: he correctly explained why the novel must follow, not precede the Pericles play—modern scholars are divided about the function of a lost pre-Shakespeare Pericles in this reconstruction, but no matter—and he pointed out, with great clarity, why some readings in the adaptive novel serve to justify or cast doubt upon independent emendations to Shakespeare (pp. 41– 42), even if the good guesses were Steevens’s: ‘these points establish how useful the novel may be made, even as regards verbal criticism, in the restoration of the genuine text, corrupted in the quarto editions beyond any of the other plays of Shakespeare, or perhaps of his contemporaries’ (p. 42). With some allowance for (so to speak) the progress of learning, this remains an acute estimate of the evidence. The second of Collier’s ‘Shakespearian’ ballads from his forged Protectorate Manuscript, announced in New Facts and signalled without a transcript in New Particulars, was finally given to the world in Farther Particulars, pp. 56– 62. ‘The Inchanted Island’, thirty stanzas of six lines subscribed ‘Finis, R. G.’, had initially been described as a ‘ballad . . . on the same story as The Tempest, and perhaps preceding it in date’ (New Facts, p. 35), and ‘possibly [by] Robert


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Greene’ (New Particulars, p. 46). The late Francis Douce, Collier subsequently reported (Farther Particulars, p. 55), who ‘had several opportunities of reading it, at first hoped that it was the long-sought original of that wonderful drama; and when I last saw him and spoke of it, he was disposed to think that the play and the ballad were derived from one common source’. But John was too canny to advance such extravagant claims for his metrical handiwork—better to let Douce be their source—and he now affected to notice ‘such strong general resemblances [between ballad and play], that I feel assured that the writer of the ballad must have known, if he did not in part use, the play’. And the attribution to Greene (d. 1592), never more than a flyer, was judiciously dismissed: ‘it is decidedly of too modern a cast and structure for him, and . . . my conjecture is that it was written about the period of the Protectorate’. To this moderated evaluation he summoned the implicit support of Alexander Dyce, who had ‘gone over’ the ballad with its perpetrator, and ‘I believe he concurs with me in thinking that it is posterior to Shakespeare’s Tempest’. It is impossible not to imagine Collier relishing the ambiguity of these qualifications. John also permitted himself to admire shamelessly what he had himself wrought, again under the byline of the eminent dead, and with the usual gesture of balancing deprecation. ‘Mr. Douce called it ‘‘one of the most beautiful ballads he had ever read’’’, he recalled (p. 56), ‘and shook his venerable head (as was his wont) with admiring energy and antiquarian enthusiasm at different passages in it; but I am by no means prepared to give it so high a character.’ Lest we underestimate it, however, ‘it is certainly vastly better, both in style and sentiment, than any thing of the sort [Thomas] Jordan has written’. Such covert self-praise can all but elicit our pity: we recall the doggerel of pseudo-Churchyard (‘a man who could thus write was no very contemptible poet’), or the lame jingle ‘Punch’s Pranks’ (‘we regret that so pleasant an effusion should be anonymous’). How gratifying, then, must have been the notice of Farther Particulars, coupled with Hunter’s own Disquisition on . . . The Tempest, in the Quarterly Review for March 1840 (pp. 469–84). William Harness, an amiable if unremarkable editor of Shakespeare, Massinger, and Ford, found the ballad ‘in itself a very pleasing poem’, and, given the scarcity of Collier’s booklet, reprinted it in full (pp. 478–80), as ‘a service to the public’. Harness went on to advance the very hypothesis that Collier had not thought worth risking, that ‘The Inchanted Island’ was in fact not based on The Tempest but anterior to it, perhaps its ‘groundwork’, unless ‘both Shakspeare and the balladist were indebted to a common Spanish original’. The fabrication now took on new lustre—the subject, potentially, of scholarly debate not about its genuineness, but about its candidacy as a source—even if Joseph Hunter, who held the antiquarian authority of the Quarterly in contempt, thought this ‘unhappy conjec-


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ture’ quite ‘miserable’ (New Illustrations, i:167; ii:370). The ballad itself Hunter did not question, for he regarded it, as Collier professed to do, as a late adaptation of no direct relevance to Shakespeare and the play it reflects.221 In 1853, in his massive folio edition of Shakespeare, J. O. Halliwell published a facsimile of the first stanza of Collier’s manuscript, from a ‘tracing . . . very kindly sent me by the owner’,222 describing the ballad as ‘the oldest piece, in English, indisputably formed either on that romance [Torrent of Portugal], or on the play [The Tempest] . . . said to be of the time of the Commonwealth’ (i:312–13). Like Hunter, Halliwell forbore to question the validity of the text, of which he offered only a précis, although ‘the diction seems to belong to a somewhat recent period’. The earliest out-and-out sceptic may have been N. E. S. A. Hamilton, in private conversation with Madden (Diary, 25 October 1859), and publicly in his Inquiry (1860), where he reprinted Collier’s account from Farther Particulars in full, as implicitly suspect (Appendix III, pp. 122–30). Never having examined the Protectorate Manuscript itself, Hamilton remarked only of Halliwell’s specimen that ‘no one, I think, experienced in ancient handwritings can look at that fac-simile, without feeling the gravest doubts in regard to its authenticity, which the intrinsic character of the verses themselves by no means serves to allay’ (Inquiry, pp. 103–04). All this (at the time) may have been educated guesswork on Hamilton’s part, but no responsible scholar since then has taken ‘The Inchanted Island’ seriously. Nor, for that matter, have readers since Harness regarded it as ‘in itself a very pleasing poem’.

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221. Hunter referred to the ballad, without having seen it, in his own Disquisition, and made no adverse comment in New Illustrations, save on the Quarterly Review hypothesis. He did not immediately learn that Harness was the author of the Quarterly notice, suspecting first J. W. Croker and later Abraham Hayward (HCR Diary, 4 April 1840); for his opinion of the anonymous reviewer, see also New Illustrations, i:131, 156–57, and 164. 222. Collier had told him on 5 August 1852: ‘You shall have the fac-simile of my Tempest Ballad when you like, and I will have the tracing carefully made for you’; LOA 53/36.


part five

The Societies and Shakespeare (I)

The years 1838–40 saw the foundation of three literary ‘societies’, or bookpublishing clubs, which over the next decade altered the face of antiquarian editing and reprinting in England.1 Unlike their principal bibliophile forebear, the Roxburghe Club, whose expensive ‘gi ’ volumes were all but inaccessible to the general public, the Camden Society, Percy Society, and Shakespeare Society consciously committed themselves to widespread distribution of old texts at low unit cost. Several of their founders, Collier certainly among them, had become exasperated by the numerical limitations, scholarly eccentricities, and high prices of such private press reprints as those by Sir Egerton Brydges, E. V. Utterson, and Joseph Haslewood, and remained unconsoled by the new local history specialists (the Abbotsford Club and the Surtees Society, both founded in 1834, for material Scottish or relating to ‘the ancient kingdom of Northumberland’) or by the arbitrarily ‘collected’ aspect of The Somers Tracts, The Harleian Miscellany, and Brydges’s several multi-volume series of antiquarian samplers. What all desired, and what their initially enthusiastic subscribers appeared also to expect, were well-edited transcripts or reprints of unavailable literary and historical texts, efficiently produced and marketed—without the traditional kite-flying of proposals, which so o en le subscribers waiting years or forever—and priced reasonably. A commercial publisher like Prowett or Pickering might have imagined the same kind of scheme, and printers and booksellers like Smeeton, Rodd, Triphook, or Payne and Foss could and did provide the occasional slim black-letter facsimile at six shillings or so; but only a philanthropical group of amateurs could propose to maintain high standards of text selection and editing (ensured by a council of ranking antiquaries and bibliophile patrons) for broad and cheap circulation. These were non-profit enterprises, and even the incidental costs of copy preparation were shouldered, at first, by the volunteer sponsors of individual volumes. No royalties were ever

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1. For general discussion, see Steeves 1913; the Shakespeare Society is examined in depth in Wagonheim 1980.

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paid out, and the only returns on publication, for the titular editors, were honour and a few author’s copies. During the eight years from 1838 to 1845 John Payne Collier contributed twenty-four primary titles to the three book clubs— two to the Camden Society, ten to the Percy, and twelve to his favourite, the Shakespeare Society—to say nothing of contributions, acknowledged and not, to many other volumes. The Camden Society circulated its prospectus early in March 1838, and held its first organizational meeting on 15 March, with Thomas Amyot, an emblem of antiquarian respectability, in the chair. Sir Frederic Madden, who attended, understood the ‘prime movers’ to be the antiquaries John Bruce and Thomas Wright, and the father-and-son proprietors of the Gentleman’s Magazine, John Bowyer Nichols and John Gough Nichols; the last, in his brief memoir of the Society, mentions the Rev. Philip Bliss and Charles Purton Cooper, Q.C., as ‘especially active’ at the outset; and Madden, on 15 March, recalled also encountering the Rev. Joseph Hunter, the medievalist Thomas Stapleton, and of course John Payne Collier.2 Lord Francis Egerton consented to be president, and on 2 May the first general meeting formally declared its corporate purpose: ‘The general object of The Camden Society is to perpetuate, and render accessible, whatever is valuable, but at present little known, among the materials for the Civil, Ecclesiastical, or Literary History of the United Kingdom’ (prospectus, issued with Bruce’s Edward IV ). Nichols reported that the name of the society ‘was chosen for its presiding genius . . . William Camden, the Elizabethan historian’, and confirmed that the enterprise ‘was suggested by the success attendant on the Surtees Society [of Durham, founded in 1834]’, a club whose publications were however restricted to ‘inedited manuscripts [illustrative of ] . . . those parts of England and Scotland, included on the east, between the Humber and the Frith of Forth, and on the west between the Mersey and the Clyde’. The Surtees Society had initially placed no restriction on its membership, at two guineas’ annual subscription, but later set a limit of 350, while the Camden Society opted for 1,000 to begin with, at £1 per annum, entitling the participants to one copy each of each work.3 By 24 May more than 320 members had been enlisted, and the first publication, John Bruce’s History of the Arrival of Edward IV in England,

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2. Madden Diary, 6 and 15 March 1838; Nichols, A Descriptive Catalogue of the First Series of the Works of the Camden Society (1872), pp. iii–ix. The society minute books (Royal Historical Society archives) confirm Madden’s list of the nine men attending the meeting of 15 March. The first council of twelve, as listed in Bruce’s Arrival of Edward IV in England (1838), consisted of Amyot, Bruce, Collier, Cooper, T. C. Croker, Hunter, Madden, Sir Thomas Phillipps, Stapleton, Edgar Taylor, W. J. Thoms, and Wright. 3. While there were no promises of frequency, three books were issued in what remained of 1838, four in 1839, seven in 1840, and three in 1841.


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initially issued in 500 copies, had to be reprinted at once.4 By May 1839 the membership had risen to 980, with ‘many’ candidates on a waiting list, and in February 1840 a new ceiling of 1,200 was oversubscribed by at least 66 names.5 The almost instantaneous success of this project inspired several emulators, among them the Parker Society (English Reformation texts and church fathers, founded 1840), the Aelfric Society (Anglo-Saxon writings, founded 1842), the Chetham Society (Lancaster and Cheshire, 1843), the various history of science societies (Sydenham, Ray, Cavendish, 1843–46), and the travel and voyages Hakluyt Society (1846).6 But the Camden Society itself effectively fathered the Percy Society, nearly all of whose founders were active in the affairs of the former. Young James Orchard Halliwell, a newcomer from Cambridge, had aired some dissatisfaction with the syllabus of the Camden Society as early as August 1839, protesting that material a er 1650 (in W. J. Thoms’s Anecdotes and Traditions, 1839) was not ‘early’ enough for the society’s announced purposes, that ‘any work that would cover its expenses in the common way of publication’ ought not to be undertaken, and that the popular appeal of some Camden books to an inflated membership would result in ‘those that are really valuable’ being driven out by ‘half-Pickwickian pseudo-antiquarian publications’.7 These highhanded aspersions from a nineteen-year-old understandably irritated some of his elders, one of whom ‘lately taunted me’; and although Halliwell continued to produce worthwhile books for the Camden Society from 1839 to 1844, he soon felt the need for an independent venue—if not three or four. The Percy Society, named for the pioneer of ballad study and dedicated to ‘the publication of Ancient Ballads, Songs, Plays, minor pieces of Poetry, and Popular Literature, or works illustrative of the above-mentioned subjects’, was his next port of call.8

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4. The quantity of the second Camden book, Collier’s Kynge Johan, was similarly increased during printing, thus permitting the correction of more than half of the text: see A29. 5. Though downsized somewhat aer 1848 (the press-run, set at 1,250 copies in May 1839, was first reduced to 1,000, then to 750, 600, and 500, reflecting competition from subsidized projects such as the Rolls Series), and administratively absorbed by the Royal Historical Society in 1897, the Camden Society continues its agenda today, aer more than 170 years. 6. The useful list in Wagonheim (1980, pp. 284–86) includes Irish and Scottish publishing clubs, the latter going back to the Bannatyne (1823) and the Abbotsford and Iona Clubs (1834). The best general list of society publications is still that in Lowndes, vol. 6. 7. A Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Francis Egerton (1839), pp. 8–10. Halliwell’s future father-in-law, Sir Thomas Phillipps, took an even more rigorous stance, in a letter of 19 June 1839 to C. H. Hartshorne: ‘It ought to be a purely Historical Society. . . . I condemned the plan of sending out [Old Poetry and] Old Plays under the name of Camden’ (Northamptonshire Record Office, Hartshorne Papers Part III, D/21; we owe this reference to Arnold Hunt). Phillipps blamed the aberration on Collier, who ‘had too much influence’ at the formative meetings. 8. Prospectus, issued in the spring or summer of 1840. Our primary source of information for the affairs of the society is a member’s careful collection of prospectuses, reports, and notices,



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Established by midsummer 1840, it was limited to 500 members at £1 a year, and promised a ‘volume’—usually a very slim one, in wrappers—each month. The agenda of the new club might seem at odds with what Halliwell urged on the Camden Society in 1839, for not even the Camden would consider reprinting many of the popular arcana the Percyites favoured; but perhaps a solemn declaration of aims lent scholarly dignity to some of the more frivolous choices. At any rate, the ballads, squibs, jingles, and nursery rhymes were segregated from weightier antiquarian matter, and a subscriber would know what to expect. The specialist movement in literary history had staked out a new territorial claim, and Collier, for one, was delighted: ‘Ever since ‘‘the Camden Society’’ was formed’, he told Halliwell in April 1840, ‘I have had, as some of my friends know, a project to get up a Society for the publication & re-publication of old Popular Poetry, and what you & others have just set on foot will, I dare say, from its title & without further explanation, answer my purpose exactly.’ 9 He accepted a place on the council of twelve, and the earliest list of seventy-five subscribers (mid-1840) included not only John but his son John Pycro Collier, his cousins George and Robert Proctor, and George Proctor’s son George Henry, then at Oxford. In May Collier was already impatient with progress (‘But that I heard Mr. [William] Chappell was at work on it, I should have taken the matter in hand months ago’),10 and when production began he pitched in with a vengeance.11 The first, second, third, fi h, ninth, and tenth publications of the Percy Society, all of 1840–41, are all Collier’s. Halliwell from the start served as treasurer of the Percy Society, and his ‘others’ included William Chappell and Edward F. Rimbault (secretary), both rising musicologists, the Irish antiquary Thomas Cro on Croker (no relation to John Wilson Croker), and Halliwell’s close Cambridge friend Thomas Wright. William Jerdan and Charles Mackay from the world of journalism, and Samuel Lover from the shallower reaches of music and fiction, were among Collier’s associates on the first Percy council, along with Dyce, who weighed in with the twel h Society reprint (1841). But scarcely six months had passed before a similar enterprise put yet a third claim on the loyalties and editorial capacities of all these enthusiasts: the Shakespeare Society, mooted by early July 1840, became a reality in October, with a prospectus calling for the ‘publication or republi-

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bound as vol. 31 of the set of Percy Society publications held by the University of London Library (shelfmark Boc Percy Society). In point of fact the only play ever issued was Massinger’s Believe as You List, ed. T. Croon Croker (1849). 9. JPC to JOH, 11 April 1840, LOA 3/49. 10. JPC to JOH, 8 May 1840, LOA 3/35. 11. On 2 August 1840 the first book, Collier’s Old Ballads, was expected ‘next Friday’; JPC to E. F. Rimbault (private collection).


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cation of Works connected with, and illustrative of, the Plays of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries’. This for Collier would represent the most appropriate venue for his own work in the busy 1840s, and to it he devoted far more personal energy than to either the Camden or Percy Societies, although he remained active in all. His activity was of a new sort, moreover, for the almost feverish competition over new texts and responsibilities, as well as the internal administrative politics of the societies, brought their principals into close touch over day-to-day plans, and kept them as closely aware of one another’s projects, long-term and short. Nothing in the Society of Antiquaries of the 1830s, or in the editorial and publishing world of the previous decade, would approach, in Collier’s experience, the intense interaction among colleagues and rivals in the book clubs of the 1840s. Let us meet some of the new cast.

James Orchard Halliwell: Early Years Thirty-one years Collier’s junior, James Orchard Halliwell (1820–89), arguably the greatest Shakespeare scholar of the century, cut a dash as an antiquary from an improbably early age.12 At Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently at Jesus (1837–40), he delved into unexplored manuscripts—apparently purloining a number of them from the unsupervised library of the former—and by his nineteenth birthday he had published no fewer than three biographical or palaeographical pamphlets and three textual editions. He became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Society in early 1839, and in the same year edited John Warkworth’s manuscript Chronicle of the First Thirteen Years of the Reign of King Edward the Fourth for the Camden Society, whose affairs he had already taken upon himself to criticize. He was certainly one of the instigators of the Percy Society, and remained its most voluminous editor, with twenty-two titles between 1840 and 1850; likewise he was in at the start of the Shakespeare Society, even before Collier, and mooted in 1841 an ‘English Theological Society’, which seemed to duplicate the aims of the Parker Society and proved abortive. For all the book clubs, and away from them, Halliwell’s labours were prolific and o en distinguished: his editorial energy rivalled Collier’s, and indeed his output of separata over a lifetime (many of them admittedly slight) well surpasses that of the older workhorse.13 His formal learning was perhaps less than profound, for he was a good mimic of learned opinion, but the combi-

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12. Marvin Spevack’s full-length biography of Halliwell (2001) was published too late to be cited formally, but we were in close touch with Professor Spevack during its preparation. On Halliwell’s life see also Spevack 1996c, with references to earlier studies; Schoenbaum 1991; and Munby, Phillipps Studies, vol. 2. 13. See Spevack 1997a.



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nation of his precocity and his assuredness impressed many of his senior contemporaries, Collier among them. Others were sceptical, to say the least. Frederic Madden thought him ‘certainly not qualified at present’ to write a treatise on manuscript editing, a project that ‘I have always had the design of writing myself ’, and considered Halliwell’s Manuscript Rarities of the University of Cambridge (1841) a ‘miserable volume . . . done in a very jejeune & meagre manner’ (Madden Diary, 17 March 1840 and 25 August 1841). ‘I am thoroughly sick of the Halliwelliana’, he complained to his diary, as the upstart’s publications multiplied. ‘He is a puerile blockhead aiming at everything and able to do nothing’, who had been shamelessly indulged by his elders: ‘It is really too bad that this conceited young man should be allowed to figure in the Council of every Society, & be so utterly incapable of editing any work properly’ (25 February 1841). Dyce, whom Halliwell had the temerity to instruct in his Letter to Egerton (1839), had similar reservations: meeting Madden in Rodd’s bookshop ‘he condemned in no very measured terms’ Halliwell’s editions of Lydgate’s minor poems and the Coventry mysteries. Presumably he shared Madden’s opinion that Halliwell ‘ought to go to school again, before he puts his name on the title page of [another] book’ (Madden Diary, 9 August 1841). Madden never came around to Halliwell at all, but Dyce eventually mellowed,14 and such prickly response to Halliwell’s youth, arrogance, and prolixity wore itself out as the years passed. Halliwell himself learned to muffle his indignation,15 and by his mid-twenties he exhibited far more maturity in his personal dealings, winning affection and respect from associates in a broad range of antiquarian fields—the history of science, philology, and archaeology, as well as literature and British history. The significant deviations from grace—his life-long estrangement from his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Phillipps, and the revelations about the manuscripts stolen from Trinity College—belong to a somewhat later period, and Halliwell somehow overcame both; in 1839–40, however, his star was ascending, and enough of those colleagues who mattered seemed to like him or trust him. Collier probably first met James Orchard Halliwell on or before 14 February 1839, when the young man became ‘F.S.A.’, a dignity that had cost Collier twenty-two more years of age to attain. Both attended meetings of the Camden Society in 1839, when Halliwell was ‘sorry to see ‘‘Kemp’s Nine Daies Won-

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14. See Spevack 1996b. 15. Shrill and rather silly at first: ‘I am sure I must be the most good-natured person living, or I should quarrel with nearly every antiquary under the sun. Hardly a day passes, but what I am assaulted with some insult or another’, etc., etc., including a letter ‘received the other day’ from ‘a narrow-minded literary quack’ (unnamed) who ‘calmly stated, that no person under age should allow his name to appear in print!’; Letter to Egerton, ‘Postscript’, p. 13.


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der’’ proposed for publication’ (Collier had done so, on 21 March), commenting caustically that ‘its Editor [Alexander Dyce] could have chosen many things so much more suitable to the objects of the Society: it would be desirable to transfer it to the pages of the ‘‘Mirror’’ ’. Dyce can hardly have been amused, but was he the ‘honourable and learned Member of your Society’, who ‘with more truth than kindly feeling, lately taunted me’, being ‘but ill-disposed to pay attention to the suggestions of a boy under nineteen’? Halliwell brought on this jibe, he told Egerton sanctimoniously, ‘when, in the purest innocence, and certainly with the best intention, I ventured to point out a most egregious and nepial [sic] error in one of his recent publications’ (Letter to Egerton, p. 10). Whoever the bully may have been, Collier apparently assumed that Halliwell meant the rebuke for himself—which of course does suggest that Collier might have thought or said something of similar force—and, hearing of Collier’s displeasure, Halliwell ‘wrote a letter to him, explaining that that passage at which he seemed vexed had no relation to him’. This quite sufficed, and le them better friends for the misunderstanding, as Collier told Thomas Wright on 25 October 1839. ‘He expressed uncommonly good feelings towards you’, Wright then informed Halliwell; ‘he says he likes you all the better because you say what you think, and are not afraid of anybody, and that it was shocking impudence to talk about your being too young. These were his own words or nearly. . . . He is a very excellent fellow, altogether.’ 16 A er the ruffling of feathers, personal relations between Collier and Halliwell remained reasonably warm, if warily so, during more than forty years’ contact and correspondence—this in spite of profound scholarly differences, voiced and unvoiced, and some sharpish book-selling practices on Halliwell’s part that would have terminated most friendships entirely.17 In April 1840 Collier accepted Halliwell’s invitation to serve on the council of the Percy Society with ‘great pleasure’; in June he applauded Halliwell’s ‘zeal [on Percy matters], excellent in itself, excellently directed’; and in July the older man would join the new Shakespeare Society ‘of course’, being ‘ready to be one of the council let who will be the others’.18 Earlier there may have been a slight hiccup over a newspaper puff that Halliwell audaciously requested for his Early History of Freemasonry in England, but while Collier boasted that he himself ‘never puffed myself, nor procured myself to be puffed in my life’, he supplied it at once.19 16. Thomas Wright to Halliwell, 26 October 1839, LOA 2/46. Halliwell’s Letter to Egerton is dated 11 August in the ‘Postscript’. 17. See Spevack 1996a. Halliwell’s assembly of incoming correspondence housed in the University of Edinburgh Library, some 15,000 letters bound in 300 volumes titled ‘Letters of Authors’, includes 358 letters from Collier over the period 1840–81; another 9 letters from 1861–65 are held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Records Office, Stratford-upon-Avon. 18. JPC to JOH, 11 April, 16 June, and 2 July, LOA 3/49, 1/13, and 1/16. 19. Marvin Spevack’s interpretation of this episode (1996a, p. 128) is more convincing than



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Halliwell’s close friend Thomas Wright (1810–77) was another new colleague of Collier, who may have dined with him as early as 1836.20 The son of a Yorkshire printer and local antiquary, Wright spent six years at Trinity, where his life-long intimacy with Halliwell commenced, before settling in London in 1836. Although Crabb Robinson assumed that ‘a moderate independence’ allowed Wright to indulge his literary appetites (HCR Diary, 6 August 1839), in fact Wright possessed no other source of income than his pen and occasional patronage: he made his living ‘by exploiting his genuine love of the Middle Ages, and his wide if inexact knowledge of them, in writing’, observed the historian of the Society of Antiquaries, a trifle snobbishly, ‘and in paid secretaryships of minor learned societies’.21 But the Percy Society, which Wright served as secretary-treasurer from 1844 to 1850, certainly did not pay its officers, and his brief secretaryship of the Camden Society (March–October 1838) was ‘honorary’; nor can the receipt of a dozen free copies of his publications explain why he wrote fi een books for the one, and seven more for the other. Initially a specialist in Anglo-Saxon and medieval history, Wright later took an interest in Elizabethan biography, Shropshire topography, and the history of caricature, and like Halliwell and Collier he remained ceaselessly productive, if never for the popular press.22 He was also one of the most prolific correspondents of a letter-mad age and milieu, although his surviving exchanges with Collier are mostly on book-club politics. One awkward moment between them involved Wright’s ‘anti-Catholic’ preface to an 1844 Camden Society volume, Lord Egerton’s strong objection to it, and Collier’s role as go-between, but there is no sign of a quarrel resulting. And in 1860, despite his own suspicions of Collier’s forgeries, and Madden’s urging him to come forward with the ‘inquisitors’, Wright held his peace: ‘I am anxious not to take any part myself in the discussion’, he told Madden, and while he offered, informally, an eccentric suggestion about erasures with acid in the Perkins Folio, he put nothing against his old confrère in print.23 William Chappell (1809–88) and Edward Francis Rimbault (1816–76), pioneers of the study of English folk-music and popular ballad- and dance-airs, Schoenbaum’s (1991, p. 284): clearly the exchange was good-natured, and the notice in the Morning Chronicle good-naturedly given. 20. Robinson refers to ‘a gentlemanly little man and scholar’ named Wright who was present, with Collier, at a dinner given by Edgar Taylor (HCR Diary, 3 December 1836); on 6 August 1839 he visited ‘Wright the A-S [i.e., Anglo-Saxon] scholar’. 21. Joan Evans 1956, p. 264; in his later years Wright became something of a tyrant at the society, whose fellows actually tried to refuse the gi of a bust of him, offered aer his death (Evans, p. 325). 22. DNB notes that the British Museum catalogue lists 129 titles under his name. 23. Wright to Madden, 12 and 17 March 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 178 and 208–09. Wright did, however, assist Halliwell in the writing of an anti-Perkins pamphlet in 1853.


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served on the original council of the Percy Society and were early contributors to its reprints.24 Chappell had been ‘at work’ organizing the society by May 1840, when Collier acknowledged his effort, and the two remained friendly for decades. Indeed Collier lent Chappell his ‘Hall Commonplace Book’, for a month, toward Chappell’s masterly Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855–59)25—the only occasion, to the best of our knowledge, when the forged ballad manuscript le Collier’s hands during his lifetime—and Chappell rewarded his trust with loyalty in the years of ‘inquiry’.26 Rimbault, whose special interest lay in ballads and their settings, took a somewhat more literary and bibliographical approach to his matter than Chappell; he also worked up useful editions of ephemeral prose by Dekker, Chettle, and others for the Percy Society, before concentrating exclusively on music. His secondary passion, like Collier’s, was collecting, and like Collier he drew on a precarious professional income, and the patience of his family, in assembling a notable library. But, more in Halliwell’s pattern, Rimbault at one period indulged his bibliophily at the expense of institutional shelves, removing a substantial number of books from the library of Christ Church, Oxford, in the early 1840s; and like Halliwell’s the s from Trinity College, Cambridge, many of Rimbault’s found their way into the British Museum.27 Contemporaries may have suspected his light-fingeredness, although the the s apparently remained undisclosed for a century. A puzzling and somewhat unpleasant satirical spoof on Rimbault’s collections, Catalogue of the Extensive Library of Doctor Rainbeau, F.R.S., F.S.A., A.S.S, &c. (1862), which Madden found ‘harmless enough’ though he was ‘unable to fathom [its] object’, ends darkly with an item that might otherwise seem pointless: ‘116 Sermon on an appropriate text, preached before the Law Judges, &c. ‘‘Thou shalt not steal’’ ’.28

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24. An appreciation of Chappell, whose ‘researches were amazingly thorough, [and] his standard of scholarship exceptional for its day’, is in Simpson 1966, pp. xv–xvii; for Rimbault, see A. Hyatt King 1975, pp. vii–ix. 25. Writing to Madden on 10 February 1860, Chappell said that the loan had taken place ‘six years ago’; he took ‘copious extracts’, passing on at least one ballad to Frederick Fairholt and others to E. F. Rimbault (BL Egerton MS 2847, fols. 105–06). A date of 1854, however, does not fit with Rimbault’s 1851 publication of two of the ‘Hall’ pieces in his Little Book of Ballads, and the loan in fact probably took place in early 1851: see A68. 26. Not quite blind loyalty, although he took the trouble to congratulate Collier for his reply to Hamilton’s first accusations in 1859 (Chappell to JPC, 10 May 1859, Furness Collection). In his long account of the loan to Madden (1860) he was curious about what Hamilton would say in his book, ‘for I entertained no suspicion of the genuineness [of the Hall MS] at the time’. ‘At the time’ is the crux. 27. See Hiscock 1939; the lesson seems to have been all but lost on Christ Church, which suffered another respectable musicologist to repeat the exercise in 1994–95. 28. Madden recorded the gi on 30 June 1863; he did not name (and perhaps did not know) the author. The spoof ridicules the pursuit of popular ephemera, but also satirizes Rimbault per-



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Rimbault’s energy in behalf of the Percy Society was unquestioned, however. From 1840 to 1843 he acted as secretary, and much of his early interaction with Collier concerned society business, especially difficulties with ‘indecent’ text, an ongoing problem for editors of early squibs. In one such crisis (see below) he and Chappell took Collier’s side, and Collier remained appreciative. They lent each other rare books and manuscripts and exchanged publications, Collier at Christmas 1850 presenting to Rimbault a copy of the Bridgewater Catalogue, as the ‘only one’ he had le .29 Earlier in that year Rimbault had dedicated his Musical Illustrations of Bishop Percy’s Reliques to Collier, ‘whose knowledge of ancient poetry and ballad literature is only equalled by his willingness to impart it to others’; and John reciprocally described Rimbault as ‘a very industrious antiquary, and a capital judge of old music, possessing great learning regarding our old popular street ballads and chap-books’.30 Rimbault, like Chappell, was duped by Collier’s Hall Commonplace Book, one of whose spurious ballads he published in 1851, and perhaps by a list of otherwise unknown dancetunes written (he told Madden in 1862) ‘apparently in an old hand’, but about which an expert friend ‘expressed considerable doubts’. Still, much to Madden’s disappointment, Rimbault followed the example of Chappell and Wright in abstaining from comment in print. He ‘quietly discarded Mr C.’s contribution to his work’, Madden recorded, but declined ‘to expose the transaction’ (Diary, 8 March 1862). Among Collier’s new crop of associates in the three book clubs, John Bruce too proved wonderfully loyal over the long term. If anyone deserves to be singled out as founder of the first one, the Camden Society, it would be Bruce (1802–69), its first treasurer, and the editor of the first volume published. Another lawyer turned antiquary, Bruce began his literary career in middle age, but he edited a great deal of Tudor and Stuart historical correspondence in his three active decades, including some fi een more Camden Society books and the Calendar of State Papers Domestic for the reign of Charles I. He was a pillar of the mid-century Society of Antiquaries, succeeding Collier as treasurer

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sonally. A. Hyatt King, who included it as an appendix in his 1975 reprint of Rimbault’s sale catalogue of 1877, found it ‘odd that the catalogue contains so many items of little direct relevance to his library’, and suggested that it might reflect ‘the eccentricities of the nineteenth century collector of music in general’; but this is surely not so: many of the sallies are obscure, but it would appear that Rimbault by 1862 was near-sighted and contentious, proprietary about the biography of Handel, concerned with borrowings and ‘plagiaries’ of melodies or musical ideas between composers, and apt to complain about his recognition and rewards. There is also some suggestion of his profiting personally from benefit concerts and public subscriptions to do with the Handel Monument in London (item 43), and the clear hint in the terminal item of larceny. 29. On the actual number remaining at Collier’s death, see A27a. 30. JPC to W. B. D. D. Turnbull, 20 January 1850, EUL MS La.IV.17.


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in 1849, and was principally responsible for keeping the membership dues at a level tolerable to poor scholars; and while he was never formally associated with the Public Record Office or the British Museum, his familiarity with both institutions, and his contributions to their evolving manuscript catalogues, made him virtually a member of staff.31 Hence his expertise and authority in the area of disputed documents were of special importance to Collier (Bruce successfully vindicated the authenticity of the Paston letters in 1865, and once addressed special attention to a fabrication imposed on the Camden Society),32 as was his persistent faith in his old friend’s honesty. Affection and well-meaning brighten Bruce’s correspondence with Collier, from early days, when he put himself out over a Camden Society project on miracle plays, to his gentle and wise admonition that Collier ‘spare Dyce’ during the Perkins controversy, a letter long kept by Collier’s descendants: ‘May God bless you, my dear friend’, it concludes, ‘and guide you rightly.’ 33 Collier for his part informed Bruce of Bridgewater House documents relevant to Bruce’s Star Chamber researches,34 and when in 1841 ‘the Duke of Devonshire has lent me all his Shakespeares’, it was Bruce whom Collier in high spirits invited to view them, with Amyot, at his Brompton Square house.35 And in 1850–51 Bruce, in his capacity as adviser to John Gough Nichols and the Gentleman’s Magazine (‘the last of the ‘‘learned’’ editors’, the Athenaeum obituary called him), opened the pages of that venerable organ to Collier at ten shillings a page. In twenty-four months Collier published no fewer than twelve semi-popular articles there, on Sidney, Drayton, Ralegh, Lodge, Bishop Hall, and broadside ballads of the Restoration; but a er Bruce’s departure, at the beginning of 1852, no more appeared.36 ‘I never saw a fault in him’, wrote Collier of Bruce in 1869, ‘unless it were, in my case, Tantum infelicem nimium dilexit amicum.’ 37 The medievalist William Hunt (DNB, 1886) described Bruce as ‘a 31. See Joan Evans 1956, pp. 267–68; and Cantwell 1991, pp. 4–5. 32. ‘Inquiry into the Genuineness of a Letter Dated February 3rd, 1613, and signed ‘‘Mary Magdaline Davers’’ ’, Camden Miscellany 5 (1864), item VII; Bruce concluded (p. 30) that the letter had been ‘put together by some one who had a knowledge of many things connected with the period in question, but whose knowledge was not deep enough or precise enough to enable him to concoct an antiquarian jeu d’esprit which should baffle investigation’. 33. Collier told J. W. K. Eyton in 1869, aer Bruce’s death, that ‘I have known him for more than 40 years’ (JPC to Eyton, 23 November 1869; bound in NYPL Berg Collection extra-illustrated copy of Kitton, Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil [1890], vol. 1, facing p. 14), but the earliest surviving letters between them (1839) are rather more formal than that, and it is more plausible to imagine the Camden Society as their first real theatre of acquaintance. 34. JPC to Bruce, 27 May 1839, FF MS 241. 35. JPC to Bruce, 19 February 1841, FF MS 242. 36. Bruce to JPC, 14 December 1849, announcing a return to old standards and seeking ‘good honest sensible attractive papers’; Folger MS Y.d.6 (10). 37. ‘He over-prized such a miserable friend’ (Virgil); JPC to Eyton, 23 November 1869. Eyton



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man of a noble simplicity of character . . . much beloved by all who worked with him’, an assertion that is easy to believe. John Bruce’s edition of BL Harl. MS 543, The Arrival of Edward IV in England, may claim the distinction of being the first Camden Society book, but John Payne Collier’s Kynge Johan, a Play in Two Parts, by John Bale (1838) followed closely upon it. Once mooted by Madden as a Roxburghe volume, a less inaccessible edition was no doubt desirable for what is, in a sense, the earliest English history play. Collier made the more modest claim that it ‘occupies an intermediate place between moralities and historical plays’, but as ‘the only known existing specimen of that species of composition of so early a date’, it ‘deserves the special attention of literary and poetical antiquaries’ (p. ix). Devonshire ‘with characteristic liberality’ permitted Collier to propose it for publication at the second organizational meeting of the society on 22 March 1838. John worked quickly indeed, for proofs were shown to the council on 19 April, although some questions remained open late in June, and the finished product was not circulated until the beginning of October.38 It is on the whole a better than adequate rendering of the text, especially given the difficult midsixteenth-century scripts, and some of the misreadings perpetuated in later editions would have been avoided if their editors had consulted Collier’s revised 1838 sheets.39 Of course it is ‘a good deal less than satisfactory’ by modern standards,40 and of course it lacks the text of the two leaves that W. S. Fitch kept back from Devonshire, but Collier appreciated that his manuscript was incomplete, and made a reasonable guess about its former collation. His introduction and notes are brief but pithy (‘some obscure allusions I have been unable to explain’, he admitted), and there is a refreshing absence of sniping at earlier critics. Devonshire having provided his ‘librarian’ with the material for one Camden Society publication, it perhaps behooved Collier’s new patron to furnish his next. As the society’s president, Lord Francis Egerton informed the first general meeting (2 May 1839) that ‘he had authorised Mr. Collier to select from amongst the inedited MSS. in his . . . Library the materials of a work to be published by the Society’, and in the event he also paid for their transcription and for the thirty-three facsimiles of autograph signatures that illustrate The had sent Collier an obituary of Bruce—possibly that in the Athenaeum for 6 November 1869, which makes a particular point of Bruce’s ‘gentle heart’. 38. He may already have transcribed some of the play, for immediately aer the purchase in 1832 he urged its publication, hoping to ‘associate my knowledge on the subject’; he sent Madden a query about the play on 26 June 1838 (BL Egerton MS 2841, fols. 314–15). 39. As pointed out by Barry B. Adams 1969, p. 18n.; see below, A29. 40. Adams 1969, p. 18.


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Egerton Papers.41 Collier’s task, if he did not himself copy out nearly five hundred pages of text as finally printed, lay in choosing 217 documentary ‘items’ from the Bridgewater House archives, and providing headlines and brief headnotes to each. Chronologically mustered, they range in date from 1499 to 1616, and in substance from a nugatory letter or two (Ralegh and Bacon are spotlighted) to series of interrelated manuscripts (criminal cases, examinations of recusants), with what royal and Privy Council correspondence one might expect from the Elizabethan Solicitor General’s papers, and those of his heirs. Few among these selections are in any sense literary, and such a formidably historical undertaking as The Egerton Papers represents a new departure for Collier, who four years earlier shrugged off all such materials in Heber’s collection, as ‘to me wholly uninteresting. The fact is that I care very little about anything but poetry & poetical antiquarianism, if I may so say.’ 42 A sense of duty to Egerton, if not to the Camden Society, may have prompted him, although the abundance of unpublished text must have at least seemed attractive, and the project took about a year to complete. Collier attempted nothing quite like it again until 1857, when a similarly untapped archive gave rise to The Trevelyan Papers, once again for the Camden Society. The significance of The Egerton Papers, and the quality of Collier’s editorial performance, may not immediately impress us—its novelties are minor—but the volume, the twel h and stoutest of the Camden Society’s early publications, can be said to prefigure many others in its long list. Selections of papers from the private archives of the Duke of Rutland (1842), Sir Harry Verney (1845, 1853) and Lady Willoughby de Eresby (Perth correspondence, 1845) soon followed, and more would ensue (part of the Savile Correspondence from Devonshire, Cecil papers from the Marquess of Salisbury, and the Trelawney, Trevelyan, and Sir Philip Egerton letters). John Bruce, who was to edit the Verney Papers, the Low Countries correspondence of the Earl of Leicester (1844), and a selection of royal letters from the Rev. Edward Ryder’s collection (1849), gave Collier’s sampler a respectful review in the Gentleman’s Magazine for October 1840. He called particular attention to a series of Harefield accounts at pp. 340–57, five documents listing expenses and gi s in connection with the royal visit of July–August 1602, and quoted ‘some observations’ upon them by Collier, ‘with the respect which is due to the first Shakespeare scholar of the day’. This visit had provided the excuse, it may be recalled, for the fabricated ‘Maynwaringes accompte’ recording a performance of Othello by Richard Bur-

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41. First Report (1839), bound with publication no. 5 (Thoms, Anecdotes and Traditions); third Report (1841), bound with publication no. 14 (T. C. Croker, Narratives . . . of the Contests in Ireland). 42. JPC to David Laing, 30 December 1835, EUL MS La.IV.17.



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bage’s company (New Particulars, pp. 58–59). In The Egerton Papers Collier published four such itemized accounts of household expenditures between 25 July and 2 August 1602, incurred during and immediately before Queen Elizabeth’s stay at Lord Ellesmere’s new seat. The first of these is for foodstuffs, presented by Thomas Sley and one Mr. Cowper; the third, from one Cowley, lists more food, wine, beer, tallow, soap, and the like, and bills for named servants; and the fourth, Sley’s again, details the formidable expenses of readying the kitchens, the dining room, ‘and other places about the house’ for the monarch and her vast entourage. Amongst these three quite genuine documents comes another, Arthur Mainwaring’s short and spurious record of ‘rewardes’ to—among others —‘vaulters, players and dauncers’ and ‘Burbidge’s players for Othello’ (pp. 342– 43); and in 1840 Collier went to bewildering lengths to downplay it. Although the performance of Othello is unquestionably, in literary terms, the high point of interest in the whole volume, no attention whatever was called to it in the headnote (p. 342), in Collier’s ‘Introduction’ and ‘Notes and Corrections’, or in the index under ‘Shakespeare’:43 one must simply light upon it halfway down p. 343, as John Bruce evidently did not.44 Of course Collier had made his full case for the record in New Particulars four years before, and would make it again in his Shakespeare of 1842–44; but for now, in a sober historical sourcebook, he clearly preferred to let others ‘discover’ it. What Bruce did single out for his readers was something that Collier also made much of, in the ‘List of Presents at Harefield’ (pp. 350–57) following the four household accounts. Two tall folio pages list contributions of foodstuffs made to Lord Ellesmere by eighty-seven helpful associates, neighbours, and friends, and no doubt guests as well. One such donor was Sir Thomas Lucie— seemingly Lucy of Charlecote Manor, Shakespeare’s boyhood nemesis—who gave one ‘Bucke’; and John seized upon this to contradict an old foe. Edmond Malone had discredited the hoary tradition of Shakespeare’s poaching deer from Sir Thomas by pointing out that there was no deer park at Charlecote, and that the old royal parklands of Fulbrook, also mooted as Shakespeare’s illicit haunt, were not acquired by Lucy in his lifetime.45 Collier now argued that to present ‘Bucke, j’ to Ellesmere, Lucy must needs have been ‘‘‘possessed’’ of deer’, at least at this date. In his Shakespeare (i:xcvii–xcviii) he would elaborate that argument, holding that Lucy ‘gave ‘‘a buck’’ because he had bred it himself ’, and ‘would hardly have exposed himself to ridicule by buying a buck for a present,

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43. It is listed under ‘Othello, performance of at Harefield’, but the notice is easy to miss. 44. Hannah Lawrence, the perceptive Athenaeum reviewer (29 August 1840, pp. 676–78) did remark it, but only in passing. 45. Boswell-Malone, ii:145–49. Fulbrook was in fact ‘disparked’ or unenclosed throughout the reign of Elizabeth; it came into the Lucy family as late as 1615 (see Schoenbaum 1975, p. 85).


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under the ostentatious pretence that it was of his own rearing’: if Malone had been wrong about the deer, so might he be about Shakespeare’s retaliatory ballad and whatever else followed. Bruce admired this little exegesis, but in 1840 Collier made one mistake that a closer reading of Malone (ii:146) would have spared him: Sir Thomas Lucy in fact died at Charlecote on 7 July 1600. The Sir Thomas at Harefield in 1602 was his son (1551–1605), and while it remains unclear where his buck came from, the inference about Sir Thomas the elder becomes rather less neat than Collier might have liked. While he appreciated the descent by 1844 (Shakespeare, i:xcviii: ‘it is most likely that [Lucy the younger] inherited [his deer] from his father’), he also repeated his conflation of father and son in a footnote, clearing it up only in 1858 (Shakespeare, i:73n.); along the way he also contrived to supply one more record of a ‘buck’ on the Lucy estates, this one ‘with an ill lyver and gretly corrupt’. Yet again was Malone put in his place, and the mid-sixteenthcentury letter that Collier published in 1852—never located, almost certainly a fabrication—‘tends’, he pronounced, ‘to confirm the opinion, that there is some foundation in truth for every tradition’.46 But the only evident forgery in The Egerton Papers is ‘Maynwaringes accompte’, with its Othello canard. The ‘List of Presents’ to Ellesmere is unexceptionable, Sir Thomas Lucy (the younger) and all, as are the three Harefield accounts rendered by Sley, Cowper, and Cowley. Yet all four of these, tarred with the Mainwaring brush, have been regarded as forgeries by their very possessors since 1910, needlessly.47 A third Camden Society project of Collier’s, though long contemplated and far more suited to him than The Egerton Papers, proved abortive. In the first volume of HEDP, and in the five privately printed miracle plays of 1835–36, John had staked critical and editorial claims to the fi eenth-century English scriptural drama, and his authority had been acknowledged by the earliest anthologist of ‘miracle-plays or mysteries’, William Marriott, in 1838. Perhaps Marriott’s compliments inspired Collier to confirm his commitment, for when in October 1839 Halliwell approached the Camden Society with a proposal to edit the Ludus Coventriae (or ‘N-Town’ plays), secretary John Bruce turned at once to the veteran, who effectively pre-empted his young rival. Collier’s own intention, he told Bruce at once, was not ‘to take the MS. called the Ludus Coventriae, or any other, entire, but to treat the subject as a science, so as to shew in a single volume the origin, progress and perfection . . . of that species of dramatic composition called a Miracle Play. I would begin with the earliest & simplest, and 46. ‘Some Information Regarding the Lucies of Charlcot’, Archaeologia 35 (1853), 18–22; read 2 December 1852. See Schoenbaum 1971. 47. See A31 below. Chambers, ES, iv:67, properly distinguished the true from the faked; see also Jean Wilson 1986, following Chambers.



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so gradually come down to the latest & most complicated, until I shewed how & at what period this kind of dramatic representation merged itself & was lost in another species.’ He had wished also to propose to the council ‘in a subsequent year’ a second volume, ‘treating Moralities or Moral Plays in the same manner as I had treated Miracle Plays, and thus establishing and pointing out from first to last the advance of our national drama, until it became what it was, in the hands of our poets of the reign of Elizabeth’. From both these proposals he had hitherto abstained, he now revealed, ‘first, because I had a work in hand for the society [i.e., The Egerton Papers], & next because Mr. [J. H.] Todd of Dublin has a Miracle Play in progress & I feared our Subscribers might think we meant to be too dramatic’.48 ‘This scheme seems to be one which it would be a great pity to interfere with’, Bruce told Halliwell gently, ‘and I rather fear a separate edition of the Coventry Plays would do so—would it not?’ Halliwell’s reaction is unknown, but his edition—perhaps already under way—merely awaited another book club: it appeared as the fourth publication of the Shakespeare Society (1841), its preface egregiously flattering to Collier and his ‘excellent’ account of the cycle. The Rev. J. H. Todd, for his part, deferred almost meekly; by 2 May 1840 he ‘has very kindly offered [to the Camden Society] his transcript of the singular Miracle Play of Sir Jonathas’ [i.e., The Play of the Sacrament, from Trinity College Dublin MS F.4.20],49 and to the list of suggested publications was added a full-titled tender: ‘A Collection of Miracle Plays, from the date of the earliest existing specimen to the period when they were superseded by Moral Plays; including the unique Miracle Play of Sir Jonathas the Jew. To be preceded by a Dissertation shewing the manner in which the change from Miracle Play to Moral Play was gradually effected; by John Payne Collier, Esq. F.S.A.’ But nothing so grand saw the light for the Camden Society, or any other publisher, under Collier’s name. Perhaps for once John had too much on his plate: only a brief history of ‘miracles’ and moralities appears in his 1842–44 Shakespeare (i:xiii–xix), along with a summary of The Play of the Sacrament, whose full text remained unedited until 1861.50 Collier’s further involvement with the Camden Society reflected, inevitably, 48. JPC to Bruce, 16 October 1839 (FF MS 801), extracted with commentary in Bruce to JOH, 17 October 1839 (LOA 2/44). Collier in fact announced a projected series of three volumes at the council meeting of 7 November, saying that he would ‘at some future time’ make a formal proposal; the third volume was to have contained ‘A Collection, in a consecutive and connected series, of very early English Dramas . . . such as they existed anterior to the time of Shakespeare’. 49. Collier had asked Todd for a transcript of this on 18 May 1836, stressing that he could not afford to pay much for it: ‘although accidentally & remotely connected with one or two great people, I have not a farthing of money to throw away’; TCD MS 2213/23. 50. And not by any of the old crew of editors or clubs, but by Whitley Stokes, in Transactions of the Philological Society.


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his work on the fellow (and rival) Percy and Shakespeare Societies, and from 1840 to 1853 there were no more book-length publications for the Camden. He remained active on its council, however, even when awkward events made their demands: in February 1844 he was obliged to represent to his friend Thomas Wright the offence taken by Egerton toward Wright’s Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of the Monasteries (1843). ‘His Lordship objects to the tone and style of the Preface’, John wrote firmly but fairly, ‘in which you attack the Roman Catholics in no measured terms, and cry up the Protestants and Protestantism;51 and he calls upon me to mention the matter at the next Council. I shall do so but in terms, as far as I am concerned, to which you cannot object’, and indeed his letter is a model of forthrightness and tact.52 Egerton had but recently stepped down as president, and the council on 6 March 1844 upheld the complaint. Sir Frederic Madden helpfully proposed that in future a notice be printed with each publication, to the effect that the council was not responsible for its contents, and this was agreed; but Collier’s relations with Wright apparently suffered no setback. In April 1845 John succeeded Amyot as treasurer of the society—a position that carried with it an annual stipend of fi y guineas 53— and was characterized by his peers as ‘a zealous and attentive Member of the Council ever since the first formation of the Society’, who ‘has given ample evidence of his willingness to labour in its cause’. The labour lay in ‘editing two most valuable publications’, for the council knew well how much drudgery such volumes entailed, and how little glory or tangible reward their makers could hope for.54

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51. Wright had inter alia called the suppression ‘an event which I regard as the greatest blessing conferred by Providence upon this country since the first introduction of the Christian religion’, and stated that the monks had ‘confessed to vices from the very name of which our imagination now recoils’ (pp. v–vi). 52. JPC to Wright, 26 February 1844, FF MS 480; Egerton’s letter to Collier (23 February) is Folger MS Y.d.6 (106). From an early date the council had insisted that editors of society publications make sheets available as the work progressed, stipulating that ‘the Prefaces more particularly should not be worked off until they had received the sanction of Council’ (Minute Books, meeting of 6 June 1839). At the meeting of 6 March 1844 another protest was also brought forth, signed by fieen Roman Catholic members of the society; it was resolved that an apology should be offered to their spokesman, noting that ‘with the view to hasten the publication of the book’, the preface had not been vetted as usual. 53. Instituted in 1842, when John Bruce had expressed his ‘inability to continue any longer the performance of certain laborious duties incidental to the office of Treasurer’; Minute Books, meeting of 6 January. 54. Seventh Report, bound with publication no. 31, Verney Papers, ed. Bruce (1845).



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The Percy Society John’s heart was probably less in the Camden than the Percy Society, from the foundation of the latter in mid-1840. Its special aims, as he had told Halliwell, ‘answer my purpose exactly’, and for its first year he prepared more than half of the publications. The very first, Old Ballads from Early Printed Copies of the Utmost Rarity (September 1840), drew principally on his transcripts of Heber’s broadsides, now inaccessibly in William Miller’s collection, although two of the twenty-five came from the library of the Society of Antiquaries, and one other probably belonged to Collier himself.55 Heber also supplied the text for The Pain and Sorrow of Evil Marriage, from an Unique Copy (November 1840), and Miller’s current ownership went likewise unremarked. Two of Collier’s originals were gratefully acknowledged, however, as coming from Egerton’s library: The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow (May 1841)56 and Thomas Deloney’s Strange Histories (June 1841); and two more, William Rowley’s A Search for Money (October 1840) and The King and a Poor Northern Man (January 1841), were probably Collier’s own, though he never made a point about that. Traditional diffidence, rather than mystification (as with the Heber-Miller material), may account for his silence. All these lightly edited reprints—six of the Percy Society’s first ten—served their modest purpose in their own time, and some remain useful today: many readers since 1840 have taken delight in William Rowley’s A Search for Money, for instance, a still-unique Nashean pamphlet of 1609, whose only modern edition is still Collier’s. John Mitford reviewed three of them in the Gentleman’s Magazine for June 1841 (pp. 563–79), finding Old Ballads ‘the most curious and valuable production that the Percy Society has yet put forth’. Its twenty-five specimens were ‘selected with judgement, printed with accuracy, and illustrated with knowledge and care’, while A Search for Money ‘has been well and carefully edited’: this from a strict critic, and no blind Collier loyalist. The lapses in editorial honesty that we have come almost to expect are mercifully few here, if John’s erratic citation of sources is not considered deceit. But the very first words of textual commentary that he wrote for the Percy Society embody a fabrication, the more futile for being relatively gratuitous. Describing ‘The Maner of the World Now a Dayes’, a mid-sixteenth-century satirical ballad from Heber’s collection, Collier evoked the subscription (‘Finis, J. S.’), along with ‘internal evi-

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55. Collier in fact ‘located’ only two of the ballads, one as formerly Heber’s and one in the Antiquaries’ library: see A32. 56. To this Collier prefixed a reprint of a defective pamphlet from his own collection, The Merry Puck (1633?), which he had also reprinted ‘some years ago, merely for distribution among his friends’: see A28.


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dence’, in attributing it ‘to the humorous and severe pen of the celebrated john skelton’. But the unique broadside (Heber-Miller-Huntington, STC 17255) in fact ends merely ‘Finis’, without the stationer’s imprint that Collier also reported, ‘Imprinted at London in Flete Strete at the signe of the Rose Garland by W. Copland’. And indeed in the Heber description (Part IV, lot 383, no. VI) the absence of these terminal words is specifically remarked (‘At the end is the word ‘‘Finis’’, but without any printer’s name or date. It seems to have been too severe for any printer to venture his name to it.’), so that in the unlikely event that William Miller himself protested the misdescription of his surreptitiously transcribed broadside, Collier would have had to claim access to ‘another’ Heber example, now lost or mislaid. The somewhat cropped state of the original, as it survives, might have lent such testimony credence, which a proud owner might not wish to risk.57 Thus Collier’s first Percy Society publication began with a characteristic canard. In 1843 Alexander Dyce, who had long laboured toward an edition of Skelton, took the attribution on board with some evident reluctance (‘I have not been able to procure a sight [of the original, which] is now given from Old Ballads, 1840’), and in his notes all but disowned it: ‘In giving this poem a place among our author’s undoubted productions, I now apprehend that I deferred too much to the judgment of my friend Mr. J. P. Collier, who had recently reprinted it without suspecting its genuineness’.58 Even though ‘it may, a er all, be Skelton’s’, Dyce conceded, ‘it is only a rifacimento of [a poem] found in MS. Sloane, 747, fol. 88, and very difficult to decipher’, which he then printed at large (ii:200–03). Nor have any modern-day scholars of Skelton found Collier’s attribution persuasive, with or without the vexed initials.59 Collier’s initial enthusiasm for the Percy Society suffered a setback in 1841. Far more than the Camden, the Percy in its thirteen years of existence was plagued by literary dissent, as well as by internal politics and shaky finances.60

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57. Perhaps with such a retrenchment in mind, Collier did open up the possibility of there being ‘some earlier edition’ in the lifetime of Skelton. See Rollins 1958 and Livingston 1986, pp. 950 ff. 58. The Poetical Works of Skelton, ed. Dyce (1843), i:148, ii:199. As early as 1834 Dyce joked that he could not finish his life of Skelton without receiving a certain transcript from Collier, and wrote an epistolary skit in which ‘Sir John Collier’ finally receives, in 1850, the completed Skelton from Dyce, now ‘Bishop of Winchester’; Dyce to JPC, 4 June 1834, FF/K MS 590. 59. See Kinsman and Yonge 1967, p. 21. It should also be noted, however—if only as an example of the Collier-Dyce commentarial warfare—that the alternative version of the poem in BL Sloane MS 747, which Dyce implied he had discovered himself, was specifically cited by Collier before him (‘Sloane MSS. No. 747 . . . a different and briefer version’; Old Ballads, p. 1). For two more instances of forged text presented in Percy Society volumes see A35 and A39. 60. Never as widely appealing as the Camden Society, the Percy’s membership limit of 500



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Ironically—or perhaps inevitably—for a club devoted to popular sub-culture, controversy about the ‘decency’ or ‘delicacy’ of its publications exercised its council almost from the start. John himself worried that parts of his third contribution, The Pain and Sorrow of Evil Marriage, would prove unprintable, and anticipated similar problems with other texts;61 and while The Pain and Sorrow did apparently pass muster as designed, another project did not. The society had originally planned to issue Charles Bansley’s Treatise on the Pride and Abuse of Women (ca. 1550, yet one more Heber-Miller unique) as its third publication, but in September 1840 the council voted to replace it, for the moment, with The Pain and Sorrow. Collier, responsible for both alternative selections, also proposed a reprint of a third misogynist satire, Pleasant Quips for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen (1595), attributed by him to the anti-theatrical polemicist Stephen Gosson,62 which the society duly listed as ‘ordered for press’ in May 1841. Between June and October Quips was transcribed,63 edited, and set in type together with Bansley’s deferred Treatise, as a two-tract Percy volume for November; but on 14 October the council took umbrage or fright. John had in fact anticipated trouble, and had wrestled with the problem of obscenity when readying the texts for the printers: ‘I declared formerly that I would be no party to the mutilation of books’, he told Halliwell on 20 October, ‘but having placed Gosson’s & Bansley’s tracts in the list of proposed works, & finding a strong objection on the part of some members to coarse words . . . I le out some lines and terms in the reprints, rather to shew how much worse the blanks were, than the lines & terms which I had omitted’. This strategy, or Collier’s presentation of it at the meeting of 14 October, backfired disastrously: the council ‘without pause or time for consideration’ summarily voted to cancel the entire publication— text, notes, and preface.64 ‘It is my belief ’, John continued to Halliwell, ‘that if I had never said that

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rarely was even approached: aer nearly a year (May 1841) there were 332, rising to 358 in November. Smaller than hoped for membership and persistently tardy subscriptions kept the balance sheets unmanageably tight (just £3 5s. 6d. in the black in May 1841), and by mid-1845 the original commitment to a ‘volume’ each month was halved, probably occasioning some further defections. By 1850 the schedule of publication was erratic, and when the society was dissolved in April 1852 only 162 members ‘in good standing’ remained; they divided the final balance of £60 15s., each receiving 7s. 6d. 61. JPC to Rimbault, 17 July 1840 (private collection). 62. The attribution is based on the MS note ‘Auctore Stephen Gosson’ in the unique original at Dulwich College, an undoubted forgery: see A37. 63. E. F. Rimbault to John Adey Repton, 20 May 1841, Houghton Library MS bMS Eng. 1106.1 (a photocopy of the original letter, unlocated). Rimbault oversaw the transcription and arranged for a wood-engraving to be prepared, and he is identified (wrongly) as the ‘editor’ in the British Library catalogue and NCBEL. 64. JPC to JOH, 20 October 1840, LOA 10/10.


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some passages were indecent, and if I had never directed attention to those passages by the ‘‘rules’’ and asterisks, the two reprints would have passed without observation’. This is perhaps not unlikely, but in the event the council declared the work ‘unfit to be issued by the Society’,65 and its ‘sudden determination [Collier told Halliwell] . . . amounted to this—that I was unfit to be entrusted with the choice or editing of works for the Society’. Censure was in effect added to censorship, as ‘one or more members observed ‘‘This ought to be a lesson to us, not to permit any work to be put to press without the previous sanction of the Council’’. Those were the very terms used, and I own I felt annoyed, not to say hurt, that what I had done (however little) was treated with so little ceremony.’ John formally resigned from the council the next day,66 and although he returned to serve as its chairman in 1841–43 and 1845, and contributed four more publications over the next three years, the episode still rankled in 1844. Declining then to edit Westward for Smelts (1620), he informed Thomas Wright that ‘part of it is indecent in the Percy Council sense of the word’.67 By then the advocates of delicacy, championed by Lord Braybrooke—the ever-so-challenged editor of Pepys’s Diary—had pushed through a resolution codifying their stance, and even Dyce would have none of it: he too resigned from the council in mid1843, blaming ‘the Percy Asses . . . I mean Lord Braybrooke and another, who have determined to castrate the publications on account of indecency,—a determination at which Collier was, as well as myself, very indignant’.68 Unlike Collier, Dyce le the council for good, explaining his decision to Collier personally, ‘as it was at your desire that I became one of the Council . . . [and] I ought not to withdraw from that body without stating to you my reason for doing so’: ‘As almost all the pieces of wit and fancy written during the reigns of Elizabeth & James (to say nothing of earlier publications of that kind) are more or less tainted with indelicacy, the Percy Society will now be obliged either to forgo such republications entirely, or to put them forth mutilated & imperfect, and consequently, not worth a straw.’ 69 The immediate a ermath of the 1841 fracas was however more comic than fraught. Having chosen on 14 October to suppress ‘Gosson’ and Bansley, the council abandoned the already-printed copies—those with ‘rules and asterisks’, as provided by John to the meeting—to its own privileged few. Collier may have believed, perhaps wishfully, that upon its rejection ‘the whole impression was

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65. JPC to Rimbault, 15 October 1841 (private collection). 66. Ibid.; he had returned to the council by 13 December, when he attempted to pacify Halliwell, who had himself resigned in the meantime (LOA 10/43; cf. Spevack 1996a, p. 131). 67. JPC to Wright, 4 June 1844, FF MS 244. 68. Dyce to JOH, 20 September 1843, LOA 16/54. 69. Dyce to JPC, undated but probably July 1843, FF MS 743.



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given to me’, but at the next council meeting a bun-fight divided it. Thomas Wright reported to John, who did not attend, that ‘in the scramble at the Percy’ Halliwell obtained forty copies and Wright himself thirteen. John at once congratulated Halliwell on his coup, ‘the lion’s share & you are a lion’, while begging for a few extras, as ‘I do not want the thing to get about into all sorts of hands, however judicious you might be in the distribution’; two days later he added that ‘as the tracts have been suppressed I do not wish them to become common’, but he seems never to have repossessed much of the stock.70 Frederic Madden found the censorship of both texts (‘for their grossièreté’) unwarranted, but even more so the irregularity of their disposition: ‘I contend that the Council have no right to expend the funds of the Society in reprinting books, & then only reserving copies for themselves’ (Diary, 8 November 1841). He was mollified by a gi from Halliwell of both tracts, presumably from the council’s unmannerly sharing-out, and two more (‘bound’) from Collier himself at Christmas. The latter may have been ‘uncastrated’, like those sent to Dyce on 18 November.71 Neither version is now common, and clearly the society’s action in 1841 rendered all of them instantly collectible as curiosa.72 In 1865 (BARB, ii:215–17) John adverted with undiminished contempt to the ‘squeamish’ behaviour of the Percy Society, ‘when they cancelled the reprint of this curious and rare production’.73

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70. JPC to JOH, 14 and 16 November 1841, LOA 11/12 and 34/3. 71. See A42a–b. At about the same time Collier also contrived to restore a bawdy epigram and poem to his Percy Society edition of Deloney’s Strange Histories (June 1841), which Madden reported had been ‘cancelled’ by the society, ‘from a feeling of false delicacy’. According to Madden (Diary, 5 November 1841) ‘Mr C. . . . has caused a few copies of the condemned pages to be struck off, and gave me one of them, to make my copy of the reprint complete’: see A40. 72. We have noted two or three copies in mid-century auction sales, the ‘uncastrated’ aspect always signalled. A version of the texts untraced by us was reported by E. J. Howard (1942, p. xix), who described a copy or copies having two extra title-pages, one announcing the tract as ‘two pieces printed, but suppressed by the Society’ and giving a price of 15s., and the other indicating on the verso ‘Printed in Germany’: see A42a–b. 73. Another echo of the controversy occurs in Collier’s condescending review of an 1850 Percy Society publication, Poems and Songs Relating to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, edited by the ‘artist, not . . . author’ F. W. Fairholt (Athenaeum, 7 December 1850). In keeping with the society’s restrictions Fairholt had liberally employed ‘asterisks and omissions’, but ‘in his simplicity, he is really not aware of the meaning of several most unpardonable expressions which he has permitted to remain’ (Collier teases us by not specifying them, but ‘swive’, p. 3, is probably the word ‘which even etymologists feel themselves compelled to express by its Latin translation’). While secure in his contempt for many of the ‘excessively indecent’ poems, Collier admitted that ‘in republishing the productions of our forefathers . . . it will not do to be affectedly nice and morbidly squeamish’. The solution, he implied, was simply not to ‘select’ materials likely to seem offensive, but to publish them only as part of extended transcriptions: ‘language and points that may pass in a large accumulation of papers are made unnecessarily obvious and objectionable when they are put forward in small separate productions’. This, together with another ‘charge


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The decline in Collier’s activity for the Percy Society a er November 1841, like his diminished performance for the Camden a er 1840, stemmed largely from his new publishing commitments, above all to the new Shakespeare Society. But disappointment in his Percy colleagues, and lingering resentment of his treatment over ‘Gosson and Bansley’, may have had something to do with it too. Of six projects mooted in 1840–41, only three ever saw the light: an edition of the tale of Patient Grissel in rival prose versions; a reprint of Thomas Heywood’s A Marriage Triumph, on the Nuptials of the Prince Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth (1613); and a collection of Lyrical Poems, Selected from Musical Publications, between the Years 1589 and 1600. As early as October 1840 John had also projected ‘A Selection of Stories, Anecdotes, and Jokes from various Jest Books printed prior to the end of the reign of Charles I’, and this was listed by the society as a ‘suggested publication’ every year until 1847;74 editions of Ulpian Fulwell’s Art of Flattery and Thomas Lodge’s Diogenes in His Singularity were proposed in November 1841 and similarly repeated until dropped in 1847. From June 1844 to May 1850 ‘A Continuation of the Collection of Ballads, by J. Payne Collier, Esq., F.S.A.’ was on the books, and from 1847 to 1850 ‘A Selection from the Roxburghe Ballads now in the British Museum’, but neither title emerged under the society’s auspices. Collier did provide his History of Patient Grissel in February 1842, A Marriage Triumph in April, and one year later a reprint of the mid-sixteenth-century Harmony of Birds, from the unique text that Heber ‘before his death gave us permission to copy’.75 Lyrical Poems from Musical Publications, his last work for the Percy Society, appeared in November 1844, but a promised continuation, to include ‘the airs, to which they are to be sung’, never did. Despite his lessened editorial activity, John continued to serve on the Percy Society Council and to concern himself in its politics for several years. He was chairman in 1842–43 during a crisis over Halliwell’s performance as treasurer, and subsequently resigned—a common enough tactic in society machinations, as Marvin Spevack has remarked—before being wooed back.76 Precisely what

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that we lately made against the Percy Society,—that their works were carelessly and inadequately edited’, constituted Collier’s final estimate of the club he helped to establish. 74. Lot 300 in the JPC sale, ‘Jokes, where found, Manuscript’, may relate to this project. 75. This was now in W. H. Miller’s library, but before November 1840 in that of Sir William Bolland. 76. See Spevack 1996a, p. 131n. Halliwell had also resigned a year earlier, and returned only aer Collier and Rimbault pleaded with him for a month (JPC to JOH, 13 and 15 December 1841, and Rimbault to JOH, 13 January 1842, LOA 10/43, 35/8, and 24/8). Collier’s solicitation is almost passionate: ‘I shall miss you most grievously, for I always look up to you as a thorough-going antiquarian, who will support me in the right against all pretenders’ (13 December), and ‘what will we do without you . . . I know not’ (15 December).



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had occurred is unclear now, but Madden, who loathed Halliwell, reported a ‘stormy discussion’ at the council meeting on 8 December 1842, concerning the younger man’s ‘shameful (not to say swindling) conduct . . . about money’, and his absconding with certain transcripts ‘paid for and belonging to the Society, & which he refuses to give up—saying in a letter to Mr. Chappel [sic], ‘‘he would see the Society damned first’’ ’. Thomas Wright, Halliwell’s loyal lieutenant, was absent, but he and Halliwell’s friends seem later to have calmed matters down, so much so that Madden himself resigned from the council (Diary, 9 February 1843). And Collier, who had wished to give up the chair the preceding November,77 before the fracas, stayed on instead while ‘the discussions with Mr Halliwell were pending’.78 He finally stood down in August 1843, but was chairman again for a year in 1845, with Halliwell back on the council. Meanwhile Dyce too had resigned (over Braybrooke and the ‘Percy Asses’), and Rimbault, the longsuffering secretary, disappears from both the council and the membership list in 1844. A er 1846 Collier’s name too is absent from the fi een-member council. In its last years Thomas Cro on Croker (1798–1856), the diminutive Irish folklorist and champion of antiquarian societies, took on much of the management of the contentious and underfunded Percy, and may have helped to prolong its existence. His valedictory notice, at the dissolution of the society in February 1852, blamed its delinquent subscribers, many of whom had been bellicose or evasive when dunned, but he quoted with approbation a letter from one thoughtful and paid-up loyalist: ‘I think it is o en well for such Societies to have a limit to their existence. They generally begin by publishing valuable works which are much wanted, but a er some time go on publishing simply because they are in existence; then subscribers become tired of paying, receiving, and reading. I do not say this by way of finding any fault with what the Percy Society has done: but it seems to be the lot of such bodies in general. Could we end with our hundredth number, or twel h year, or some fixed period, I think we might do so with advantage.’ 79 The final councillors included Braybrooke (still president), Wright (secretary and treasurer, 1844–48), Halliwell (secretary, 1849–50), and Croker (chairman, 1848–50, treasurer 1851). There was no chairman in 1852. John Payne Collier was no longer even a member, on the evidence of the last published list.80

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77. JPC to JOH, 14 November 1842, LOA 23/14. 78. JPC to Rimbault, 2 August 1843, tendering his resignation (private collection). 79. Report Made by the Treasurer of the Percy Society to a Special General Meeting, on the 20th February, 1852, p. 3. 80. In a letter of 23 January 1855 to T. J. Pettigrew, who had asked for a copy of The Pain and Sorrow of Evil Marriage, Collier said: ‘The fact is that, some months ago, I could easily have complied with your wish; but I sold all my needless books, at Sotheby’s, and now my only copy of ‘‘the Pain’’ &c. is the one I have had bound up with my incomplete set of the Percy Publns. I


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The Shakespeare Society Although Collier has been widely credited with forming or organizing one of the most influential of all book clubs, the Shakespeare Society, it was Halliwell who first broached the idea to John on 2 July 1840, and procured his enthusiastic participation.81 Halliwell mentioned only one of his coadjutors, Frederick Guest Tomlins (1804–67), a journalist and publisher’s clerk known to Collier only from his recent ‘very clever & judicious book’, A Brief View of the English Drama (1840).82 Tomlins may indeed have conceived the whole enterprise on his own (DNB calls him ‘the founder’), although in September Thomas Amyot told John Bruce that the (plural) ‘Projectors of the Scheme’ included ‘some names in the list [of proposed council members] hardly known to me, nor perhaps to you’,83 a claim that could hardly apply to Halliwell or his fidus Achates Thomas Wright, whom Collier remembered as having ‘a good deal to do with it’.84 Perhaps the more obscure projectors included George Lillie Craik (1798–1855), the Scottish critic and friend of Charles Knight and Douglas Jerrold; or William Harness, the Shakespeare editor who had so admired ‘The Inchanted Island’ in March 1840. But as Collier recollected long a erward, it was he who effectively assembled the original council: ‘I was able to collect immediately round me about a dozen or fi een members who formed a Committee . . . . All were zealous, I may say enthusiastic’;85 and Amyot, writing to Bruce in 1840, confirmed this account: ‘I suspect [the society’s projectors] could not have been enabled to carry it into effect, if they had not called in Collier’s assistance to complete the List deleted Cabinet’. have not one of any of the later issues, since I ceased to be a member of the Society’ (Beinecke Osborn Pettigrew MSS). Lots 1245–54 in the anonymous sale (23 January 1854) contained 165 Percy pamphlets, all but 17 of them Collier’s own author’s copies. 81. Two weeks earlier Collier had written to Halliwell, regarding ‘our new Society, the Percy’, that ‘I like to see your zeal, excellent in itself, excellently directed. It is much better employed in making new coats than in picking holes in old ones. My own, I know, is too threadbare to endure much rubbing, and therefore I feel some interest for others who have much better covering, than I can boast. If you wish to build a house, build it of new materials: the ruins & rubbish of bad reputations will never make a substantial fame’; 16 June 1840, LOA 1/13. 82. Tomlins there referred to Collier as one ‘to whom all lovers of the drama and of literary antiquities are deeply indebted’, terming his ‘most excellent’ HEDP essential for anyone interested in the literary history of the period covered (pp. 13, 23). As George Byron Whittaker’s literary assistant it was probably Tomlins who in January 1841 arranged the contract between Collier and Whittaker for Collier’s edition of Shakespeare. 83. 28 September 1840, FF MS 535. 84. JPC Memoirs, p. 143: ‘I forget exactly who was the originator of [the society]—perhaps Amyot, but Thomas Wright . . . had a good deal to do with it’. But in fact Amyot was himself recruited to the council by Collier, or so he told Frederic Madden on 22 September 1840; BL Egerton MS 2842, fols. 141–42. 85. JPC Memoirs, p. 144.



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John soon brought in Amyot, the most selfless and dependable of allies, and a grudging, not to say truculent Alexander Dyce: ‘Collier has instituted another literary Society, to be called the Shakespearean’, Dyce informed Mitford; ‘& though I violently set my face against it, he forced me to become one of the Council. I thought it particularly unnecessary, as the Percy Society professes to print the very same kind of works which this new institution sets forth in its prospectus.’ 86 Originally it was proposed to limit the council to fi een members (‘the Camden number’), including Collier, Dyce, Halliwell, Wright, Amyot, Tomlins, Harness, and Craik, along with the new Shakespeare editor Charles Knight, the playwright and miscellanist Douglas Jerrold, and the redoubtable Charles Wentworth Dilke, now editor of the Athenaeum. Topping these up by the end of September 87 came the politician Thomas Peregrine Courtenay (author of Commentaries on the Historic Plays of Shakespeare [1840]), Thomas Noon Talfourd, William Macready (a long-term enthusiast), Joseph Hunter, and Sir Frederic Madden, whom Amyot, not Collier, was assigned to invite.88 That brought the number to sixteen, subsequently increased to twenty, and at last to twenty-one: John Bruce, warmly solicited by Amyot, joined up, as did the retired Drury Lane comedian Charles Mayne Young (1777–1856); but Sheridan Knowles and J. R. Planché did not, the latter declining even to subscribe.89 The remaining places were taken by Collier’s old friends William Ayrton (1777– 1858, the musical writer and Morning Chronicle colleague) and the farceur James Kenney, by John Bruce, and by Thomas Campbell, an immediate disappointment.90 From this directorate of twenty-one, announced in the Athenaeum of 24 October 1840,91 the sensitive Joseph Hunter almost immediately withdrew; Collier later lamented to Halliwell that Hunter ‘perhaps . . . does not like some of the members of it; but I think he is wrong to let any personal feelings inter86. Undated letter, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.101 (49). The Madden proof prospectus shows that Dyce was a council member by 22 September 1840. Aer his withdrawal from the Percy Council in 1843 Dyce wrote nothing for them; he refused to edit Gosson for the Shakespeare Society when asked by Collier in November 1840, but did edit two other works for it (Timon and Sir Thomas More). 87. According to letters from Amyot to Madden (26 September, BL Egerton MS 2842, fols. 245–46) and to Bruce, 28 September. 88. Madden Diary, 27 September 1840; and Amyot to Madden, 22 September. Amyot also brought in Courtenay, who had chastised Collier publicly during his 1819 House of Commons ‘scrape’. 89. JPC to JOH, 19 January 1842, LOA 24/1. 90. Campbell resigned in the first year both from the council and the society: ‘He is one of those who think that mines of information have yet been unexplored and that we ought to discover wonders unheard of respecting Shakespeare’, wrote Collier to Halliwell. ‘Let him be one of the discoverers’; 8 January 1841, LOA 10/20. 91. The list duplicates that on the printed prospectus sent by Tomlins to Madden on 13 October 1840, BL Egerton MS 2842, fols. 255–56.


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fere with the attainment of a good object. . . . If I were he, I would stand on my own learning & reputation and not care one straw for any member of the Council, however dislikeable.’ 92 By early November Hunter’s place as the twenty-first member was taken by Henry Hart Milman, a distinguished choice, but an old sparring-partner of Collier’s.93 As its organization and composition suggest, the first council of the Shakespeare Society would prove easier for Collier to work with than the austere ‘Camden Fi een’ or the fractious ‘Percy Twelve’. From the beginning of its formal meetings John served as director—a title he never relinquished—with Tomlins as secretary and initially Dilke as treasurer,94 and changes in its membership never seemed to affect his implicit leadership. Resignations under Law IX (five council members to stand down each year) generally became permanent, and from the first council six names were erased in one year. Talfourd, Jerrold, Madden, Kenney and Young, and the dissatisfied Campbell were replaced by three of Collier’s nominees (Barron Field, W. J. Thoms, Henry Hallam), two of Halliwell’s (his crony T. J. Pettigrew and J. R. Planché a er all), and the playwright John Oxenford.95 The conventional and rather overpopulated superstructure of titled patrons—a president, the silver-fork novelist Marquess of Normanby, and four, later five or six lordly vice-presidents—in all likelihood meant next to nothing in the running of the society, although Lord Francis Egerton and the ubiquitous Braybrooke (vice-presidents) may have taken their responsibilities seriously enough. Egerton, clearly Collier’s choice, became president in 1848. The prospectus that Collier received from Halliwell in July 1840 he found mildly embarrassing—‘there is a little too much ‘‘flourish of trumpets’’ ’, he remarked, although ‘over-zeal is rather to be praised than blamed in such a matter’ 96—and it probably benefited from re-casting or an active blue pencil. Proofs were transmitted to Madden on 22 September and 13 October (by Amyot and

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92. JPC to JOH, 8 January 1841, LOA 10/20. Hunter’s name is absent from an undated prospectus inserted in Madden’s correspondence between letters of 29 October and 10 November 1840 (BL Egerton MS 2842, fols. 265–66), and on 8 November Collier spoke to Halliwell of ‘Hunter’s reluctance’, though admitting ‘he may have good reasons for retiring from active duties’ (LOA 3/32). 93. The nomination was Amyot’s, but Collier unreservedly approved; JPC to Bruce, 8 November 1840, FF MS 807. 94. Dilke was replaced aer a year by Peter Cunningham. ‘Director’ is not indicated in the lists of councillors prefixed to each volume, but appears in the annual reports. The titles ‘President’ and ‘Vice-President’ were essentially honorific; the director was effectively in charge. 95. For some account of this re-shuffle, see Spevack 1996a, p. 131; a table of all fiy-nine council members with terms of office is given by Wagonheim (1980, pp. 294–99) but contains several errors. 96. JPC to JOH, 2 July 1840, LOA 1/16.



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Tomlins), to John Bruce (by Amyot, 28 September, asking for its immediate return as ‘I have no other & Collier not having one le ’), and to David Laing on 22 October (by Collier). Dilke published part of one version in the ‘Our Weekly Gossip’ column of the Athenaeum for 25 July, and the final form in extenso on 24 October. There, the prospectus dedicated the society to ‘the purpose of collecting materials, or of circulating information, by which [Shakespeare] may be thoroughly understood and fully appreciated’; it hoped to inculcate widely ‘a spirit of inquiry and examination, the result of which may be the discovery of much curious and valuable information, in private hands and among family papers, of the very existence of which the possessors are not at present aware’; and it promised to publish ‘the best’ of the unedited pre-Restoration dramatic manuscripts, along with reprints of rare tracts ‘by such prolific authors as Nash, Greene, Harvey, Dekker, Breton, Munday, Rowlands, Riche, [John] Taylor, Jordan, &c.’ (so that ‘in time complete sets may thus be afforded of [their] scattered publications’), and by ‘others who wrote for or against theatrical representations in their comparative infancy’, such as ‘Northbrooke, Gosson, Lodge, Rankins, Whetstone, Stubbes, [and Thomas] Heywood’. That the society stood by or surpassed this demanding agenda, and in thirteen years published much of what Collier and his earliest associates projected, was a remarkable achievement in an era of editorial overcommitment. The initial list of works suggested ‘for immediate publication’ included Gosson’s School of Abuse, Heywood’s Apology for Actors, Dekker’s play Patient Grissel, Henslowe’s Diary and Account Book, The Coventry Plays, Sir Thomas More, and (by early November) The Memoirs of Edward Alleyn.97 A tantalizing ‘Collection of all the Documents which have Reference to Shakespeare’s Life’, including the will (edited by Madden, with facsimiles of the signatures) and the marriage license (edited by Bruce), was announced as ‘in the press’ in a prospectus issued with the Alleyn Memoirs (February 1841), but never materialized. The Shakespeare Society engaged a commercial printer (Frederick Shoberl the younger, Collier’s old regular) and a book-selling agent (Thomas Rodd), priced its subscriptions at £1 a year, and by November had filled 168 of its 1,000 places; the first annual Report, issued 26 April 1842, put the membership at 716. Having perhaps learned from the Percy Society’s struggles with self-imposed deadlines, the society offered no promise of frequency in publication, though volumes averaged six a year through 1844, and were cloth-bound, like those of the Camden. Not that standards of production were of paramount concern: Collier told Laing in March 1841 that ‘type and paper . . . are secondary mat97. Prospectuses of September–November 1840; BL Egerton MS 2842, fols. 255–56 and 265–

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66.


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ters’, though ‘we hope to improve’;98 but there is no real sign of improvement in subsequent volumes, and the cloth casings were always cheap and fragile. One provincial subscriber, the Ipswich marchand amateur William Stevenson Fitch, found the physical product unappealing: ‘The execution’, he told Dawson Turner, ‘would disgrace any County printer’.99 Collier’s initial literary contribution to his new favourite society comprised— as for the Percy but five months before—a wealth of appropriate text. Four of the first five volumes issued (all in 1841) were his, ranging from slender but thoughtfully edited reprints of prose, verse and drama, to a 220-page biography based largely on unpublished sources, The Memoirs of Edward Alleyn; over the next twelve years he was personally responsible for twenty-one of the Shakespeare Society’s forty-four individual publications,100 plus the lion’s share of contributions to four volumes of Papers (1844–49); but even by these standards his output in 1841 seems phenomenal. The very first society book—perhaps chosen to show how substantial its offerings would be—was Memoirs of Alleyn, which apparently took Collier no more than four months to complete, in the midst of all other professional and para-professional duties. It owed its urgency to Collier’s discovery of new manuscript resources at Dulwich College, or at least his appreciation of how much material, beyond what he had used in HEDP, remained unexploited in those chaotic archives. Dulwich was of course also the home of the famous diary of Alleyn’s father-in-law Philip Henslowe, a proper edition of which figured prominently in the society’s original plans, and John’s return there in 1840 came principally in aid of that project. What he found, and how he made use of it in three major but deeply flawed books for the Shakespeare Society, requires a separate account.

Dulwich College Revisited: The Alleyn Papers Collier had first visited the library at Dulwich in the spring of 1830, when Henslowe’s diary provided valuable evidence for HEDP, as well as the context for six

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98. 10 March 1841, EUL MS La.IV.17. 99. 11 April 1841, TCC O.14.28 (11). Several letters to Rodd from subscribers, part of a large collection acquired by T. P. Barton and bound up in four volumes as ‘Member’s Autographs’ (BoPL G60.5), mention defects in publications, and many more complain of slow delivery to the provinces; cf. Wagonheim 1980, pp. 55–62. 100. We may compare Halliwell with eight, and Wright, Dyce, Laing, and Barron Field with two each; no one else contributed more than one, and many of these projects involved considerable input from Collier, as the editors regularly testify. The sole 1841 book not by Collier, for instance, Halliwell’s edition of The Coventry Mysteries, cites Collier more oen than any other authority, and finds it ‘unnecessary’ to reiterate the general account of mystery plays given in the ‘excellent’ HEDP (p. vi).



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spurious adumbrations. Among proposals for ‘immediate publication’ in the September 1840 prospectus of the Shakespeare Society was ‘The Diary and Account Book of Philip Henslowe, between the years 1590 and 1610 . . . by permission of the Master, Warden, and Fellows’, and wisely so, for it was by far the most important manuscript relating to the Elizabethan stage not yet fully in print. John’s name had not been attached to the project initially, for (as he told Dyce on 30 November) ‘variety gives confidence & therefore it was that I struck out my name as Editor’, but he was in fact already ‘at work upon it, & it will come out as my undertaking’.101 The discovery of a large body of additional papers, however, pertaining to Henslowe and Edward Alleyn and ‘including important and interesting particulars respecting Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Massinger, Marston, Dekker, and other Dramatists of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I’, sidetracked work on the Diary, and inspired Collier to design in its stead ‘an extended biography of the Founder of Dulwich College’ (Memoirs of Alleyn, p. v). This reached prospectus form only in November,102 as the last in a list of eight new ideas; but by 5 January it was ‘very nearly ready’,103 and it had been printed, bound, and distributed by the end of February. Collier’s presence at the south London school, no short stroll from Brompton Square or the offices of the Morning Chronicle, must have put some strain on his other professional and social activities at the end of 1840, unless—like his predecessor, Edmond Malone—he was able to borrow the material en bloc for study at home.104 Memoirs of Edward Alleyn is a very substantial compilation, printing at large or in toto some seventy-five Dulwich documents, ranging from brief accounts and memoranda to texts of two and three pages in small type, in addition to dozens of extracts from Henslowe’s and Alleyn’s diaries, and from printed and manuscript sources outside Dulwich—all this within a somewhat disjointed narrative framework, treating Alleyn’s life and milieu. Collier’s first ambition was to register the ‘particulars’, and the Memoirs is notable for publishing much that was new—a good letter of Thomas Dekker, warrants concerning the Rose and Fortune theatres, details of Ben Jonson’s fatal duel with Gabriel Spencer (whom Collier correctly identified), and above all Alleyn’s ‘part’ of Orlando, in

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101. 30 November 1840, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (12). 102. Undated version, inserted between letters to Madden of 29 October and 10 November, but printed aer Hunter’s resignation from the Council. 103. JPC to W. O. Hunt, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (134). 104. This seems unlikely, for while Collier was allowed to take home Henslowe’s diary on 12 October 1840 (for two months, which in fact stretched to five years), there is no record at Dulwich of his ‘signing out’ anything else. The Diary project had been specifically approved for the society by ‘the Master, Warden, and Fellows’, and as a single volume its loan might seem secure; but the miscellaneous papers were badly catalogued, and had within living memory caused a great deal of trouble to retrieve from Edmond Malone.


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Robert Greene’s play Orlando Furioso. This remains the only extant actor’s script of the Elizabethan era, and John conjectured wistfully that ‘Alleyn’s papers at Dulwich College [may have] originally contained many such portions of old plays, in the performance of which he was principally engaged’ (Memoirs, p. 8). Biographical interpretation, when not corrupted by fictions, is relatively sketchy, but Edward Alleyn’s second wife was (correctly) identified as Constance, the daughter of John Donne, and there is some wisdom in the insight (p. 97) that Alleyn perhaps never ‘liked his profession’ of player.105 The account of the actor’s later years, business success, and benefactions is ‘nearly all new’ (as Collier told W. O. Hunt), and well set-out, and the character of the philanthropist in his personal life seems well judged. Inevitably, however, it is the impostures in Memoirs of Alleyn that now concern scholars, and overshadow its merits. Ten of these have long been acknowledged, all but two based on physical forgeries among the Dulwich College archives. Like the six spurious interpolations in Henslowe’s diary, published in HEDP and presumably written into the manuscript in 1830, five of the new fakes are additions, in a mock-Elizabethan hand, to genuine Henslowe/Alleyn documents. An inventory of costumes prepared by Alleyn himself (Memoirs, pp. 17– 22) included a few designated for specific characters (e.g., ‘hary ye viij gowne’, ‘will somers cote’, ‘faustus Jerkin his clok’), and this proved irresistible to an embellisher: ‘a scarlett cloke . . . wt gould buttens of the sam downe the sids’ has ‘for Leir’ tacked on, in a different but ostensibly contemporary hand; ‘A purpell sattin [gown] welted wt velvett and silver twist’ is ‘Romeos’; a ‘blew damask cote the moro [or more]’ is rendered Othello’s by an added ‘in Venis’;106 ‘pryams hoes’ attracts ‘in Dido’ and ‘spangled hoes’ ‘for Pericles’.107 In his familiar sceptical posture, Collier declined to infer that Alleyn himself ‘performed in any of Shakespeare’s plays’, for ‘in our present state of information, it is impossible to speak decisively upon the point’. The Lear, Romeo, Othello, and so forth ‘may have been [those] of Shakespeare’, or possibly source-plays that Shakespeare knew, but in either case ‘the above list shews that [Alleyn] had perhaps been in some way concerned in the representation of them’. All this figures eventually

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105. As Collier pointed out, we never hear of Alleyn, aer his early retirement from the stage, attending a play for his own pleasure, although two abandoned forgeries would later contradict that observation. Here and in The Alleyn Papers, pp. xx–xxi, Collier seemed to be claiming the identification of Constance Donne as his own discovery, but it was largely anticipated by Daniel Lysons (Environs of London [1792], i:89), and also by the antiquary G. Steinman Steinman in 1834. 106. Greg (1907, p. 53) transcribed this as ‘Venus’, perhaps correctly; but if so the forger’s misspelling was probably a slip of the pen. 107. Collier’s transcription of ‘A cloth of silver for Har.’, where Greg read ‘for parr’ (and suggested the actor W. Parr), was probably a genuine mistake by Collier, whose transcript is extremely erratic throughout.



in aid of Collier’s contention that Alleyn knew Shakespeare well, and took over his share in the Blackfriars playhouse in 1613, a theory for which there is not a scintilla of genuine evidence. In the rough dra of a letter from Philip Henslowe to Henry Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, a phrase has been altered to confirm Collier’s old conjecture that Thomas Lodge—poet, novelist, playwright, and physician—had also worked as an actor.108 Arrested for debt, Lodge had appealed to Henslowe to rescue him, ‘haveinge of me some knowledge and acquaintaunce’. This became, with a crossing-out and an interlineation, ‘haveing some knowledge and acquaintaunce of him as a player’, and while there are other scribal corrections to Henslowe’s rough dra , they are in a hand quite dissimilar to that of the Lodge passage. But the forger was apparently unaware that a retained fair copy of Henslowe’s letter, presumably as sent to Lord Hunsdon, also survived among the Dulwich manuscripts, where the original phrase stood unchanged, clearly betraying the latter-day mischief. In 1867 this single oversight provided C. M. Ingleby, Collier’s late nemesis, with matter for an entire—and devastating— pamphlet critique, Was Thomas Lodge an Actor? A list (pp. 90–93) of the inhabitants of the Liberty of the Clink, near the Bear Garden in Southwark, with weekly assessments ‘towardes the relief of the poore’ (6 April 1609), includes Henslowe and Alleyn, and several names that may be those of contemporary actors (Lee, Benfield, Towne, Jubye, Hunt, Bird), but ‘Mr Shakespeare’, taxed at the maximum rate of sixpence, is a forged modern addition to the head of one column. The name a er Shakespeare’s, ‘Mr Edw. Collins’, may also be modern, or at least traced over in ink to make it look more like its predecessor—these are the only two entries that ‘bleed’ through the paper—and ‘Mr. Louens’ earlier, whom Collier identified with John Lowin the actor, seems originally to have been ‘Leuens’, touched up. The faked entry permitted Collier to conclude that Shakespeare still lived in Southwark in 1609 (otherwise unlikely: see Schoenbaum 1975, p. 163), ‘in as good a house as any of his neighbours’. A second copy of the same list also exists in the Dulwich archives, to which Collier did not allude in Memoirs of Alleyn; but this time, unlike the fair copy of Henslowe’s letter to Lord Hunsdon, it does not omit the accretions—it reproduces them literatim. It is however written ‘on what appears to be a fly leaf of a book having red edges’ (Warner, p. 30), and its penmanship has attracted suspicion, well merited, since the 1850s; one must simply suppose that the forger introduced it, like other wholecloth forgeries discussed below, among the loose papers at Dulwich, to corroborate the doctored text of the original list. Another forged list, this of eleven actors in the King’s Company in April 1604, boasts a similar transcript ‘confirmation’, likewise forged, though on this 108. For Collier’s earlier accounts of this, see QD A36.4.

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occasion not claiming antiquity (pp. 67–68). The list itself (Burbage, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Phillips, Condell, Heminge, Armin, Sly, Cowley, Ostler, and Day) showed ‘our great dramatist . . . numbered among the actors of the company’ a year a er the traditional last trace of his stage-playing, in the printed cast-list of Jonson’s Sejanus. It is written—in a different hand and ink—at the foot of a damaged but genuine Privy Council warrant of 9 April 1604, which permits three companies of players to perform ‘except there happen weeklie to die of the Plague above the number of thirtie’. Malone had discovered and published the warrant in his 1796 Inquiry, but not the appended list of players, a circumstance which was bound to provoke some suspicion, although Collier would provide a clever rationale for Malone’s ‘reserving’ the new information. In later years, however, goaded by his inquisitors Hamilton and Ingleby, he thought it better to demonstrate that Malone (d. 1812) had indeed seen the additional text some thirty-five years before John first visited Dulwich. ‘I have now before me Malone’s copy of his Inquiry (8vo, 1796)’, he wrote in his Reply to Hamilton (1860), ‘as annotated by him for a second edition: it is full of scribbled scraps and notes with information, not contained in the first edition, and on the back of a letter addressed to ‘‘Mr. Malone, Queen Anne Street, East’’, is the very list of players in question’ (p. 53). Hamilton was probably not invited to examine this evidence, but Collier really did possess the volume, which is now in the British Library, and a transcript of the list is indeed tipped in, facing p. 210. But while it is written out on the verso of a fragment of a letter addressed to Malone, as Collier described it, Malone’s correspondence was widely broadcast a er 1825, and the transcript is not in Malone’s hand—nor in any imitation thereof—but in Collier’s, very slightly disguised. A genuine dra letter from Alleyn to John Donne (pp. 173–76) sports another interlined addition, again linking Alleyn with the Blackfriars playhouse and (by implication) with Shakespeare’s old share in it. Alleyn did possess rental property in the Blackfriars precinct, and referred to it here as ‘divers tenementes in the Black-friars worth 120li a year’: between ‘Black-friars’ and ‘worth’ are intercalated the words ‘as the plaie howse theare’, in a hand certainly not Alleyn’s. G. F. Warner thought it ‘the same hand to which are due the forgeries [in Henslowe’s diary]’, and his judgement remains widely accepted. Collier’s determination to endow Alleyn with a share in the great indoor playhouse—for which there is no evidence elsewhere—would land him in difficulties later. Two more physical forgeries first published in Memoirs of Alleyn are on independent loose sheets, now among the Alleyn and Henslowe papers at Dulwich College, but presumably introduced there (like the duplicate copy of the Clink assessment list) in 1840–41. The first (pp. 13–15) is a short letter in verse to ‘Sweete Nedde’, that is, Alleyn, begging the actor to ‘wynne an other wager’ by out-performing his rivals William Kempe, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope,



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and ‘Rossius Richard’, that is, Burbage. The venue for the competition is to be the Hope Theatre, ‘the moneyes down’, and if Alleyn would act there ‘the globe shall have but emptie roomes /. . . and Willes newe playe / Shall be rehearst some other daye’. This theatrical nugget, too good to be true as so o en, took its pretext from the established tradition of ‘acting for a wager’, and its immediate inspiration from a genuine challenge to Alleyn that Malone had first printed.109 In the forgery (which is relatively skilful) Alleyn once again is associated with the actor-playwright of the rival Lord Chamberlain’s or King’s Men, for ‘we need feel little hesitation in believing that the couplet [on ‘Willes newe playe’] refers to Shakespeare’ (p. 14). A short letter from John Marston to Henslowe, seeking £20 for ‘my play of Columbus . . . as I knowe the kinges Men will freelie give mee asmuch for it’ (p. 154), resembles much of Henslowe’s correspondence, but this is a forgery, and ‘Columbus’ is a fiction. Halliwell treated both without suspicion in his 1856 Works of Marston (i:x), and let a biographical hypothesis rest on the text, but since 1859 scholars have condemned the original. ‘Although the writing is said to be exceedingly well executed’, N. E. S. A. Hamilton informed Madden then, ‘yet beneath the ink, the pencil tracings of the letters are still clearly to be seen, and demonstrate the fraud’ (Madden Diary, 26 July). Hamilton thought that ‘the whole of the letter had been first traced out in pencil’ (Inquiry, p. 94), a careless procedure that would come home to haunt Collier on other occasions. Even the script—a handsome italic, as in the poet’s holograph manuscripts in the Bridgewater collection—was probably the wrong choice, as Marston’s normal letter-writing hand was secretary. But Collier could not have known that.110 Two further impostures in Memoirs of Alleyn are fabrications, for which no physical embodiment was prepared or remains. The words ‘and Mr Shakespeare of the globe’, in a badly decayed letter from Joan Alleyn to her husband (pp. 62–64), do not actually appear there, as Halliwell pointed out as early as 1848, concluding charitably that ‘Mr. Collier probably, in haste, took the words down without sufficient examination’ (Life of Shakespeare [1848], p. 330). In later years Collier was to claim that the passage occurred ‘in the most rotten and fragmentary part of the letter’, from which ‘portions . . . have crumbled away and entirely disappeared’, lamenting that ‘an intimate and excellent friend’ who examined the letter in 1840 (undoubtedly Thomas Amyot) was no longer alive to confirm this (Reply to Hamilton, p. 48). But in fact there is simply no room in the manuscript, taking into account all its defects, for the words to have been—the same kind of evidence that, as we have seen, condemns Warton’s fabrication of lost text in Machyn’s diary. 109. Shakespeare (1790), ii:322–23. See Joseph 1964, pp. 93–95. 110. See Tricomi 1980, p. 88.


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A last fiction (probably) is the ‘rough memorandum, in Alleyn’s handwriting’ that Collier printed at p. 105, again in support of his theories about Alleyn, Shakespeare, and the Blackfriars theatrical stock. The very substantial sum of £596 is supposed to have been ‘paid by me E. A. for the Blackfryers’ in April 1612, and ‘for aught we know, it was to Shakespeare himself, and just anterior to his departure from London’. But Alleyn’s considerable dealings in Blackfriars property in fact had nothing to do with the Blackfriars Theatre or the activity of the King’s Men there, as Collier himself was soon to appreciate. Following his discovery of Alleyn’s real ‘Memorandum Book’ for 1594–1614, which he published in 1843 as part of The Alleyn Papers, John must have realized that the ‘rough memorandum’, or at least his interpretation of it, was glaringly unconfirmed by Alleyn’s own records. Still he repeated his theory in Alleyn Papers (‘there is little doubt that [Alleyn’s property in the Blackfriars] was leasehold, and none that it was theatrical’, p. xi), before abandoning it in his 1844 Shakespeare (i:ccxxxiv). There, observing that Alleyn’s memorandum book ‘omits all notice of purchases he made in the Blackfriars in 1612’, Collier admitted that his old guess about Alleyn and Shakespeare’s Blackfriars interest had been ‘hastily hazarded’, and suggested instead that Alleyn’s purchases consisted of ‘certain leasehold houses’ unassociated with stage and performance. Where this reversal was supposed to leave ‘the plaie howse’ in the dra letter from Alleyn to Donne, we cannot conceive; the ‘rough memorandum’ itself, although John reprinted its text in 1844, has never been seen by anyone else. Perhaps its disappearance— if it ever existed—was not accidental.

Malone and Dulwich How Collier in 1840–41 could expect to perpetuate so many new fictions may require some explanation. The relatively compact Henslowe/Alleyn archive at Dulwich College, unlike the Bridgewater House papers, or the vast disarray at the Chapter House, Westminster, had been examined by Edmond Malone between 1790 and 1812, in search of precisely the sort of evidence now sought by Collier. Well before Collier’s birth Malone had been aware of theatrical manuscripts at Dulwich, having examined Alleyn’s late diary and found its contents less than exciting, and knowing well at least one of the sixteenth-century stage ‘plotts’ associated with Alleyn, which George Steevens had transcribed before 1780.111 He learned of the existence of Henslowe’s diary only in mid-1790, however, when told of its discovery just as his Plays and Poems of William Shake-

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111. Greg (1931a, i:7–8) argued persuasively that Malone in his Supplement of 1780 had relied on Steevens’s transcript of 2 Seven Deadly Sins, Steevens having ‘met with [the original] in the library of Dulwich College’.



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speare ‘was issuing from the press’ (ii:288). The Dulwich librarian obligingly arranged to lend his find to Malone, who received the manuscript ‘on the very day when I had ordered my last sheet of Hist. of the Stage [vol. 11 of his Shakespeare] for press. I immediately stopp’d it [i.e., the printing]’, he told Boswell (8 July 1790), ‘and shall be able to include several curious matters in a couple of sheets.’ 112 Collier himself might have admired the dispatch of his predecessor (the new matter ‘will throw me back a fortnight’, Malone estimated), who whipped together thirty-eight pages of annotated extracts from Henslowe, tacked on a few more stop-press corrections, and still managed to have his eleven-volume set in the shops by November. Malone was a tenacious borrower, however,113 and Henslowe’s diary did not revert promptly to Dulwich. Nearly six years later, the magisterial Inquiry into W. H. Ireland’s forgeries—another phenomenally efficient performance, three months between conception and print—relied in part on the diary, published eleven new extracts from it, and reproduced in woodcut facsimile three specimen autographs, ‘one or more of which [Malone] may have cut out from the manuscript’.114 Although some commentators have thought this sort of scissoring more cavalier than criminal,115 Malone’s misconduct with the Dulwich materials went well beyond providing patterns for engravers. Several of his own rare printed books were found a er his death to contain, pasted onto their flyleaves, autograph signatures excised from the diary (at least a dozen such mutilations can now be traced to him),116 and other misappropriations of frag-

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112. See Martin 1995, pp. 126–27. 113. In May 1788 he borrowed the Stratford Parish Register, to search for records of Shakespeare, and while this appears to have been returned promptly, in April 1793 he obtained the loan of other records from the Stratford Corporation, apparently borrowing everything from the period before 1650. A few months later Malone visited Stratford in person, taking home even more MSS and documents, and protesting when a new Stratford mayor recalled them. John Jordan was sent from Stratford to reclaim the papers in June 1799, but failed, and it was not until 1805 that the town clerk demanded them back, saying that the books for 1563–1650 were needed ‘immediately’, and hinting that the Corporation would apply at the Court of King’s Bench if necessary. This time Malone returned them. See Martin 1995, pp. 129 and 179–82. 114. Martin 1995, p. 196. One contemporary (George Chalmers) apparently thought that Malone had purchased the Dulwich MSS, or somehow leased them, as he referred to ‘the papers of Henslowe . . . which Mr. Malone procured, for a valuable consideration, from Alleyn’s College, at Dulwich’; Supplemental Apology (1799), p. 237. 115. W. W. Greg characteristically sided with the ‘gentleman’: ‘I do not doubt that if, as I suppose, Malone did cut signatures from the Dulwich documents, it was done . . . with the concurrence of the owners’ (1931a, i:7n.); we may be reminded of the widespread reluctance to accuse Thomas Warton of fabrication. Sidney Lee (DNB life of Philip Henslowe, 1891) was likewise reluctant to condemn Malone, declaring on no given evidence that the mutilations to the diary occurred ‘probably aer Boswell returned it to Dulwich’. 116. Martin 1995, p. 128.


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ments and entire manuscripts may not have been accidental. Collier himself was well aware of Malone’s dark side as a collector, and would play upon it in defending himself twenty years on. But Dulwich College, in Malone’s day, was not, and although the trustees did repossess Henslowe’s diary at some point, they credulously lent it back to Malone, with a great mass of Alleyn and Henslowe papers ‘in a trunk and a basket’, on 26 March 1806.117 This time they would wait even longer, and for less: Malone died in 1812, leaving his heirs and his executor (James Boswell the younger) to sort out what was his property among the manuscripts in his keeping, and what belonged to the college. Boswell found a considerable number of ‘very curious documents’ relating to Henslowe, ‘having been mingled with other papers of a different description, and mistakenly endorsed by Mr. Malone, so as to mislead me concerning their contents’—enough to provide thirty pages of Henslowe/Alleyn ‘Addenda’ to the 1821 Boswell-Malone Shakespeare—and set about returning to Dulwich what he determined was theirs. But when Boswell himself died, now possessed of the Malone manuscripts given him by Malone’s heirs,118 his own sale (1825) included material indisputably removed from the Dulwich archives. The college claimed, and was ceded, the ‘plott’ of 2 Seven Deadly Sins (lot 3136) and the manuscript of The Telltale (lot 3140), which once had been bound up with it, but it could not or would not pursue four more plots (lots 3137–39) that had almost certainly originated with Alleyn.119 The college probably considered lot 3117 not worth making a fuss about, although it contained, inter alia, ‘two Receipts of edward alleyn, Founder of Dulwich College’, and there may also have been other Henslowe/Alleyn material unnamed amongst the 157 manuscript lots. Despite the persistent suggestion (by W. W. Greg, especially) that the Dulwich manuscripts had ‘suffered mutilation at the hands of autograph

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117. Ibid., p. 127, citing an uncatalogued memorandum by Malone in the Folger Library. 118. Boswell-Malone, xxi:389; Martin, pp. 278–79. 119. Perhaps the college authorities had in fact disposed of some of these to George Steevens, who transcribed 2 Seven Deadly Sins before 1780, for Steevens possessed at his death two other ‘plotts’ that must once have been at Dulwich, Frederick and Basil and The Dead Man’s Fortune. Malone purchased both at Steevens’s sale (1800). Boswell also turned up with The Battle of Alcazar and ‘another Plott’—Greg says ‘no doubt’ 2 Fortune’s Tennis—so that apparently Malone held, at one time, all five of the now-extant ‘plott’ MSS (1 Tamar Cam was transcribed by Steevens as ‘in my possession’; the original has vanished). Steevens’s opinion of his trio (Frederick, Dead Man’s Fortune, and Tamar Cam), printed in a stop-press addition to the 1793 Variorum—not the 1803 Reed edition, pace Chambers and Greg—is prescient, if not ominous: ‘There is reason to suppose that these curiosities once belonged to the collection of Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College; nor am I le without expectation that at some future period I may derive more important intelligence from the dispersed remains of that theatrical repository’; Shakespeare, ed. Steevens (1793) large-paper issue, ii:*505. The possibility that Steevens simply appropriated these is not to be dismissed, but the failure of Dulwich College to claim them in 1823 may suggest otherwise.



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hunters’ (plural),120 there is no serious evidence that anyone before Malone ever raided the Dulwich archives for autograph signatures (the very predilection for these is a post-1800 phenomenon), nor that the Dulwich librarians of that era were so liberal to outsiders as to allow unsupervised (and undocumented) access to their muniments. Uncomfortable as it may now seem, the proliferation of Henslowe/Alleyn documents on the open market almost certainly dates from the period of Malone’s unscrupulous guardianship.121 Against this shadowy background, John Payne Collier erected his own testamentary barricade. Malone, he reminded his assailants in 1860, ‘had quietly taken possession’ of the Henslowe/Alleyn documents, which ‘remained in his hands several years’, and ‘he did exactly what he liked with them’, including cutting away signatures and otherwise mutilating the famous diary, to improve ‘his own books . . . the title-pages of which he decorated with the old autographs’ (Reply to Hamilton, pp. 46–47). To explain Malone’s overlooking major passages in the Dulwich papers, Collier resorted to slighting Malone’s skill in transcribing and his sense of what really mattered: the forged Marston note, for example, was from a correspondence ‘the major part of which Malone has given copies, but omitting the [present], which is certainly one of the most interesting of the whole collection’ (p. 154n.). More deliberately, and perhaps most ingeniously, Collier posited a tactic of Malone’s to ‘reserve’ his discoveries for a revised Life of Shakespeare—never completed—some of whose notitiae were later gathered by Boswell. On one fateful occasion Malone had declared that a ‘curious document in my possession . . . affords the strongest presumptive evidence that [Shakespeare] continued to reside in Southwark to the year 1608’, and that this ‘will be produced in the History of his Life’ (Inquiry, pp. 215–16). No such manuscript has ever turned up, although Malone’s vague description does not really suggest what to look for, and he may simply have mistaken a reference: Schoenbaum regarded it as otherwise ‘unlikely’ that Shakespeare was still in Southwark

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120. Greg 1956c, p. 27; Foakes and Rickert (1961, pp. 265–69) print the major known fragments, with no discussion of provenance. 121. While the best-known excisions from Henslowe’s diary, now preserved with Malone’s books at Bodley, are reproduced by Greg (1932, secs. VIII, X, and XII; and 1956b), no serious attempt has ever been made to calendar other abstractions from the Henslowe/Alleyn papers. Collier possessed a diary scrap before 1831, which he claimed to have discovered in a volume of plays bought at auction, but which Greg suspected (on no evidence whatever) that ‘he found . . . lying in one of Malone’s volumes in the Bodleian, just as a memorandum of [Henry] Porter’s was subsequently discovered’ (1931a, i:7n.). Joseph Haslewood (d. 1833) possessed a fine specimen, a list of costumes and play-books that he tipped into his presentation set of Collier’s HEDP, fully aware of its likely provenance (‘the Founder of Dulwich College’); see G. B. Evans 1973. In recent years examples have been listed in Hofmann and Freeman Catalogue 32 (1971), item 2 (now at Folger), and sold at auction (Sotheby’s, 21 July 1983, lot 1; now in a private collection), and citations might be multiplied. Several inventories also went missing aer Boswell-Malone printed them.


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in 1608 (1975, p. 163). But Collier seized upon the idea of Malone holding back novelties to render plausible his own rediscoveries at Dulwich: ‘We come now to a paper’, he remarked of the genuine Privy Council warrant of 9 April 1604, ‘which Malone saw, and to the general import of which he adverts in his ‘‘Inquiry’’, p. 215, but which, as he tells us, he reserved for publication at large in his projected life of Shakespeare, which he never completed’ (Memoirs of Alleyn, p. 66). Now in fact this is either a misreading by Collier or a deliberate misrepresentation: Malone had briefly described the Dulwich warrant on pp. 214– 15 of An Inquiry, as evidence that Shakespeare’s company ‘were not then possessed of the playhouse in Blackfriars’; the quite different evidence that would ‘be produced in the History of [Shakespeare’s] Life’ derived from ‘another curious document’ of 1608, which Malone instanced immediately a erward. By misidentifying the reserved document as the Dulwich warrant of 1604, Collier was able to extend his scenario to cover the faked list of the King’s Players, copied onto the genuine warrant, but never mentioned by Malone: ‘Malone also appears to have reserved another circumstance, of very considerable importance in relation to Shakespeare, for his life of the poet’ (p. 67). And by further extension, the repression of other new data—the more striking or important, the more appropriate for Malone to ‘reserve’—could account for anything amongst the Henslowe/Alleyn papers unreported before. Collier did not stress this last point in print, but it remained implicit, and implicitly persuasive. Despite the amplitude of Memoirs of Alleyn, its authoritative if dry presentation, and its considerable biographical novelty (genuine and specious), critical reaction from reviewers and friends was all but perfunctory. John Mitford in the Gentleman’s Magazine (July 1841) acknowledged ‘Mr. Collier’s intimate knowledge of dramatic literature’, which ‘has enabled him to draw from [the Dulwich papers] many curious facts that would have escaped others’, and he cited a few specimen texts—notably the versified acting wager and Joan Alleyn’s letter mentioning Shakespeare, both forgeries. The Athenaeum reviewer—possibly C. W. Dilke, the council member who had earlier advertised the foundation of the Shakespeare Society—devoted more than ten columns to it, mostly of extracts and synopsis, as the ‘first-fruits offering’ of the society; he signalled Collier’s ‘unwearied industry’, and declared the outcome ‘a more perfect biography of Alleyn than of any contemporary dramatist or player’. It ‘might have been more popular had [Collier] given it more the character of a mere narrative’, he concluded, adding magnanimously that such a treatment ‘would have been less authentic, and, therefore, less worthy the Society from which it emanates’ (27 February 1841, pp. 163–66). The Athenaeum reviewer at least was attuned to the subject at hand, and sympathetic to Collier’s implicit belief that any new documentary evidence con-



cerning the Elizabethan theatre was worth printing in full; such readers were rare, however, and Memoirs of Alleyn passed unnoticed by the grander monthlies and quarterlies, and by the daily or weekly press. In Collier’s immediate circle, no better than mixed reactions are evident. Madden thought that ‘there is not much in it’, and (not unreasonably) that ‘to a general reader [it is] by no means an interesting compilation’ (Diary, 24 February 1841), while Henry Crabb Robinson, who grudgingly read the work through, found it ‘a very dull book indeed . . . very full of details and most minute particulars but not any of them of any importance’. He recorded as well the dismissive opinion of ‘Hr’, no doubt Joseph Hunter, that ‘it is a bad book’ (HCR Diary, 20 February 1841), although Hunter’s private animus against John and the Shakespeare Society may have soured him accordingly. Away in Ipswich, William Stevenson Fitch shared these testy misgivings: ‘It is far from an interesting work’, he told his friend Dawson Turner, who should ‘have no cause for regret [at] not having received the volume’.122 One might hope for John’s sake that Dyce, to whom he sent a gi of three supplementary facsimiles printed at his own cost (see A36), would at least have conceded him a complimentary reply, but none seems to survive.123 David Laing must have written something polite, for he was offered the same gi of facsimiles (‘not for the general body of the Society, but for my friends’), although Laing, like Fitch, expressed concern about the type and the paper of Memoirs of Alleyn—what Collier deemed ‘secondary matters’ in the making of books.124 It is perhaps true that Memoirs of Alleyn is hard going as biographical narrative, and it is certainly true that it is peppered with deceptions, but the tepid response of Collier’s contemporaries now seems more lazy or jaded than warranted. If this was indeed arguably the most ‘perfect’ biography (until 1841) of any Elizabethan actor or dramatist, or even the fullest or most elaborately documented, there was merit in its conception. Readers like Robinson and Fitch, and the general public as well, simply regarded the particulars of the life of Edward Alleyn as insufficiently interesting in themselves, and not even the spice of fabricated testimony could tickle their palates; Collier, who clearly wished to win over some kind of popular following, again offered up provocative fictions among his facts, but as usual drew the line at making the results truly appealing to an audience of non-specialists. He had already complained that too few nineteenth-century readers appreciated minor biographical discoveries—even his own provocative inventions—about a giant like Shakespeare, so that widespread inattention to those about Edward Alleyn should not have surprised him. 122. 11 April 1841, TCC O.14.28 (11). 123. JPC to Dyce, 23 February 1841, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (13). 124. JPC to Laing, 10 March 1841, EUL MS La.IV.17.

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The next stages of Collier’s Henslowe/Alleyn project at Dulwich, moreover, were to be even more uncompromisingly abstruse than the first. Between mid-February and mid-August 1841 Collier returned to Dulwich College, in search of documents relating to Edward Alleyn ‘which were new, or which, if not new, I had passed over without due attention’. He discovered ‘in a sort of side drawer or recess’ Alleyn’s holograph memorandum book of financial transactions over the period 1594–1614, which Malone had examined with some disappointment, and sparingly extracted. This filled out much detail of Alleyn’s late pursuit of land and leaseholds in Dulwich, preparatory to the establishment of his college, and corrected a few of Collier’s honest conjectures in Memoirs of Alleyn. John published a selection of new financial accounts in the Athenaeum for 28 August 1841 (B182), leavening the lump of his non-theatrical data with some general remarks on the hazards and rewards of ‘antiquarian researches’; but the four-column article cannot have attracted a wide readership, nor convinced anyone on these grounds alone that ‘if Alleyn could acquire so much [costly property] between the years 1590 and 1614, it is not very unfair to presume that our great dramatist [Shakespeare] was also a comparatively wealthy man at the time he quitted London for Stratford-upon-Avon’. The less than honest conjecture about Alleyn’s interest in the Blackfriars playhouse, proposed by Collier as ‘evident’ in February 1841 in Memoirs, was le open in August, with Alleyn’s properties in the Blackfriars now described as ‘including probably the playhouse’. Further Henslowe/Alleyn material turned up in June 1842, when James Orchard Halliwell alerted Collier to a group of letters and other papers in his own possession, apparently offering to sell them. John doubted that Devonshire would be interested (‘I had great difficulty in persuading him to purchase MSS. even if they were plays’, he said), and while ‘I wish I could afford to buy your Alleyn Letters myself . . . I cannot, so there is an end of that matter as regards me’.125 Still, Halliwell ‘unhesitatingly’ furnished John with transcripts, and in 1843 ‘thirty-six letters and papers, which originally formed part of the Dulwich collection . . . were restored by him to the College’.126 These and other

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125. JPC to JOH, 30 June 1842, LOA 23/74. 126. Warner, p. 120; George Young (1889, ii:327) chose the words ‘restored’ and ‘returned’, seemingly implying that no money changed hands. In Alleyn Papers Collier referred to the papers as ‘the property of J. O. Halliwell’ (p. v); but they had certainly gone back to Dulwich by 6 November 1843, when Collier remarked in a letter to Halliwell that ‘I shall be at Dulwich in a day or two and shall probably hear of the purchase [sic] by the College. I think they were right to buy & I dare say that you were right to sell’ (LOA 23/38). A list of the documents in Halliwell’s hand, dated 20 March 1843, is now Dulwich MS iii.129. Warner further noted that Collier published ‘most of these’, but he in fact used only nine. Eighty-nine of the documents printed in Alleyn Papers



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supplementary records of Alleyn’s and Henslowe’s transactions, business and personal, provided Collier and the Shakespeare Society with a new monograph, The Alleyn Papers, published late in 1843. Offered as ‘some curious and interesting additions’ to the Memoirs, it was organized (lazily) on the pattern of The Egerton Papers, with transcriptions of 100 chosen documents prefaced by brief headnotes, tied in when possible to the Memoirs or to contemporary theatrical and literary history. Nearly two-thirds were in some way related to the Elizabethan stage—if sometimes distantly, as with bull- and bear-baiting (no. 5) and the management of property and tenancy on the site of the Fortune Theatre (no. 8)—but of some 47 items directly linked to acting and playwriting, 42 had already been published by Malone and Boswell. John excused his repetitions partly by misrepresenting their extent (he acknowledged only six of them in his text), and partly by belittling Malone’s accuracy and judgement. ‘Some of the most valuable papers . . . were copied for Malone’, he slyly maintained. ‘We say that they were copied for Malone, because we can hardly believe that he would have himself been guilty of so many errors and oversights: he must have employed some person to transcribe them who could not read any old writing with facility’ (p. xxvi). Elsewhere he reiterated this conjecture as fact (‘Malone . . . was in possession of a copy [our italics] of this letter’, p. 19), and repeated the slur (Robert Shaa’s note to Henslowe, p. 24, ‘was printed in Mal. Shaksp . . . . but most inaccurately and imperfectly’); but of course it was not Malone, but James Boswell the younger, who in 1821—nine years a er Malone’s death—published every one of the documents republished by Collier, and who almost certainly employed the originals directly.127 Nor were Boswell’s transcriptions as slovenly as Collier suggested. A few insignificant misspellings occur in the 1821 text of the Shaa note, for example, and one line is missing; but Boswell included one proper name that Collier le out altogether in 1843, and Collier mistranscribed another that Boswell had skipped. Some of the handwriting and phraseology are quite difficult, but that hardly excuses Collier for omitting, with no notice, thirteen words he could not easily read in a ‘rustic’ letter to Alleyn from William Fawnte, supplier of bulls and bears for baiting (p. 32).128 George Warner in 1881 taxed Collier with numerous misreadings, omissions, and ‘free’ transcriptions, and Greg signalled some lurid specimens of the last at p. 24 of Alleyn Papers,

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were already at Dulwich (although in some instances Boswell’s transcripts may have served as copy-text, despite what Collier says of their accuracy), and two were declared to follow BoswellMalone, the originals having vanished. One of these now is, and possibly was then, at Dulwich (Alleyn Papers, pp. 78–81; Dulwich MS i.106); the other (pp. 75–77) is still untraced. 127. See Boswell-Malone, xxi:389, quoted above. 128. The three letters from Fawnte to Alleyn have recently been published as ‘samples of idiosyncratic spelling’; Keränen 1998.


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where the line ‘Jngland has my prayers le behind’ is rendered by Collier as ‘And glad has my pursuers le behinde’, and ‘lets vs Commit in sad and mournfull sound / there worthes to fame’ becomes ‘Lets to the Court instead, and a er send / Their wretched wifes’.129 Collier was hardly in a position to twit Boswell on the score of accuracy. The Alleyn Papers offered some considerable novelties, however, including, in the introduction, a transcript of Alleyn’s will from the registers of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (pp. xxi–xxvi), unpublished extracts from Alleyn’s memorandum book, and further literary illustrations of his career (e.g., from Ratsey’s Ghost and Edward Guilpin’s Skialethia). At least one theatrical document was a new discovery, an application for support signed by seven of Henslowe’s players in respect of their exclusion from the Hope Theatre, Bankside, in about 1616 (pp. 86–87). John printed a facsimile of the signatures, but misread ‘Robt hamlen’ as ‘Hampton’, whom he termed ‘the only new [name]’ in the list; the point was never stressed, and the mistake is obvious from the facing facsimile, so that no deceit need be suspected. On one other occasion, however (p. 52), Henslowe’s recalcitrant tenant ‘Mr. Pattent’ (probably Mercury Patten, the Blue Mantle pursuivant, as Warner suggested, pp. 87, 146) is twice represented by Collier as ‘Mr. Pallent’—conjecturally Robert Pallant, the ‘actor of considerable eminence in the reign of James I’, whose name figures in other Henslowe/Alleyn documents; and here it is possible that forgery backs up the misreading. As Warner pointed out (p. 146), ‘in both cases a recent attempt seems to have been made to erase the cross-strokes of the tt’. In a third document (p. 24), Collier’s confident reading of ‘Will Hunt, the Pedler’, as the assignee of Henslowe’s payment to John Day seems to be an honest, if questionable guess. Boswell in 1821 had rendered it ‘will hawton’ (not ‘Will Haughton’, as Collier claimed), while Warner in 1881 gave ‘Will Hampton [?],—sadler’, and more recently (1932) Greg has preferred ‘will hauton. sadler’, for which there may be some historical confirmation. If the last version is correct, Boswell was closer to it than his immediate successors (see A53). Most valuable, in literary terms, of the texts published for the first time by Collier in 1843 are seven dramatic or poetical scraps preserved among Alleyn’s and Henslowe’s accounts and loose papers. John had already gleaned in Memoirs of Alleyn the longest and best of these, the incomplete actor’s part of Orlando written on ten long strips, and he again permitted himself to speculate about missing scripts: ‘we cannot help thinking that they must originally have been much more numerous: if Alleyn kept one, why should not he have kept others?’ —for example, the part of Faustus, in which ‘we have no doubt that impor129. Greg 1907, p. 58.

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tant additions and variations would have been found’ (pp. vi–vii). If the last sounds like a programme for some future discovery, it never materialized. What Collier did find, however, and uncharacteristically le all but unstudied, was a twelve-line fragment of a pre-Shakespearian version of the Henry IV history, in the hand of John Day (pp. 23–24). Malone had temporarily possessed this little manuscript, and Boswell had transcribed the note on its verso—a supplication from Day and Samuel Rowley to Henslowe—but they ‘took no notice’ (said Collier) of the passage of dramatic blank verse; and had Collier himself not notably butchered its transcription, he might well have been suspected of forging it. His discomfort with Day’s idiosyncratic holograph may have deterred him from analysing the text, which (as Warner pointed out, p. 23) was ‘spoken apparently by Henry, Prince of Wales, to his brother . . . over the dead body of Hotspur’, although in Day’s version the Earl of Worcester seems anachronistically to have died in battle. John merely described it as ‘no doubt a part of some play then in hand’, leaving all its Shakespearian potential to subsequent editors.130 He was likewise at sea with the ‘Love Verses’ of 1596 printed at p. 21, twenty-four somewhat mangled lines which ‘we do not recollect [in] any printed work’ and which ‘were perhaps incorrectly copied from some original manuscript’. Here Warner could not help, and the latter-day exorcist Sydney Race pronounced them forgeries;131 but the Dulwich manuscript is simply an inferior copy of a madrigal by John Dowland, published in his First Book of Songs or Airs of Four Parts (1597).132 A fawning acrostic on ‘Philip Henslowe Gentleman’ and a short verse tribute to Mrs. Alleyn from one Rich. Meridall (pp. 38–39, 83–84) are of less interest, and Collier was probably right to identify the brief prayer and saucy quatrain given at p. 88 as in the ‘female handwriting’ of Alleyn’s last wife Constance Donne.133 Seven stanzas constituting ‘The Defence of Tailors’ (pp. 13–14), again carelessly transcribed, may have had something to with the stage (‘possibly they were spoken by some clown of the company in the dress of a tailor’), but two longer verse-dialogues have better claim to be what John termed ‘theatrical

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130. See S. B. Hemenway, ed., New Variorum 1 Henry IV (1936), pp. 391–92; and Arthur Freeman 1997b, p. 105, n. 18. 131. Race 1950c, questioning ten of the papers catalogued by Warner, only six of which had been published by Collier. Five were poems for which Race could see ‘no obvious reason for their existence in the collection’ (MSS i.140–44); the others, Race felt, also called for ‘further examination’ although not questioned by Warner. Surprisingly, Race forbore to condemn the verses by Richard Meridall printed on p. 84. 132. Crum C54; Fellowes 1967, pp. 456–57. 133. The prayer evokes ‘the love of my husband’, and Collier’s point that Joan Woodward probably ‘could [not] write’ is also probably valid: see Warner, p. 24. Confirmation that Constance was Donne’s daughter (as Collier conjectured in Memoirs of Alleyn) was provided by an earlier note (1834) of ‘that excellent antiquary, Mr. G. Steinman Steinman’, now cited by Collier in his introduction, pp. xx–xxi.


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relics’. The roundelay at pp. 29–30, a line-by-line exchange between ‘Man’ and ‘Boye’, may well have been ‘set to music and sung’: Baskervill pointed out similarities with later pastoral dialogues for Court entertainments, and observed that ‘the man’s bombastic narrative . . . and the boy’s mocking refrains show a kinship to certain farce jigs’.134 The even more extended ‘Theatrical Dialogue in Verse’ (pp. 8–11, edited by Collier ‘with great freedom’: Warner), is a true stagejig, which Baskervill re-edited as ‘The Wooing of Nan’ and discussed at length.135 Collier thought it ‘unlike anything else of the kind that has come down to us’, and his instincts for stage history were, as usual, acute. And as usual he touched up the text more than necessary, omitted or failed to appreciate stage directions, and was probably responsible for an almost pathetic, stillborn adumbration. On the blank verso of the first leaf appear a few scribbles and a bold ‘Kitt Marlowe’ in a hand emulating, clumsily, early penmanship. While this is to all appearance a deliberate forgery—the letter-forms are distinctly ‘antique’—it is so flagrantly unconvincing, and perhaps seemed on reflection so presumptuous and fauxfamiliar an attribution, that John chose to reject it himself. Or at least to reject its contemporary authority: he described the inscription as ‘in a more modern hand’, but did not altogether dismiss its implicit evidence. ‘What connection, if any, [Marlowe] may have had with [the jig], it is impossible to determine’, he wrote, but it ‘was obviously worthy of preservation, as a curious stage-relic’. No scholar since Collier has taken ‘Kitt Marlowe’ seriously (cf. Baskervill 1929, p. 252), yet in the absence of any strong claim for it by Collier, remonstrance has never seemed necessary: the attribution is indeed, as Collier disingenuously remarked of it, in a ‘later’ hand.136 But as a trial-balloon for a physical forgery it will remind us of some earlier, aborted attempts; and some similarly ‘unemployed’ forgeries among the Dulwich archives (see below) may in turn remind us of this one. Audacity, in a few instances at least, had been tempered with prudence, and if ever Collier envisioned the full-scale inquiry into these and other papers that was to ensue, a few suspect inscriptions not discovered and disclosed by the accused might prove useful. Had other mischief-makers, perhaps, been abroad in the stacks? 137 Collier need hardly have worried about public scrutiny of The Alleyn Papers: few as were the provocations in this slender volume, it may have attracted even fewer diligent readers. The Athenaeum reviewer (27 January 1844, pp. 85–86)

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134. Baskervill 1929, p. 209; Warner, p. 62, pointed out a few glaring mistranscriptions. 135. Baskervill 1929, pp. 252 ff., 432–36. 136. Warner, p. 61, drily converted this to ‘later, and perhaps modern’. Collier’s transcript of the dialogue (Folger MS Y.d.582 [44]) is headed: ‘From a half-sheet of paper written on one side only excepting that there is ‘‘Kitt Marlowe’’ at the back of it.’ 137. Dewey Ganzel (1984) has developed this suggestion.



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found ‘not many papers of great interest in this collection’, and extracted a handful of ‘the most curious’. John himself was just now putting the finishing touches to his 1842–44 Shakespeare, designed for a wider public, and may hardly have noticed; his extant correspondence makes no mention at all of The Alleyn Papers.

Henslowe’s Diary The final instalment of Collier’s labours at Dulwich, and surely the most important and most controversially disfigured among them, was the earliest undertaken: The Diary of Philip Henslowe from 1591 to 1609, announced by the Shakespeare Society in its initial surviving prospectus (September 1840), but unrealized in print until mid-1845. This project, central to the society’s original commitment, called for an extended transcript, with editorial commentary, of ‘the chief source for theatrical history between 1590 and 1604’ 138—the golden decades of Elizabethan drama, and the period covering about two-thirds of Shakespeare’s writing career—an idiosyncratic, o en chaotic record of expenses, receipts, obligations, and inventory, kept by the principal theatrical entrepreneur of the day. Malone had first published selections from Henslowe in 1790, immediately following its latter-day discovery, and retained and probably mistreated the original manuscript over some twenty years’ casual custody. Collier in 1830–31 had re-examined the diary, and printed a few further extracts in HEDP, among them six which are now known to be forgeries; and the idea of editing a complete transcript of the theatrical material in the volume was certainly his. The uncharacteristic delay in completing this laudable, if scarcely crowdpleasing project, bears explaining. To begin with, the manuscript was palaeographically challenging: Henslowe’s handwriting is among the most difficult and erratic of his era, and Collier, despite his experience and his condescension toward rivals, was never as capable a palaeographer as he claimed to be. Many years later he gave an account of the work that involved two co-transcribers (both long dead by 1874), Thomas Amyot and ‘my next-door neighbour’, Peter Cunningham. Collier having borrowed the original manuscript from Dulwich College, on behalf of the new society,139 Amyot supposedly ‘produced from his

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138. Foakes and Rickert 1961, p. ix; Greg called it ‘of all documents illustrating the external history of the Elizabethan drama the most important that has escaped the ravages of time’ (1904–08, i:xiii). 139. The college records confirm that on 12 October 1840 it was ordered that the manuscript be entrusted to Collier, ‘upon his engaging not to let it go out of his own hands, and to return it within two months’; and on the following day Collier signed a receipt for the book (Dulwich


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own shelves a MS. copy of considerable portions of it, made by or for [George] Chalmers’, and upon this matrix Amyot and Cunningham ‘worked . . . filling up the missing pages, which were not a few, and o en referring to me, where the old manager’s hand was peculiarly illegible’ (Athenaeum, 21 February 1874, p. 257). ‘My duty’, Collier added, ‘was to supply the notes, and for nearly all of them I am responsible’—but, by implication, not for much of the text, which was ‘copied’ variously by Amyot, Cunningham, John Allen (the master of Dulwich), and John Lindsay (college usher)—‘but as it is almost thirty years ago and I am now past eighty-five years old, I cannot pretend to speak positively’. Collier in 1874 was at pains to defend himself from charges by F. J. Furnivall of deliberate misreadings in the diary, and Furnivall in rejoinder expressed his scepticism about this scenario (given ‘for the first time, I believe’, as Collier’s introduction of 1845 had credited no colleagues or assistants), which appeared to ‘shi the blame [for certain tendentious mistranscriptions] from Mr. Collier’s shoulders to theirs’ (Athenaeum, 28 February 1874, p. 293). Whether Collier had any help at all in preparing the text of Henslowe’s Diary (and incorporating some half-dozen new forgeries) remains doubtful, as does the very existence of the ‘Chalmers transcript’;140 but his editorial task remained arduous, and in April 1842 he appealed to James Orchard Halliwell for help with a different, and ultimately embarrassing, old copy of Henslowe’s crabbed manuscript. This appeal, however, may have been less in the way of convenience than of caution. Collier knew, since at least the Heber manuscript sale of February 1836, that Malone had at one time obtained or commissioned a transcript of parts of the diary, which he had collated against the original and corrected in his own hand. At the 1825 sale of James Boswell the younger, Thomas Thorpe had purchased this copy (lot 3141) for Heber at the high price of £5 10s., and in Heber’s sale (Part XI, lot 826) it again fell to Thorpe, this time much more cheaply (18s.), but among the desiderata of the omnivorous Sir Thomas Phillipps.141 John

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Private Sittings Book, 1829–53, p. 61). The two months turned into an ‘almost indefinite period’; see the introduction to Collier’s edition, p. viii. 140. We have found no evidence whatever that Chalmers ever consulted, borrowed, or directly employed the original diary. In his first reply to Malone’s Inquiry, which had cited several entries, Chalmers referred to the diary in a manner that suggests he had never seen it (An Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers [1797], pp. 266n. and 390–91n.), and a passage in his Supplemental Apology (1799) indicates that he thought Malone himself had purchased the Henslowe papers from Dulwich (see above, note 114). The only borrower of the diary mentioned in the Dulwich records between Malone and Collier was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Manners Sutton, on 9 June 1819 (Greg 1904–08, i:xiv). If the ‘Chalmers’ transcript is imaginary, as we think likely, Collier’s motive in imagining it may have been to reduce the Malone transcript (then among Sir Thomas Phillipps’s MSS) to the status of ‘yet another’ copy, with lessened authority for its pre-1830 and pre-1845 readings. 141. Phillipps presumably would have swallowed a much higher price (see Munby, Phillipps



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must also have realized that the six forged additions to the diary that figure in HEDP would of course not appear in this pre-1812 transcript, and appreciated what that implied: if the 1836 catalogue note is his, as seems almost certain, he attempted then to mitigate its evidence, lest any future researcher compare texts.142 But now, perhaps not without thoughts of reconciling the differences with a few de corrections, he sought to borrow the Malone transcript from the notoriously possessive baronet. Knowing that Halliwell had visited Sir Thomas at Middle Hill in February 1842, and was soon to return—but apparently having no inkling of the crisis brewing between the two men over Halliwell’s courtship of Phillipps’s daughter—John asked his friend to ‘endeavour to lay your hand on Sir T. P.’s copy [of the diary] . . . which may contain matter not now found in [the original]’. A fortnight later he pressed him again (‘Pray let me know whether you have [found it], or whether there is any chance of finding it, as I am anxious to go to press with the vol.’).143 But his timing could not have been worse: Halliwell was undergoing painful interviews with Sir Thomas over his suitability as a son-in-law, and in August, when negotiations became hopeless, the young couple eloped, leaving Phillipps intractably furious with both for the rest of his life. Collier was still pursuing the idea of a loan in October (‘This is important’), well a er Halliwell had been permanently barred from Middle Hill, but the altered circumstances seem not to have sunk in. ‘Your information about Sir T. Phillipps’s MS. of ‘‘Henslowe’s Diary’’ is very unsatisfactory’, John complained four days later, ‘but that is not your fault. . . . I shall go to press with the transcript I have had made soon’.144 And he may well have been lucky that the Middle Hill hoard remained inaccessible throughout most of the century, for the Malone transcript would certainly have interested his adversaries in the 1860s and 1870s. Its eventual resurfacing in 1895, and its purchase by Dulwich College, showed it to be what all might have expected: ‘a copy [of the diary] . . . made before the forged interpolations’.145

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Studies, iii:73 ff., for his domination of Part XI); hence Collier himself may not have been able to buy and suppress it. The Malone transcript became Phillipps MS 9091, part of a large single purchase from Thorpe in 1836. 142. ‘826 Henslow. This volume, which belonged to Malone, consists of Extracts from Henslowe’s Diary, preserved at Dulwich College. They have been made by a person not very conversant with hands writing [sic] of the time, and the names of the places and persons are sometimes mistaken. Some of these errors are introduced by Malone into his History of the Stage.’ 143. JPC to JOH, 7 and 24 April 1842, LOA 24/15 and 24/16, the second letter addressed to Halliwell at Middle Hill. It is not clear why Collier himself did not approach Phillipps, who had in 1838 had sent him, with a friendly letter, a copy of the patent of John Bernard’s appointment as Henry VIII’s Master of the Revels (see Bodl. MS Phillipps-Robinson.d.224, fol. 10v; and MS Phillipps-Robinson.c.463, fols. 209–10). 144. JPC to JOH, 27 and 31 October 1842, LOA 37/15 and 23/56. 145. Dulwich College, Catalogue of Manuscripts and Muniments, 2d ser. (1903), p. 99. Warner


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A er this setback, and as other tasks intervened, Henslowe’s Diary continued to languish. ‘Soon’ became ‘if I can’, Collier hoping to provide the society with its ‘first book of the year 1843 . . . but I am doubtful’;146 and by March 1843 Peter Cunningham, speaking for the society, felt ‘buoyed up with the promise of the Henslowe Diary’, but ‘somewhat astonied in Expectation of an attack to be made on Collier at the next General Meeting from Mr. Charles Knight [concerning] Collier’s not editing in time the aforesaid Diary’.147 Knight, Collier’s immediate rival in editing a new text of Shakespeare, had his own reasons to challenge the dilatory sequestrator of Henslowe. But the final product was not actually in the press until January 1845, when Collier told Halliwell that he was busy ‘printing it, & noting it’, that is, supplying the ‘Additional Notes and Corrections’ at pp. xxxi–xxxiv.148 It was published in June. Although Henslowe’s Diary served as the standard edition of a seminal theatrical text for more than half a century, and provides on the whole a satisfactory transcription and notes, posterity has given Collier little credit for his work. One reason for its chilly reception may have been the harsh treatment of Malone, who was once again charged with ‘important errors and various omissions’ in his abstracts of 1790. ‘He has mistaken dates and misread the titles of several pieces’, Collier maintained, ‘assigned to one or more authors the work of others . . . [and] passed over without notice several plays, the performance of, or the payment for which Henslowe duly records’ (p. xix). Scholarship aside, John also blamed nobody else for the manuscript’s being ‘not now in the state in which it existed when in the hands of Malone’: the mutilations must have occurred ‘within perhaps the last fi y years’, but ‘considerably before the time of the present or of the late Master of Dulwich College’, for ‘ever since it was restored by Malone [in fact by his executor Boswell] to its ancient depository, it has been preserved with the care and caution due to the extraordinary curiosity and interest of the relic’.149 Worst of all, ‘Malone made long and curious quotations from parts of it not now found in the manuscript’, which ‘evidently

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was well aware of its potential use, remarking at p. xlii that ‘if this could only be traced, it would furnish most valuable evidence’. In 1860 Thomas Wright had suggested to Madden that Malone’s Dulwich transcripts were probably in Phillipps’s collection; letter, 12 March 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fol. 178. 146. JPC to JOH, 11 November 1842, LOA 23/52. 147. Cunningham to David Laing, 29 April 1843, EUL MS La.IV.17. 148. JPC to JOH, 25 January 1845, LOA 23/7. 149. Introduction, pp. xii–iii. Of course Collier was here suggesting that his own extended custody and earlier use were blameless in that respect, which may be far from the truth. But the Dulwich Governors did at least count the leaves and detail their general condition before lending him the MS: see the loan specification cited in A63.



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formed a portion of it, when it was so many years in his hands’: these ‘quotations’, specifically from the seven lost inventories of 1598 for which Boswell’s 1821 text does remain the only source, Collier consigned to an appendix, ‘without any means of correction or verification’.150 A er such telling indictments, however, Collier’s propitiatory conclusion rang hollow indeed. ‘We only mention [his shortcomings] in order to put our readers on their guard against placing entire confidence in Malone’s quotations’, he asserted (p. xix), with double-edged charity. ‘It is unnecessary, as well as ungracious, to dwell here upon the defects of a man whose sight failed him at the end of his career, and who had the merit of being the first to find and to make use of a volume, the thread of which is much entangled, and the handwriting not unfrequently extremely difficult to be deciphered.’ Collier, who by implication could disentangle and decipher all that Malone had botched, engaged to ‘set these matters right in our notes’, and it is understandable that Malone’s admirers might find such smugness offensive. Even Peter Cunningham, whose anonymous review appeared in the Athenaeum for 12 July 1845—perhaps the only contemporary notice of Henslowe’s Diary—protested that Collier ‘overcharges’ Malone with damaging the original diary, and noted that ‘the portion here printed as an Appendix’, namely, the seven missing inventories, ‘was not a portion of the volume, but discovered by Malone, as he expressly tells us, ‘‘in a bundle of loose papers’’ ’ (Greg made the same point in 1904, p. xvi). Later scholars would also resent Collier’s ‘aspersions on the earlier honest extracts of Malone’, side-by-side with his ‘inaccuracy’ and ‘tampering with the text’;151 while Greg, who in 1904–08 restricted his animadversions to Collier’s impostures, also considered many of Collier’s ‘strictures on Malone . . . grossly incorrect’, and his censure of Malone for ‘overlooking’ fraudulent or insignificant entries as ‘singular’—a tight-lipped summing-up, which reflects the latter-day reputation of each editor.152 Another reason for regarding Collier’s Henslowe as unsatisfactory is of course its notorious corruptness, although no widespread suspicion of the forgeries in it arose for some three decades. Furnivall’s skirmish with Collier in February 1874 had initially concerned only two careless misreadings of ‘Cstmes’ [i.e., Christmas] for ‘S steuen’ and ‘S steuens day’ at pp. 46 and 62; but when the eighty-five-year-old editor defended himself by attempting to implicate Amyot and Cunningham, Furnivall caustically remarked that this revised ac-

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150. These have always seemed credible, but where indeed were the originals in 1845, and where are they now? Collier did have a point. 151. Schelling 1908, ii:482. 152. Greg, i:xxxvi. It is nonetheless true that Collier corrected several egregious misreadings in Boswell-Malone.


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count should ‘gladden the heart of my friends, Mr. N. E. S. Hamilton and Dr. Ingleby [and] appease Mr. A. E. Brae’, three of Collier’s principal adversaries of the 1850s and 1860s. Ingleby then seems to have looked over the manuscript diary, and in the Academy for 1 April 1876 observed for the first time that it ‘contains some modern interpolations’. Two days’ examination yielded him just two examples, however, the play-title ‘Like quits Like’ inserted in a space le blank by Henslowe (Collier’s edition, p. 230), and the memorandum of payment to ‘Thomas Dickers . . . for adycyons to Fostus [and] for a prolog to Marloes Tambelan’, which Collier had originally published in HEDP, iii:113. Ingleby concluded by observing that ‘it may very well be that the book contains other interpolations’, and while one American loyalist would suggest that the day-date of the Academy article reflected the tenor of its allegations,153 more soon emerged. George F. Warner of the British Museum, in his masterly catalogue of the Dulwich muniments (1881), exposed eight further forgeries;154 and in 1904–08, with Warner’s assistance, W. W. Greg brought the count to sixteen.155 In 1961 R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert suggested one more, which may now seem debatable, and one of Greg’s suspects (‘Mr. Mastone’) remains in dispute. With the accumulation of these charges, the reputation of Collier’s edition understandably plummeted. Warner, who in 1881 forbore specifically to accuse the still-living editor, nonetheless thought the published spuria ‘characterized by still greater audacity [than that of the Alleyn impostures], and we can only be thankful that the hand, which did not scruple to tamper with the names of Nash, Marlowe, Dekker, and Webster, stopped short of Shakespeare’ (p. xl). Halliwell, who like Furnivall and Ingleby had partly collated his copy of the 1845 Henslowe’s Diary against the original manuscript, crossed through its entry for ‘Galfrido and Bernardo’ and the payments to Dekker for the Marlowe ‘adycyons’, and wrote ‘Forgery’ beside the latter; and in 1890 Frederick Gard Fleay—no paragon of responsibility himself—dismissed Collier’s edition as ‘a disgrace to English literature . . . the Dulwich authorities would do well to have it re-edited by a competent hand’.156 Greg’s edition of 1904–08 superseded it in every respect. Of the sixteen or seventeen interpolations and erasures in the original diary that have been attributed to John Payne Collier, six were first made public in HEDP, and were presumably in place, physically, before 1831. Three more saw

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153. H. H. Furness, New Variorum Othello, p. 402. 154. He was apparently unaware of Ingleby’s article, and missed ‘Like quits like’, which Ingleby instanced again in N&Q, 6 August 1881, as ‘one of the most important in the volume’. 155. In 1931 he commented: ‘It is even possible that there may be yet others, no less certain, that I too overlooked, though I should be mortified to think that it was likely’; Greg 1931b, p. 269. 156. Fleay 1890, p. 94. Halliwell’s copy of the Diary is Houghton *EC85.H1573.Zz845h.



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print in 1841, in two Percy Society reprints, and a fourth was foreshadowed in a work privately issued by Collier in 1844. The words ‘or Northern Man’, interlined a er ‘a playe called to[o] good to be trewe’ in Henslowe’s advance to Henry Chettle of 14 November 1601, allowed Collier to associate the verse tract The King and a Poor Northern Man, which he had edited anonymously for the Percy Society in 1841, with a lost play for Henslowe by Chettle, Richard Hathway, and Wentworth Smith. Two spaces le blank by Henslowe in other advances of September 1602 to Chettle—this habit of the manager’s, when he was unsupplied with a title, proved irresistible to the forger—are filled up with ‘Robin hoodfellow’ and ‘Robingoodfellow’, and the term ‘tragedy’, which rather belies the invention, is twice struck through and once over-written with ‘playe’. These alterations once more provided a link between a Percy Society reprint, The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow (1841), and a lost Henslowe play. In 1845 (Henslowe’s Diary, p. 239) Collier explained the deletion or replacement of ‘tragedy’ ingeniously, as occurring ‘when Henslowe found that [the play commissioned] was not a piece of that description’, and because ‘no doubt this was done at a subsequent time’ the ‘different colour’ of the correcting ink explained itself. As to the goodfellow/hoodfellow uncertainty, Collier in 1841 proposed that ‘Henslowe had in his mind some confused notion of a connexion between Robin Hood and Robin Goodfellow’; but Greg (i:xliv) mooted a slip of the forger’s pen, ‘since the old h was o en much the shape of a modern g’. Collier was perhaps tempting fate when he boasted that ‘Malone takes no notice of these remarkable entries’, for while they are indeed absent from the 1790 Variorum extracts, they do appear in the Malone transcript recovered in 1895, with Henslowe’s text unimproved—confirming Warner’s guess in 1881 ‘that in Malone’s time the entries remained in the state in which Henslowe le them, viz. with a blank space for the title of the projected tragedy, as in another entry [for 3 October 1602] on the next page’ (p. 162). The Pitiful History of Two Loving Italians, Gaulfrido and Barnardo le Vayne, a verse romance of 1570 ‘translated out of Italian into Englishe meeter by John Drout, of Thauis Inne’, was privately reprinted by Collier in 1844, from a unique copy in the collection of Charles Wycliffe Goodwin. Although he did not then allude to any play on the subject, John instanced the unusual ‘use of prefixes to various speeches’ as lending ‘a dramatic character to what in fact is mere narrative’, and held that ‘the sort of epilogue at the close also carries on the resemblance to an ancient play’ (p. ii). A year later, however, an appropriate entry had turned up in Henslowe, though ‘omitted to be noticed by Malone’: ‘Galfrido & Bernardo’, ‘a play founded, doubtless, upon the recently-discovered poem by John Drout’, was listed as staged on 18 May 1595, to a good house of thirtyone shillings (Henslowe’s Diary, p. 52). Warner found the date ‘significant’, for


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it called for a Sunday performance, and while this is not ( pace Greg) an impossible event,157 there are no other such violations of the Sabbath during the season between Easter and the end of July 1595 (Warner, p. 159). Its ‘suspicious’ appearance, moreover—‘written at the very bottom of the page in a style of hand which appears nowhere else in the volume’—caused Warner to doubt the oneline record, and Greg followed suit, noting its absence from the Malone transcript; Foakes and Rickert in our time declared it ‘a modern forgery’, which it probably is. Greg went one step too far, however, in suspecting the poem itself, ‘the genuineness of which the present entry has been forged to support’, and which ‘has not yet [1904] come to light’ (p. xxxviii). Gaulfrido and Barnardo was in fact then, as now, at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, the gi of C. W. Goodwin in 1847 (STC 7241.5). Seven more dubious entries appeared first in the 1845 Henslowe’s Diary. Ingleby, as we have seen, exposed ‘Like quits like’ in 1876, but the rest survived unquestioned into the twentieth century. Greg described two more Chettle forgeries as ‘certainly among the best in the volume. The colour of the ink has been imitated with unusual success, but a careful examination of the forms of the letters leaves no doubt as to their nature’ (p. xli). The entries, which involve two payments of ten shillings each ‘unto cheatall’ for a ‘Sir plasidas’ or ‘his booke of plasidas’, appeared to demonstrate ‘that [in 1598] Chettle had contrived to make a play out of the dull incidents of Sir Placidas, upon which John Partridge had written and printed a poem in 1566’, a fiction that Collier would reiterate in his 1866 reprint of Partridge (The History of Plasidas, A143), and which A. H. Bullen would trustingly reproduce in his biography of Chettle for DNB (1887). Although as usual ‘Malone takes no notice of this [i.e., the first] entry’, it is hard to see why Collier bothered to enlarge by one the canon of forty-odd lost projects for Henslowe by Chettle, unless another small item overlooked by Malone lent credibility to the more provocative post-Variorum novelties. An unimportant and underplayed addition of ‘Downton’, that is, the player Thomas Downton, in a modern hand ‘not much disguised’ (Greg) to a receipt of April 1596 (Henslowe’s Diary, p. 72) was described by Collier as ‘not in [Downton’s] own handwriting’; and Greg thought ‘it may be doubted whether, considering its want of significance, it was inserted with any fraudulent intention’ (p. xl). Either it is a forgery or it isn’t, however, and if only a false start or an aidemémoire, Collier reproduced it as meaningful.158 Physically slight, but far from

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157. Believing that Elizabethan theatres were closed on Sunday, in his edition of Henslowe’s Diary (1904–08) Greg altered all dates of Sunday performances by moving them to another day of the week; see Maguire 1996, pp. 53–54. 158. Foakes and Rickert 1961, p. 45, called it ‘a modern forgery’. It is clearly not in Malone’s ‘undisguised’ autograph, a specimen of which Collier also recorded as ‘another hand’ in a footnote



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innocuous, are two erasures at pp. 28 and 72, where the genuine interlineation ‘10 day’ is adjusted to ‘1 day’ for the performance of A Knack to Know a Knave in June 1594; and Henslowe’s enigmatic siglum ‘ne’ is deleted from a record of Jeronymo (i.e., The Spanish Tragedy) played on 7 January 1597. The first rubbingout, which is contradicted by Malone’s transcript, and whose erased ‘0’ is still faintly perceptible in the original, allowed Collier to establish ‘the first performance of this celebrated play . . . which the Shakespeare Society proposes to reprint’; in fact Henslowe’s notation signifies ‘10 day [of June]’, as we now think, although Collier was probably right to suppose it the earliest performance. The almost pointless imposture served incidentally to confirm, again quite superfluously, Collier’s intelligent guess that Henslowe’s scribbled ‘ne’—present here as well—means ‘new’, or ‘newly revised’, or, as Greg put it in 1908, ‘mark[s] the first occurrence of a play [in the diary]’ or the first performance of a play ‘new to the particular company, though not to the stage in general, or . . . new in the sense that it was a revival with alterations’ (ii:148). Malone had never chosen to copy out ‘ne’ in his 1790 extracts, from which omission Collier adduced (p. xvii) that he ‘was not at all aware’ of its meaning and significance. But in fact Malone reached the very same conclusions, annotating his transcript with the suggestion that ‘ne’ meant ‘new enterlude’, and punctiliously recording its occurrence. One of his transcriptions traps the forger as well, for the ‘ne’ before the entry for Jeronymo on 7 January 1597, incompletely erased and still partly visible, is preserved by Malone, but seemingly ‘did not suit Collier . . . and he therefore removed it’ (Greg, i:xlv). Presumably the idea of ‘a revival of the popular play called the Spanish Tragedy’ (Collier, p. 84) failed to square with Collier’s notion of ‘ne’, but we now are aware of a sequence of revisions to Kyd’s masterpiece that could easily explain such a qualification in 1597.159 Henslowe’s ‘ne’ and the reputation of Collier reached scholarly collision in 1902, when Theodor Eichhoff, a German academic, insisted—without travelling to Dulwich—that all inscriptions of ‘ne’ in the diary were forgeries. Greg administered a characteristically devastating review, pointing out that Henslowe’s daily entries are in remarkably different inks (‘they range from jet black to bright yellow’), and in every case ‘ne’ is consistent with its surrounding text, so that ‘no competent person can, a er due investigation, for one moment doubt the genuineness of the ne’s in Henslowe’s Diary’;160 no subsequent scholar has ac-

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about ‘Tassos Picture’ (Henslowe’s Diary, p. 127; cf. Greg 1904–08, i:xli). Other innocent mistakes in Henslowe’s Diary include the misreadings of ‘Cstmes’ at pp. 46 and 62, and the wrong guess about the parentage of George Peele (p. 29, repeated in BARB and refuted in 1881; see Bullen’s Peele, i:1). 159. Arthur Freeman 1967, pp. 122–30. 160. Greg 1904a (reviewing Eichhoff’s Der Weg zu Shakespeare [Halle, 1902]), p. 297.


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cused Collier of manipulating these sigla beyond the one Jeronymo deletion— although the potential for two-character forgery may once have seemed tempting indeed—and although alternative interpretations of ‘ne’ have from time to time surfaced,161 Collier’s of 1845 remains fundamentally secure. Finally, Foakes and Rickert in 1961 raised the possibility that the name ‘Mr Porter’, appended to a payment for ‘a booke called love prevented’ on 30 May 1598 and described by Collier (p. 124) as ‘in a different hand’ from the rest of the entry, is ‘perhaps a forgery . . . in a different ink . . . and written in heavy and clumsy strokes’ (p. 90); but this name appears in Malone’s transcript, and has not otherwise been questioned. On recent re-examination we think it genuine. A codicil to the legacy of fraud at Dulwich College involves the 1617–22 diary of Edward Alleyn, which Collier employed toward Memoirs of Alleyn and elsewhere, but never edited in full. Warner in 1881 discovered six forged interpolations in the sixty-two-leaf manuscript, which differed from the rest of the Henslowe/Alleyn forgeries in one remarkable respect: ‘the latter, as we have seen, have all been printed, and . . . printed first in every instance by Mr. Collier’, but ‘with the forgeries in Alleyn’s Diary it is otherwise, for I cannot find that they have been referred to either by Mr. Collier or by any one else’ (pp. xlii–xliii). Yet they are all characteristically theatrical, and take the usual form of interlineations or blank spaces filled up, in a mock-secretary hand. Alleyn’s business visit to the Fortune Theatre on 9 April 1618 was crowned, it appears, with a performance of ‘as you like itt’, and on 30 October at the same venue, he ‘saw Romeo’; both allusions to Shakespeare’s plays are interlined, and are evident forgeries (Warner, pp. 170, 175). They must also post-date Collier’s truthful observation in Memoirs (1841) that Alleyn, a er his retirement from the stage, ‘appears to have frequented theatres very little, if at all, as places of entertainment’, citing specifically the visit of 9 April as ‘probably . . . for the purpose of collecting his rents’ (p. 155). Similarly, the forged insertion ‘B. Jonson’ among dinner guests on 20 June 1619 contradicts Collier’s earlier remark that Jonson’s name never appears ‘among the persons occasionally entertained at Dulwich’ (p. 154);162 and an entry for 27 August 1618 (‘Pole brought me word yt ye building would be pulled down’) was correctly rendered at p. 106 before ‘of the playhouse’ was interlined between ‘building’ and ‘would’. Warner noted (p. 183) that a forged entry for 12 November 1619 (‘I went to see poore Tom Dekker’) ‘is meant, doubtless, to be read in connexion with Dekker’s [genuine] letter to Alleyn’ that Collier published in Memoirs, p. 131, but again without mentioning this echo; and one more attempt to make Alleyn’s property in the Blackfriars include the playhouse (‘the-

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161. See Frazer 1991. 162. Warner (p. 179) correctly described this as written in aer ‘Mr’, in ‘a blank space . . . le by Alleyn, as in other instances when he had forgotten the name of a chance visitor’.



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atre’ interlined over ‘from Blackfriars’, 29 September 1618) was likewise allowed to subside undiscovered. Clearly these forgeries were neither present nor even, in all likelihood, conceived at the time of Memoirs of Alleyn, and Warner later conjectured that they might have been introduced a er 1845, although any time a er 1841 would be credible.163 A er Collier’s death, Dulwich College acquired his transcript of Alleyn’s diary, which Warner examined in 1884 and found additionally revealing. It was originally prepared, as marginal pencillings indicate, before the publication of Memoirs in 1841 (Ganzel, p. 401), and Collier had some trouble with Alleyn’s hand, for in the early pages he compared what he had copied with the extracts printed by Daniel Lysons in his 1792 Environs of London (i:97–100), at one point leaving space for a long passage that Lysons had printed and reminding himself to ‘See Lysons for this’.164 Five of the six spuria are present in the transcript,165 though presumably entered at some time a er 1841 (those interlined in the original are interlined in the transcript). Four of them are also heavily scored through—at some even later date, logically—for the transcript itself has been worked upon over time; the fi h, the spurious ‘saw Romeo’ of the manuscript, was inserted in Collier’s copy only in pencil, as ‘saw Romeo and Juliet’, and then erased. Warner believed, not unreasonably, that this represented a half-way stage in a botched operation, and attempted to reconstruct, in

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163. Dewey Ganzel, in an attempt to exonerate Collier (pp. 396–405), proposed a fantastic scenario, in which (1) the forgeries were made ‘between the date when Malone saw the manuscript . . . in the 1780s and the date in the 1830s when the original was unearthed at Dulwich’, i.e., before Collier handled it; (2) Collier took his 1841 extracts (Ganzel seems to confuse HEDP, where there is no use of Alleyn’s diary, and the Memoirs) from a transcript of his own, rather than from the original, which he had not yet seen: ‘Collier’s transcript was made from another transcript—probably Malone’s [!]—which is now lost’; (3) Collier then rediscovered the original, and corrected his transcript against it, during which process he ‘initially inserted these [spurious] additions into his copy. Later he realized they were false and cancelled them’, for they are crossed through in his transcript. Ganzel would thus have us believe that Collier had (1) the sharp-eyed discernment to identify every one of the forgeries in Alleyn’s diary, but (2) the credulity or bad luck to be taken in by every other fraudulent scribble at Dulwich, to say nothing of those at the PRO, Bridgewater House, etc. And (3) for some reason he never said a word about his sleuthing to anyone, even when calling attention to a rival backstairs forger would have done his own tarnished reputation a world of good. 164. Collier’s transcript of the diary (now Dulwich MSS 2d ser., no. 94A), p. 26. Ganzel argued, unpersuasively (p. 403), that such comparison ‘clearly indicates that the source from which Collier made his transcript was not the manuscript diary itself, for if his source had had that authority, he would have had no purpose in correcting it against the lesser authority of Lyson [sic]’. Alleyn’s hand is difficult, and Collier could use all the help he could get, although his own comment on Lysons (p. 142n.) is typical: ‘The reverend author [made] frequent errors of transcription’. 165. The latest in date, ‘I went to see poore Tom Dekker’, is squeezed into a wide space between two genuine lines of the original MS; it does not appear in the transcript.


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rather more detail than the evidence supports, the precise sequence of Collier’s procedure.166 A completely ‘unused’ seventh imposture (the name ‘Mr Shakespeare’ included among dinner guests on 4 October 1618, an anachronistic howler if William Shakespeare was meant) appears only in the transcript, and Collier clearly thought better of committing any of the Alleyn diary forgeries to print. To begin with, his own 1841 extracts would call into question any altered version of their text, much as Malone’s Henslowe transcript might do, if it reappeared, for Henslowe’s Diary. Indeed it is hard not to wonder how Collier could have imagined publicizing these revised entries without sacrificing his own reputation for accuracy, such as it was, in the Memoirs; but of course he chose not to proceed. What may finally have deterred him, although he was willing to brazen out his Henslowe impostures as ‘overlooked’ by Malone, was the prospect of explaining how not only Malone but also Daniel Lysons (whose son, also an antiquary, survived him until 1877) had managed to read past allusions to Shakespearian plays, Jonson, Dekker, and two playhouses—almost every literary allusion in the text—in assembling his specimens. W. W. Greg pointed out frequently that Collier was never a fool, but had John published his own version of Alleyn’s 1617–22 diary, as Warner thought he once contemplated,167 his day of reckoning might have come ten years earlier. Of course the evidence of his Alleyn transcript, like that of his youthful revision of Churchyard’s eulogy on Norris, remained safely on his own shelves for as long as he chose to preserve it. Between 1841 and mid-1844 Collier edited no fewer than nine further reprints for the Shakespeare Society, drawing on rare texts in the Ellesmere and Devonshire libraries, in the British Museum and the Bodleian, and on his own shelves. Three were prose tracts attacking or defending the stage, Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1579), Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors (1612), and John Northbrooke’s Treatise against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes (1577). For

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166. Warner’s observation of ‘set-offs’ from Collier’s penmanship in the transcript may not quite substantiate his conjectures about Collier’s ‘method’, and his letter to William Young (laid into Dulwich College Library MS 2d ser., no 94A; published, with serious inaccuracies, by Young in his History of Dulwich College [1889], ii:341) betrays some haste, but he was essentially right. Ganzel seized on what he called Warner’s ‘error’, ‘misquotation’, and ‘distorted description’, but his own triumphant revelation that the ‘B. Jonson’ interpolation ‘is not interlined in Collier’s transcript . . . it is in the body of the text’ will hardly impress us—for the forgery is also ‘in the body of the text’ in the original, filling up a blank space le by Alleyn. 167. Giving it as his ‘decided opinion’ that all the Dulwich forgeries, including the additions to Alleyn’s diary, were ‘executed by one and the same person, whoever he may have been’, Warner remarked that ‘as the [diary interpolations] were doubtless meant for use and not inserted in mere wantonness, it would be interesting to learn whether an edition of the MS. was ever contemplated and, if so, by whom’ (p. xlvi).



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the first of these—the second Shakespeare Society publication to appear, a er Memoirs of Alleyn—John himself sought an alternative presenter, begging Dyce to take it on, since it was ‘objectionable to see the same name over & over again as editor’, and ‘variety gives confidence’. ‘A single day’s work would end it’, he cajoled, and even volunteered his own transcript of the text and the loan of a copy of the original in his possession (apparently the copy-text, now at Houghton).168 Dyce declined, however, and Collier supplied the ten notes (p. 52) and the anonymous brief introduction, devoting six of its fourteen pages to extracts from Pleasant Quips for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen (1596), which he attributed to Gosson on the strength of a highly dubious inscription in the unique Dulwich copy of the second edition.169 Otherwise his reprint of Gosson was ‘reasonably accurate’, ‘the most reliable in the nineteenth century’,170 and Heywood’s pro-theatrical Apology for Actors, issued with Gosson in a single volume, was also textually sound. Northbrooke’s longer, and rather duller, Treatise of 1577 had the distinction of being ‘the first work printed in England in which an attack on the stage was considered of sufficient importance to merit mention on the title page’,171 and this time (February 1843) John initialled the introduction, promising that other puritan attacks on the early stage ‘from time to time will be presented to the members of the Shakespeare Society’. But no more were immediately forthcoming: Peter Cunningham, reviewing the Gosson and Heywood tracts for the Athenaeum (5 June 1841, pp. 436–37), had lamented that Lodge’s Defence of Stage Plays remained unavailable for the society to reprint, since ‘the possessor, . . . not satisfied with the rarity of the original, determined on keeping the contents sacred to himself ’. The dog in the manger of Cunningham’s report was of course William Henry Miller, whom he mistakenly believed to possess both extant copies, and ten years were to pass before David Laing, with Collier’s help, could fulfil that ambition. From Bridgewater House and the Duke of Devonshire’s collection Collier chose two more texts to reprint in 1841: the versified Debate between Pride and Lowliness (1577?), with its highly suspect attribution to Francis Thynne; and a rare play by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, Patient Grissel (1603). He had purchased Heber’s perfect copy of the latter for Devonshire in June 1834 (Part II,

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168. JPC to Dyce, 30 November 1840, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (12). 169. In the Shakespeare Society volume, which introduces the attribution for the first time, the location of the faked ‘presentation copy’ is unstated. 170. Kinney 1965, p. 428. 171. Ringler 1942, p. 60; cf. Arthur Freeman, preface to the Garland Press reprint of Northbrooke (1974). The latter erred in stating that Collier ‘edited the text . . . from the 1579 second edition’ (p. 6): he seems in fact to have employed a private copy of the first edition (1577; STC 18670)—probably his own, for Ouvry later turned up with one—with its missing text of A3 supplied in manuscript from the slightly imperfect British Museum copy.


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lot 4376), whereupon the duke made him a present of his imperfect duplicate from Kemble’s collection:172 ‘both [copies] have been of material service in the present reimpression’, as the text of the defective exemplar provided a working transcript, and the perfect one was employed ‘to supply its deficiencies’ (p. ix). Collier also printed extracts from an analogous ballad ‘of a noble Marquess and Patient Grissel’ (pp. xiii–xvi), without identifying its origin—a red flag!—but this was quite genuine, from his own collection, and may now be found among the Crawford broadsides (see A43). From the Bodleian Library Collier procured, through Halliwell, a transcript of the madcap prose farrago A Nest of Ninnies (1608), by the comedian of Shakespeare’s company, Robert Armin. A reprint for the society appeared in September 1842, with an introduction initialled ‘J. P. C.’ (but with some notes by W. J. Thoms), as Fools and Jesters, with a Reprint of Robert Armin’s Nest of Ninnies, and embodied, perhaps unintentionally, the germ of a long-term scholarly feud. For Collier permitted himself a gratuitous slur on the scholarship of his fellow member Charles Knight, with whose popular edition of Shakespeare Collier’s own had begun to compete. Knight, he observed in a long footnote (p. ix), had ‘fallen into an error’ about prompt-book evidence in the 1623 text of Much Ado about Nothing, ‘from not having consulted the earlier editions of [Shakespeare’s] plays’: the 1623 Folio text had been set from the 1600 quarto, and the presence of the names of two early actors, instead of their characters, merely reflected a slavish copy of an old printing-shop blunder, not, as Knight would have it, ‘a historical tribute’ by the Folio editors John Heminge and Henry Condell ‘to the memory of their fellows’. Collier was quite right bibliographically, as it happens, but Knight took procedural umbrage, and addressed the Council of the Shakespeare Society with a four-page printed letter, complaining about ‘an injustice which an individual [rather than the council itself, under whose authority the volume appeared] would scarcely attempt to perpetrate’.173 The council deliberated in early October, and ‘refused to take any further notice of Mr. Knight’s Epistle’,174 save that in future a notice was to be published that the editors, not

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172. OMD, ii:56–57, dates the purchase 19 September 1832, which is of course impossible, and gives the price as £10 (it was in fact only £1 15s.); Collier’s copy (Kemble-Devonshire-CollierLocker, lacking twelve leaves) = Pforzheimer 181, now at the University of Texas. 173. Knight’s main point was that Collier, in quoting him, had distorted his meaning by replacing eighteen words with editorial asterisks. Studiously refraining from mentioning Collier by name, he also protested the adducing of ‘causes’ for the ‘supposed errors’ committed by him, which the council had no business in doing; nor ought they to ‘meddle . . . with criticism upon their contemporaries . . . who are labouring for a common object’. Knight’s letter (‘To the Council of the Shakespeare Society . . . 20 September 1842’) is now rare; there is a copy in the Barton Collection, BoPL. 174. JPC to JOH, 13 October 1842, LOA 10/29.



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the council, were responsible for opinions expressed in their books—a strategy imitated by the Camden Society in 1844. It was also thought that ‘if [Knight] addressed the Council at all, it ought not to have been in print, but in manuscript’, and Collier appeared to have won the day with his ‘unanswerable (I still call it) note’; but Knight, now doubly rebuked, bided his time. No more submissive in spirit than S. W. Singer, over the years he would prove a thorn in the side of his high-handed critic. Another Bodleian original, the anonymous Ghost of Richard the Third (1614), appeared in a Shakespeare Society reprint in April 1844; the work of transcription and re-collation was undertaken by H. S. Harper of the Bodleian, but the introduction and nine pages of notes were Collier’s. The dedication of the poem, a monologue in the hoary tradition of The Mirror for Magistrates, is signed ‘C. B.’, and Collier—crediting the learned bookseller Thomas Rodd with the original idea (p. xiv)—mooted Donne’s friend Christopher Brooke as its author; this attribution is now widely accepted, on the strength of the dedicatory verse by Chapman, Jonson, and William Browne.175 The society’s editions of Dekker, Armin, and Brooke, all no doubt instigated, as well as prepared, by Collier himself, provided the first modern texts of each title, as did Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Devil (December 1842)—a work more important, in literary terms, than any of the above. John stated that his text had been taken ‘from the first edition of 1592, compared with later impressions’, and the complexity of such an undertaking was explained sixty years later by R. B. McKerrow (1958, i:140–48). The copy-text primarily employed was McKerrow’s ‘A’ (STC 18371, five copies recorded), which Collier properly identified as the earliest (see A50). Finally, and again from his own shelves, Collier reprinted two tracts of 1606 and 1620 by the dramatist John Ford, neither of them available to William Gifford (1828), who supposed the second one—known only from its title in the Stationers’ Registers—to be a lost play. Honour Triumphant, or the Peers Challenge (1606), a hitherto unrecorded rhapsody in prose and verse on the occasion of a royal entertainment, was ‘discovered’, Collier had informed Edward Moxon in 1839, ‘in a parcel of tracts I purchased’;176 A Line of Life, Pointing Out the Immortality of a Vertuous Name (1620), a short moralistic essay on public and private duty, was likewise said to be ‘the sole existing copy’ (p. v), though lacking one medial leaf. Honour Triumphant, published when Ford was twenty-one, is still thought to be his earliest work; two more copies are recorded today, and one other (at Bodley) of A Line of Life. Collier provided the briefest of introductions (three pages, unsigned) and a few notes, making no attempt to publicize

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175. STC 3830 lists it flatly as ‘Brooke’; it was thought to be unique in 1844, but is now known in six copies (two issues). 176. JPC to Moxon, 9 April 1839, CUL MS Add. 8202 (95).


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his ownership of both tracts, which eventually passed to the British Museum— Honour Triumphant by 1862 (see A54). When reprinting them in 1869 in his revision of Gifford’s Works of John Ford, Dyce chose only to reproduce the Shakespeare Society’s text, from which they were ‘known to me only’ (iii:336). He did not then mention Collier at all.



Ivory portrait miniature of John Dyer Collier by George Engleheart, 1785; by courtesy of the Picture Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.


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Portrait of James Perry, engraving by James Thomson aer a drawing by Abraham Wivell, 1818; collection of Arthur and Janet Freeman.



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Title-page of Collier’s own copy of The Poet’s Pilgrimage (1822), with his annotations; collection of Arthur and Janet Freeman.



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Collier’s marked proofs for the preface to The Poet’s Pilgrimage, showing the change from first to third person that probably reflects his decision to remove his name from the title-page; collection of Arthur and Janet Freeman.



Portrait of Thomas Amyot, lithograph by William Drummond aer Thomas C. Wageman, 1836; by kind permission of The Athenaeum, London.


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Portrait of Henry Crabb Robinson by Henry Darvall, ca. 1855; by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.



Portrait of Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, by Edwin Long; by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.


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Portrait of William George Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1824; by permission of the Trustees of the Firle Estate Settlement (photograph: Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art).



Portrait of Frederic Madden, lithograph by William Drummond aer his own painting, 1837; by kind permission of The Athenaeum, London.


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Portrait engraving of Alexander Dyce by Charles Henry Jeens; courtesy of the Picture Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.



Portrait of Richard Heber by John Harris, ca. 1831; by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.


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Portrait of William Henry Miller by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1823; private collection.



Photograph of James Orchard Halliwell (-Phillipps) by Ernest Edwards, ca. 1863; by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.


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Stipple engraving of Joseph Hunter by Henry Hoppner Meyer aer Stephen Catterson Smith, 1829; by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.



Portrait of Peter Cunningham by Charles Martin; by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.


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Portrait of Samuel Weller Singer by Eden Upton Eddis, 1831; by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.



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William John Thoms, 1861; by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.


part six

The Societies and Shakespeare (II)

In January 1841, just prior to the appearance of his first Shakespeare Society volume, John Payne Collier entered into an agreement with Whittaker and Company, publishers in Ave Maria Lane, for a new edition of the works of Shakespeare himself. Robinson learned of this at the Proctors’ on 27 January 1841, and recorded it in his diary alongside grim news from the Chronicle, that John ‘is reduced to a clerical office, from eight to five guineas a week, and is forced to go into the gallery again’. Against such ‘a loss and an humiliation’ at the workplace might be set the good news that ‘he is about to edit Shakespeare, for which he is to receive 500 guineas’. These events need not have been unrelated: Collier’s accelerating literary commitments in the early 1840s may have either provoked or exacerbated his problems with Easthope, or followed upon them, but in this instance demotion at the fraught newspaper office and a major independent undertaking seem to have occurred simultaneously. Whittaker’s fee, though payable in stages, would have been significant to the Collier household above and beyond its honorific implications—more by far than anything John had hitherto received for a single work, or in fact (over four more decades) ever would.1 Frederick Guest Tomlins, one of the founders of the Shakespeare Society,

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1. Whittaker’s had initially offered £500 (JPC to John Bruce, 30 and 31 December 1840, FF MSS 808–09, seeking and obtaining Bruce’s approval for dropping the same project as informally mooted for the Shakespeare Society, which apparently had involved Harness and Thoms), and John had sought £600, while admitting that ‘I so doat on coupling my name with a substantial edition of Shakespeare, that if Whitakers [sic] had come to me & said ‘‘We will find printing and paper, but we can do no more’’, I would have been content to give my labour for nothing’ (JPC to Bruce, 5 January 1841, FF MS 810); 500 guineas was the compromise aer F. G. Tomlins could obtain no more. Collier’s previous high was £300 for the 1831 HEDP; in 1853 (according to an article in the Critic, 27 August 1859, pp. 200–02, which both C. M. Ingleby and Collier’s friend W. D. Cooper attributed to Tomlins), Whittaker’s paid Collier £120 for the first edition of his Notes and Emendations to Shakespeare, £100 for the second edition of the same, and £300 for a one-volume Shakespeare incorporating the new readings of the Perkins Folio. He received only 100 guineas from Bell and Daldy for his 1862 Spenser (see A92a), and for his final commercial publication, the revised HEDP of 1879, he earned nothing beyond fieen free copies (see A185).

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probably brokered this lucrative project, for he was George Byron Whittaker’s ‘literary assistant’ or principal editor at the time, and knew Collier well by mid-1840. Whittaker, whose speciality of multi-volume sets and series included Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom, Sir Walter Scott’s novels, the Popular Library series, and a standard run of the classics,2 had yet no Shakespeare in his formidable list, and chose to pay for a new text, commentary, and life, rather than cobble together an edition from out-of-copyright sources. The project would extend over four years initially, and would generate, during the next decade, a supplement and a fatefully revised second edition, and more published controversy than has attended any other editorial work of its era—or perhaps any era since Luther’s and Tyndale’s. John had in essence already proclaimed his availability for the task. Throughout New Facts and New Particulars, and especially at the conclusion of Farther Particulars (1839), he had picked at textual and commentarial errors by earlier editors, and harped upon the general inadequacy of all the traditional scholarly editions, down to Boswell and Malone’s still-standard Variorum of 1821. His own qualifications were set forth in passing, diffidently but unabashedly, with scarcely a nod to his predecessors, nor much in the way of acknowledgement of his contemporaries, like Dyce and Hunter—not to speak of Charles Knight and S. W. Singer—who might have considered themselves suitable candidates too. ‘I have rarely opened and read . . . a book about the age of Shakespeare, without finding something more or less to illustrate his productions’, John had boasted, adding parenthetically that ‘the commentators seem o en to have opened without reading’ (Farther Particulars, p. 67), with the clear implication that his own commentary would be preferable to any at hand. He had also now staked a firm claim to source study, beyond that of New Facts and its sequels, with a series of reprints for Rodd, Shakespeare’s Library (1840–43); and indeed, at the age of fi y-one, with Dodsley and HEDP well behind him, it was hardly impertinent of Collier to solicit and accept what everyone of his time thought the ultimate editorial task. As early as 1832 Barron Field had urged it upon him, suggesting that if ‘Murray were to put Gifford’s collections for his edition of Shakespeare into your hands . . . you would give us all his plays in 10 or 12 volumes, omitting one half of the rubbish of Johnson & Steevens, Warburton, Malone & Reed’,

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2. A survivor, despite heavy losses, of the 1825–26 book-publishing crash, Whittaker was thought by Scott to have touched off the panic: ‘the rascally bookseller whose slip for £200,000 or thereabouts [of ‘honest people’s cash’] has brought ruin near on the trade . . . [he] kept seven hunters and be damned to him’ (Edgar Johnson 1970, ii:958, quoting from Scott’s journals). Scott lived to see Whittaker’s imprint on his last work of fiction, the fourth series of Tales of My Landlord, but not the run of early collected editions that formed (according to DNB) Whittaker’s stock-in-trade. Whittaker also published Mary Russell Mitford and Frances Trollope in the 1820s and 1830s, on apparently generous terms; N. John Hall, Trollope (Oxford, 1991), pp. 38–39.


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and repeated his feelings to Robinson three years later (‘I have the highest opinion of [Collier’s] taste as well as his lore, and think him the only man to give us a princeps Shakespeare with Notes in only 10 vols’).3 And while Collier’s lifelong sympathy lay more with the wide range of early English poetry and drama than with Shakespeare’s uncontested but sometimes tiresome supremacy within it, he was fully capable of handling the textual and explanatory demands of a new Shakespeare edition for the mid-century. By all indications Tomlins and Whittaker had made an excellent choice. John’s project, upon which he embarked with characteristic alacrity, had a particular timeliness. The text and conventional apparatus of Shakespeare was ripe for revision in 1841—especially in the light of new literary-historical research—for while some two hundred editions of more or less ‘collected works’ had seen print since the Boswell-Malone Variorum of 1821, virtually none offered any significant commentarial novelties or represented a fresh collation of textual sources. The majority, indeed, were no more than reduced reprints of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century editions by Johnson, Steevens, Reed, and Malone, or ‘harmonies’ of these four by such adaptors as Alexander Chalmers, A. J. Valpy, or C. H. Wheeler. Some publishers strove to capitalize on the current popularity of a literary lion, no matter how unqualified or perfunctory his contribution: an abortive edition by Sir Walter Scott and J. G. Lockhart, for which Scott was promised £2,500 for a ‘Life’, was scuttled by the crisis of 1826, and his countryman Allan Cunningham put his name to another in 1836 (Steevens-Malone text). One with a ‘memoir and essay on his genius’ by ‘Barry Cornwall’ (B. W. Proctor) was serialized in 1839–43, and inevitably Thomas Campbell provided his own (1838, at least five times reprinted). More serious attempts came from Collier’s old friend William Harness (1825, at least nine reprints by 1842), and his old bête noire Samuel Weller Singer (Chiswick Press, 1826, many reprints in Germany and America). The last, originally a ten-volume work with a ‘Life’ by the Miltonian Charles Symmons, approaches editorial significance, although Singer is better remembered for his revised version of 1856. The only truly important Shakespeare edition in these two lean decades, however, and the one against which Collier’s was measured by most contemporaries, was the work of the irrepressible Charles Knight.4

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3. Field to JPC, 8 September 1832, EUL MS Gen 1731/23; and Field to Robinson, 17 October 1833, HCR Correspondence. Field’s somewhat naïve idea was that John should proceed by ‘troubling us with no various readings of the quartos & folios, but silently giving us the most probable text’. Ganzel’s statement (p. 56) that Collier, on the advice of Charles Lamb, around 1832 ‘turned down a proposal to edit Shakespeare’ would appear to be based only on OMD, i:48–49 and 55. 4. The history of Shakespeare editing between Boswell-Malone and the Cambridge or ‘Globe’ Edition (1863–66) has scarcely been attempted: see, mostly for negative evidence, Taylor 1990; Taylor’s general introduction to Wells et al. 1987, pp. 52–56; and Ioppolo 1991.


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Several aspects of the boyhood and early career of Charles Knight (1791– 1879) bear an uncanny similarity to Collier’s, although neither of them, in all likelihood, would have found this significant. Two years younger, brought up in a comfortable bookish environment (his father, a thriving bookseller in thenrural Windsor, knew King George III personally, and once served as mayor of his town), Knight le grammar school with Latin but no Greek, and like Collier entered the twin trades of authorship and publishing at a relatively early age. His level and angle of entry, however, were rather more privileged: while John conned his shorthand and toiled at unsocial hours in the parliamentary gallery, Knight spent two lively months there in 1812 as a cub for the British Press and the evening Globe (George Lane, their editor, was a friend of his father’s) before setting up, with his father as co-proprietor, his own local newspaper, the Eton and Windsor Express.5 Like John he read voraciously, wrote Spenserian imitations, and even published a verse-play of his own at age twenty-two, and he experienced the black-letter bibliomania in his mid-teens, just as John had; but while John’s first Shakespeare was a Bell’s, purchased volume by volume out of pocket-money, young Charles obtained—as a gi from a generous clergyman— no less than a 1623 Folio, whose imperfections he lovingly made up in typeset facsimile—thereby learning, he later said, to appreciate ‘the essential differences of the early text, as compared with modern editions’.6 Knight edited Fairfax’s Tasso in 1817, a mildly arcane task rendered thankless

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5. Knight’s recollections of the gallery in February 1812 include a tale of accidentally scooping his elders on a very-late-night speech by Canning (‘I doubt whether any literary success of my aer-life gave me as much pleasure’), and the observation that ‘very few [reporters] have acquired, or at any rate employ’ the ‘useful art’ of shorthand stenography; Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century (1864), i:111, 108. 6. This winsome story (Passages, i:80–81) may seem particularly relevant to Knight’s later loyalty to the Folio text, but elements of romance in it rival Collier’s own autobiographical fantasies: as Knight told it, he procured the 1807 Douce facsimile of the Folio, and with an old fount of type in his father’s printing office, ‘which exactly resembled that of the folio’, he himself composed and printed ‘every page that was wholly wanting, or was torn and sullied’ on ‘fly-leaves of seventeenth-century books’ in the shop’s stock ‘which matched the [1623] paper’. Knight went on to allege that when ‘one of the Eton private-tutors’, to whom his father had shown it—now handsomely bound—and explained ‘how it had been completed’ offered a tempting price for it, ‘my treasure passed from me’. But in fact the First Folio that descended from Knight to his grandson, W. C. Knight-Clowes (see Lee 1906, pp. 25–27), very much corresponds to Knight’s initial description: imperfect ‘in many places’, rebound provincially about 1820, and indeed made up—but simply by employing twenty-seven leaves from Douce’s facsimile, which rather scuttles Knight’s tale of laborious, self-educating toil at the press. And unless Knight repossessed it in later years, or found a copy uncannily like his old ‘treasure’—while the book of his boyhood, unknown now to the census-makers, has vanished—the tale of the importunate tutor must be suspect as well. The Knight-Clowes copy was sold at Sotheby’s on 29 July 1946 (lot 197) and was re-offered at Christie’s on 12 July 2000 (lot 453, unsold; it has subsequently passed into a private collection).



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by Singer’s better edition of the same year; but his antiquarian interests were soon outstripped by his commitment to general publishing. Another newspaper (the Guardian) and two literary journals (the Etonian, with his new friends W. M. Praed and John Moultrie, and Knight’s Quarterly Magazine) followed apace, and by the panic of 1826 Knight was deeply enough involved in bookpublishing to be badly burned. A er a period of free-lance journalism and editing, however, he returned to the book trade, now concentrating upon ‘useful’ and ‘entertaining’ knowledge for a popular audience—he was genuinely devoted to a broad educational programme—and world literature for the masses. His influential Penny Magazine and Penny Cyclopaedia enjoyed a brief vogue and a vast circulation, without ever enriching their projector, and by 1835 Knight had developed a new plan for popular classics in serial form, beginning with the Pictorial Bible of 1836. ‘Pictorial’, he later recalled with some pride, was a kind of coinage, both in spirit and name, ‘a term which the Dictionaries pronounced as ‘‘not in use’’’, but which served well to describe his combination of biblical wood-engravings with a good biblical text (Passages of a Working Life, ii:253). The Pictorial Bible was succeeded by a Pictorial Thousand and One Nights, a History of England (1837–43, ‘a book which is still unbeaten as a history of England for domestic use’; DNB, 1893), and finally a compelling History of London (1841– 44), with Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere (36 parts, gathered into eight volumes, 1838–43) in between. By now Knight certainly knew Collier: he had joined the Literary Union in about 1831, and the Garrick Club in 1834, and like John had withdrawn his candidacy for the Athenaeum, as ‘party feeling then ran high’ (Passages, ii:239). We have already found the two men at odds over scholarly matters in the Shakespeare Society in 1843, but that episode need not have reflected personal animus. Knight also knew Collier’s work, especially the Bridgewater Facts and Particulars; and when he determined to add Shakespeare to his Pictorial series it was Collier’s old bookseller Thomas Rodd who provided him with ‘a considerable collection of commentaries on Shakspere, ranging from Rymer and Dennis to Hazlitt and Coleridge’ (Passages, ii:286). Knight’s presumption in this headlong pursuit, despite his early enthusiasm for Shakespeare and his youthful brush with the 1623 text, may seem naïve, if not arrogant, what with so many betterqualified candidates about; but Knight’s mid-Victorian energy, optimism, and unflappability were famous in his own time. Specialists like Collier and Dyce regarded his scholarly pretensions as negligible (there is no sign of any apprehension or initial resentment from either about the Pictorial project), yet a er one year’s intense preparation and less than four years of providing his press with fresh copy, Knight produced what can only be termed a major new text of Shakespeare, the first independently collated since well before Boswell-Malone,


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and what became—under various labels—the most popular edition of the nineteenth century. Knight’s forthright approach to his task was complicated neither by caution nor by any sense of its intimidating magnitude. With the Pictorial editions, ‘which had become a marked feature of my business, I was naturally led, as one serial approached its completion, to look around me for its fit successor’ (Passages, ii:262). Having chosen to supply Shakespeare, and having decided to edit this series himself,7 Knight began simply to accumulate ‘artistic material’ for its illustration, but soon came to grips—unsuspectingly—with the text. He ‘procured a copy of the first folio, which was read aloud to me whilst I marked upon a copy of the common trade edition, all the variations that presented themselves’ (ii:285). From such humble experimentation, hardly at Hunter’s, or Dyce’s, or Collier’s level of experience, Knight discovered that a modern debased text was worthless, and he went on to find (like everyone else) the great variora not only unwieldy but cluttered with conjectural emendations that called for individual review. With commendable impatience he resolved to create a fresh version, for which ‘I absolutely relied upon the authority of the first folio compared with the quartos’; and while this was, had been, and would be the claim of virtually every modern editor of Shakespeare, Knight performed his task assiduously. For the Folio he presumably employed his own copy;8 for the quartos he relied on Steevens’s reprint in Twenty Plays (1766), testing its accuracy ‘by having the several plays which he thus reproduced, collated with originals in the British Museum’ (Passages, ii:285). Collier, of course, would find such a process lazy and second-hand (Knight clearly employed an assistant, perhaps George Lillie Craik), but in the event Knight’s collations betray few literal errors, while John’s laborious first-hand investigations provide few improvements. In adopting or rejecting emendations, or in choosing between Folio and quarto readings, however, Knight’s editorial principles were no more bibliographically considered than his predecessors’, and amounted in essence to ‘conservative taste’ and a firm preference for Folio readings ‘for three-fi hs of Shakspere’s plays’, that is, eighteen ‘of which no previous edition is known’ and four which ‘were there first printed in a perfect shape’ (ii:289). His disaffection with the pre-Folio text— ‘those rare quarto morsels which the editors of the first folio had described as stolen and surreptitious copies’—was remarked on in contemporary reviews as over-zealous, while Collier was as o en chastised for the opposite propensity;

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7. The text and commentary of earlier compilations were largely by others, though Knight may have supplied part of England and subsequently much of London. 8. Its facsimile leaves may have harboured errors, of course: see N&Q, 18 February 1865, pp. 139–40, itemizing forty of the worst misprints. None of these figures in Knight’s text, but there are many other minor variants in the Douce reprint.



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and by 1864 Knight felt that although he ‘went on fearlessly and consistently’, he had ‘preferred perhaps a little too exclusively the authority of the folio’ (ii:290– 91). ‘I o en adopted the text of a reliable quarto’, he asserted, begging a tricky question, ‘always pointing out the discrepancies of the two editions. But I utterly rejected the principle of making a hash out of two texts, which had been the common practice of the variorum editors.’ This last bold claim would have impressed posterity more if Knight had evinced serious curiosity, like Collier, in the textual relationship between quartos and Folio, to the extent of identifying the irreconcilable elements of a latterday ‘hash’; but Knight’s editorial method was practical, not theoretical, and he was blessed with good literary taste and good luck. His explanatory notes were straightforward and articulate, and in his play-by-play summaries he supplied far more critical interpretation than Collier would venture. Like John he was harsh on his predecessors, ‘the dwarfish commentators who are for ever cutting [Shakespeare] down to their own size’, for which Thomas Rodd nobly rebuked him (‘a body of men who have rendered singular service to English literature . . . let me beg of you to tread more lightly over their ashes in future’);9 and he appears to have received help from few ‘professional’ contemporaries: those whom he chose to thank in 1864 include only one dedicated Shakespearian, the astute William Spalding, among non-specialist literary figures like Leigh Hunt, Thomas Hood, John Britton and William Maginn, Allan Cunningham, H. N. Coleridge, and Anna Jameson.10 Yet Knight’s editorial mark upon Shakespeare is not much fainter than Collier’s or Halliwell’s, and probably bolder than Singer’s and Dyce’s. While scholarly readers of the 1840s may have sniffed at the Pictorial version, its immediate recasting as The Library Shakspere (from January 1842), and its numerous revivals over the next decades (as the Cabinet Edition, National Edition, Companion Edition, Stratford Shakspere, Standard Edition, Blackfriars Edition, Imperial Edition, etc.), ensured the respectability, as well as the unmatched circulation, of ‘Knight’s Shakespeare’;11 for his judge-

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9. Introductory notice to Two Gentlemen of Verona (Pictorial Shakspere); Rodd’s comment is quoted in Passages, ii:287. 10. Knight’s literary circle and Collier’s rarely intersected, nor did Collier himself reflect, in his later memoirs, on his rival. Dyce barely knew Knight (‘What Knight thinks [about Dyce’s Remarks] I care not’, he wrote more than once), nor did Robinson, who read his autobiography with ‘great respect’, and thought his occasional bragging ‘hardly to be avoided in a parvenu’ (Morley 1938, ii:824), while Madden seems never to mention him. Only Halliwell claimed him as a personal friend, although in twenty-five years he preserved only four letters from Knight (Spevack 1997b, p. 135). 11. Knight’s more raffish William Shakspere: A Biography (published as the final volume of his Pictorial Shakspere) was perhaps equally popular, though famously undependable; see Schoenbaum 1991, pp. 273 ff.


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ment, as well as his immediate priority in re-collating the quarto/Folio text, the New Variorum editors of our own day invariably consult him and cite him. It was Collier’s fate, by the timing of his own recondite eight-volume Works, to be read and reviewed alongside a self-taught popularizer, whose enterprise and achievement could not be lightly dismissed. John can never have bargained for that. What must instead have concerned him in 1841 was the shadow of Dyce. Collier’s great friendly rival had never formally proposed to prepare a new Shakespeare, but solid editions of the plays of Peele, Greene, Webster, and Middleton—the last of them dedicated to John—clearly pointed toward the ultimate editorial challenge. No more obvious candidate-editor stood in the wings;12 the question for Dyce had never been ‘if ’, but rather ‘when’; and with Collier before him, as well as Charles Knight, the answer came harder. Nor was John unaware of the problem. As he recounted it in 1845—and he returned to the story again and again, over some thirty-five years— You [i.e., Dyce, as addressed in the shockingly outspoken Letter to Alexander Dyce] were the first person to whom I mentioned that I had received such a proposal from the publishers. I saw that you looked blank, and I asked at once whether you had any intention of the kind? Your answer was that, even if you ever undertook such a task at all, you could not engage in it for many years . . . . I told you—as indeed you knew—that I had been thirty years engaged in reading old plays and productions connected with our early stage; and that, as the opportunity offered of turning my knowledge to some account, I was unwilling to reject it. Your reply was, that I was quite right; and, a er sitting with you an hour or two, and talking the matter over, you remarked, just as I was going away, ‘If such an offer were made to me, I should be somewhat afraid of it; but all I can say is, that I have been at various times so much obliged to you, that any notes I have upon Shakespeare you shall be welcome to’. This promise came rather by surprise upon me, but it was the more gratifying; and my closing observation was, that I thanked you heartily, and that, with your aid, and that of other friends, I should set about the task cheerfully.13

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12. Hunter, whom Collier paired with Dyce as a scholar ‘engaged upon works of a character akin to my own’ (Shakespeare [1844], i:x), surely did not contemplate editing the whole Works; Halliwell, still only twenty-two, was yet to concentrate his attention on Shakespeare. 13. A Letter to the Rev. Alexander Dyce, pp. 3–4. Dyce indeed remained ‘somewhat afraid’ of editing Shakespeare. In 1853 Moxon announced Dyce’s edition (it appeared at the very end of 1857), but three undated letters from Dyce to Chapman and Hall show that he had earlier undertaken a Shakespeare for that house, giving up aer completing work on three plays: ‘the proposed



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Yet Dyce, according to Collier, turned ‘reserved’ by the next meeting, and reneged on the promise of documentary help, explaining that ‘my notes are chiefly in my memory’—although Collier knew better. Increasing coolness between them attended the whole Shakespeare project, although Dyce answered a few queries (‘and I have inserted in a note in my Shakespeare every atom I obtained, and with careful acknowledgement’), and John sent him the volumes as they were issued, although a er two or three had appeared ‘I became aware of your decided hostility’. Dyce made no secret of his feelings about the work in progress: Peter Cunningham told David Laing that Dyce ‘offers no assistance to Collier—& speaks his mind very freely about the merits of the Edition’, and that he ‘whispered to me that the notes were bad—the derivation of words & suggestions abominable—but the collations invaluable’.14 The final blow, and the first severing of relations between the uneasy old friends, came with Dyce’s censorious Remarks of 1844. Collier professed at first not to understand Dyce’s hardening attitude. ‘What hurts me [is] his want of feeling and ingratitude’, he told Halliwell in August 1843. ‘He never published a book that would not have been extremely incomplete without my help, and I have been intimate with him for 16 or 18 years’; less credibly, perhaps, ‘I would have cut off my pen-hand rather than have treated him so’.15 And six months later, to Amyot, ‘the greatest drawback [of the Shakespeare edition] has been the estrangement between me and Dyce that it has occasioned. It is to me unaccountable, a er our long friendship, that he would so have conducted himself. Nothing of the kind in the course of my life has so grieved and disappointed me.’ 16 Later, however, he drew the obvious inference, as perhaps he had silently done all along: Dyce ‘could not forgive me for stepping before him in publishing an edition of Shakespeare, when he never gave me a hint, even, that he contemplated such a work’ (JPC Diary, 1 July 1873). For his part, Dyce could be grudgingly apologetic to mutual friends, at least about his impending Remarks: ‘the coldness which has already arisen between Collier & myself ’, he wrote to Laing, ‘and the complete estrangement which I cannot but forsee [sic], have given me more uneasiness than . . . you will readily suppose’. To Halliwell he averred that ‘in spite of the conviction that I have Truth

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Shakespeare must be abandoned’, he wrote, citing ‘the difficulty of determining the true text, of ascertaining the exact meaning of passages, &c. &c.—a whole day being sometimes spent in turning over books to obtain the illustration of a single phrase. . . . The thing is utterly impossible’; FF MSS 539–41. 14. Letter to Dyce, pp. 4–5; Cunningham to Laing, 29 March 1843 and 22 July 1842, EUL MS La.IV.17. 15. 21 August 1843, LOA 17/99. 16. 23 February 1844, Bodl. MS Eng.lett.d.219, fols. 81–82.


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on my side’, the book ‘affords me little satisfaction, because I am attacking one with whom I have long been on terms of friendship’; and to Mitford, his dedicatee, he confessed: ‘I am vexed that I should have to attack an old friend like Collier’—but then, ‘considering him merely as the Editor of Shakespeare he well deserves it’.17 Any imputation of professional jealousy, however, he warmly rejected: ‘By editing a Shakespeare’, he insisted to Laing, ‘Collier interfered with no plans of mine; even if I had myself intended to do so, his previously taking the field would have been the very thing I should have wished, because it would have increased the mass of materials for me to work upon; nor could it prevent my finding a publisher; I might have one tomorrow, if I chose.’ Perhaps so; but the last words have a blustery sound.

Reasons for a New Edition of Shakespeare Undeterred by Dyce’s froideur, John ‘set about the task cheerfully’, and straightaway, although the punishing schedule of his Shakespeare Society commitments cannot have le him with very much time for it. ‘All I now wish is that I could cut myself adri from my other most incongenial drudgery’, he told Devonshire on 14 February, ‘and devote my time & attention more to this one purpose. My night-employment [for the Chronicle] is the nuisance, because it so unfits me for the day.’ 18 If this was a hint, the duke did not rise to it with a subsidy, but he did almost more for his protégé, with an immediate long-term loan of the four Shakespeare Folios and all his sixty-two quartos, including the Hamlet of 1603 (then thought unique), the 1597 Richard II, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece (1594), Othello (1622), the three editions of Lear dated 1608, and the exHeber Taming of a Shrew (1594). This priceless hoard turned up at 24 Brompton Square on 11 February, and John could barely contain his own pride in its custody: ‘I never before had such an assemblage of worthies in my house’, he bubbled, inviting John Bruce to join Amyot in ‘looking over’ the borrowed treasures.19 Lord Francis Egerton, equally trusting, followed suit with ‘all the plays, poems, or tracts that would contribute to my purpose’ (Reasons, p. 10), among them the unique Titus Andronicus of 1600 and the Bridgewater First Folio, of which more below. In November the scholar-publisher William Pickering had

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17. Dyce to Laing, 12 January 1844, EUL MS La.IV.17; Dyce to Halliwell, March 1844, LOA 17/13; Dyce to Mitford, n.d., but 1844, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.101 (70). 18. Chatsworth, sixth Duke of Devonshire’s Correspondence, 2d ser., 17.3. 19. JPC to Bruce, 19 February 1841, FF MS 242. Devonshire later stated in his Handbook of Chatsworth (1845) that he had derived ‘great pleasure’ from knowing that his plays had ‘assisted in the completion of the best and most satisfactory edition of Shakespeare that exists’ (p. 72).



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his own Sunday view of the Shakespeares, and Dyce too was invited, but probably chose not to accept.20 How promptly John embarked on his collations is unclear, however, for the fi y-page prospectus that Whittaker and Company thought appropriate ‘to prove the necessity of such an undertaking’ appeared only in mid-November (with a slightly revised ‘second edition’ in January 1842), while the first of eight volumes of text took a year to complete.21 Reasons for a New Edition of Shakespeare’s Works is an impressively confident tract, which served the multiple purposes of testing market response for the publisher (intending purchasers were asked to notify their booksellers, ‘as the number printed will be regulated accordingly’), of laying down Collier’s editorial principles, and of formally staking his claims: a er Reasons, it would be a rash projector who would hurry a rival, unheralded version into print, at least until this one was finished. John devoted two-thirds of his space to Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetical text, the establishment or ‘settling’ of which he regarded as ‘the most sacred part of the duty of an Editor’, and the remainder to principles of annotation and considerations of dating and sequence, historical context, and the obligatory ‘Life’. Not surprisingly, he espoused a conservative view of the textual demands, suggesting—somewhat unfairly, as usual—that the traditional authorities (First Folio, pre-Folio quartos) had been betrayed by Malone and Malone’s predecessors, no matter how much lip-service they had paid them. Specifically (like Knight, and like almost every modern editor) he endorsed the 1623 Folio for the eighteen previously unpublished plays, although he gave rather more weight to corrective changes in the 1632 Second Folio than we would today, claiming that Malone— his whipping-boy throughout Reasons—had underestimated it, in reaction to Steevens’s over-reliance upon it. His rationale for employing quarto text, in the eighteen instances in which quartos anticipate the First Folio, was never systematically developed (is a version thought to be revised in its own time necessarily preferable to the ‘original’?), although in individual prefaces to each play he did seek to establish textual precession and to explain, when he could, the perceived origin of each early printing and any interrelationships that might exist. Where Knight instinctively shied away from ‘making a hash out of two texts’, Collier treated his quarto evidence more pragmatically, but with little more attention to what produced the discrepancies than Knight, in his haste, could afford. For such refinements of method and textual choice we must await the ‘new bibli-

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20. JPC to Dyce, 25 November 1841, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (141). 21. This was vol. 2, in John’s hands by 28 January 1842; vol. 3 followed in April, with the rest at irregular intervals until February 1844, when vol. 1, containing the prefatory ‘Life’, etc., appeared last, as designed.


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ography’ of the twentieth century: despite a meticulous devotion to recording his variants, Collier dealt with them simply as variants, and made his editorial selections largely through personal taste, like his scorned antecedents. Otherwise most of John’s editorial principles were conventionally virtuous. He insisted upon ‘minute and patient accuracy’ in rendering the text, and promised ‘with the most plodding diligence [to] go over every line, word, and letter of each play or poem, in order to be sure that the new edition corresponds with the ancient copies, as far as they are to be followed, and that no syllable is passed over or omitted that can be corrected or recovered’.22 Harping on the inadequacies of Boswell-Malone, he devoted a full page to a single missing line in their Taming of the Shrew, iv.3, implying that it ‘made its escape from the text’ in some mysterious—even deliberate—fashion;23 its omission ‘proves that Boswell (to say nothing of Malone) performed his duty with almost criminal inattention’, which ‘must put an end to confidence in such an edition’. Harsh words indeed from an editor widely arraigned for his own carelessness! Conjectural emendations were of course to be avoided, except when persuasively ‘happy’ (personal taste again), and those based on preconceptions of metrical requirements, for which he particularly faulted Steevens, were generally unjustified. Here Collier himself was ahead of his time, and astute: ‘I am firmly persuaded that many passages, now considered defective, were purposely le so by the poet, with a view of giving variety, and of avoiding that weighty and tedious monotony observable in the works of all his immediate predecessors, with the solitary exception of Marlowe’.24 The elimination of vowel-elisions called for in the old copies (e.g., ‘th’only darling’, ‘on’s bed of death’) had also disfigured modern editions, ‘the verse rendered lame and imperfect, by printing words at length which were meant to be elided . . . to the great offence of an acute and sensitive ear’ (p. 29); while ‘false punctuation’ created havoc of a different sort, again in Boswell-Malone. ‘Here, of course, we do not object that the ancient authorities have been deserted’, since ‘our old printers . . . were notoriously either heedless or incompetent’, Collier explained (p. 25), ‘but we must say that

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22. Reasons, pp. 8 and 10. In 1849 Collier recalled that ‘what I intended to do . . . was to take the utmost pains to restore [Shakespeare’s] text to the state in which he le it’. This was ‘the chief recommendation’ of his edition, and his ‘only boast’ was that he had ‘restored the text of Shakespeare, as nearly as possible, to the integrity of the old copies’; N&Q, 24 November 1849, p. 58. 23. Reasons, pp. 22–23. This was disingenuous: it was clearly a printing-house error of 1821, as the line is present in Malone’s 1790 text, and probably was dropped by a typesetter because it half-echoed the line just before it. 24. Reasons, pp. 26–27. Critics of English prosody before Collier may have addressed the attempt of editors to regularize Shakespeare’s progressively ‘loose-girt’ blank verse, but we have not found them; see George Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody, vol. 2 (1908), pp. 536 ff.



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in some instances it would have rendered Shakespeare more intelligible, if the pointing in his day, or shortly a erwards, had been adopted’. In practice Collier seems rather to over-punctuate, once more on the basis of personal taste. Having abandoned the idea of ‘variorum’ commentary, where conflicting opinions of any weight are recorded and ‘illustrations’ are multiplied, Collier declared for explanatory notes ‘as few and as concise as possible, so that the attention of the reader is diverted from the author as rarely and as briefly as is consistent with a clear understanding of his words’ (p. 36). He took special exception to ‘parallel passages . . . frequently rather at right angles than parallel’, which smacked of Bacon’s ‘vain learning’, and ‘will usually be avoided altogether’. Such self-restraint, in keeping with most editorial practice since 1821 (the variora, of course, deliberately court over-kill), would find its minimalist apogee in Collier’s final Shakespeare of 1878, offering ‘the purest text, and the briefest notes’. There is much to be said for such an approach from the viewpoint of a reader like Barron Field, exasperated with self-important and self-proliferating commentary; but it is also an easy way out for the overworked editor. Collier had never been keen on explaining what was (to him) obvious, nor comfortable— beyond an approving or pejorative sentence or two—with critical adumbration. Readers not yet already familiar with Shakespeare might be better off, reviewers would say, with Knight’s eight-volume Works than with Collier’s, at least for guidance in the notes and introductory matter. Although John promised ‘entirely new’ prefaces to each play, with a complete résumé of modern scholarship on its sources and its printing- and stage-history, specimens of the ‘wider range and more intellectual system of criticism on Shakespeare’ characteristic of ‘late years’ (p. 37) were thinly provided. ‘Our countryman Coleridge’, to whose lectures ‘I first listened more than twenty years ago, taking and preserving notes of all that fell from him . . . [of which] I shall not omit to avail myself ’, supplied most of the succinct critical opinion, though largely from published works, not John’s shorthand records; and for the occasional remark of the German Shakespearians Tieck, Schlegel, and Ulrici, John found a place, ‘taking care, however, not to obtrude the rhapsodical outpourings of their extravagant and ignorant imitators, whether abroad or at home’ (p. 38). Of his own critical judgement there was to be virtually nothing. Finally Reasons addressed the biography of Shakespeare, his place in literary and theatrical history, and the chronology of his plays. A new life would ‘form an important portion of our first volume’ and would rely upon ‘no secondhand authorities’ but on ‘the original sources of information, from the register of his baptism to the proof of his will’, including the many ‘new facts [discovered] of late years, and even within the last few months’. A summary of ‘the origin, rise, and progress of dramatic performances in this country’ would ac-


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company the ‘Life’—in effect, when supplied, a forty-page précis of HEDP. As for the vexed problem of Shakespeare’s dramatic chronology, ten pages of Reasons mainly signal uncertainties and old errors (Malone’s, inevitably), until Collier—like Malone—settles upon the old non-chronological ‘Folio order’ as the simplest for organizing a modern edition. Here an opportunity arose to compliment Dyce on his 1833 ‘Shakespeare Chronology’ (‘appended to a short but excellent ‘‘Memoir’’ of the Poet’), which Collier did not forgo; in an earlier footnote he had also invoked ‘my friend the Rev. A. Dyce’, one of only two living scholars mentioned in Reasons. The other, lest perhaps the omission seem calculated, was Charles Knight, whose Pictorial Shakspere John praised for ‘restoring some of the readings of the first folio’ (including the line in The Shrew dropped by Boswell), and for ‘the originality of some of his views’ and ‘the ingenuity and ability with which he has enforced and illustrated them’.25

Shakespeare’s Text Our estimate of Collier’s achievement in the 1842–44 Shakespeare will depend in part on how novel (and how sound) were his prescriptions in Reasons, insofar as he carried them out. He was scarcely a pioneer in championing the authority of the First Folio, and it is too sweeping a claim to make him ‘the first Shakespeare editor to relate textual problems to printing procedures’, or ‘the first to trace the progression of each play [by comparing quarto and Folio text carefully] . . . and to base his text on the result’.26 Edward Capell’s famous ‘ray of light’—although even earlier editors might challenge for priority—led him ‘to stick invariably to the old editions’, and for the eighteen plays first printed in 1623 to cleave strictly to the First Folio, ‘the text of which is by far the most faultless of the editions in that form’.27 Likewise the credit for first ‘respecting the integrity’ of individual Folio and quarto versions of plays published in both formats may belong to Malone, not to Collier;28 and ‘printing procedures’ of the sort that generate textual corruption had been instanced by Lewis Theobald and

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25. Reasons, p. 23. At least two parodic but good-natured send-ups of the editorial criteria of Reasons appeared in 1842, one (Postscript to the Child’s Own Book) perhaps by William Durrant Cooper, the other (A Letter to the Editor of the Glasgow Argus, by ‘Alexander M’Chaff’) evidently Scottish: see A44. 26. Ganzel, pp. 86–87. 27. Introduction to Capell’s Shakespeare (1767–68), i:21. Tracing the ‘progression’ of the text (a good example is Collier on Richard II; Shakespeare, iv:156) also interested Knight, whose (correct) demonstration of the dependence of F1 Much Ado on Q1 was given particular notice and credit by Halliwell (Shakespeare [1853], i:288). Collier was also the first to point out (at viii:471) the two distinct imprints of Shakespeare’s 1609 Sonnets; see Rollins, New Variorum Sonnets, ii:1. 28. See Ioppolo 1991, p. 209 n. 55.



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others long before Zachary Jackson made a professional—if wildly eccentric— survey of them in his Shakespeare’s Genius Justified (1819).29 But John does deserve special notice for a perception which is now so unquestioned in editorial procedure that its originality has been scanted: ‘Early impressions of plays’, he wrote, ‘even of the same edition, not unfrequently differ in minute particulars, improvements having been made as they were going through the press’ (p. 10). The opportunity, afforded by the Devonshire and Egerton loans, of ‘collating one copy against the other’ enabled Collier to pick out several new variant readings in the rare quartos, and even in the First Folio, from the two copies at his disposal. Obvious as this practice may seem, there is no systematic precedent for it in Shakespeare scholarship or (we think) elsewhere. H. J. Todd, in his magisterial edition of Milton (1801), had supplied an interesting note on copies of the 1667–69 Paradise Lost, indicating variants that appeared to reflect presscorrection and, ‘perhaps’, cancellations; but while ‘several variations of this kind might be pointed out’, he did not (as textual editor) follow them up.30 And while the potential of collating copies of the ‘same’ edition may not have been lost on Malone, who found and recorded variants in three copies of King Lear dated 1608, he seems to have assumed that all three were of discrete printings, and hence worthy of comparison,31 and he showed no interest in investigating such anomalies in other play-texts. Bibliographers and collectors before 1841 knew about variant states in many other old books—Collier himself had described the three-state text of Fairfax’s Tasso (1600) in 1817—yet the application of such awareness to textual editing was largely new; there is no hint of it in the editorial work of Gifford, Singer, or Dyce. And John was well aware of his own originality in the pursuit. To the slightly augmented ‘second edition’ of Reasons (reflecting at most six weeks’ further work with his sources) he added a long footnote on variants in Q1 of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Q1 of The Merchant of Venice, found in the Devonshire and Egerton copies (p. 12), and registered an even more provocative discovery about the text of Lucrece (p. 39). Here, having accused Malone of a ‘gross mistake’ in mistranscribing two lines in the first quarto of 1594, he recorded a visit to Oxford ‘since this observation was originally printed’, where he had compared Malone’s copy with ‘the four other copies I have had

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29. For examples, see Seary 1990, pp. 138–39 and 155. Seary notes (p. 19) that because of his own familiarity with dramatic manuscripts and promptbooks, Theobald was better able than most editors ‘to strip away the veil of print and imagine the nature of the manuscript before a compositor, as well as the kind of misreadings such a manuscript might induce’. 30. Todd’s Milton (1801), i:cxci; he relied somewhat on Capell Lofft’s preface to his (abandoned) edition of Paradise Lost (1792). 31. 1790 Variorum, i:xviii; cf. Greg 1940, p. 1. Two were in fact variants of the genuine 1608 first, or ‘Pied Bull’ quarto; the third was Pavier’s falsely dated reprint of 1619.


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the means of inspecting. To my surprise, I found that Malone’s copy supports his reading, while those of the Duke of Devonshire, the late Mr. Caldecott, and two others, contradict it.’ Other variant readings emerged, and the ‘difference, never hitherto suspected, between copies of the same edition is remarkable, and shows that it is impossible to collate too many of them. The corrections must have been made as the poem passed through the press, and they tend to confirm the opinion that Shakespeare himself superintended the publication of his earlier works.’ 32 John was wise to have visited Oxford, for although he claimed to have ‘duly consulted . . . the dramatic collections in the British Museum, and at Oxford and Cambridge’, he had also hoped that the liberality of Devonshire and Egerton ‘rendered a resort to public establishments less frequently necessary’ (p. 10); he told Devonshire in February that his sixty-two quartos ‘will save me the expense of several journies to Oxford and Cambridge’. But in fact the Lucrece variants were among the most striking of Collier’s textual discoveries for Shakespeare, and they derive from Malone’s copy of the poem, in the Bodleian Library (Malone 34). Had tight-fisted George Daniel allowed Collier to consult his copy —the only other one with uncorrected sheet B, as it turns out—the trip might have been saved, but (as modern editors will know) ‘it is impossible to collate too many’ of anything. That said, it must be admitted that John overlooked or considered negligible three of the six variants in sheet B, and re-spelled or mistranscribed two of the three he recorded. The uncorrected/corrected readings of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Merchant proved to be his best finds among the dramatic quartos, although he tried to add Devonshire’s ‘unusual’ quarto of Troilus and Cressida, with two unique readings, to his list;33 while the variations in Pericles, which he reported from Malone’s quarto, actually reflect two different editions.34 He theorized (iv:330) that Kemble had seen a press-corrected 1598 quarto of 1 Henry IV, from the evidence of a ‘collation’ in the copy ‘now before me’, but this was apparently some kind of misapprehension or misrepresentation, as the Devonshire copy (now at Huntington) was not originally Kemble’s;35 and if the smudged alteration on K2v (‘now’ to ‘nor’?) is what Collier meant by a ‘collation’, it may have been anyone’s, even Collier’s. He in fact missed genu-

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32. The last speculation is reiterated, without credit to Collier, by H. R. Plomer (1903, p. 184) and by H. E. Rollins (New Variorum Poems [1938], p. 407). 33. The first—‘repured’ vs. ‘reputed’ at iii.2.22 (Collier’s Shakespeare, vi:67)—is said (New Variorum) to be in fact the reading of all copies; the second—‘aimes’ vs. ‘armes’ in v.7 (vi:131)— may simply be a misreading. 34. Shakespeare, viii:290, 323, 326, and 319. Collier was in fact the first to distinguish these, although he did not realize that Devonshire vs. Malone was in fact Q2 vs. Q1. 35. Allen and Muir (1981, p. 893) are in error: Devonshire purchased it (ex-Bunbury) from Payne and Foss in December 1824.



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ine quarto variants in Richard II, wrongly accusing Malone of a ‘blunder’ in one reading (iv:121–22) and rashly asserting that all texts were identical—Malone in fact had employed an uncorrected copy—and he inexplicably ignored the King Lear variants distinguished by Malone in his copies ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’, although those in the true 1608 Q1 constitute relevant alternatives. However much inspired by the idea of a new textual resource, Collier’s quarto collations did not live up to his programme: the idea itself, on the other hand, thrives mightily in editorial practice of our own day. Collier’s collations of the massive First Folio, for obvious reasons, were even more scatter-shot; but here too he broke new ground. He was aware of potential differences between copies—the presence or absence of Troilus and Cressida as a point of issue, for instance (pp. 48–49), an idea convincingly revived by Peter Blayney 36—and no doubt simply from handling Devonshire’s copy alongside Egerton’s he became aware of occasional press-corrections, never previously signalled. Thus Folio variants in Comedy of Errors, iv.2.38 (Shakespeare, ii:153); 3 Henry VI, v.7.25 (v:336); and Othello, iv.2.182 (vii:603), are described for the first time; and it is the first time, as far as we know, that any printed volume of this size was so ‘minutely’ collated with another copy.37 John may not have approached the task at all systematically (he missed a good chance just adjacent to his 3 Henry VI findings), but he claimed to have consulted on occasion Amyot’s copy ‘and three others’ to confirm what the usual reading might be (v:337), and Charlton Hinman’s definitive modern study bears out his reports.38 Other instances of Collier’s originality may be more fortuitous, but deserve acknowledgement. In his accounts of Q1 Hamlet (1603) and Q1 Romeo and Juliet (1597) he came closer to describing the nature and possible origin of a ‘bad quarto’ than any scholar before him, and although controversy still surrounds the term, and the candidacy of individual texts for its use, Collier’s brief character of the two problematic quartos has a very modern ring to it. Q1 Romeo, he declared, ‘has generally been treated as an authorised impression from an authentic manuscript’,39 but such, a er the most careful examination, is not our opinion. We think that the manuscript used by the printer or printers . . . was made up, partly from portions of the play as it was acted, but unduly obtained, and

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36. Blayney 1991, pp. 17–24. 37. Of course facsimiles had long been checked against their originals: see N&Q, 8 January 1853, p. 47, for William Upcott’s laborious collation of the 1807 Douce First Folio facsimile. 38. See Hinman 1963, i:257, i:275, and i:315. 39. Knight, e.g., though choosing F1 as his source, was ‘perfectly certain’ that the ‘copy’ for both Q1 and the ‘good’ Q2 ‘derived from him [Shakespeare]’; Pictorial Shakspere, preface to Romeo and Juliet, p. 3.


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partly from notes taken at the theatre during representation. Our principal ground for this notion is, that there is such great inequality in different scenes and speeches, and in some places precisely that degree and kind of imperfectness, which would belong to manuscript prepared from defective short-hand notes. . . . We do not of course go to the length of contending that Shakespeare did not alter and improve the play, subsequent to its earliest production on the stage, but merely that the quarto, 1597, does not contain the tragedy as it was originally represented.40 Q1 Hamlet had been available to readers only since 1825, and Knight followed Thomas Caldecott (‘Hamlet’ and ‘As You Like It’: A Specimen of a New Edition, 1832) in considering it ‘the play as originally written by Shakespeare . . . an early conception’, discarded and perhaps pirated a er Shakespeare revised it (Pictorial Shakspere, preface to Hamlet, p. 87). Collier, far more plausibly (most, if not all modern scholars would agree), thought it in no manner ‘authentic’, but a botch of shorthand transcript, eked out by either the stenographer’s memory or the work of ‘an inferior writer’. He also theorized that ‘although some of the scenes were carelessly transposed, and others entirely omitted’ in Q1, what the stenographer was watching (for he was writing at the theatre, a notion that Singer, before and a er Collier, found ‘next to impossible’) was in fact ‘in all its main features’ the same play represented by Q2 and F1: that is, Q1 does not preserve ‘early dra ’ characteristics, only somewhat mangled evidence of the play-on-the-stage, although it is ‘of high value’ in settling the text of some passages and proving that portions of the play that appear in F1 but not in Q2 ‘were originally acted, and were not, as has been hitherto imagined, subsequent introductions’ (Shakespeare, vii:191–92). All this seems to be original with Collier,41 especially the mention of stenographic shorthand, which, though well-known to have been employed by pirates of sermons and plays, had not hitherto been signalled in connection with specific Shakespearian texts.42 Of course none of his play-editing contemporaries—

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40. Shakespeare, vi:368–69. Laurie E. Maguire (1996, p. 201), remarking on Collier’s ‘principal ground’, says that ‘Collier was the first to comment on stylistic unevenness as a symptom of reporting’, although he may rather mean that ‘inequality’ is a symptom of mixed copy-text, and ‘imperfectness’ the characteristic of the stenographic/reported part of it. 41. Furness (New Variorum Hamlet [1877], i:14), called him ‘the first to maintain’ the transcribed performance idea. Collier’s general bias (again prescient) is against the idea of early quartos representing unrevised authorial dras, seeing them instead as botched versions of what was already perfected. He would not ‘go to the length’ of denying that Shakespeare could alter and improve a play aer its first staging, but he would not automatically treat variations in text as indicative of that practice. This seems again well ahead of his time. 42. See Maguire 1996, pp. 73 and 96–105 (esp. 103), on Collier’s anticipation of the ‘New Bibliographers’.



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not even Knight, who confessed as much, in his newspaper days—could call on John’s experience with shorthand; and although for the moment he resisted speculating upon what kind of mistakes a shorthand reporter might make at the Globe (deeming it ‘unnecessary to go in detail into proofs’ to establish his case about copy), he would return to the matter when editing his own boyhood reports of Coleridge on Shakespeare (1856).

The Bridgewater Folio Unfortunately, the most vivid of Collier’s novelties in Reasons, and in Shakespeare, was none of the above, but the use of manuscript resources, ‘to which former Editors either did not resort at all, or very sparingly employed’. ‘By availing myself of them’, he announced, ‘as largely as the nature of the case will allow, it will be seen that something has been accomplished for the illustration of our great dramatist’ (Reasons, p. 8). Of course these would provide ‘illustration’ rather than primary text, for although there existed original dramatic manuscripts of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Milton (and fragments of Marlowe and Greene), ‘it is a remarkable fact, that not a single written fragment of any of the Plays of Shakespeare has come down to us, with the exception of a few passages in some unprinted poetical miscellanies’ (p. 6). One such, however, ‘is now before me’, and while its brief extracts might derive simply from print (‘it is not easy to decide’), ‘even these . . . now and then throw light upon difficult and doubtful expressions’; another seventeenthcentury miscellany which has ‘devolved into my hands . . . very importantly illustrates the minor productions of Shakespeare’, including ‘some manuscript copies at full length of poems contained in Shakespeare’s ‘‘Passionate Pilgrim’’ ’ (pp. 7–8). We have reason now to believe that Collier’s two manuscript miscellanies were in fact one and the same, the problematic Hall Commonplace Book, of which more below.43 But an even more promising new source of ‘illustration’ was Lord Francis Egerton’s First Folio, lent to Collier along with other books from the Bridgewater House library. This copy (Lee LI, now Huntington RB 56421) was imperfect, and partly made up, Collier said, in considerably later manuscript;44 ‘but certain corrections, in the margin of the printed portion of

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43. In his 1842–44 Shakespeare Collier employed this manuscript only for a few readings in Richard II and The Passionate Pilgrim, which are quite genuine in the MS, although the initials ‘W. S.’ that he mentions at the end of one sonnet have been questioned (along with four similar occurrences to which he does not call attention); see QD 46.62. 44. Collier described the supplied transcripts of ‘some deficient leaves’ as ‘not older than the end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century’, and as copied from the Second


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the folio, are probably as old as the reign of Charles I’. John played down their textual importance, even in terms of near-contemporaneity (‘whether they were merely conjectural, or were made from original manuscripts of the plays, to which the individual might have had access, it is not perhaps possible to ascertain’), yet he devoted four pages of Reasons to five examples of manuscript emendation in the Folio, describing them as ‘happy’, ‘plausible’, and serving ‘to make the sense perfect and intelligible’ (pp. 11–15). One was ‘so obvious, that the moment it is mentioned, it will seem wonderful how so many learned and ingenious men [i.e., earlier editors] could have overlooked it’, another ‘does not admit of a moment’s doubt or dispute’, and it was only to be regretted that the old owner confined his annotations to five plays at the beginning of the volume, namely, Measure for Measure, Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like it, All’s Well that Ends Well, and The Winter’s Tale. In his 1842–44 Shakespeare Collier recorded, and adopted, nineteen manuscript corrections from the Bridgewater First Folio, all of which may be found written in ink in its margins today; five others—still fully legible—he passed over without citation, although three of these (obvious readings found also in the Second Folio) he endorsed; and there are several apparent erasures that may represent still more marginalia, deleted beyond clear reconstruction. Two of the acknowledged nineteen are also duplicated in the Second Folio, so that just seventeen 1842–44 readings are ‘original’ to the Bridgewater Folio as quoted. None affects more than one word, and most involve only the change of one letter or two; these are all emendations presuming only the slightest of compositorial negligence, although the sense may be altered profoundly. Of their overall ‘excellence’ (Reasons, p. 11) Collier was confident, but in fact only six of them are now widely accepted, and of these one also appears in the Fourth Folio (Measure for Measure, iii.1.29), one was championed by Rowe (Winter’s Tale, i.2.276; Collier cited Pope instead), and two by Theobald (All’s Well, i.3.171 and ii.1.144, neither acknowledged by Collier)—leaving just two (All’s Well, iii.7.19 and ii.5.27) that truly originate with John or the Egerton ‘corrector’, and have stood up. The last one John was justly proud of, as ‘obvious’, ‘easy and happy’, and yet overlooked by all his learned and ingenious predecessors, and it remains perhaps the single most significant textual suggestion in all his Shakespearian

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Folio, and so ‘of no worth’ (Reasons, p. 11). He can hardly have invented this detail, for Egerton to contradict, although one may wonder if he collated all the MS against another First Folio and a Second. Unfortunately, these MS leaves are no longer present in the volume; instead nine scattered leaves are supplied from a shorter copy or copies, mounted on stubs, presumably the remains of the excised transcripts. The original defect is a little puzzling, as the binding appears to be contemporary, and tradition has it that the copy ‘was probably purchased on its publication in 1623 by John Egerton, first Earl of Bridgewater’(Lee 1902, p. 28).



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labours: Bertram to Parolles, ‘And ere I do begin’ emended, with the alteration of one vowel, to ‘End ere I do begin’.45 One last correction (the twentieth) from the Bridgewater Folio derived, professedly, not from manuscript but from print—an example of a variant reading hitherto unsought and unsuspected in the 1623 princeps. Lines 8–9 of Measure for Measure, ii.4 (‘like a good thing, being o en read / Grown feard and tedious’), stood thus ‘in most copies of the first folio’, but not in Lord Francis Egerton’s: his ‘has it seard, as if the letter s had been substituted for f, as the sheet was going through the press’ (Shakespeare, ii:41). This one-letter change served to confirm an old conjecture of Warburton’s, and with the irrefutable evidence of press-correction by the compositors of 1623 ‘we need not therefore doubt as to the adoption of sear’d ’—another minor triumph for meticulous collation, the ‘plodding diligence’ overpassing ‘no syllable’, which John had promised his readers in Reasons. But alas no other copy of the First Folio has turned up such a reading (cf. Hinman 1963, i:257). And a close examination of the Bridgewater copy in 1859– 60 revealed what is still visible, that the ‘f ’ became a long ‘s’ not by the substitution of a single type, but by the erasure of the right-hand spur of the crossbar of the ‘f ’. Similarly—although no sceptic in the 1840s could or would scrutinize the volume—the manuscript additions have proved fraudulent. There are traces of dra -pencilling beneath the ink, hardly characteristic of a casual annotator providing a few letters only of correction, and other evidence of modern tampering with the Bridgewater Folio has been gathered since 1859, to devastating effect. While the twenty footnotes in Collier’s eight-volume Shakespeare that record Bridgewater emendations were scarcely audacious enough to excite scholarly suspicion (unless linked with other of the Bridgewater-Collier revelations), a repetition of the formula in the ‘Perkins Folio’ was to bring Egerton’s exemplar back into question in 1859. For the moment this helpful volume, and the laconic testimony of ‘the individual who set right a few of the mistakes in [it]’, remained an object of editorial veneration, at least to John and its (no doubt) appreciative owner. The importance of the Bridgewater Folio to Collier’s 1842–44 Shakespeare lay more, we can now see, in the very idea of employing such textual ‘illustration’ than in the evidence that (as it happens) it corruptly embodies. For it did represent a novel technique: old annotated books, even Shakespeare Folios, had long

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45. Reasons, pp. 13–14: a full page and a half devoted to this single reading. The emendation has become standard. Perhaps four others, all in The Winter’s Tale (i.2.45, ii.3.162, iv.4.654, and v.1.97), have some alternative currency as conjectures, but not much; among the remainder there are readings that go back to Hanmer (All’s Well, i.1.147), Johnson (As You Like It, iii.2.419), and Rowe (Winter’s Tale, v.1.140), the last unacknowledged.


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afforded literary editors with hints and short-cuts, but the implicit, if highly uneven authority of an intelligent reader two hundred years dead—someone at least steeped in a culture that moderns could only reconstruct from their reading—had not really been exploited before Collier’s time. Regardless of the ritual caveat, that the ancient reader may or may not have had access to lost superior texts (‘it is not easy to decide’), and even the likelihood that he had nothing of the kind, something about listening to the voice of a vanished era must appeal to us, whatever editorial theorists insist about the sanctity of undiluted copy-text. Nor did Collier’s particular malpractice altogether vitiate the use, in moderation, of such testimony, as editors today—especially of popular and anonymous texts, not subject in their own time to respectful recensions—have come to appreciate. The Bridgewater Folio may be deliberately corrupted, but if it were not, it would have been reasonable to employ it—although Collier’s rivals, belittling the results, would and did strongly demur.46 The ongoing pity is that Collier’s scholarly and editorial instincts (quite apart from his passion for novelty) so persistently outran his own genuine raw materials that his spuria, on occasions like Shakespeare, provided an almost compulsory resource.

Commentary and ‘Life’ The text of Collier’s 1842–44 Shakespeare was on the whole a good one, conservative in design and uncharacteristically accurate in execution, compromised

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46. Singer, deprecating the use of the Perkins Folio in 1853, nonetheless made frequent reference to his own annotated Second and Third Folios. Other annotated copies, furnishing nonauthoritative but more or less venerable opinion about text, include a Fourth Folio marked up by Thomas Southerne, which was later owned by Thomas Amyot and used by Collier (now in the Folger Library); the Dent Third Folio, employed by Halliwell; the former B. B. MacGeorge First Folio, now in the Free Library, Philadelphia (see Lee 1899); the Honeyman First (see Hook 1959); and the Inchiquin-Halliwell-Euing First at the University of Glasgow. In the 1840s a mysterious, perhaps illusory, annotated First was reported by the Spanish archivist Pascual de Gayangos y Arce, who claimed to have seen it around 1835 at Valladolid, part of a pile of old books in the abandoned residence of Don Diego Sarmiento (1567–1626), Count of Gondomar and Spanish ambassador to England. Gayangos described the book to Frederic Madden in a letter of 23 December 1860 (BL Egerton MS 2847, fols. 167–68), saying: ‘I cannot remember which of the four folio editions it was, but I am almost sure that it was neither that of 1664 nor the more modern of 1685; but I recollect perfectly well that it was very well preserved, was bound in old English calf, and had on the margins much writing, with this peculiarity that in some instances there were crossings of the pen over five or six verses.’ But ‘when in 1840, at the prayer of several English friends I wrote to a friend at Valladolid, enquiring what had become of the books, the answer was that they had been sold to mercers in the town, for the purpose of wrapping up their goods. I myself visited Valladolid in 1843 . . . and though the old man who showed me the house, was dead one of his sons confirmed to me the lamentable news which I had received. There was not one sheet of printed paper remaining.’



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only in its citation of the faked Bridgewater Folio. Had its twenty unsubstantiated Bridgewater readings been advanced as the editor’s personal conjectures— as today’s editors must and do treat them—there would be little to complain about, for Collier’s text was certainly no worse than Charles Knight’s, and arguably the very best before 1864 and the Cambridge or ‘Globe’ version. The commentary, in individual play prefaces and explanatory footnotes, proved less impressive, although there are insights and glosses throughout that remain useful. As we have remarked, John had always seemed uncomfortable with literarycritical tasks beyond simple praise, blame, or paraphrase, and when more was called for, he preferred to let others provide it. Coleridge was his principal, virtually his only, resort, with brief estimates extracted from Literary Remains and some version of the early lectures on Shakespeare in fi een of the thirty-six plays, and a few textual notes in five others, where some eccentric suggestions are raised to be quickly dismissed.47 Despite the promise in Reasons to supply ‘what may have been well and justly said by German critics, especially by such men as Tieck, Schlegel and Ulrici’ (p. 38), there are a total of three half-sentence references to Schlegel (and one subsequent note, i:cclxxxix, that Goethe anticipated one of Schlegel’s opinions), and no more: nothing from Lamb, Hazlitt, or De Quincey, or for that matter from Dryden, or Rymer, or—about anything aesthetic or moral—from Samuel Johnson. When William Spalding complained in the Edinburgh Review that Collier’s footnotes were ‘laconic, o en laconic to excess’ (April 1845, p. 332), he had cause. Collier’s line-by-line commentary at page-end, what for many readers would constitute his main editorial presence, was (as promised) modest, spare, and mostly concerned with textual alternatives. In assessing the tradition behind him he was somewhat less given to belabour the ‘blunders’ of his predecessors than in earlier projects or even in Reasons: with the mantle of arbiter upon him, in a grand new edition, some magnanimity was appropriate. Hence while Malone still attracted footnotes more captious than grateful, the eighteenthcentury editors from Rowe and Theobald to Steevens and Reed came in for selective approval, with rather more attention paid to Hanmer and Warburton than one might expect; illustrative parallels, when not of Collier’s own selection or discovery, were usually credited to those who first adduced them in print. When John referred to ‘modern editors’, however, he invariably meant to signal some slavish perpetuation of an old misreading, and while the category might seem to include Charles Knight—as well as Harness, Singer, Campbell, and others—John was in fact careful to cite the 1838–43 Pictorial Shakspere in at

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47. Collier’s quotations from Coleridge’s lectures of ‘1818’ and ‘1815’ or even ‘1813’ have been suspected: see QD A46.2.


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least thirteen discrete footnotes, principally laudatory.48 Such familiarity with his rival’s first version of the text might well suggest that John’s own copy for Whittaker’s printers consisted of a marked-up set of the Pictorial parts.49 Collier was likewise punctilious in crediting (or discrediting) earlier authorities who were not primarily Shakespeare editors, notably Thomas Tyrwhitt (Observations upon Shakespeare, 1786) and John Monck Mason, with whose Comments on the Last Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays (1785) he showed close acquaintance;50 also Ritson and Percy, Warburton’s nemesis Thomas Edwards, Zachary Grey, Benjamin Heath, the ‘retired ironmonger’ Thomas Holt White,51 and of course Francis Douce. He frequently cited the General Dictionary of Provincialisms by William Holloway of Rye (1838), Brand’s Popular Antiquities, H. J. Todd’s Johnson’s Dictionary (though never his Spenser or his Milton), and musicologists from Charles Burney to Chappell and Rimbault. He meticulously identified the most recent editors of his illustrative texts: Gifford’s Jonson and Massinger, Dyce’s Peele, Greene, Middleton, Webster, and Beaumont and Fletcher, a number of Halliwell’s productions, and even Barron Field’s Heywood and Margaret Tyler’s translation of the Spanish Knight of the Sun (iv:230). Some of these complimentary citations were certainly nosegays, either to reward friendship or to ward off reproach, as in references to Madden’s ‘excellent’ and ‘admirable’ glossary to Sir Gawaine (iii:73, vii:181), Beriah Botfield’s ‘interesting’ Roxburghe Club Household Expenses (vii:428), Thomas Wright’s ‘beautiful edition’ of The Tournament of Tottenham (vii:408), Peter Cunningham’s ‘excellent’ revision of Campbell’s Specimens of English Poets (viii:473), James Maidment’s ‘beautiful reprint’ of the Stanyhurst Aeneid (‘Scotland has contributed her full share of valuable works of this description’, viii:17), and the ‘very beautiful re-impression’ of Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses by ‘my friend Mr. W. B. D. D. Turnbull, of Edinburgh’ (iii:501). Even the great past and future adversary S. W. Singer received his tribute, as one ‘who has contributed so much to the knowledge and just appreciation of old English literature’, for an emendation in Timon (vi:559). Only Collier himself was never mentioned by name—

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48. Shakespeare, ii:462; iii:175, 234, 237, 445, and 525; iv:74, 534, and 574; vi:168; vii:122 and 441. 49. We can be certain that Collier possessed a copy of the Pictorial Shakspere in parts, not only from his many allusions to it, but because Knight himself wrote to him on 30 October 1838, promising to send each part as it appeared (Folger MS Y.d.6 [158]). But there was no copy in Collier’s 1884 sale—only a bound set (lot 785) of Knight’s 1842–44 Library Shakspere, the second version of his text. One can hardly imagine a more obvious use for such fascicles than as marked-up printer’s copy. 50. Singer in 1853 demonstrated that a considerable number of the ‘Perkins’ emendations also duplicated Mason’s. 51. On the last, see Sherbo 1992, pp. 86–108.



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in the diffident convention that effectively calls attention to itself—although footnotes to Dodsley, HEDP, Henslowe’s Diary, the Bridgewater Catalogue, New Facts, New Particulars, Farther Particulars, and various Shakespeare, Camden, and Percy Society publications abound. Personal advice, by way of private communication, was lavishly acknowledged throughout—even to surfeit, as some contemporaries felt.52 The suggestions and opinions of Thomas Amyot, o en no more than confirmations of Collier’s own thoughts, called for elaborate thanks on fi een separate occasions, and although Amyot, ‘for whose unceasing encouragement and ever prompt advice I cannot be too grateful’ (i:x), was indeed in constant correspondence with John during most of the period, the deference paid him is sometimes cloying. Even plumper is the input of Barron Field (nineteen citations, only one of which—vii:179, an emendation to Midsummer Night’s Dream, v.1.224, once widely adopted but now unfashionable—seems essential), and there are five notes of credit to John Bruce, three to W. J. Thoms, and others to Halliwell (viii:266), Cunningham (viii:475), Benjamin Thorpe (‘whose name as an AngloSaxon scholar requires no tributary epithet’, vii:103), Robert Lemon (iii:433), W. H. Black of the Record Office, the Rev. Mr. Goodchild of Hackney for an inscription (i:cclxxxvii), and F. A. Twiss for ‘a MS. note of his father [Francis]’ on King Lear (i:cclxxxviii–cclxxxix). Silliest are two acknowledgements of Henry Crabb Robinson, one for advising Barron Field on a point of German etymology (i:151) and one for the opinion that Banquo’s ghost is really Duncan’s (vii:172). Robinson at least had the sense to regard his presence among those acknowledged ‘for welcome and necessary assistance’ (i:ix) as ‘an altogether unwarrantable compliment’ (HCR Diary, 29 February 1844), but these were John’s perquisites, and he chose so to distribute them. Two potentially influential advisers, however, were deliberately unclaimed by him in 1844, with a show of honourable, and no doubt genuine, regret: ‘If I am not able to add to this enumeration [of helpers] the names of the Rev. Alexander Dyce, and of the Rev. Joseph Hunter, it is because, when I found that they were engaged upon works of a character akin to my own, I refrained from asking for information, which, however useful to their own purposes, they would have been unwilling to refuse’ (i:x). Hunter’s work-in-progress was historical and biographical rather than editorial (his New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare appeared in 1844–45), and while Collier

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52. ‘It grieves me to find John Payne quoting so repeatedly ‘‘Mr: Barron Field’’’, Turnbull wrote to Dyce in 1843. ‘I met this same barren field at his house, & a more shallow self-sufficient ass I have seldom seen. I told Collier so, but he did not admire my estimate of his Apollo’; letter dated ‘St Eusebius 1843’, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.5 (62). Turnbull added that ‘the eternal Mr: Amyot too liketh me not’.


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dealt respectfully with his touchy friend’s ‘very ingenious and elaborate’ arguments (1839) for re-dating The Tempest, he quite rightly rejected them (i:56 and iii:203–04); and he repeated his claim to priority in revealing (in HEDP) the Middle Temple performance of Twelh Night (1602), noting somewhat condescendingly that Hunter had identified the diarist as ‘a person of the name of Manningham’ (iii:317). Hunter would devote six pages to reviewing the evidence in 1845 (New Illustrations, i:372–78), and not mention Collier at all. Dyce, of course, was the more sincerely missed comrade-in-arms. And there remains a profusion of citations to his works, some friendly, but two or three of them with a sting in the tail: in 1830 Dyce had ‘doubted the existence’ of a Webster quarto, but ‘the Duke of Devonshire has one’ (iii:239); and a passage in Greene’s Orlando Furioso must be quoted from Collier, for it ‘was not discovered’ when Dyce published his Greene in 1831. Dyce’s new Skelton—the longawaited edition in which, to his mortification, John was never acknowledged— is remarked on in the ‘Additional Notes and Corrections’ of 1844, but only to rectify a mistake in it. Yet Dyce’s Peele was an ‘excellent’ edition (iii:368); he was the owner and ‘learned editor’ of the academic Timon-play, through whose ‘liberality’ in publishing the manuscript ‘it may now be said to have become public property’ (vi:503); and even his forthcoming edition of Marlowe drew a puff. It was ‘much wanted, and we have no doubt that it will be as conspicuous for its accuracy, as the [George Robinson/Pickering] reprint in 3 vols. 8vo, 1826, is remarkable for its errors’ (iv:385). One doubts, however, that Dyce took much pleasure in the repetition of his name by the new editor of Shakespeare. The one name which most recurs in Collier’s apparatus is that of the Rev. H. Barry of Draycot (ii:30), to whom no fewer than twenty-five suggestions are credited, with increasing frequency as the eight volumes emerged. Some are interpretative or explanatory; most, however, are preferred readings, whether restorations of F1 or F2 text, or conjectural emendations. Of the latter (fourteen) Collier in fact adopted only one, a transposition of two words that Knight had previously made, although Barry is said to have mooted it independently. While the others were o en thought ‘plausible’ or ‘logical’, they were rejected throughout for the same solid reason, that the old text was insufficiently puzzling to warrant them. Why did Collier record these damp squibs? The effect of their registry, perhaps, was to anticipate their suggestion by anyone else, or even to demonstrate how consistently the conservative razor was wielded in resisting conjecture. Two of Barry’s emendations, it is true, resurfaced elsewhere in 1853: the transposition of ‘ill’ and ‘deeds’ in King John, iv.2.220 (‘there may be some ground [for this]’, wrote Collier in 1843), and ‘crouchings’ for ‘couchings’ in Julius Caesar, iii.1.36, which Collier agreed ‘suits the sense better’, but dismissed because ‘an intelligible meaning is to be obtained from the old read-



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ing, and it is, in such cases, our principle to adhere to the text of the old copies’ (vii:45). Both are duplicated among the manuscript corrections to the Perkins Folio, where one other change (Winter’s Tale, ii.1.134, ‘me stable’ for ‘my stables’; cf. iii:456) may echo, as well, an ‘interpretation’ proposed by the ingenious clergyman. The obscurity of the Rev. Mr. Barry—thanked on twenty-five occasions and listed in the general preface among friends who ‘have taken an interest in the progress and success of my undertaking’—may have led Collier’s contemporaries to consider him no more than another fabricated identity, like George Steevens’s two clerical correspondents, ‘Mr. Collins’ and ‘Richard Amner’, or the far-flung contributors to the Shakespeare Society Papers. Could Barry have been a straw man? And if so, had he cousins in ‘the Rev. Dr. Morehead of Easington’ and ‘Mr. Petrie of Edinburgh’, a similarly obscure pair who recommended, respectively, some pointing in Hamlet (vii:202, adopted) and one mindless emendation in Othello, ‘which, I must own, is not a very probable conjecture’ (vii:498)? In ridiculing Barry and the vapidity of his extensive input, Dyce in his 1844 Remarks all but supposed this ‘correspondent’ to be Collier himself, bent on diversifying his sources; and so might we, if there did not turn out to be just such a man, the rector of Draycot Cerne and Upton Scudamore, Wilshire, since 1812. Nothing much is known of him now: in 1844 he proposed that the Camden Society edit Humphrey Mildmay’s diary—although he himself could not volunteer, as he lived too far from London—but Henry Barry remains as a caution to all who would reject every reference by Collier to an unfamiliar authority or witness.53

Peter Cunningham and the Revels Accounts Among friends and colleagues acknowledged by Collier, Peter Cunningham made just one appearance, but his edition of Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I (Shakespeare Society, 1842) was a prime new resource, appropriately cited, for dating Othello, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, and for filling in the stage history of these and other plays. Both Cunningham and his book were later to come under scrutiny, in conjunction with Collier, and to some extent because of their personal association in the 1840s. Peter Cunningham (1816–69) was the third son of ‘Honest Allan’ Cunningham, the Scottish poet and miscellaneous writer, in a family distinguished over two generations by conspicuous achievement in literature, medicine, and civil

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53. Camden Society Minute Books, 4 September and 2 October 1844.


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and military service.54 He attended Christ’s Hospital in London, published his first antiquarian edition (Drummond of Hawthornden’s Poems, with a memoir) at the age of seventeen, and joined the Audit Office in Somerset House as a clerk a year later, subsequently rising to chief clerk. Son and nephew of poets, he himself issued privately one book of verse no worse than Collier’s (1841), and later edited Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and Walpole’s Letters, and wrote a standard life of Nell Gwynn, a famous Handbook for London, other works of local history, and a great quantity of periodical essays. For the Shakespeare Society he produced not only the highly important Extracts, but a good life of Inigo Jones, and for the Percy Society oversaw two slim reprints. Cunningham was a good friend of Dickens, Thackeray, John Forster, and Douglas Jerrold, a participant in amateur theatricals with Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and a great diner-out; ultimately he became (it seems clear) a great toper, who—Dyce told Madden in 1859—‘has been turned out of the Audit Office, on account of his drunken habits & negligence’, wherea er Lord Macaulay ‘interfered’ to procure him a pension.55 He died untimely in 1869, with his scholarly and personal reputation in disarray, if not tatters. Ten years later, however, John Payne Collier remembered him as ‘my old and dear friend’, and wished that he possessed some kind of portrait, for ‘P. C. was always a willing and able supporter of mine’ (JPC Diary, 8 August 1879). Collier and young Cunningham first met before 25 February 1837, when the latter wrote with a naïve query about Samuel Daniel, diffidently reminding his correspondent that ‘you asked me to see your books’, an offer not yet taken up. In May 1838 Cunningham told David Laing of having read The Harrowing of Hell ‘from one of Collier’s printed rarities, which he lent me to look upon: not that I suppose he thought I could understand it or cared anything about it, but to show the magnificence of John Payne in printing a miracle play at his own cost’.56 In an affectionate epitome of his senior—as witty and acute as any we know—he continued: ‘I like Collier very much, from his cynical nature and

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54. The family merits six entries in DNB, a hereditary bonanza credited by Leslie Stephen to the ‘marked intellectual power . . . transmitted to her children’ of Allan’s mother, Elizabeth Harley. 55. Madden Diary, 11 October 1859. Cunningham was not universally liked: in 1849 Robinson commented that he wished his friend Collier had ‘better associates’ than Halliwell and Cunningham (HCR Diary, 8 June). See also note 65 below. 56. Cunningham to JPC, 25 February 1837 (FF MS 748) and Cunningham to Laing, 19 May 1838. Laing was an early friend, and as early as 15 December 1835 Cunningham had exhibited curiosity to him about Collier and the same topic, perhaps indicative of some anterior contact: ‘I see by the last Athenaeum that you are leagued with the indefatigable John Payne Collier in privately printing old Miracle Plays from the Auchinlech & Har[leian] MSS’; both letters from EUL MS La.IV.17.



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from his untiring love of Early English Literature. It is true he writes as dully as his subject will allow him, and tho’ his matter is always good, yet his manner is very wet-blanketish. He has neither the art or grace of writing, and of setting out to the best advantage the very rich materials he always has at hand. If he were to cook a goose or a turkey, he would send it up intestines and all’. John had presented the potential acolyte with his Bridgewater Catalogue, which ‘is very well done . . . and I deserve it for I have supplied him with twenty-eight rolls of the accounts of the Master of the Revels during the reigns of Elizabeth and James and Charles: and another curious account of the Privy Purse Expenses of Henry Prince of Wales’. In May 1841 John added a very personal gi , from the stock of his 1822–25 Poet’s Pilgrimage—poet to poet, perhaps in return for Cunningham’s 1841 Poems upon Several Occasions (seventy-five copies printed, forty-nine of them later destroyed).57 Cunningham’s Revels discoveries were the first fruits of his quest for early manuscripts in the Audit Office, an avocation ‘unconnected with my official duties’ as clerk, but condoned by the chairman, Francis Seymour Larpent. The privy purse expenses of Prince Henry (three rolls found ‘in my first day’s search’) included payments for paintings and books, hunting and hawking, and gambling losses; fees, rewards, or pensions to Inigo Jones, John Owen ‘the latyne poet’, Tom Coryate, Josuah Sylvester, and Michael Drayton; and full accounts for the production of a masque on New Year’s Day 1610, which enabled Cunningham to confirm Nichols’s and Collier’s evidence (HEDP, i:375–76) that Ben Jonson’s Oberon was first staged at that time (Extracts, pp. viii–xix). These must surely have pleased Collier, as must the ‘twenty-eight rolls’ of Revels accounts, that is, the ‘very incomplete’ series of accounts submitted for audit in 1560–1619, which Cunningham next turned up;58 but the best was to come. ‘The discovery of these papers’, wrote Cunningham, ‘sharpened my desire to discover more; and I sought in dry repositories, damp cellars, and still damper vaults, for books of account, for warrants, and for receipts. . . . I was told again and again that, if there were any old papers in the office of the reigns I sought for that were not Declared Accounts [i.e., the final summaries of payment, which unfortunately omit such particulars as the names of plays, authors, etc.], they were there by accident . . . while a few recollected, and all had heard of, the cart-loads of old papers burnt in Tothill Fields on the removal of the [Audit] office from Whitehall to Somerset House’. He indeed found the ‘declared’ (or ‘registered’)

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57. Cunningham to Laing, 19 May 1838; JPC to Cunningham, 12 May 1841, both in Harmsen collection. For the limitation of Cunningham’s Poems, see Martin, Privately Printed Books, 2d ed. (1854), p. 495. 58. See Chambers, ES, iv:134–35, ‘Accounts in P.R.O.’ Cunningham gave selections from these at pp. xxvii–xlv.


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accounts for the era of Shakespeare, in which ‘the number of plays performed [at Court] in the year was always given, but not a title or a dramatic name, or anything beyond the mere pounds, shillings, and pence of the matter. . . . All that had been kept was, comparatively speaking, of little use’; but a er initial disappointment, ‘I had the good fortune to redeem from a destructive oblivion a bundle of the Original Accounts of the Masters of the Revels’, that is, the more fully documented vouchers submitted to the Exchequer office by Masters themselves (Extracts, pp. xlv–xlvi). These last were of paramount importance for theatrical history, and they had a curious history. Malone realized that they must have existed, and ‘made several unsuccessful attempts to discover [such] documents in the office of the late Auditors of the Imprest: but all the more ancient records belonging to that office, were then in such a state as to be absolutely inaccessible’ and ‘in a damp and dark room at Westminster’ (i.e., Whitehall). Only in November 1791, a year a er his Shakespeare appeared, and the old papers had been transferred to Somerset House, did Malone hear from the obliging first Commissioner of the Audit Board, Sir William Musgrave, that the long-sought materials remained extant—both the declared accounts and some of the original vouchers in the so-called Officer’s Book. Musgrave well appreciated the value of the latter, in recording the transactions ‘more particularly . . . so that where both are existing for the same year, the ‘‘Officer’s Book’’ will best answer the objects of your researches, and the ‘‘Recorded Account’’ need only be resorted to when there is any hiatus in the other’. What Musgrave had unearthed, and what Malone now consulted and extracted (with considerable inaccuracy, as Cunningham pointed out in Extracts, p. xlvii), were eleven original ‘books’ of Revels expenses between 1571 and 1588—1583–84 and 1585–87 being missing—and Boswell printed the results, from Malone’s notes, in the 1821 Variorum.59 Subsequently, however, three more books came to light (for 1604–05, 1611–12, and 1636), those for the two Jacobean seasons proving the most piquant of all, as they recorded performances of eight Shakespeare plays and named ‘Shaxberd’ four times as author. It seems clear that Musgrave (d. 1800) informed Malone of these novelties, for a partial transcript in Musgrave’s hand of the 1604–05 accounts survives among the Malone MSS at Bodley;60 and there is no other explanation for Malone’s positive knowledge, in 1808, that The Tempest had been staged in 1611.61 But either Malone made no further inquiry, or Boswell overlooked or 59. Boswell-Malone, iii:360–64, 364–409. Malone omitted the eleventh book, covering 1587– 88, as it ‘does not contain the names of the Plays represented’. 60. Malone MS 29, fol. 69v; its source may have been either the 1821 donation or Thomas Rodd in 1838, but that hardly matters. 61. The so-called Malone Scrap, Musgrave’s memorandum, has been the subject of foolish speculation by S. A. Tannenbaum (1928b) and C. C. Stopes (1922: both Cunningham and Collier



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failed to report Malone’s notes in 1821—as Chambers wryly remarked, Boswell ‘probably . . . did not know everything that Malone knew’ (ES, iv:138)—so that for Peter Cunningham the rediscovery of the two James I accounts, in addition to the eleven earlier books known to Malone, was the sort of investigative coup that the Shakespeare Society itself was designed to inspire. ‘Alighting as I now did upon two official books of the Revels . . . which had escaped both Musgrave and Malone, I at last found something about Shakespeare—something that was new, and something that was definitive. This was my little Guanahana’ (Extracts, p. xlvii), and the treasure had turned up, he told Laing, ‘in the charcoal repository of my office’ 62—not quite the coal-hole it suggests, but a ‘dry and lo y cellar’, as he later explained, ‘under the Vault of Somerset House, far under the Quadrangle’ (Madden Diary, 30 April 1868, quoting a letter from Cunningham). Cunningham shared his discovery with his new friend, who shared Cunningham’s elation. ‘Collier is in a delirium of joy about [the papers]’, Cunningham informed Laing; ‘he is to have the use of them’—for Shakespeare, presumably—‘& I have bound myself to silence’, although at John’s urging Cunningham also engaged to edit the whole series of original accounts for the Shakespeare Society.63 Their intimacy continued in the mid-1840s, when (according to John) Cunningham helped with the transcription of Henslowe’s diary—for he was clearly a skilled reader of old handwriting—and, as a good friend of John Forster, was a principal go-between in attempting to reconcile Dyce with Collier in 1846. By autumn of that year the two were also near neighbours, for in March 1843 John made his seventh house move, to 1 Victoria Road, Kensington; and Peter, who in September 1842 had married the daughter of John Martin the painter, took the next-door house, 2 Madeley Villas. A er Collier’s departure from London they remained in touch by letter, although Cunningham’s alcoholic decline in the 1860s may have strained the relationship.64 During Collier’s troubles in 1849 and the 1850s, however, with Panizzi and the Perkins Folio sceptics, Cunningham remained so publicly loyal that Collier’s enemies despised him in private.65 Indeed Collier was right in 1879 to have valued and missed his ‘old and dear friend’, the ‘willing and able supporter’ of earlier years. accused of forging it, ‘planting’ it among Malone’s papers, etc., and incidentally failing to ‘find’ it—for it was Halliwell who did, and only in 1880). For the evidence of The Tempest, see Chambers, ES, iv:138. 62. Cunningham to Laing, 16 March 1841, EUL MS La.IV.17. Cunningham’s allusion is to the island of Guanahani in the Bahamas, where Columbus first made landfall on 12 October 1492. 63. Cunningham to Laing, 8 April 1841. The book had appeared by the date of the society’s first annual meeting, on 26 April 1842. 64. Twenty-six letters from Collier to Cunningham (1844–51) survive in the Harmsen collection. 65. Frederic Madden, Howard Staunton, and N. E. S. A. Hamilton were predictably contemp-


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But Cunningham’s scholarly reputation, which Extracts and other Shakespeare Society publications should have established, and his Handbook for London confirmed beyond doubt, fell victim for half a century to widespread suspicion—which, a er nearly a century more, seems utterly misplaced. For this his own foolish behaviour was as much to blame as the tar-brush of an alliance with Collier: in April 1868, still only fi y-two but in precarious health, Cunningham attempted to sell to the British Museum certain ‘Papers relating to Shakespeare’, which turned out to be none other than the 1604–05 and 1611– 12 Revels accounts.66 In approaching Frederic Madden—who had in fact retired from the Department of Manuscripts two years earlier—he could not have aroused a more dangerous watchdog, for Madden at once recognized that ‘as part of the Records deposited in the Audit Office, they belong to the Nation’, and took steps to ensure their return (Madden Diary, 30 April 1868). Cunningham’s vague pretext that as ‘finder’ he was somehow their legal possessor (‘Had I been a rich man I would have presented these highly interesting Papers to the Nation through the Trustees of the British Museum’, he told Madden) may have derived from a fuddled memory of permission from F. S. Larpent ‘to transcribe what I liked, and to seek what I thought was there, or ought to be there’ (Extracts, p. viii); or perhaps the past history of cartloads of documents jettisoned and the ‘destructive oblivion’ of their storage seemed to justify their appropriation. Still, the offer was remarkably näive, and a er an exchange with the new Keeper of Manuscripts, E. A. Bond (Cunningham named his price as sixty guineas, and compounded his folly by suggesting that Collier would endorse the transaction), the papers, which Cunningham had trustingly forwarded to Madden, were simply impounded and handed over to the Public Record Office. We

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tuous, Madden referring to Cunningham in one diary entry as an ‘egregious coxcomb’ (12 September 1859), recording in another that he received two guineas a week for the ‘nonsense’ he contributed to the Illustrated London News (11 October 1859), and objecting in a third to a ‘partial, lying paragraph [in the ILN ] concerning the Museum & Mr Panizzi’ (29 February 1860, with a note the following day of Staunton’s opinion that Cunningham ‘is certainly one of the most injudicious writers living, and nothing he sends ought ever to pass without rigid supervision’). Yet C. M. Ingleby in 1882 remembered him as ‘poor Peter Cunningham’, and warned a correspondent that if ‘the younger members of Collier’s family’ attempted (aer Collier’s imminent death) to ‘saddle’ Cunningham with ‘the Shakespear Forgeries of 1830–1853 . . . it will bring me to the front, & the smouldering embers of the Controversy will break out in flame again’; Ingleby to J. Parker Norris, 23 October 1882, Folger MS Y.c.1386 (116). 66. That these were missing from the Record Office had in fact been discovered four years earlier, when N. E. S. A. Hamilton, suspicious of their genuineness, had attempted to see them. As Madden explained in his diary (22 March 1864), Hamilton ‘found, to his surprise, that all the Books referred to by Mr P. C. are in the Record Office, except those of 1605 and 1612! This is strange and ought to be explained. Mr [Thomas Duffus] Hardy promises to have some inquiry made on the subject.’



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have no knowledge of any remonstrance from Cunningham or any proceedings against him: Madden wrote, on 1 August 1868 (Diary), that ‘of late years [Cunningham] has drunk himself almost to delirium tremens, and this business of seizing the Revels Papers, has caused his mind to give way, and he is now in charge of a Keeper! Strange result of his letter to me!’ In less than eight months he was dead.67 But the affair had been publicized in the Athenaeum—one bookseller in fact returned to the Record Office another manuscript sold him by Cunningham, the 1636 Revels accounts published in Extracts, pp. xxiv–xxv—and in the a ermath of the furore over Collier’s own Perkins Folio, some unnamed ‘experts’ who examined the two Jacobean Revels books for the first time in June 1868 were swi in condemning their Shakespearian aspect, the list of plays, players, and poets.68 Time and literary politics would add to the band-wagon of sceptics, notably Richard Grant White (British Quarterly Review, January 1869, without sight of the original, which he proclaimed ‘evidently the production’ of the Perkins annotator), Dyce (Shakespeare, 3d ed. [1875], i:93n.), N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Thomas Duffus Hardy, C. M. Ingleby, and even (in 1881) HalliwellPhillipps, who sensed that the text of the entries and the ‘Malone Scrap’ were both genuine, but contrived a theory of secondary transcription to explain what he thought was unquestionably a forgery ‘of more recent date’, the play-list within the 1604–05 accounts.69 Among contemporaries only Madden, privately, found these allegations unpersuasive: although ‘I looked at those Papers by lamplight, and with no very critical eye . . . I hold it impossible that two folio pages of writing could have been forged, and not have excited my suspicions. . . . I should like to know more about this, and who the experts were who decided on the forgery. The case cannot rest here . . . it seems to me incredible, had those entries been forged, that I should not have noticed the forgery’ (Madden Diary, 20 June 1868). And Madden, whose judgement in such matters was so rarely faulty, was perfectly right: the 1604–05 and 1611–12 Revels accounts are to the best of our modern knowledge unimpeachably genuine, although the spellings of the listed plays in the former are ‘unusual’ and the hand itemizing them ‘sufficiently different from the rest of the document to have a slightly suspicious air’ (Chambers, ES, iv:137). In the mid-to-late 1920s the case was re-opened, with

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67. Informing Collier, Cunningham’s widow noted that ‘poor Peter died on the 18th at five minutes past seven p.m.’; she added that ‘in February he was attacked by a series of epileptic fits in close succession, which le him speechless, and so he continued till death released him’; Euphemia Cunningham to JPC, 20 May 1869, FF MS 749. 68. Athenaeum, 20 June 1868. The marked file copy of the journal attributes the article to William Hepworth Dixon. 69. Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (1st ed.), p. 163.


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a fusillade of accusations by C. C. Stopes and Samuel Tannenbaum (Collier replacing Cunningham, for the latter, as the forger); D. B. T. Wood, W. J. Lawrence, and W. W. Greg quashed the uprising, and a masterly demonstration by A. E. Stamp (1930) effectively dismissed it;70 but long-term slander is hard to eradicate, and Cunningham’s Extracts continues to attract innuendoes from the lazy or credulous.71 Volume 1 of Collier’s Shakespeare, the last of the eight to be published (February 1844), contained the equivalent of Malone’s ‘Prologomena’—a brief history of the English stage, a life of Shakespeare with a text of his will, prefatory materials from the First and Second Folios, and a modest glossary. The stage history updated HEDP with reference to Collier’s findings at Dulwich, Bridgewater House, and elsewhere, and abundant citation of new Shakespeare Society publications, many of them his own. Collier’s ‘Life’ in twenty-one chapters and more than two hundred pages, plus a critical text of Shakespeare’s will, was in effect a new work, though never separately published like Charles Knight’s (1843). Reviewers inevitably compared the latter with Collier’s, usually to Collier’s advantage, for while Knight’s biography may have been—apart from Nathan Drake’s cumbersome Shakespeare and His Times (1817)—‘the first work on the subject to reflect the art of literary biography’ (Schoenbaum 1991, p. 278), its pervasive imaginative freedom offended most knowledgeable readers. Collier’s, by contrast, was dry and concise, but ‘a sober and sensible account of Shakespeare [which] has strained our information quite as far as it will go’ (Whitwell Elwin, Quarterly Review); its conservatism was especially remarked upon by the Edinburgh reviewer (William Spalding), as ‘whimsically rare in the annals of research. [Collier] has been, and is to this day, more reluctant than any other man to draw inferences, or to admit the soundness of inferences drawn by others, from the facts which he has himself had the undivided honour of discovering’.72 70. See Wood 1925a–b, Lawrence 1924, Greg 1929a, and Stamp 1930 (Tannenbaum 1932 is a ludicrous riposte); and cf. Law 1911 and 1913, and Streitberger 1986a, pp. xxx–xxxi. 71. As early as 1876 Joseph Crosby, an American Shakespearian, thought that Cunningham ‘must have’ forged some of the papers published by the Shakespeare Society (Crosby to J. Parker Norris, 23 April 1876; printed in Velz and Teague 1986, p. 156); as recently as 1981 the editors of Dickens’s Letters described Cunningham’s Extracts, ‘in which J. P. Collier allegedly contributed’, only as a work ‘denounced by Samuel Tannenbaum in 1928 as a forgery’ (v:283n.); and in 1997 (p. 7) Katherine Duncan-Jones remarked with reference to an alleged forgery in the Dulwich College MSS that both ‘Collier and his assistant Peter Cunningham were accomplished and intelligent forgers and fabricators’. 72. Quarterly Review, 79 (1847), 315; Edinburgh Review, 81 (1845), 332. In a good chapter on Knight, Schoenbaum remarked that ‘he repeatedly crosses the not always distinct boundary between speculation and outright fictionalizing. Sometimes he offers as extenuation ‘‘perhaps’’ or ‘‘he may have’’ or ‘‘it is possible’’, but he does not always make these concessions to normal factual rigour. His Shakespeare shudders; he feels wonder and elation. At his mother’s knee he imbibes



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Earlier we have suggested that such deliberate caution on Collier’s part, such a show of judicious restraint, may have been (with suspect matter) the cleverest and least ingenuous of postures, but the 1844 ‘Life of Shakespeare’ does consistently restrict itself to a minimum of inference from the data provided.73 And the accumulation of ‘new facts’ for this ‘Life’ was not inconsiderable: S. Schoenbaum enumerated ten genuine documentary discoveries first published here, contending that ‘had Collier satisfied himself with these valid contributions to knowledge, his place would have been secure in the great tradition of English literary scholarship which extends from Malone to Chambers’.74 Had Collier indeed unearthed all—or any—of these Shakespearian records from repositories hitherto unexplored, such praise should well have been merited. Their sources, however, were less archaeologically demanding, and Colthe cardinal doctrines of the faith. A zealous minister of Stratford lends him a Puritan diatribe against the stage. He exchanges small talk with an ancient minstrel who sings in a tremulous but clear voice’ (p. 280). Knight’s relentless contextualizing (which Schoenbaum rather admired) provoked the impatience of Marmion Savage, the Athenaeum reviewer (‘we cannot disguise our apprehension that the Life of Shakespeare, by this inventive biographer, might be as endless as his poetic fame’), who found his speculation about where and when Shakespeare might have travelled, etc., the literary analogue of ‘the endless screw in mechanics’ (3 August 1843, p. 707). Whitwell Elwin pictured Knight indulging in ‘a variety of conjectures’, building upon them ‘fanciful and elaborate theories, which are again made the foundation of fresh deductions, and which may be just as readily contradicted by opposite theories of equal plausibility’, and concluded that his William Shakspere: a Biography ‘might be more properly spelt and entitled ‘‘William Shakspeare, a Burlesque’’ ’. And the judicious William Spalding thought it ‘much too bulky, and much too discursive’, mostly because of Knight’s plan of ‘illustrating the poet’s times, as well as his personal history’, which is ‘in itself of very doubtful merit’: the work should be ‘reduced to less than half its size, by the curtailment of much of the speculation and description, and the total exclusion of some of the collateral topics’ (p. 335). 73. Noteworthy exceptions are the very dubious Spenserian reference to ‘Willy’ in Tears of the Muses (1591); and the credit paid the feeble tradition of Southampton presenting Shakespeare with £1,000 in about 1594 (p. cxlvii), although the latter implicitly links up with the spurious ‘Blackfriars certificate’. 74. Schoenbaum 1991, pp. 254–55. These are (1) the lease of a house from Robert Arden by Richard Shakespeare, probably William’s grandfather (p. lxii); (2) deeds revealing that Arden had at least seven daughters, not four, as Malone thought (p. lxiii); (3) a record of John Shakespeare appraising the goods of Henry Field, tanner of Stratford, in 1592 (p. cxlii); (4–5) two warrants signed by John Shakespeare with his ‘mark’, confirming his illiteracy (pp. lxxii–iii); (6) the sale of Snitterfield tenements in 1579 for the small sum of £4 (pp. lxxx–xxxi); (7) the famous list of recusants and those who ‘forbeare the church’ in 1592, including John Shakespeare (pp. cxxxviii ff.); (8) an inventory of corn and malt (Stratford, 1598), including Shakespeare’s substantial holding (pp. clxiii–xv); (9) a chancery suit relating to Shakespeare’s leasehold interest in Stratford tithes (p. ccxl); and (10) notes of Thomas Greene, Town Clerk of Stratford, on Shakespeare’s freehold of unenclosed fields, 1614 (pp. ccxliii–lv). To these we may add the record of Shakespeare’s 1602 purchase of a tenement and garden in Dead Lane (p. cciv), and note also that Collier probably provided Thomas Rodd with the gossipy Dowdall letter of 1693, which Rodd published as Traditionary Anecdotes of Shakespeare (1838), a work that has been credited, unpersuasively, to Collier himself.


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lier’s role in their discovery not quite that of a sleuth. The most important, the 1592 charge against John Shakespeare of delinquency in church-going, had been found shortly before in the Record Office by Robert Lemon, to whom Collier offered ‘our best thanks . . . for directing our attention to this manuscript, and for supplying us with an analysis of its contents’ (p. cxxxviii). Lemon also furnished new-found records of the actors Nicholas Tooley (p. ci) and Richard Burbage (p. ccxxii), and was handsomely acknowledged (‘as indefatigable in his researches as liberal in the communication of the results of them’, p. ccxxii). But the ten Stratford documents, the novelty-coup of John’s 1844 ‘Life’, came in one batch from a different quarter, their origin and provenance undisclosed by the biographer, and still somewhat obscure. This episode, apparently unknown to Schoenbaum and earlier historians of Shakespearian scholarship, deserves a brief notice. One of the initial ambitions of the Shakespeare Society was to inspire ‘the discovery of much curious and valuable information, in private hands and among family papers, of the very existence of which the possessors are not at present aware’. And with one of its first announced projects, ‘A collection of all the Documents which have reference to the Events in Shakespeare’s Life’, the society might have hoped to flush out new material of this description. For the proposed work Sir Frederic Madden engaged to edit Shakespeare’s will, while John Bruce would account for ‘the Marriage License, transcripts from the Registers at Stratford-upon-Avon, and all the other [unspecified] Documents’ (1841 prospectus, issued with Collier’s Memoirs of Alleyn in February). Just how close to publication this design ever came is uncertain: it was ‘ordered for press’ in April 1842, and reported to be ‘in the press’ a year later. But in April 1844 the work was reported as ‘under revision by authors’, a status that may reflect events of the preceding May. For Madden recorded then (Diary, 3 May 1843) that the bookseller Thomas Rodd had shown him ‘a bundle of deeds and papers’ relating to Shakespeare’s family, with ‘Malone’s writing . . . on several of them’. ‘It seems more than probable’, he observed sourly, ‘that he took them away [from the Stratford archives, presumably, which Malone borrowed in 1793], as he did the Stage Plots of Old Plays from Dulwich College. He seems, like ‘‘honest Tom Martin’’ [of Palgrave, the antiquary and collector], to have had a very imperfect notion of meum and tuum’. Perhaps these had been among the ‘Stratford Papers’ that contained ‘two letters of Thomas Greene’ among much unnamed material (lot 3116 in Boswell’s 1825 sale, £16 to Harding); now they belonged to ‘a member of parliament’ (‘Rodd told me [his name] . . . but I forget’). Five years later Madden identified the current owner (1848) as ‘a Capt. Saunders’, that is, James Saunders of Stratford (1775–1855).75 75. On Saunders, see Bearman 1990.



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Rodd le the principal deeds and papers with Madden, and on 11 May John Bruce and Collier inspected them (in Madden’s temporary absence) at the British Museum, and ‘made a selection to be printed by the Shakespeare Society’, presumably as a part of the project now in the hands of the society’s printers.76 Collier seemed anxious to have nearly all of them transcribed by one Osman ‘of your institution’—the court-hand perhaps proving difficult for himself or for Bruce—as quickly as possible, ‘for I am somewhat afraid the owner may change his mind’.77 Precisely why John feared such a turnabout we cannot explain, but clearly transcripts were made, for it was these papers, all today at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, which were employed or extracted in John’s ‘Life of Shakespeare’ of February 1844. Madden and the Shakespeare Society appear not to have opposed or resented their peremptory use: Collier properly identified most of them as ‘in the hands’ or ‘in the possession’ of the Shakespeare Society, as intended for publication;78 while Madden himself lent John the proofs of his transcript of Shakespeare’s will, whose use John acknowledged (p. cclv), while printing the text of it literatim (pp. cclxvii–xxi). What realistic purpose remained now for the Shakespeare Society ‘Collection of Documents’? The project was still ‘under revision by authors’ in April 1845, a year later ‘in the hands of the editors, and will be put to press without more delay than is unavoidable’, then ‘in the hands of the Council, or of the different editors’ (1847), and ‘in the hands of the editors’ (1848). The rest is society silence, for James Orchard Halliwell, who had by now turned his attentions intensively toward the biography of Shakespeare, made his own use of the Stratford materials. On 1 January 1848 Madden recorded that Collier

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informed me, that the original documents relating to the Shakspere family placed in my hands about two years ago 79 by Rodd, and communicated by me to himself (Mr Collier) and Mr Bruce, had been transcribed at 76. Madden Diary, 11 May 1843; JPC to Madden, 10 May 1843, BL Egerton MS 2843, fols. 166–67. 77. JPC to Madden, 12 May, BL Egerton MS 2843, fols. 169–70. Other documents relating ‘collaterally’ to Shakespeare’s family remained at Rodd’s: on 12 July Collier invited Bruce to join him in viewing these, ‘the sooner the better, as [Rodd] is under some engagement to return the papers soon to the owner’; JPC to Bruce, FF MS 825. 78. One, the ‘coeval copy of the court-roll’ detailing Shakespeare’s 1602 purchase of a tenement and garden in Dead Lane, bore the initials of Edmond Malone: ‘no doubt it was his intention to have used it in his unfinished Life of Shakespeare’ (p. cciv). The transcripts were ready by early October 1843, but Collier retained these, toward his own ‘Life’, until mid-January 1844; JPC to Bruce, 7 October 1843 and 19 January 1844, FF MSS 828 and 830. 79. Sic, for more nearly ‘five years ago’. While this may be a careless slip on Madden’s part, it is worth bearing in mind that his diary sometimes embodies wishful thinking, or (it has been argued, especially in relation to Collier: cf. Ganzel, p. 220 and elsewhere) testimony deliberately designed to mislead posterity.


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the expense of the Shakspere Club, and were advertised to be edited by Mr Bruce. Some delay however having occurred in regard to the publication, Mr J. O. Halliwell, with that mean and dishonorable feeling which has marked his whole career, having learnt, as Member of the Council of the Shakspere Society, to whom these documents belonged, had without the sanction of the Society gone down to the proprietor (a Capt. Saunders) and persuaded him to let Mr J. O. H. publish the documents himself! So he did, in his 1848 Life of Shakespeare, and again in his folio Shakespeare of 1853–65, identifying just one (the 1602 Dead Lane purchase) as ‘in the possession of W[illiam] O[akes] Hunt, Esquire, the present owner [of the old premises]’ (Shakespeare, i:post 8). Madden’s indignation seems more personal than principled, given that Collier’s use of the Stratford material was tolerated nearly four years before, and that ‘A Collection of Documents’ had languished incomplete for seven years: one might think that Halliwell had been patient enough. A er 1848 the 1841 project, rendered superfluous by Halliwell’s full transcripts and facsimiles, is no longer mentioned in Shakespeare Society reports. As well as Robert Lemon, Collier thanked many for advice toward his ‘Life’, his complimentary footnotes representing, in effect, the sodality of his allies in its latest form. Cunningham and Halliwell figure, of course, as do John Bruce (p. ccliii), David Laing (p. cxcvi, his research on Scottish theatrical history), Whittaker’s go-between Frederick Guest Tomlins (p. cxiv, a ‘very sensible and clever work’ on English drama), and the unrelated Thomas Edlyne Tomlins of Islington, a loyal contributor to the Shakespeare Society Papers (p. xxxvi). William Staunton of Longbridge House, near Warwick, offered information (p. lx), like Mr. N. Hill (p. cxcv); and the generous William Fricker of Hyde, near Manchester, lent or gave John a copy of Select Observations on English Bodies (1657), by Shakespeare’s son-in-law Dr. John Hall. Sir Frederick B. Watson’s ‘very elegant volume’ of religious passages extracted from Shakespeare (1843) served—with what urgency we can hardly imagine—to ‘counteract a notion, formerly prevailing, that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic’ (p. cxliii); and the Rev. N. J. Halpin’s ‘ingenious and agreeable’ Oberon’s Vision (a forerunner of F. G. Fleay’s eccentric parade of historical allusions in the drama, and an uncharacteristic Shakespeare Society publication) drew a polite ‘we differ’. Thomas Campbell’s derivative ‘Life of Shakespeare’ (1838) begged an all but pointless acknowledgement (p. cxii), and even Charles Dickens made a gratuitous appearance, as ‘the medium of the information respecting the Shakespeares of Warwick, transmitted from Mr. Sandys’ (p. lx). Among more serious Shakespearians Knight received one more bouquet for his ‘vindication of Shake-



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speare’s memory from the supposed neglect of his wife’ (p. cclvi, the sole reference to Knight’s William Shakspere: A Biography), while Hunter was thanked for the unhelpful notice of a William Shakespeare drowned in the Avon near Warwick in 1574 (p. lx). But Alexander Dyce, whose antagonism toward his Shakespeare John by now well appreciated, had a rough ride in the terminal volume: he was unaware of a 1604 miniature edition of Peele’s Tale of Troy, ‘corrected and augmented’ (p. cx), he confused Delane the actor with Swi ’s friend Dr. Delany (p. clxxxiii), and he ‘misunderstands’ a passage in The Merry Jests of the Widow Edith (p. cclxxxvii). And while Dyce’s own ‘Life of Shakespeare’, prefixed to the Aldine edition of the Poems (1832), ‘comprises all the main points of the biography of our poet then known’, his contention that Anne Hathaway must have been beautiful (‘it is unlikely that a woman devoid of personal charms should have won the youthful affections of so imaginative a being as Shakespeare’) earned him a modest but telling rebuke, perhaps not unrelated to his cavalier bachelorhood. ‘When the Rev. Mr. Dyce observes [the above]’, Collier remonstrated (p. lxxxix), ‘he forgets that the mere fact that Shakespeare was an ‘‘imaginative being’’ would render ‘‘personal charms’’ in his wife less necessary to his happiness.’ Just what subtext to this gratuitous reflection Collier intended we can only speculate, but Dyce, once again, was its target, and not Shakespeare’s ‘Life’. In Collier’s concise ‘History of the English Drama and Stage to the Time of Shakespeare’ (pp. xiii–lvii) suspect and spurious data were conspicuously absent, perhaps none of the fictions from HEDP seeming worth the recycling, or perhaps some kind of maturing self-censorship asserting itself. But in ‘The Life of William Shakespeare’ all the Bridgewater and Dulwich canards reappeared— most were by now so famous that they could hardly be passed over—and we hear once again of the Blackfriars sharers of 1589, the players’ petition of 1596, Shakespeare’s interest in the Blackfriars company in 1602, and the 1604 list of the King’s Men; of Joan Alleyn’s letter (now ‘much decayed’), the 1609 Clink assessment, the verse-challenge to Alleyn and the ‘augmented’ elegy on Burbage; of Tarlton’s jig and the ballad on Marlowe; of Othello at Harefield in 1602, and Nashe’s Isle of Dogs played by the Admiral’s Men; of the impossible date for constructing the Globe Theatre, the memoranda on Kempe and Armin and the playlist annexed to the ‘Daborne warrant’, and the faked letters from Samuel Daniel and H. S. to Egerton, the latter already suspect.80 Just one new (probable) fabrication or forgery made its appearance, a ‘small slip’ among the Alleyn papers at Dulwich, listing eleven ‘inhabitantes of Sowtherk as have complaned’

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80. The Athenaeum reviewer of Collier’s Shakespeare (2 March 1844, p. 192) noted that Collier ‘omits all allusion to the questioned authenticity of the H. S. letter’.


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of some unspecified offence in July 1596 (pp. clvii–ix). Among these are ‘Wilsone the pyper’ and ‘Mr Shaksper’, who is thus shown to be resident in Southwark in 1596. Malone had in fact in 1796 (Inquiry, p. 215) reported some kind of ‘paper now before me, which formerly belonged to Edward Alleyn’, by whose evidence ‘our poet appears to have lived in Southwark, near the Bear-garden, in 1596’, but which is not known to survive. Collier’s discovery—unmentioned in the Alleyn Memoirs and Papers—purports to be what Malone had seen half a century earlier, and its reappearance could buttress the notion that the Dulwich archives were chaotic enough for anything still to turn up. But the judgement of posterity (Hamilton, Madden, and Ingleby in 1859–61; Warner, Chambers, and Foakes) has been—unanimously—against Collier’s unfindable ‘small slip’, despite its inferred pedigree; and on balance we too must reject it. Before 1844 such individual fabrications relating to Shakespeare and his theatrical contemporaries may have muddied the waters for scholars and students, misleading specialists and casting doubt on some genuine (and perhaps contradictory) evidence, but it is only in the context of a full narrative biography that the extent of their corrupting influence becomes clear. Our impression of Shakespeare’s prosperity in middle age may not have been greatly distorted by some of these data, but aspects of his earlier life almost certainly were. A boy holding horses at the theatre-door is a tradition of one kind whose likelihood we can sceptically assess, but the opposite—a company sharer at twenty-five, the ‘especiall friende’ of a powerful courtier, a playwright admired by two monarchs—requires similar caution. From proven intimacy with Southampton, for instance, it were an easy leap to believe in a one-thousand-pound subvention toward building the Globe Theatre, which in turn would place Shakespeare (like Henslowe and Alleyn) at the commercial centre of the entertainment business of Elizabethan England. Like Charles Knight we would be piling deductions upon theories upon conjectures, save that our underlying conjectures had masqueraded as facts. Our curiosity, as well as our scepticism, must suffer when imaginary answers are put to our questions. The forged list of Blackfriars sharers is perhaps the most mischievous of the twenty impostures rehearsed in Collier’s ‘Life’, for by establishing Shakespeare as a young man of substance in London in 1589 it effectively eliminates the puzzle of the ‘lost years’, a key area for speculation—vain or profitable, but at least open—in all Shakespeare biography.81 Knight, as Schoenbaum points out, was especially victimized by the implications of the sharers’ list, and built other sand castles on Collier’s documents (the high assessment of

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81. See Schoenbaum 1991, p. 282: ‘The Lost Years vanish because the dramatist had achieved sufficient prominence by the time he was twenty-five to own shares in a major theatrical enterprise; he must have begun his employment some years before then.’



the Clink residence meant that Shakespeare could afford to house his wife and children in London, etc.). Such reckless inferences were more Knight’s fault than Collier’s, perhaps, for not even genuine data can support exponentially improbable interpretation. But the provider of spuria has the advantage over others in exhibiting his tainted wares: he himself knows, a er all, what is fiction, and can best guess how far to exploit it. In this kind of nice judgement, the confidence trickster’s time-honoured technique, John Payne Collier was ever a master.

Reviews and Reaction For the achievement of his 1842–44 Shakespeare Collier deserved favourable contemporary notice, which indeed he received, though not on all fronts. The Athenaeum reviewed his progress, two and three volumes at a time, alongside that of Knight’s lightly revised ‘Library Edition’ (which paralleled Collier’s in its issue), and considered readers fortunate in ‘having two such excellent and beautiful editions of the works of our great dramatist simultaneously presented to its notice’.82 Marmion Savage, the Dublin-based novelist (The Bachelor of the Albany, etc.), compared Knight’s text of the comedies with Collier’s, ‘and the few discrepancies we have observed, fully sustain our opinion, that a hair might turn the scale in balancing the merit and worth of the two editions’. Of course Collier ‘espouses the quartos rather more warmly than Mr. Knight’ and while the results of his painstaking collations might not be earth-shaking, ‘we do not think that labour of this kind is fairly to be estimated by the actual returns which it yields. Had Mr. Collier’s industry been far less productive of illustration and improvement than it has been, we should still applaud his exertions, and think that he has well bestowed his eminent critical talents and scholar-like acquirements’ (9 July 1842). Savage was seemingly perspicacious (and unusual) in appreciating that editorial responsibility extends to the search for negative evidence, and that a report of ‘no known variation’ is not therefore pointless or worthless. But by Collier’s sixth volume (reviewed 14 January 1843) Savage had tired somewhat of the bibliographical exercise: ‘the work goes smoothly on, with undiminished accuracy, though we continue to think that the quartos have not, upon the whole, contributed much to the effect’. Volume 8 (5 August 1843) ‘completes Mr. Collier’s edition’ (in fact volume 1 was still to come), and ‘he has faithfully discharged the duties which he imposed upon himself ’, bringing the text ‘to the utmost degree of accuracy of which it is susceptible, in the present state of our resources’. The annotation, however, with its ‘something too much of mere verbal criticism’, and the ‘dry discussion about folios and quartos, and entries 82. For full references to this and other reviews, see A46.

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in Stationers’ Registers in the introductions’, rendered the edition short of a popular triumph; that is, its ‘critical observations [failed] to make the immortal poetry better understood and more profoundly felt’ or to ‘encourage and heighten the rapturous mood of mind proper to the reading of these most glorious productions of human genius’. Collier himself might have forsworn such a purpose, at least in such terms of Hibernian bardolatry. Yet Savage came down hard on Knight’s romantic life of Shakespeare, and praised Collier’s warmly (2 March 1844), and at seven-column length. ‘We do not want either fine writing or new theories about Shakespeare: we have had plenty of both already: we want facts, trivial though they be; and it is in ferreting out facts, and adjusting minute incidents, that Mr. Collier has acquired a name for successful industry and pains-taking investigation’. Collier’s biography ‘abounds in minute and curious information’, satisfying this primary need, and his own speculations—unlike Charles Knight’s—were modest, infrequent, polite, and acceptable: ‘thirty years of unwearied research into the history of his author [have] entitled him to be heard on points wherein we are only half informed or not informed at all. We are the more willing to sanction the privilege he has assumed, inasmuch as he at all times states his views without dictatorial assumption.’ For Percival W. Banks (‘Morgan Rattler’) in Fraser’s Magazine, Collier’s Shakespeare was simply ‘the very best edition . . . that has been published’;83 and even John Mitford, noticing Collier and Knight and his friend Dyce’s obloquy upon both for the Gentleman’s Magazine, allowed Collier ‘the praise . . . certainly due of having given such a faithful and accurate collation of the older editions, as to render any future endeavour of the same kind utterly superfluous: and in some instances he has found his labour rewarded by the discovery of the authentic text, and the rectification of a long disputed passage on which conjecture and learning would equally have been employed in vain’ (June 1844, p. 564). The mainstay Quarterly reviewer, the Rev. Whitwell Elwin—an eighteenth-century specialist with a retrograde fondness for Johnsonian emendation and exegesis—thought both Collier and Knight ‘useful and commendable’ and deserving ‘an average share [of ] the gratitude of the public’, but severally inadequate to the task of preparing a standard edition. ‘In their zeal for restoration they have restored indiscriminately beauties and errors. The result is far from identical, for . . . they are partisans of different editions; and whereas Mr. Knight is resolved, if possible, to torture into sense the merest nonsense of the folio, rather than adopt a reading from a quarto, Mr. Collier, whenever he can venture, puts up with a doubtful, or worse than doubtful, reading from a quarto, rather than

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83. From a highly laudatory review of Collier’s Memoirs of Actors (1847): Fraser’s, February 1847, pp. 163–69.



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admit the version of the folio. In one point they are agreed’, Elwin sneered; ‘they o en prefer an obvious misprint to the substitution of a conjecture which is too certain to deserve the name.’ Both editors were guilty of converting ‘passages, which as they stood before, were as clear as they were admirable’ into ‘pitiful stuff ’, with their ‘tasteless innovations’, although Collier ‘is a less offender than Mr. Knight’, and o en the victim of his own ‘officious correspondents’. Yet Collier’s introductions were ‘neat’, and documented ‘with precision’, and his ‘Life’ was ‘a sober and sensible account of Shakespeare’, whereas Knight’s was no better than a burlesque, and of his original commentary ‘it is impossible in the main to speak with respect’. To the extent that Knight was deemed subject to ‘the dreamiest silliness’ and ‘thoughts that are condemned by their inherent absurdity’, expressed in ‘slovenly, inaccurate English, if English it can be called’, Collier was certainly the winner by default in this hostile account (March 1847). A far more serious and extended reflection on Collier’s edition, and on both Knight’s Pictorial and Library versions, had already appeared in the Edinburgh Review for April 1845 (pp. 329–84). Its author was William Spalding (1809– 59), the clever Scottish Shakespearian, whose precocious Letter on Shakespeare’s Authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1833) had been cited by Collier as ‘ingenious’ (while disagreeing with its thesis, which is now widely accepted; Shakespeare, i:cxxii); and although Collier and Knight served as its occasion, it was more in the way of a general essay on editorial principles and Shakespeare textual scholarship. Spalding reproduced ‘statements of purpose’ by each, correctly adducing their implied quarto/Folio predilections: Collier’s ‘folio-phobia’ (‘not a terror of the folio in itself; but an abhorrence of particular parts of it which happen to have been previously patronized by Mr. Knight’) and the ‘Triangular Duel’ among Dyce, Collier, and Knight are shrewdly observed. Collier’s metrical judgements, while ‘in some places . . . preferable to Mr. Knight’s’, appeared inconsistent to Spalding (‘while he sometimes declares himself, and still o ener acts, as an opponent of the old-fashioned scheme of syllable-counting, there are not a few instances in which he falls back upon it’), and led to a perhaps unconsciously cruel reflection on Collier’s ‘evident want of a good ear for the melody of verse’ (p. 351); but the four ‘instances in which homage is paid [by Collier] to the arithmetical system of scanning’, and which sensitive readers would appreciate as ‘irreconcilable with any just theory of English versification’, prove nothing of the sort.84 Spalding’s analysis on balance favoured Collier’s methodology and textual decisions over Knight’s, but his summing-up stressed a quite different—and previously unaddressed—aspect of each editor’s work:

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84. Collier was perfectly right in all four lines quoted (or misquoted) by Spalding: Othello, i.3.145, where Collier adopted the text of Q1, like most subsequent editors; Love’s Labour’s Lost, ii.1.45; Henry VIII, v.4.1 2 (prose!); and Measure for Measure, iv.3.89, all standard readings.


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The value of Mr. Collier’s edition is great: but it is chiefly valuable as a storehouse of materials for others. It will be more useful to the bibliographer or to the future editor, than to the student who desires to be guided towards the formation of just critical opinions of his own. The editor has performed well the duties which he himself holds to be of paramount obligation: but he is blind to the importance of other duties, which in the present state of criticism, and of our acquaintance with Shakespeare, an enlightened editor will believe to fall imperatively within his province. By contrast, Knight’s edition, ‘both in plan and execution . . . appears to us not only to be worthy of representing . . . the improved criticism of our times; but to be singularly valuable as a suggestive and instructive text-book for the study of the poet’s works’ (p. 384). Within twenty-five years, of course, neither edition would attract readers in quest of a settled text, and within fi y the ‘province’ of critical commentary, even ‘the improved criticism of our times’, would seem matter for a detached or independent study, and no longer the duty of an ‘enlightened editor’. Yet Knight, in his many appealing and well-marketed Shakespeares, far outshone and outlasted the popular achievement of Collier, whatever Collier’s ambitions for that might have been. Spalding in 1845 had a point. What John may have anticipated, along the way, was a good puff in the Westminster Review, the ‘third’ major quarterly,85 for on 8 June 1844 Barron Field told Henry Crabb Robinson: ‘I hope my article [on Shakespeare, presumably complimentary to Collier] will appear in the next Westminster Review, and that our friend’s handsome edition will meet with a fair sale’ (HCR Correspondence). But something went wrong: in December an editorial note regretted that the article on ‘Shakspere’s Editors and Commentators’ was held over until spring, where the one canonical emendation by Field to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (v.1.224, ‘A lion’s fell, nor else no lion’s dam’), which Collier had endorsed lavishly, found only a paragraph of its own: ‘we are indebted for this emendation to Mr. Barron Field’ (Westminster Review, March 1845, p. 55). What replaced Field’s friendly report was an altogether different sort of notice by George Henry Lewes. A rising young Turk among literary critics, Lewes had been recruited by the Westminster in 1840, and already had pronounced there and elsewhere upon the French, Spanish, and Italian drama and on English theatrical reform. ‘Shakspeare and His Editors’, for the March 1845 Westminster (pp. 40–77), was a logical extension of Lewes’s territorial claims, and his fierce antipathy toward over-wrought commentary made Collier its incidental, and perhaps inappropri-

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85. Traditionally Benthamite and then broadly liberal, whereas the Edinburgh was Whiggish, and the Quarterly Review Tory in spirit.



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ate, target. Boswell’s Malone bore the brunt of Lewes’s first charge (‘It is impossible to conceive a greater amount of stupidity, drivelling, pedantry, senseless learning, collected into one work’), but Collier was singed and then scorched in the a ermath: his very first note on The Tempest (i:9) ‘is only introduced to display the editor’s acquaintance with obscure books’, and a sampling of ‘valuable erudition’ was then held up to scorn. What faint praise Lewes allowed John was crudely two-edged (‘we applaud his plodding diligence’ and ‘the brevity of his notes . . . although a large proportion . . . are trivial’, ‘we forgive the tediousness for the sake of the implied accuracy of collation’, etc.), while the documentation of prior misreadings did not, Lewes insisted, spring from reverence for the text, but from ‘a desire to impress the world with a sense of unwearied diligence, and lynx-eyed accuracy’: Lewes claimed to have counted nine instances in fourteen pages of volume 1 in which errors signalled by Collier had been corrected by ‘all the modern editors’ before him.86 Collier’s zeal and hard work were conspicuous, perhaps, ‘but we cannot regard [diligence] as constituting the sole, or even primary quality desired in an editor of Shakspeare’, and ‘with all respect for his erudition, and gratitude for the facts he has discovered, we cannot bring ourselves to believe him fit to edit Shakspeare’. Lewes dismissed Collier’s command of his matter as ‘rather curious than valuable’, while his ‘deficiencies are many and serious, in knowledge, in taste, in ear, and in judgment. His erudition and diligence cannot replace these. He has consequently produced an edition where he ought only to have published a small volume of new readings and suggestions’, like—a deep thrust—‘his friend Mr. Dyce’. Like Spalding, Lewes fastened upon Collier’s imperfect ‘taste’ in versification (he ‘has manifested great incompetence; and he has done this with more than his usual confidence’), and added insult to injury by advising the old Italophile to ‘open Petrarch’ to learn about vowel elision. Meanwhile Charles Knight ‘has done more for Shakespeare than any living man’, exhibiting ‘acuteness, patience, energy, learning, and untiring enthusiasm, joined to a larger conception of his editorial function’, and ‘has done much to make antiquarian knowledge popular’. Knight ‘was the first to give us the text of Shakespeare purified from later corruptions, and the gi was immense’; and Lewes withheld even the usual concession to Collier’s literal fidelity, finding Knight ‘as diligent as Mr. Collier [and] more accurate, because more intelligent’—whatever that means. Barron Field’s Shakespearian article never appeared in the Westminster Review—Lewes’s apparently pre-empted it—but the friend who once thought John ‘the only man to give us a princeps Shakespeare’ soon soured on its final accomplishment. From his retirement at Torquay, devoted again ‘to the old English

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86. This is a bald exaggeration: we count six at most, nearly all the subject of intelligent notes.


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researches of my student-days’, he lamented the ‘jealousy’ of Hunter and Dyce ‘of their friend Collier’s having had the honour of editing their common Idol’, but deemed them both ‘better philologists than our friend . . . he would have done well to take one of them into partnership in his edition’.87 A month later he was even less gracious: ‘With all his superiority as a master of stage-history, [Collier] has lived to hear universally, that he is an incompetent verbal critic, and that upon the whole Knight’s Shakespeare is preferred to his.’ 88 But this turning against an old ally and a long-called-for work may trace its origins to a personal pique: ‘I shall make two more portions on Shaksperian ‘Conjectures’ in the [Shakespeare] Society’s Papers’, he told Crabb Robinson, ‘which our friend John Collier might have had the benefit [of ] . . . but he wrote me that he was overwhelmed with suggestions, anonymous & other, lumping me, who am older than [by three years], & had begun the study before him, with every young scribbler.’ Evidently nineteen footnotes from John—a quantum that made W. B. D. D. Turnbull ‘grieve’—did not sufficiently appease Barron Field. To some other old friends Collier presented copies of Shakespeare, costly though sets may have been: Bruce received one, and Robinson characteristically told his brother Thomas that ‘I neither wished nor expected’ John’s gi , and that John ‘is much too liberal a man for one in his situation’ (HCR Correspondence, 5 February 1842). Halliwell, who in his short-lived journal The Archaeologist (January 1842) had handsomely puffed Collier’s Reasons, anticipating ‘an edition far superior to any of its predecessors’ (p. 201), received instead an apology, and a cri de coeur: ‘I wish the ‘‘liberality’’ of the publishers enabled me to give you a copy of the Shakespeare’, John wrote, ‘or that I had never presented one copy to a quarter where it is only received for the sake of finding all possible fault with it, in the true spirit of an old friend turned new enemy.’ 89 That recipient was of course Alexander Dyce, and the unkindest of all cuts, by way of review, would appear within three months of the gi as completed.

Dyce Again For some time Collier had been aware that Dyce intended a formal reply to his Shakespeare, but he may not have anticipated its size and minuteness. ‘Collier dreads my book on Shakespeare’, Dyce told John Mitford early in 1843, while

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87. Field to Robinson, 21 October 1844, HCR Correspondence. Dyce would not have been flattered: ‘All I know of Barron Field’, he told Mitford, ‘is—that he is a friend of Collier,—a middleaged, fat, ugly, consequential sort of person’; 25 February 1845, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.102 (82). 88. Field to Robinson, 16 November 1845, HCR Correspondence. 89. 30 January 1843, LOA 23/45.



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himself professing to ‘dread’ correction by Mitford.90 ‘It will be printed the instant Collier’s last vol. has appeared; and he has now but 2 more to issue.’ By mid-May 1843 ‘Collier has published his last vol. except one, and Moxon is to print my Notes immediately a er the appearance of the concluding volume. . . . I shall run to about 300 pages—&, I fear, will be thought dreadfully carping & ill-natured.’ On 12 January 1844, even before the publication of Collier’s volume 1, with its ‘Life’, Dyce reported to David Laing: ‘The die . . . is cast; for Moxon has advertised my book, and says, that more than half a dozen people have been inquiring for it at his shop.’ 91 Unwilling to seem more devious or covert than he must, he effectively warned John in a tight-lipped note of 19 February: ‘Many thanks for the concluding volume of a work, which I wish most heartily that you had never begun. Yours always, A. Dyce’.92 And while Remarks on Mr. J. P. Collier’s and Mr. C. Knight’s Editions of Shakespeare was still ‘printing’ or ‘at press’ in March, Dyce continued to rally his spirits by protesting his altruism, despite ‘attacking one with whom I have long been on terms of friendship’. ‘Of one thing I am sure’, he told Mitford, his dedicatee, ‘that what I have said throughout the volume was said for the sake of truth.’ The book was selling ‘much better than I have expected’, and Thomas Rodd showed Dyce a letter from a bloodthirsty American client (‘send me Dyce’s book on Collier: I hope he will give it him well’), which reassured him that his position was ‘not singular’. Yet ‘what Collier thinks of [Remarks], I am almost afraid to ask’, Dyce admitted; ‘what Knight thinks, I care not’.93 Dyce need hardly have speculated about John’s reaction: in December ‘Collier cut me dead in Rodd’s shop’,94 and January 1845 saw the publication of Collier’s extraordinary Letter to the Rev. Alexander Dyce. Clearly, what wounded Collier was the very idea of Remarks, a critical inquiry directed almost entirely at his edition and Knight’s, with close verbal examinations of nearly four hundred passages in terms of the two editors’ textual choice or their commentary. Had Dyce cooperated with Collier, of course, most of this would have been need-

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90. Dyce to Mitford, undated but probably early 1843, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.101 (65). Dyce wrote of a prospective ‘book’ by Mitford (‘I feel certain that in conjectural emendation you will floor us all’), which never saw the light as such. Possibly some of whatever Mitford intended is to be found in his Cursory Notes on . . . Beaumont and Fletcher, as Edited by . . . A. Dyce (1856), which also contains (pp. 40–53) observations on Dyce’s 1853 Few Notes on Shakespeare and on the Perkins Folio. 91. Dyce to Mitford, 8 May 1843, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.101 (69); Dyce to Laing, 12 January 1844, EUL MS La.IV.17. 92. Letter bound in vol. 1 of Collier’s own set of his 1842–44 Shakespeare, BL C.134.f.1; it bears Collier’s late annotation: ‘It sadly interfered with his own scheme as I found aerwards.’ 93. Dyce to Halliwell, dated March 1844 by the recipient, LOA 17/13; Dyce to Mitford, 6 May 1844, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.101 (71). 94. Dyce to Mitford, 22 December 1844, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.101 (79).


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less, whereas by withholding his knowledge and opinions he could be seen to have trapped John into error. Not, however, that Remarks abounds with telling corrections: Knight and Collier share Dyce’s strictures about equally, although ‘the one appears to be sometimes right where the other is wrong’, and in several instances one or the other attracted praise. The impugned passages o en involved no more than interpretative pointing, failure to cite earlier commentary or conjecture, or even the absence of explanatory notes. Dyce’s own arguments about each ranged from a paragraph to three pages—a luxury unavailable to either Collier or Knight—and few if any of his conclusions have the ring of sic probo. ‘That Shakespeare has suffered greatly from both [Collier and Knight]’, Dyce offered, in his preface, as ‘my deliberate opinion’, echoing what he had asserted to Mitford, Cunningham, Laing, and Halliwell, and even Collier himself since mid-1842; but save for the cumulative weight of multiplied instances, the fault-finding of Remarks hardly justifies so sharp a prefatory rebuke. In his main text Dyce was more guarded and sparing of sixpenny emphasis, although Collier ‘dislocates and jumbles’, ‘mutilates’ and ‘tortures’ his text, suffers oldcopy ‘nonsense’ repeatedly, adopts pointing ‘of prodigious absurdity’, and preserves conjectures that are ‘wretched’, ‘unnecessary’, and ‘beyond measure injudicious’. Dyce well perceives Collier’s penchant for black-letter mystification: he ‘evinces a sort of kindly feeling towards the misprints of the old copies, dismissing them, when he does not receive them into the text, with an express declaration that they may nevertheless be the genuine readings’ (p. 125), and he exhibits ‘unwillingness to reject a gross misprint without saying something in its favour’ (p. 190). But the harshest of Dyce’s Remarks are reserved for the ubiquitous Rev. H. Barry—did Dyce assume him to be John’s alter ego, a straw man, and fair game for a thrashing?—whose contributions are derivative (p. 156), when not unimaginably ‘wretched’ (p. 80) or ‘villainous’ (p. 252). ‘Away with Mr. Barry’s restoration!’, he cries of one (p. 189), and concludes, of another, that ‘the stupidity of Mr. Barry’s alteration is intolerable, and Mr. Collier’s rashness in adopting it extreme’ (p. 195). It is hard to imagine Dyce so chastising a living contemporary, fellow cleric or no; but if he thought the Rev. Mr. Barry was Collier himself he was of course wrong. Some reviewers of Collier and Knight chose to notice Remarks, on the whole unsympathetically. Whitwell Elwin thought that Dyce ‘shows an excellent tact in the choice of his readings’ but ‘it is a pity he has thought fit to pervade his comments with a tone of scorn—for it really leaves more ridicule on himself than on anyone else. Satire, which has laughed away graver vices, is lost upon notemakers.’ Collier, by contrast, ‘to his honour, has treated every one with courtesy or silence. His notes are not a vehicle for vain-glorious contempt, private pique, and petty jealousies; and if his forbearance to others of the cra criti-



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cal could not suggest similar civility, it should have been felt that respect was due to long and meritorious toil in the elucidation of our dramatic literature’.95 The Gentleman’s Magazine—in a notice that Barron Field correctly identified as by Dyce’s friend and dedicatee, John Mitford—attempted to pour oil on the waters, by complimenting all three contestants while cleaving, predictably, to Dyce: ‘There is no cause why either of the editors should receive offence at this publication; because Mr. Dyce has never differed from them without specifying his reasons, nor ever disputed their conclusions without bringing his arguments and authorities fully before them. We therefore hope that the editors will, in the candour of generous minds, believe what he says, that this work originated in pure love of Shakespeare, and not in the desire of decrying their labours’.96 William Spalding was simpler, and less sanctimonious: ‘three men of literary merit [are] in a position, which ludicrously resembles that of the combatants in the Triangular Duel described in a farcical novel. Mr. Collier fires at Mr. Knight; Mr. Dyce fires at both; and Mr. Knight, a er having returned Mr. Collier’s first fire, has the manliness and good sense to stand passive’ (Edinburgh Review, April 1845, pp. 352–53). But the most significant reply to Remarks, though oblique and virtually uncirculated, was by Collier himself; for if Collier deserved Dyce’s Remarks, Dyce deserved Collier’s retaliatory Letter of New Year’s Day 1845. We have quoted before from this remarkable pamphlet, which consists principally of mock-Dycean ‘remarks’ on one play (The Woman’s Prize) in Dyce’s own recent edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, prefaced by a highly personal three-page account of the Shakespeare affair. ‘As the work went on’, Collier deposed, ‘I sent you the volumes. You were thus able to track every step of my progress, and to mark where I had slipped or stumbled . . . . When I heard that you were preparing a volume of your own against me, it gave me poignant sorrow, not so much in fear of what the book might turn out, as in the conviction how the matter must end’ (p. 5). Incredibly enough, for his annotated copy of Dyce’s Remarks remained in his possession until his death,97 John claimed—as of New Year’s Day 1845—that ‘I never have seen that volume’, although he seemed sure enough of its animus and its reception to consider it misconceived. ‘Your ‘‘Remarks’’ have done you no good’, he told Dyce, ‘and me no harm:

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95. Quarterly Review, p. 316. That Elwin was blind to John’s own deer but long-standing techniques of footnote-provocation seems clear, although in the 1842–44 Shakespeare bouquets do greatly outnumber brickbats. 96. June 1844, pp. 563–65; a subsequent letter from an unidentified ‘Country Parson’, castigating ‘the absurd incompetency of those two editors of Shakespeare’, added ‘my mite’, most of it contemptuous of Collier, and fawning toward Dyce (July 1844, pp. 42–43). 97. JPC sale, lot 170, with a letter inserted.


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the public take no interest in such individual controversies, unless . . . they can get a laugh at the expense of one party or the other. Of this fact you have had experience’. The present Letter, he added, ‘printed . . . merely for private circulation’, was occasioned not by Dyce’s Remarks, but instead by the ‘injustice’ displayed in Dyce’s revised seventh volume of Beaumont and Fletcher. Nothing whatever was said of the questioned Shakespearian passages (Collier had of course ‘never seen’ them), but eight passages from Dyce’s text of The Woman’s Prize were scrutinized with malice aforethought. ‘It would be easy for me to multiply them’, John declared—echoing Dyce’s claim in Remarks to have published ‘only a part of what I had actually written’—but ‘you will see from hence that you too are liable to error, and that even you require some forbearance’. The instances are mostly unremarkable, and civility is strained to breaking, with Collier at one point tasking Dyce with ‘un nez pour les ordures’: ‘witness the manner in which he restores, at full length, and repeatedly, the grossest and coarsest words in our language, for which even the old printers felt themselves compelled to leave blanks’ (p. 12). If this is not pot and kettle, nothing is; and Crabb Robinson pounced on the ‘serious charge against the Reverend Commentator’, recollecting that Hunter had once ‘blame[d] you for the like imputation in one of your former works, but . . . not in such strong terms’.98 He thought that John had ‘done well in suppressing’ A Letter, whose rarity today and absence from any other contemporary notice suggests it was never at all broadcast— although Dyce received (and preserved) his own copy.99 John himself told Cunningham (6 January 1845) that ‘I find that to send round my ‘Letter’ . . . would give my poor wife so much pain (as she thinks it would do me injury, and put me in the wrong, who am now in the right), that I have resolved, at all events to postpone it. Therefore be so good as to say nothing about it.’ 100 If indeed postponement led to suppression, Collier’s motive may have involved other than Robinsonian prudence, or the placating of Mary Louisa: he may have regretted his own humiliating confession of distress more than his consequent spite or indelicacy.

Shakespeare’s Library and the First ‘Reprint Club’ Between his Shakespeare and the various society publications one might think Collier busy enough to avoid other literary commitments. But he had already

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98. HCR to JPC, 6 May 1845, Folger MS Y.d.6 (188). 99. Robinson locked his copy away, promising to return it to Collier. There is no copy in the British Library, and no ‘stock’ of it in Collier’s posthumous sale, although that absence may reflect Halliwell’s advice. 100. JPC to Cunningham, Harmsen collection.



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suggested to Rodd a series of reprints of Shakespeare source books, and from October 1840 to November 1843 that bookseller brought out Collier’s Shakespeare’s Library in eight two- or four-shilling parts, before issuing the whole in two cloth-bound volumes, at one guinea, in late 1843. John wrote a prospectus and provided introductions to each part ‘explanatory of the extent and nature of the obligation of our Great Poet, and furnishing the most complete information regarding the Authors and their productions’;101 but with this, and the original selection of items, his work ended. Rodd procured copies of the originals ‘in public and private depositaries’, prepared the printer’s copy and collated the proofs (‘I am not & never was answerable for the text’, John told W. C. Hazlitt in 1874; ‘Rodd took that upon himself ’);102 and the ‘editor’ made no bones about the limitation of his services. ‘This is a book about which I took no pains’, he wrote in his own thick-paper copy, ‘excepting in writing the short introductions. I promised Rodd to lend him my name, if he would be responsible for the accuracy of the text . . . on the t.p. I only profess to have furnished the ‘‘Introductory Notices’’, and that, in fact, is all I did for the work’.103 Nonetheless Shakespeare’s Library is not an insignificant production, for it assembles good old-spelling reprints of some nineteen sources and analogues in a convenient compass, including at full length Greene’s Pandosto, Lodge’s Rosalynde, Twyne’s Apollonius, Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, and the 1608 Hystorie of Hamblet, as well as extracts from Painter, Riche, Whetstone, Gower, Holinshed, Yong’s Montemayor, Sidney’s Arcadia, Sylvain’s Orator, the Hecatommithi and Pecorone (in Italian with English translations), the Mirror for Magistrates, Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory, and Westward for Smelts. In some cases these are the first modern reprints, or the first since Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated of 1753–54. John’s prefaces bristle with bio-bibliographical arcana, and incorporate the usual admixture of compliment and correction to Hunter, Dyce, and Malone, rebuke for Steevens, and acknowledgements of friends, among them Halliwell, Cunningham, and John Holmes of the British Museum. The Rodd-Collier project made a considerable body of early Shakespearian text widely and inexpensively available, but the general public was still unapt to care about such material, and John indulged his old urge to accommodate the select few in three or four ‘private’ reprints of 1844–45. The costly Miracle Plays of 1835–36 and the limited-issue Bridgewater booklets had been accompanied by at least one little reprint for personal use, The Merry Puck, or Robin Goodfel-

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101. Collier’s undated dra of the prospectus, Folger MS Y.d.279. 102. 18 October 1874, BL Add. MS 38,902, fol. 62. 103. Folger PR2952 C59 Ex. ill. Collier’s disclaimer is not strictly true: there are explanatory and textual notes to the first two reprints (Pandosto and Rosalynde), presumably completed before Collier’s Shakespeare duties precluded such attentions to the text.


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low (ca. 1837: see A28), in which Collier eked out the defective text of his ca. 1633 original with conjectural verse of his own, signalled by bracketing.104 Presumably even the Shakespeare and Percy Societies would not republish everything that Collier found rare and appealing, or he may have preferred not to appear ubiquitous under their imprints—as he had explained to Dyce with regard to Henslowe’s Diary. In 1844, confronted with a unique black-letter poem, he formed a sort of informal reprint-club of his own, dividing the cost of printing and binding among twenty-five volunteers, of whom Sir Frederic Madden enthusiastically made one. Collier, Madden recorded, ‘proposes to print only 25 copies, and then to distribute them to 25 persons who are willing to bear a share of the expense of the printing and paper. By this means many unique tracts may be preserved from the chance of destruction at a moderate price, and the holders of the copies’ (he noted cannily) ‘will always be able to get their money back in the market. I immediately assented to become one of the twenty-five, as I think the plan a very excellent one’ (Madden Diary, 16 February 1844). The first in Collier’s new programme of reprints was The Pitiful History of Two Loving Italians, Gaulfrido and Barnardo le Vayne, in the Time of Emperor Vaspasian (1570), a verse history ‘translated out of Italian into Englishe meeter’ by the otherwise obscure John Drout (or John Grout) of Thavies Inn. This sixtypage poem in undistinguished fourteeners, whose Italian source is untraced,105 had hitherto been known only from its entry in the Stationers’ Registers (Arber, i:440: ‘the petyfull history of ij lovyng Italyons’), and Malone had speculated that it might be ‘a prose narrative on the story on which [Romeo and Juliet] is based’ (Boswell-Malone, vi:4). Collier did not see fit to repeat Malone’s guess, either in his Shakespeare or in Shakespeare’s Library, but a generous correspondent, the Anglo-Saxon scholar and Egyptologist Charles Wycliffe Goodwin, informed John of the existence of his still-unique copy of the book, ‘which I am very sorry to say has nothing to do with Romeo & Juliet’,106 then lent it, and agreed to its reprinting. Sending Madden his subscribed copy on 16 February 1844, John noted that ‘the cost is 9s/, the whole 25 copies costing just under £12 for printing, paper and binding’, and encouraged its return ‘if you repent, or do

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104. Despite the covering claim of ‘only twenty-five copies printed’, and his declaration to Bruce that a gi copy was ‘almost the only one I have le’ (17 April 1841, FF MS 811), there were seventeen copies in Collier’s 1884 sale. But he seems to have circulated it stingily, and aer the 1841 Percy Society version had appeared it may have seemed redundant. 105. M. A. Scott (1916, p. 233) identifies none; Collier supposed it to be original with Drout/ Grout, and described as a translation merely to capitalize on the vogue of the 1560s and 1570s for Italian novelle. The poem refers to Robin Hood, scarcely a figure of Italian folklore. 106. Undated letter, bound into the Folger Library copy of the reprint. Gordon Goodwin (DNB, s.v. ‘Drout’), echoed by Scott 1916, maintained that ‘part’ of Gaulfrido and Barnardo ‘relates to the history of Romeo and Juliet’; but this is untrue, as Collier himself made quite clear.



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not like [its] appearance . . . as I have plenty of people to take the 25 copies off my hand[s]. My intention is, just saving myself harmless, every now and then to reprint some unique tract in prose or verse. . . . My printer [Shoberl the younger] charges me 1.6.0 per sheet and 1s/ for the binding, which I am sure is not out of the way.’ 107 Madden was happy to keep his copy, and in fact Collier’s reprint of Gaulfrido and Barnardo remained for about a century the only form in which the poem could be read; for Goodwin’s original passed in 1847 to his college, St. Catharine’s Hall (Cambridge), but eluded 1926 STC and the researches of W. W. Greg.108 Whether John ever distributed twenty-five copies remains undemonstrable, as must the limitation itself, although survivors are rare: Beriah Botfield, the Roxburghe Club stalwart, received a copy inscribed on the same date as Madden’s, designated ‘no. 2’; and Goodwin thanked Collier for the one sent to him—churlishly late—on 10 June. Dyce, Rodd, Halliwell, Bruce, Amyot, Mitford, and Laing (four copies, three of them perhaps intended for other Scottish subscribers) no doubt paid for theirs;109 but gi s (e.g., to Devonshire and Egerton) would have diminished the stock, while four uncirculated copies remained in Collier’s own library at his death. In June 1844 the second ‘one-of-twenty-five’ reprints made its appearance, a short verse tract titled A Dialogue between the Common Secretary and Jealousy, Touching the Unstableness of Harlots (ca. 1540). John suggested a ‘not unlikely’ attribution to Edward Gosynhill, the mid-century satirist who wrote in both praise and dispraise of women, although the evidence is slight. ‘Only two copies of [the original tract] appear to have been preserved’, he deposed: ‘one of these, if we are not mistaken, was in the library of the late Mr. Heber, and the other is in the hands of a gentleman, who has liberally allowed it to be reprinted’. In fact the Macro-Heber copy (Part IV, lot 969; STC 6808), purchased by William Miller through Thorpe, remains the only one known, and it seems likely that Collier transcribed it while cataloguing the book for Evans in 1834.110

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107. JPC to Madden, BL Egerton MS 2843, fol. 257. 108. It is unlocated in his and W. A. Jackson’s MS notes in Greg’s copy of Arber (i:440), marked up between 1943 and 1958; on this set (now FF) see Greg 1944, p. 3, n. 2. And because it provided the topical basis for a forgery in Henslowe’s Diary of a ‘Gaulfrido and Barnardo’ play (Collier had called attention to the ‘dramatic character’ of the poem, which employs marginal speechprefixes), Greg suspected the very existence of the poem itself: ‘the original of the poem printed by Collier, the genuineness of which the present entry [i.e., for the performance of the play in 1595] has been forged to support, has not yet come to light’; Greg 1904–08, i:xxxviii. 109. Collier told Laing on 3 March 1844 that he owed him 36s. for the four; EUL MS La.IV.17. 110. Such convenient but anonymous lenders will always inspire our suspicion, but the truth can alternate maddeningly: here the liberal ‘gentleman’ is probably a fiction, but the ‘gentleman’ who provided Gaulfrido and Barnardo was real, as we have seen.


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The text was very brief, twenty-four quatrains of dialogue on five pages, and the subscribers—among them Botfield, Dyce, Rodd, Cunningham, and W. B. D. D. Turnbull—paid just four shillings for one of ‘twenty-five copies printed’, as John inscribed each. In this instance, however, the limitation, and therefore the division of costs, were demonstrably misrepresented: thirty-three copies ‘in quires’ accompanied the one half-bound copy in Collier’s 1884 sale (lots 336–37 and 617–18). A third reprint was ready by mid-February 1845. The Praise of Nothing, a facetious prose tract of 1585 by ‘E. D.’, with some blank verse incorporated, was confidently attributed by Collier to Edward Dyer, the courtier-poet famous for ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’. While this may have been an innocent guess in 1844–45, four years later it would come to involve a particularly disingenuous episode of forgery-by-suppression; scholars today think ‘E. D.’ most probably one Edward Daunce, a pamphleteer of the 1580s.111 Collier had procured, through Halliwell in September 1843, a transcript of the Tanner copy at Bodley, which he believed to be unique, and had intended to reprint it early in 1844. The cost of printing, paper, and binding came to £12 10s. for the ritual ‘twentyfive copies’, and Madden paid just ten shillings for his. Only one copy (lot 590) figured in Collier’s posthumous sale. A fourth and last undated reprint may stem from the same 1844–45 project, or perhaps from later in the 1840s (see A74): A Libel of Spanish Lies . . . Discoursing the Fight in the West Indies (1596; STC 6551). A much greater effort here went into imitating the original typography, woodcut devices, initials, and ornaments, but the preface ran to only a dozen lines, and the distribution seems to have been unsystematic. In 1863 John described it as ‘reprinted some years ago’—probably from his own copy—in ‘twenty-five copies, most of which are still in my hands’;112 in his 1884 sale thirty-five copies were offered as lots 941–44. Other publications in the first half of the decade included papers for the Shakespeare Society’s collections of 1844–45, one short signed article on Edward Alleyn, and two unsigned reviews (of Halliwell’s Ludus Coventriae and Cunningham’s Revels at Court) for Charles Wentworth Dilke’s Athenaeum.113 But

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111. Although Collier’s attribution was accepted by 1926 STC, it was thought doubtful by Grosart in 1872 (Works of Dyer), essentially disproved by Ralph M. Sargent in 1931, and rejected by 1986 STC: see A62. 112. N&Q, 3 October 1863, pp. 271–72. 113. Collier had earlier published two unsigned reviews in the Athenaeum, one the infamous notice of Genest (1833), and one of John Martin’s Privately Printed Books (1834); but he would contribute voluminously over four more decades. We have counted 85 signed articles or notes in that periodical between 1841 and 1881, as well as 30 anonymous notes or articles and 119 unsigned reviews, the last all before March 1863.



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his major non-Shakespearian task in this period was a paid editorial project, a transcript with slight apparatus of the 1481–90 household books of Lord John Howard, first Duke of Norfolk (d. at Bosworth Field, 1485), and his son Thomas, first Earl of Surrey. This opportunity no doubt arose from John’s use in 1831 of the two manuscript volumes, then and now in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, for their evidence of fi eenth-century dramatic performances: they ‘remained unnoticed’, he now declared, ‘until attention was directed to them’ (in HEDP, i:28). Beriah Botfield (1807–63), the wealthy bibliophile and M.P. and a devoted adherent of learned and bookish societies,114 had in 1841 presented to the Roxburghe Club an edition (by Thomas Hudson Turner) of household records of the thirteenth and fi eenth centuries, including earlier accounts and memoranda of the first Duke of Norfolk (Manners and Household Expenses of England in the Thirteenth and Fieenth Centuries); and in the spring of 1843 he and John appear to have joined in proposing a sequel, to be paid for by the club as a whole.115 In mid-May the printing committee read letters from Botfield and Collier, and agreed to proceed ‘on the terms agreed upon between Mr. Collyer [sic] and Mr. Botfield, viz £2.2.0 per sheet’.116 Fi y pounds was advanced Collier, again on Botfield’s initiative, by 25 May: ‘The progress of the work may be as rapid as your other engagements will allow’, Botfield suggested respectfully, ‘and the introductory matter may be le to your own discretion as to its nature and content.’ 117 On 10 August John mentioned the project to Halliwell (‘Of course they pay me but not well’),118 and the finished volume was available to the thirty-three club members—or anticipated to be so—at their annual meeting on 22 June 1844. Collier by then had been paid £144 18s. for his work, hardly a niggardly sum; and while he told Madden that ‘my 2 copies’ remained unde-

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114. Some notes additional to DNB are by Felix Oyens in the Christie’s Botfield sale catalogue of 30 March 1994, and by John Collins in Bulletin du bibliophile (1994), 218–24. Botfield is best remembered for his Notes on the Cathedral Libraries of England (1849) and other antiquarian and bibliographical publications. 115. In his Memoirs of ca. 1880 Collier claimed that Botfield, seconded by the Duke of Devonshire and Sir David Dundas, had at one time proposed him for membership in the club, but nothing in the club’s records corroborates this. He went on to say that because of the expense ‘I necessarily declined, but at the same [time] I offered my services to the members in the editing of any of their productions. The consequence was that they freely availed themselves of my services and I superintended the production of at least half a dozen 4to volumes . . . and for work of this kind, I apprehend, though I kept no accounts relating to it, I received, in the whole, about £500, at that date a very serviceable supply’ (‘Patch’ at end of Memoirs). He in fact edited only three volumes. 116. Roxburghe Club minute books, on deposit at the Society of Antiquaries, London. 117. Undated letter from Botfield to JPC, Folger MS Y.d.6 (7). The club records note the advance of £50 under the date 25 May. 118. JPC to JOH, LOA 23/99.


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livered until 25 August,119 there were three in the 1882 sale (lots 283, 665, 883), one of them ‘in sheets, folded ready for binding’. The size and shape of the final product are imposing—more than 550 pages in generous quarto format, and the traditional ‘half-Roxburghe’ binding of russia-backed reddish-brown boards 120—but Collier’s personal part in it, aside from transcription (if he in fact did this himself, rather than farming it out), was unspectacular: 29 pages of largely summary ‘Introduction’ and a sprinkling of illustrative footnotes and glosses constitute his contribution.121 He was principally animated, of course, by the theatrical evidence contained in the household accounts, which he had somewhat underestimated in 1831 (HEDP, i:28–30). To the three entries of payments for town and village ‘players’ there instanced in passing, he could now add six, involving troupes from neighbouring Coggeshall, Hadleigh, Easterford, and Thorington Street, and a ‘pley’ at church on Whitmonday 1482—not an insignificant harvest.122 His prolific literary output in the early 1840s effectively put paid to John’s prospects at the Morning Chronicle, although even a er the harsh salary cut of January 1841 he depended on the newspaper for at least half of his income.123 But even ten months before Easthope sent him back to the gallery, John had sought, through Devonshire, a political alternative to his lost hope for the Licensing Office, this time putting his twelve-year-old bar accreditation to some use. ‘I am extremely anxious’, he wrote, ‘to be advantageously placed upon Lord Normanby’s list of Barristers whom it may be fit, as vacancies occur, to make Police Magistrates. My profession, my standing, & my attainment qualify me for such an office.’ He quoted Lovelace and Swi in an embarrassingly jocular appeal, but either Devonshire did not respond, or the appointment lay outside his gi ;

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119. JPC to Madden, 26 August 1844, BL Egerton MS 2843, fol. 337v, accompanying what was ostensibly Collier’s only gi of a copy, considered by Madden ‘a very handsome present’ (Diary, 26 August 1844). ‘Both’, said Collier, ‘have an inscription by the Earl of Powis’, the club president. 120. Collier himself, among others, copied this style for his 1844–45 reprints and later Hamlet quarto facsimiles. 121. Dyce, not unexpectedly, came in for one more correction (p. xxxi) to his Skelton, the edition that never acknowledged Collier’s advice. 122. Chambers listed these (1903, ii:255–56) apparently without consulting the originals— which seem perfectly credible to us. Cf. also ES, ii:102, on Collier’s (correct) identification of ‘my Lord of Essex men, plaiers’ as ‘the earliest household troop on record’. 123. The Chronicle’s £5 5s. a week may be set against Collier’s income from other sources at this time: Devonshire’s stipend of £100 per year, plus about £125 per year from Whittaker in 1841–44, and whatever trickled in from Egerton’s largess and ‘outside’ journalism. In the year of the Roxburghe Club contract (1843–44) Collier’s literary income did outweigh that from the Chronicle.



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nothing came of it, certainly.124 Egerton, who would later help John to precisely the kind of position he craved—and then, John believed, let him down—found a post in the Stamp Office for twenty-three-year-old William (October 1843),125 so that both sons now contributed to the family coffers; while Mary Louisa, Aunt Emma Pycro , and the four Collier daughters kept house.126 In March 1843 they all moved once again, for the last time in London, to 1 Victoria Road, Kensington; it was ‘apparently a better house’ than 43 Brompton Square, thought Crabb Robinson (Diary, 15 April 1843), ‘and a more attractive situation from the vicinity to the gardens’. Just one year later the last of John’s elder relations died, at Gravesend, the unregenerate but spirited uncle Joshua.127 Scourge of Robinsonian propriety, but a scapegrace with some literary talent, he le seven or eight children, including a daughter whose son married John Payne Collier’s daughter Henrietta in 1860, and a son named Koskiusko, who ‘is living a vagabond life in Paris being imbecile and self-willed’ (HCR Diary, 19 March 1844). On these offspring devolved the last of old John Collier’s fortune, some £1,900 le from the painful entailment of 1816. John Payne Collier inherited nothing significant from Joshua, save perhaps (collaterally) a dash of his recklessness, imagination, and amorality. By the end of the half-decade John was fi y-six, in far from exemplary health (bouts of influenza and worsening eyesight afflicted him), and unsure of his day-to-day income, indeed of his wage-earning future. What seemed certain, at least, was his literary reputation, although he told Devonshire that he had jeopardized even this by helping ‘to support Ministers with my pen . . . for two or three years’—surely an exaggerated concern, if at all candid (letter of 3 March 1840). However, in these pivotal years the first hints of distrust in John’s documentary disclosures began to accumulate: a rumble of isolated doubt, and no more, before the storm of 1859–60, but in retrospect the start of a long-drawnout sequence of discreditation. To the clever and high-handed John Wilson Croker belongs, in all likeli-

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124. JPC to Devonshire, 26 March 1840, Chatsworth, sixth Duke of Devonshire’s Correspondence, 2d ser., 17.1. Ganzel’s account (p. 66) of an application for ‘a government appointment’ in Lord Melbourne’s second administration three weeks before, the duke’s ‘friendly refusal’, and Collier’s ‘ill-advised petulance’ in reply is unfounded: it appears to rest on a misunderstanding of Collier’s letter to Devonshire of 3 March 1840 (Correspondence, 2d ser., 17.0), which refers to the appointment on 24 February of John Mitchell Kemble to succeed his father, Charles, as examiner of plays. 125. According to Robinson this was ‘a very great relief to Collier’; HCR Diary, 7 October 1843. 126. We know nothing about their life at this period: only Henrietta ever married, and not until she was thirty-three. If the women became proficient at transcribing—a traditional occupation—they may have helped to prepare (e.g.) Collier’s text of the Howard Household Books. 127. Robinson records the death date as 13 March 1844, with burial on the 19th.


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hood, the distinction of first having seriously questioned a Collier disclosure, and having persisted in his suspicions.128 Since 1836 or before, Croker had entertained a casual ambition to edit—or to participate with John Gibson Lockhart in editing—Shakespeare, a project that John Murray was still reminding him about eighteen years later;129 and in 1842 he began a review of Collier and Knight for Lockhart’s Quarterly, before yielding place to the Rev. Whitwell Elwin. He seems not to have known Collier personally well, if at all;130 but he wrote to him on 30 July 1839, suggesting ‘that the style and phraseology of the letter signed H. S. published in your tract of 1835’ [i.e., the notorious evocation of Burbage and ‘my especiall friend’ Shakespeare] were ‘more like Ireland’s imitations than a genuine contemporary record’.131 How and if John defended his text we do not know, but Croker returned to the matter eighteen months later, raising the same doubts with Egerton himself, a friend and one-time political ally; Egerton, however, stood more or less firm. ‘I do not know what your internal grounds for skepticism may be’, he replied (16 January 1842), ‘but as far as I know there are few external reasons for doubt: & little possibility of a recent trick. I think it unlikely that anyone but old Todd has ever had access to the Br[idgewater] House papers before Collier . . . at least within times when such a gratuitous scheme of forgery could have entered anyone’s head.’ 132 Although Egerton was virtually conceding that only Todd or Collier could have introduced a forgery into the Bridgewater House archives, he again stressed the pointlessness, and therefore the implausibility of such mischief: ‘in the absence of any controversy which could be affected by the discovery, [or] of any motive for such an imposture, I cannot conceive its possibility. . . . I think it im-

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128. The Athenaeum reviewer who wondered why the H. S. letter was a copy, contemporary or modern, deliberately curtailed his curiosity, as ‘Mr. Collier’s name is our trust and security’. 129. See Brightfield 1940, pp. 306–08. 130. Collier does not mention Croker in his late diary, memoirs, or OMD, although in his Reply to Hamilton (1860) he called on him (now deceased) as a character witness. 131. Croker to JPC, 30 July 1839, copy, John Wilson Croker Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan. Croker had expressed his doubts in conversation with Amyot, and was now responding to a letter from Collier, whom Amyot had evidently alerted: his suspicions, he politely explained, had simply to do with ‘the style & phraseology . . . & my question to Mr Amyot was whether the appearance, & all the other circumstances of the paper, established its age, & authenticity beyond the possibility of doubt’. He allowed that its discovery ‘in a bundle of law papers which are certainly genuine’ would be ‘almost conclusive’, but only if one ‘could be sure that the bundle had not been tampered with’, and suggested that Collier—having perhaps been carried away by the thrill of discovery—might share his own scepticism ‘if you were now to read it . . . for the first time’. And while amenable to ‘any material evidence that should effectively negate my doubts’, Croker closed by warning that he intended to call on Egerton ‘some day’ and ‘ask permission to see the paper itself ’. 132. Duke University, John Wilson Croker Papers.



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possible the letter can be forged, but whether H S are the initials for Ld Southn [i.e., Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, as Collier had deduced with ‘little question’] may be uncertain.’ The document itself, he supposed, had been among Ellesmere papers rescued by Todd ‘from being burnt’, and although at that time Todd had ‘roughly & imperfectly arranged them’, he was now ‘so old & deaf (if alive) that little could be got from him & I can hardly say that he ever arranged this paper although he catalogued some, for it was in a heap with others in a chest’. This last detail rested of course only upon Collier’s report, for it was Collier who exhibited it to his patron at Bridgewater House: ‘I saw the letter when Mr Collier found it, but not critically or with suspicion.’ ‘Suspicion’, by implication, he le to Croker, but warned him that ‘there may be difficulty in getting at [the H. S. letter] now, for with my other papers it was rather hastily transferred to the Pantechnicon’ and placed in storage during the erection of his new house at Worsley.133 Nevertheless ‘if I can find the chest they are in I will rummage for the one in dispute’. He sounds unenthusiastic, and Croker apparently obtained no sight of the original until a er 1845, when according to Collier he found nothing to pursue (Reply to Hamilton, pp. 43–44). Still unconvinced, however, Croker addressed a pithy demurrer to Charles Knight, his old publishing crony, who had taken the H. S. letter at face value in his 1841 essay ‘Shakspere and His Writings’.134 ‘I observe you quote and rely upon the letter signed ‘‘H. S.’’ discovered among Lord Ellesmere’s papers by Mr. Collier’, Croker wrote. ‘If that letter be genuine I must plead guilty to a great want of critical sagacity, for somehow it smacks to me of modern invention, and all my reconsideration of the subject, and some other circumstances which have since struck me, corroborate my doubts. Mr. Collier is, of course, above all suspicion of having any hand in fabrication’.135 Here Croker’s part in the prosecution of ‘H. S.’ effectively ends,136 but Knight

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133. Collier, however, claimed in his Reply to Hamilton (1860) that ‘at least from 1836 to about 1845’ the Bridgewater documents had remained in his own keeping: ‘Lord Ellesmere never asked for them, nor inquired regarding them; but one day, aer 1845, Lord Ellesmere either told me, or wrote to me, that Mr. J. Wilson Croker had questioned their genuineness. His Lordship, therefore, desired me to send the original papers to his house’ (p. 43). 134. In Knight’s Store of Knowledge for All Readers, pp. 31–32. 135. The letter is not dated by Knight, who printed part of it in his Passages of a Working Life (1864–65, ii:296), but in his life of Shakespeare, first issued in July 1843, he referred to doubts raised ‘a year and a half ago by a gentleman of great critical sagacity’ (p. 497). 136. His intended review of Collier and Knight never materialized: in March 1844 Lockhart was still urging him to supply it, and expressing his own doubts about H. S.: ‘I am convinced it is a forgery & a recent one’ (Lockhart to Croker, 4 and 25 March 1844; all letters quoted here are among the Croker Papers at the University of Michigan). Croker did send Lockhart some ‘very curious papers’ to do with Collier’s facsimile of the H. S. letter, but his inability to consult the original proved discouraging, and Lockhart returned them (26 April 1844), together with an un-


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was bound to reconsider the matter himself, and in his 1843 William Shakspere: A Biography he provided a long ‘Note on the copy of a letter signed H. S., preserved at Bridgewater House’ (pp. 496–500). Citing its first appearance in Collier’s ‘valuable little volume’ New Facts, he began by terming it ‘the most interesting document that has ever been discovered in connection with the life of Shakspere’, and then, as Schoenbaum remarked (1991, p. 257), ‘agonize[d] publicly’ over its veracity. Knight registered Croker’s objections, but summoned against them the ‘high character’ of Collier, the unlikelihood that any earlier trickster had had access to Bridgewater House—so as to have ‘dropped his cuckoo egg in the sparrow’s nest’—and the evidence of allusions, by H. S., to historical facts ‘only . . . brought to light in very recent times’. The latter, unsurprisingly, derive from two associated forgeries, the documents showing the interest of Shakespeare and others in the Blackfriars company in 1589 and 1608, but to impugn these as well seemed beyond contemplation for Knight. ‘Looking at the decided character of the external evidence as to the discovery [i.e., Collier’s account and Egerton’s corroboration]’, he concluded (p. 500), ‘and taking into consideration the improbability of a spurious paper having been smuggled into the company of the Bridgewater documents, we are inclined to confide in it.’ Whatever suspicion had attached to the H. S. letter, no one to this date had publicly or in surviving correspondence suggested that Collier himself was involved in chicanery: Croker had deliberately ruled out such a charge, and both Knight and the Athenaeum reviewer of 1835 took Collier’s reputation and expertise as evidence toward its genuineness. If anyone was thought capable of such a hoax it was as usual George Steevens, whom Knight hinted at without naming (‘some half century ago . . . there was a man then living who perpetrated such deceptions’), and on 10 February 1844 an unidentified Athenaeum reviewer repeated the traditional allegations, but dismissed them, at least in this instance, declaring that ‘for our own part, we do not believe in the Steevens story’.137 But neither was the reviewer confident in ‘the full authenticity of the paper’, whose ‘language and allusions . . . are more against it, to our thinking, than the want of superscription, date, or name, or the more unaccountable circumstance of its being a copy and a copy unattested’. All this came in response to a bold stroke by Collier, who shortly before had published for private distribution a facsimile of

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helpful letter from Egerton (16 April) repeating his excuses: ‘the document suspected by Croker is still packed with a mass of others . . . [and] to endeavour to find it without a general rummage would I fear be hopeless. I can hardly conceive the possibility of a forgery.’ 137. The ‘Puck of commentators’, he remarked (p. 135), ‘drew a little, and was fond of making tracings and facsimiles. He was fond moreover of a joke, and loved to mislead Malone. Steevens is supposed [by some sceptics] to have put this very document among the Egerton papers on purpose to entrap the first historian of our Stage. Malone escaped the snare, if snare it was, and the discovery was reserved for Mr. Collier.’



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the vexed letter, and had exhibited the original at a meeting of the Shakespeare Society’s Council. There he seems to have impressed everyone favourably: ‘a few shrugs and much wonderment followed its first appearance’, the Athenaeum reported, but ‘these soon gave way, and the general feeling of those present— men well fitted to pass judgment on such a point—was, that the document was to all appearance of the age of James I., and therefore genuine’. Halliwell in 1848 recalled the occasion in much the same way, although later he would reverse his opinion of the material in question: ‘it must be admitted, in fairness to Mr. Collier, that when the doubt of [the Bridgewater documents’] authenticity was raised, he produced the letter of H. S., the one most severely attacked, before a council of the Shakespeare Society, and several competent judges, including Mr. Wright, fully concurred in believing it to be genuine’ (Life of Shakespeare, p. 225). And Alexander Dyce, in a letter repeatedly quoted by Collier in 1860, responded to the gi of Nethercli ’s lithographic facsimile ‘not . . . in haste, but a er considerable delay and deliberation’, with as complete an endorsement as John could have desired: ‘The fac-simile has certainly removed from my mind all doubts about the genuineness of the letter’.138 From one direction, at least, John had once more dodged a bullet.

Joseph Hunter We have already met the Rev. Joseph Hunter (1783–1861), as the addressee of Collier’s New Particulars, as a reluctant sponsor of the Shakespeare Society, and as a scholarly rival, paired honourably with Dyce, in Collier’s Shakespearian enterprise of 1842–44. Another clerical antiquary, but no meek country parson, Hunter served twenty-four years as minister to a Presbyterian congregation at Bath before removing to London in 1833 and embarking on a new archival career. He began as Sub-Commissioner of Public Records, and soon rose to Assistant Keeper in the Public Record Office (1838), a post he retained until his death, aged seventy-nine, in 1861. Strong-willed, thin-skinned, and outspoken, if not generally quarrelsome, he was long a vice-president (like Collier) of the Society of Antiquaries, where on at least one occasion a fellow member found him ‘in one of his unitarian tempers’ over administrative reform, and he participated to the hilt in the political affairs of the Record Office as well.139 Over a fi yyear period he edited cartularies, diaries, and other early manuscripts; wrote

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138. Reply to Hamilton, p. 41. While Dyce’s letter itself may not survive, it is highly unlikely that Collier would court contradiction by inventing it, and Dyce almost certainly did not doubt the Bridgewater papers in 1844: see his Remarks, p. vi. 139. Schoenbaum (1991, p. 267) remarked that ‘there is little about Hunter’s life to stir a biographer’s interest’, but DNB can be supplemented by Joan Evans 1956 and Cantwell 1991. The bulk of Hunter’s own papers, including diaries and memoranda books, are in the British Library.


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on national and local history, British philology, genealogy, county topography (especially of his native Hallamshire), on the first colonization of America, and on Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope; and le voluminous manuscript collections, including the still-unpublished but seminal ‘Chorus vatum Anglicanorum’, a vast biographical commentary on English writers before 1700 ‘who have verse in print, no matter however small, or however worthless’. Much of his historical research remains valuable, even standard, although his critical and biographical extrapolations have not worn so well. In the mid-1830s Hunter became particularly concerned with Shakespeare’s biography and genealogy, and in 1839 he published an eccentric study of The Tempest, whose thesis (that the play was one of Shakespeare’s earliest, and that Prospero’s island was historically Lampedusa, off the coast of Morocco) Collier treated in 1844 with polite respect, but rightly rejected (Shakespeare, i:5–7). Hunter’s brushes with Collier, however, went back to the 1820s, and the discovery of John Manningham’s diary among the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum. Petty and one-sided though Hunter’s complaints now may seem, they concerned what would have been for each scholar a major coup in Shakespearian research, and priority in the matter remained a bee in the older man’s bonnet for thirty years. As we know, Collier had in HEDP (i:327) first published the diarist’s record of attending a performance of Twelh Night at the Middle Temple on 2 February 1602, a date-defining event that corrected all prior critics, and may be John’s most famous genuine Shakespeare discovery. Hunter, however, had—he deposed—made the same find in May 1828, during ‘a fortnight’s miscellaneous reading at the British Museum’, but held off announcing it while he tried to identify the anonymous diarist: he resided at this time at Bath, and the research required further spade-work in London. In a state of archaeological euphoria, however, he ‘immediately made a communication of the treasure which I had discovered to two literary friends’, namely, Benjamin Heywood Bright and John Henry Markland, the second of whom he later suspected of telling Collier about it.140 Collier published the Twelh Night evidence in HEDP, with other records of Burbage, Jonson, and Marston, but without identifying the diarist, and rather botching the transcript;141 and ‘when Hunter read it there’—Collier recollected some forty-eight years later—‘he was in an agony of vexation. Amyot told me

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140. Hunter’s autobiographical account of his discovery is in New Illustrations, i:365–76. The British Museum Reading Room registers (now lost, but searched by Frederic Madden in 1858) confirm that Hunter examined MS Harl. 5353 on 13 May 1828, followed by B. H. Bright on 5 December 1828 and 2 February 1829, and Collier on 9 July, 13 July, and 8 October 1829; Madden Diary, 18 January 1858. 141. Hunter (New Illustrations, i:368) gives a devastating example of mistranscription: ‘Mr. Collier . . . has misread the words, and made deplorable havock of the sense’.



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so’. Evidently Hunter had contemplated an edition of the barrister’s diary, and had therefore ‘hoped that the book . . . had escaped my research’ (JPC Diary, 11 May 1879). In any event he declined to provide John with the diarist’s identity until mid-1831, when HEDP was already in print;142 in 1839 (and only then) Hunter made public this lesser discovery (A Disquisition on Shakespeare’s Tempest, pp. 69–70), which Collier had fleetingly acknowledged a few months before (Farther Particulars, p. 10). But Hunter remained intent on his primary claim, which he laid out in detail in New Illustrations of Shakespeare (1845, i:367–68), namely, that in 1828 ‘to my great surprise and delight, I found [the Twelh Night entry], containing information perfectly new concerning one of the most favourite of the comedies, information which at a stroke overturned all the theories which had been formed respecting the period of the poet’s life at which the play was produced, which opened a new and unsuspected origin of the plot’, etc., concluding with the cri de coeur of an unthanked Columbus: I will not conceal that I regarded this as a very valuable discovery: one on which an investigator of literary antiquities might felicitate himself. The manuscripts of England are a mighty mass, and may be resembled to a mine, in which, however, there have been too many explorators to allow of much of the more precious or curious metal to be found. Discoveries in literature are, perhaps, of less importance than discoveries in science; but they are of the same class, and require the same preparation and the same habit of mind. John did acknowledge, at least in correspondence, that Hunter may have examined Manningham’s diary first, but kept up his own claim as to independent discovery. ‘I well remember’, he wrote to Halliwell on 26 October 1844, ‘that it was not until sometime a er I first mentioned Manningham’s Diary to him, that he told me he had seen it some time before. He is quite welcome to priority, for me’; and a summing-up many years later repeated that concession, albeit with the same double-edged credit: ‘Old Joseph Hunter, the Dissenting Clergyman, was, I believe, the first to discover in the B. M. the MS of Manningham’s Diary but kept it quite close, well knowing that I was in eager search for such matter. . . . He had not the generosity to tell me of the MS, and perhaps had the cases

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142. Writing on 18 June and 6 July 1831 to an unnamed correspondent (probably Joseph Haslewood) who thought of editing the diary ‘as a summer amusement’, Collier first remarked that ‘Mr Hunter of Bath told me that he had found out the name of the Barrister, but he did not seem very ready to let me into his secret’, and volunteered to ‘press him’; three weeks later he reported that ‘Mr Hunter of Bath or Mr [Thomas] Heywood of Manchester, or both in conjunction have the same design [to publish the diary], but when they mean to execute it I know not. I learn also that the name of the writer of the Diary was Manningham, a fact which Mr Hunter has with some diligence & research ascertained’; FF MSS 235 and 236.


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been reversed, I should have done as he did, but I hope not.’ 143 Nothing, however, seemed quite to placate Hunter himself, who as late as 1858 pursued Sir Frederic Madden ‘on a subject he had previously (some time ago) written to me about. . . . . Mr. Hunter’s object is to prove that he was the first to examine the MS. in question (in May 1828), and that Mr Collier did not see it till long a erwards’ (Madden Diary, 18 January 1858). Madden obliged the elderly obsessive, effectively proving his point from Reading Room records, and adding that ‘in 1830 Mr Hunter mentioned to myself the fact of the Authorship of the above MS. & I made a note of it in my copy of the Harleian Catalogue in my study’. One hopes that Hunter, at seventy-five, found such testimony vindicatory; but eighteen months later he still nursed a grudge against seventy-year-old Collier. His son Sylvester apologized to Henry Crabb Robinson (8 July 1859) for Hunter’s animosity, clearly an embarrassment: ‘I have o en with great pain heard my Father speak in your presence of Mr Collier in a manner that no mere literary differences could justify or even account for’, he wrote solemnly, having failed to pacify the older antiquary. By then, however, ‘literary differences’ between the two extended well beyond Manningham. Collier’s dedication of Farther Particulars to Hunter in 1839 may have represented an olive branch, but Hunter’s sceptical attention had already turned to New Facts (1835) and New Particulars (1836). Without actually viewing the originals, he found reason to suspect four of the documents described in New Facts, and in the spring of 1844 he published his reservations, along with his dismissal of the Shakespeare/Skipwith misattribution from New Particulars, in The First Part of New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, reissued the following year simply as New Illustrations, etc. (2 vols., 1845). Hunter concentrated his fire on the 1589 ‘Blackfriars Certificate’, which, if it were genuine, would establish Shakespeare’s presence in London, as a theatrical shareholder, three years before any other notice of him as an actor-playwright. Hunter distrusted above all the language of the document, quoting one passage that ‘sounds to me not like the phrase in which a genuine certificate of that time would be conceived, but very like what fi y years ago would be thought a good imitation of that phrase’ (New Illustrations, i:68): ‘fi y years ago’ because he was already pointing toward George Steevens as the perpetrator of the Bridgewater forgeries. But he also questioned the likelihood that Richard Burbage had appeared as a Blackfriars proprietor at the age of about nineteen, along with the even younger Nicholas Towley or Tooley, his one-time apprentice, and the clown William Kempe, who—Dyce had suggested in 1840—was at this time

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143. JPC to JOH, LOA 21/85; JPC Diary, 11 May 1879.



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among Alleyn’s troupe at the Rose Theatre.144 Concluding that the 1589 document ought not to be accepted as trustworthy ‘without some hesitation’, Hunter proceeded to touch on ‘others of the like nature, in papers of Lord Chancellor Egerton. The right determining of the question of the genuineness of this document would be influenced by the opinion which might be formed concerning the rest’ (i:70), three of which he addressed briefly: the 1605 memorandum of the Lord Mayor to the Privy Council; the 1608 Blackfriars valuation; and the already controversial 1608 H. S. letter (our QD A22.5, A22.7, and A22.10). The first he questioned chiefly for again listing Kempe, who was probably dead by then;145 the second ‘has more the air of being genuine than the two which we have examined: yet it is rather a suspicious circumstance that we find in one of the entries the names of Heminge and Condell united, in anticipation, as it may seem, of their union in 1623 . . . as the joint editors of the first folio of the works of Shakespeare’ (i:71–72). Finally, the H. S. letter, ‘which bears upon it strong marks of being a modern fabrication . . . is not in the style of the times at all’ (i:67, 72), and Hunter, like Croker and Knight before him, found the phraseology, the terms of address, and various historical misinformation ‘open to very grave suspicion, which I cannot stay to adduce’ (i:73). Hunter was especially sceptical of the casual borrowing from Hamlet, iii.2.20 (Burbage, ‘our English Roscius’, is described as ‘one that fitteth the action to the word, and the word to the action, most admirably’), which he considered unnatural, and so would we: ‘It was not the practice of those times to quote in letters demiofficial, passages from Shakespeare, in the manner in which he is here quoted’ (i:72). But like Croker, Knight, and the Athenaeum reviewer of 1835, Hunter declared it unthinkable that Collier himself could be guilty of imposture: ‘No one who knows Mr. Collier, can for a moment doubt that [the documents] were found by him there [at Bridgewater House]; the question only is, How came they there?’ (i:73). Hunter’s suggestion, like Knight’s, was that George Steevens, ‘in the perversity of his humour . . . may have introduced some or all of these papers into the bundle, enjoying the thought that they would one day be mistaken for genuine remains of the time’. He also remembered, or thought he remembered (‘for my note, if one was ever made, is lost’), having ‘somewhere seen that Steevens had access to the Egerton Papers’, which if true would sup-

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144. Hunter and Dyce were probably wrong about Kempe in this respect. Dyce in his Camden Society edition of Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (1840) made no reference to the 1589 ‘Blackfriars Certificate’ or to Collier’s analysis of it; Hunter’s fuller notes on Kempe, which he preferred in 1846 to ‘reserve’ (Add. MS 24,497, fol. 48v), may be those in his ‘Chorus vatum’ cited by DNB, s.v. ‘Kempe’. 145. Halliwell would subsequently argue that this unlocated MS was genuine, and never among the Bridgewater papers (Life of Shakespeare [1848], p. 225); but it now seems to have been a fabrication: see A22.


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port, and if untrue virtually scuttle, the theory.146 It is remarkable how far all the sceptics of the 1830s and 1840s would go to avoid even hinting at a living perpetrator. To Hunter’s allegations, touching not one but four Bridgewater discoveries, John made no formal response: as in later years, wounded or contemptuous silence remained his preferred tactic, although his friends might lament it. Henry Crabb Robinson seemed to accept Hunter’s discreditation of at least one Bridgewater document (although ‘of course, he imputes nothing morally wrong to Collier’), and found it bewildering that when Hunter ‘did intimate to Collier a wish to see the original letter . . . Collier did not procure him a sight of it’. He feared ‘unpleasantness between them’ (for Hunter was ‘growing more bitter towards Collier’), and that Hunter would censure Collier for his gullibility in approving the forgeries, supposedly Steevens’s; while ‘the worst is that Collier has taken no notice of Hunter’s book, which shows a want of confidence or a want of candour’.147 But just at this date Dyce’s Remarks made its appearance,148 so that Collier’s concern about New Illustrations may have been temporarily eclipsed. On 24 May Robinson attended an evening party at Hunter’s, where he saw Hunter and William Harness ‘agreeing rather more than I liked about Collier’s Shakespeare, and in the opinion that on most points Dyce is right in his animadversions’. On 3 March 1846 Hunter finally visited Lord Francis Egerton and examined the suspect Bridgewater documents for the first time. He made notes in two forms on five manuscripts—never published—which represent the earliest independent scrutiny of any ‘Collierian’ forgery. He began one dra with general comments on ‘several’ papers, including at least the 1589 Sharers’ certificate, the 1608 Blackfriars valuation, and the 1610 Warrant of James I (QD A22.13), and probably also the H. S. letter and the spurious letter from Samuel Daniel to Ellesmere (QD A22.15).149 ‘My impression was not on the whole favourable to their genuineness as a mass . . . . It seemed to me as if they were the work of some one

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146. In his 1846 MS notes Hunter backtracked: ‘I have not found on what authority I had formed an uncertain opinion that Steevens had had access to the Ellesmere papers. And I may have attributed to him what belongs to some correspondent of The Censura Literaria where one of the Letters is printed, proving the access of some literary man of Steevens’ period’ (BL Add. MS 24,497, fol. 47). A note in his copy of New Particulars suggests that Hunter was referring to the genuine letter of Samuel Daniel published in Brydges’s Censura Literaria (1808), vi:391–93. 147. HCR Diary, 16 and 17 April and 6 May 1844. 148. Robinson noted it as ‘out’ on 6 May, but did not immediately procure a copy. 149. ‘Shakespeare. Notes on his Life and Writings, made aer the publication of my New Illustrations, &c. 1846’, BL Add. MS 24,497, fols. 46v–53r, headed ‘The Shakespeare Papers among Lord Ellesmere’s Remains, in possession of Lord Francis Egerton’. What appear to be Hunter’s original jottings on four pages of notepaper are bound into his copy of New Particulars (FF), together with a few sketches of watermarks and an Egerton genealogical tree.



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person, and written nearly at the same time.’ Although ‘it is not easy to describe intelligibly the grounds of the opinion’, he signalled six indicators: (1) ‘The precise similarity in their state of preservation’; (2) ‘A general resemblance of handwriting though various in style’; (3) ‘The hand writing a little peculiar in all, neither quite clerklike, nor quite common cursive’ (Hunter’s experience with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscript was far broader than that of most of his contemporaries, including Collier); (4) ‘The paper nearly the same, & having the appearance of having been leaves of books’; (5) ‘The uniformity in the orthography of Burbage’s name, ‘‘Burbidge’’ ’; and (6) ‘The great similarity of the word William in Shakespeare’s name in documents of 20 years distance of time’. The last point is explained in Hunter’s earlier dra notes, there being a distinctive ornamental dot in the right-hand loop of the ‘W’ in ‘William’ in documents purporting to be of 1589 and 1608. The handwriting, Hunter remarked, could not be judged by the usual tests of forgery, as it never attempted to imitate the autograph ‘of any individual person’; nor did it betray ‘the tremulous & uncertain tracing’ of the slavish copyist: ‘hence also the freedom of hand-writing: there are no originals to be counterfeited’. ‘The paper on which [the suspect documents] are written’, however, offered a more obvious warning: it ‘appears to me not like the writing-paper of the time, but rather like the paper used by the Stationers in printed books. Indeed the folio sheet on which the copy of the letter [of H. S.] is written has marks toward the edges as is o en seen in the fly-leaves of old books’—that is, offset from the leather folded over the boards of the bindings. Proceeding to individual specimens, Hunter observed that the 1589 Sharers’ certificate ‘is written lengthwise on a long slip of paper [he added ‘in this resembling the State paper document’, i.e., the spurious players’ petition of 1596], half of a folio sheet . . . in a small character and the lines close. The paper has three rough edges & one smooth as if cut with an ivory knife’, not in itself overly suspicious, but ‘there is nothing to shew from whom [the document] proceeded or to whom it was addressed’, nor had it any of the docketings appropriate to a copy meant for Lord Ellesmere. Hunter listed ‘phrases which savour of modernity’ in the text, such as ‘poor players’, ‘lewde spectators’, ‘matters of state and religion’, ‘yield obedience’, and several spellings (e.g., ‘preferrde’, ‘unfitt’, ‘blackefryers playehouse’, and the monstrous ‘sertifie’, perhaps deliberately mistranscribed ‘certifie’ by Collier) that exhibited a ‘superabundance of es’, but were ‘not so over-burthened of unnecessary Letters as are the Ireland Forgeries’; and indeed, as Chalmers could demonstrate to Malone in 1799–1800, precedents for most of these eccentricities might easily be found, even if the accumulation of them breeds disbelief. And Hunter considered, name by name, the sixteen supposed Blackfriars sharers, concluding that at least eight were im-


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probable at this date. Against the participation of James Burbage, John Laneham, Robert Wilson, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, and William Johnson there was little or nothing ‘to be allowed’, but the presence in the list of William Kempe and the too-young Richard Burbage, Robert Armin, Nicholas Tooley, Thomas Greene, John or Joseph Taylor, Anthony Wadeson, and George Peele (the last two otherwise unknown as actors) struck Hunter as highly suspicious, in company of course with young William Shakespeare. One inclusion, however, Baptiste Goodall, provided ‘a strong case in favour of the genuineness of the document, his name appearing no where else except in the names of Actors in the Play of Sir Ths. More in the Harl MSS. with which the fabricator would hardly be acquainted’.150 This of course assumed the fabricator to be earlier and other than John Payne Collier, who was fully familiar with Sir Thomas More. Hunter assessed the other Bridgewater documents more briefly. The 1608 Blackfriars valuation, he noted, ‘is written on what has every appearance of having been a leaf of an old folio volume’, on paper with a crowned fleur-delis watermark, initialled ‘W. R.’, which ‘I have reason to think was not in use before the time of the Civil Wars’. Hunter was one of the earliest English bibliographers to pay serious attention to the watermarks of paper-stock, and took tracings of those in the Bridgewater suspects, later comparing them with examples in various record offices whose use was datable to 1654–88. Phraseology also seemed questionable to him (‘grosse summe’), and the ‘round numbers’ of the valuation argued against its representing a legal claim. The Daborne warrant of 1610, appointing Shakespeare and three others to train child-actors at the Blackfriars, was ‘written on a folio leaf ’ whose watermark Hunter carefully sketched, and had ‘more the appearance of a forged document than any other of them’, while the H. S. letter had ‘very much the air of having been a fly leaf of a folio volume’, and Samuel Daniel’s letter to Ellesmere, alluding obliquely to Drayton and Shakespeare was ‘in 4to—with the direction at the top—not like an original Letter’.151 As far as we know, Hunter never published or publicly communicated a word of these well-considered findings. Why did he not? Clearly, any formal exposure would have required organization and polish, and perhaps the diminished likelihood of Steevens as culprit meant that Hunter would have had to confront the possibility of Collier’s personal guilt, and so brace himself for a sensational

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150. The Book of Sir Thomas More (BL Harl. MS 7368), first edited by Dyce in 1844. S. A. Tannenbaum’s 1928 suggestion that Collier forged the name ‘T. Goodal’—not Baptiste, as here— on a page of the additions to Sir Thomas More is now generally rejected; but Collier has also been accused, perhaps rightly, of another minor insertion in the same MS: see QD A22.3. 151. The watermark sketch and the comments on the ‘H. S.’ and ‘Daniel’ letters are in Hunter’s rough notes.



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controversy. Fearless though he appears, did he also consider the strictures of peacemakers like Robinson (‘I wish I could bring them together’), or the feelings of Egerton, who had permitted him access to the originals? If for any of these reasons he balked, did he simply decide to reserve his suspicions until, with the lapse of time and public concern, he was no longer able to marshal them effectively? That might account for his ongoing frustration with Collier, perceived by contemporaries simply as ‘bitterness’, over two more decades.152 In 1859, in the wake of the Perkins Folio affair, Hunter privately reiterated his charges against the Bridgewater papers to Sir Frederic Madden, ‘and declared his opinion that they were forgeries’, adding, unrelentingly, ‘that whoever had forged the letter of H. S. at Bridgewater House had, in his opinion, forged the notes in the Perkins folio’ (Madden Diary, 2 July 1859). There was no mention then of George Steevens or any other hoaxer ‘fi y years ago’. 152. Such frustration may help to explain a very curious publication of 1851, in which Hunter revealed a side of himself few (then or now) would suspect. Pasquyl of Rome, declarynge sertayne wronges, done of contynuans by the Frensh king, against the nobyl Emperour, & also of the most famous king Henry of Ingelande—a six-page ‘political pasquinade’ in barely literate doggerel verse, ostensibly ‘translated out of Latyne into Inglyshe Anno .M.CCCCC.xliii. the xvi. daye of July’—was (Hunter wrote) ‘printed in fac-simile . . . from [what] he conceives may be the sole existing copy’. Like Collier on so many occasions, Hunter agreed that ‘as verse it has very small merit’, but stressed the rarity of the imprint, true or fictive: ‘Imprinted at London in Lyme strete besyde Saynte Denis churche, by me Jhon the Buys’. No such printer or crypto-printer was known to Ames, Herbert, or Dibdin, or to STC now, nor is the original tract, as Hazlitt observed in 1867 (Handbook, p. 476). It is certainly a hoax, although never identified as such, and Hunter may have deliberately compounded the joke by printing it on comparatively archaic paper-stock, watermarked 1828. Yet he seems to have had second thoughts about circulating his own forgery/jeu d’esprit; for although Philip Bliss, for one, had a copy (sale, 1858, lot 3219, 5s. 6d.; cited by Lowndes, iv:1796), there were at least eighty-seven untrimmed copies in Hunter’s own posthumous sale (1861, lot 886). These passed en bloc to Sir Thomas Phillipps, who stitched them up together in his patent ‘Middle Hill boards’. A few have been extracted, but some seventy remain as Phillipps le them (now FF).


part seven

Shakespeariana

Shakespeare Society Papers A er 1844 Collier would always be known, at home and abroad, as ‘the editor of Shakespeare’—a dignity not yet accorded to Dyce, Halliwell, and other confrères, and which in the public eye distinguished the mainstream scholar from his backwater fellows, the literary maestro from the mere virtuoso. But if some enhanced recognition in the press accompanied this new honorific, there was little by way of new remuneration or popular credit, and no diminishment at all in the editorial drudgery John’s book-club commitments required of him. Concentrating now upon the Shakespeare Society, John readied his laborious Henslowe’s Diary (1845), and whipped up in one busy year a biographical compendium of Shakespearian players (Memoirs of Actors), as well as a reprint of Barnaby Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession and a commercially sponsored collection of Roxburghe Ballads (all 1846). During all this and beyond, furthermore, he undertook the assembly—and largely the creation—of four volumes of the Shakespeare Society’s Papers (1844, 1845, 1847, and 1849), critical and editorial essays ‘illustrative of our early drama and stage, none of which, by themselves, would be of sufficient length and importance to form a separate publication’.1 Ninety-two such contributions, ranging in length from one page to thirty, appeared during a period of five years, in bundles of twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-three, and nineteen, ostensibly to provide ‘zealous Members in different parts of the kingdom’ with a venue for their own novelties of fact and opinion, and to encourage ‘a wider range of criticism and reflection’ than the dedicated monographs of the society afforded. From the first the impression was given of enthusiastic supply in excess of space (‘several individuals, friendly to the design, would have sent contributions’ had they known of the opportunity, and the council must ‘apologize [to some] for the non-insertion’ of articles), and indeed eighteen names, sobriquets, or sets of initials attach to the first twenty-

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1. Papers I (1844), p. v. Subsequent references to individual articles are as numbered within each volume, e.g., I:vi or III:xix.

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five papers; all in all, thirty-eight signatories account for the entire four-volume series. But while several would be familiar to readers—Peter Cunningham and J. O. Halliwell with eleven papers each, T. E. Tomlins with five, Barron Field with two, and single efforts from John Bruce, William Harness, T. J. Pettigrew, Jabez Allies, and others 2—there was clearly no such ground-swell of amateur participation as the Shakespeare Society suggested, or as subsequent historians have adduced.3 For John Payne Collier himself wrote not only the fourteen articles signed by him (and one footnote, signed ‘J. P. C.’, to another; II.iv), but another twenty-nine or thirty under at least eighteen pseudonyms, pen-names, and misleading initials. He was (almost certainly) ‘Dramaticus’ (six articles), ‘Ballad Monger’ (two), ‘A Member from the First’ (two), ‘Philo-Heywood’, ‘A Member of Both Societies’ [i.e., Percy and Shakespeare], ‘G. L.’, ‘J. J. B.’, ‘L. L. D.’, and ‘F.S.A. of Manchester’. He was also Andrew Barton of Bristol, Hugh Anderson of Glasgow, James L. Pearson, James Purcell Reardon of New Street, London (four), J. F. Herbert, T. J. Scott (two), T. Hornby, H. G. Norton (two), and perhaps Alfred T. Goodwin; in short, he was virtually all the far-flung ‘unknown’ names in the four volumes of Papers, names otherwise untraced in Shakespeare Society correspondence and members’ lists, or in similar registers and publications of the period.4 Collier’s motives in adopting so many false identities appear to be multiple. First, ‘variety gives confidence’, as he had informed Dyce in 1840, and the recurrence of one name in the Papers might undercut the impression of a thriving body of enthusiasts. Second, in the more statesmanlike posture that his Shakespeare now called for, the old digs at Malone, Dyce, Hunter, and others could seem jarring: hence John Payne Collier of the Papers is charitable to a fault with his rivals, and positively lavish in complimenting his colleagues (Cunningham, Halliwell, and even Sir Thomas Phillipps, whose brief report to Archaeologia of a Warwickshire will was the substance of Collier’s ‘The New Fact Regarding Shakespeare and His Wife’), while the pseudonymous ‘T. Hornby’, ‘H. G. Norton’, ‘James L. Pearson’, ‘James Purcell Reardon’, and ‘Philo-Heywood’ re-

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2. Other certainly genuine names are Robert Bigsby, N. J. Halpin, William Sandys, William Tyson, and Miss G. M. Zornlin (three articles), the last presumably the ‘Miss Zornlin’ whom Madden records as offering a manuscript to the British Museum in 1862 (Diary, 18 July). 3. Cf. Wagonheim 1980, pp. 205 and 236–37, referring to the society’s efforts ‘toward cooperative scholarship’ and ‘encouraging the amateur as well as the professional scholar to participate actively’. 4. See Appendix III for JPC’s aliases; a few of these were earlier questioned as Collier pseudonyms by Sydney Race (1953c). Exceptions are (we think) J. Hinton Baverstock (II:vi—corrected in a somewhat condescending footnote by ‘J. P. C.’—and II:xxiv), J. Hawkins Robinson (III:xxii), ‘Book-Lover’ (I:xv, just possibly Collier, but we doubt it), ‘Oxoniensis and a Member’ (III:ii), and ‘L. S.’ (III:xi).


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mained free to criticize, correct, and trump Dyce’s editions of Greene, Middleton, Skelton, and Beaumont and Fletcher, and ‘Dramaticus’ to castigate both Dyce and Malone. ‘A Member of Both Societies’, another Collier alias, could take T. Cro on Croker sharply to task over a Percy Society reprint, and ‘Hugh Anderson of Glasgow’ could spotlight flaws in Barron Field’s Shakespeare Society edition of Heywood’s Fair Maid of the Exchange—including Field’s failure to acknowledge, in one note, the priority of ‘Mr. Collier, in his edition of Shakespeare’. Field, it may be remembered, had begun to grumble about John’s indifference to his Shakespeare suggestions in 1844, and contributed two series of ‘Conjectures on Corrupt Passages in Shakespeare’ to the Papers (II:vii and III:xv, the latter just posthumous), not always complimentary to his old ally.5 Furthermore, while all but one of the fourteen articles signed by Collier are uncontaminated by fiction,6 ‘J. F. Herbert’ (‘Additions to the Alleyn Papers’, I:v) and ‘Dramaticus’ (‘The Players Who Acted in ‘‘The Shoemakers’ Holiday’’ ’, IV:xi) promulgated forgeries and fabrications that have long been condemned, and elsewhere ‘Dramaticus’ (II:xviii) and ‘F.S.A. of Manchester’ (I:xix) provided an otherwise unsupported date of one ballad, and the highly dubious text of another. Finally, ‘James L. Pearson’—perhaps some relation of the eighteenth-century collector Major Thomas Pearson?—who reprinted extracts of an ‘Unknown Pageant by Thomas Middleton, the Dramatist’ (II:xiv) not only capped Dyce, but perhaps served a secondary purpose: the original quarto, thought then to be unique,7 was said in 1845 to be in the contributor’s possession (‘I have had it by me for many years’), whence it passed to the library of the Duke of Devonshire (now in the Huntington Library). John himself could hardly have charged his Duke overmuch for it, especially a er extolling its rarity and importance in print, but the society’s mysterious correspondent ‘James L. Pearson’ might have proved a hard bargainer. That John took pains with his masquerade, and perhaps pleasure in beguiling his readers, is clear from the text of his pseudonymous papers. Faux-naïf observations, seemingly candid confessions of inexperience or ignorance, thirdparty allusions—sometimes gently corrective—to his own published works, are all calculated to support the fiction of eighteen co-contributors. Can his own close associates—Halliwell, Bruce, and the clever and cynical Cunningham— have been largely deceived? One must doubt it,8 although no contemporary— 5. Field died at Torquay on 11 April 1846; Papers III was listed as ‘in the press’ at the society’s annual meeting a few days later. 6. For the exception, see below, page 455. 7. The British Museum copy of The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue (1622) lacked quire A, with Middleton’s name on A1, and so resisted identification. 8. Certainly Collier revealed his authorship of several papers in letters to Halliwell; see Appendix III.


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such as Robinson or Madden, or (later) Singer and Ingleby—appears to have minded, if ever he knew. Dyce, so frequently bitten in the past, would surely have considered it curious that so many Shakespearian amateurs now seemed to share Collier’s penchant for exposing his editorial shortcomings, but Dyce was not one to commit unworthy suspicions to paper. As the reviewer’s and newspaperman’s traditional anonymity had always catered to mischief, while safeguarding privilege, the blinds of the Shakespeare Society’s Papers may have seemed acceptable, or at least not reprehensible, to those who suspected the fine hand of their editor. Fiction of authorship, a er all, has always been mostly a game, more provocative than provoking; fiction of evidence, however, less so. Collier’s forty-odd Papers, some 270 pages over six years, consist variously of reprints and miniature editions, spin-offs of earlier work and work in progress, and the odd bibliographical or critical article.9 Renderings of rare printed texts predominate: fi een of these range in size from individual broadside ballads in the British Museum’s Roxburghe collection and a brief murder narrative (the source, possibly, for a lost play by Dekker and Jonson) to full-length pamphlets and poems, including Robert Greene’s A Maiden’s Dream (1591, unique at Lambeth Palace and ‘unknown to Dyce’), a hithertounacknowledged pageant by Thomas Middleton (The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue, 1622, missing from Dyce’s 1840 Works of Middleton), and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602, an Ovidian translation questionably attributed— by Dyce again—to Francis Beaumont). Accompanying these are two fragmentary early plays (Albion Knight, ca. 1566; and Francis Douce’s unique Everyman, printed by Pynson, ca. 1515); extracts from rare tracts by Philip Stubbes (two), Thomas Lodge (the notoriously sequestered Defence of Stage Plays), and Samuel Rowlands (a conversation in a bookshop about Greene and Nashe pamphlets, 1602); an Italian poem of 1553 about ‘i due fedelissimi amanti Giulia e Romeo’, with verse-translations of five stanzas; and what John considered—under the pseudonym ‘H. G. Norton’—to be ‘the original of the Induction to ‘‘The Taming of the Shrew’’ ’: a prose tale titled ‘The Waking Man’s Dream’, from an otherwise unknown and fragmentary volume, ca. 1620–30. A few manuscripts found places too: a letter of 1586 from Lord Burghley to Sir Francis Walsingham, communicated by Robert Lemon, which furnished a rather far-fetched ‘illustration’ of Dogberry’s actions in Much Ado about Noth9. He seems first to have envisioned these contributions as a single volume: ‘What think you of this?’ he asked John Bruce on 18 April 1841. ‘Since I published my ‘‘Hist. of Dram. Poetry & the Stage’’, I have found many other papers &c. illustrative of the subject. Of these I should like to make a volume for the Shakespeare Society. I am afraid I would not combine the matter always very conveniently, but I do not want it to be lost. Neither would it do, in point of size, to go with my three volumes [of 1835–39]’; FF MS 812.


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ing; two ballads from the Benjamin H. Bright manuscripts, copied long since by John in the run-up to HEDP; directions for thirteen courtly dances, one of them providing an ‘illustration of a passage in Twel h Night, the passing measure Pavin’;10 a number of records of revels and ‘disguisings’ from Chapter House manuscripts, probably transcribed for HEDP and unused; a covenant between sharers in the Drury Lane Theatre, 1674, ‘presented me [by] a friend of many years standing, who knows my propensity to collect and possess’;11 and (if ‘Alfred T. Goodwin’ is really Collier: see Appendix III) the description of a midsixteenth-century court entertainment from a Harleian manuscript. Peter Cunningham had joined Collier in research for the Memoirs of Actors (1846), and their investigation of London parish registers threw up some data not published there, which was divided between them in the society’s Papers: from the records of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, John offered evidence of performances ‘by Parish Clerks and Players in Churches’, and from other sources an amplification of his sketch of Richard Burbage, and a note on ‘John Wilson, the singer, in ‘‘Much Ado about Nothing’’ ’—the last being largely mistaken, but honestly so. Other by-products of work in progress included details of ‘Players and Dramatic Performance in the Reign of Edward IV’, from the Howard Household Books in the Society of Antiquaries; biographical records of Richard Field, Shakespeare’s printer and townsman, from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company; and an account (dated April 1845) of John Drout’s rare poem Gaulfrido and Barnardo, which Collier had reprinted privately in February 1844. Le overs from his work on the 1842–44 Shakespeare provided John with several more notes, especially on Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado about Nothing, and the date of composition of Venus and Adonis; 12 but the most important Shakespearian piece, and one of the more significant articles in all the society’s Papers, was his essay ‘On the Earliest Quarto Editions of the Plays of Shakespeare’ (III:x). This descriptive account of ‘first’ and ‘first good’ quartos offers only a few passing remarks about text, good or bad, or transmission (Folio copy), but discusses the individual publishers and printers, and gives quasifacsimiles of the title-pages, ‘exactly as they stand, and in the form in which they are printed, in the original quartos’—an innovation upon which Collier prided himself, as ‘no edition of Shakespeare, nor any list of his plays’ had

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10. This was part of lot 1051 in Collier’s 1884 sale, and is now at Dulwich College, MSS 2d ser., no. 94.11. 11. Collier’s document is now in the Harvard Theatre Collection; see Milhous and Hume 1991, i:162. 12. Collier’s argument for an early, even Stratfordian date for Shakespeare’s first poem—once widely endorsed, now widely dismissed—was given support by ‘G. L.’ and ‘James Purcell Reardon’ (B197 and B236).


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provided anything similar.13 He reduced Steevens’s traditional canon (1766) of twenty plays ‘printed anterior to the folio of 1623’ to seventeen, by omitting— quite properly—the two-part Troublesome Reign of King John, as well as the ‘bad’ two-part quarto version of 2 and 3 Henry VI (the Contention and True Tragedy of 1594–95), and restoring Pericles, which Steevens had obstinately le out; his twenty-two type-illustrations included the good and bad quartos of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, both versions of the 1609 Troilus and Cressida title, and three specimens of the ‘1600’ reprints that we now know to be Thomas Pavier’s (1619). He was of course unaware of the 1594 Titus Andronicus, discovered only in 1904—although he knew that Gerard Langbaine had seen a copy (Collier’s Shakespeare, vi:272)—and he deliberately ignored the 1634 Two Noble Kinsmen. As a concise guide to Shakespeare-in-quarto, this was a sensible, authoritative, and unprecedented survey, and John was right to be pleased with it. Some of Collier’s more miscellaneous contributions, especially those under misleading names and initials, betray the old motive of score-settling. Dyce was the true target of papers on Middleton (a correction, which reappears in Memoirs of Actors, of a biographical error), Beaumont and Fletcher (gratuitously out-of-field), and John Heywood (a ‘Skeltonic’ poem overlooked by Skelton’s editor). A note by ‘L. L. D.’, ostensibly on Thomas Campbell’s misinterpretation of a line in The Tempest, really served to chastise ‘the very ingenious and wellinformed’ Joseph Hunter for mechanically adopting it, and went on to dismiss once again Hunter’s early dating of that play. John’s old antipathy to Shelley bore curious fruit, in an article by ‘J. J. B’. exposing the ‘palpable imitations’ of Shakespeare in The Cenci (1819); nowadays staples of Shelley criticism, Collier’s parallels had ‘never . . . been pointed out’ by contemporary reviewers or the few commentators on Shelley before 1844, and they are indeed telling, although the consequent reflections on Shelley’s ‘original powers’ may seem overstated.

The T. C. Croker Episode All the above circulated without notable reaction from Dyce, Hunter, or Shelley’s widow and editor; but one sharp article in the fourth and last volume pricked someone less docile. Thomas Cro on Croker, the peppery Irish antiquary and

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13. Collier did not mention the attempts at quasi-facsimile in the 1760 Prolusions of Edward Capell, who has been called ‘the inventor’ of the system: see Foxon 1970, pp. 10–20, although he was unaware of Collier’s contribution to the Papers, and claimed that aer Capell’s death ‘quasifacsimile seems to have vanished from English scholarship for a century’ (p. 13). Collier did not in fact represent borders or devices, or distinguish long from short ‘s’, but his transcriptions are fairly dependable, erring only in three or four added/omitted full stops, and one wrong initial majuscule (Richard II, line 3).


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folklorist, had known Collier for more than a decade, as a co-founder of the Percy and Camden Societies, and as a fellow, since 1827, of the Society of Antiquaries. ‘Little as a dwarf, keen eyed as a hawk, and of very prepossessing manners . . . something like Tom Moore’, his friend Sir Walter Scott described him,14 but he brooked no perceived insult. In 1844 Croker had come into possession of an unpublished manuscript play by Philip Massinger, Believe as You List, and— he later testified—showed it to Collier, with the intention of ‘transferring it to that gentleman’ for editing. Precisely what followed is uncertain, for Croker’s enraged account of proceedings bristles with animus: Collier allegedly ‘appeared unable fluently to read [it]’, and ‘this evident incompetence on Mr. Collier’s part . . . decided me to undertake the laborious task of editorship myself ’.15 Whether he informed Collier so at the time he did not say, but nearly four years later the Percy Society brought forth, as its eightieth publication, Croker’s own edition— a poor reward, as it happened, for so protracted a project. Croker’s ten-page introduction—civil enough about Collier and Collier’s Memoirs of Actors—is slight and uncritical, and his main text is naked of annotation, inconsistently punctuated (Croker explained in painful detail how and why he changed his principles of pointing a er page 32, but without turning back), and fraught with misreadings, some glaring.16 The volume appeared in the first week of January 1849 (Croker’s preface is dated 30 December 1848), and within a week, if we accept the given dateline of 9 January 1849, Collier had worked up a devastating critique of it, by way of a Shakespeare Society Paper: ‘On Massinger’s ‘‘Believe as You List’’, a Newly Discovered Manuscript Tragedy, Printed by the Percy Society’, by ‘A Member of Both Societies’. Here ‘Member’ objected first to the absence of explanatory notes, suggesting (tongue-in-cheek) that ‘the accomplished editor, Mr. Cro on Croker [might have] subjoined much useful, and sometimes necessary, illustrative matter . . . had his leisure allowed’; he went on to suspect, with transparent mock-charity, ‘that Mr. C. Croker employed some person to transcribe the old manuscript who was not sufficiently familiar with the writing of the time’, which might account for the chaotic punctuation, and the mangling of the text itself, from the evidence of sense and rhyme. For by guesswork only, it seems, ‘Member’ was able to posit—correctly, as it happens—‘scholler’ for ‘stroller’ and ‘finde’ for ‘pride’ in the Prologue alone, and ‘in 14. Journal, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford, 1972), p. 217 (entry for 20 October 1826). 15. Statement Made to the Council of the Percy Society, 5th April, 1849, p. 9. The hand of the MS (now BL Egerton MS 2828) is somewhat difficult, but Croker’s remark is clearly an exaggeration, and other details of his account seem suspect. 16. Croker later claimed that other ‘engagements and occupation’ obliged him ‘to pass the sheets . . . very rapidly through the press,—so rapidly that I doubt if I even read the proof of my Preface . . . and I certainly did not see a revise of the last sheet’ (Statement, p. 10); yet the principal errors are almost certainly not those of the Percy Society’s printer. For comment, see Sisson 1927, pp. xxvi–xxx.


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the most friendly spirit’ to suggest some dozen more misprints or misreadings (‘Asorumbal’ for ‘Asdrubal’ throughout, ‘deuies’ for ‘denies’, ‘conjure’ for ‘fortune’, and ‘inglinge’ for ‘iuglinge’—the last an inspired conjecture, which Croker stiffly resisted, but modern editors adopt)—all this, infuriatingly, without even consulting the manuscript. John’s revenge on the man who would deem him incapable of reading Massinger’s hand, though cloaked for the moment in terms of formal respect, was undoubtedly sweet. Cro on Croker, however, took more vehement umbrage than any of John’s literary victims to date. On 12 March he wrote to F. G. Tomlins, the Shakespeare Society’s secretary, ‘requesting the Council to furnish me with the name of the author of an anonymous article issued under their sanction’—although in all likelihood he already knew his assailant. Tomlins refused, and Croker immediately approached the Earl of Ellesmere (as president), repeating his demand, and on the same day received a letter from Collier, ‘informing me, that he is the responsible editor of the volume’, but not identifying himself as ‘A Member of Both Societies’. A further exchange found Collier ‘expressing his regret’ that Ellesmere had been troubled, Ellesmere himself replying non-committally to Croker, and Croker submitting ‘a rejoinder to the Earl . . . endeavouring to shew the injurious effect which must arise to both Societies by one Literary Association criticising the publications of another’. On 31 March Alexander Dyce wrote to Croker ‘disavowing the authorship of the article in question, which he had not even read’;17 and on 5 April Croker delivered his Statement about the affair to the Percy Society Council, implicitly accusing Collier of the anonymous critique, and retaliating with examples of such ‘oversights and blunders’ in Collier’s Shakespeare that ‘I intend discarding it from my library’. Croker’s spleen renders his irony embarrassingly thick (‘I can only act in the same spirit of kindness, conciliation, courtesy, and amiable candour so evidently displayed by him’), and his censure overflows into silliness (Collier ‘cannot read and copy print correctly’); but the Council of the Percy Society, well aware of Collier’s hostility toward his old club, endorsed Croker’s Statement in a formal resolution issued amongst its reports. ‘They feel themselves called upon to protest not only against the injustice of the anonymous criticism’, someone wrote—perhaps Croker himself, for it echoes the words of his rejoinder to Ellesmere—‘but also against the proceeding, on the part of one literary society towards another, as calculated to excite ill feeling on the part of individual members, and ultimately to prove injurious to the interests of such institutions’ (Statement, p. 3). Aside from so general a protest, Croker’s principal claim in his Statement 17. In mid-January William Jerdan had written to Dyce about Believe as You List, asking ‘your opinion of its authenticity’, presumably in view of the ‘private’ nature of the manuscript (13 January 1849, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.3 [127]); but no further such doubts seem to have been expressed—nor are they warranted.


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had been that the animadversions of ‘A Member’ duplicated, in large part, a list of errata ‘prepared and printed . . . for the consideration of the Council of the [Percy] Society . . . before I had read [the] article in the Shakespeare Society’s Papers’. Croker published or republished this list in his Statement (p. 6), although no separately printed version is known to survive, and presumably forwarded some form of it to Ellesmere in mid-March, for Ellesmere conceded ‘that my corrections were only accidentally anticipated by those of my reviewer’, or at least such ‘appears to be the fact’. One may regard this coincidence with some scepticism (Croker had between 12 March and 5 April to concoct it, and if he really imagined that Collier had sight of a dra , he would surely have said so), and the Council of the Shakespeare Society, unsurprisingly, sided with its director. The annual meeting (26 April 1849) apparently did not dwell on the matter, as John Forster had feared it might: ‘The puddle this poor Irish jackass is making seems to me inconceivably and incredibly ludicrous’, he wrote to Cunningham, excusing his absence—‘Oh that I could attend to say so! . . . I do hope, however, that the meeting will not allow itself to be overborne by such trash & nonsense’.18 Forster need not have worried: as in the intra-society contest between Charles Knight and Collier, John’s colleagues preferred his own silky thrusts to the muscular parries of his paper-war rivals.19 Three years later, in the preface to the penultimate Percy Society volume (Britannia’s Pastorals, February 1852), Croker alluded bitterly to the ‘charges made, without communication, under the mask of friendly criticism . . . against him as the Editor of an unpublished manuscript of Massinger’s’, which (he said) had so demoralized him that he ‘hesitated again to appear before the members of the Percy Society as the transcriber and Editor of another unpublished manuscript’—had not James Orchard Halliwell himself checked his new work and corrected his proofs. And two more years on, memory still rankling, he compounded his case against Collier with an allegation of a five-year-old the , perhaps wilful thinking in retrospect. On Collier’s part—regarding T. Cro on Croker, Massinger, and the Percy Society—there was silence again. Inevitably, Collier’s contributions to the Shakespeare Society’s Papers, signed or pseudonymous, pose a number of problems. A ballad illustrative of Petruc-

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18. 26 April 1849, John Forster Correspondence, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University. 19. Collier’s review may have caused Croker to reconsider making a gi of the MS: he is quoted in Willis’s Current Notes (June 1852, pp. 54–55) as having told George Willis that he would have presented it to the British Museum or the Society of Antiquaries ‘did he not consider that a most unfair attack had been made upon him by Mr. Payne Collier, a V. P. of that Society’. The MS instead passed to Halliwell, and from him to Thomas Corser; it was purchased for the Museum in 1900.


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cio’s announcement to Kate that ‘We will be married a’ Sunday’ (Taming of the Shrew, ii.1.324) is in all likelihood an invention, perhaps based on a memory of a song in Susanna Centlivre’s The Platonic Lady (1707), and the accompanying critical estimate (‘by no means a discreditable production, either as regards spirit or simplicity’) cannot but remind us of Collier on his fictional Thomas Churchyard (‘no very contemptible poet’), or Byron (‘so much truth and vivacity’), or ‘The Inchanted Island’ (‘one of the most beautiful ballads [Douce] had ever read’). Another ballad extracted from a genuine Roxburghe broadside of about 1628 (STC 1327) hardly belongs ‘early in the reign of James I’, and is dated back even further on the testimony of ‘a gentleman with whom I am acquainted’. That unnamed worthy ‘has a copy of it ‘‘printed for E. W.’’, i.e., Edward White, who was a bookseller of considerable note before 1590’, which conveniently supports the application of the text to Shakespeare’s nonchurchgoing father; but no trace of any such version survives (‘On the Recusancy of John Shakespeare’, II:xviii, by ‘Dramaticus’). Only one article signed by Collier contains fraudulent information, and that merely a repetition of the Globe canard from HEDP (‘the Globe playhouse had been erected . . . in the year 1594’: IV:viii, p. 67), but his alter ego ‘Dramaticus’ introduced a series of spuria relating to Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, from manuscript notes ‘in a handwriting coeval, I think, with the date of publication’, present in a tattered copy belonging to ‘a friend of mine, who really does not know the value of it, but who, at the same time, is unwilling to part with it’ (IV:xi). The old annotator attributed co-authorship of the play to Robert Wilson, listed nineteen original actors by name against the characters as they first enter, and identified the singers of the two ‘merry three-mens songs’ and the speaker of the Prologue—a host of novel testimony, rendering welcome the postscript that recorded the willingness of the owner ‘to allow the whole of this rare and excellent play to be reprinted’. ‘Dramaticus’ now promised (20 November 1848) ‘an accurate transcript’ of the text and annotations toward such a project, but nothing more came of it, and had the annotated quarto itself never turned up we might only have shared W. W. Greg’s instinctive suspicion of the report. In 1908 Greg termed the list of actors, at least, ‘an obvious forgery, and a very clumsy one’, an opinion voiced earlier by the erratic F. G. Fleay,20 and while E. K. Chambers in 1926 did not quite dispute these polar authorities, ‘I rather wish’, he remarked, ‘they had given their reasons’ (ES, iii:292).21 Neither

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20. Greg 1904–08, ii:203; Fleay 1891, i:125. 21. We do not have Fleay’s, but Greg, in his own copy of the Shakespeare Society’s Papers, questioned eight of the parts assigned, especially those of Jane and Sybill to H. Jeffes and ‘Alleine’ —‘grown up’, as he notes. And in his copy of The Elizabethan Stage he answered Chambers’s question accordingly: ‘The female parts are assigned to grown men!’ (both books FF).


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Greg nor Chambers noticed, apparently, that the quarto (with ‘a MS list of [the Actors] by J. Payne Collier’) had figured in Collier’s 1884 sale (lot 564); it came later to rest at Harvard, where Fredson Bowers examined and described it in 1949, finding the supposedly early script betrayed by ‘several slips of the pen which make it unlikely that the writing is genuine’.22 Furthermore, one of the actor-attributions listed by ‘Dramaticus’ in 1848 is not present in the quarto itself, but only in Collier’s own autograph schedule of notes, which still accompanies the volume—so that ‘at a minimum . . . Collier-Dramaticus must have created this [assignment] out of his imagination’. With the demise of the castannotations there is no reason to take seriously the co-authorship note, nor the names of the singers and speaker, which are all in the same mock-secretary script. A few other suggested emendations, in undisguised modern pencil, coincide with those Collier later proposed in an unsigned 1863 review of a modern edition (B491). As so o en before, the demonstrably corrupt testimony in the Shakespeare Society’s Papers has coloured our response to other quite genuine matter. ‘H. G. Norton’, of Liverpool, provided for the second assembly what he believed to be ‘the original of the Induction to ‘‘The Taming of the Shrew’’ ’, from a ninepage fragment of a printed quarto, headed ‘The Waking Mans Dreame. | The Fi h Event’ (II:i). This he dated, conjecturally, about 1620–30, and suggested that it represented a reprint of a lost collection of short comic narratives by the poet/playwright Richard Edwards (1570), which Thomas Warton had seen ‘among the books of my friend the late Mr. [William] Collins of Chichester, now dispersed’ (HEP, iii:292–94). Although the tale of Christopher Sly and the Duke’s entertainment, as employed by Shakespeare to frame his main plot, has analogues stretching from the Arabian Nights to the mid-seventeenth century, Edwards’s version, in Warton’s report, was accepted by Collier and his contemporaries as its first appearance in English, and the likeliest immediate source of the dramatic action. We now know, or strongly suspect, that the lost 1570 volume ‘existed only in the mischievous brain of Tom Warton’;23 but Collier did not, and had any of his subsequent invigilators appreciated both Warton’s fraud and ‘Norton’s’ identity, the authenticity of ‘The Waking Man’s Dream’—‘now in my hands’—would certainly have been questioned as well.24

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22. F. Bowers 1949, p. 518. 23. See Mish 1951. 24. Remarkably, perhaps, no one before 1953 (Sydney Race) expressed significant doubts: Halliwell reprinted the 1845 text in his folio Shakespeare, considering its derivation from Edwards ‘probable’; and W. C. Hazlitt added it to his revision of Collier’s Shakespeare’s Library (1875, iv:406–14). F. S. Boas reprinted it again in his edition of A Shrew (1908), his discussion (pp. xiv– xvii, 99–100) remaining the latest estimate cited by Bullough (i:59).


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Collier’s discovery, however, and his puzzlement over it were both genuine, if unedifying: early in 1842 he thanked a correspondent (probably Scottish and possibly James Maidment, for Collier remembered himself to W. B. D. D. Turnbull and David Laing ‘if you see them’) for lending him a folio volume that contained, among other things, the ‘Waking Man’s Dream’ fragment, ‘a piece of a larger book [in quarto] . . . paged from 59 to 67 inclusive’.25 He enquired ‘from whence you took the nine pages’, which presumably the owner was unable to say, for ‘Norton of Liverpool’ remained in the dark, nor did his readers come forth with any further information.26 By 1858 Collier had concluded that the fragment was ‘probably from some old version of Goulart’s ‘‘Admirable Histories’’, which were wholly translated by Edward Grimstone in 1607’ (Shakespeare, ii:441), and Halliwell appears to have recognized the true source by 1876.27 This was identified in print by A. E. Thiselton in 1913 (in The Mystery of the Waking Mans Dreame Revealed, a six-paragraph bifolium), but later commentators continued to repeat Collier’s unhelpful description (‘a fragment, paged 59–67, of a work which has otherwise disappeared’—F. S. Boas), until in 1951 Charles C. Mish pointed out that its source was the not-uncommon Admirable Events of Jean Pierre Camus, Englished by Susan du Verger in 1639 (STC 4549). Even so, editors of The Shrew have continued to misrepresent ‘The Waking Man’s Dream’,28 and while Mish did essentially clear ‘Norton’ and the original text, a century of dim copy-cat scholarship proceeds from the 1845 republication. For all the guesswork—especially the reiteration of the Edwards canard in terms of

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25. 6 January 1842, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (209). He had accepted the offer of the loan on 22 December 1841, again mentioning Turnbull and Laing; Harvard Theatre Collection. 26. Collier had at this time been in close correspondence with Thomas Amyot over the latter’s edition of the bad quarto Taming of a Shrew for the Shakespeare Society, but apparently had not informed his old friend directly about the ‘Waking Man’s Dream’. In a postscript to his introduction (November 1844) Amyot mentioned receiving from F. G. Tomlins, as secretary of the society, ‘a communication addressed to him, which, with the writer’s consent, will probably appear in the next volume of the Shakespeare Society’s Papers, containing apparently the original story on which the Inductions of ‘‘The Taming of a Shrew’’ and of ‘‘The Taming of the Shrew’’ were founded. As the discovery has been made since the ensuing play was printed, and has not yet been reported to the Council of the Society, I do not feel myself warranted in anticipating the contents of the writer’s communication.’ 27. See his Catalogue of the Shakespeare-Study Books in the Immediate Library of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, p. 64. 28. Geoffrey Bullough (i:59) was clearly unaware of Mish’s note, and Brian Morris (New Arden Taming of the Shrew [1981], p. 77) thought the ‘Waking Man’s Dream’ was a ballad. Both he and Ann Thompson (New Cambridge edition [1984], p. 10), no doubt following Bullough, misdescribed Warton’s supposititious volume as a ‘jest book’, which it is certainly not, and seemed to accord its existence the benefit of the doubt: if Warton was ‘correct’, Morris declared, ‘this is a far more probable source than any of the extant versions’. For an accurate analysis see the Oxford Shakespeare Shrew (1982), ed. H. J. Oliver.


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this text—might have been avoided had Collier or anyone else consulted the Censura Literaria of Sir Egerton Brydges (1809, ix:14–24). Here, in this favourite literary quarry,29 we find a long account of Admirable Events, including a full reprint of ‘The Waking Man’s Dream’, as ‘the Induction story to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. It was evidently taken from Heuterus [i.e., De rebus Burgundicis, 1584]’, Brydges correctly explained, ‘but remains to be added to the list given by Annotators’. So much for priority. A simpler but ultimately darker case of suspect testimony stems from Collier’s signed article ‘On Norton and Sackville, the authors of ‘‘Gorboduc’’ ’ (IV:xii), dated 17 October 1848. Here John published ‘a discovery I recently made among the papers of a friend, viz: some verses by Sackville, no where mentioned’, three ten-line elegiac stanzas on the Hoby brothers, Sir Philip and Sir Thomas, d. 1558 and 1566. These are signed ‘T. B.’, whom Collier glossed as ‘Thomas Buckhurst’, Sackville’s baronial title from 1567, and ‘still stronger evidence of his authorship is afforded by the fact that they are in his own handwriting, which I recognized in a moment while turning over my friend’s portfolio’: hence ‘they are to be included among what Anthony Wood calls Sackville’s ‘‘lost or forgotten poems’’, many of which he wrote in comparative youth’. Inevitably, the manuscript itself has vanished, and commentators from 1859 onward have expressed doubts about Sackville’s authorship, or even about the contemporaneity of the verse—which is not very good.30 But in fact the three stanzas, signatory initials and all, are literally cut in stone, as one of the epitaphs on the joint tomb of the Hoby brothers in the parish church of Bisham, in Berkshire, and were published from that source by Elias Ashmole (Antiquities of Berkshire, 1719) and in The English Baronetage (1741).31 Collier clearly was unaware of these confirmations in both stone and print (he asked his readers ‘where were they [the Hobys] buried, and does any such monument still exist?’), and the only significant variant in his text is an obvious misreading (‘unfull’ for ‘rufull’ or ‘ruful’ in line 17), but he really seems to have been the first to link Sack-

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29. It is hard to imagine any serious mid-nineteenth-century antiquary or scholar not possessing a set; Collier’s own was lot 61 in the 1884 sale. 30. Reginald W. Sackville-West, The Works of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (1859, p. viii), referred to the lines as ‘ascribed by some to Sackville’ and did not reprint them. They pass unmentioned in notices of Sackville in editions by Marguerite Hearsey Swart (The Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham, 1936) and Lily B. Campbell (The Mirror for Magistrates, 1938); and as recently as 1980 Peter Beal (IELM, i:2, p. 447) remarked only that ‘Collier claimed that he found the poem in Sackville’s autograph in a ‘‘friend’s portfolio’’, but the MS has never come to light since then and it is now quite impossible to test this claim’. 31. See Hultin and Ober 1989. Collier’s attribution of the verses to Sackville/Buckhurst, who contributed a commendatory poem to Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione (1561), is in fact quite plausible.


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ville with the Hoby epitaph. The fate of the manuscript in ‘my friend’s portfolio’ remains a mystery, but that it existed and who the friend was were confirmed, in 1989, by Neil C. Hultin and Warren U. Ober. None other than T. Cro on Croker, the abused editor of Massinger’s Believe as You List, possessed it, and privately accused Collier of stealing it, at least temporarily. Writing to J. W. Croker on 19 January 1854, he reminisced about the events of 1848–49: Mr. Collier a er having stolen a Manuscript from my library, when I went out of the room to seek for some information for him, attacked me most unfairly in one of the Volumes of the Shakespeare papers respecting a supposed lost play of Massinger’s which I had edited for the Percy Society, and between both Societies a good deal of ill feeling arose. When the MS which Mr. Collier had pilfered from me became the subject of conversation—he actually having had the audacity to print it in the Shakespeare Society’s papers as found by him among the papers of a deceased friend— it was one night or morning thrown into the letter box at my gate addressed to me in a blank cover. It was of no particular interest or value and I gave it to Lord Londesborough for his autograph Collection. It was one of the Hoby papers.32 Despite T. C. Croker’s resentment of Collier, and his capacity for defaming him, this unpublicized account rings circumstantially true; and not for the first or last time has John been accused of light-fingeredness or of misappropriating—temporarily or not—materials entrusted him. The episode of the missing leaves of Kynge Johan has been mentioned above, and the migration of the Chirk Castle Masque of the Four Seasons, and of a 1587 letter of Sir Walter Ralegh, from Bridgewater House to Collier’s shelves will be treated below. In 1859 Sir Frederic Madden recorded in his diary ‘a very extraordinary story, for the truth of which [N. E. S. A. Hamilton of the British Museum] vouches, and which affects Mr Collier’s honesty to the last degree. It appears that about 1850 he was allowed free access to the State Paper Office, and was seen by Tom Temple, one of the Clerks, to put some Papers into his pocket, and take them away. Mr C. was not stopt at once, because he was a great friend of Mr Lemon, but Temple communicated what he had seen to his superior officers, and a few days a erwards, the missing Papers were brought back, and thrust into one of the presses. If this is true, a public inquiry ought to take place’.33

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32. Quoted by Hultin and Ober 1989, p. 145, from the letter in the Clements Library. The MS itself is not to be found in the Londesborough sale (autograph letters and historical documents, Sotheby’s, 11–12 June 1888). 33. Madden Diary, 5 November. A similar case may be that of the Pembroke letter about Middleton’s Game at Chess, reported in New Particulars as ‘discovered only recently’ in the State


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To the serious, but in some terms mitigable, charges of scholarly impatience, carelessness, and perhaps deliberate miscitations, one last article by ‘J. F. Herbert’ makes a damaging addition. We have earlier considered John’s ownership of a scrap of Henslowe’s diary unalarming, as fragments had circulated in commerce before, during, and a er Malone’s depredations. But ‘Herbert’, in ‘Additions to ‘‘The Alleyn Papers’’ ’ (Papers, I:v), came up with an awkward trove of four Henslowe/Alleyn documents, discovered amongst ‘a good many small manuscripts [assembled by] my father and grandfather’, in an effort to find ‘something that might answer the purpose, and be worthy of insertion among the proposed miscellany of the Shakespeare Society’.34 These comprised an undated plea for money from Robert Daborne, the playwright; (a receipt signed by William Rowley and two others; twelve lines of acrostic verse (‘thomas downton’) by John Day; and a letter from Day transmitting a ‘small Poeme, contayning the Miracles of our Blest Saviour’—itself not present, nor otherwise known—as a New Year’s gi . While two or three of these have been suspected as fabrications or forgeries, they are all genuine, and all were at one time in Collier’s possession: the first two are now preserved in the British Library (Egerton MS 2623, items 14 and 15), from an album of material that passed from Collier to Frederic Ouvry;35 while the John Day manuscript and letter remained in Collier’s hands, figuring as part of lot 1051 in his 1884 sale. There they were purchased (back) by Dulwich College, through its historian William Young, for £3 15s., the lot containing as well eleven other manuscripts, some of considerable interest.36 A dogged apologist could of course hypothesize that all four Alleyn papers were acquired by Collier from J. F. Herbert, whoever he was, at some time a er 1844. If Collier had himself pilfered them, moreover, he could hardly have published them in his Alleyn and Henslowe volumes without risking a challenge, and an interim owner served two useful purposes: the literary evidence, which must have tantalized its discoverer, might be published in full, and that very process would provide a provenance-buffer in ‘Herbert’ (to say nothing of Herbert’s father and grandfather), between the Dulwich archives and their intimate of the previous decade.

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Paper Office, but in the 1879 revision of HEDP as ‘only recently discovered’ and now ‘in the library of F. Ouvry, Esq.’, Collier’s nephew by marriage, to whom he supplied many rare books and MSS: see QD A24.7. It is not clear if the document was in fact ever in the State Paper Office, for in telling Madden it was missing, Hamilton added: ‘nor could any trace of its existence be found’ (Madden Diary, 11 February 1860). 34. ‘Herbert’ was quite aware that the papers stemmed from the Dulwich College archives, having, like many others, ‘disappeared . . . in consequence of the little value in the last century supposed to belong to [them]’. He certainly did not offer to return them. 35. The album was lot 530 in Ouvry’s sale. 36. Dulwich MSS 2d ser., nos. 94.1–12.


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Memoirs of Actors Since 1841 the Shakespeare Society had projected ‘a volume of the Names, Lives, and Characters of the Actors in the Plays of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Shakespeare, Lodge, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Massinger, Ford, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, &c., alphabetically arranged, and embracing various particulars hitherto unknown’.37 Toward this John must have already assembled some notes, the final extent of which he described in 1879 as ‘a list of not fewer than between 400 and 500 persons who figured, more or less prominently, in the dramas represented in England anterior to the Restoration’ (JPC sale, lot 117: ‘Collections for the lives of all our old actors, original manuscript, arranged in alphabetical order’).38 But the breakthrough in research began only in October 1845, when—with Peter Cunningham sometimes in tow—Collier began to examine the parochial records of eight London churches, both their registers (births, marriages, burials) and their token books (annual lists, street by street, of those who attended Mass), when available. A wealth of new biographical data emerged, especially from the records of St. Saviour’s, Southwark;39 St. Giles’s without Cripplegate; St. Ann’s, Blackfriars; St. Botolph’s without Bishopsgate; and St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch,40 relating not only to actors but to playwrights and poets; and probably in view of the discoveries John narrowed the scope of his study to the twenty-five men (Shakespeare excepted) named in the First Folio as ‘the principall actors in all [Shakespeare’s] plays’. To these biographical notices, ranging from two pages to fi y-eight (Richard Burbage), he added a long introduction, detailing those parish-record novelties about other players

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37. Item no. 15 among ‘Works Suggested for Publication’ in the society’s prospectus, as annexed to Collier’s Memoirs of Edward Alleyn. 38. HEDP, 2d ed., iii:256. F. G. Fleay doubted the existence of such a list (1890, p. 370), suggesting that Collier ‘only meant to concoct one out of such documents as the forged Blackfriars petition’; but E. K. Chambers in 1923 (ES, ii:295) was ‘glad to have an opportunity for once of defending Collier, even if it is only against Fleay’, in identifying lot 117 as Bodleian MS 29445 (= MS Eng.hist.e.1), a manuscript of several hundred pages titled in Collier’s very late hand ‘Old Actors. Collections for the biography of, derived from Old Books & MSS’. The principal section is an alphabetical compilation of notes on actors (Alleyn to Young); some of the data are taken from the accompanying extracts from London parish registers made by Collier and Peter Cunningham in 1845–46. 39. On 19 October 1845 Collier asked if Cunningham would ‘make a day with me this week to examine the Registers of St Saviour’s Southwark’; Harmsen collection. 40. On 29 December 1845, having lain sick in bed for a fortnight with ‘one of my old confounded quinzies’, Collier mentioned ‘our [forthcoming] expedition to Shoreditch’ to Cunningham, tempting his companion with an offer of ‘printed scraps & broadsides’ toward Cunningham’s Handbook of London. Collier also turned up evidence at St. Mary Aldermary, St. Andrew by the Wardrobe, and St. Bartholomew the Great, and pursued a Malone reference at St. Martin in the Fields; JPC to Cunningham, 18 May 1846, Harmsen collection.


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and non-players that he could hardly resist making public; and a continuation of the project to provide ‘Lives of the Players at the Fortune and Cockpit’ was mooted even before Memoirs of Actors appeared.41 The work was in the press by 7 June, with John ‘correcting the last sheet but one of the Lives . . . [and] endeavouring to render the Introduction readable’, and intending to submit ‘a rather heavy bill against the S. S. for searching registers of some six or eight churches, but well worthwhile’.42 On 30 June Egerton declared himself ‘proud’ to accept the dedication, under his new style as Earl of Ellesmere; on 28 July the sheets were at the binder’s;43 and by 15 August the first half of a two-part review had already appeared in the Athenaeum. Peter Cunningham, who by now surely knew more about the material in Memoirs of Actors than anyone save Collier himself, wrote the anonymous, extended, and highly favourable Athenaeum review. John thanked him for it on 21 August (‘I see what you have done for me in the Ath’.), having already acknowledged in print ‘all the cheering aid received from Mr. Peter Cunningham, whose information is so extensive on matters connected with literary archaeology, and whose liberality is as enlarged as his knowledge’.44 While not blind to Collier’s occasional leaps of identification (especially of common names like Benjamin Jonson or Johnson, John Lowin or Lowen, or Joseph Taylor), Cunningham loyally signalled the novelties in Memoirs of Actors as evidence of ‘what untiring industry can accomplish if a man will but write a book upon what he understands’, and gave gratifying play to Collier’s critical and biographical generalizations, regarding Shakespeare in particular. ‘There is not a greater name in the history of our stage than Richard Burbadge’, Cunningham declared, citing Collier’s discovery of family records ‘overlooked both by Malone and Chalmers’ in the registers of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch (including the baptism of a son on 6 November 1616, who Collier speculated ‘was named William a er our great dramatist, who died about six months before’), and evidence of action in Chancery involving James Burbage and the Blackfriars Theatre in 1590–96. Cunningham also praised Collier’s treatment of William Heminge and Henry Condell (‘a er Burbadge, the next great names of interest’), John Lowin and Joseph Taylor (‘who gave us the first folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’), and the morris-dancing clown William Kempe; but his attention was principally devoted to Collier’s long introduction, and the particulars of poets and playwrights there gathered—since ‘poets make actors,—not actors poets’, and ‘we have, therefore, given the preference to the former’. Chief among these were bio41. Athenaeum, 14 February 1846, p. 175; this came to nothing. 42. JPC to Cunningham, 7 and 8 June 1846, Harmsen collection. 43. Ellesmere to JPC, 30 June 1846, Folger MS Y.d.6 (109); JPC to Alexander Dyce, 28 July 1846, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (23). 44. JPC to Cunningham, Harmsen Collection; Memoirs, p. xxxiv.


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graphical records of Shakespeare’s immediate family, his actor-brother Edmund, buried at St. Saviour’s on 31 December 1607, and the once-mysterious ‘Edward, sonne of Edward Shackspeere, player, base borne’, who was interred at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, sixteen weeks earlier.45 Next come baptismal and burial records of Ben Jonson’s infant son Ben (1607–11), and that of his supposed second marriage, to one Hester Hopkins, in 1623;46 the burial of Gabriel Spencer, the actor whom Jonson killed in a duel (St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, 24 September 1598); records of John Fletcher the playwright and Lawrence Fletcher the player;47 the correct date of Philip Massinger’s burial (Gifford having mistaken it by a year, and misinterpreted the term ‘stranger’ applied to the deceased); the death of Fortunatus Greene, Robert Greene’s son; and family records of Thomas Tusser, Josuah Sylvester, Thomas Watson, and Thomas Dekker.48 Most important of all, perhaps, were six lifetime records of Inigo Jones, including his baptism, from 45. Memoirs, pp. xiii–xvi. The original record of Edmund Shakespeare’s burial, in the parish register of St. Saviour’s, had long been known (though imperfectly transcribed before Collier); but the sexton’s account, charging 20s. for ‘a forenoone knell of the great bell’ was Collier’s discovery, upon which Cunningham speculated that the choice of ‘forenoone’, rather than aernoon or evening, probably was meant to avoid ‘the ceremonies customary on this occasion’, i.e., New Year’s Eve. The St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, record of ‘Edward Shackspeere’, father and son, prompted Collier’s injunction to Cunningham to keep it ‘a dead secret’ until it could be announced to the Shakespeare Society Council and the press, ‘but not so as to lead to a knowledge of the source of our information’—otherwise ‘we shall have people treading on our heels’ (18 March 1846, Harmsen collection). The council was informed on 14 April, and Collier himself provided a lengthy notice for the Athenaeum of 18 April, mentioning many ‘other novel particulars, deserving record’ that were also laid before the council. Collier originally thought ‘Edward Shackspeere’ not simply a clerical error for ‘‘Edmund’’, but rather ‘a member of the family . . . of whom . . . we have never heard’; Cunningham, however, mooted otherwise (i.e., that ‘Edward’ = ‘Edmund’, and that ‘the residence of Edmund in St. Saviour’s . . . is of no validity to disprove the burial of his sons [sic] in St. Giles’s’), an opinion adopted by Collier himself in 1858 (Shakespeare, i:185), and echoed by Chambers, WS, i:187; Schoenbaum 1975, p. 26; and Phelps 1978. Schoenbaum’s remarks that ‘it does not occur to Collier to identify Edward senior with the playwright’s brother Edmund’, and that ‘he does not claim to have discovered these items’ are somewhat misleading. 46. Memoirs, pp. xxii–xxv: all are genuine entries, but the identification of the latter ‘Ben. Johnson’, of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, with the forty-nine-year-old poet remains open: Herford and Simpson, xi:576, regarded it as ‘requir[ing] further evidence’. 47. Memoirs, pp. x–xiii. The discovery of John Fletcher’s burial at St. Saviour’s on 29 August 1625 (Aubrey said that he died in the Great Plague) was Collier’s, although both Chambers (ES, iii:314) and Bentley, iii:310, credit William Rendle, the Southwark historian, who reported the same three records forty years later (Athenaeum, 21 August 1886, p. 252). Collier speculated that the actor Lawrence Fletcher (buried at St. Saviour’s on 12 September 1608) might be related to the playwright, ‘but it will perhaps ever remain [a question]’. 48. The identification of the ‘Thomas Watson, Gent’ who was buried at St. Bartholomew the Less on 26 September 1592 (Memoirs, p. xix) with the poet and intimate of Christopher Marlowe was accepted by Sidney Lee in DNB, and has been credited by at least one modern biographer (Cecioni 1964, p. 71). The Dekker family records from St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, were confirmed in 1920 by F. P. Wilson, correcting Collier’s transcriptions: see Jones-Davies 1958, i:30–32.


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the register of St. Bartholomew the Less, West Smithfield (pp. xxv–xxvi), but other finds, unmentioned by Cunningham, relate to Thomas Deloney (p. 110), Anthony Munday (pp. 110–11), Aurelian Townshend (p. xxiv), and a pair of problematic names, John Webster and George Wilkins (for whom see below). Although the underpinning of Memoirs of Actors was the old work of Malone, Chalmers, and their predecessors (censured by Collier, more stridently than ever, for ‘overlooking’ the new evidence), the London church records were nearly all novelties in 1846, of which John was justifiably proud, and Peter Cunningham meticulous in crediting to his friend. That they had searched the parochial archives together is implicit from Collier’s letters, especially that of 18 March, urging secrecy about ‘the source of our information’, lest ‘we shall have people treading on our heels’. Very possibly, indeed, John required Cunningham’s intercession, as a civil servant, with the scattered repositories; but Cunningham never attempted to claim a share in the discoveries, beyond publishing a few of them, unlisted by Collier, in the Shakespeare Society’s Papers.49 Save for Cunningham, John found only three individuals to thank in his preface: Ellesmere, the dedicatee, ‘for many favours conferred’; one Mr. Monro, a registrar of the Court of Chancery, for providing the James Burbage lawsuit particulars; and ‘the author’s zealous and intelligent friend, Mr. F. Ouvry’, for prompting Monro’s communication;50 apart from these, ‘he regrets that he has no other names to record, for to him it is as great a pleasure to admit an obligation as to receive one’. This has a ring of petulance to it, but the expectable castigations or tweaks of contemporaries are subdued: Hunter is footnoted only for lending a copy of Marston’s Scourge of Folly, and Dyce is admonished only two or three times—for a ‘singular’ oversight regarding William Kempe (pp. 90, 118), and for the same confusion between Edward and Thomas Middleton that we have noticed before.51 The modesty of the latter campaign may reflect stoppress revisions, for in May and June 1846 John and his bête noire were, through the efforts of Forster and others, temporarily reconciled. ‘Remember in reading my forthcoming book’, John cautioned Dyce on 28 July—a er an exchange of

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49. ‘Did General Harrison Kill ‘‘Dick Robinson’’ the Player?’, Papers, II:iii. In 1847–48 Collier himself published a series of four articles on the records at St. Margaret’s, Southwark, in the British Magazine and Monthly Register of Religious and Ecclesiastical Information, Parochial History, &c., one of whose editors was S. R. Maitland. 50. Collier had known Ouvry at least since early 1840, when he desribed him to John Bruce (FF MS 805, 11 February 1840) as ‘a man in business in the City as a Solicitor [who] has no peculiar qualifications for the task of editorship & no vanity whatever in connection with his M.S.’, the manuscript in question being a volume of the Earl of Leicester’s correspondence that Bruce later edited for the Camden Society (1844). Ouvry (1814–81) married Collier’s niece Emily Anna Proctor in 1854, and bulks large in Collier’s later affairs. 51. The reference to Dyce on Greene at p. xx is positively civil.


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mutually affecting letters—‘that it was not written under present circumstances. I am not aware that more than one or two passages require this fact to be borne in mind’.52 Dyce presented his renewed friend with volume 11 of his Beaumont and Fletcher in November, and Collier reciprocated with a few yet-unpublished records of Fletcher, for which Dyce thanked him fully in print.53 Although Memoirs of Actors is an important and pioneering study, full of new evidence and thoughtful re-interpretation of the old, it is also one of the thorniest of Collier’s texts in terms of misinformation, deliberate or otherwise. Quite apart from forgery and fiction, it hosts a number of what seem to be honest errors, confusions, and speculative (but dubious) identifications, many of which have been perpetuated in later biographies. Collier muddled two John Wilsons and two Nat. Fields;54 he assumed that the Joseph Taylor baptized at St. Andrew’s by the Wardrobe on 6 February 1585 was the Shakespearian player, because ‘in no other [London] register have we seen the baptism of a Joseph Taylor, that in point of date would so well answer to our purposes’ (p. 249); and only wishful thinking (‘from the peculiar wording of the registration, as well as from the correspondence of dates’) would intimate (p. xxi) that the ‘Wilde, otherwise Greene’ who married Elizabeth Taylor on 16 February 1586 at St. Bartholomew the Less, was the ‘ill-governed’ author Robert Greene. No major claims were made for Thomas Shakespeare, who married Luce Booth on 25 August 1618 at St. Giles’s without Cripplegate (the parish church where ‘Edward’ Shakespeare the younger was interred in 1607), save that ‘it is extremely probable that this Thomas Shakespeare was related to Edward’, and his consanguinity with the dramatist has never been seriously pursued. These hypotheses are perhaps easy to resist, but what of the records of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, supposedly pertaining to the playwright John Webster? Collier confidently declared Alice Webster, baptized on 9 May 1606, to be his daughter, and thought a marriage entry for John Webster and Isabell Sutton (25 July 1590) possibly germane, although if so ‘it must have occurred when he was very young’ (p. xxxii). Lee (DNB, 1899) and Chambers (ES, iii:507) recited Collier’s identifications without really endorsing them, but in 1927 F. L. Lucas reported that ‘only the second of these entries [i.e., the baptism of Alice]

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52. JPC to Dyce, 28 July 1846, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (23). 53. Dyce’s Beaumont and Fletcher, i:lxxvii–lxxviii, and in the acknowledgements, p. iv. Bentley, iii:307, cast unjustified doubt on the record of one baptism (John, son of John and Joan Fletcher, 25 February 1619); but Bentley was searching in the St. Saviour’s records, and Dyce, citing his memorandum from Collier, clearly indicated that the entry was from the register of St. Bartholomew the Great. Dyce’s letter presenting vol. 11 to Collier (7 November 1846) is Ohio State University SPEC.MMS.12. 54. See QD A65.5 and A65.28.


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really exists’ in the St. Leonard’s registers. ‘Either Collier invented the other’, he suggested (‘though it scarcely seems worth inventing’), ‘or else he confused St. Leonard’s with some other church’. Recent scholarship has revealed that Webster was in fact resident in the parish of St. Sepulchre without Newgate, and married Sara Peniall in about 1605,55 so that neither of the St. Leonard’s records actually relates to the playwright; but the source of the 1590 marriage entry cited by Collier remains cloudy. More problematic is the burial record (19 August 1603) of ‘George Wilkins, the poet’, of Halliwell or Holywell Street—also St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch—‘four years before any dramatic work from his pen [i.e., The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, 1607] came from the press’ (p. 112). This time Lee (DNB, 1900) checked the register and confirmed the entry, but concluded that ‘ ‘‘The Poet’’ George Wilkins may have been father of the dramatist and pamphleteer. He cannot be identical with him. The latter’s publications all appeared at a date subsequent to the burial entry of ‘‘the Poet’’ in 1603, and none of them can be regarded as posthumous works.’ But if so, what, if anything, did ‘the Poet’ George Wilkins write, to cause him to be so designated in the parish? Collier himself wrestled with that problem, and in 1865 (BARB, ii:552) distinguished ‘the elder George Wilkins, who died in 1603’, from a namesake who wrote the (prose) Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608) and other tracts, and attributed The Miseries, a domestic tragedy largely in verse, to the former. Modern scholarship rejects the St. Leonard’s identification entirely, fixing instead on a different poet Wilkins and (perhaps) his playwright son.56 At least a dozen old forgeries from four published sources (HEDP, New Facts, New Particulars, and Memoirs of Alleyn) are recycled in Memoirs of Actors. New canards are less numerous. From the parish register of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars, Collier published a 1599 burial entry for ‘Paull, soon to Paull Bucke, bastard of a player’, and identified the father as the ‘Paule Bucke’ named at the end of Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, a comedy first printed in 1584: ‘we can now prove that he was an actor, and most likely he made and signed the transcript from which the play was printed’ (p. 131). ‘There was a natural horror of players in the puritanical district of the Blackfriars’, Collier added, ‘and this entry was intended as a reproach upon the profession.’ He noted also that ‘Paul

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55. Webster, Complete Works, ed. Lucas (1927), i:47; for more recent scholarship, see Bradbrook 1980, building on the discoveries of Edmond 1976. 56. George B. Dickson argued (1939) against associating the playwright with any of the known London George Wilkinses, but both Roger Prior (1972 and 1975) and Mark Eccles (1975) have convincingly identified Wilkins as a London victualler. Prior agreed with Lee that the playwright might have been the son of ‘the Poet’, and further suggested that father and son might have been responsible for the sonnets signed ‘G. W.’ and ‘G. W. I[unior]’ prefixed to Spenser’s Amoretti, 1595.


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Buck figures in several other parts of the same register’;57 and from his and Cunningham’s notes (Bodleian MS Eng.hist.e.1) E. K. Chambers reported the burial of another child, Bucke’s daughter Sara, on 23 July 1580 (ES, ii:304, followed by Nungezer 1929, p. 64). But in 1991 Mark Eccles re-examined the register of St. Ann’s, and found that the entry read in fact ‘‘Paull soonn to paull bucke, bastard’’. ‘A forger has added in different ink ‘‘of a player’’ ’, Eccles reported, and ‘the word ‘‘player’’ has also been forged a er the burial entry in 1580 of ‘‘Sara daughter to Paule Bucke’’’.58 In the St. Saviour’s token took for 1605, according to Memoirs, the actor William Kempe is recorded as residing ‘ ‘‘near the playhouse’’, though which playhouse was meant is not specified’ (p. 116). This evidence would add over a year to Kempe’s dates as we now think of them,59 and incidentally support the forged 1605 Kempe-Armin memorandum from New Facts, which is recycled a page later. But in fact the entry quoted by Collier appears in the token book for 1602, not 1605;60 and although one might think this merely an error in notetaking on Collier’s part, it is more likely a gambling fabrication: for he was certainly aware of the 1603 St. Saviour’s burial notice for ‘Kempe a man’ and realized that that date rendered the supposed Lord Mayor’s memorandum of ‘1605’ impossible. We would be credulous indeed not to investigate Collier’s attribution of Conclusions upon Dances (1607), a brief vindication of dancing ‘by J. L. Roscio’, to the actor John Lowin or Lowen, on the basis of another reported inscription. ‘A copy of it exists’, Collier testified (p. 169), ‘in the library of a collector, with these words distinctly written upon the title-page, ‘‘By Jhon Lowin. Witnesseth Tho. D. 1610’’. This evidence is therefore sufficiently complete, without supposing, as we may reasonably do, that ‘‘Tho. D.’’ means Thomas Dekker, who was a distinguished dramatist for the company to which Lowin belonged, and in whose plays he had o en acted’. The published initials (‘J. L.’, ‘Roscio’ connoting ‘actor’) make Lowin in fact a reasonable authorship guess—there are no obvious contemporary alternatives—but the very existence of the inscribed copy, with its provocative authority, has excited the suspicion of others before us.61 It does however survive, and is now in the British Library, where a recent writer

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57. In the reissue of Memoirs appended to the 1879 HEDP (iii:165), he ‘figures insignificantly’, etc. 58. Eccles 1991, p. 42. 59. Eccles (1992, p. 295) accepted the 2 November 1603 burial at St. Saviour’s of ‘Kempe a man’ as a reference to the actor, pointing out that in the same registers other actors (Lawrence Fletcher, Edward Juby, etc.) are also designated ‘a man’. 60. See Eccles 1992, p. 294. 61. E.g., Joseph Knight in DNB (1893).


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on Lowin has found it persuasive.62 But Collier’s ‘collector’ was almost certainly Collier himself, for the book turned up in the 1882 sale of Frederic Ouvry (lot 1003, £4 4s. to Ellis for the British Museum); our own impression is that the inscription is a forgery, probably by Collier—although the attribution it fosters is probably correct. No Collier text as substantial as Memoirs of Actors would seem quite complete without a modicum of suspect ‘original’ verse. At pp. 51–55 he presented at full length ‘the elegy upon Burbadge from which we have already made several quotations’, that is, in New Particulars, where the notorious interpolation detailing Burbage’s parts in plays by Shakespeare and others first appeared (see QD A65.20). Another elegy, from an unidentified manuscript, was said to contrast ‘the public grief for the death of a player with the comparative indifference with which the news of the demise of the Queen of James I. had been received’ (p. 56), and John took pains to explain the object of the author’s satire, and to point out that ‘the two lines at the commencement are copied from the opening of the first part of ‘‘Henry VI’’ ’. This sonnet was duly credited and reprinted in part by C. C. Stopes in 1913,63 but elicited no comment from Chambers or Nungezer, and perhaps deserves none. De Burbagio et Reginâ Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! Comets importing change shoot through the sky: Scourge the foul fates that thus afflict our sight! Burbadge, the player, has vouchsafed to die! Therefore, in London is not one eye dry: The deaths of men who act our Queens and Kings, Are now more mourn’d than are the real things. The Queen is dead! to him now what are Queens? Queans of the theatre are much more worth, Drawn to the playhouse by the bawdy scenes, To revel in the foulness they call mirth. Dick Burbadge was their mortal god on earth:

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62. Rick Bowers, urging the attribution to Lowin on other grounds, took the inscription at face value, asserting that ‘ink analysis proves the inscription to be early seventeenth-century, thereby heightening the likelihood of the attribution. It is a brown writing ink, very corrosive and acidic, and compares favorably under high magnification with other writing of contemporary date’ (1987b, p. 172). Bowers does not indicate what sort of ‘ink analysis’ he employed toward this curious verdict. 63. Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage, pp. 117–18. In arranging her quotations Stopes implied that the text was to be found in BL Sloane MS 1786, like the genuine verse epitaph beginning ‘This life’s a play’; but it is not.


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When he expires, lo! all lament the man; But where’s the grief should follow good Queen Ann? Phrases like ‘vouchsafed to die’ and ‘is not one eye dry’, the usage of ‘act’ (for ‘play’) and ‘real things’, and the quibble on ‘queens’ and ‘queans of the theatre’ are about as Jacobean as Collier’s ‘Sonnet to Punch’ is Byronic, and perhaps he half-intended the text as a tease.64 Finally (p. 220), an epigram—‘sold among the manuscripts of the late Mr. Heber’—testifies that Nathan Field, the actor, ‘was of a jealous turn of mind’, and suggests ‘that Burbadge, some time before his death, had relinquished to Field the part of Othello’, or ‘at all events Field . . . had played the character’: De Agello et Othello Field is, in sooth, an actor—all men know it, And is the true Othello of the poet. I wonder if ’tis true, as people tell us, That, like the character, he is most jealous. If it be so, and many living sweare it, It takes not little from the actor’s merit, Since, as the Moore is jealous of his wife, Field can display the passion to the life. R. F. Brinkley, Field’s biographer, rejected this as ‘Collier’s fabrication’, citing the ‘strangely non-Elizabethan sound [of ] both metre and expression’;65 and E. K. Chambers agreed that ‘it would be dangerous to regard it as genuine’ (WS, ii:391). Impressionism, perhaps, but it is our impression as well—and predictably, the manuscript itself is unlisted among Heber’s collections, and has never been mentioned by anyone other than Collier. Perhaps these specimens of occasional verse—unambitious as ever, in literary terms, but always embodying some biographical or socio-historical novelty—will prepare the reader for the great flowering of popular balladry in the next half-decade. As Samuel Johnson remarked of James Macpherson’s Ossianic rhapsodies, whether antique and genuine or modern and spurious, ‘a man might write such stuff for ever’.

B. H. Bright and the Roxburghe Ballads On 4 August 1843 Benjamin Heywood Bright died at Ham Green, Surrey, and his library came under the hammer at Sotheby’s between June 1844 and July

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64. He might at least have taken refuge, if challenged, in the wording of his description (p. 56), which never specifically declares the lines to be contemporary with the event. 65. Brinkley 1928, p. 43.


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1845. Seymour De Ricci called him an ‘omnivorous bibliophile’ (1930, p. 107), and indeed his English literary books proved a particularly rich lode of rarities, for the most part untapped by scholars—although the ‘Introductory Notice’ to his main sale made a point of his ‘pride and delight to share the treasures he had collected with his fellow-lovers of curious literature’. Collier had benefited from Bright’s generosity twelve years earlier, and thanked him for it in print; but perhaps relations had cooled, for John’s anonymous two-part essay on Bright’s ‘Roxburghe Ballads’ (Athenaeum, 23 and 30 August 1845) suggested that Bright deliberately withheld material from the saintly Douce, being ‘so chary’ of his three famous volumes of ballads, and ‘so afraid lest anyone should even know that he possessed them’.66 Had Bright deserved these aspersions? Little has been written of the collector: although his 1844–45 sale was one of the major dispersals of the decade he is not noticed by Fletcher, Quaritch, or DNB, nor (remarkably) Dibdin; in 1836, in fact, Dibdin (who ‘should have preferred the acquisition of the old Ballad Poetry, in three folio volumes, in the Roxburghe Collection, to all the Boccaccios in the world’) admitted that ‘of their present destination I am ignorant’ (Reminiscences, i:361). Bright (1787–1843) was a member of a wealthy banking family (on both sides) of Bristol and Manchester, and the younger brother of the distinguished physician and traveller Richard (‘Bright’s disease’). Twice widowed by 1829, he became a barrister at thirty-three, but ‘in his habits, and from his health, [remained] a ‘‘retired gentleman’’ ’ (John Mitford in GM, March 1847), devoted to his library in Cadogan Place, Chelsea. He was a close friend of Joseph Hunter, who described him as ‘remarkably sagacious’ and ‘intimately acquainted with the whole range of Elizabethan literature’ (New Illustrations, i:237), and has le an account of him (1830) in manuscript.67

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66. Collier repeated this charge against Bright (‘for many years [he] . . . kept the volumes out of sight’) in his selection of Roxburghe Ballads, and in his anonymous three-part preview of the March 1845 Bright sale (Athenaeum, 18–25 January and 1 February 1845) he suggested as well that Bright withheld a rare Skelton from Dyce, and ‘kept the fact concealed that he had been the purchaser of the series of York Miracle Plays sold at Strawberry Hill, lest perhaps, he should be asked by the Shakspeare Society (which has already printed the Coventry and Chester Plays) to allow them to be published’. 67. BL Add. MS 36527, fols. 117–19. Bright’s main claim to literary fame was his identification of the vexed ‘Mr. W. H.’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) as William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke— still a favourite guess, although Bright’s priority in proposing it has been hotly debated. Hunter, who testified that Bright had first mooted the idea to him in 1818–19, wrote that ‘Mr. Bright was in this an original discoverer if ever there was one’, although he effectively forfeited recognition by failing to publish. Instead James Boaden first offered in print this ‘major theory’ (Schoenbaum 1991, p. 200) in 1832, in periodical articles later collected as a pamphlet. The latter version was inspired by Collier’s New Facts (Boaden, On the Sonnets of Shakespeare [1837], p. 61), and Collier himself praised its argument in his 1842–44 Shakespeare (viii:473), while recording that Bright


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Bright’s principal treasure, the collection of broadside ballads formed by Robert and Edward Harley, and augmented by Thomas Pearson (with Isaac Reed’s help) and by John Ker, third Duke of Roxburghe (d. 1804), had fetched £477 15s. at the Roxburghe sale in 1812, and passed to Bright at some later date for £600 or £700—reports vary. A er its latest enlargement it numbered more than 1,300 pieces, elaborately guarded and bound in three folio volumes; it did not, pace the Roxburghe sale catalogue, ‘greatly exceed’ the Pepsyian collection at Cambridge (about 1,700 broadsides), and its strength was not in sixteenthcentury material, like the smaller Davies-Hollis collection at the Society of Antiquaries, or the 150 Tollemache ballads now divided between William Miller and George Daniel; but its purchase for £535 by the British Museum marvellously strengthened the national holdings.68 Collier sang its praises in two anonymous articles for the Athenaeum, replete with extracts and commentary, and concluded that ‘in what are properly termed broadside ballads’—as opposed to poetical tracts or ‘penny histories’, which he deemed the respective strengths of Oxford and Cambridge—‘neither [university] can at this time compete with the British Museum’.69 With the sort of proprietary liberality that raises curators’ (‘well known for his acuteness and learning’) ‘had fallen upon the same conjecture before it was broached by Boaden’. Aer Bright’s death, however, Collier characteristically withdrew the bouquet, professing ‘little faith in these ‘‘prophets aer the event’’, who pretend to have found out matters long before others’, and recalling that ‘Mr. Boaden himself informs us, that the idea had presented itself to his mind as long ago as . . . 1797, although he did not publish it until thirty years aerwards’ (Athenaeum, 18 January 1845, p. 70). For his part, Bright had accepted the preemption with the best of grace, writing to Hunter in 1832 that ‘I readily acknowledge that he who unnecessarily hoards information of any kind rightly loses the privilege of first communicating it’ (New Illustrations, ii:347–48). For Hunter, nursing his resentment of Collier and Manningham’s diary—and for Collier as well, ever mindful of such competitive ‘privilege’—the Bright-Boaden issue could not but evoke parallels. Bright himself, for all his diffidence toward ‘selfish regrets’, clearly could alternate ‘liberality’ with secrecy, and Collier’s souring on an old benefactor may be owing to the revelation, through the 1844–45 sale catalogues, of what Bright had possessed and chosen not to share. 68. Sotheby’s, 3 March 1845, lot 296. The Museum also purchased a fourth volume containing eighty-five further pieces added by Bright (lot 297, £25 5s.); see Roxburghe Ballads, i:i–vi. 69. Collier’s estimates may be a little askew, but the Selden-Pepys collection was then notoriously difficult of access, and he was less familiar with Oxford’s libraries than with London’s. At the British Museum much of the broadside material already to hand derived from the Thomason, Luttrell, and Bagford collections, while in the Bodleian Library at Oxford the donations of Douce and the Rawlinsons supplied an equivalent core, alongside Anthony Wood’s ballads (already somewhat pilfered) at the Ashmolean Museum. Among ‘private collections in this kingdom’ Collier thought ‘there are only three which deserve any notice, and two of them belong to persons [i.e., William Miller and George Daniel] who are just as unwilling to let them see the light as the third [Collier himself, clearly] is ready upon all occasions to make whatever he possesses useful, by rendering it accessible’ (Athenaeum, 23 August 1845, p. 839). His failure to mention the Society of Antiquaries, whose unparalleled pre-Elizabethan material he knew very well, is curious.


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hackles, John invited ‘our readers . . . [to] inspect the contents of the volumes in the Library of the Museum’ as soon as they were catalogued and made generally available. He himself, offering a glimpse of Aladdin’s cave to the ‘curious’, clearly had had privileged access beforehand. For John’s first step had been to survey the three volumes, and copy out extracts, mostly to be employed in his Athenaeum articles of August 1845.70 Soon he was also transcribing texts toward a selection of Eight Ballads, from the Original Black-letter Copies, which he told Madden in February 1847 ‘I meant . . . as a continuation of my suspended series of B. L. tracts & poems’—that is, the reprints he had offered to his friends in 1844 and 1845. This little keepsake (which is one of John’s rarest separata)71 may never have been even privately distributed, for by mid-March 1846 the ballad project had taken a more formal turn. ‘I was printing a small B. L. vol. of the ballads’, he told Halliwell on 14 March, ‘when Longman’s having heard of it, made me the offer [to edit Roxburghe Ballads for them] which I did not feel at liberty to refuse.’ 72 All but two of the 1846 Eight Ballads were thus pre-empted, leaving only ‘The Praise of Our Country Barley-Brake’ (STC 20186, a unique 1634 Roxburghe broadside) and ‘Ballad to His Lady’, from Barnaby Googe’s Eglogs, Epitaphes and Sonnettes (1563), unemployed in the Longmans collection. The latter is unknown in broadside form, despite Collier’s claim in Eight Ballads that ‘the early broadsides have been scrupulously adhered to’, and similarly unconfirmed citations of broadside printings were to pepper all Collier’s subsequent work on old ballads. A Book of Roxburghe Ballads, a much larger selection of fi y-five specimens, saw John back in the world of commercial book-making, with yet another new publisher, who paid him £50 for his trouble. The venerable Longmans—now Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, of Paternoster Row—had for two years been marketing a series of gi -books with old-style type and design, quasiantique paper and binding, and deliberately archaic phraseology and spelling.73

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70. Collier’s MS ‘Notes of Ballads in three Volumes called the Roxburghe Collection’ are part of BL Add. MS 38,813, fols. 96–114, a gathering of miscellaneous lists and transcripts of ballads that may have formed lot 328 (‘a parcel’) in his 1884 sale. A number of full transcripts from the Roxburghe volumes are also present, including seven that served as printer’s copy for Eight Ballads, and two others overwritten with ‘improvements’ by Collier. 71. Sending a copy to Madden perhaps a year aer production, John declared that ‘only twenty-five copies are in existence’ (26 February 1847, BL Egerton MS 2844, fol. 214). He employed one or two as printer’s copy for six texts in Roxburghe Ballads (Folger MS N.a.63), and there were four—three of them lacking the first two leaves—in Collier’s posthumous sale. 72. LOA 24/49. 73. The first of these had been Hannah Mary Rathbone’s historical novel The Diary of Lady Willoughby (1844, Further Portions of the Diary appearing in 1848), for which Charles Whittingham the younger supplied both an appropriate fount (Caslon old face, with long ‘s’s and archaic ligatures) and ornamental headpieces and initials, printing the text within rule-frames—a for-


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Presumably its programme invited, or embraced, a selection of old-fashioned popular verse like Collier’s (‘ ‘‘unclapperclawed’’ ballads’, he described them to Halliwell on 12 March 1846, reporting his contract),74 and the result by Christmas 1846 was an elegant small quarto volume, offered in deceptively ‘Roxburghian’ morocco-backed boards or—should one desire it—‘in morocco in a style characteristic of the period . . . if transmitted to the Publishers for that purpose’ (see A67). It was liberally illustrated with re-workings of old woodcuts by F. W. Fairholt, F.S.A., the well-praised partner in Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere, and a staunch ally of Halliwell. Henry Crabb Robinson received his ‘valuable present’ of a copy of Roxburghe Ballads from John on New Year’s Eve, and thought it ‘a beautiful book to look at, and’—for once—‘a promising one also for perusal’ (HCR Diary, 31 December 1846). Collier’s choice of ballads for a popular anthology was a plausible one, ranging from early Elizabethan to Caroline, with one or two perhaps as late as 1685, and the majority unreprinted in modern times. Forty-five of his fi y-five texts were taken from broadsides in the Roxburghe collection, printed between the mid-1620s and about 1690, although earlier printings of most would have perished. The two earliest examples, however, ‘The Lamentacion of Freyndship’ (ca. 1566) and ‘Epitaph on Bishop Jewell’ (1571), derived yet again from the Heber-Britwell cache, presumably transcribed by Collier before William Miller acquired them; four other sixteenth-century ballads were represented as broadsides but almost certainly came from books, or in one instance from a manuscript. One further example (1586) was taken from a Society of Antiquaries unicum, but with its imprint misreported; and one Caroline piece, mistranscribed and apparently ‘improved’, must stem from a report of the original in the Pepysian Library. ‘Several of the most ancient and interesting ballads’, John wrote (p. ix), ‘have been derived from the editor’s portfolio’, but in fact only two clearly were, ‘The Lamentation of Englande’ (1584, on the Throckmorton Plot) and ‘The Common Cries of London’ (1662). His apparatus was modest—a twenty-two-page historical introduction, headnotes to each ballad, and eight pages of further notes at the end—and his scholarly sources, as cited, consist almost entirely of his own works and those of his immediate circle, with his own outnumbering the others’ by about two to one. Questionable testimony mostly concerns his copy-texts, such as the nowunknown broadside versions of ‘The Complaint of King James’ (repeated from Eight Ballads, almost certainly taken from Ulpian Fulwell’s The Flower of Fame,

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mula re-employed for the 1847 Roxburghe Ballads, among other projects for Longmans and other publishers. See Ing 1985, pp. 38–40 and 306–08. 74. LOA 24/24: the allusion is to the preface of Shakespeare’s unapplauded Troilus and Cressida (1609).


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1575), ‘A Larum Bell for London’ (from John Carr’s three-poem octavo of 1573, the Chalmers-Britwell Court copy having passed through Thomas Rodd’s hands in 1841), sixteenth-century versions of ‘The Soldier’s Repentance’ (known only from a unique printing, ca. 1630, in the Pepys Library) and ‘God Speed the Plough’ (known only in mid- to late seventeenth-century printings), and ‘The Song of the Caps’, which was said to be ‘one of the many [broadsides] ‘‘printed for John Trundle’’ but [with] no date’, and which probably derives instead from the 1656 drollery Sportive Wit.75 One misreported imprint—for ‘The Substance of All the Late Intended Treasons’ (1586), unique at the Society of Antiquaries— has resulted in an STC ghost (see vol. 3, note to STC 18426); and ‘our copy’ of ‘The Lamantacion of Freyndshyp’ with no printer’s name—which allowed Collier to describe the unique Heber-Britwell-Huntington broadside (doubtless his direct source) as of ‘another impression’—has never been seen again.76 Finally, one methodological claim put the history of the Roxburghe collection itself to a test: ‘the transcripts we have employed’, Collier declared, ‘were made before the originals were purchased for their last owner, but there is no instance in which our copies have not since been compared’.77 Now as Collier believed—rightly or wrongly—that the ballads were ‘bought for the late Mr. Bright’ at the Roxburghe sale, his alleged transcripts must have been made before 1812, or even before the death of the Duke of Roxburghe in 1804. Who can such a copyist have been? The only editor before Collier who is thought to have explored the collection was the auctioneer of the Roxburghe library, R. H. Evans (1778–1857), who revised his father’s Old Ballads in 1810 with additions ‘from public and private collections’;78 according to Collier (Athenaeum, 25 January 1845, p. 93) ‘Evans obtained permission to transcribe not a few [ballads], and these he inserted in the last edition of his Old Ballads’. Had Collier obtained Evans’s transcripts, and if so, why not say so? Or had he himself made some copies at an earlier time, when Bright was more forthcoming with his treasures? 79 Or is the whole story another (and strangely pointless) mystification?

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75. Trundle d. 1626; see QD A67.10. 76. See Livingston 1986, pp. 966–68, discussing Collier’s ‘false duplicate’ and pointing out that his division of the text into six-line stanzas has caused ‘some peculiar division in the thought’. 77. Roxburghe Ballads, p. ix. This statement, which implies a freer access by scholars to the collection before Bright owned it, was repeated by J. A. Herauld in his Athenaeum review of Collier’s book (16 January 1847, p. 63), but construing Collier’s ‘last owner’ (i.e., Bright) as ‘their present [keeper]’ (i.e., the British Museum). 78. A. B. Friedman (1961, p. 235) wrote that ‘apparently the younger Evans . . . had access to the Roxburghe ballads [when] owned by Major Pearson’: this is impossible, as Pearson died in 1781. Evans himself wrote (Old Ballads [1810], i:ix) that the collection ‘has been diligently examined, and I hope, very considerable advantage has been derived from it’. He probably took advantage of the hiatus between the first advertisement of the sale (1807) and its event (1812). 79. John Mitford rebuked Collier, mildly enough, for implying that all private collectors were


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There is also some textual mischief in A Book of Roxburghe Ballads, but not very much. Silent revisions for decency’s sake find ‘the whore is wondrous’ (‘Mock-beggars Hall’, line 23) rendered as ‘her score is wondrous’; ‘wenching’ for ‘whoring’ and ‘with a fox’ for ‘with a Pox’ in ‘Few Words are Best’ (lines 84, 127); ‘gaming’ for ‘whoring’ in ‘The Devil Driven Away by Women’ (line 20); and ‘care nothing for’t’ for ‘not care a fart’ in ‘The Devil and the Scold’ (line 24). These changes of course may have been made at Longmans’ behest, the conventional ‘[. . .]’ only calling attention to the unprintable, as Collier had told Halliwell during the Percy Society fracas six years earlier. Other misreadings may perhaps have been careless, but still others certainly reflect conscious ‘improvements’, logical or aesthetic: ‘mournful’ for ‘wofull’ in ‘The Soldier’s Repentance’ (line 15), to avoid a repetition in line 24; ‘wicked sonnes came in’ for ‘wicked sonnes, roaring’ in ‘The Devil Driven Away by Women’ (line 59), a quite unnecessary change; and ‘quoth the young man’ for ‘quoth the Widow’ in ‘The Widow of Watling Street’ (part 2, line 56), a plausible emendation. One ballad, however, appears to combine extensive imaginary text with imaginary bibliographical description: ‘Be Merry, Friends’, a cheerful song by John Heywood, was known only in 1846 from a contemporary manuscript, owned by Bright, which Collier had inspected before 1831, and which Halliwell subsequently published in his edition of Wit and Science (Shakespeare Society, 1848).80 Collier mentioned the manuscript source, but professed to have taken his text from a broadside printed by Thomas Millington in Cornhill ‘soon a er the year 1600’, which was ‘evidently a clever modernization’—do we imagine a smile?—and supplied ‘deficiencies’ in the manuscript version, ‘either from a better copy or by conjecture’. No such broadside has survived, nor any record of its registry by Millington (d. 1603), and the variations from the manuscript in Collier’s text sound modern indeed. The last two stanzas in manuscript (Halliwell’s transcript) read thus: Man hardly hath a rycher thyng Then honest myrth, the whyche well-spryng

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morally obliged to make their treasures available to would-be editors and publicists. Circumstances of ownership varied, Mitford wrote, in a largely appreciative review of Roxburghe Ballads in GM (March 1847, pp. 227–43). Not everyone was a patrician like Devonshire and Egerton: Bright, as a literary antiquary, being one, like Mitford and Dyce and even Collier, ‘who himself is the workman as well as the proprietor’. The applicant too must be considered, for ‘we know some to whom we would freely impart every thing we possess; we know some also to whom every thing we must refuse’. The ‘average value of editorial labours’ was hardly to be guaranteed, Mitford pointed out (unsparingly), ‘when such learned societies as the Shakspere and Percy have permitted some works to be edited under their auspices, by persons either incompetent to their work or too careless to execute it [properly]’. 80. The poem appears at pp. 104–06.


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Watryth thee rootes of rejoysyng, Feedyng the flowers of flooryshynge; Be mery, freendes! Bee meery in God, saynt Powle sayth playne Any yet, sayth he, be mery agayne; Synce whose advyce is not in vayne, The fect thereof to entertayne, Be mery, freendes! Collier’s version replaces these with five stanzas, which Halliwell trustingly reprinted (pp. 127–28), if only ‘to afford an example of Sly’s phrase, ‘‘let the world slide’’, in Taming of the Shrew, induction’: The loss of wealth is loss of dirt, As sages in all times assert: The happy man’s without a shirt, And never comes to maim or hurt, Be merry, friends! All seasons are to him the spring, In flowers bright and florishing, With birds upon the tree or wing, Who in their fashion always sing Be merry, friends! If that thy doublet has a hole in, Why, it can keep the less thy soule in, Which rangeth foorth beyond controulling, Whilst thou hast nought to do, but trolling Be merry, friends! Be merry in God, St. Paule saith plaine: Be merry in God, I say again, And let not his advice be vain; Or if thou wilt, thou cannot complain. Be merry, friends!

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Let the world slide, let the world go: A fig for care, and a fig for woe! If I cant pay, why, I can owe; And death makes equall the high and low. Be merry, friends!


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Collier’s immediately post-Shakespeare years witnessed no slackening in literary productivity—if anything, a more voluminous output than ever. In 1845–46, still a Morning Chronicle full-timer, he saw from the press Henslowe’s Diary, Memoirs of Actors, one volume of the Shakespeare Society’s Papers, Roxburghe Ballads, three privately printed booklets, and a Shakespeare Society reprint of Barnaby Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession (as Eight Novels Employed by English Dramatic Poets of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 1846). The last, involving only an eleven-page introduction, required no major effort, and Collier’s name did not appear in it; the transcript of the unique Bodleian first edition had in fact been procured in 1843 by Halliwell, whom John then asked (for reasons undeclared, and which he called ‘not important’) ‘not [to] mention in the Bodleian that you are doing it for the Shakespeare Society unless you see reason’.81 Periodical essays of 1845–46 were all for Charles Wentworth Dilke’s Athenaeum, comprising one review (of S. R. Maitland’s catalogue of printed books before 1600 at Lambeth Palace), two notes supplementary to Memoirs of Actors, and the five articles on the Bright library and the Roxburghe Ballads. In 1847, an off year by comparison (one more volume of Shakespeare Society Papers), he began an eight-year stint of intensive reviewing for the Athenaeum—coinciding with the new editorial presence of T. K. Hervey—and published by year-end eight anonymous notices of antiquarian works (Camden and Chetham Society publications, John Mathew Gutch’s Robin Hood, and a specimen of historical fiction passed off as a seventeenth-century tract, of which he professed not to ‘see the point’). One condescending review may have helped to provoke, fourteen years later, a Byzantine revenge: James Crossley, editor of The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington (Chetham Society, 1847), had ‘elaborately and patiently’ edited his material, Collier declared, but it was ‘hardly worth the pains bestowed upon it’, and ‘a duller book we have rarely taken the trouble to cut open’.82 But the most interesting notice, in retrospect, was that of ‘The New Cromwell Letters’, published by Thomas Carlyle in Fraser’s for December 1847, and already the subject of controversy (8 January 1848). We now know that all thirtyfive of them—letters from Oliver Cromwell to an imaginary ‘Samuel Squire’,

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81. JPC to JOH, 12 August 1843, LOA 23/4. Collier also reported, surely in good faith, a fragment in the possession of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe of Edinburgh; but this was in fact part of a 1583 reprint, now at Folger. 82. Athenaeum, 13 March 1849, p. 282. A True and Faithful Relation of a Worthy Discourse between Colonel John Hampton and Colonel Oliver Cromwell, supposedly by William Spurstowe, the ‘Smectymnuan’, is a mock-Commonwealth tract ‘reprinted’ by Whittingham for Chapman and Hall on deliberately stained paper, with archaic spelling that Collier ridiculed. He assumed that the pseudonymous author (George Grenville, Baron Nugent) ‘was above any species of imposition’, but questioned the purpose of the whole project.


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eked out with extracts from a Civil War diary—were fabrications by William Squire of Norwich and Great Yarmouth, a hoaxing antiquary who had approached Carlyle shortly a er the publication of his Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches; but until the mid-1880s their authenticity was still a matter of debate.83 Collier, whom we might think forearmed by personal experience, began by saying that ‘in the main we believe them to be genuine’—a conviction formed ‘a er reading them again and again’—but censured Carlyle’s own uncritical acceptance of a strange tale of incinerated originals and old Squire family feuds, and his inaction when first made aware of the cache. For Carlyle had let months pass without visiting his informant, and had never yet met him face to face: the literary bloodhound in Collier was appalled at such lethargy. ‘There are railways . . . and the journey would have occupied only a few hours . . . yet [Carlyle] rests secure and quiet at home, and waits, until, all of a sudden and completely by surprise, the post brings him ‘‘a heavy packet’’ [Carlyle’s words in Fraser’s] containing copies’. Yet ‘there is no forgery, we feel sure, in the Letters—notwithstanding some suspicious readings, which we believe to be resolvable into errors of transcription’; but as to the tale of destroyed originals, ‘our own conviction [is] that not one of them has had this fate’, and that this ‘is very like an experiment by their owner to excite additional curiosity . . . and to enhance their pecuniary value when herea er they shall be brought to the hammer’. What Carlyle himself thought of this mixed notice—he continued to defend the Squire material, with the collusion of John Forster in an anonymous Examiner review of it, and incorporated it all into the third edition of Letters and Speeches—is unclear, though John’s poke at his ‘supineness’ cannot have been welcome. He received ‘that clipping from the Athenaeum’ on 13 January from George Lillie Craik, who reassured him that ‘if [the Squire letters] be a forgery, they are out of sight the most daring and extraordinary on record’.84 Three of his four societies kept John busy as well. He continued to serve as director and principal workhorse of the Shakespeare Society, and while he caught up with some of their old projects (like the Riche Eight Novels, on the books since April 1843), others remained outstanding, including ‘A Volume of Ballads upon which Old Plays were founded, or which were founded upon Old

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83. The affair of the Squire fabrications has been curiously so-pedalled by Carlyle’s biographers, as K. J. Fielding pointed out in 1982, but the entire episode—in which Edward FitzGerald figured as Carlyle’s emissary in Suffolk, and the lynx-eyed William Aldis Wright obstinately defended the spuria—was meticulously chronicled by Clyde Ryals in 1987. Nearly forty years on, Wright could make the same mistake in underestimating Squire as many others had made with Collier: ‘the writer was quite incapable of executing such a piece of literary forgery, even if he had a motive for doing so’ (Academy, 21 March 1885, p. 206). 84. Carlyle, Collected Letters, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals and Kenneth J. Fielding (1995), xxii:203 and n.


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Plays’.85 Supposed, a er 1845, to contain ballads ‘in the Roxburghe Collection now deposited in the British Museum’, it may have seemed a less promising idea a er the appearance of Roxburghe Ballads, although the Longmans volume involved little or nothing in the way of play-related material. What Roxburghe Ballads probably did render superfluous, however, was a project announced by the Percy Society in May 1847, ‘A Selection from the Roxburghe Ballads now in the British Museum’, to be edited by J. H. Dixon. For the loss of the latter Collier can have had few regrets, but neither society volume ever materialized. Another abortive plan occupied Collier’s attention in 1844–46, an edition for the Shakespeare Society of the York Mystery Plays, of which B. H. Bright, once again, had possessed the sole manuscript. Sir Frederic Madden, who had first encountered it at the time of the Strawberry Hill sale (April 1842, when Rodd bought it for Bright for £220 10s.), now seriously coveted the volume for the British Museum, but worried that Museum funds would not suffice, and that at the Bright manuscript sale (18 June 1844) ‘it may be purchased by a second Mr Bright, and shut up from the public’ (Madden Diary, 24 April 1844). Halliwell, presumptuously perhaps, wrote to the Secretary of State, Sir James Graham, recommending its purchase for the nation, and citing Madden, Ellis, and Markland, as well as Collier and Wright, as witnesses to its importance; but Madden himself sought the direct aid of the Shakespeare Society. This Collier attempted, somewhat half-heartedly, to provide—although the society was ‘not rich enough’ to compete on its own, and if they and the Museum each put up £100, ‘to whom is the M.S. a erwards to belong?’ At the June meeting a day later his fears were confirmed: no one present wished to contribute, and he could only hope that if the Museum acquired it, Madden would edit the York cycle for the Shakespeare Society.86 On the eve of the sale, however, Madden struck a bargain with the bookseller Thomas Rodd, who agreed to bid £200 on his own (the reserved price being £150) and pay Madden £100 to edit the manuscript for him; Rodd would then cede it to the Museum for not more than £180, retaining ‘the benefit and merit of the publication’, and the Shakespeare Society would play no part in the affair. The last consequence did not displease Madden, for ‘Mr Halliwell’, whom he loathed, ‘will be kept in the background’ (Diary, 18 June 1844). In the event, although Rodd stretched his mark to £230 and Madden coura-

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85. This was first mooted in 1842–44 as ‘to be edited by W. D. Cooper’; in 1845 Cooper’s name disappeared, and for one year (1846) W. J. Thoms was indicated as editor, aer which (1847–49) Collier was named. Cooper appeared again in the last prospectuses of 1850–51. 86. JPC to Madden, 10 and 11 June 1844, BL Egerton MS 2843, fols. 313–14 and 316–17. The society had already published Halliwell’s edition of the Coventry plays, and the first volume of Wright’s Chester plays. It is not clear that Madden ever actually offered his services to the society.


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geously continued, counting upon his own editor’s fee, to £300, the pair were outbid by Thomas Thorpe, ‘on commission’, at £305. Thorpe’s principal went unnamed, but Madden ‘trust[ed] that the owner will not lock it up, in imitation of Mr Bright’ (Diary, 18 June 1844). Here again Madden and Collier were in for a disappointment: the Rev. Thomas Russell, a shadowy collector no more forthcoming than his predecessor, was apparently the 1844 purchaser,87 and in 1847 he sold it on (for £350, Madden reported) to the truly aloof Earl of Ashburnham—a collector who once dismissed the Historical Manuscripts Commission as ‘a society of ruffians who tamper with title-deeds’.88 While Madden confined his mortification to his diary, Collier chose print, and pilloried the buyer at least twice.89 ‘We are not at all surprised that the present owner (who is well known, although his name was not permitted to transpire at the sale) should be resolved to pursue a similar course [to Bright’s]’, he wrote in the Athenaeum for 1 February 1845; ‘This is a species of literary dog-in-the-mangerism that cannot be too much discouraged’. In Roxburghe Ballads he further lamented that ‘this series of inedited Scriptural Dramas has devolved into the hands of some party who has again plunged it into darkness’, and looked forward to its resurfacing by whatever means would suffice (‘Time may yet stand our friend’). These were the extreme sentiments that John Mitford sought to moderate in his Gentleman’s Magazine review—perhaps out of sympathy for a fellow collector, no matter how selfish: ‘We do not know who possesses the York Miracle Plays: from his outbidding the British Museum it is clear he sets a high value upon them, and may probably have his own views as to their future publication.’ In fact that would be four decades away. To the Camden Society’s first Miscellany (1847) John contributed a short piece, an edition of his own 1485 ‘Bull of Pope Innocent VII’, and then favourably noticed the entire volume for the Athenaeum.90 He had attended monthly council meetings religiously since the inception of the society in 1838, a performance recognized in the minutes of 8 May 1845, which record his election as treasurer, succeeding John Bruce. Bruce had quitted London, and the post—un-

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87. On Russell and the whole affair, see Cawley 1980. 88. Augustus Hare, The Story of My Life (1900), vi:75, quoted in Munby 1972, p. 121. The York Plays remained unpublished until aer the death of the fourth Earl in 1878, and the Museum finally acquired the MS in the Ashburnham sale of 1899, for just £121. This time its bid, through Quaritch, was a spirited £500, but its 1885 publication in full, and perhaps an understanding with potential rivals like J. Pierpont Morgan, kept the price modest. 89. Collier was probably also responsible, Madden thought, for the long paragraph in the Morning Chronicle praising the Museum for bidding so strongly in the person of Madden himself; Diary, 19 June 1844. 90. He presented the folio broadside itself (STC 14096, which he claimed to have ‘met with . . . as the fly-leaf of an old book’) to the Society of Antiquaries in 1852.


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like most society offices—offered the handsome stipend of fi y guineas a year, no doubt welcome in Victoria Road. For the Society of Antiquaries John also laboured, unpaid, joining its council in April 1845 and becoming treasurer two years later. His even temper and candour, in correspondence and personal conduct—if not always in print—ensured that such organizations found in Collier a valuable leader or cog, whichever he chose to be. Usually, when trouble arose— as it must among quirky, individualistic, and competitive antiquaries—John’s response had been calming, or at least uninflamming; and so it remained in the most sensational flap of the 1840s, involving his friend and associate James Orchard Halliwell. The episode has been frequently recounted, and may be summarized briefly.

Halliwell, Trinity College, and the British Museum In August 1840 Sir Frederic Madden had purchased of Thomas Rodd thirtythree manuscripts from the collection of young Halliwell, who had run up debts while at Cambridge and sold his first ‘library’, principally scientific, at Sotheby’s in June. The book prices were disappointing, and a follow-up sale of 162 lots of scientific manuscripts, some two dozen of them medieval, was abandoned when (as Rodd informed Madden) no bidders turned up. In July Halliwell offered his manuscripts en bloc to the Museum, which Madden declined at his price, but when Rodd next took them over Madden was able to choose those he wished at his own figures, £35 12s. for the lot. In December he paid Rodd £16 16s. for another Halliwell manuscript, again earlier refused when offered by Halliwell directly. Madden of course already distrusted and disliked the precocious vendor—‘a puerile blockhead’, he considered him by February 1841—and no doubt took pleasure in cheapening his wares. Three years passed, and Madden began to suspect that one Halliwell manuscript, the De omni scientia artis pingendi of Theophilus (or Rugerus), was identical with what R. E. Raspe had edited in 1781 as ‘e codice manuscripto collegii Trinitatis Cantabrig.’ By October 1844 he had determined that this was the case, and that TCC MS R.15.15 had been noted as missing in the most recent ‘call-over’, taken in March or April 1838. Halliwell had studied at Trinity from November 1837 to 4 April 1838, before transferring to Jesus College, and the master of Trinity, William Whewell, now sent Madden a ‘list of seventeen volumes of manuscripts missing from Trinity College Library, May 1838’.91 At least five more Halliwell manuscripts in the British Museum were found to correspond

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91. Winstanley 1948, p. 256; unless another source is specified, further quotations in the next two paragraphs are taken from Winstanley’s article.


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with these absentees, as did two or three others still in Rodd’s hands; more recent counts vary, for some of the original volumes were broken up and rearranged, but at least eleven manuscripts seemed to have passed from Trinity College to J. O. Halliwell without benefit of formal release. Most of the more important ones have never gone back. As early as February 1844 Madden had sought, through the antiquary Albert Way, to obtain from Halliwell a statement on the source of the Theophilus, which he later felt ‘perfectly certain’ was false; but neither the Museum nor the college (nor Rodd) took further action until 29 January 1845, when Sir Henry Ellis wrote to Halliwell, repeating Madden’s questions about the immediate provenance of the manuscripts—courteously, and without any implied accusation, yet suggesting that until the matter was thoroughly investigated ‘you may, perhaps, think it proper to abstain from frequenting our Reading Rooms or consulting our collections’. Halliwell responded at once, wrote to Whewell, and with his friends Wright and Pettigrew visited the Museum, where he repeated his account of purchases from one George Denley, a deceased London bookseller. Madden, a habitué of Denley’s second-hand shop, thought that the old man ‘could never have possessed [such manuscripts] without my knowing it’, although this claim would later be warmly disputed. The Museum trustees endorsed Ellis’s Reading Room ban, however, and later agreed in principle to cooperate with Trinity College in a suit to reclaim one of the volumes, as a sort of test case in court; criminal prosecution of the suspected thief seemed less likely. With the passage of months tempers rose, especially Halliwell’s, who took his cause to the press, and published a private Statement in his defence in August 1845.92 The case took a curiously political turn in the newspapers when The Times seized the opportunity to condemn Sir Robert Peel’s tottering government for acquiescing in the Museum’s judgement without trial (Peel himself had long been a Museum trustee),93 and Halliwell’s friends kept the pot bubbling well into mid-1846, with a campaign of letters to The Times and the Literary Gazette. Faced with negative publicity, with what its solicitors regarded as no provable case against Halliwell himself, and a good chance of counter-action for slander, the Museum hedged on its arrangements with Trinity College, and the college had no choice but to drop the whole matter. The trial, scheduled to begin on 23 June 1846, was rescheduled for 25 June and then abandoned, and in early July Halliwell’s readership privileges at the British Museum were restored.94 92. Statement in Answer to Reports Which Have Been Spread Abroad against Mr. James Orchard Halliwell (24 pp.). 93. See W. H. Bond 1963. 94. Despite the dissolution of the case in law, Halliwell’s personal responsibility for the Trinity College thes, or at least for disguising or misrepresenting the source of his manuscripts, is rarely questioned today.


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Through nearly eighteen months of controversy and gossip, the Trinity College affair tried the loyalties of Halliwell’s associates in all the learned and bookpublishing societies. Madden, unsurprisingly, quit the Percy Society, ‘on account of the scandalous conduct of the Council, Messrs. Wright, Pettigrew & Co. in electing Mr. Halliwell a member, in spite of the stigma which rests on him’ (Diary, 2 June 1845). At the Shakespeare Society, Thomas Wright threatened to resign from the council if Halliwell was not retained, telling Collier melodramatically that ‘I am as much convinced of Halliwell’s entire innocence as I am of my own existence’.95 This stand must reflect some movement afoot, but Halliwell was never formally challenged by any organization or club on the Trinity College account.96 Collier’s personal reaction to the brouhaha is nowhere recorded, although Halliwell in July 1846 asked him to ensure that ‘the fact of my readmission’ to the British Museum be widely publicized—implying that Collier had already been willing and able to help.97 Their relationship in the late 1840s remained close, though bumpy; but in the early 1850s accumulating professional tensions led John to re-estimate his friendship, and the character of his junior as well. That turnabout, when it came, was unattractive, if understandable. ‘I never dined at Halliwell’s’, he told Cunningham early in 1851, ‘for . . . I was always shy of him and his. Beware of him: he is slippery and insincere. I know him, and so does [William] Chappell, who speaks even worse of him than I think.’ 98 A week earlier he had put Devonshire ‘upon your guard’ about an application by Halliwell to have a facsimile made of the Duke’s 1603 Hamlet: ‘He is too fond of doing things underhandedly, and then congratulating himself on the success of his cunning.’ 99 In 1853, more ignobly, Collier exchanged private slurs on Halliwell with Sir Thomas Phillipps over what Phillipps called ‘this catchpenny folio Shakespeare of 20 Vols!!!’ ‘I know nothing & care nothing about it’, Collier replied, adding that ‘Mr. Halliwell has behaved very ill to me’, and apparently leaving uncontradicted Phillipps’s belief that Collier had ‘nothing to do’ with his son-in-law.100 But the patriarch of Shakespeare studies soon resumed 95. Wright to JPC, 7 April 1845, FF MS 348. 96. Sir Thomas Phillipps tried as late as 1858 to block his son-in-law’s honorary appointment to the Royal Society of Literature (‘the person who has never cleared himself from the suspicion of having stolen MSS from Trinity College’), but instead was himself obliged to resign, as he also did in 1853, for the same reason, from the Cambridge Antiquarian Society (Munby, Phillipps Studies, ii:79–80). Trinity College itself denied Halliwell access to the Capell collection in 1861 (diary of Henrietta Halliwell, EUL H.-P. Coll. 327-30, 24 February; quoted in Spevack 1999, pp. 140–41). 97. JOH to JPC, 10 July 1846, Folger MS Y.d.6 (135). On Collier’s ‘studied distancing of himself from the [Trinity College] affair’, see Spevack 1996a, pp. 140–41. 98. JPC to Cunningham, 8 February 1851, Harmsen collection. 99. JPC to Devonshire, 31 January 1851, Chatsworth, sixth Duke of Devonshire’s Correspondence, 2d ser., 17.10; misdated by Ganzel (p. 165) to 1845. 100. Phillipps to JPC, 23 November and 13 December 1853 (dras), and JPC to Phillipps,


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familiarity with the pretender, and Halliwell’s discreet silence, in print, over the forgery and fabrication controversy of 1859–61 is remarkable, even concerning those anomalies which he had been among the first to expose. Whatever suspicions of Collier Halliwell entertained in 1845 we shall probably never know; but if Collier reserved his own about Halliwell and Trinity College, he cannot but have appreciated the kinship in guilt these suggested. Like Collier, Halliwell had cause now to keep certain acts undiscussed, certain secrets forever unshared. And so Halliwell did a er 1846, treating the episode with resolute silence, like Collier’s upon the Perkins Folio dispute: he is said never even to have mentioned it to his four daughters or to his second wife, Mary Rice (m. June 1879), none of whom ‘had heard aught of the affair’ until the publication of Sidney Lee’s DNB biography of Halliwell in 1890.101 Seven years earlier Collier’s heirs had been less in the dark about old allegations and scandals, but they worried about what papers, among John’s surviving professional Nachlass, to make public through a saleroom dispersal. An old friend, consulted by Collier’s daughter Emma Letitia, advised them firmly to sequester the correspondence and ‘private memoranda’—who other than James Orchard Halliwell?—and so they did.102 Another delicate relationship improved temporarily in mid-1846. John had effectively suppressed his Letter to Dyce of early 1845, but gave no early sign of forgiving his old ally for Remarks on Collier’s and Knight’s Editions of Shakespeare: a er cutting him dead at Rodd’s shop he must have encountered him here and there, certainly at a private performance of Every Man in His Humour on 20 September 1845, with Dickens in the role of Bobadil. ‘Every body was there’, Dyce reported to Mitford, including Collier, accompanying the Duke of Devonshire, but if words were exchanged Dyce did not say.103 By January 1846 John Forster had begun peace-brokering efforts: he invited Collier and Dyce to dine with him, and summoned Peter Cunningham ‘to outrage any existing arrangement you may have, & join them’, if the party came off as planned.104 It did not, evidently, but Forster tried Collier again on 1 May, promising that Dyce would be present, ‘knowing (or rather hoping) that you are coming’. This time

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26 November 1853, Bod. MSS Phillipps-Robinson.d.157, fols. 19v and 22–23. In this instance Halliwell’s ‘ill’ behaviour was his public questioning of the Bridgewater documents. 101. See John Cordy Jeaffreson, A Book of Recollections (1894), ii:192. 102. Correspondence of E. L. Collier and Halliwell, 16 October–14 December 1883 (LOA 261, fol. 31; LOA 276, fols. 49 and 53; LOA 278, fols. 23–25; and LOA 280, fols. 11–12). 103. Dyce to Mitford, letter datable to 21 September 1845, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.102 (92). Collier told Forster on 3 May 1846 that ‘I not infrequently spoke to [Dyce]’ aer the publication of his Remarks. 104. Forster to Cunningham, 30 January 1846, John Forster Correspondence, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.


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Collier was (he said) otherwise engaged, but he accepted the gesture in principle, although he insisted upon ‘clarifying’ his position: ‘The Rev Mr Dyce is a man of scholarship and accomplishments’, he told Forster, ‘an unexceptionable associate. I found him so for seventeen years. I can have no objection to meet him at your table . . . . He is the person to object to meeting me.’ John then rehearsed his version of their falling-out, asserting that he ‘never had a word of difference with [Dyce] in my life & the cause of his animosity I cannot understand’; also that he had ‘never read one line’ of Dyce’s Remarks, and ‘never ‘‘took it in dudgeon’’’. It was Dyce who ‘chose to begin attacking me, and he has chosen to go on attacking me . . . . I am not his enemy: he is mine’, and so forth.105 Forster persisted, persuading Cunningham that Dyce was ‘particularly desirous of re-acquiring [Collier’s] friendship’, intelligence that Cunningham passed on to John with his own plea for reconciliation.106 To this two-pronged appeal John responded at last, with a letter directly to Dyce. We do not know its text, but Forster told Collier that ‘your letter affected him deeply’, and Collier could hardly expect a more gracious capitulation than Dyce offered in reply: ‘Nothing, for many a day, has given me one tenth part of the pleasure that your letter did’, the younger man wrote. ‘Believe me that I am truly anxious that what has passed should be eternally forgotten, but I cannot let the subject be dismissed without most fully and directly acknowledging,—that I was the offending party: you, indeed, mistook (as it was perhaps only natural that you should) my feelings towards you, but you still were the injured person’.107 Visits resumed, and Collier probably toned down some remarks in Memoirs of Actors, ‘not written under the present [reconciled] circumstances’, while Dyce found occasion to thank John for assistance, in the preface and biographical introduction to his Beaumont and Fletcher.108 Among other old friends Robinson remained constant, sharing Collier’s 1844–45 indignation toward Dyce, applauding the progress of his children, and rejoicing in the prospects of an unexpected inheritance—‘for the family are estimable . . . and he is too liberal and literary to know how to raise money’ (HCR Diary, 1 February 1846). Barron Field, miffed with John at the end, died in April 1846, and according to Robinson, Thomas Amyot—long the most judicious and graceful of John’s mentors, now entering his seventies—was suffering an embar-

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105. Forster to JPC, 1 May 1846; and JPC to Forster, 3 May 1846, Folger MSS Y.d.341 (68a–b). 106. Cunningham to JPC, 11 June 1846, Folger MS Y.d.341 (32). 107. Undated letter from Dyce to JPC, Folger MS Y.d.341 (53). 108. Forster yet again invited both to a dinner in June, and Collier found Dyce away from home in July, when dining was out of the question at present, but tea was possible on the next Sunday; Forster to JPC, 29 June 1846, Folger MS Y.d.341 (69); and JPC to Dyce, 28 July 1846, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (23).


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rassing ‘decline in his faculties’. He was drunk, it was whispered, at a meeting of the Antiquaries Club, and ‘was not permitted to come’ to a subsequent dinner on 9 December 1845. ‘I saw him’, he added, ‘and his manner of saying he should not be there confirmed this report’ (Diary, 9 December). By August 1846 Robinson found his mind ‘sadly declined’, and ‘the subject of remark to all his friends’ (Diary, 22 August). Amyot served on, however, in various capacities, for the societies he had supported, resigning as vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries only in May 1848, when Robinson spoke on their long friendship, and ‘Collier a erwards gave him as a toast, which Hunter said was de trop’.109 Collier’s genuine loyalty to his early advocate, patron, and book-speculating backer was underlined by the dedication of Roxburghe Ballads to someone (for once) other than Ellesmere or Devonshire: ‘Thomas Amyot, Esq. F.R.S. Treas. S.A., in Testimony of long Friendship and sincere Esteem’. At home, the inheritance prospects at which Robinson ‘rejoiced’ turned out disappointing. John Pycro , Mary Louisa’s cousin who had played chess with John until John threw up the game, and who resided with the other Pycro s at Putney, ‘died less affluent that the Colliers supposed . . . and has shared some £4000 or £5000 among [the Pycro s] and the Colliers’ (HCR Diary, 14 November 1846). His namesake, the responsible elder Collier son, kept his nose to the grindstone at the Treasury, and in July 1846 became private secretary to Charles E. (later Sir Charles) Trevelyan, the assistant secretary, whom Robinson considered ‘a rising man’ (Diary, 1 November 1851). The younger son, William Proctor, an underachiever by Collier standards, had followed his brother into the Stamp Office, entered the Legacy Duty Office of the Inland Revenue in 1843, and on 14 October 1847 married Harriett Elizabeth Smith, the daughter of a London turner, at St. John’s, Smith Square. Robinson in 1851 contrasted the two sons with typical acerbity: John Pycro , he reported, ‘is in a fair way to rise in the world’, while luckless William ‘has managed ill and with scarcely any income beyond what would maintain a bachelor has made a foolish marriage and already has three young children!!!’ 110 William eventually fathered at least twelve children—all of them alive in 1876, when the eldest was twenty-eight 111—followed his Legacy Duty employment to Dublin in 1873, and died intestate in Sussex in 1891, with an estate valued at £367 18s. His widow and administratrix can have been no weak vessel, despite Robinson’s slur: she surpassed even her father-inlaw in longevity, dying in June 1916 at the age of ninety-six.

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109. HCR Diary, 2 May 1848. Amyot was director of the Camden Society from April 1845 until his death (28 September 1850). 110. Letter to Thomas Robinson, 1 November 1851, HCR Correspondence. 111. JPC Diary, 31 July 1876.


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John’s labours at the Chronicle continued, unsung and ill-paid, his position perhaps now less than secure. Easthope, who in 1843 had sacked wise old John Black as editor and replaced him with his own son-in-law Andrew Doyle, saw the influence of his paper—long so devoted to Palmerston’s muscular foreign policy that it seemed Palmerston’s mouthpiece—decline, even under the new Whig administration of Lord John Russell. Overmatched by the establishmentarian Times, and challenged in 1846 by the new Daily News, its circulation suffered as well; and when a desperate price-cut in 1847 turned a marginally profitable enterprise into a losing one, the disillusioned proprietor sold out to a consortium of highminded Peelites, who reversed its political commitment and presided over its final decline.112 The transfer was effected in February 1848, but the last turbulent years of Easthope’s regime can hardly have inspired the confidence of a passed-over sub-editor. John had sought alternative positions for more than a decade, usually through the Duke of Devonshire, whose company he was more than usually keeping in 1845: this principally because of the ducal project of a Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick, privately issued late in that year. In April Devonshire suffered an eye inflammation, following which Collier was (he told Halliwell) ‘so employed by him that I hardly know how matters go elsewhere’; in July he visited Chatsworth alone, where he scanned the Duke’s journals for 1817, 1825, and 1844 toward the Handbook—no easy task, given Devonshire’s penmanship—and ventured to point out ‘a fault in your Grace’s style of composition . . . an aversion to adverbs’.113 In October he forwarded proofs of a section, marked up ‘as usual with some queries and suggestions of mine’; later he offered help on choosing illustrations (‘I do not think your Grace ever detected me vaunting my accomplishments, but I profess myself a judge of water-colour drawings’), and dwelt more on printing-house matters, again and again praising the Duke’s unremarkable text.114 The volume was at last printed in mid-1845 by Frederic Shoberl Jr—surely Collier’s choice—from a transcript entirely in Collier’s legible hand.115 Devonshire lavished praise upon John’s ‘un-

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112. See Bourne 1887, ii:151–58 and 242; and Bostick 1979, citing the evidence of the reporter Charles Mackay in his Forty Years’ Recollections (1877), ii:149–50. 113. JPC to JOH, 6 April 1845, LOA 23/18; JPC to Devonshire, 6 August 1845, Chatsworth, sixth Duke of Devonshire’s Correspondence, 2d ser., 17.4. John ‘ran the risk of marking several places where this error was committed’, but the one example he submitted (‘the sun shone bright’, instead of ‘brightly’) is hardly an ‘error’. Perhaps the pedantic tone and the heavy-handed familiarity of Collier’s letter of 11 November helped to inspire the Duke’s little joke in December. 114. Letters of 18 and 20 October and 11 November, Chatsworth, Devonshire Correspondence, 2d ser., 17.5–7. The book is in fact unillustrated. 115. A volume now at Chatsworth, containing the transcript together with proofs corrected by both Collier and Devonshire, a dozen letters from Devonshire to Collier, and some other material, was probably assembled and bound up by Collier for the Duke’s keeping. On a leaf pasted to the front inner cover Collier wrote: ‘This book is the authorship [sic] of the Duke of Devon-


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wearied diligence and unexampled knowledge’ in overseeing the Kemble collection, which since its transfer to London ‘has been of real use to several men of letters, and especially . . . has assisted in the completion of the best and most satisfactory edition of Shakespeare that exists’ (p. 72). He also credited ‘my intelligent friend and librarian, Mr. J. Payne Collier’ with selecting most of the inscriptions on the medallions in the refurbished library at Chatsworth (Spenser on Chaucer, Marvell on Milton, etc.), and even thanked him (p. 109) for obtaining ‘a large box full of young [rhododendrons] from his friend [Barron Field] the Chief Justice of New South Wales at Sydney’. But such graceful lip-service may not have entirely sufficed, and throughout most of the 1845 Collier-Devonshire correspondence a strain of unctuousness, extravagant gratitude, and forced jocularity—extreme even for John with ‘his Duke’—hints at a particular misunderstanding. This became clear in December, when a er a brief but severe bout of fever, Collier apologized for his curiosity ‘about your Grace’s new property’, promised that ‘another question . . . shall never pass my lips’ in the future, but confessed: ‘I was disappointed (and the disappointment has troubled me during my illness) not only not to be consulted at all, but to have the matter studiously kept from my view—a matter too, on which, either I am a fool, or I must be peculiarly qualified to give an opinion.’ What Collier had mistakenly supposed—we learn from the Duke’s nearly apologetic reply—was that Devonshire had acquired, or was about to acquire, the proprietorship of a new London newspaper, the Daily News, which began publication on 21 January 1846 with Charles Dickens as editor.116 ‘I am now going to give in, and acknowledge myself beat’, wrote the Duke on 17 December, in a letter that Collier himself may have destroyed.117 ‘Your illness, and the sort of illusion you have worked up about my proprietorship . . . have conquered me. Know then that I have nothing on earth to do with the new newspaper’, save that Joseph Paxton (one of projectors) had asked Devonshire ‘with several friends’ for suggestions in naming it, and that a ‘mercantile business card on the chimney’ had given John the wrong idea. ‘Now you want to know why I did not tell this at once? It was chiefly out of fun, and because you were so very curious & fussy on the subject (as nobody likes to be catechized) and on finding you annoyed I strike at once. But of this be assured’, he concluded—perhaps not altogether undoing the humiliation—‘that if there had been a literary concern

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shire. He wrote the original M.S. & I copied it, and made very few, and those trifling changes: the Duke subsequently read over and corrected the whole.’ 116. It was co-founded by Joseph Paxton: see Bourne 1887, ii:140 ff. 117. It is known from a dra at Chatsworth (Devonshire Correspondence, 2d ser., 17.9), but the original does not survive among those ducal letters that Collier and his descendants carefully preserved.


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in which I took a personal interest, you are the only person to whom I should have applied to transact with it.’ Dickens’s News in fact hired away several of Easthope’s reporters, including Thomas Hodgskin as his second sub-editor,118 but not John: how different might Collier’s late journalistic career have been under Dickens? We never will know, but the possibility of escape from the Chronicle inspired one more foray. Two weeks a er Devonshire undeceived him, he approached John Walter II, whose Times he had le twenty-three years before; in this he was encouraged by Robinson’s report that the hereditary proprietor, now nearly seventy and unwell, had expressed himself ‘kindly’ towards his old employee. Collier recalled his years on The Times with warmth, blamed his dismissal on Barnes (‘now no more’) and Alsager (‘then guided by Mr Barnes’), and effectively asked for another late chance. Easthope, he explained, ‘dislikes me’, and although ‘I will not treat him and his paper unhandsomely’ by resigning abruptly with Parliament sitting, he felt he could do just that in due course, ‘on the ground of want of good faith’—for Easthope had recently cut back his salary, a er raising it slightly during the preceding session. He had been faithful to the Chronicle and to Sir John, ‘but I could not avoid rejoicing that his prosperity did not impede yours’, and ‘I should be most happy to do my utmost to contribute to the farther success of a concern, the triumphant progress of which I have always watched with satisfaction’.119 ‘Excuse this rigmarole . . . as it requires no answer’, John concluded, and Walter apparently took him at his word. John wrote again in mid-April, repeating his tale about Barnes’s personal malice, and stressing that his own case was not desperate (he sought only Walter’s good opinion, and remained ‘in want of no employment, because where I am I have my own terms’), but by 31 August all his cards were on the table: ‘I have received from the Proprietor of ‘‘the Morning Chronicle’’ a notice which puts me quite at liberty to make a new engagement, & I avail myself of it to make you an offer of my services in any department in which you may think me most qualified.’ 120 Conditions at The Times were far from welcoming, however, in mid-1846. A er a record annual profit in 1845, figures for the half-year were so far down that the ailing Walter investigated the books, and found them improperly kept. Blame settled upon the treasurer, William Delane, and the head of his ‘City department’, Thomas Alsager, who were asked to resign, Alsager terminating

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118. See Dickens, Letters, iv:444–45, 1 December 1845 to Paxton and 2 December 1845 to Hodgskin, the first crowing that Hodgskin’s defection ‘is likely to drive Easthope (when he knows it) raving mad’. 119. JPC to Walter, 4 January 1846, Walter Papers 292, TNL Archive. 120. JPC to Walter, 15 April and 31 August 1848, Walter Papers 297 and 299.


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thirty-five years with the paper in September 1846.121 Walter’s son John Walter III was brought in as joint manager and manager-designate upon the expected death of his father, whose lingering illness had now been diagnosed as throat cancer. In the midst of all these distractions, Collier’s diffident tenders and final hat-in-hand application met no taker. Walter II excused himself with reference to ‘the subsisting understanding between the Proprietors of Newspapers’ against poaching staff, and Collier, ‘both grieved and disappointed at the result’, admitted that ‘I ought to have come to you perfectly unshackled’ and ‘shall do so next year . . . if I am living’.122 Indeed Walter told Robinson at Christmastime that he ‘had wished to have [Collier] once more with the Times: but there was an opposition’—whether from departing or incoming personnel, he did not say. He repeated to Robinson his intimations of affection toward John at least three more times in the last month of his life, and Robinson in turn reported to Collier ‘the kind way in which Walter spoke of him, when I took leave of him lately. He said ‘‘I have told those who are to come a er me my feelings toward him’’. This may be a barren expression of kindness but it is agreeable notwithstanding’.123 On 28 July 1847 John Walter II died, and if his successors remembered to think about John Payne Collier it may no longer greatly have mattered. For— remarkably, a er so many patronage-dependent setbacks—a salaried position of no trivial importance in the public sphere opened up in mid-1847, and within weeks John was seconded to it. This swi progress began with questions in the Commons in February regarding aspects of the British Museum. By June the rising dissatisfaction of ‘regular readers’ and other interested parties with (in particular) the administration of the printed books department had provoked the appointment of an ad hoc Royal Commission, ‘for the purpose of inquiring into the Constitution and Government of the British Museum, into the Administration of its Funds, and the Organization, Arrangements, and present Condition of the several Departments’, this ‘with the view of ascertaining in what manner that National Institution may be made most effective for the advancement of

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121. Less than two months later, in a depression compounded by the death of his wife, Alsager committed suicide. 122. JPC to Walter, 3 September 1846, Walter Papers 300. Walter replied four days later, thanking John for his understanding and promising to ‘communicate what you have intimated to my friends at Blackfriars’; he himself would ‘be happy to see your former relations with them reestablished at a fit opportunity’; Folger MS Y.d.6 (220). 123. Letter to Thomas Robinson, 26 December 1846, HCR Correspondence; and HCR Diary, 30 June and 2 and 3 July 1847. On 3 July Robinson opined that ‘had [Walter] retained his health and had Collier wished it I have no doubt he would have given C: an appointment’; see Morison, ii:34–35.


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Literature, Science, and the Arts’.124 The original commissioners—Lords Langdale and Wrottesley, the Lord Advocate Andrew Rutherfurd, Edward Stanley (Bishop of Norwich), Sir Charles Lemon, Sir Philip de Malpas Grey Egerton, Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, Samuel Rogers, Joseph Hume, and Richard Monckton Milnes—were chaired by Lord Ellesmere, and the Queen’s letters patent are dated 17 June 1847. But as early as 6 May Ellesmere had contacted John, with an effective offer of the paid secretaryship to the commission,125 and three weeks later Robinson knew that ‘Collier will probably soon receive an appointment and be named Secretary to the Comm[ission] to whom the Brit: Museum will be referred’.126 On 19 June the London Gazette reported the news, confirmed by an official notice, which Sir Henry Ellis received on 2 July. ‘It pleased me that you should be Secretary to the Commission’, he told Collier, perhaps anticipating an ally in his and Madden’s struggle with Keeper Panizzi; on the same day Robinson formally congratulated his old friend.127 The Times for 6 July, perhaps in mitigation of its professional rebuff, commented that John had ‘the habits of application and business which peculiarly fit him for his new office’. On the surface, the appointment could not but seem sensible and propitious: Collier certainly knew the Museum and many of its collections intimately, was friendly with several members of its staff, and had no known parti pris on the controversies and personal rivalries bubbling beneath its institutional surface in 1847. Nor was he, despite his specialist commitments, conspicuously narrowminded about inter-disciplinary issues—the sciences lobby was unhappy about under-representation—modern languages, or periods in intellectual history. His handling of book-society politics and fractious trustees had nearly always proved de (here his studied neutrality in the Halliwell affair no doubt served him well), and at the outset, at least, the commission’s secretary was not ex-

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124. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Constitution and Government of the British Museum (1850), p. iii. 125. ‘Lord Clarendon will be at the head of the Museum Commission. I do not know whether he, . . . Lord John [Russell], or the commission at large will appoint their payed officer or officers but if I were you I would acquaint him with your wishes & qualifications & you are at full liberty to refer him to me for my wishes & opinion’ (Folger MS Y.d.6 [111]). Did John beg the appointment? He had dedicated Memoirs of Actors to Ellesmere in June 1846, and in the spring of 1847 was apparently serving in an informal capacity as Ellesmere’s literary messenger, for J. W. K. Eyton, the collector of private-press books, thanked Collier for a copy of Ellesmere’s Alfred, a Drama in One Act (1844) on 13 May; Folger MS Y.d.6 (97). 126. Letter to Thomas Robinson, 5 June 1847, HCR Correspondence, reporting a dinner-table conversation of 29 May. 127. Ellis to JPC, 2 July 1847, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.14, fols. 11–12; HCR to JPC, 2 July 1847, Folger MS Y.d.6 (189).


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pected to direct its deliberations. But he would be the only paid and ‘permanent’ member, within the duration of the charge, of a powerful investigative body, and responsible for maintaining the record that would ultimately constitute its report. What might succeed this responsible posting was perhaps up to Collier’s performance, but four years earlier Ellesmere (then Egerton) had encouraged in him some kind of hope for a Museum keepership or ranking position,128 and no doubt that possibility was raised once again, whether by Ellesmere in ‘assurances’ (as Collier later implied) or by Collier in fantasy, we cannot now say.129 On a practical front, however, no set stipend was mentioned by Ellesmere (and no doubt Robinson would have recorded one if he knew it), so that John hardly could take his last leave of the Chronicle yet. The commission met first on 10–13 July, and not again until 10–25 February 1848; in between, as ‘congenial occupation for intervals of leisure’, Ellesmere suggested that his protégé prepare a catalogue of the Bridgewater Shakespeariana, for which ‘I shall be glad to make it worth your while & either privately print or publish as may prove most expedient’.130 Clearly, the commission secretaryship was no full-time employment in 1847, for Collier thanked Andrew Rutherfurd in November for his trouble ‘on the subject of my emoluments’, and it was not until 23 June 1848 that Ellesmere could report that ‘I have reason to believe that they mean to propose 500£ per annum for the office of Secretary’.131 That figure (well in excess of John’s Chronicle salary) may have reflected the increased activity of the commission in 1848–49, and the increased secretarial duties involved; but John’s original stipend was £300 and we know of no increase.132 In February 1848 Sir John Easthope sold off his newspaper, and on 21 October Robinson visited Victoria Road and learned from Mary Louisa of an overdue career decision. ‘Collier

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128. ‘The prospect might be distant’, wrote Egerton on 29 June 1843, ‘but your pretensions are such as would at least justify the attempt, and I for one would have no compunction in stating your claims as a labourer in the vineyard’; Folger MS Y.d.6 (104). Years later William Hepworth Dixon, probably reporting what Collier had told him, pictured the Museum staff in a state of dismay over Ellesmere’s wish to ‘put Mr. Collier at the head of the Museum’ (Athenaeum, 18 February 1860, p. 229); but ‘It is really too absurd’, Madden wrote in his diary that day. ‘It is the first time I ever heard of such an intention, and what is more, I am positive it cannot be true.’ 129. According to Ganzel, Egerton suggested to Collier that the commission’s work would ‘probably bring about a reorganization of the Museum’ and lead to the creation of a new Keeper of English Books, ‘a position for which Collier would be a likely candidate’ (pp. 106–07). There is no mention of this in extant correspondence, and it would appear that the only source is Collier’s own preface to BARB, pp. viii–x. 130. Ellesmere to JPC, 23 August 1847, FF/K MS 645; the project was apparently never undertaken. 131. JPC to Rutherfurd, 20 November 1847, NLS MS 9714, fol. 150; Ellesmere to JPC, Folger MS Y.d.6 (112). 132. See Collinge 1984, pp. 37–38. Ganzel’s figure of £500 (p. 106) is evidently based on Ellesmere’s letter.


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has now le the unhonoured occupation of a Newspaper reporter’, he wrote to his brother. ‘He has no other place than that of Secretary to the Commission to enquire into British Museum [sic] which will be of no long duration but he has acquired the friendship of some very influential great persons such as the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl of Ellesmere who I hope will have both the power & the will to make a provision for him.’ 133 No more gallery service and shorthand, no more late nights in the Strand, no more daily-wage slavery, and no more security of contractual employment and week-to-week income. Nearing his sixtieth birthday, John Payne Collier would make a fresh start, with patronage and literature his only paymasters.

The Stationers’ Registers and the Hall Commonplace Book His new post and new freedom from the Chronicle in prospect, by the autumn of 1847 John could contemplate a formidable new project: an edition, for the Shakespeare Society, of the early Stationers’ Registers, those chronological records of copyright entries by London publishers from 1557 forward, which survive in the archives of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, at Stationers’ Hall, near St. Paul’s. These invaluable sources of printing history and literary performance, preserving a vast range of evidence about the date, authorship, and auspices of works both extant and lost, had long been quarried for what they could reveal about individual writers and books, but never systematically edited for publication. Although Company records had o en been difficult of access—some early material even in 1875 being deemed too confidential for Edward Arber to consult 134—the three-volume folio registers themselves (i.e., the ‘Warden’s Accounts’, containing inter alia the ‘Entry of Copies’ by intending publishers) had been consulted by scholars as early as Bishop Tanner (ca. 1699; see Arber, i:2), and among Collier’s predecessors employing them were George Steevens,135 Thomas Warton,136 Edmond Malone,137 Joseph Ritson, George Chal-

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133. Letter to Thomas Robinson, 27 October 1848, HCR Correspondence. 134. See Myers 1990 and, for discussion of early users of the registers, Myers 1988. 135. Myers thinks Steevens ‘the first scholar to come to the hall’ (1990, p. xx), where his interest in the registers, mainly for Shakespearian records, is confirmed by his arrogant habit of penning his initials and a date beside entries that interested him (the earliest noted by Dickey, p. 42, is ‘G*S 1774’ in Liber B, fol. 193, against a ‘Shakespearian’ title). While these sigla are technically ‘modern additions’, no one has ever suggested that Steevens meant them to mislead or deceive anyone; however, simply by existing, they may have tempted a future annotator to do just that. William Herbert transcribed at least some of Steevens’s aides-mémoires in red ink, but Arber ignored them in 1875, and the Company itself probably resented his importunity, for when in 1802 Alexander Chalmers sought access to the registers it was stipulated that ‘no Book shall be removed from the Hall, nor any Mark or writing whatever be made in them’ (quoted by Myers, p. xx). 136. Arber (i:2) regarded Warton as the ‘first [who] extensively quoted the Registers in his


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mers,138 and Francis Douce.139 Most importantly, however, in 1780 the revisor of Ames’s Typographical Antiquities, William Herbert, borrowed two volumes of pre-1600 registers, returning to the Hall for the third in 1790, and made extensive transcripts of each, which today have rejoined the originals at Stationers’ Hall.140 Herbert’s autograph copies comprise 777 pages, in three manuscript volumes, employing an elaborate code of abbreviations and rendering the text in brown ink, with his own commentary distinguishably and consistently in red; they are nearly complete for Register A and Liber B, and exhibit ‘considerable though not absolute accuracy’, although ‘a er the year 1600, the terminal date for Ames, Herbert’s interest lags, until for roughly the last 125 folios of Book C he provides only selective entries’.141 Whether or not his project was authorized is perhaps moot—Samuel Bentley, the indexer of Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes, referred to the register as ‘examined (and unhandsomely [i.e., shabbily, dishonestly] copied)’ by Herbert, although Nichols himself had said only that Herbert ‘searched through them . . . most diligently for his improved edition of ‘‘Ames’s Typographical Antiquities’’ ’ 142—but his transcripts have proved crucial to revealing modern interpolations, as we shall see. What Herbert transcribed (with some shortcuts), and what Collier in 1847 sought to consult, were the three folio volumes of Wardens’ Accounts known as Register A (containing entries of copies from mid-1557 to 25 July 1571), Liber B

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History of English Poetry, 1778’, but all his use of SR (all three MS volumes) comes in his own third and abortive fourth volumes of HEP, and the first indication of his borrowing a Register (‘A’) is found in a Stationers’ Court order of 28 September 1780 (noted by Myers 1988, p. 44: ‘Mr Wharton [sic] of Oxford’). In the light of Warton’s fabrications in HEP one must point out that none of the entries now deemed forgeries appears in HEP, and that one entry (for Glaucus and Scilla; Warton, iii:418) is cited without the marginal allusion to Lodge; nor did Warton’s extended account of the balladeer Elderton (iv:40–41) mention the two spurious attributions in Liber B. 137. He was allowed to borrow Liber B at least twice, in November 1789 and February 1790, but in July 1800 he was restricted to examining the books in the Hall (Myers 1988, p. 47). Had his reputation with the Dulwich and Stratford-upon-Avon archives got back to the Stationers? 138. In 1798; see Myers 1988, pp. 49–50. 139. Peter Cunningham, in his Athenaeum review of Collier’s first volume (19 August 1848, p. 821), also cited Ames and Dibdin among Collier’s predecessors, but was surely wrong in both instances. On Ames, see Myers 1988, pp. 40–41; Dibdin seems only to have followed William Herbert’s edition of Ames’s Typographical Antiquities (1785–90) literally, without examining the registers himself. Somewhat later, Alexander Dyce consulted the registers for his edition of Kempe’s Nine Days Wonder (Camden Society, 1840). 140. On 4 July 1780 he was allowed ‘the use of the severall Books of Entries belonging to this Company, one at a time, giving receipts for the same respectively, with a promise to return them on Demand’; quoted in Myers 1988, p. 43. 141. Dickey, p. 42. 142. Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (1812–16), vii:177 and iii:586. Perhaps Nichols, a Stationer himself, learned of the transcriptions only aer the publication of vol. 3 in 1812; he helped Bentley with the index (vol. 7) in 1813.


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(17 July 1576–25 June 1595: the entry records for mid-1571 through mid-1576 are lost), and Liber C (4 July 1595–11 July 1620). Of these, Register A is a fair copy, in one neat and uniform hand, of what must have been earlier accounts, while the others are the Company clerk’s ongoing record of entries, in a hand less expert and ‘much more demanding’ (Dickey, p. 42), which offers more scope— Dickey notes—for additions. Normally, each entry gives the date of the application, the name of the publisher-applicant, the fee (usually sixpence for books and fourpence for ballads, but there are many variations),143 the name of the licenser, if appropriate, and a short title of the work. Sometimes other details or conditions of entry are provided, but attributions of authorship—of great interest, of course, to all later scholars—are scattershot at best, and rarely if ever written in as an a erthought by the clerk himself.144 The registers function, as Franklin Dickey pointed out (p. 43), ‘essentially [as] business, not literary documents’, intended only ‘to provide a record of copyright, a legal record in which ambiguities will be at a minimum’. On 7 December 1847 the Court of Assistants of the Stationers’ Company ordered ‘that Mr. J. Payne Collier and Mr. Halliwell be respectively permitted to inspect the Registers of Copies in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James 1st’ (Dickey 1960, p. 41). In 1848 John thanked three members of the Company, Joshua W. Butterworth (an active F.S.A. and future master of the Company) and George and Joseph Greenhill (the treasurer and future treasurer respectively), as well as the master, wardens, and court assistants, ‘for the facilities so liberally afforded . . . during many visits to Stationers’ Hall’, and for providing ‘unrestricted use of such invaluable documents’; Halliwell, it would seem, played no part in Collier’s new enterprise, but made some use of the registers for his Descriptive Notices of Popular English Histories (Percy Society, November 1848). Indeed Collier may have undertaken the project simply when the opportunity presented itself, for unlike most of his Shakespeare Society publications it was not advertised in advance: the Report of the council in April 1848 noted the first volume of Collier’s Extracts as ‘already in the press, though not announced in any previous publication’. Collier’s overall plan for the new project was more selective than that followed at Dulwich eight years before. Perhaps the mass of material and the difficulty of transcription seemed daunting—he appears not to have known of Herbert’s highly legible copies, though they had passed through auction in 1842 —and the access, while ‘unrestricted’, may not have been ideal: by April 1850

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143. See W. A. Jackson 1957. 144. Dickey’s only example of the latter (p. 43), a ‘p[er] Elderton’ in the margin of a balladentry in Liber B, fol. 168, was transcribed by Herbert before 1795, and so would appear to be genuine.


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‘great progress has been made’ (the council reported), ‘but the work can advance but slowly, owing to regulations of the Company, and the necessity of having every extract made by the pen of our Director’. Hence, perhaps, John had chosen from the outset to confine himself to entries of ‘popular poetry and prose, plays, tracts, voyages, travels, and lighter literature’—especially ballads— and to exclude ‘early dissertations upon medical and other sciences, old divinity, and such chronicles, and other works, as are well known in the various extant editions’. He also deferred, and never produced, a general introduction to what he envisioned as ‘the series of volumes—for such it must necessarily be’, containing an account of the Stationers’ Company and their archives at large. This not altogether satisfactory compromise le him free to concentrate upon his favourite species of publication, and to provide extensive notes on what he chose to include, as well as the notorious ‘illustrations’ that constitute much of his text and a large part of its problems. In the event, the first volume of Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company (midsummer 1848) covered only the years 1557–70, in 230 pages, with a preface and an elaborate 21-page index, and Extracts II (midsummer 1849) carried on through 1587, ‘about the period . . . that Shakespeare arrived in London, and became a writer for the stage’, in about the same bulk. Further extracts, extending to 1594, were intended to make up a third volume, ‘nearly finished’ in April 1850, and ‘ready for the printer soon’ in June,145 but with the subsequent collapse of the Shakespeare Society never appeared in book form: they were finally published in twenty-eight instalments in Notes and Queries for 1861–63. Collier’s transcribing and editorial task was, needless to say, a formidable one, and the material dry as ever to non-specialists—for which reason, he explained, he would leaven the lump by supplying ‘illustrations . . . appended between brackets’ for entries of ephemeral articles, notably broadside ballads whose printed versions no longer survived. ‘Hundreds of [named and entered] ballads and broadsides, to say nothing of tracts and chapbooks, have been lost, all of them interesting’, he lamented (Extracts I, p. vi), and ‘perhaps not one in fi y of these has been mentioned by any historian of our early typography’, even by ‘an industrious and learned man like Herbert’, who seemed to regard ballads and broadsides as insignificant elements of his early printers’ output. ‘Among the illustrations, following the entries’, John promised in redress, ‘will be observed not a few ballads, which have never been re-published in modern times, which, no doubt, once existed in print, but which have been lost, and are now known only from transcripts. Most of these have been derived from the

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145. Report of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Society, p. 5; JPC to Peter Cunningham, 9 June 1850, Harmsen collection.


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Editor’s own sources, particularly from a volume belonging to him in a handwriting of the time of James I.’ To this very curious manuscript, the so-called Hall Commonplace Book, we shall soon return. The true novelty and importance of Collier’s Extracts, however, was its presentation in print, for the first time, of a large part of the early Stationers’ Registers, and that should have impressed contemporaries more than it did. Peter Cunningham, in an anonymous but loyal review in the Athenaeum,146 applauded the project (‘the examination of all who have preceded Mr. Collier has been casual, careless, and restricted’) and Collier’s ancillary researches ‘extending over thirty years’, but concentrated upon the lively ballad-illustrations, the transcribed entries themselves being ‘singularly barren even for a clerk of the Stationers’ Company’; and on 14 July 1848, writing to Halliwell, Collier himself alluded only to ‘some ballads, good bad & indifferent, but all worth reading, as relics of the time’, as a feature of his new book—in the preface to which he had virtually apologized for ‘the dryness of the details, into which . . . it has been necessary to enter’.147 Similarly, Sir Frederic Madden (Diary, 14 August) found the book ‘very curious and amusing’, but only as ‘illustration of old English ballad literature’. Yet for nearly thirty years, Collier’s Extracts remained the only published version of any substantial part of the Stationers’ Registers, and even a er Edward Arber’s full four-volume transcript of 1875–77 (supplement and index, 1894), Extracts remained valuable for identifying or discussing the printed texts of each chosen entry, something Arber himself le largely unattempted.148 But among the wheat of Extracts, inevitably, lurked the weevils, this time in the form of physical forgeries in the registers themselves, to say nothing of the fabricated ‘illustrations’ and other questionable testimony in print. The former are few, but insidious, and are glaringly exposed by the evidence of Herbert’s

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146. 19 August 1848, pp. 821–23, for Extracts I; 12 September 1849, pp. 925–26, for the second volume. 147. JPC to JOH, LOA 11/8; this is the only direct allusion to Extracts that we have found in Collier’s extant correspondence. 148. The history of the final project of transcription is outlined by Arber (v:xvii–xix), paraphrased by Blagden (1960, pp. 260–61) and Myers (1990, pp. xxiii–xxiv). Arber himself (i:2) remained highly respectful of ‘the most excellent endeavour of Mr. John Payne Collier to cull such Book Entries as related to Drama and Popular Literature, &c. &c.’, referring to him elsewhere (i:30) as ‘the Nestor of all living Restorers of our Old Literature to modern thought’, while explaining (i:19–30) his own decision to eliminate ‘illustrations’ from his work. Indeed, in 1869 Arber thought enough of Collier’s selection to write that ‘I should like very much to Reprint your Extracts from the Stationer’s [sic] Co.’, in lieu of re-editing the registers himself (Arber to JPC, 25 June 1869, Folger MS Y.d.6 [1]). Even today there is no easily available version of SR with STC numbers keyed to each entry.


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systematic transcripts of 1780–95,149 where the absence of certain key words and phrases condemns as modern additions what Collier made public in 1848–63. In the Shakespeare Society volumes of 1848–49 were published, for the first time, nine readings that reflect evident tampering with the Stationers’ Company registers. One of these is a quite delicate alteration of genuine manuscript text, and eight take the form of marginal or interlinear additions of names. All the latter provide specific attributions of authorship, in a mock-secretary hand that differs (as Collier himself would point out) from the running-hand of the Company clerk, but which appears to represent contemporary information or opinion. All the suspect amplifications—none of which Herbert transcribed in 1780–95—occur in Liber B (1576–95), and Franklin Dickey has plausibly suggested that the regularity of the scribal hand in Register A ‘offers little chance for forgery’ (p. 42), whereas the ‘much more demanding’ penmanship of Liber B might have positively encouraged it—to say nothing of the presence throughout of Steevens’s ‘sacrilegious’ inked sigla or the pencilled markings by Herbert reported by Arber (ii:30). The post-Herbert novelties, in a hand unmistakably not the Company clerk’s but still ostensibly of the period, include ‘by T Lodge’, ‘by Greene’, ‘Elderton’ (twice), ‘by Bretton’, ‘Lyllye’, ‘Mr Whetston’, and ‘Warren’; and Collier, in assessing their evidence in print, once again played the judicious, even sceptical scholar. The attribution to ‘Greene’ of ‘A Ballad intituled Youthe’ for instance, is described in Extracts II (p. 140) as ‘interlined, as if the fact of the authorship had been ascertained a er the entry was made. This may have been an early and a distinct piece by Robert Greene . . . [but] some other author of the name of Greene may . . . be intended’; and the marginalia involving Thomas Lodge and John Lyly are in a hand ‘different’ from that of the entering clerk. Even more subtly, three of the eight manuscript additions offer no new evidence at all, but merely confirm what we already knew—namely, that George Whetstone wrote A Heptameron of Civil Discourses, 1582 (his name is on the title of the printed book); that William Warren (again named in the book) wrote The Nursery of Names, 1581; and that John Lyly wrote Sappho and Phao.150 The 1584 quarto is anonymous, but the play was included in Lyly’s 1632 Six Court Come-

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149. It is curious, considering the freedom granted Collier with the registers themselves, that he seems never to have been aware of Herbert’s transcripts, with their damning evidence—the very sort of anterior transcript that he had pursued, through Halliwell at Middle Hill, in the anticipated crisis over Henslowe. In fact Herbert’s MSS were all now at Stationers’ Hall, having been purchased by the Company at the George Chalmers sale in 1842; an account of their history, and of the wanderings of Liber C, is given by Blagden (1960, pp. 259–61), by Dickey (pp. 39–40), and by Myers (1988, pp. 48–49). At the very least they would have saved Collier much struggling with the difficult clerk’s hand of Liber B. 150. Gerard Langbaine (An Account of the English Dramatick Poets [1691], p. 329) listed it as by Lyly, and we have found no instance of the attribution’s being questioned.


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dies: here Collier’s assertion (Extracts II, p. 185) that it ‘has been attributed to other dramatists’ is mere mystification. Dickey (p. 45) was puzzled by the first two of these superfluous ascriptions (‘I can see no point to the [Warren] addition . . . Collier gives no clues as to motive [for ‘‘Mr Whetston’’]’), but of course they serve to confirm the five other spuria, in terms both of the implicit ‘authority’ and of the hand, consistent among them, of the unknown annotator. The five remaining novelties attribute two ballads, one extant, one lost, to William Elderton, a lost ‘Epitaph on the Lady Anne Lodge’ to Thomas Lodge (in fact Lady Anne’s son, although Collier did not yet know that), another lost ballad to ‘Greene’, and the extant Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Herbs (STC 25329, by Anne Wheathill) to ‘Britton’, that is, Nicholas Breton.151 The last called forth a characteristic rumination: ‘There must either be a mistake in the entry, or Nicholas Breton had something to do with the composition of this book, which was printed in 1584 as the work of ‘‘Ann Wheathill, Gent’’. [i.e., ‘Gentlewoman’]. It was very likely the production of Breton, but published as that of the lady; and ‘‘by Britton’’ having been interlined, shows that it was an a erthought, when the clerk had perhaps learned that he was the real author’ (Extracts II, p. 185). But as Dickey shrewdly observed (p. 45), ‘Collier’s interest in authorship was much keener than the Clerk’s’. As three of these eight forgeries offered no novel evidence, and three more affected only lost titles, they caused little mischief and provoked little response. Edward Arber in 1875 duly transcribed each one, but in a last-minute caveat— which some readers, even Hyder E. Rollins in 1920, may have overlooked—he signalled six of them as among ‘a very few idle ascriptions of authorship inserted in the margin . . . which, being apparently an indifferent imitation of the original handwriting, may be interpolations’ (ii:30). ‘They add nothing at all to our information’, he explained, an assertion which, though technically true, was not quite the point: misinformation requires more than a casual dismissal. Rollins swallowed both of the Elderton canards in 1920,152 but corrected himself, citing Arber’s stop-press, in his Analytical Index of 1924. There, however, he took seriously the spurious ‘by Greene’ (which Arber had failed to denounce) against the 1581 ballad-entry for ‘Youthe . . . abandoninge vertue and leanynge to vyce’, and even mooted an alternative referent in one Paul Green, hanged for murder in 1580.153

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151. The MS reads ‘by bretton’, which Collier (deliberately?) mistranscribed as ‘britton’: cf. his reading of his own ‘sertifie’ as ‘certifie’ in one of the Bridgewater documents. Arber confused the matter by reading ‘By Bretton [or? Dretton]’, apparently endorsing the forgery. 152. Rollins 1920b, pp. 227 and 229. 153. Rollins no. 3078, le unamended in his own copy of the Analytical Index (FF). The ‘Lyllye’ forgery is sometimes credited, despite Arber’s notice of it among the ‘idle ascriptions’, e.g., by


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In one further instance a slight but devilish tampering with Liber B enabled Collier to shore up an earlier attribution. On 27 June 1585 Hugh Jackson paid sixpence to enter ‘a Booke intituled the prayse of nothinge, by Edward Da.’— at least ‘Da.’ is what Herbert transcribed, and what he also printed in Typographical Antiquities (1786, ii:1134). Collier had reprinted this rare tract in 1845, confidently attributing it to Sir Edward Dyer upon the strength of the titular ascription (‘By E. D.’); he must not at that time have consulted or worried about Herbert’s 1786 publication of the SR entry. Now, however, if ‘Da.’ was the true reading his conjecture was punctured. But by 1849 the awkward ‘a’ had miraculously disappeared, and Collier, a er transcribing the entry in full (‘a Booke intituled the prayse of Nothinge, by Edward D. . . . vjd’), remarked that ‘Herbert knew nothing of this ‘‘booke’’, beyond the entry, which he quotes incorrectly’ (Extracts II, p. 196). As regards Typographical Antiquities, Collier was technically right, for Herbert had there abbreviated ‘Edward’ to ‘Edw’. (it is spelled out in his transcript), but of course the true point at issue is ‘D.’ versus ‘Da.’—which, if challenged, Collier might lump with ‘Edward’ versus ‘Edw.’ as specimens of Herbert’s carelessness. But here physical evidence comes into play: in Liber B, folio 204, following ‘by Edward D’, as Dickey (p. 46) reports, ‘there is almost a hole in the paper’ before the full stop, where presumably ‘the letter [a] stood’, and which must reflect physical forgery—by eradication. It may seem a high risk to take simply to protect a thesis advanced in a private edition of twentyfive copies, but John was proud of this attribution, and Herbert had seemingly laid his own testimony open to question by companion inaccuracy. In 1931, remarkably, Ralph M. Sargent, himself unaware of the SR problems, attributed The Praise of Nothing—on internal literary evidence alone—to the pamphleteer Edward Daunce. His case, already persuasive in itself, now gains independent support. Not every discrepancy between Herbert’s and Collier’s text was a sure sign of mischief. One questioned reading in Register A—where Dickey in fact found none to suspect, the hand being ‘single, monotonously neat [and] bold’ (p. 42)— deserves a hard look in John’s favour. Herbert had transcribed an entry at folio 102 for a lost devotional of 1562–63, as ‘a book of serten Godly prayers of Lady Fanes’ (ii:1103 [misnumbered 1013]), probably the work of Elizabeth, Lady Fane or Vane (d. 1568), ‘a liberal benefactor of God’s saints’ during the Marian persecution, according to Strype (DNB). Collier, however, read this as ‘a boke . . . of Lady Janes’ [our italics], explaining that ‘Lady Jane is Lady Jane Grey’, and find-

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R. W. Bond in his edition of Lyly’s Works (1902), ii:362 and 364. Greg (i:6) reproduced the text, noting merely that it was in a ‘later hand’; he is followed by Bevington 1989 and 1991.


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ing it ‘singular that Herbert . . . should have misread and misprinted the entry’, for ‘it is written as clearly as possible ‘‘Lady Janes’’ ’ (Extracts I, p. 85). While ‘the book is not now known’, it might well have something to do with the annotated prayer-book that the nine days’ queen presented to the lieutenant of the Tower on the eve of her execution—a ghost of a perished reprint of a relic, and a good story, which Peter Cunningham repeated in the Athenaeum, ridiculing Herbert and Dibdin for such a ‘joint error . . . [as] would form an entertaining supplement to Mr. Disraeli’s chapter ‘‘On the Ignorance of the Learned’’ ’.154 Twelve years on, in the course of pursuing other Collierian matters, Thomas Duffus Hardy, assistant keeper at the Public Record Office, called on Frederic Madden ‘to speak about an alteration in the Books of the Stationers Company, which he thinks suspicious, and which he wishes me to look at. It occurs at vol. 1 p. 85 of Collier’s Extracts’, wrote Madden (Diary, 6 July 1860); and Hardy believed that in the register itself ‘initial J. has certainly been tampered with, and he thinks Mr C. may not be free from suspicion in the matter’. Madden visited Stationers’ Hall four days later, meeting Hardy and John Sherrin Brewer, and agreed that the initial letter had been ‘meddled with, but at what period, it is difficult to say’. Unaware as he was of other forgeries in the registers, Madden drew the line at accusing Collier himself: ‘there is not sufficient proof for such a charge’. Hardy then let the matter drop—there were other new fish to fry in his Review of the Present State of the Shakespeare Controversy (1860)—and in 1875 Edward Arber (i:102) repeated the ‘Janes’ reading with no apparent qualms; even William A. Jackson, in the Jackson-Greg copy of Arber’s Transcript (i:102), did not question it. All indications, one might suppose, point toward a oneletter alteration akin to the ‘Da’ deletion: but we must differ with Hardy and Madden. In our opinion, a er careful examination and with the volunteered assent of the honorary archivist, Collier’s reading (‘Janes’) is correct, and there is no sign whatever of ‘tampering’ with the initial ‘J’ in the entry. A final and somewhat different sort of invention—and one unnoted by Dickey, perhaps because Collier did not publish it in either the 1848–49 or 1861–63 Extracts—involved yet more Shakespearian ballads. It is reasonable to suppose, however, that the forgery in Liber B (among the ‘Decrees and Ordinances’ that Arber was not permitted to treat) was created at the same time as all those above, although only in 1858 did Collier announce it, as ‘quite new’ (Shakespeare, v:382). The stationer Thomas Millington had been fined 2s. 6d. on 27 August 1596 ‘for printinge of a ballad contrarye to order’ (a record noticed in 1790 by William Herbert in his edition of Typographical Antiquities, iii:1379), and immediately below this record now appeared the following, struck through 154. Athenaeum, 19 August 1848, p. 822.

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501


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but legible: ‘Md. the ballad intuled [sic] The taming of a shrew. Also one other Ballad of Macdobeth’. The variant on ‘Macbeth’ was no doubt inspired by a facetious account in Kempe’s Nine Days Wonder (1600) of ‘a penny Poet, whose first making was the miserable stolne story of Macdoel, or Macdobeth or Macsomewhat’, which Collier duly cited; and as the ballad version of The Taming of a Shrew reflected a known published play, he surmised that this 1596 ‘Ballad of Macdobeth’ was ‘of the same character’—which in turn suggested that ‘a considerably older drama on the story of Macbeth’ than Shakespeare’s had at one time existed. Collier’s discovery was largely credited until 1928–30, when Samuel A. Tannenbaum and W. W. Greg (and E. K. Chambers, WS, ii:392) for once coincided in condemning it.155 The ‘illustrations’ that Collier provided in Extracts, ‘to relieve the dryness’ of the entries themselves, consist of thirty-nine specimens of popular verse—poems and ballads, complete or extracted—which ‘have never been republished in modern times’ and although ‘no doubt, once existed in print . . . are now only known from transcripts’ (Extracts I, p. vii). Thirty-five of these derive from one manuscript volume, which John initially described as ‘in a handwriting of the time of James I’, but subsequently as in ‘two, if not three handwritings . . . the earliest beginning before the year 1600, and the latest continuing until a er the Restoration’ (Extracts II, p. vii). This remarkable relic (now Folger MS V.a.339) has come to be known as the ‘Hall Commonplace Book’, from the signature on a flyleaf of one Joseph Hall (not, nor meant to suggest, the famous Bishop of Norwich),156 who may in fact only have registered his ownership of it around 1700. In 1971 Giles E. Dawson gave a physical description of the volume, and some account of its provenance, which is murky before Collier possessed it in 1841. It is a small stout octavo now containing 291 leaves (nine others were removed at an unknown date), which began life as a commonplace book, divided into categories (theology, remedies and recipes, ‘fabulae and dictae’, etc.), and the first writer in it (Dawson thought

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155. Tannenbaum thought the entire entry a Collier invention, as he could not find it in Arber, and a London representative assured him that ‘the [manuscript] Stationers’ Registers contain no such entry’ (1929a, p. 15). Greg (1928, p. 418) had already described the full entry and cast doubt on the genuineness of the (deleted) addition, but apparently without appreciating that Collier had first aired it. ‘Some of the letters look to me suspicious’, he then wrote, and with E. Boswell in 1930 he conservatively described the passage as ‘probably modern’ (p. 55). In his contemporaneous reply to Tannenbaum (Greg 1930), pointing out the location of the entry and the use of its genuine portion by Herbert, he went further: the crossed-out portion ‘is in a different hand from the rest, and is, I have little doubt, a modern fabrication’. We have looked, and agree. 156. Both the 1887 Quaritch General Catalogue and the 1899 Pearson Catalogue of Shakespeareana did describe it as Bishop Hall’s, but in error.


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him at work in the 1630s, in a ‘small, sometimes minute’ hand) entered his sentences consecutively in each section, so that sequences of blank leaves—one of them stretching to 142 pages—followed the end of each block of his text. A second owner, writing in the 1640s (the latest of a few scattered dates in his hand is 1648), carried on the commonplace entries, but when he le off approximately 163 pages in the bound volume were still virgin. These—and the order of hands in the book is quite obvious, from the use each writer made of available space— now contain eighty-three individually titled ballads and ballad-style poems, in a ‘simulated hand of the seventeenth century’ (Dawson), which the weight of the evidence ascribes to the latter-day owner. Collier first mentioned his manuscript in Reasons for a New Edition of Shakespeare (1841), as a volume ‘of some 500 closely written pages’ containing extracts from Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, ‘and about five other dramas’—‘brief extracts, never exceeding five lines’, but which ‘now and then throw light upon difficult and doubtful expressions’.157 The Shakespeare extracts are indeed genuine, if only from the two named plays and The Passionate Pilgrim, in the hand of the earliest compiler.158 But curiously, no mention was made, here or elsewhere until 1848, of the presence of the eighty-three ballads, which included such temptingly theatrical pieces as ‘Tarltons Toye’, ‘Against the newe Playhouses’, ‘ffatall ffall at Paris Garden’, and ‘A jest of Peele and Singer’.159 Moreover, in commenting upon Juliet’s allusion to ‘hunts-up’—the tune played to waken huntsmen, or ‘any morning song’ (Shakespeare, vi:453)—Collier referred readers only to Chappell’s Collection of National English Airs (1838–40, ii:147), ‘where all that is known on the subject is collected’, and to the phrase ‘the hunt is up’ in Munday’s Two Italian Gentlemen, without ever mentioning his own texts of ‘The Kinges hunt is upp’ and ‘The newe Hunts upp’, two versions of ‘one of our oldest ballads on record’ which he proudly transcribed in Extracts I (pp. 129–30), and which Chappell in turn republished in Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855). Similarly, notices of George Peele and John Singer in

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157. Reasons, p. 7. Collier may have purchased the MS from Thomas Thorpe (see Dawson, pp. 2–3); it is not, however, the MS he described in OMD, i:39–40, as containing ‘a great many valuable and curious poems’ (now Rosenbach Library MS 1083/15; cf. Wagonheim 1980, p. 136). 158. Collier cited six of the seven Richard II passages in his 1842–44 Shakespeare (iv:112 ff.), but did not refer to the extract from The Merchant of Venice. The 1899 Pearson description mentions all eight dramatic extracts and three of the six poems, but the quotations given there (pp. 217–19) are emphatically not transcriptions of the HCB text. Five of the poems are subscribed ‘W. S.’ in a later, probably modern, hand; see QD A46.62. The extra stanza of ‘Robin Goodfellow’ discussed by Collier (Shakespeare, ii:389) is likewise genuine, but again the initials ‘B. J.’ are doubtful: see QD A46.39. 159. We have given all ballad titles in the form in which they appear in Folger MS V.a.339; for Extracts Collier modernized both titles and text. Quotations from ballads printed by Collier are taken from the published text rather than from HCB itself.


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Memoirs of Actors, Henslowe’s Diary, and The Alleyn Papers would surely have benefited from a citation of the long ballad ‘A jest of Peele and Singer’ (Extracts II, pp. 215–18) if Collier had had it to hand before 1846. Supposing only that the ballads were inspired by the SR entries which Collier began to examine in 1847, Dawson (pp. 15–16) dated their composition, and subsequent transcription onto the blank pages in the Hall Commonplace Book, to between 1847 and 1849—the latter a terminus ad quem, for John published a list of all eighty-three in the second volume of Extracts (pp. viii–ix). The negative evidence of non-use of such exciting material before 1848 supports such a conjecture—assuming, of course, that most of the ballads are modern. Collier’s contemporaries, as we have seen, took them at face value. Cunningham admiringly reprinted seven in the Athenaeum, remarking with no hint of irony that ‘Mr. Collier [is] seldom at a loss for a curious illustration’. Madden found them ‘curious and amusing’, E. F. Rimbault anthologized two in 1851, and William Chappell borrowed the manuscript itself sometime a er January 1851 160—a rare instance of Collier’s parting with a forged primary resource, even to a close associate—and published nine extracts in his Popular Music (1855– 59).161 The commonplace book stayed with Collier for the rest of his life,162 and remained unavailable to scholars, for all practical purposes, during the first four decades of this century. Several of the ballads enjoyed republication (notably by Norman Ault, in his influential Elizabethan Lyrics [1925 and later editions], where three appear), and one has earned a measure of immortality. In 1943 Giles Dawson first re-described the Hall Commonplace Book, declaring that Collier had ‘tampered’ with it, and in 1971 he amplified his account and his case against Collier, arguing persuasively, with illustrations and palaeo-

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160. Chappell expressed his gratitude to Collier for the loan of it (Popular Music of the Olden Time [1855–59], i:xii) and later provided the following description of HCB to Frederic Madden (10 February 1860, BL Egerton MS 2847, fols. 105–06): ‘I had the MS. of James the first’s time in my possession for about a month, six years ago [perhaps in fact nine years ago: see Chappell to JPC, begging the loan on 20 January 1851 (Folger MS Y.d.6 [15])], & then made copious extracts from it. It is a small pocket volume, clearly written, & contains but one allusion to Shakespeare, as ‘‘our Will’’, coupling him with Drayton. I gave Mr Fairholt one song on Tobacco from it, ‘‘Who durst dispraise Tobacco’’ & printed another with the signature of G. W. at p. 563 of ‘‘Popular Music’’.’ E. F. Rimbault, to whom Chappell also lent his transcript, published two ballads from it in his Little Book of Songs and Ballads (1851), likewise preserving the (forged) added initials ‘G. W.’ (i.e., George Wither) at the end of the popular ‘Tobacco is an Indian Weed’. 161. All of these correspond to texts in Extracts, however, so Chappell’s direct use of the manuscript, beyond checking Collier’s ‘transcripts’, is uncertain. 162. It was lot 16 in his sale, £52 to Bernard Quaritch, who listed it in his General Catalogue in 1887 (no. 22350, £84). The MS appeared again at Sotheby’s in April 1899, and later in the year was described at length for John Pearson’s two-volume catalogue of Shakespeareana, from which it was purchased by Marsden J. Perry.


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graphical analysis, that the hand of the ballad-writer was identical with that of ‘the Old Corrector’ of the so-called Perkins Folio (Part Eight below). Unfortunately he neglected to demonstrate—save by showing how unlikely it was that the ballads in question could have been transcribed, in the order that they now appear, by a mid-seventeenth-century copyist—that most were modern pastiche, and (beyond the usual reasoning of ‘who else?’ and ‘finders = fakers’) that Collier alone could have written them into the manuscript volume. Upon this perceived lapse—although Dawson’s analysis would convince most juries— Dewey Ganzel in 1982 fastened, with an extensive rebuttal (pp. 405–16). Ganzel acknowledged that the ballad transcripts ‘must have been made a er 1648’, but not necessarily two centuries on; he suggested, without specifically risking the claim, that they could be genuinely of the seventeenth century; and if they were, the similarity of the Perkins and HCB hands, as well as the common provenance of both suspect volumes, was not ‘a very remarkable coincidence’, as Dawson had mildly observed. ‘It is entirely possible that the Old Corrector who spent hundreds of hours copying thousands of bad emendations into the Perkins Folio also copied dozens of bad ballads into the commonplace book’, Ganzel wrote (p. 416), and with a backward look at his argument that Collier ‘could not have forged the Perkins Folio emendations’, he turned Dawson’s thesis back on itself: ‘if Professor Dawson is correct that whoever wrote those emendations also wrote the ballads into the Hall Commonplace Book, it must follow that, whoever did write them, it was not John Payne Collier’. These were ingenious, if exponentially improbable, reconstructions of long-lost events,163 and while Occam’s razor would shave them away in a trice, one can imagine Collier himself approving the courtroom logic: if the HCB ballads cannot be proved modern, have we only a case in which multiple but parallel improbabilities—and not a sequential argument—cast doubt, rather than final discredit upon them? Fortunately, one more strand of evidence remains, unknown to Dawson and Ganzel, which even a diehard apologist would be hard-pressed to refute. Not all the ballads in HCB are textually unique: seventeen of the eighty-three are known wholly or in part from printed sources 164—the usual technique for confirming the others, we might say—and a few more are variants upon known examples. Ironically, it is one of the largely genuine ballads that effectively topples

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163. Ganzel does not appear to have re-examined HCB itself carefully, for he repeated all of Dawson’s slightly inaccurate statistics. 164. Dawson (pp. 10–12) accounted for thirteen, to which Eric Berryman (1971) added three (Dawson’s nos. 35, 36, and 78), and Carole Livingston (1986) one (Dawson’s no. 76; see below). Nearly all the texts have been altered by Collier, sometimes significantly, but at least one has been accepted as a genuine variant: see Ruth Hughey, ed., The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (Columbus, Ohio, 1960), ii:392–94, printing variants from the HCB version of ‘Attend ye, go play ye’ (titled in HCB ‘The lover scoffed’, and never published by Collier).


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the whole house of cards, as Carole R. Livingston demonstrated in 1986.165 This is captioned ‘The Cobler of Colchester’ in HCB, and although Collier did not publish it until 1868, in his Broadside Black-Letter Ballads, it is unmistakably part of the ballad-copyist’s sequence, figuring as the seventy-sixth of his eightythree poems, on folios 178v–179 of the manuscript. Its text reproduces, with tell-tale errors, that of a unique but fragmentary broadside in the library of the Society of Antiquaries (STC 5530.5, Lemon no. 90, from the Folkes-Gifford purchase of 1756). That curious survival is actually a half-sheet of printer’s waste, re-employed as a proof for STC 11485.5,166 with the one-page double-column ballad itself (‘A Merry New Song . . . of the Cobler of Colchester’) printed— too faintly for any vendible use—both on the recto and (upside down) on the verso; the folio sheet was then torn in half, and the order of the text it preserves is not obvious. It defeated Lemon himself in 1866 (pp. 29–32: he thought that the recto and verso were two consecutive pages) and Collier in 1868 (Broadside Black-Letter Ballads, pp. 31–35, adopting but tinkering with Lemon’s text), but Livingston has restored it beyond any dispute: the key point is that the two columns of print are to be read one a er another, as usual, and thus the text on the surviving top half of the recto actually jumps from the middle of the second stanza (where the first column ends) to the beginning of the sixth stanza as printed by Lemon and Collier. Only by understanding what the old printer was up to—two pulls of the same single page, in opposite directions, with half of the sheet now lost—can we reconstruct the order of stanzas in the ballad, although a few lines have been irretrievably lost in the tearing and trimming. As neither Lemon nor Collier in 1866–68 could solve the bibliographical conundrum, neither did the HCB copyist: for his version of ‘The Cobler of Colchester’, a mere six stanzas long, corresponds—with a few supplementary lines, eking out an otherwise pointless narrative sequence—to what appears on the recto of the Society of Antiquaries’ fragment. The two stanzas that are textually defective there also omit text (which could have been supplied from the verso, had one known) in HCB, and there is nothing in HCB that corresponds to the verso of Lemon no. 90. Perhaps when Collier transcribed it the fragment was still laid down on the ‘fine cartridge paper’ that the society had earlier provided (Lemon, p. v), but at any rate, the HCB version of ‘The Cobler of Colchester’ derives, as Livingston demonstrated, not from a broadside ballad as printed, or even an early transcript of such a printing, but from a misunderstanding of a unique but defective proof-pull in a library accessible to Collier. If the HCB copyist were following a genuine textual tradition before 1648, how could he,

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165. Livingston 1986, pp. 975–88. 166. Reproduced, with some explanation, by Percy Simpson in Proofreading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1935), plate 5 and p. 64.


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or any predecessor, have made such a mistake? Only by confronting precisely the same paper-waste that now survives, with the same incomprehension and lack of recourse to the text on its verso—which requires more than a short leap of faith. Carole Livingston’s argument, in 1986, followed inexorably: if the HCB manuscript of ‘The Cobler of Colchester’ is a modern forgery, ‘all of the eightythree ballads written in the same hand in the Hall Commonplace Book are [also forgeries]’ (p. 987), and ‘if we are convinced by Mr. Dawson’s [palaeographical] evidence’ of the identity of the HCB forger with that of the Perkins Folio annotator, the case against one common forger is proven (p. 993). That he was John Payne Collier ‘and no other’ seemed obvious to her, and alternative explanations of the palaeographical and provenential coincidences become almost absurd. The evidence of ‘The Cobler’, it seems to us, must also dismiss Dewey Ganzel’s hypothesis—casual though it may be—of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century scribbler with blank paper, blank margins, and time on his hands. By ‘Collier’s Great Forgery’ Giles Dawson in fact meant the Perkins Shakespeare Folio (Part Eight below), rather than the ballads in the Hall Commonplace Book—his essay of 1971 links the two artifacts—but in terms of literary mass, audacity, and the sheer labour of transcription in a mock-antique hand, the latter may also lay claim to that title. Eighty-three narrative, elegiac, memorial, moral, facetious, gallant, and amatory compositions in verse, many of them extended (one runs to 170 lines), would have tasked many a practicing pot-poet of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, to say nothing of the nineteenth, for sheer volume and variety of style and subject.167 Of these, thirty-five, totalling 1,836 lines—nearly the length of The Poet’s Pilgrimage—appeared in Collier’s Extracts of 1848–49. Eighteen more, with six repeats from Extracts, were published by him in 1869, in Twenty-five Old Ballads and Songs, leaving twenty-nine ballads to languish in manuscript. We do not as a matter of course analyse John’s unpublished suspect texts (a list with incipits was given by Dawson, and the entire text has been edited, with critical commentary, by Eric Berryman);168 but a few are provocative: sensational ballads on the murders of Lord Burgh and of John Brewen (the subject of a prose pamphlet that Collier would later attribute to Thomas Kyd) both echo entries in SR,169 and were presumably intended to

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167. Eighty-three is the number of ballads that are physically forged in HCB. Three more, represented as from a manuscript ‘belonging to the late Mr. Heber, and sold when his library was dispersed’, appear in Extracts II and are probably fabrications (see A73). 168. Berryman 1971. We are grateful to Dr. Berryman for giving us a copy of his thesis and discussing it with us; for specifics of his findings see A68. 169. ‘Corsbies [for ‘‘Cosby’s’’] Confession’, Dawson no. 61, matches an entry for 6 February 1591 (Arber, ii:574), and ‘Murther of Iohn Bruin’ one of five entries in July 1592; see Marshburn 1971, pp. 68–70 and 77–81.


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‘illustrate’ them in volume 3 of Extracts.170 A poem (‘Churchyardes ffarewell’, beginning ‘With shaking handes & heavy harte’) possibly intended to match the entry for ‘a ballett intituled a Fayre Well, called Churcheyardes Ronde’ or ‘a ballett intituled Churcheyardes ffayre well’ (both 1565–66, Arber i:308), remained unused, perhaps because Collier decided, or felt safe in suggesting, that both entries referred to the same extant text (STC 5230), which he had published in 1840 from a surreptitious transcript of the Heber-Britwell original.171 Two more unpublished narrative ballads (‘ffatall ffall at Paris Garden’, on the collapse of the bear-house, 1583, and ‘The life and Death of Lo. [Arthur] Graye’, d. 1562) may have seemed too much of a good thing; some of Collier’s ‘merry work’ here is really too lame to make public, as he must have appreciated.172 Several others, which derive wholly or in part from early printed sources, might also not repay the reprinting, but would of course strengthen the credentials of the rest, were the manuscript itself to undergo scrutiny.173 The very first (unpublished) poem in the series, ‘The Pinnace’, was perhaps based on a line in T. Cro on Croker’s 170. When in 1861–62 Collier finally published in N&Q a selection of the post-1587 entries, he included no spurious illustrations—a wise decision, in the climate of suspicion then prevailing. But Ganzel, in his riposte to Dawson, missed two key points about this: ‘If Collier forged thirty-four ballads into the manuscript to provide himself with false illustrations for the first two volumes of the Extracts edition, why should he not have composed more to correlate with the entries in the third volume?’ The first point is that he did—witness these unused specimens—and the second is that, if Collier believed in his MS, his choice not to employ what so neatly fit the occasion is inexplicable. 171. Extracts I, p. 136. In fact the two entries are independent: STC 5230 (‘Churchyard’s Round’) and 5221 (‘Churchyard’s Farewell’) are both known from unique Heber-Britwell-Huntington exemplars, from the group of six ballads offered as lot 377 in Heber IV. Could John, having copied and later published the first of these (‘A Farewell cauld Churchyeard’s Rounde’, printed by William Griffith), have failed to appreciate that the fih (‘Churchyarde’s Farewell’, printed for Edward Russell) was entirely different, and extant in 1848 at Britwell Court? If so, it was a curious mistake, as the descriptions in the Heber sale catalogue—which he himself wrote, in all likelihood—are unambiguously clear; perhaps, having not transcribed the latter broadside, he chose to dismiss it (‘no impression by or for Russell is known’), but this seems a rash and gratuitous misstatement, which the Heber catalogue itself could refute. At any rate he did not risk introducing a third version of ‘Churchyardes ffarewell’ (Dawson no. 78) into Extracts, or ever again allude to it. It is in fact, as Eric Berryman noted (1971, p. 142), a largely genuine Churchyard poem, titled ‘The partyng of frendes’ in A Praise and Report of Master Martin Forboishers Voyage to Meta Incognita (1578; STC 5251), but with numerous changes in the HCB text, and the addition of eight lines (90–97). 172. He did print four stanzas from the first in his 1879 revision of HEDP, i:244, referring to it as a ‘ballad of the time’ but not mentioning his immediate source. 173. Some of John’s later annotations in pencil clearly aim at the same end: e.g., beside ‘The Louer his Lullabie’ (Dawson no. 77) is Collier’s question and answer ‘Qre Gasc? Yes, p. 8 1587’, i.e., ‘Yes, I have ‘‘now’’ found this in George Gascoigne’s A Hundredth Sundrie Flowres (1587), p. 8’, its true source.


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vexed edition of Believe as You List, and thirty years later John was still seeking an audience for it.174 Like many of the HCB ballads, ‘The Pinnace’ is smugly, almost tauntingly, indelicate. It is hardly overinterpretive to suggest that John’s throwback ballads allowed him to air his own sentiments about women, sexual freedom, matrimony, the nuisance of fatherhood, and the like, libertine topics which, increasingly, he would deny dabbling in, let alone stressing in print—in contradistinction (say) to the goatish Rev. Mr. Dyce. The traditional misogyny of ‘The Batchelour’, ‘Women best when at Reste’, ‘The wickednesse of Cruell Women’, and ‘Wine Women and Dyce’ [sic], and the implicit if harmless lubricity of ‘Beauties fforte’, ‘Kitt hath lost her Key’, and ‘The Cuckoes Song’, remind us of Collier’s earlier brushes with censorship in the Percy Society, whatever his strait-laced persona now would prefer. Versification, no matter how casual or disguised as discovery, remained a source of release from the burdens of literary office to John all his life—as the secret vices of fabrication and forgery themselves may have done, re-enacting the arrogant pranks of his youth in the mid-life of his respectability. For when poetry and fakery meet in the HCB ballads, the result, for all its mischief as textual imposture, resonates (if you can endure the piously sly commentary) almost joyously. Not that the artistry of the ballads of 1848–49, nor even their verisimilitude as sixteenth-century compositions, is very impressive. Collier’s enthusiasm for old popular literature did not mean he could always mimic it persuasively, no matter how primitive it may have seemed, and some of his efforts are betrayed by metrical errors and lameness of diction beneath even the clumsiest of his models, as well as vocabulary and phrasing that sound anachronistic, even if precedents can be found in the dictionaries. In ‘The wickednesse of Cruell Women’, for instance, we are told that Clytemnestra ‘with Egisthus went astray’—pure music hall!—and that ‘Oedipus . . . went blinde’, the latter a use of ‘go’=‘become’ (OED 44a) that is certainly modern, as is the phrase ‘under some delusion’ (‘he felt he must be under some delusion’) in ‘A jest of Peele and Singer’. Many other jarring examples will strike us, like the ‘false notes’ John’s critics seized upon in the earlier Shakespearian ballads, although it is impossible to dismiss most of them categorically. Collier may have anticipated such a response once again, for on more than one occasion he pre-empted it: ‘Some words and expressions [in ‘The Praise of Milkemaydes’] . . . are hardly as old

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174. Collier annotated this ‘See Massinger ‘‘Believe as you List’’, pr[inted] by Percy Society p. 65’, where the same figure (a courtesan as ‘a new rigg’d pinnace’) is employed; see also his edition of Roxburghe Ballads, p. xix, noting ‘some ballads mentioned by Samuel Rowlands, in his ‘‘Crew of kind Gossips’’, &c. 1613’, including ‘The Pinnace rigg’d with silken saile’.


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as the date of the entry [1564]’, he remarked, invoking the tradition of evolving popular texts, and he disarmed scepticism of ‘The wickednesse of Cruell Women’ by blaming transmission: ‘the wording of the MS. . . . is clearly incorrect in several places’; likewise, the allusions to tobacco-taking in taverns in ‘The Vertuous Wife’, supposedly a ballad of 1566, were ‘evidently . . . adaptations to circumstances which occurred subsequent to the original publication’. From time to time Collier ‘corrected’ his seventeenth-century scribe by inserting bracketed words ‘which the copyist omitted’, or signalling, while conservatively retaining, a mistranscription (‘in the third verse, the word ‘‘eyes’’ has been written for eyne, which is necessary for the rhyme’ [Extracts I, pp. 187 and 162–63]). But more o en than not Collier’s commentary on his own work was shamelessly laudatory: ‘The Batchelour’ was an ‘excellent ballad’, ‘The great Earthquake’ a ‘remarkable historical relic’, ‘Life and Death’ a ‘remarkable and striking relic of the time’, and ‘The Damned Soule in Hell’ was ‘very striking in the manner and measure . . . [though] we do not find, from any re-entry of its republication, that it became popular’. ‘The Cuckoes Song’, one of the bawdier pieces, was not only ‘a remarkable and spirited ballad’, but one that positively demanded publication (‘the reader would hardly pardon [the editor] if he did not subjoin it’); while ‘Beauties fforte’, as John deposed deadpan, transcended the limitations of the genre itself: ‘The allegory is extremely well sustained, and the ballad must have been written by no inferior hand. It would be vain now to attempt to ascertain the authorship.’ Most of the thirty-five HCB ballads in Extracts are whole-cloth fabrications, unindebted to any specific literary precedent; but one is based closely upon, and two probably inspired by, lines in a new edition of John Redford’s Wit and Science: Collier had once borrowed the manuscript of this mid-sixteenthcentury play, which also contains songs by John Heywood and others, from B. H. Bright.175 Now in the British Museum (Add. MS 15,233), the Bright manuscript had been transcribed and lightly annotated by Halliwell for the Shakespeare Society, his work on it approximately coinciding with Collier’s at Stationers’ Hall, for the volume appeared in January 1848, a few months before the first volume of Extracts.176 ‘Arise, Arise, I Say’ is a lively poem of eighty-two

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175. BL Add. MS 38,813 includes Collier’s transcripts (fols. 1–8) of four of the ballads in the Bright MS, though not the two here discussed. 176. Halliwell had procured a transcript of the Bright MS before May 1846, when Collier, hard at work on Memoirs of Actors, was urging him to prepare it for the Shakespeare Society: ‘It is fifteen years since I saw the [original] MS . . . it will be well worth printing, and I hope that you will edit it’ (JPC to JOH, 5 May 1846, LOA 176/22); ‘You must edit it—I would not (and now could not) take it out of your hands’, adding that ‘I would not let the MS. go to press before it is collated—if we can collate it; but I am not sure that the original MS. went to the B.M. If it did, there will be no difficulty’ (8 May 1846, LOA 24/27).


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lines (Wit and Science, ed. Halliwell, pp. 89–92), which Collier reduced to eleven quatrains by eliminating the preliminary couplet and the fourth, eleventh, and thirteenth through nineteenth stanzas of the original, and altering what was le , sometimes drastically and nearly always for the worse.177 He described his version as ‘more brief, and on some accounts . . . more correct’, and directed ‘those who wish to compare the two versions, one in some respects modernized from the other’, to consult the Shakespeare Society’s text. It is likely that John Thorne’s ‘moral version’ of ‘The Hunt Is Up’ (Halliwell, pp. 65–68) inspired Collier’s two attempts to reconstruct its prototype: he alluded to Thorne’s text, without citing its source, as ‘a religious parody of our ballad, in precisely the same measure’ (Extracts I, p. 130). As director of the Shakespeare Society Collier would have had access to Halliwell’s work as it passed through the press—and indeed Halliwell himself may have shared his transcripts well before publication—but any note of the comparable texts in HCB is glaringly absent from Halliwell’s commentary. And if John had to rely on a source unavailable before mid-1847 for poems that figure as the twel h, fourteenth, seventeenth, and twenty-fourth among his eighty-three transcripts, this dependence would further confirm the late date of transcription of the entire HCB ballad-text.178 One other ballad follows the same pattern of abridgement and pretence of priority: ‘Against Covetousnes’ (Extracts I, pp. 33–35) is an eleven-stanza reduction of the twenty-seven-stanza ‘Nigardie and Riches’ in BL Add. MS 15,225 (another Bright manuscript), again promoted by Collier as ‘clearly the older and more correct copy of the two’. The remaining thirty-one ballads, as far as we now know, are original compositions, though mostly predicated on SR entries of titles or first lines.179 A few contain potentially treacherous misinformation, chief among these being the ‘circumstances not related elsewhere’ with which John justified publishing his ballad on ‘The burning of Powles’ in 1561 (Extracts I, pp. 39–40): any historian tempted to liven up his account of the celebrated conflagration with details of its duration (‘five long howers’, not four,

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177. ‘Awake and Arise’, Extracts I, pp. 186–87. 178. Collier had had temporary custody of the Bright MS around 1830, but the negative evidence of his four (only) transcriptions from it in BL Add. MS 38,813 suggests that he did not then provide himself with the other texts—although conceivably they could have been copied, altered, used as printer’s copy, and lost. See also note 176 above, indicating that in 1846 Collier did not seem to know the whereabouts of the MS. Another borrowing from Wit and Science, Heywood’s ‘Song against Idleness’ (Halliwell’s ed., pp. 79–80), received the same treatment in HCB, being cut down from six seven-line stanzas to four, but John saved the publication of this travesty for Twenty-five Old Ballads (1869). 179. A 1566 SR entry preserves, remarkably, the first four lines of ‘a ballett intituled fayne wolde I have a vertuous wyfe’, which John cheerfully extended to forty-eight in ‘The Vertuous Wife’ (Extracts I, p. 162).


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as in Stow), where the lightning struck (providentially, ‘it did not strike the crosse’), and how the fire spread (‘The wind it was so strong / It made the fier / To blaze the higher’) will have been duped. Minor embellishments in others will not seriously colour the biographies of Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex,180 George Peele, or the player John Singer;181 but ‘Ladie Janes lament’, ten quatrains in illustration of an entry for ‘the lamentation of the ladye Jane [Grey] made sayinge my fathers proclamation, now I must lose my hed’ (Arber i:209), might still confuse the unwary. Dawson, for example, wrote (p. 18) that ‘Collier . . . lived to see . . . ‘‘Lady Jane’s Lament’’ printed by Furnivall in Ballads from Manuscript (1869–72), the first volume of the Ballad Society’s publications’; but in fact Furnivall was principally concerned to republish the true ‘Lamentation’, from the original broadside that Henry Bradshaw had discovered in 1870 among the Portland Papers at Longleat (1562?; STC 7280, still unique), and subjoined Collier’s fabrication only ‘for completeness’ sake . . . though I have no means of ascertaining either its correctness as a print of the MS. or its authenticity’ (Ballads from Manuscript, i:426–31). By 1909 C. H. Firth could dismiss the Extracts ‘Lamentation’ as ‘a fraud of the most barefaced character, written in a bad imitation of sixteenth-century English, and trite and trivial in expression’, probably the earliest formal denunciation of an HCB ballad.182 The only attempt at Shakespeariana among these is by no means ambitious: an allusion to ‘Romeo and Juliett’ and the feuding families ‘Mountagu and Capulett’ in the very long and painfully flat ‘Two Spanish Lovers’—the mention of whom ‘makes [the poem] valuable, if on no other account’. But ‘references to [the story] are numerous long before the date of Shakespeare’s drama’ (Extracts II, p. 205), and this one, supposedly of 1586, was signalled only as ‘interesting’. John took care, in the ballads of Extracts, not to court disbelief through details as sensational as those of the bold 1830s. Some of the merrier ballads, on themes safely non-historical, must have given their composer a moment of relatively innocent fun. One cannot but imagine his eyes lighting up at the entry of 17 September 1578 for ‘ij ballates, one of Dice, wyne, and women’ (Arber ii:338), whose orthography in HCB is subtly altered

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180. ‘The Death of Devoreux’ (Extracts II, pp. 35–37) is offered not as a lost entry, but merely as ‘a poetical rarity’, which Sidney Lee cited in DNB (1888) without questioning. 181. The ‘Jest’ involving Peele and Singer is based on a late-seventeenth-century source, which the ballad would appear to antedate; but the narrative itself is merely folklore. 182. Firth 1909, p. 61. In 1917 Firth contributed an essay on ‘Ballads and Broadsides’ to Shakespeare’s England, ed. C. T. Onions, remarking (ii:537) that as the ballads published in Extracts ‘are of very little interest and their genuineness is very doubtful, none of them are referred to in this chapter’. Two years later Hyder Rollins noted that Collier’s manuscript ‘has long been an object of suspicion’ and suggested that readers might find it ‘profitable’ to compare Collier’s versions of certain ballads with others known from MSS in public collections (Rollins 1919b, pp. 53–54).


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to ‘Wine Women and Dyce’—an ‘amusing production’, John assessed it (Extracts II, pp. 69–71), though only a jingle, and a lame one at that. No better as verse is ‘Defence of a bald Head’, ninety-six lines of dialogue between ‘B’ (for Baldness) and ‘H’ (Hair) about hair loss, traced repeatedly to venery; but the debate is good-natured, and one must suppose that the poet, now certainly balding, enjoyed concocting his doggerel ‘defence’:183 Then, thinke also of this: if you no haire have gott, How pleasantly your haire you misse, when weather it is hot. Jeux d’esprit like these did not flatter Collier’s muse, but some other poems gained him an audience far beyond the few readers of Extracts. Cunningham in the Athenaeum reprinted six HCB ballads and three from the imaginary Heber manuscript, one of the former ‘a very sprightly performance’, another ‘deserv[ing] transcription for its own merits’.184 Chappell reprinted or extracted nine, including four of Cunningham’s selections; and Rimbault in 1851 anthologized, incomprehensibly, ‘Kitt hath lost her Key’; while Arber included ‘Beauties fforte’ in the first volume of his English Garner (1877, p. 128).185 The three HCB poems selected by Norman Ault for Elizabethan Lyrics (1925; 3d ed. 1949), one of the best and most influential collections of its kind, were ‘Maides and Widowes’ (in both Cunningham and Chappell), ‘To his Lady’ (from the 1869 Twenty-five Old Ballads), and the enduringly familiar ‘Love me little, love me long’.186 The last had also appealed to Chappell, and to many other anthologists. In Extracts I (pp. 213–14) it illustrates a 1569–70 entry to William Griffith of ‘a ballett intituled love me a lyttle and love me longe’ (Arber i:408). The title, whether or not intended as a first line, is proverbial, going back at least to John Heywood (1547: see Tilley L 559), and appears in Florio’s First Fruits (1578), Gabriel Harvey’s

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183. Like the unforeseen surfacing of ‘Ladie Janes Lament’ and the Heber-Miller original of ‘Churchyardes ffarewell’, an extant printed prose tract that can be identified with the 1579 entry (STC 23603) rendered the Extracts fabrication superfluous. In this instance, however, Collier preempted criticism by announcing the redundancy in N&Q 1 (8 December 1849), pp. 84–85. 184. It is always possible—as we have suggested before—that Cunningham suspected or even knew what Collier was up to: one ‘Heber’ poem, he wrote, ‘has rather a more modern sound than the date of the entry, but it may have been altered in transcription’; while ‘The Death of Devoreux’ ‘reminds us in many places of Burns’s ‘‘Dirge for the Earl of Glencairn’’’. But these may have been only casual reflections, not hints nor a private subtext between friends. 185. A. H. Bullen, however, removed it from the revised edition (1903). 186. Ault expressed no doubts about the authenticity of these three, but, ‘failing to trace Collier’s MS.’, adapted his texts from those of Extracts (1949, pp. 37–38, 61–62, 514–15, and 520n., 521n., 530n.). ‘To his Lady’ is in fact closely based on a genuine ballad in Barnaby Googe’s Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonettes (1563; STC 12048).


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marginalia (ca. 1580), in Nashe, Marlowe, and even—slightly altered—in Herrick.187 It is always employed as a one-line proverb, however, and there is no evidence ( pace Rollins, no. 1557), that it was ‘evidently the first line of an enormously popular song’, nor that there was ever a traditional second line (‘Is the burden of my song’) before Collier. Rollins seems strangely to have lost track of the origin of this ballad in Extracts, for he cited Eleanor M. Brougham’s Corn from Olde Fieldes (1918) as quoting two stanzas ‘from a Manuscript of about 1610’, and speculated that ‘perhaps . . . [she] has found a copy of the ballad here registered’. All the Hon. Mrs. Brougham was reproducing, however, were the first and fi h stanzas of the Extracts text, reporting—somewhat arbitrarily— Collier’s own description of HCB as ‘of about 1610’. ‘Love me little’ is indeed a fabrication, whose transcription in a mockseventeenth-century hand was intended to falsify its date of origin, but the poem itself has transcended discredit. A er Chappell’s republication it stuck in the popular memory. Charles Reade’s use of the proverb as the title of his 1859 novel may or may not be indebted to Collier, but forty years later Winston Churchill’s Richard Carvel summoned up the verses themselves, to ‘the tinkle of the spinet, and the notes of an old familiar tune’ (chapter 38), and again (chapter 55), when ‘the words of that air came out of my heart from long ago’: Love me little, love me long Is the burden of my song. Love that is too hot and strong Burneth soon to waste: Still, I would not have thee cold, Nor too backward, nor too bold, Love that lasteth till ’tis old Fadeth not in haste. This is indeed poetry, for once, and the next four stanzas carry out the conceit of the incipit skilfully. It is ironic, though perhaps a bittersweet loss to Collier himself, in a lifetime of craving praise as a poet, that his best-known lines of verse—and certainly his only presence, if only for the second line of the initial couplet, in books of ‘familiar quotations’ 188—could never be claimed by their secret composer.

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187. See McKerrow 1958, iii:166 and iv:441. 188. See e.g., Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 16th ed. (1992), p. 776; and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 5th ed. (1999), p. 17. Both date the verse to 1569–70.


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Collier’s 1848 Masques: Red Herrings, New Problems To imagine that John Payne Collier could, on some occasions at least, successfully fabricate a ballad in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century style is by no means eccentric; but to suppose that he could concoct a whole Jacobean poetical masque in convincing pastiche overestimates both his recklessness and his creative abilities. Yet with such he has been taxed. At the very end of 1849, in a long-delayed co-operative Shakespeare Society volume devoted to Inigo Jones and the courtly entertainment, John published five early masques, two by Ben Jonson, one attributed to John Marston, and two anonymous, their manuscript originals ‘belonging to the editor’.189 Nothing is amiss with Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens or his Twelh Night’s Revels (otherwise The Masque of Blackness), both well-known from early printed quartos and folios but here edited, for the first time, from two manuscripts in the British Museum. The former is in Jonson’s elegant autograph, the latter scribal, as Collier now realized, although in HEDP (i:viii and 363) he had believed it autograph too. The Mountebank’s Masque (a Gray’s Inn Christmas show of 1617– 18, otherwise titled The First Antimasque of Mountebanks) presents difficulties, however. John seems to have employed a manuscript belonging to the Duke of Devonshire: his thanks to the Duke ‘for the opportunity of printing this valuable relic’ (p. xix) could conceivably apply to a sketch of Harlequin by Inigo Jones mentioned in connection with the masque, but more likely refers to the masque itself. This is now Huntington Library HM 21, although it dropped from sight over a long period, and on the first page is pencilled ‘By J. Marstone’ in an old hand, or an imitation of one. Collier described it as ‘a new discovery’, and attributed it to the satirist and playwright ‘not only because his name is on the cover, in a handwriting of the time, although only in pencil, but because it is corrected in several places in his own handwriting, which entirely agrees with other extant specimens’ (Inigo Jones, pp. xviii–xix). But the corrections (minor and scattered) are not demonstrably in Marston’s hand,190 nor is the improbable pencilled ascription, unlikely spelling and all. Even without the evidence of handwriting, which is all too generic, and all too characteristic of Collier’s authorship revelations, modern scholars have unani-

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189. Inigo Jones: A Life of the Architect by Peter Cunningham; Remarks on Some of His Sketches for Masques and Dramas by J. R. Planché; and Five Court Masques Edited from the Original MSS. of Ben Jonson, John Marston, etc. by J. Payne Collier. Though dated 1848, the book did not actually appear until aer 18 December 1849, when John Forster enquired of Peter Cunningham: ‘When is Inigo out?’ (Forster Correspondence, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University); the earliest review we have found is 23 February 1850. 190. Collier seems to have been genuinely confused about Marston’s autograph: see Tricomi’s exhaustive account (1980) and below, QD A89a.4.


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mously dismissed the attribution to Marston;191 a preferred candidate, at least for the verse, remains Thomas Campion. Nor was Collier’s ‘discovery’ at all new: John Nichols, who mistakenly thought the Antimasque a ‘second part’ of Gesta Grayorum (1594), had first published it from a different manuscript in 1788 and again in 1823, in his Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, and further discussed yet another manuscript in a footnote to Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First (1828, iii:464).192 In 1952 Sydney Race suggested that Collier had based his text directly upon Nichols, and that the ‘Marston’ manuscript was imaginary. It is not, of course, and in terms of variant readings and overall arrangement is superior to Nichols’s, although it omits some material. Race extended his allegations, and his implicit confidence in Collier’s creativity, by asserting that the final two entertainments published in 1848, The Masque of the Twelve Months and The Masque of the Four Seasons, were also Collier originals. While again these charges are dismissible, considerable murkiness surrounds both compositions. The Twelve Months, a masque staged at court in January and February 1619, which John claimed to have taken ‘from a manuscript of the time, belonging to the editor’, has in recent years been attributed with near-certainty to George Chapman,193 and certain errors in the sequence of Collier’s very ‘disordered’ text are consistent with his editorial misunderstanding of a hard-to-follow or misbound original.194 No serious doubts about its authenticity remain, however, for, as Martin Butler has shown, ‘external evidence . . . unavailable to Collier provides independent testimony of the masque’s existence, while the internal evidence [of Chapman’s authorship, which Collier did not himself moot, nor hazard a date] is of a kind which Collier would have been unlikely to have known about or to have fabricated convincingly’; furthermore, ‘the garbled state of the text which Collier printed’ is ‘so thoroughly confused as to show that [Collier] did not understand the correct order in which the masque’s component parts were to be arranged’.195 But again

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191. See A69 for references. 192. Collier may have forgotten about this last MS, or deliberately have ignored it, although Frederic Madden had asked him about it in 1835 (Madden Diary, 23 November): it passed through the 1825 sale of James Boswell the younger (lot 3145, £4 4s. to Pickering), and was still in Pickering’s stock ten years later, when Madden examined it. By 1886 it had passed to Gray’s Inn, where it remains. See Bentley, v:1376–78, for other MSS. 193. See A69 for references. 194. Chambers, ES, iv:58–59, remarked that the text ‘can easily be reconstructed’. Collier seems to have been aware of some of the problems, for in implicit self-defence he declared (p. xx) that ‘we have given it as it stands in the manuscript, not even dividing the lines, whenever they are written in sequence, and without observation of the metre’. 195. Private communication, 27 July 2000; Dr. Butler’s edition is forthcoming in Courtly Negotiations: The Stuart Masque and Political Culture.


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Collier’s source has dropped from sight—this time perhaps irretrievably—for the ‘manuscript of the time’ cannot be traced through the Collier or Ouvry sales or any parallel nineteenth-century dispersal, nor in any institutional or private collection of our day. Given Collier’s penchant for misdirection, it is possible that his ‘manuscript of the time’ was in fact his own modern transcript of a sequestered original, and if so it may have figured as part of lot 702 in the 1884 sale, ‘manuscripts in the handwriting of J. P. Collier’ of two named masques ‘and 3 others’. Alas, that lot as well remains untraced, but despite the mystery of an unlocated original, we are disposed nowadays to believe in The Twelve Months. The Four Seasons, even more clearly, cannot be a fabrication, for its manuscript survives in the British Library (Egerton MS 2623, fols. 20–23), acquired in 1885 from the stock of F. S. Ellis, who had purchased it three years earlier at the Ouvry sale. But other, and possibly uglier, questions about it arise. John described the slight piece (149 lines; seven pages in manuscript, six in print) as ‘the property of the editor’, and as a ‘show . . . of a peculiar character . . . written for the sake of introducing and terminating a supper, upon some occasion which has not been recorded’; he attempted to adduce a connection with a finished drawing by Inigo Jones of ‘The Four Seasons’ in the Devonshire collection, and declared it ‘evident that James I., his Queen, the Princes Henry and Charles, and Princess Elizabeth, were present’, and that ‘hence we may be sure that the performance occurred before 1612’ (Inigo Jones, pp. xx–xxi). The last is simply not true, and it is difficult to believe that John did not know it. Erased but still legible, on the verso of the last leaf, is a contemporary endorsement that reads ‘at Chirke Castle, 1634’.196 Bentley in 1956 (v:1303–06) saw ‘no reason to doubt the endorsement’, and therefore dismissed Collier’s dating of pre-1612, although he found the suggestion of royal presence beguiling, and posited instead a western visit by Charles I, his queen, and their young children. A more recent, and more persuasive, account of the mini-masque by Cedric Brown fairly demonstrates that the entertainment, at the seat of Sir Thomas Middleton in Denbighshire, North Wales, was composed (probably by the baronet-poet Sir Thomas Salusbury) for the visiting Egerton-Bridgewater family: Brown calls attention to the proximity of Ludlow Castle, and to affinities with another masque of the same year performed by and for the Bridgewater family, Milton’s Comus.197 Fortuitously, Miltonic echoes in The Four Seasons— to Arcades, in fact—had also suggested themselves, nearly two centuries earlier, to the Rev. Henry John Todd, who first described Collier’s manuscript and found

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196. So transcribed by the British Museum cataloguer (Catalogue of Additions . . . 1882–87 [1889], p. 352), with the remark that ‘the endorsement, giving the place and date, has been carefully erased, but may still be read’. 197. Brown 1977 and 1985, p. 34.


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no difficulty in reading the now-faint endorsement (‘a Maske performed, as it is stated on the back of the manuscript . . . at Chirke Castle in 1634’), nor in identifying ‘the hand-writing of the first Earl of Bridgewater’ (Milton, Poetical Works, ed. Todd, 2d ed. [1809], vi:170). In 1809 Todd stated that ‘the manuscript is now in the Marquis of Stafford’s library’, that is, the father of Collier’s patron Lord Ellesmere, to whose library John had enjoyed access since 1830. In 1849 it was on Collier’s shelves, with the tell-tale endorsement all but erased, and now endowed (in print) with a suggested provenance and date incompatible with Todd’s old notice. The most charitable explanation must be that a the or extrusion from Bridgewater House occurred independently of Collier, who a erward acquired the manuscript with its doctored last leaf, and never examined it closely enough. Less charitably, he may have received it from Ellesmere by gi —but if so, why not say so, with Ellesmere alive?—and deliberately have ‘improved’ its date by erasing the endorsement. Least charitably requires no spelling-out.198 In April 1846 Barron Field had died, with his project of editing the plays of Thomas Heywood for the Shakespeare Society yet in its infancy. In 1842 he had issued parts I and II of Edward IV, in 1845–46 The Fair Maid of the Exchange and Fortune by Land and Sea (Heywood and William Rowley), but this le much yet to be done with an author who himself famously claimed to have had ‘either an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger’ in 220 plays. Although only some 30 of these seem to survive, editing Heywood has always seemed a daunting task: who is to say which of the hundreds of anonymous plays of about 1596– 1641 betray at least his ‘maine finger’, and how should his voluminous output of non-dramatic verse and prose (including the o -reprinted Apology for Actors, 1612) be treated? Since the Shakespeare’s Society’s effort, the only attempt at reassembling Heywood’s works has been R. H. Shepherd’s in 1874, a six-volume reprint now ‘badly outdated’, though, with its twenty-eight plays and entertainments, ‘the only collection which is even remotely complete’.199

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198. Similarly, it is hard to rationalize the fate of the Ralegh letter published by Collier in March 1853 as ‘among the MSS. of the Earl of Ellesmere, transmitted to him from the time of his ancestor’. This was certainly then the property of the first Earl (‘the present wearer of the title’), whom Collier specifically acknowledged, and from whom he may have borrowed it to transcribe. But the letter vanished from the Ellesmere archives (Latham and Youings 1999, p. 44, wrote that ‘all efforts to trace its present whereabouts have drawn a blank’), and turned up instead in the JPC sale, lot 1050, fetching £17. More recently it sold at Christie’s New York (26 April 1978, lot 248, and 28 November 1983, lot 326) and Christie’s London (3 December 2003; lot 38, £19,120), and is now once more in a private collection. 199. Logan and Smith 1975, p. 115. An Oxford edition, projected by Arthur Brown in the 1960s, has never appeared.


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Still, in April 1848 the council of the Shakespeare Society hoped to continue Field’s work, and proposed to its members a separate subscription to Heywood’s plays (and a parallel edition of Thomas Dekker), at an independent 10s. per annum. A frosty response by the membership to this effective surcharge led the council to withdraw the suggestion. By April 1850 it was determined to proceed with the remaining Heywood plays as part of the regular series, for ‘an Editor has been obtained . . . who will leave nothing undone which an ancient love for the subject can accomplish’. This honour inevitably fell to John Payne Collier, but he had not necessarily sought the task: in 1846 Dyce had apparently ‘consented to edit the remaining plays of Heywood’, but was disappointed by the society’s level of support. ‘I of course took it for granted’, he wrote to John, ‘that the Sh. Soc. was to be at the expence of furnishing me with transcripts . . . from the Museum copies’,200 and from that date forward no record is found of his part in the project. Five years later Collier described his own editorial responsibility as inherited, and reluctant: ‘In consequence of the death of a friend [i.e., Field], I have been, in a manner, trapped into the superintendence of an edition of Tho. Heywood’s works’.201 Nonetheless, during 1850–51 John provided the Shakespeare Society with four more volumes containing eight plays by Thomas Heywood—The Fair Maid of the West, parts I and II; Royal King and Loyal Subject; A Woman Killed with Kindness; If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, parts I and II; The Golden Age; and The Silver Age—which constitute all but the very last of his society contributions; the fourth volume concludes with a promise, never fulfilled, that ‘our next issue, in pursuance of our design to republish the whole of Heywood’s dramatic works, will be the Brazen and Iron Ages’.202 Each pair of plays was sparely introduced and annotated, with explanatory commentary printed at the end of the book, Collier stating that ‘like Mr. Field, he has avoided the inconvenience of foot-notes, which usually distract attention from the progress of the plot and from the poetry of the scene’, and had also ‘excluded many quotations where one would answer the purpose, deeming it a useless consumption of space to multiply authorities’ (Fair Maid of the West [1850], p. vi). No complication attends any of his chosen copy-texts, save that of Heywood’s masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness, which he took from the third quarto of 1617, and repeated an old tale of a purloined first quarto of 1607: ‘we can ourselves bear witness to having many years ago seen a copy of ‘‘A Woman Killed with Kindness’’, dated 1607, upon the shelves of an eminent book-auctioneer. It strangely disappeared from 200. Dyce to JPC, 7 November 1846, Ohio State University SPEC.MMS.12. 201. JPC to W. C. Trevelyan, 12 June 1851, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34. 202. Collier’s holograph transcripts of these two plays are now Folger MSS N.a.60–61.

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sight before the sale came on. . . . There was a mark in it by which we should know it again; and whoever may have it now in their hands (if it still exists) can congratulate themselves only on a very unsatisfactory possession.’ 203 Collier evidently had forgotten, or chose to ignore, the appearance of a second copy—which in fact remains the sole known exemplar—in a volume of five Heywood plays from the library of Charles II that had figured in B. H. Bright’s sale (1845, lot 2900), although at the time he had signalled it as ‘an item of such importance that we never heard of more than one other copy of it’ (Athenaeum, 1 February 1845, p. 120). This had in fact passed to the British Museum, and his attention was soon enough called to it, when ‘the great supplemental manuscript catalogue of books in the British Museum, in 153 volumes . . . was made accessible’: there, ‘we were surprised to see . . . the first edition of which we had been in search for twenty years’.204 In an appendix to the next Heywood volume (Two Historical Plays, 1851) he offered seven new leaves intended to cancel their 1850 equivalents, since ‘not a few errors of importance had crept into the later impression of 1617’. Why John could not in 1850 have traced the fate of the Bright volume (purchased by his friend Thomas Rodd, for £12 17s.) remains a mystery, considering his reiterated concern for the purloined copy of 1824: perhaps he genuinely forgot, or was too pressed to investigate.205 Nothing more has been seen of the ostensibly missing exemplar.206

Obligations Interactive antiquarianism in the era of the societies, to say nothing of dayto-day patronage and literary politics, drew working scholars like Collier into relationships sometimes more taxing than profitable. While his labour on the Handbook of Chatsworth was effectively part of his salaried duties as Devonshire’s librarian, one might also regard it as a quid pro quo for the use of countless essential resources; likewise, the cataloguing of Ellesmere’s archives and

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203. A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. Collier (1850), pp. vii–viii. This circumstantially firsthand account (he suggests that he himself would have competed for the prize) is at variance with the report in Dodsley, vii:291, where ‘a copy of this play, dated 1607, we are informed, was inserted by Mr. Evans in one of his catalogues of 1824’, etc., and ‘would have occasioned a strong competition’. 204. Heywood, Two Historical Plays, ed. Collier (1851), p. xxi. 205. As it is, the 1850 text closely follows Collier’s edition of 1825 (Dodsley’s Old Plays, vii:225– 90). The substitute pages, which also embody corrections of ‘one or two mistakes for which we are responsible’, have been overlooked by all subsequent editors of Heywood’s play. 206. We have not traced any listing of such a book in any contemporary sale, but from what other source would Collier have known the correct date of the quarto? K. M. Sturgess (1970) does not mention the Collier claim.


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library and the editing of individual texts were mutually rewarding enterprises, even if enough seemed enough in 1847. But other service to titled or influential acquaintances took its toll of John’s time in the busy 1840s, and le him in one instance bitterly resentful, when a reciprocal gesture—as he considered it—was denied him. John Campbell (1779–1861, Chief Justice, Lord Chancellor, legal biographer) had crossed paths with John Dyer Collier in early Morning Chronicle days, and appears to have regarded John Payne with affection and respect in the 1840s and 1850s. As early as 1842 Collier had rendered assistance to the ‘literary labours’ of the new-made Baron, who thanked him, although ‘it does come too late for the first edition of my new book’;207 two years later John put Campbell in touch with Egerton, in connection with Campbell’s brief life of the first Baron Ellesmere, read the dra of it ‘in its present incorrect & defective state’, and provided, at Campbell’s request, corrections and ‘hints’ (‘the more numerous [they] are, I shall be the better pleased’), as well as facsimiles of Egerton manuscripts to help embellish the work.208 Finally, on Campbell’s behalf, he negotiated the sale of The Lives of the Lord Chancellors to John Murray in early 1845—a difficult exercise, involving the usual delays by Murray, a threat to approach Longmans, and Campbell’s notion of publishing at his own risk if Murray’s terms were not more ‘liberal’ than Collier first reported.209 Murray did indeed take on the work, thanking John directly ‘for the favour you have conferred on me in confiding to me the MS. . . . I should be proud to be the publisher of such a work by such an Author’;210 and Campbell’s Lives became one of the staples of the publishing house. On publication of the first three volumes, Campbell duly presented the trio to John, but his gratitude did not extend to completing the set as it came from the press: John had to request the remaining volumes from John Murray III, who supplied them. ‘His Lordship sent me the three first volumes’, Collier wrote in December 1846, with perhaps a trace of remonstrance, ‘but as I lent him no aid in the last two vols. he omitted me, and presented the work to those who had more immediate claims upon him. I shall read the continuation of the work, I

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207. Campbell to JPC, 2 November 1842, FF/K MS 623, apparently relating to Campbell’s Lives of the Chief Justices, which however remained unpublished until 1849. Collier seems to have volunteered information on ‘the mode of making a Chief Justice in the reign of Elizabeth’. 208. Campbell to JPC, 2 September and 29 November 1844, FF/K MSS 624 and 625. This relates to Campbell’s magnum opus, the Lives of the Lord Chancellors (8 vols., 1845–47). Collier must have told Campbell that he himself intended to write a full-scale life of Ellesmere, which Campbell ‘hope[d] sincerely’ his own work ‘will neither supersede nor delay . . . I am conscious there must still be ample space [for an extended biography]. With me he is one of 150 [Lord Chancellors]’. 209. FF/K MSS 626–30, five undated letters from Campbell to JPC. 210. Murray to JPC, 24 March 1845; copy in John Murray archives.


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am sure, with much pleasure.’ 211 If this was fair warning of how far Lord Campbell would go to repay a few favours, however, John did not quite absorb it, as we shall see in a subsequent decade. Richard Neville, Lord Braybrooke, the much-maligned editor of Pepys’s Diary, may seem an unlikely applicant for Collier’s advice, a er the fracas over ‘indecency’ in Percy Society publications which had so provoked Collier and Dyce in 1844. But as long-term president of the Percy Society, vice-president of the Shakespeare Society from its start, and a fellow member of the Camden Society Council, his lordship was certainly in a position to enlist John’s help with his revised new edition of Pepys (5 vols., 1848–49). Between 6 July and 28 November 1848 John wrote at least seventeen letters to Braybrooke, answering a host of queries, mainly about plays attended by Pepys. From his labour he did extract the satisfaction of condemning some readings that Joseph Hunter had suggested (‘As I write short-hand myself, & know various systems, I can speak to this point with some positiveness’) and of questioning the literary expertise of John Holmes of the British Museum, another of Braybrooke’s advisers.212 He was able to correct some titles, provide one cast-list and biographical data for a few actors, and identify several plays, including ‘the new play, Queen Elizabeth’s Troubles, and the History of Eighty-Eight . . . the most ridiculous that sure ever came upon stage’, which he recognized as an adaptation of Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody.213 This response impressed Braybrooke (‘your account of 88 is very satisfactory & just in time’), who thought it ‘odd . . . that a play which went through so many editions should have been unnoticed by Langbaine &c.’, but blamed ‘constant interruptions, & numerous other avocations’, and lack of access to ‘a first-rate library’ for his own editorial shortcomings.214 These were in fact pilloried in a series of Athenaeum reviews, which Braybrooke initially suspected were Collier’s; but John denied all knowledge, and Braybrooke ‘acquitted’ him.215

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211. JPC to Murray, 7 December 1846, John Murray archives. Murray sent Collier a further two volumes in 1848 (JPC to Murray, 18 December). 212. JPC to Braybrooke, 11 July and 23 August 1848; all the Collier letters quoted are part of Pepys Library Ancillary MS 43. 213. JPC to Braybrooke, 17 August 1667. 214. Braybrooke to JPC, 24 August 1848, FF/K MS 586. But Langbaine did make the identification: see his Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), p. 265. 215. JPC to Braybrooke, 21 and 23 August 1848. The reviews were in fact written by Peter Cunningham, who in his notice of vol. 2 (Athenaeum, 8 July, pp. 669–70) had named Collier, saying that his ‘curious printed elegy’ on the death of the actor Clun and his playbill for The Humorous Lieutenant deserved a reference (on the latter, see QD A16.53). Elsewhere Cunningham repeatedly commented on Braybrooke’s errors and imperfect knowledge of Pepys’s times, and claimed that the edition was ‘a book . . . not edited at all’ (9 September, pp. 902–04). On 23 December,


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At least Collier maintained his dignity in not flattering Braybrooke, whose stinginess about commentary ‘would be unexceptionable, if people were all of one mind as to who, or what, is not important’ (Collier to Braybrooke, 6 July 1848), and who might well (‘if I may be allowed to express an opinion’) take account of the Athenaeum critique ‘as regards future volumes’ (23 August). ‘Your Lordship mentions ‘‘interruptions and numerous avocations’’: no doubt there are many’, he wrote tartly, ‘but you must not expect readers to allow for them. They think that a Peer can have nothing to do but ‘‘To pick his teeth and swirl his seals about’’, as Churchhill [sic] describes his patron’. Braybrooke seems not to have resented John’s audacity; he credited him individually in at least six notes, and in the last volume added ‘my best thanks to John Payne Collier, F.A.S., whose knowledge of the drama proved of essential service’ (v:215). He also complimented his correspondent on the first part of Extracts (‘full of interesting, & to me, new matter’), supplying one modest correction, for which John professed himself ‘greatly obliged’.216 Braybrooke seems also to have met a reciprocal application by Collier helpfully, up to a point, although what eventuated remains unclear. John naturally coveted access to the Pepys Library, at Magdalene College, Cambridge, home of the Selden-Pepys ballad collection and other seventeenth-century ephemera virtually unknown to the scholarly world of the day. In September 1848, a er a run of successful answers to Braybrooke’s queries, he raised the question with the usual mixture of tact and importunity: ‘One of these days I shall have an earnest request to prefer to your Lordship’, he prefaced it. In aid of his own ongoing research (‘I am writing a history of popular literature from the earliest times to the period of the Revolution’) he sought ‘an opportunity . . . of rummaging and examining, at my leisure, the contents of the Pepysian Library. In that quarter, you are all powerful’ (Collier to Braybrooke, 22 September). ‘All I want’, he elaborated (25 September), ‘is, that your Lordship will dispose your Brother, the Dean [George Neville, the master and vice-chancellor of Magdalene], to afford me such facilities as, under the testator’s will, he is able to give me, in consulting the Pepysian Library’. But his request was not simply for access, and he began by stipulating conditions, almost as if courting rejection: ‘If I am asking or expecting too much, I am sorry for it. I would rather have a direct denial, than a grudging permission, without full means of acquiring the knowledge I am in search of.’ The ‘full means’ John wished for—extraordinarily, con-

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however, he found that vol. 4 was ‘more successful’, especially as Braybrooke had ‘called in able assistance on one or two occasions’, with the result that some of the notes ‘evince an intimate knowledge of the period’ (pp. 1293–95). 216. Braybrooke to JPC, 24 August 1848; JPC to Braybrooke, 25 August.


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sidering the strict administration of Pepys’s bequest to his college—was in effect the run of the collections, with minimal, if any, supervision, a liberty which in retrospect might send a shiver down the spine of any curator. ‘I cannot accomplish what I desire without occupying considerable time, & I am sure that there is much in the collection that is not known at all, or not known as it ought to be’, he explained (22 September), as ‘I do not know the extent of the library’ and ‘a search such as I must make is not made at a hand-gallop’ (25 September); but, he insisted, ‘the evil I dread is, that all the time I am making my search and examination, and extracting passages and particulars, I shall have to victimize some B.A. or M.A., a man of education and standing, whose time is highly valuable, to attend in the library with me. . . . I would rather say herea er that ‘‘I could not examine the books in any way that would be useful or satisfactory’’, than to run over them in such tantalizing and distressing haste, as I must use with a learned graduate of the University at my elbow, wondering what I can find worth his time or my attention.’ ‘If it were only a servant, or person of that class’, he conceded, ‘I could be content, because, if necessary, I could make it worth his while.’ If these stipulations rang alarms in the minds of Lord Braybrooke or his brother, the legatory guardian of the library, we do not know: they should have done. On 12 October Collier thanked Braybrooke for ‘the trouble taken about giving me facilities at Cambridge’, but the extent of these is unclear, and despite mooting a visit at Easter,217 John seems not to have visited Magdalene College, and the treasure-house of the Pepys books and manuscripts, in 1849 or at any later time. His last extant letter to Braybrooke (28 November 1848) finds him setting out for Oxford for a day or two, and unable to help with a query. A third, and altogether dissimilar, literary engagement with eminent contemporaries began also for Collier in 1848. Our account of The Trevelyan Papers, an ill-starred project extending over fi een years for John, and nine more for the Trevelyans, belongs to a later chapter. But initially it involved Collier as a councillor of the Camden Society, of which Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan, sixth Baronet Trevelyan of Nettlecombe (1797–1879), was himself an early member. In January 1848 Sir Walter approached John, offering the society ‘a Selection from his Family Papers consisting of Documents illustrative more particularly of Irish Affairs from about the year 1595 to the Time of the Civil War’,218 and a considerable correspondence ensued; the council approved the suggestion in

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217. Easter fell between the two final sessions of the British Museum Commission, however, and John may have had more pressing affairs. 218. Camden Society Council minute books, 2 February 1848. The idea had been floated between W. C. Trevelyan and his cousin Charles about two years before; Charles Trevelyan to W. C. Trevelyan, 8 December 1845, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 33.


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November 1849, and by mid-1850 Collier had agreed to collaborate with Sir Walter—the nominal editor—in ‘culling & weaving together’ the family papers, and, as it happened, providing biographical introductions to two of three volumes. John Pycro Collier, as we have noted, had in 1846 become private secretary to Sir Walter’s cousin, Charles Edward (later Sir Charles) Trevelyan, then assistant secretary to the Treasury, and John Payne took on what turned out to be an interminably demanding editorial obligation largely—his son felt, nine years later—‘to make an acknowledgement to Sir Charles of the great benefit he had conferred on me’, and with a strict understanding that he was never to be paid.219 Carrying through what he promised, however, turned out to be more difficult and protracted than anyone had anticipated. Nonetheless all parties to the project remained on respectful, even affectionate terms over the years, which found John working in spurts between periods when other literary, controversial, and family demands prevailed on his energy, and the Trevelyans enduringly patient as nearly three decades elapsed, for three volumes of Papers to trickle into print.

Marlowe: A Project Released Amid all these piecemeal commitments at the cusp of the half-century, John abandoned one long-deferred project, perhaps as part of his temporary rapprochement with Alexander Dyce.220 In the preface to his 1850 Works of Christopher Marlowe Dyce specifically acknowledged the gesture: ‘Several years ago, an edition of Marlowe’s works was projected by Mr. J. P. Collier; but, on learning that I had commenced the present one, he abandoned his design, and kindly transmitted to me some curious documents which he had intended to use himself, and which I have inserted in their proper places’. Dyce indicated that Collier’s decision had been made before 1844, for in view of the ‘inexcusable delay in bringing out the present edition’ he could not complain that Collier had printed some of the papers in his own Shakespeare; but more recent hand-overs had included ‘all the entries concerning Marlowe’s pieces which he had met with while preparing for the press his Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company’ as well as the spurious ballad of ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’ from the Protectorate Manuscript. The very last offering—a poisoned chalice?—had arrived when ‘the present edition . . . was just completed’ (Marlowe, i:vii–viii): Collier sent his reconciled friend six transcribed lines of verse, having ‘found them

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219. John Pycro Collier to his father, 13 March 1857, FF/K MS 608. 220. Relations between Collier and Dyce aer 1846 remained cordial until the publication of Dyce’s A Few Notes on Shakespeare in May 1853, but only one exchange between the two aer that date is preserved (autumn 1854).


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written, in an old hand, on the title-page of Alarum for London, or the Siedge of Antwerpe . . . 1602’, an anonymous and pedestrian modern-history play.221 They read as follows: Our famous Marloe had in this a hand, As from his fellowes I doe vnderstand; The printed copie doth his Muse much wrong, But nathless manie lines ar good and strong. Of Paris’ Massaker such was the fate; A perfitt coppie came to hand to late. Dyce was unwilling to pursue this implausible attribution beyond remarking that ‘the report of Marlowe’s ‘‘fellowes’’ may be true: but certainly in the Alarum for London (as we now possess it) no traces of his genius are discoverable’. Yet in spite of his later doubts about the Perkins Folio and other Collier transcripts, he reprinted these lines in his ‘revised and corrected’ edition of Marlowe (1862, p. xlvii, with the same observation), as he also did ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’. The doggerel about A Larum for London—which would not have deceived any editor a er 1860, save possibly the high-minded Dyce 222—is indeed to be found on the title of Collier’s imperfect copy, now at Houghton, which was signed by him in his very late hand, but subsequently altered.223 In a period of friendly exchange Dyce sent Collier his Marlowe edition, apologizing that ‘on the whole, it is poor enough: the text is doubtless better than any yet given of Marlowe; but the notes are only so-so; & the biography is little more than a lumbering detail, without either sentiment or grace of style,—much in the manner

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221. Attributions to Lodge, Kyd, Marlowe, Robert Wilson, Barnaby Riche, and John Marston range from arbitrary to absurd (see Logan and Smith 1975, pp. 167–70), for the play itself—though purportedly staged by the Lord Chamberlain’s Company—is dauntingly undistinguished, its language by turns flat and inflated, and stylistically imitative throughout. But there is no particular reason to regard the text itself as seriously corrupt, as Collier’s verses suggest, and as Dyce appears to consider possible—although the Malone Society lumped it with other ‘bad’ quartos, and Laurie Maguire (1996, p. 211) called it ‘non-memorial but textually disordered’. 222. A. H. Bullen in 1885 dismissed the lines, without recourse to the ‘original’, as ‘a very ridiculous piece of forgery’ (Marlowe, i:lxxiv). Only in 1868 did Dyce realize, ‘to my great annoyance’, that the entry from Henslowe about Tamburlaine was in part a forgery; Dyce to J. O. Halliwell, 6 October (LOA 137/18). 223. As John Bakeless (1942, ii:285) pointed out, and we can confirm, the ownership entry ‘J. Payne Collier’ is clumsily inked over to read ‘S. Leighe Collier’ (the last word smudged), with the misleading date 1743 below; in seeking to transform the signature, the forger no doubt recalled the name of S. Leigh Sotheby. A further note in Collier’s undisguised hand (also very late) appears in the margin of the same page, effectively disowning the verses, which provide ‘no pretext for assigning a single line to Marlowe’. The book passed to Halliwell, who grumbled about its imperfections and observed unequivocally that ‘the MS. note in the centre of the title-page is clearly a forgery’ (flyleaf note).


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of the Shakespeare-Society publications’.224 Collier reciprocated with a gi of the grand Roxburghe Club Five Old Plays (discussed below), which Dyce ‘never dreamed of your sending me’, and found ‘as unexpected as welcome’, while forwarding ‘kindest regards to Mrs Collier & to all others of the family who still remember my existence’.225 Five years later, however, relations were chilly again, and Collier would not spare Dyce’s Marlowe in his catalogue of ‘errors’ and ‘blunders’ by that ‘accomplished and well-practised editor’ (Seven Lectures, pp. cvii–cviii, cxvii–cxviii). But in instancing only one of ‘a few important mistakes’ in Tamburlaine—which ‘must have cost [Dyce] a vast deal of trouble’—John could suggest only one emendation (2 Tamburlaine, v.3.164, ‘substance’ for ‘subjects’) which ‘we cannot avoid’, but which posterity has failed to endorse.226

Shakespeare’s House New celebrity attracted new responsibilities. In April 1847 John was elected treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries, succeeding Amyot, who resigned under pressure a er twenty-four years in office; and in March 1849 he became vicepresident, and stood down as treasurer to John Bruce. Evening speakers continued to be at a premium, and in 1848–50 John provided four talks and four papers for the society’s journal, Archaeologia. Meanwhile, matters archaeologically Shakespearian demanded immediate action, for in the summer of 1847 the imminent sale of the so-called Birthplace itself was announced—John Shakespeare’s Henley Street house in Stratford-upon-Avon, along with the adjoining Swan and Maidenhead Inn, all formerly the property of Shakespeare’s sister’s descendants. The heirs of its owner since 1806, one Thomas Court,227 chose the London auctioneering firm of George Robins, of Strawberry Hill fame, to puff and dispose of the complex of buildings. Robins spared no rhetoric in his brochure: Shakespeare’s house was ‘the most unique Relic amongst England’s Treasures’, ‘the most interesting Monument of the Poet’s Fame which this Country

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224. Dyce to JPC, undated letter, probably December 1850, Folger MS Y.d.6 (93). The last observation was clearly malicious. 225. Dyce to JPC, undated letter, probably July 1851, Folger MS Y.d.6 (92). 226. Dyce cogently rejected it in his 1862 Marlowe, p. 73. Another suggestion by Collier (Seven Lectures, pp. cvii–cviii) about Faustus, that ‘every future edition’ should alter line 710, Lechery’s ‘The first letter of my name begins with Lechery’, to ‘begins with L’. (rhyming with Faustus’s response ‘Away to hell! to hell!’), has earned some following, including that of Dyce himself, giving Collier full credit (1862 Marlowe, pp. 90, 116). 227. Court died in 1818, ‘leaving a will in which he directed the properties to be sold aer the death of his wife, and the moneys arising therefrom to be divided amongst his children’ (Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, i:388). His widow, who made the house something of a tourist attraction (with more than two thousand visitors per year in 1844–46: see Fox 1948, p. 82), died in 1846, occasioning the sale, although sale by auction had never been stipulated.


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boasts’, and ‘the most honoured Monument of the Greatest Genius that ever lived’, and although under the terms of Court’s will it ‘must be offered to Public Sale’, this was being done ‘with every fervent hope that its appreciation by the Public will secure for it a safeguard’—albeit at a price reflecting ‘a spirit of competition hitherto unknown’.228 But no national, county, or municipal authority existed, appropriate to purchase and preserve property in a still untouristic Warwickshire market-town, and the first initiative to act in the interest of national piety was taken by the Royal Shakespearean Club and the Shakespearean Monumental Committee of Stratford, on or about 22 July, joined soon by ad hoc groups in London and elsewhere.229 The Athenaeum, strongly advocating a public purchase, endorsed ‘the formation of a general Metropolitan Committee to aid and stimulate the exertions of the Stratford Shakespeare Club’, and reported on 14 August that ‘the whole Council of the Shakespeare Society volunteered to become members of such a Committee’, and to organize an independent fund toward the project—their own cash-on-hand being restricted to publishing. Collier provided a letter designed to forestall sceptics, pointing out that while Shakespeare’s nativity in the Henley Street house was only a biographical tradition, ‘he, at any rate, lived in it for eight or nine years prior to his marriage’, and declaring the Birthplace issue ‘of comparatively little consequence’ in the establishment of a shrine to the poet (Athenaeum, 14 August 1847). Responding with uncharacteristic alacrity, concerned antiquaries convened in three independent London meetings at the end of August. Thomas Rodd, the Shakespeare Society’s publisher, advertised the first, at the Thatched House Tavern in St. James’s Street (22 August), where Collier took the chair and read out a list of the principal subscriptions (including five guineas from himself), and where ‘fears were expressed that separate proceedings might seem to imply a want of union . . . in short, that too many cooks might spoil the broth’ (Literary Gazette, 28 August 1847, pp. 629–30). A more select meeting, with a delegation from Stratford attending, was held on 26 August in Abingdon Street, where the London Committee for the Purchase of Shakespeare’s Birthplace was established, with the venerable Thomas Amyot its chairman, and Peter Cunningham its treasurer; the ‘important co-operation’

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228. Particulars of Shakspeare’s House at Stratford on Avon, for Sale by Auction by Mr. Robins (1847). George Robins himself died in February 1847, but Robin Myers (1982, p. 154) has argued that ‘the style of the catalogue and of the pictorial poster advertising the sale make it probable that it was prepared before George died’. If so, it was the last major project of the great entrepreneur. The sale itself (his ‘first big auction’) was taken by George’s cousin and partner Edmund Robins. 229. By 2 August the newly named Shakespeare Birthplace Committee at Stratford had announced that Prince Albert had pledged £250 toward the project, but on 28 August the Literary Gazette counted only ninety guineas ‘contributed . . . [by] a few members of the Stratford subcommittee’, and ‘not more than £200’ subscribed in London.


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of Lords Ellesmere, Morpeth, Clarendon, and Howe was anticipated, as well as that of T. B. Macaulay, while Charles Knight, W. J. Thoms, and Charles Kemble had participated from the start.230 The British Archaeological Association, the Archaeological Institute, and the Museum Club, among other organizations, declared themselves sympathetic; benefit performances of Shakespeare were held in London (26 August) and Liverpool (9 September); and fund-raising lectures sponsored by provincial literary and scientific societies (‘as Mr. Dawson’s at Derby, for instance’) were projected: ‘all has been proceeding satisfactorily’, the Athenaeum maintained, a month before the sale. But time was short. At noon on Thursday, 16 September 1847, Edmund Robins took the rostrum of the Auction Mart, Covent Garden, read the conditions of sale, fended off a heckler who asked him ‘to prove that the house he was about to sell’ was the Birthplace itself, and announced an opening bid of £1,500. This was advanced to £2,000 by a Mr. Butler of Clapton 231 and to £2,100 by another bidder, and then came ‘a slight pause’, according to the Illustrated London News, whose graphic artist, P. W. Archer, captured the moment of truth (25 September 1847, p. 208: Collier appears in the le foreground, holding a book). Property like this in provincial Stratford-upon-Avon, devoid of associations, could not be worth anything like the sums named. But at this point Peter Cunningham, ‘on the part of the Stratford and London Shakespeare Com-

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230. Aer the sale itself Amyot was succeeded as president by Viscount Morpeth, with Ellesmere as vice-president; Cunningham remained treasurer, and F. G. Tomlins the secretary. A rival appeal, headed up by the American tragedian George Jones, held ‘a numerous meeting at the Hanover-square rooms’, calling itself the People’s Central Committee of the Shakespeare Memorial Fund, ‘but Jones’s efforts met with considerable criticism, and his project failed’ (Fox 1948, p. 83). 231. Otherwise unidentified, but any competition could inspire national paranoia. Halliwell (Outlines, i:388) spoke of ‘whispered designs of an unpatriotic character’, and Fox (1948, p. 82) recorded ‘a rumour to the effect that a plan was on foot to remove the fabric to the United States of America’. Mark Twain, no less, spun a tale about P. T. Barnum’s outright purchase of the dilapidated Birthplace—for ‘$50,000, I think’—to be moved overseas, set up as a museum, and bequeathed ‘to the safe and perpetual guardianship of the Smithsonian Institute at Washington’ (Following the Equator [Hartford, Conn., 1897], extracted in Rawlings 1999, pp. 403–06). Barnum was supposedly inspired by the rejection of his offer for the prize elephant ‘Jumbo’ at Regent’s Park Zoo, and had first contemplated buying Nelson’s Column instead; aer protests at the ‘outrage’ of his purchase of the Birthplace—and ‘offers of re-purchase . . . [at] double the money’— the irrepressible showman was said to have ‘handed the house back [at his original cost] . . . but on the condition that an endowment sufficient for the future safeguarding and maintenance of the sacred relic should be raised’. This surely fictional episode (‘I knew Mr. Barnum well’, wrote Twain, ‘and I placed every confidence in the account which he gave me’) was treated as sober fact by George B. Churchill in ‘Shakespeare in America’ ( Jahrbuch der Deutschen ShakespeareGesellscha 42 [1906]; reprinted in Rawlings, p. 433), and cannot possibly have eluded all notice in England.


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mittee . . . placed in the hands of Mr. Robins’ a formal offer of £3,000, with a curiously qualified statement of purpose, perhaps designed to spike all private opposition: ‘The Committees having purchased another property, which really constitutes an integral portion of Shakespeare’s House,232 have expended a considerable part of the amount already raised by public contribution; but, looking at the duty imposed upon them in undertaking to represent the feeling of the nation . . . [make] this large and liberal offer for the property now on sale, without regard to the funds which they at present command, in the confidence that the justice of the public will eventually discharge the Committee from the individual responsibility which they thus incur’ (ILN, 25 September 1847). This tender was signed by Dr. Thomas Thomson (1803–73, thrice mayor of Stratford) and William Sheldon, chairman and treasurer, respectively, of the Stratford Committee, and by Amyot and Cunningham, their London Committee equivalents, and was accepted by Messrs. Robins, to a flurry of mutual congratulation and applause in the press. But the money had not actually been raised, nor would it be for a considerable period, public apathy over faits accomplis being no more unusual in 1847 than today.233 The property was conveyed, on 27 July 1848, to four individuals (Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, i:388, says ‘delegates selected from the committees’), namely, Thomson, Amyot, George William Frederick Howard (Viscount Morpeth), and Collier, the latter two replacing the original signatories Sheldon and Cunningham. Frederic Ouvry, solicitor and new F.S.A., arranged for the Bank of Stratford to advance the full purchase price, over and above the subscriptions so far collected, to complete the sale of the preceding August.234 Technically, then, John was one-quarter or one-half owner of Shakespeare’s House from mid-1848 until 4 July 1866, when he and Thomson (the surviving

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232. This was the ‘four messuages, tenements, or dwelling-houses . . . being on the westward side of and adjoining to and originally forming part of ‘‘Shakespeare’s birthplace’’’, purchased from Mrs. Izod for £820, and conveyed to four Stratfordians on 1 January 1848: see the published grant of 4 July 1866 (This Indenture Made the 4th Day of July, 1866), p. 1. That purchase, entered into by the Stratford Committee independently of the Londoners, was always treated separately; Fox (1948, p. 84) confused a later transaction involving ‘the property’ with the Birthplace itself. 233. Accounts vary, but the initial shortfall must have been approximately £1,400 (not £500, as suggested by Fox 1948, p. 84; and the editors of the Letters of Charles Dickens, v:296n.), for ‘Shakespeare Night’ raised £900, and at that time ‘£500 are still wanting to relieve the committees from the liabilities they have incurred’ (Literary Gazette, 11 December 1847, p. 867). By April 1849 ‘about four hundred pounds are still needed to place [the property] in the hands of National Trustees’ (Shakespeare Society’s Report, 26 April 1849), and although Macready raised nearly £300 from Shakespeare readings in March 1851, the committee’s debt was not liquidated until 1856 (Fox, p. 85, misquoted as 1855 in Dickens, Letters). 234. Ouvry to JPC, 20 July 1848, FF/K MS 615. At this point evidently the available funds and the title-deeds were lodged with a ‘Cheltenham Banker’.


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co-proprietors) granted it in perpetuity to the mayor, aldermen, and burgesses of Stratford, upon various trusts.235 By then the original obligation had been met, but subsequent costs of repair and restoration had required further appeals, for a legacy from one John Shakespear of Worthington, Leicestershire, who claimed descent from the poet, had been counted on and committed, only to be overturned in probate. Charles Dickens, too, disappointed the administrators: having led a personal campaign, through amateur benefit theatricals in 1848, to endow a resident curatorship of the house for the old stager James Sheridan Knowles, he and John Forster turned over the takings to Knowles himself when their plan fizzled, depriving the Birthplace of some £1,500.236 The principal early attempt to raise money, however, was a ‘Shakespeare Night’ at the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden, on 7 December 1847, in which nine Shakespearian scenes or sequences were represented by such luminaries as Macready, the Mathews brothers, Madame Vestris, and Helen Faucit. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert served as special patrons, music was furnished by Sir Henry Bishop, and tickets ranged from two shillings (gallery) to five guineas (grand tier private box). The theatre was ‘crowded in every part’, the programme was ‘fully and effectively carried through’—although a prologue by Charles Knight, read by Phelps, ‘from the disturbance at the back of the pit was almost inaudible’— and £900 was reportedly raised (Literary Gazette, 11 December 1847, p. 867). Dickens attended, but commented only that ‘a most extraordinary effect was produced by the whole audience being in a paroxysm of sniffing during the whole of the entertainments’.237 In Punch Douglas Jerrold devoted a full page of whimsy to the occasion, recounting the appearance of Shakespeare himself, ‘received—and a erwards lighted to his box—by his editors, Charles Knight and Payne Collier, upon both of whom the Poet bowed benignly’, but not of the Queen, who remained at Osborne House with her consort, playing cribbage. Lord Morpeth ‘looked excessively joyous’, and ‘the other noblemen and gentlemen of the Committee seemed either beautifully unconscious, or most hero-

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235. The grant was published under the title This Indenture Made the 4th Day of July, 1866. 236. Dickens, Letters, v:ix. Just why Knowles never served as curator is unclear: the editors of the Letters blamed ‘lack of government support’, while Fox (1948, p. 84) inferred that ‘the project . . . did not eventually prove acceptable to the Stratford Committee’. The House Committee attempted to recover the lump sum in 1862–63, aer Knowles’s death: see DNB, s.v. ‘Knowles’, citing the Stratford Minute Book, 31 December 1862. Dickens’s regard for the Birthplace itself was clearly this side of idolatry: ‘I think of setting up a claim to live in The House at Stratford, rent-free’, he told Forster whimsically (19 September 1847; Letters, v:165), this ‘claim’ resting upon one of the silliest emendations to Shakespeare ever proposed—if he was serious—namely, ‘make arms’ for ‘take arms [against a sea of troubles]’, ‘which is the action of swimming. It would get rid of a horrible grievance in the figure, and make it plain and apt.’ 237. Dickens to Spencer Lyttelton, 10 December 1847, Letters, v:207.


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ically indifferent to the legal fact, that, albeit the house was crammed full as any carpet-bag, they were, nevertheless, debtors for crushing hundreds of pounds for the Shakespeare messuage. This they thought not of; or thinking, had a sweet, sustaining faith in the generosity of an enlightened British public’. Cunningham, ‘as treasurer . . . had a wondrous look of wealth to him’; he appeared in a waistcoat ‘wholly made up of ten thousand pound Bank notes (handsomely lent for the occasion by the Bank of England till)’, which the Bank’s governor assured him would generate contributions, ‘for when people see that you have so much money about you, they will immediately pour in more’ (Punch, 11 December 1847, p. 221). From Punch’s short-lived rival The Man in the Moon, edited by Albert Smith and Collier’s Morning Chronicle colleague Angus Reach, came a marginally wittier squib on the campaign, which brought in the biographical delvings of Memoirs of Actors, and glanced sidelong at the new anti-Stratfordian heresy (as expressed in Joseph C. Hart’s Romance of Yachting, New York, 1848). ‘Good News for the Legitimists’, it pronounced: ‘Mr. J. P. Collier, aided by Mr. Peter Cunningham, a er a search of eight months through the parish registers of London, have discovered, and can prove by incontestable evidence, that Shakespeare’s cousin’s uncle’s niece’s son-in-law’s step-daughter, by the mother’s side, died in 1615, of measles, at the age of three years; and was buried on the 1st of April, in that year, in the churchyard of Bishopsgate-without. A er this discovery, the Shakespeare’s House Committee appeal with confidence for the further assistance of an enlightened British Public’.238 This was followed a month later by a parody of Mary Cowden Clarke’s Concordance, again mentioning John (January 1848, p. 13): ‘There are 384,976 ‘‘Q’s’’ in Shakespeare, and 759,951 ‘‘P’s’’. Mr. Knight doubts this statement; but we believe that Mr. J. P. Collier is inclined to credit it, because, as he acutely says, ‘‘The Swan of Avon always minded his P’s and Q’s’’’. Such attention in the popular press was quite new to Collier, and however pointless the satire may have seemed to him, there is an element of flattery to it. A friendlier reception was his at Stratford itself, at the annual birthday celebrations made specially grand in 1848: Morpeth, Cunningham, Collier, and others from London spent a long weekend in and about Stratford, entertained by Thomson, R. B. Wheler, E. F. Flower, and H. S. Lucy of Charlecote. At the great banquet on Monday, 24 April, Ouvry recorded, ‘Collier spoke admirably and was greatly applauded’,239 and the dinner itself, attended by one hundred

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238. The Man in the Moon, no. 12 (December 1847), p. 345. An illustrated ‘vision’ based on the committee’s need to raise £1,400 appears in the same number, pp. 354–56; the ‘leading member of the committee’ caricatured here is almost certainly Collier. 239. Ouvry to his sister Francisca, 28 April 1848, typed transcript made ca. 1950 for Violet


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and sixty subscribers, lasted until near midnight, followed by tea at the Thomsons’. John made his way home before one o’clock, but his companions rejoined the mayor and some thirty others at the town hall for ‘brandy and water and cigars . . . till near three’, when ‘Mr Butterworth, one of the London Committee, favoured us with a Comic song’. Accompanying Collier church-viewing to Coventry at eight o’clock the next morning, before returning to London, cannot have been an unmixed delight for Ouvry; but the expedition, by his own account, was ‘a very pleasant one’, and the limelight no doubt suited John. Another Shakespearian icon changed hands in 1848 with less fuss. At the forced sale of the effects of the profligate Richard Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Ellesmere purchased for 355 guineas the original ‘Chandos portrait’ of Shakespeare.240 Whatever the present view of its authenticity, this was and remains the most famous putative oil-painting of the poet, earring and all, and—a er the Droeshout engraving for the First Folio—the best-known Shakespearian image, perpetuated through a series of copies by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Vertue, and Ozias Humphry (a sketch for Malone), and employed in some form in literally dozens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of the Works.241 With characteristic liberality Ellesmere almost at once permitted Collier to borrow his prize and display it to a meeting of the Shakespeare Society’s Council on 10 October 1848, where ‘it was placed . . . in every possible kind of light—examined and reexamined, and compared with prints and copies said to have been exact’.242 Collier provided the Athenaeum with nine intelligent paragraphs on the provenance of the portrait and its claim to represent Shakespeare himself (‘[William]

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Koop (photocopy in FF). The Daily News (26 April) reported the substance of Collier’s speech, calling it ‘replete with knowledge, feeling, and occasional eloquence’, and delivered by ‘the best historian of our stage, and the best biographer of our greatest poet’. Collier dwelt on the contrast between Shakespeare’s ‘bare’ stage and the present-day theatres, with their ‘gorgeous’ scenery and costumery, which ‘had done much, he said, to depress dramatic genius’. Shakespeare’s consequent obligation ‘to eke out the imperfections of the stage in his time’ with ‘so many fine descriptions of castles and towers’ should make us ‘thankful that the stage was then so very unlike what it is now’. He proposed ‘the Drama’, but asked that the toast (‘in Shakspeare’s native town, on Shakspeare’s natal day’) be drunk ‘in solemn silence’—which it was. Others were not. 240. It was the penultimate lot in the sale of 1 October, and Collier evidently encouraged Egerton to bid strongly: ‘I am glad you have screwed up Lord E. to a higher mark’, wrote Cunningham. ‘He will never grudge the money when he has got it [the painting]’; Cunningham to JPC, 11 September 1848, Folger MS Y.d.6 (36). 241. But not in Collier’s. See Schoenbaum 1991, pp. 202–06, for a convenient account of the portrait. 242. Athenaeum, 14 October 1848, pp. 1033–34 (report by Peter Cunningham, incorporating Collier’s comments on the portrait).


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Davenant would not have prized it, [Thomas] Betterton bought it, and Kneller copied it [for Dryden], if the resemblance to Shakespeare had not been accurate’), and the council proposed forthwith ‘that an accurate engraving should be made from the picture and presented to every member of the Shakespeare Society not in arrear with his subscription on the 31st of January next’, that is, as a bonus for the punctual members, and a carrot for the evasive.243 Ellesmere, through Collier, agreed to permit the reproduction, by Samuel Cousins ‘in mezzotinto’ (an alternative was line-engraving by John Henry Robinson, the Athenaeum reporting that ‘what is required is a faithful and clever fac-simile— in one word, a kind of daguerreotype’), and by 28 October the council engaged ‘to spare no expense’ in the production. Collier was named ‘to furnish accompanying letter-press relative to the history and authenticity of the Chandos (now the Ellesmere) portrait—for printing on paper the size of the intended engraving, to be either bound up with it or framed for suspension at the option of the members. The circulation will, we hear, be strictly confined to members of the Society who shall have recorded their names and paid up their subscriptions . . . and a er the sufficient numbers of plates and proofs shall have been printed the plate will be destroyed’ (Athenaeum, 28 October 1848, p. 1081). The carrot had thus become something of a stick: John welcomed a prospective new recruit (18 November 1848) with the assurance that ‘if you begin by subscribing for the present year you will be entitled to [the engraving] . . . accompanied by a letter-press dissertation on the imputed portraits’;244 but the threat of platedestruction, an old tactic championed by Dibdin, was clearly meant to rally subscribers already delinquent. In the event, the project proved troublesome and exorbitant. Nothing seems to have come of Collier’s own promise of a ‘letter-press dissertation’ to accompany it. This was envisioned in the council’s Report of 26 April 1849 as ‘an account of all the known and acknowledged representations of the Poet, a work at any rate highly interesting in itself, but, appended to such an illustration, doubly so’; but a year later it was still ‘delayed’, owing to ‘a desire to obtain the most novel and accurate information’, the compiler being ‘unwilling to repeat what had before been detailed’, and hoping to include a fuller account of Kneller’s copy for Dryden, as well as particulars of ‘two hitherto unnoticed pic-

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243. Dues collection had become a serious problem: the balance on hand at the annual meeting of 26 April 1849 was only £57 17s. 6d., and ‘the temporary employment of a collector for the purpose of obtaining the arrear subscriptions’ was then recommended. A one-page prospectus was circulated to members, informing them that an extra £3 would purchase one of twenty-five ‘Artist’s Proofs’, numbered and signed by the engraver, and an extra £2 one of fiy proofs on India paper, numbered and signed by the director; copy in BL 816.l.47 (205). 244. JPC to unidentified recipient, 18 November 1848, FF MS 342.


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tures’ of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson ‘forwarded from Ireland . . . within the last few weeks’. Ten years on, a correspondent of Notes and Queries (February 1859, p. 123) remarked on the unfulfilled project, perhaps with a trace of irony: ‘I trust Mr. Collier still intends carrying his intentions into effect, although the [Shakespeare] Society is defunct’. The print itself remained in limbo until April 1849, when the council recorded its decision ‘that a certain number of Artist’s proofs, and proofs signed by the Director [i.e., Collier], should be struck off, at advanced prices; by which means the other impressions are furnished at very slight expense to the Society’.245 But as a means of stabilizing the finances of the society this strategy also failed: Cousins’s fee for engraving the portrait came to £178 10s., Dixon and Ross charged £48 5s. for printing the 22 ‘Artist’s Proofs’, 13 ‘Director’s Proofs’, and 750 ordinary impressions, and with extras the operation cost over £235. Against this the society recovered £87 from the sale of the proofs— ceding Ellesmere one of each sort, valued at £5—and the irrecoverable balance more or less equalled Shoberl’s annual bill for printing all the society’s letterpress productions. The total outlay ‘has been much greater than the Society has hitherto expended on any single publication’ and ‘has in some degree crippled the funds of the Society’, but the council claimed ‘every reason to be proud of the success of their endeavours’, and was confident that ‘this will be but a temporary difficulty, and that the funds at their disposal will soon return to their former amount’.246 The last hope turned out to be terminally elusive, and the cost of the Chandos print may have broken the back of the society’s publishing programme. Nor were even the favoured subscribers unanimous in their approval: John Forster thought himself ‘somewhat scurvily treated’ in receiving the twenty-first of twenty-two artist’s proofs, having spoken for one at £3, as a sponsor listed immediately a er Collier and Cunningham.247 Collier must have retained one of the very first strikes, but we can no longer locate it. The Council of the Shakespeare Society kept its word about destroying Cousins’s expensive steelwork, exhibiting to its membership ‘an impression from the disfigured plate, and the plate itself, broken into pieces’, at the annual meeting of 26 April 1850 (Report, p. 4). Ellesmere, public-spirited to the last, in March 1856 presented the original painting to the newly created National Portrait Gallery, where it remains, surely the most-viewed canvas of all in the Gallery’s permanent collection.

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245. 1849 Report, p. 2: by 10 October John Forster had his proof-copy. 246. Report, 26 April 1850, p. 4. 247. Forster to Cunningham, 10 October 1849, Forster Correspondence, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University: he speaks of ‘twenty-five proofs’, but Dixon and Ross charged for just twenty-two.


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Conspicuously out of the limelight, in these Shakespearian events of 1847– 48, was James Orchard Halliwell. He attended the sale of Shakespeare’s House,248 but he went unmentioned in the newspaper accounts of the committee activities, and by Ouvry and others during its jubilant a ermath; nor was he instrumental in the fund-raising exercises a er the fact, or vocal in the Chandos portrait negotiations. These silences may surprise us, as it was precisely in this period that Halliwell’s attention turned firmly to Shakespeare, resulting in the first version of his evolving documentary and biographical study, A Life of William Shakespeare (1848, i.e., December 1847), while in subsequent years his involvement with the Birthplace became far more intimate and proprietary than Collier’s, or anyone else’s. Perhaps it was the Life itself which set Halliwell somewhat at odds with his ally, for re-examination of some old suspect texts could well have proved awkward. In August 1847 the intending biographer sought access to the originals of the Bridgewater manuscripts published in New Facts and New Particulars, and received, as Hunter had done three years earlier, a cool response from their discoverer: John had long since returned them to Ellesmere, and he reminded his correspondent that ‘I produced some of the papers at a Council of the Shakespeare Society, when, as I fancied, you, among others, were present’. Halliwell next approached Ellesmere directly, who replied briefly on 25 August, putting off any immediate display of the questioned documents. Ellesmere had not, he said, seen Hunter’s account of them (in New Illustrations), but he recalled that Hunter had examined them ‘in my house, & the investigation removed some, though very possibly not all, of the doubts he was disposed to entertain of their authenticity’. Writing simultaneously to Collier, he enclosed Halliwell’s application, and wondered if a review a er Hunter (‘an elderly gentleman’) was ‘either necessary or desirable’.249 It is not hard to guess what Collier advised in reply, and Halliwell did not procure a sight of the Bridgewater manuscripts until 1853. In October 1847 John provided him at least with a facsimile of the notorious H. S. letter, which he had commissioned from Nethercli in 1844, ‘to satisfy, as I think, unreasonable doubts’, and which ‘I should not have felt at liberty to print or publish . . . I do not think that there are 30 copies out’. There were no facsimiles of the other Ellesmere papers, however, and Halliwell would have to be satisfied with ‘my conviction . . . that I carefully collated all the documents I printed in 1835. Such has always been my pra[ctic]e’.250

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248. Diary of Henrietta Halliwell, printed in Spevack 1999, p. 36. 249. JPC to JOH, 17 August 1847, LOA 59/66; Ellesmere to JOH, 25 August 1847, LOA 30/19; Ellesmere to JPC, 25 August 1847, FF/K MS 646. 250. JPC to JOH, 24 and 14 October 1847 (the latter with a seal-tear), LOA 266, fol. 17, and LOA 11/12.


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If Halliwell still harboured suspicions about any or all of the Bridgewater manuscripts, he had no further excuse to badger Ellesmere without expressing them clearly, which he chose not to do. He contented himself with re-examining some Alleyn papers at Dulwich, and produced a new transcript of Joan Alleyn’s letter to her husband ‘quite sufficient to show that Mr. Collier’s interpretation [i.e., his fabricated interpolation of ‘and Mr Shakespeare of the globe’ in the defective text] cannot be correct’ (Life of Shakespeare, p. 330); the explanation for this, as Halliwell charitably suggested, being that the letter ‘has been misread’. The physical forgeries, however, fooled Halliwell completely;251 the Joan Alleyn invention is the only one he unmasked in 1848. His respect for Collier’s documentary discoveries remained undiminished, and he cited ‘that little mine of valuable detail, Collier’s New Facts, 1835’, as containing ‘more new information than any biographical work on Shakespeare that has ever appeared’—including his own, for which he claimed runner-up credit. Indeed, notes on the Bridgewater and Record Office forgeries were extravagantly loyal: the 1599 Blackfriars certificate was said to be ‘one of the most important documents connected with Shakespeare that has yet appeared’ (p. 137), and the vexed H. S. letter ‘perhaps the most interesting document relating to Shakespeare yet discovered’ (p. 223). Halliwell gave Collier’s facsimile of the last pride of place in his biography, facing page one, and treated his readers to a lecture on scholarly attainder: the reproduction ‘will suffice to convince any one acquainted with such matters that it is a genuine manuscript of the period. No forgery of so long a document could present so perfect a continuity of design’. ‘Yet it is right’, he continued, ‘to state that grave doubts have been thrown on its authenticity’, and ‘it is of importance to decide upon the character of this paper [i.e., document], for on the degree of credit we may give to it depends the value of the other MSS. relating to Shakespeare discovered in the same collection; and it would be satisfactory were Mr. Collier to furnish the public with fac-simile copies of all of them’. ‘At the same time’, he added (pp. 225–226), it must be admitted, in fairness to Mr. Collier, that, when the doubt of their authenticity was raised, he produced the letter of H. S., the one most severely attacked, before a council of the Shakespeare Society, and several competent judges, including Mr. Wright, fully concurred in believing it to be genuine. Mr. Hunter has systematically argued against the authority of all the Shakespearian documents found by Mr. Collier in Lord Ellesmere’s

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251. The forged list of players appended to the Privy Council letter of 1604, for instance, was described by Halliwell only as a ‘memorandum . . . written in another hand, perhaps by Allen [sic]’ (p. 331), which is no less than its perpetrator had claimed (‘in a different hand and in different ink’ (Life of Alleyn, p. 68)).


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collection, but how much reliance is to be placed on his conclusions may be inferred from the fact that the paper of the spuriousness of which he is most positive [i.e., the paper relating to Kempe and Armin, 1605: New Illustrations, i:70–71] is preserved, not in that nobleman’s library, but in the archives of the city of London, enrolled in books unquestionably authentic. No reasons absolutely fatal to the truth of Mr. Collier’s discovery have yet been produced. Thus, with more negatives than John might have wished, Halliwell took his stand against the pot-shots of Joseph Hunter; he also found precedents for an undated ‘copia vera’, which Knight had thought ‘strange’, and for the attentionbegging echo of Hamlet in the H. S. letter (‘it is by no means impossible that it did not originate with Shakespeare’). For this timely support John might well have been grateful, even if twenty-seven-year-old Halliwell stopped short of blind admiration for his near-sexagenarian senior. Transmitting a copy of the finished Life on 18 December 1847, Halliwell declared he had ‘spoken very freely of your valuable labours & said just what I thought, relying on your usual candour not to be affected by plain speaking’. Regarding the Ellesmere documents, he felt certain that John would approve his reprinting the H. S. facsimile— clearly, Halliwell had not asked permission to do so—‘for nothing will tend so much to vindicate its authenticity’.252 It is quite possible, however, that Collier bridled at this, having earlier stressed the limitation, the expense to himself, and the unpublished cachet of his own private production, although Halliwell’s version of it reproduces only ten lines. The harping on controversy, too, and phrases like ‘no reasons absolutely fatal . . . have yet been produced’ may have given John pause. But in all likelihood it was rivalry itself which put friendship to a test, for Collier suspected—wrongly—that Halliwell intended a new cheap edition of Shakespeare to ‘supersede’ his,253 a project for which this 1848 Life, dry and over-documentary as it now stood, might be the harbinger. John replied with formal thanks at once, the volume still ‘unopened’, and between that date and 26 March 1848 no correspondence is preserved, and no mention of A Life of William Shakespeare survives in any of the extant letters from Collier to Halliwell therea er.254 All we have upon which to base a conclusion (as Halliwell himself might have put it) is a froideur on Collier’s part in the next few years, reflected in harsh comments about Halliwell’s undertakings to the Duke

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252. JOH to JPC, 18 December 1847, Folger MS Y.c.1207 (1). 253. JPC to the Duke of Devonshire, 31 January 1851, Chatsworth, sixth Duke of Devonshire’s Correspondence, 2d ser., 17.10. 254. JPC to Halliwell, 20 December 1847, LOA 11/21. Halliwell did destroy whatever he thought untoward among his papers, however, and some remonstrance may thereby have perished.


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of Devonshire and Peter Cunningham (early 1851), and in two gratuitously unpleasant anonymous reviews in the Athenaeum of 5 October and 26 October 1850, in which the ‘editorial doings of Mr. Halliwell’ and his failure to acknowledge a notice of an interlude by ‘Mr. Collier . . . twenty years ago’ are pointedly castigated.255

The Museum Commission The Commission to Inquire into the Constitution and Government of the British Museum, created by royal letters patent on 17 June 1847, originally consisted of eleven members;256 three more (Lord Seymour, the future twel h Duke of Somerset; Charles John Viscount Canning; and John Shaw Lefevre) were added on 4 May 1848, and one (the Bishop of Norwich) died in 1849 and was not replaced. The unsalaried and otherwise busy commissioners convened to hear ‘evidence’ on just five occasions in three years, but each time over a more extended sitting: three days in July 1847, five in February 1848, sixteen between 12 May and 21 July 1848, twenty-three between 6 February and 30 March 1849, and finally back to seventeen between 27 April and 26 June 1849. Collier, the paid secretary, was appointed by 1 July 1847, and attended throughout, not only in his official note-taking capacity—for which his shorthand must have been indispensable—but latterly as an independent witness; between meetings he also circulated minutes, corresponded with members, and perhaps (as it was suspected of him and of others) leaked details of the confidential proceedings to the press. From the start the commission was charged to examine various administrative practices of the Museum, the interaction of the contentious departments, the rights and responsibilities of the trustees, and some slighter matters.257 But John’s own personal concern, apart from his duties, lay almost exclusively with

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255. These constitute two of the only three publications of Halliwell that Collier is known to have reviewed, save for the 1840 ‘puff’, and may reflect Collier’s antagonism toward the Percy Society as much as toward Halliwell. 256. No officer or trustee of the British Museum was included, although of course the testimony of several was sought. 257. There is considerable literature on the Museum Commission. The most recent (and most balanced) account is by P. R. Harris (1998, pp. 165–76); see also Edward Miller 1973, pp. 172–83, and 1967, pp. 171–99 (a pro-Panizzi account of the proceedings). Earlier historians of the Museum (Robert Cowtan, Arundell Esdaile) also generally inclined toward Panizzi; anti-Panizzi slants are in Ganzel, and at great length in the periodical press of the day, notably the Athenaeum and GM. The 1850 commission Report (with its elusive appendix) is the essential, though dauntingly massive, narrative of the meetings—but not of what lay behind them; T. D. Hardy, Memoirs of the Right Honourable Henry Lord Langdale (1852), ii:194–211, provides some insight into aspects of the deliberations.


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the operation of the library—the Department of Printed Books in particular— and the policy of its keepers, especially with regard to cataloguing the collections, and thereby servicing its readers. Most of the readers’ complaints in the recent past had centred on the inadequacy of the catalogue of printed books, which made access to much of the library tedious at best, and at worst nearly impossible; about this a paper war had already been waged between the hotheaded antiquary Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas (1799–1848) and the Keeper of Printed Books, Antonio Panizzi (1797–1879),258 when other aggrieved parties in public and private, as well as the periodical press, had joined in. Briefly, the controversy concerned the so-called third Catalogue of Printed Books, designed to replace Ellis’s and Baber’s outdated version of 1813–19,259 and in effect pitted utilitarian against curatorial principles, and the majority of Museum readers against a party of its custodians—in particular Panizzi, the aloof ‘Prince of Librarians’ himself. Such a catalogue had been projected in 1834, and funded by Parliament, with completion anticipated in 1845, but a er seven years the only published result was a specimen letter ‘A’, containing 18,200 entries (including cross-references, but out of what Panizzi later estimated as 800,000 in all, and incorporating no books acquired a er 1838): even this Panizzi, who wished to complete the entire project in manuscript before publishing (if he must) anything, thought woefully inaccurate, believing that ‘many thousands [of entries] that should have appeared under that letter were missing and would have to be added as the work proceeded’ (Chaplin 1987, p. 33). Blame for this impasse may be divided among departmental understaffing, interruptions by other emergent duties, and bureaucratic slippage between the cataloguers and the trustees; but the lion’s share of it surely fell to Panizzi, who fought every inch of the way to preserve ‘higher’ standards of bibliographical description, even when the carrying-through of the project became their casualty. Baber’s sixteen old rules of description rose, a er intra-house modifications and debate, to Panizzi’s intimidating but canonical ninety-one, which Nicolas and other impatient readers denounced as absurd: ‘what the Public requires, in the first instance at least, is

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258. In May 1846 the Spectator published three unsigned articles by Nicolas critical of the catalogue and the requirement that readers include pressmarks taken from it on their application tickets. Panizzi attacked Nicolas in June with the pamphlet On the Supply of Printed Books from the Library to the Reading Room of the British Museum, and Nicolas immediately replied with Animadversions on the Library and Catalogues of the British Museum; see Harris 1998, pp. 156–57; and Chaplin 1987, pp. 34–38. 259. Seven vols., the (unassisted) work of Sir Henry Ellis and H. H. Baber; a separate catalogue of the George III books appeared in 1823, and with the addition of MS addenda the reference or ‘finding’ copy of these catalogues had swollen to forty interleaved folio volumes by 1834, suffering from a double alphabet of entries, exhaustion of space, and wear and tear from use: see Chaplin 1987, pp. 1–2.


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simply a practical Catalogue, having the titles or authors’ names placed in alphabetical order, and not a Catalogue formed upon so abstruse a plan as to require ninety-one rules for its construction’.260 These sentiments were echoed by the Athenaeum (15 May 1847, p. 518), which called for ‘an alphabetical catalogue of the books . . . published in a small and cheap form, with only short distinctive titles—like the Catalogue of the London Library’; more elaborate subject-catalogues, with systematic indices and cross-references, might be prepared independently, but the finding-list (with its present backlog of 100,000 items: Athenaeum, 25 March 1848) ought not to depend on this. But the Museum trustees, worn down by Panizzi’s intransigence, had by now agreed to suspend publication of the 1834 project: ‘B’ through ‘CHE’, completed by December 1845, never appeared, and no practical substitute was ever prescribed. If it had hitherto been suspected, it was now clear that Panizzi (who warned the trustees in July 1844 that the preparation of catalogue slips, ‘in conformity with the rules now adopted’, would require at least ten more years, to say nothing of arrangement for the press) simply did not want a printed finding list of the Museum’s complete holdings at all: on 6 February 1849 Richard Monckton Milnes would ask him, flatly: ‘You want to get rid of the printed part [of the Catalogue]?’, and Panizzi would reply: ‘Yes’.261 The Athenaeum could go on rattling its sabre (‘Let this be clearly understood: if Mr. Panizzi will not undertake to supply forthwith a complete alphabetical Catalogue of the printed books in the Museum, some other person must be called in who can undertake it and will complete it’; 17 February 1849, p. 169), but only the trustees, or indirectly the commissioners, could insist upon any such programme. There was no question where Collier’s sympathies lay in the catalogue matter, but the commission had other duties as well, and pursued them deliberately, while the press harped on delay and ‘inaction’. In July 1847 and February 1848 the commissioners devoted their attention to internal disputes, interviewing Principal Librarian Sir Henry Ellis (who characteristically thought nothing amiss), Sir Charles Fellows (the provider of the Lycian Marbles), Edward Hawkins of the Antiquities Department, and above all the Rev. Josiah Forshall, secretary to the trustees, upon whose ailing shoulders most of the blame for mismanagement was ultimately to be laid. In May, June, and July 1848 they looked further into departmental dissent, minuting the xenophobic antagonism of Sir Frederic Madden toward Panizzi on matters ranging from perceived incivility of staff to the disposition of manuscript material in the King’s Library and the new Grenville bequest (Collier warned him ‘to shew no personal feeling

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260. Nicolas, Animadversions, p. 18. 261. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Constitution and Government of the British Museum; with Minutes of Evidence (1850), question 4295.


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against Mr P.’, Madden recorded, ‘but I really hardly know how to avoid this’; Diary, 28 February 1848); and they took evidence from curators and outside experts representing antiquities (sculpture), mineralogy, natural history (zoology, botany), numismatics, maps, and prints and drawings. Some witnesses provided little more than evidence about in-house squabbles (William Cureton, for instance, on Madden versus Panizzi); others aired personal grievances (such as John Gould’s, that the nation had failed to buy his Australian stuffed birds and eggs at a prix d’amitié, thus losing an unparalleled collection to America); and in fact it was not until July 1848 that Panizzi began to define and defend his position, which lay near the heart of his struggle with Forshall and the trustees, on the stalled catalogue of printed books. The third session of the commission adjourned on 21 July 1848, with Panizzi himself still the only witness to speak on the ‘catalogue controversy’: questions about this had been put to him almost deferentially by the commissioners, who were also concerned with personnel shortages, copyright demands, acquisition policy, and Reading Room service, and he had merely recounted the history of the project and the evolution of his ‘rules’, which he represented as definitive. In the absence of any further interviews over the next five months, Madden was at least chuffed to read in the Observer an unsanctioned report of the committee proceedings to date, the writer of which ‘seems to have rightly divined the true character of Mr Panizzi, a turbulent, over-bearing, grasping foreigner, who ought to be kicked out to make room for better men’ (Diary, 30 October 1848). This article, ‘of course . . . done by a partizan’, was condemned a week later in the Athenaeum (‘surreptitious publication is beginning . . . it is clear that nothing but harm can come of truth distorted’), but blame for its appearance was laid in part on the ‘ill-judged’ policy of privacy adopted by the commission itself. The latter contribution (4 November 1848, p. 1103), though anonymous, was in fact written by Panizzi’s adherent Augustus De Morgan, who had been, he said, ‘all along in possession of such information as to these proceedings as we could have safely made the basis of a continued series of remarks’, refraining out of respect for the ‘right’ of the commission ‘to keep [the evidence] secret, though it be mere folly to exert that right’, and because ‘it would be impossible to quote [the evidence] largely in the very words of those who gave it’. Now, however, with ‘a source which we have no doubt is in the Museum itself ’ leaking its version of events to the Observer, and without any denunciatory response by the commission in prospect, ‘it will . . . become a matter of consideration whether we are not morally authorized to avail ourselves of the means which we possess’. Whoever the Observer’s source may have been (Panizzi’s enemies among the Museum trustees and staff were legion), the new ‘information’ and ‘means’ available to the Athenaeum stemmed not only from De Morgan, but also from


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Peter Cunningham, who was the unnamed contributor of at least four further articles (17 February and 23 June 1849, 13 and 20 April 1850), and whose proximity to the commission’s paid secretary was obvious. And although the Athenaeum continued to observe journalistic discretion, other weeklies and dailies did not, leading members of the commission inevitably to suspect the newspaperman in their midst. Meanwhile, also in the recess between sessions, Panizzi had written an open letter to Ellesmere, in which ‘he set out in greater detail than was possible in his evidence before the Commission exactly what his methods and rules of cataloguing implied . . . a masterly summing-up of his position in the controversy’.262 Ellesmere apparently desired a rejoinder, from the viewpoint of a serious reader, and Collier, who had already been told that his own oral testimony might be required in February, supplied it—partly in hope, he said, that it ‘may render needless a vivâ voce examination’, although ‘I am quite willing to submit myself to any interrogatories, and to go through the ordeal’.263 He wrote his forty-two-page pamphlet, dated 24 January 1849, ‘in two days, printed it in one, and instantly sent it to your Lordship’,264 who found it ‘on rough perusal precisely what I wanted, namely an exposition of opinion founded on experience & well calculated to assist the mature consideration of important points at issue’.265 John’s arguments, based upon forty years’ experience in the Reading Room, were summed up in nine ‘points’, beginning with ‘(1) That a printed alphabetical list of the books in the British Museum is necessary’, stipulating ‘(5) That what is wanted is an index by which the books may be found’, and concluding with estimates of working time (four years), printing time (one year), and cost (‘not so great as that of Mr. Panizzi’s manuscript catalogue in 500 volumes’). Along the way, while paying lip-service to Panizzi’s ‘industrious habits of business, energy, acuteness, promptitude, and decision’ (p. 3), John flatly declared that the ‘Letter A’ catalogue of 1841 ‘has been made upon an entirely wrong principle’ (p. 20), and included among his points ‘(2) That Mr. Panizzi has imagined difficulties [in preparing an alphabetical list] that have no real existence’, and ‘(3) That his method of cataloguing anonymous works is entirely erroneous’ (p. 41). With these confrontational positions Collier nailed his colours to the mast, gave his allies an immediate agenda to develop, and Panizzi one to target at

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262. Edward Miller 1967, p. 180. The commissioners ordered that Panizzi’s letter be printed, but it was circulated only to themselves, the trustees, and heads of departments; Harris 1998, p. 169. 263. A Letter to the Earl of Ellesmere, on the Subject of a New Alphabetical Catalogue of the Printed Books in the British Museum (Printed for Private Circulation Only, 1849), p. 4. 264. Collier, A Supplementary Letter to the Earl of Ellesmere (1849), p. 6. 265. Ellesmere to JPC, 6 January [sic, for February?] 1849, Folger MS Y.d.6 (114).


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leisure. Lord Ellesmere did not then, or ever, endorse John’s conclusions: ‘I do not think that these points can be settled without controversy’, he wrote. ‘I suspect that we start, you & I by myself, with some difference of opinion as to what is the main object to be attained. I consider yourself as a type or specimen of the class of readers whose convenience & advantage is to be consulted in the matter of the catalogue at any expence or trouble . . . [but] I have still my doubts whether a printed catalogue of the entire library is that which will serve your purpose.’ Instead he mooted ‘a printed catalogue of rare works, unique or distinguished editions, & works perhaps in unusual foreign languages’ alongside ‘the Ms. Catalogue on the spot’, which ‘I have little compunction in sending the mass of readers to consult’. Neither Collier nor he ‘should put the public to any expense to tell us that the Spectator or Hume’s history may be found & read there’, and ‘I cannot conceive the possibility of printing a full catalogue which shall answer the purpose of men of learning within manageable limits as to bulk & expense’; while if we ‘reduce the printed catalogue to the dimension you anticipate, it will remain beyond the purchase of scholars of moderate means’. In thanking John for ‘precisely what I wanted’, Ellesmere welcomed it as testimony of ‘a type or specimen’ of reader, and never as the expression of his own thoughts on the matter.266 Though printed ‘for private circulation’ in at least 160 copies, Collier’s Letter to the Earl of Ellesmere was at first distributed only to the commissioners,267 and (he later claimed) never subsequently circulated beyond a few of the Museum trustees and ‘three private friends’: even that he publicly regretted, its having been pointed out to him, remonstratively, that Panizzi had refrained from broadcasting his own proposals.268 When the third session of the commission began, on 6 February 1849, Panizzi was back, testifying on Reading Room accommodation, conservation, duplicate books, and his policy of providing ‘secondary’ copies of rare works to those readers he considered unqualified. He said

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266. Ganzel’s selective misquotation of this letter (p. 124: the words ‘just right’ never occur) allowed him to represent Ellesmere as later capitulating to an adverse majority (‘Ellesmere, too, at last had voted against a printed index catalogue. He had disowned, albeit with misgivings, the evidence which he himself had urged Collier to present’, p. 130), and to misinterpret Ellesmere’s rueful letter of 25 July 1849 as ‘a kind of apology’ for his pusillanimity. 267. Madden still only ‘hope[d] to obtain a copy’ on 12 February 1849 (Diary), a day before Collier’s first testimony. 268. Supplementary Letter, p. 9. Most museum historians unite in condemning the ‘unjustifiable’ publication of Collier’s arguments, given his ‘access to all the papers and communications’ (as if Panizzi had not the same), and his presence ‘at all [the] deliberations’ (Robert Cowtan, Memories of the British Museum [1872], p. 82; cf. Arundell Esdaile, The British Museum Library [1946], p. 113), and the ‘scarcely edifying’ spectacle of the commission’s secretary ‘engaging in public controversy with the principal witness’ (Miller 1967, p. 180).


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little upon catalogue matters, save to report its alphabetical progress (‘upon the word FRANCIA’) and to reiterate his opposition to printing it (Report, question 4295). But the next nine witnesses (8, 9, and 13 February) were all actively concerned with that issue, and nearly all partisans of the finding-list: Thomas Carlyle, in particular, at the height of his reputation as Commonwealth and French Revolution historian, found the lack of an up-to-date printed catalogue ‘extremely grievous to the readers’, and ‘an immense evil’. He despaired of ‘a perfect catalogue’ as a chimera, and when Monckton Milnes respectfully asked his old friend if ‘you think the accuracy or perfection of a catalogue is very unimportant, in comparison with having a catalogue of some kind’, Carlyle declared that ‘any catalogue whatever, even a mere auctioneer’s list, printed with ordinary correctness, is preferable to no catalogue’ (question 4379). On crossexamination he repeated this position more than once, pointing out also that only with a viable printed index could a visitor from a distance prepare his desiderata beforehand, thus conserving his precious hours in the Reading Room for research. Carlyle’s crotchets, however (his complaint about ‘what I call the Museum headache’ from the ‘bustle and confusion’ there is typical), cannot have impressed the commissioners,269 nor can the coltish hyperbole of Collier’s friend Peter Cunningham, who termed the absence of a printed catalogue ‘an injury to literature’ and ‘a disgrace to the country’ and thought that ‘a common bookseller’s catalogue, the worst catalogue that is put out . . . would be better than waiting for Mr. Panizzi’s’ (4803, 4807, and 4809). The advocates of practical bibliography were in danger of seeming frivolous, what with Carlyle’s remark that some French Revolutionary tracts ‘might as well have been locked up in watertight chests and sunk on the Dogger-bank, as put into the British Museum’ (4373), and Cunningham’s flippant references to ‘the dust . . . never unmoved’ upon parliamentary papers, to Capell’s edition of Shakespeare to which ‘nobody refers’, and to ‘the worst catalogue ever made’—George Robins’s Strawberry Hill sale catalogue—still an improvement on nothing; even sillier was the testimony of George Soane, a miscellaneous writer and the son of Sir John Soane, who complained about everything imaginable, including Panizzi’s legendary punctiliousness in attendance, a slander which Sir Henry Ellis took occasion to refute a day later. On the heels of these witnesses came John Payne Collier,270 interviewed for

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269. See Miller 1967, p. 183, on Panizzi’s ‘furious’ response to Carlyle’s behaviour. 270. Others, mostly in favour of an alphabetical finding-list, were the cyclopaedist George Dodd (1808–81), the antiquary James Paterson (1805–76, on the parliamentary papers ridiculed by Cunningham), and the scientific writer Charles Tomlinson (1808–97), who engaged with Milnes in an interesting exchange on the bibliography of Wordsworth. Edward Edwards of the British Museum (1812–86), soon to emerge before a new parliamentary committee as Panizzi’s adversary


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the first time on 13 February 1849. Collier held the advantage over most of his predecessors in possessing access to all previous testimony, which he himself had recorded,271 a privilege otherwise extended only to the commissioners and the Museum officials (including Panizzi, of course) who chose to attend or to apply for it. But although some thought it ‘irregular’ that he could serve both as paid secretary and as independent witness, there is no reason to think that he sought the latter role—rather the opposite, given his hopes for a Museum post at the end of the inquiry, and his sensible caution about antagonizing Panizzi overmuch. Still, John could never resist an audience, and the effect of his evidence was anything but diplomatic; and—as would soon become obvious—he fatally underestimated, from the outset, Panizzi’s powers of conception, analysis, and persuasion, to say nothing of his iron conviction of purpose. John’s intuitive understanding of intellectual culture in its broad sense —for through self-instruction, antiquarian contacts, and general reviewing he might now claim horizons beyond early English literature—could never be a match for Panizzi’s cosmopolitan professional experience, his alertness and access to out-of-the-ordinary areas of record, and his single-minded dedication to the ideals of librarianship, past and future. Let the weeklies complain about ‘Panizzi’s Commission’ or cronyism in its membership; Panizzi’s eventual triumph rested substantially on the merit of his own testimony and powers of persuasion—much as the defeat of his rivals (Collier included) spoke for the woolliness of their campaign. Collier’s reasonable if airy pronouncements on the methodology and purpose of cataloguing—right or wrong in the long run— met Panizzi’s hard evidence of facts, costs, and precedents head-to-head, without much of a contest. Collier’s initial testimony, presented on 13 February 1849, consisted mainly of points made in his Letter to Ellesmere, which he repeatedly cited.272 He himself raised the cataloguing issue (5017, as an explanation for the underuse of the Museum by readers), and Lord Ellesmere, in the chair, allowed him to explain his preference for a printed short-title catalogue, and his differences with Panizzi over the listing of anonymous books. When asked about Panizzi’s

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on administrative and cataloguing policies—and to be sacked for his outspokenness—was here rather circumspect, and kept his testimony ‘general’: he would have made a powerful advocate for the finding-list party. 271. Presumably during his own testimony someone else recorded what was said: an allusion, supposedly by John, to HEDP as ‘The History of our Stage and Drama’ (5005) may suggest that he himself never revised the transcription. 272. At least one commissioner besides Ellesmere had already read it, Lord Seymour; see Report, questions 5095 and 5108.


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ninety-one rules, John considered them ‘too numerous by far’, but declined for the moment to indicate which ones were superfluous; he advocated, however, leaving ‘more to the discretion of the cataloguer’—a kind of bibliographical relativism that would have been anathema to Panizzi. Much time could be saved by paring down the titles of books, and Collier felt that a cataloguer’s work rate could be doubled, at least, from what Panizzi had estimated—sixty titles in a six-hour day for his own employees—by a floating work-force of ‘men of education, men of ability, and men of character’ paid for piece-work production. He was ambitiously specific about their numbers, their salaries, and the quantity of entries to be supplied (‘748,800 . . . which is not very far from twice the number of volumes at present in the Museum’: question 5070); he thought five years would suffice, rather than ‘the 50 years that Mr. Panizzi requires’, at a yearly expense no greater than that ‘now yearly laid out in abortive efforts for Mr. Panizzi’s interminable catalogue’ (5066); and he expected to be able to recoup the outlay in part by public sale, although ‘I would have it furnished at the cheapest possible rate to readers’. As a model for an alphabetical finding-list he suggested the Rev. Samuel Maitland’s Index to the books in the archiepiscopal palace of Lambeth (1845), which, with its ‘compactness and clearness’, never had failed him, and whose ‘brief and distinct entries are more satisfactory than the useless detail in letter A of the New Museum Catalogue’, while ‘the difference of expense is almost incalculable’. Indeed, if ever a bibliographical catalogue of the dimensions Panizzi envisioned were required, he remarked, the standards of the 1841 sample should be reconsidered—for (in spite of its length) it was blemished with ‘abbreviations, which I presume to call unintelligible dots, indicating nothing but the absence of certain words, which words may be the very words the bibliographer is in search of ’ (5084–90, 5103, 5107). A er such testimony John resumed his secretarial duties for a fortnight, then reappeared before the commission as a witness on 27 February. A er insisting that, in his Letter to Ellesmere, he had never intended to belittle Panizzi’s command of English literature, or to have exhibited personal discourtesy toward him (‘I can have no feeling but that of great respect to Mr. Panizzi . . . I speak of him only as the advocate of what I consider a bad system’; 6214), he repeated his recommendations, now reducing his estimate of the time required to prepare 748,800 entries to just two years, with a work-force of ten cataloguers. To support this highly optimistic figure, he had performed a timed experiment at home, ‘only a day or two since with the books on my own shelves. I took them down indiscriminately, and I found that with ease I could make 25 or 30 entries in the hour’ (6217). The commissioners requested, and received, Collier’s sample list, and heard further reflections characterized by what John himself called ‘the tone of confidence I may have assumed’; at the end of the interview, Milnes


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asked: ‘Have you any objection to intrust the titles of the books which you catalogued from your own library to the care of Mr. Panizzi for a time?’, and John replied: ‘Not at all; they were made in the course of one hour, and may be useful to Mr. Panizzi’ (6328). He cannot have known how true the last observation would turn out to be. For once again John had sadly underestimated his opponent, and provided him with gratuitous evidence, out of his own mouth, to be mercilessly examined in the next three months. The penultimate session of the commission dragged on to 30 March, with more than a dozen new witnesses expressing opinions on the form of catalogue needed; but this time Panizzi’s supporters made their voices heard—in particular the mathematician Augustus De Morgan (three times), a passionate and deeply informed enemy of ‘imperfect’ catalogues; and John Wilson Croker, who thought any form of a printed catalogue ‘impracticable for any good or useful purpose’ (8703–04). Museum librarians and former cataloguers (Edward Edwards and John Humffreys Parry) spoke knowledgeably in support of the ninety-one rules, and friendly booksellers (Adolf Asher of Berlin, Edmund Hodgson and J. G. Cochrane of London) stood up for Panizzi on the mechanics of catalogue production and its varying standards. Proponents of Carlyle and Collier remained in the majority, however, with John Bruce and George Lillie Craik declaring the ‘Letter A’ catalogue ‘objectionable as being too involved and intricate’ and ‘unnecessarily complete’, while Bolton Corney lamented that under the present plan ‘I see no chance, at my time of life, of ever having before me a [complete] catalogue’ (6098).273 The Rev. S. R. Maitland, perhaps interviewed because Collier had so praised his Index of Lambeth Palace books, was unwilling to find much fault with his brother-projectors, but Sir Frederic Madden invited himself back to support ‘Mr. Collier, Mr. Bruce, and other gentlemen’ in urging ‘a catalogue on a less extensive, less costly, and less laborious plan’ (7438). Madden had already complimented Collier on the ‘voluntary and convincing evidence’ he had given to the commissioners (Diary, 14 February), but his mind ran more on the despised Panizzi than on the issue at hand: a day before his own new testimony he twitted Collier with having spoken ‘so much of Mr. Panizzi’s attainments, learning, &c. and begged him to give me any proofs of these qualities’. Collier, he reported, only ‘smiled, and said unless he had done so he should not have stood a chance of being heard by the Commissioners!’—which may have been true, or may have been Collier’s diplomacy toward Madden. Madden supposed it the former, of course,

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273. Panizzi responded to this complaint (9751) by calling it, ironically, the ‘only . . . good reason for having a short catalogue’, but ‘this is a great national undertaking; a catalogue is not to be made according to the age of Mr. Bolton Corney’; Bruce, in his GM review of the Report, rightly admonished Panizzi for this ‘sneer’ (p. 628).


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concluding: ‘Shame, I say, on such scandalous proceedings!’ (Diary, 8 March 1849). At the end of March the commission adjourned for four weeks, before winding up its interviews in a final seventeen-day session between 27 April and 26 June. During the recess two adversaries of Panizzi published yet more Letters to the beleaguered and now unwell Earl of Ellesmere, who cannot have welcomed them. J. E. Gray, the keeper of the Museum’s zoological collections, had followed Collier’s example of January with his own Letter to the Earl of Ellesmere, on the Management of the Library of Printed Books in the British Museum (15 February), and now produced a Second Letter (4 April), equally critical of Panizzi and his system of cataloguing; and John himself, despite having largely suppressed his own first Letter, issued on 16 April A Supplementary Letter to the Earl of Ellesmere, Occasioned by Certain Interrogatories from the Keeper of Printed Books in the British Museum, again ‘printed for private circulation only’, but in approximately two hundred copies. This twenty-four-page squib consists mainly of a protest against Panizzi’s ‘interrogations (somewhat imperative in their tone)’ concerning John’s February testimony, which had not been addressed directly to him, but instead forwarded through Ellesmere. He professed to fear that ‘the subject was degenerating into individual hostility, which has always been repugnant to my nature’ (p. 3), but he must also have realized how carefully Panizzi was examining his evidence, and anticipated what line the Keeper would take in his own. For among Panizzi’s ‘imperative’ requests was the loan of eleven of the exemplary volumes Collier had catalogued for the commissioners,274 which could only mean that the specimen descriptions were being scrutinized against their originals—with what results Collier, with his notorious inattention to minutiae, could easily imagine. And that is precisely what occurred on 17 May 1849. A er its Easter break the commission reconvened on 27 April, when Augustus De Morgan, Panizzi’s principal independent advocate in the catalogue controversy, offered more evidence against ‘practical’ finding-lists, savaging those of the Bodleian Library and Carlyle’s own London Library (‘neither Bohn, nor Payne and Foss, nor Rodd, nor Thorpe, have issued a catalogue of so low a standard’; 8967). With that prologue Panizzi himself returned to the stand, and the entire month of May was devoted to his evidence.275 He replied briefly to a few of Collier’s published remarks on 4 and 15 May, in the course of answering his other critics, but on

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274. So wrote Collier in the ‘Postscript’ to his Supplementary Letter (June 1849), p. 29; in his evidence, however, Panizzi made use of only two. 275. At Panizzi’s own instance three brief questions were put to an earlier witness on 4 May, but the rest of the nine days’ testimony (accounting for nearly 128 pages in the folio Report) was uninterruptedly Panizzi’s.


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17 May he took on Collier’s casual estimates of work-rate and pay, and his model finding-lists (Maitland’s for Lambeth, and the meretricious Index of Trinity College, Cambridge), and made short work of each; finally, he devoted nearly half a day’s testimony—ten printed pages—to a meticulously prepared demolition of John’s twenty-five sample descriptions of books on his own shelves. It would have been an excruciating experience for Collier to have to transcribe, in silence, Panizzi’s onslaught; and it may have been no coincidence that Ellesmere—ordinarily in the chair—chose this day to absent himself. On receipt of John’s specimens of 27 February, Panizzi, who ‘did not wish to criticize them [him]self ’, had handed them over to John Winter Jones, his thirdin-command and eventual successor as Keeper, ‘just as I would have delivered to him the title of any work in the library, to revise. I said to him, ‘‘Here are certain titles, just see how they are drawn’’ ’ (9788); and Jones, the embodiment of a professional librarian, clearly relished his task. ‘These 25 titles contain almost every possible error which can be committed in cataloguing books’, he reported, and Panizzi read out, ‘and are open to almost every possible objection which can be brought against concise titles.’ Thirteen discrete kinds of error were laboriously distinguished, including omissions (Christian names, names of editors, translators and annotators, declaration of numbered editions), incorrect or insufficient title descriptions, ‘calculated to mislead as to the nature or condition of the work specified’, arbitrary or novel designation of authorship (‘where this practice is adopted, the books so catalogued can be found only by those who possess the same information as the cataloguer’), mistakes in grammar—particularly in foreign-language titles—and identification of format. Collier, in his February testimony, claimed to have selected his samples ‘indiscriminately’, and chose a range between 1560 and 1847 in English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek, from Elizabethan rarities to schoolboy texts of the classics, modern editions of drama by Hawkins, Gifford, and himself (the 1825–27 Dodsley), one periodical (Halliwell’s Archaeologist), one translation by the chairman of the commission (Von Raumer’s History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries), and one new work by a Museum trustee, Henry Hallam. If this was meant to show how widely adaptable his cataloguing principles were, it failed miserably, for while Jones and Panizzi could find fault even with descriptions of Middleton’s Black Book, Lodge’s Rosalynde, and Harvey’s New Letter of Notable Contents—works on which Collier himself was a bibliographical authority—they had a field day with the foreign-language titles and terminology. ‘Von Raumer is a German; he does not call himself ‘‘Frederick’’ in German’, Panizzi was able to point out, scornfully, and ‘Auguste Wilhelm Schlagel’ was in fact ‘Schlegel’, while the words ‘übersetz von’, following ‘Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke’, ‘form a most abrupt and unmeaning conclusion’. John had failed to distinguish between


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Auflage and Ausgabe; he had thought ‘die Brüder Grimm’ was enough to identify Jacob and Wilhelm; he had listed Marguerite de Valois ‘under the name of the country [i.e., Navarre] of which the authoress was queen, instead of under her name’, and had given the author of Consideration sur . . . la revolution Française as ‘Staël, La Baronne de’, a title ‘which would belong equally to her daughter-inlaw’. Worst of all, and most humiliating before the university men addressed by Panizzi, John’s unschooled command of the classical languages lay open to ridicule: the title of Quintilian’s Institutiones, as abbreviated, was ‘bad Latin’, and the Latin portion of the title of Longinus, De sublimitate, was ‘ungrammatical’. Was Collier aware, in omitting the praenomina of his authors, that there were five different writers named ‘Longinus’? The implication was clear: he did not. Perhaps to show off his little Greek, John had described an edition of Homer’s Odyssey as ‘Homerus, Οδυσσεια. Graece. 2 vols. Oxford, 1811’, letting himself in for a devastating critique: ‘The title of the book is in Latin; Mr. Collier gives it in Greek. The place of printing on the book is in Latin; Mr. Collier gives it in English.’ For good measure, ‘The size of the book is either foolscap 8o. or 16o. in half sheets; Mr. Collier calls it 12o. In short, the better the reader knew the book the less likely he would be to send for it from such a title’ (9811). Panizzi took special pleasure in the example of the Oxford Homer, to which Jones and he had devoted considerable malicious research, enquiring ‘everywhere’ (he claimed) about the existence of such a book ‘printed at Oxford, with a Greek title’, and finding nothing to match John’s description: ‘I sent to Oxford; I made all sorts of inquiries’, but ‘it was not until I had seen Mr. Collier’s copy that I could feel assured that the edition in the British Museum [listed as ‘Homer. Homeri Odyssea, Gr. 2 Tom. Oxonii, 1811, 16o.’] was that referred to by the above title. This is an example of the trouble and delay that naturally result from hastily written and incorrect titles, in cases where it is necessary to identify a book’ (9788, 9811). Earlier, he had signalled this foolish entry as demonstrating ‘the importance of precision in cataloguing’, and later (9842) he would return to it as a specimen of ‘misleading’ description. Another classical botch proved delicious, Collier’s apparent mistaking of an edition of Aristophanes’ Acharnenses for a translation of it, by T. Mitchell—under whose name, and not Aristophanes’, he had catalogued it. This time, though charitably blaming ‘the danger of writing titles against time’, Panizzi hinted that John simply did not read his more difficult books: ‘It may be that Mr. Collier imagined that the book before him was a translation of the Acharnenses (Mitchell having actually published a translation of this play), and not looking beyond the title-page, [he] could not, of course, discover his error’ (9842, 9823). On and on went Panizzi, indulged with leading questions by the commissioners, some of whom no doubt found the exposure of a self-assured auto-


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didact amusing. The moral of the story, the Keeper insisted, concerned only the short-title list project and its impatient advocates: ‘When we see such a result . . . from an experiment made by a gentleman of education, accustomed to research, and acquainted with books generally, upon only 25 works, taken from his own library, and of the most easy description, we may form some idea of what a catalogue would be, drawn up, in the same manner, by ten persons, of about 600,000 works, embracing every branch of human learning, and presenting difficulties of every possible description.’ But Collier himself, the terms of whose confrontation with Panizzi were a er all his own choice, would not escape the implications of his impugned testimony: ‘I humbly conceive that it would be impossible to prove the inexpediency of Mr. Collier’s plan more effectively than he has himself done; and I hope I may add, without giving offence, that, had I seen these titles under any other circumstances than the present, I should have concluded that the object was to show how nearly worthless would be a catalogue, the proposed advantages of which were short titles, drawn up and printed within the shortest possible period of time’ (9788).276 Thus was Collier damned for his slipshod submission, and his cause, whatever its merits, damned as well by his own vulnerable advocacy. Unable to defend himself in camera—and, as it transpired, no formal response to Panizzi’s nine-day testimony was ever permitted by the commission—John resorted once more to the printed page. In a separately published twelve-page ‘Postscript’ to his Supplementary Letter to Ellesmere, dated 1 June 1849, he complained that ‘palpable injustice was done to me . . . by Mr. Panizzi’, and ‘as it was understood that no witness should reply to him’, only such a means was available for ‘doing myself right, while I strive to avoid doing any body else wrong’. Indeed, he asserted, ‘I am the only witness who could be in a condition to reply’, for uniquely, among the ‘outsiders’ interviewed, he himself had heard Panizzi’s recent testimony verbatim. As he had deliberately ignored the Museum’s ninety-one rules of cataloguing, nothing ‘could be more obviously unjust’ than to test his sample entries by those rules; he had ‘proceeded without a single rule, excepting such as common sense and ordinary sagacity dictated’, and the only purpose of his exercise was practical: ‘The real question is, whether a reader can recognize a book by the title I give, and whether an attendant can go to the press and shelf and bring it to him’ (p. 32). John made no attempt to defend the accuracy of his descriptions—how could he?—but accused Panizzi’s staff of attacking them simply because ‘my system would dispense with the services of at least half of them’. Although Panizzi had been ‘unfair’ in judging the entries by rules to

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276. Panizzi’s concluding remark (10,016) that ‘the more ignorant people are, the more troublesome they are’ has nothing whatever to do with Collier, as Ganzel (p. 127) implied; it refers to readers unacquainted with the parameters of the manuscript catalogue.


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which ‘they were never meant to conform’, Collier claimed to retain ‘much personal respect’ for the Keeper—he quarrelled only with his system—and chose to disregard other details of Panizzi’s hostile testimony because they were ‘merely personal’. Once again John put some two hundred copies of this protest into print, but distributed very few at the time, perhaps only to the commissioners and trustees. One of the latter, Sir Robert Harry Inglis, had responded positively to Collier’s initial Letter of February,277 and Inglis, along with William R. Hamilton and the historian Henry Hallam, provided the commission with its final evidence in June 1849. Long an adversary of Panizzi, Inglis had spearheaded the original movement within the Museum for a new printed catalogue, and still wanted one badly; he blamed Panizzi and his ‘too lengthy’ procedure for the delay, and seemed willing to trade debased standards of description for some kind of result. His was the penultimate plea for the finding-list project (19 June), and he was seconded by Philip Henry Stanhope, Viscount Mahon, on 21 June; Hallam, for the now-ascendant opposition, supported Panizzi’s ninety-one rules whole-heartedly, and saw no reason for a printed catalogue of any sort (12, 15, and 21 June), while W. R. Hamilton, Panizzi’s close friend, sang his praises in all Museum affairs, as ‘one of the best public servants I ever knew’ (10,586).278 A er a last interview on general matters with Hamilton, the commission adjourned sine die on 26 June,279 with only its report to the Queen to complete. This was however by no means a rapid formality, as the press and the public discovered: nearly a year was to elapse before it appeared, occupying forty-four pages in a great folio volume devoted principally to the testimony of fi y-one witnesses, and with a documentary ‘Appendix’ issued a few weeks a erward, and provided only selectively. The assembly of the volume, like the transcripts it prints, was presumably Collier’s responsibility, and however galling the task of recording his own treatment and the failure of his cause may have been, he at least remained salaried through April 1850. But only the commissioners conceived and prepared the Report itself, with its modest administrative recommendations and its nearly unqualified vindication of Panizzi (a preliminary version ‘merely passed through my hands’, John told Lord Langdale on 20 September 1849),280 and the logistics of completing their work proved complicated.

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277. Inglis called it ‘modest able and conclusive’; letter to Collier, 22 February 1849, Folger MS Y.d.6 (153). 278. Madden, predictably, detested Hamilton (‘a prejudiced, ill-tempered partisan’), who alongside Ellis (‘a bully and a slave’) and Panizzi (‘a knave and a blackguard’) was one of his three bêtes noires in the Museum (Diary, 12 June 1849). 279. The very last witness was Sir Frederic Madden (26 June), who submitted a few leover complaints against Panizzi’s department; the commissioners virtually cut him off in mid-delivery. 280. JPC to Langdale, BL Add. MS 36,716, fol. 46.


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Ellesmere, who by the end of July was wishing he had never taken on the chairmanship (‘if it were to do again I would . . . decline such a duty’) and blaming his own ill health, which resulted in ‘incaution & want of foresight’, for much ‘embarrassment & regret’,281 planned to redra and recirculate the initial report himself, but went abroad in September before doing so.282 Meanwhile, in the absence of the commission’s published recommendations, the Athenaeum impatiently demanded at least ‘a report of the evidence’ (23 June 1849, p. 645), in the wishful belief that ‘the evidence [would be found] generally . . . unfavourable to the system of management hitherto pursued, especially in the department of Printed Books’ (15 September, p. 941); and on 12 August the Observer printed a preview of certain ‘agreed’ points in the report-in-progress. This account was reprinted the next day by the Globe, alarming Lord Langdale, who recognized among the particulars ‘a true statement of some suggestions of my own’. Langdale quizzed Collier, who denied circulating any of the commissioners’ private memoranda, and assured him that ‘if any irregularity has taken place, it has not been his’.283 This statement, with a confirmation of confidence from Ellesmere, seems to have satisfied Langdale, but he remained cross and puzzled about the source(s):284 well he might have been, for by 9 September J. E. Gray had reported the contents of an early dra to the Keeper of Manuscripts (Madden Diary, 9 September 1849), and later procured a dra of the final version ‘through one of the attendants who had been Joseph Hume’s secretary’, suggesting that security was anything but effective.285 Collier, it must be said, is unlikely to have been the direct informant of any newspaper,286 but no doubt—given his profession—he remained a logical suspect. The Report of the Museum Commission, in its public appearance as a ‘blue book’ (28 March 1850), treated first the administrative disorder of the Museum, and the alleged mismanagement of its funds and responsibilities. The commissioners found fault specifically with the office of the trustees’ secretary (For-

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281. Ellesmere to JPC, 29 July 1849, Folger MS Y.d.6 (115). 282. JPC to Langdale, 30 July and 18 September 1849, the latter suggesting also that his son’s ‘dangerous illness . . . may be the cause of any delay’ (BL Add. MS 36,716, fols. 32 and 45). Only a portion of the Report was set in type in early August; Langdale to Ellesmere, 26 September 1849, BL Add. MS 36,716, fol. 47. 283. JPC to Langdale, 20 September 1849, and Langdale to Ellesmere, 26 September 1849, BL Add. MS 36,716, fols. 46 and 47; see also Hardy, Memoirs of Langdale, ii:206–11. 284. See Ellesmere to Langdale, 29 September 1849, and Langdale to Ellesmere, 1 October 1849, BL Add. MS 36,716, fols. 50–51. 285. Edward Miller 1973, p. 180n. 286. In September 1850 he informed Madden that ‘I have made up my mind to put my name to every line I write upon the subject . . . Panizzi shall not have to complain of anonymous attacks from me’; JPC to Madden, 4 September 1850, BL Egerton MS 2845, fol. 77.


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shall, who was paid £700 per year and occupied ‘one of the best houses in the Museum’, but had been too ill to respond fully to their enquiries), with the unsalaried trustees themselves (whose out-of-touch performance ‘has not been satisfactory’), and to some extent with the Principal Librarian, Sir Henry Ellis (for his failure to keep abreast), and with department heads Gray and Madden for harbouring dissent without communicating their feelings to the trustees.287 But a er general reflections on accommodation (insufficient) and remuneration of staff (unnecessarily irregular), and a few suggestions about reorganizing departments and exhibits, the only radical recommendation was to abolish the overempowered offices of secretary to the trustees (Forshall’s position) and Principal Librarian (Ellis’s), and to institute a five-man executive council of professionals and outsiders in their stead. On the affairs of the Department of Printed Books, however, to which ‘the attention of the public has perhaps been most directed’ (p. 13), they pronounced with decision: Panizzi’s performance over the past decade had been unimpeachable, and the trustees’ ‘constant supervision and frequent authoritative interference’ was to blame both for the stalled book catalogue and for personal injustice to the Keeper.288 The 1841 ‘Letter A’ catalogue was a mistake, pure and simple, and should never have been printed before the whole alphabet had been dealt with in manuscript. ‘It will be seen from our evidence’, they conceded, ‘that a vital disaccordance of opinion prevails . . . as to the advantage to be expected from a compendious printed catalogue of the Museum Library’, but ‘in our own body, we are unanimous in considering that advantage not such as to make advisable any interruption whatever of the progress of the MS. catalogue. We are further satisfied that any attempt now, to commence a new catalogue, with a view to a reduction of bulk, early completion, and publication . . . would not only interrupt the progress, but, in all probability, defeat the accomplishment of the work’ (pp. 19–20). There remained some disagreement among members on the ultimate merit of manu-

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287. Miller 1973, p. 181 (and 1967, p. 185), wrote that Madden and Gray ‘were rebuked for the ‘‘manifestation of certain feelings . . . of ill judged criticism’’, as had been shown by outside critics of the library’, citing Report, p. 13: we have not found the words ‘ill judged criticism’ anywhere in the original. The commissioners expected negative opinions from the ‘outside’ witnesses, ‘their prima facie recommendation to our notice being the notoriety of their dissatisfaction with various particulars of the administration of the Museum’, but ‘had less previous reason to expect the manifestation of similar feelings . . . especially as to the Catalogue of Printed Books, on the part of some of the gentlemen connected with the Museum’ (Report, p. 13); but no explicit reflection on these feelings appears in the text cited by Miller. 288. They did recognize, among other problems of a personal nature amongst the Museum personnel, that ‘some peculiarities of [Panizzi’s] position [i.e., as head of department and a foreigner] may have led him to occasional misapprehension or exaggerated sensibility on the latter score’, but reaffirmed that his promotion to Keeper through ‘acquirements and abilities’ alone ‘did credit to the Principal Trustees’ of his day (p. 25).


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script versus print, but ‘we unite in deprecating any proposal for entering now on the preparation with a view to publication, of a compendious catalogue’. They had considered the question as ‘one of eventual utility, as compared with estimated labour, difficulty, and expense’, finding that ‘the principal advocates of a printed catalogue have over-rated its utility, and under-rated its difficulties’ (p. 20); and they reduced the classes of user who might most benefit from such a work to just two: booksellers (seeking to sell their wares to the Museum) and visitors from a distance, such as Carlyle had mentioned, who wished to preorganize their researches. Both such interests were lightly dismissed (‘the requirements of such persons whose requirements we are most bound to consult, would be on the whole better satisfied with [a single manuscript catalogue on the spot]’), although as a sop to the opposition they recommended preparation of ‘a compendious ‘‘Guide to the Reading-room’’ ’ and various class-catalogues, including one of ‘rare books’. Significantly, the witnesses cited as ‘by experience and pursuit highly qualified to judge’ were Croker, Maitland, De Morgan, Parry, and Cochrane, all pro-Panizzi, while oppositionists such as Carlyle, Bruce, Cunningham, Craik, Dodd, and Soane were never mentioned by name— nor of course was Collier. It would be tempting to believe that the commission merely acquiesced to Panizzi on the catalogue issue as part of its blanket endorsement of his policies and performance, but there is ample evidence in the Report, and in the questioning throughout the minuted interviews, that its conclusions were considered, and arrived at on perceived merit.289 It is not our brief here to judge them, but the loss of a practical printed catalogue was one suffered not only by Collier and his contemporaries, but also by at least one more generation of readers, whose impaired access to the library cannot be dismissed as insignificant. Dewey Ganzel has assailed the policy adopted, severely but not unfairly, as a ‘legacy of delay’ which diminished Panizzi’s ‘great achievements in reorganizing the library’s procedures, building its collection and enlarging and redesigning its reading room. . . . The greatest irony of all is that a er Panizzi’s death, when the British Museum Catalogue finally resumed publication in 1881, it was a compendious index to the collection, printed in double column, published in parts—a catalogue of the kind, scope and form that Collier, to his disfavour and loss, had advocated over thirty years before’ (p. 129). Reaction in the public press to the Report, and in particular to its stance on the catalogue controversy, was hardly ‘on the whole, favourable’, as Edward Miller (1967, p. 187) described it, and certainly the long five-part review in the

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289. The very make-up of the commission, however, as predisposed toward Panizzi, was specifically criticized in the press.


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Athenaeum, 6 April–11 May 1850, was far from approving:290 that journal excoriated the Report as ‘an unparalleled specimen of Parliamentary logic’, remarking that ‘for the want of harmony between premises and conclusion, as a rare example of the non sequitur, for verdicts given directly in the teeth of the evidence upon which they profess to be founded,—it may challenge comparison with any record of a deliberative body that has recently been communicated to the public’ (6 April, p. 365). On 13 and 20 April the Athenaeum addressed the catalogue question, in a painstaking reconstruction of the debate by Peter Cunningham,291 which spoke of the ‘surprise and astonishment of the public’ over its ‘recommendation in the matter of the Catalogue, [which] is one of the heaviest blows dealt against the progress of literature for many years past’, and through which ‘the national treasures, accumulated and maintained at heavy cost, have been to a great extent sealed up for our generation, and perhaps the next’ (13 April, p. 390). Cunningham named most of the witnesses in the controversy—twelve on the side of a finding-list, only four (Hallam, Panizzi, De Morgan, Croker) opposed, noting that ‘Dr. Maitland can hardly be considered a witness either way’; he asserted that ‘nine-tenths of all the literary men of England’ would take the part of Inglis, Carlyle, Collier, and himself. ‘Unless Mr. Panizzi is willing to undertake and complete a ‘‘compendious and accurate’’ Printed Catalogue— or in other words, one shorter and simpler’, he thundered, ‘the Trustees should find a Librarian who will,—and, what is more, will fulfil his undertaking within a reasonably short time’ (20 April, p. 417). Toward this end the summing up on 11 May published the elaborate cost-calculations of William Desborough Cooley for creating separate stereotyped catalogue-titles (‘the benefits that would result from this plan have no limit’), and an independent petition to Parliament was mounted in the midsummer;292 but nothing came of these motions to reconsider. At the Gentleman’s Magazine another disgruntled witness, John Bruce, reviewed the Report anonymously and harshly, charging the commission with

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290. The praise of Panizzi and his cohorts J. W. Jones and Thomas Watts (another future Keeper), on 11 May, as ‘a race of bibliographical giants’, and of Panizzi’s ‘manly spirit in which he faced all difficulties and grappled with all opponents’—all that Miller quotes—had nothing to do with the findings of the Report, which were savaged. 291. While this part of the Athenaeum review is Cunningham’s, the scientist Edwin Lankester was responsible for the discussion of natural history (27 April), and the initial and final estimates of the Report (6 April, 11 May) were provided by T. K. Hervey and C. W. Dilke respectively. On 4 May W. J. Thoms contributed a signed letter complaining about the inaccessibility of the Grenville catalogue. 292. JPC to Cunningham, 12 August 1850, a lukewarm endorsement (‘I could not refuse my signature, nor did I wish it’), urging that ‘the Petition should not go forward unless it [is] well signed ’; Harmsen collection.


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prejudice and impugning its procedures. ‘Some of the most active and influential members of the Commission were discovered to be personal and intimate friends of Mr. Panizzi, the very gentleman whose conduct was one of the principal subjects for inquiry’, he wrote (May 1850, pp. 502–03); ‘one of them, it was said, was honoured by a visit from Mr. Panizzi at his seat in Scotland before the business of the Commission was proceeded with’. Before and a er the meetings ‘Mr. Panizzi and some of his friends on the Commission were not unfrequently closeted together’, and during the interviews themselves ‘Mr. Panizzi . . . prompted his friendly advocates in the Commission, handing them written questions’, while ‘a erwards [he] was allowed (as it was rumoured, and now proved), without the presence or the knowledge of the witness, to insinuate his reply’. Lord Ellesmere, ‘the kind and amiable Earl’, was of course unassociated with these abuses, but with the end of his charge, he, like Prospero, ‘has broken his staff. His spell is dissolved, his charms are o’erthrown’ (p. 504). Like Sir Frederic Madden,293 Bruce appears to have considered the éminence grise behind the Report to be Andrew Rutherfurd, the Lord Advocate, who throughout the interviews ‘exercised his wonderful gi of cross-examination’ on Panizzi’s behalf. A final complaint concerned the missing ‘Appendix’, referred to throughout the Report, which ‘to our certain knowledge . . . ought to contain papers by Mr. Carlyle, Mr. Bolton Corney, Mr. Payne Collier, and Mr. Panizzi’, but which was not available to the Gentleman’s Magazine. The Athenaeum too had remarked on this absence (‘Can this be the document of which it has been said that only forty copies have been printed?’), and in the event it contained nothing by the opposition (Carlyle, Corney, Collier) at all.294 To the June 1850 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine Collier contributed a six-column letter, communicating in full his challenged list of twenty-five titles, which Bruce had referred to—intending no slight—as ‘hurried slips’, exposed to unfairly minute examination by Panizzi’s lieutenants. Here Collier repeated his shaky argument that one should ‘try Mr. Panizzi’s titles by Mr. Panizzi’s rules, but try my titles by the rules I professed to follow’; and Bruce, apologizing for any imputation of carelessness by John, welcomed his letter as ‘characteristic of our manly, straightforward friend, and powerfully conclusive against the outrageous scheme of Mr. Panizzi’: the gloves of the anti-Panizzi faction were now clearly off, if too late. Collier, who had hitherto refrained from circulating his three-part Letters to Ellesmere, in April presented the Supplementary Letter and

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293. Madden to JPC, 13 April 1850: ‘I shall record my opinion for posterity, that this Report of Mr Rutherfurd (I ought to have said, of the Commissioners) is the grossest piece of humbug & favoritism ever attempted to be imposed on the literary public’; FF MS 352. 294. In June 1850 the GM reported that ‘one hundred copies . . . [had been] struck off, and the type was then broken up and dispersed’, calling such treatment of ‘a public document . . . scarcely credible’ (p. 628). In extant copies of the Report the Appendix rarely occurs.


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the ‘Postscript’ to Madden, who ‘rejoice[d] that there is one man who has not been afraid to speak the truth. My fingers itch to follow your example’, he added, but excused his own silence ‘by the fear of the nervous excitement which could follow, since I could not take up the subject without shewing up certain of the Trustees, as well as Mr. P. and Sir H. E.’ 295 In his diary Madden recorded that ‘both [the Supplementary Letter and ‘Postscript’] are written in an honest fearless & convincing style to anybody but the rascally Italian and his gang’; but five months later Collier found Madden’s politic inaction frustrating: ‘Were I in your condition, and with your convictions, I could not keep silent . . . I do not want to stir you up—to rouse the lion in you; but knowing how strongly you feel, I wonder that you do not write as strongly’.296 At Madden’s request he had in May forwarded a set of his Letters to John George Children, formerly of the Museum, and he sent another to W. B. D. D. Turnbull in June.297 Until now, in public at least, John had remained civil toward Panizzi himself: ‘I have not, and never had, any difference with Mr. Panizzi’, whose ‘conduct to me personally has been unexceptionable’, he wrote in the Gentleman’s Magazine (though adding that ‘he is the author of a bad, useless, and most dilatory system of cataloguing’), and he never gave Madden the direct satisfaction of sharing his phobic intolerance of ‘the rascally Italian’: we would surely have heard, if he had. But in writing to Turnbull, a man who would himself experience the arrogance of office, resentment of what had been indeed a miserable experience bubbled over: ‘It makes my blood boil’, he admitted, ‘to see the Italian carry it away as he does, by dint of trickery, treachery, brazen-facedness & flattery. Never mind—I did my best to get a Catalogue for the use of poor literary men—& that is my consolation—& all my consolation.’ John had however been resigned to his fate, vis-à-vis the Commission and the British Museum, since before the Report emerged. On 4 March he wrote to his oldest friend, Robinson, a careful letter that summed up his disappointment, and his resolution to trim sails. It has a valedictory tone, and we quote it in full:298

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295. Madden to JPC, 13 April 1850. 296. JPC to Madden, 4 September 1850, BL Egerton MS 2845, fo. 77. 297. JPC to Madden, 7 May 1850, BL Egerton MS 2845, fol. 72; JPC to Turnbull, 3 June 1850, Corporation of London, London Metropolitan Archives Q/WIL/117/1. 298. JPC to HCR, 4 March 1850, HCR Correspondence. Robinson recorded in his diary (6 March 1850) that ‘[John’s] frankness has displeased the Commissioners of the British Museum Inquiry, and they will do nothing for him’, but that ‘I assured him of my sympathy and increased respect’. To Collier he wrote that ‘you have been wanting [only] in that prudence which makes a man look to his own personal interest as the pole-star of his life’, and ‘I know no one who has pursued literature more carefully or more disinterestedly than you’; HCR to JPC, 6 March 1850, Folger MS Y.d.6 (190).


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Victoria Road Kensington 4 March 1850 My Dear Robinson As the Commission on the British Museum is now practically at an end, and as the result has been the disappointment of any hopes of further advantage to me from it, you will not be surprised (or at all events not much surprised) to hear that I am putting my affairs into as small a compass as I can, and that with my Wife and four daughters I am about to retire into the country. The distance we are going is not great, and the friends & relations to whom we are going most kind & considerate. Robert Proctor and Polly, at Geys, have a larger house than they at all need, & they have agreed to take us in on such terms as offer them no benefit, but as will afford us a most agreeable & welcome asylum. In this way I shall be able, I think, to make my small income sufficient; and I am too old now to be able to increase it in the way in which, as you are well aware, I formerly managed to eke it out, and make both ends pretty nearly meet. I shall employ my leisure, in my retirement, in writing to as much profit as I can, but my knowledge, I am sorry to say, is not of the most saleable kind. What I can do I will do; and however ill advised, on many accounts, has been my course, I do not believe that anybody can justly say of me that I have not been a willing and a hard-working man. At sixty, my health would not be equal to night-work upon newspapers, and unless I could do night-work, I do not know what employment I could obtain. If you happened to hear of any, consistent with my knowledge, abilities (such as they are) and health, you do not know a man more desirous of performing it. I wish to make my change as easy and noiseless as I can upon all accounts; and it is not unnatural that at my age I should not object to retirement, though I may not like obscurity. The truth of the matter is (but I do not wish it to go farther now) that the Commissioners will do nothing for me. In advocating, with more zeal than discretion, a short, but complete printed Catalogue of the books in the Museum, I opposed not only Mr. Panizzi, but the views of the great majority of the Commissioners, and instead of floating down the stream of good luck, I am le high and dry on the sand-bank of disappointment. Without a figure, I took the honest but the unwelcome course; and for the sake of literature and poor literary men, I placed myself in a position rather to offend than to please those whom


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I served. I must take the consequences, though I cannot but feel them severely, and the more severely because I necessarily draw my dear old wife and my daughters into the scrape. However, they suffer so cheerfully, that they do much to reconcile me to the condition of my affairs. They believe it is no fault of mine, and on some accounts I rejoice in my comparative poverty. I am troubling you too much at length upon these matters; but recollecting that you are the oldest friend of me and of my family, I will not make any apology. Bob and Polly will do everything to make us comfortable; and, in the country, I shall at least get rid of the irritation & anxiety occasioned throughout by the adverse working of the Commission, the object in appointing which I entirely, and from the first, misunderstood. I am, My dear Robinson, Your always affectionate friend, J. Payne Collier Do not speak of the subject of this letter excepting in general terms to any of our mutual friends. I wish, as much as I can, to keep up appearances.

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This self-scourging letter is indeed ‘manly’ and honest, in the wake of a last expectation—perhaps one only of his imagination—denied. What John regarded as his loss through ‘more zeal than discretion’ was (he later asserted) a position comparable to Panizzi’s in the Museum itself, although there is really no evidence that such a post was ever on offer. ‘I have reason to know’, he wrote in 1865, ‘that, nearly twenty years since, I injured my own prospects by the part I took upon this subject; because, if I were correctly informed, the Commissioners had at one time a design to separate the Printed Book Department into two portions—English and Foreign. If this reasonable plan had been carried out, and I had accommodated myself to the views of those who were for a manuscript Catalogue in five or six hundred huge folio volumes, I might, with the assistance of the Earl of Ellesmere, as head of the Commission, and of the Duke of Devonshire, as one of the trustees, have had a chance of filling the appointment which would thus have been created’ (BARB, pp. ix x). The patent improbability that such a ‘design’—through which Panizzi would have been deprived of half his empire—had been mooted, to say nothing of adopted, by the admiring commissioners, leaves little to say. In the palmy first months of the Museum Commission, or at the point of submitting his early evidence as an expert, Collier may have grasped at such a straw, as at so many before; but one can only


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think that he exaggerated his chances, like his claims, in his ignorance of civilservice procedure and professionalism. Still it was no doubt some consolation to believe that the devilish machinations of Panizzi, the connivance of the predisposed commissioners, and the pusillanimity of Ellesmere had combined to scuttle this ‘reasonable plan’, rather than John’s habit of putting too much trust in his (unaware, uninformed, uncommitted) patron-princes. In practical terms, however much a main-stream Londoner John always would feel, the occasion for a country retirement could not but seem imminent and compelling. At sixty-one, he was cut off from the newspapers and public service, without any gainful employment whatever in hand or in prospect, save literary piece-work and perhaps amateur book-trading, both of which could be pursued, via the post, from a distance. His elder son John Pycro had married in August 1849,299 leaving the house in Victoria Road underpopulated for once, and perhaps the illness of his daughter Jane Emma, who was to die of tuberculosis in early 1853, was already apparent. His own health, a er a long history of respiratory infections and arthritis (‘for a long time I have had only the use of a finger and thumb, as far as any penmanship is concerned’, he told Halliwell),300 might have encouraged him to quit London, with its debilitating fogs and pollution; but he took no evident pleasure in the move. Sending his wife and remaining family ahead, early in March, John joined them at Geys House, Holyport, near Bray and Maidenhead, in mid-April.301 He never resided in London again.

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299. To Cornelia Ann Laura De Zoete (b. 1820), the daughter of old family friends. 300. 1 July 1850, LOA 230, fol. 10. 301. JPC to JOH, 1 March: ‘I am going to send my wife & family out of town for 6 months, & I shall be very much in the country myself ’ (LOA 230, fol. 6); JPC to Cunningham, 17 April 1850 (Harmsen collection).


part eight

The Perkins Folio (I)

The Hermit of Holyport Geys House, John Payne Collier’s first home in the country since 1802, still stands, a substantial eighteenth-century brick farmhouse with arched windows and a porch framed by plain Tuscan columns. It is set among fields cultivated in the mid-fi eenth century by one John Gey or Gay, a quarter-mile from the village green of Holyport and close to Bray, Maidenhead, and the Thames; by the Marlow omnibus from Holyport to Windsor, and thence by the Great Western Railway, the trip to Waterloo Station took no more than ninety minutes in 1850,1 so that John’s rustication was hardly profound. Indeed the Proctors, who leased the property in 1843, maintained their own London residence five more years, presumably treating Geys House as a part-time retreat.2 Robinson, who visited them there several times, thought Geys ‘a sweet place’, the house ‘a very pretty one’, and its garden ‘handsome, with a tree that ennobles every spot it adjoins, a cedar of Lebanon’ (HCR Diary, 26 September 1848 and 5 May 1857). If self-exile from London was obligatory, John might have done worse. Robert and Mary Proctor brought three of their four living children to Geys House, two daughters of eighteen and twenty, and their elder son, Robert, aged twenty-seven, who as a babe-in-arms had crossed the Andes by donkey, but who had subsequently been crippled by rheumatic fever.3 To this ménage of

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1. HCR Diary, 10 October 1850. 2. In 1843 Robinson recorded the Proctors’ intention to move there ‘permanently soon’ (Diary, 19 August), but in fact they did not give up their London house until the spring of 1848. Although Robert Proctor’s farming experience went back to his partnership with John Dyer Collier at Smallfield in 1818, it is unclear that he meant to operate Geys Farm itself, or ever did so. By 1840 Proctor was in indifferent health, but aer some lean years with the Aldernay Dairy he had belatedly made good, becoming ‘the prosperous one of the family’—in contradistinction to John and his own schoolmaster brother George—with an income in the late 1830s of £2,000 per annum, and assets that Robinson estimated at £12,000 (HCR Diary, 29 January 1837 and 22 September 1839). Aer the death in 1860 of his wife, Mary, John’s sister, he spent some time in Rome and elsewhere on the continent, and died 12 November 1875 (estate probated at under £16,000). 3. Robinson found the young Robert at Geys ‘in an invalid chair’ (Diary, 26 September 1848). He married late (1867) and became the father of Robert George Collier Proctor (1868–1903), the distinguished bibliographer.

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five the Colliers, in the summer of 1850, added seven: John, Mary Louisa, her maiden sister Emma Pycro , and the four unmarried daughters, Mary Frances (aged thirty-three), Jane (twenty-six), Emma Letitia (twenty-four), and Henrietta (not yet twenty-three). A dozen adults under one roof, plus domestics, must have challenged even the accommodation of Geys House, given moreover John’s work-habits, newly restricted to home, and the extent of his private library and personal archive. While there is no tangible evidence of friction between the communalists at first,4 John may have been embarrassed by his perceived dependence upon his brother-in-law, whatever the financial arrangements between them: six years later Robinson would refer to John’s having been disesteemed by the neighbouring gentry as ‘the inmate of Robert Proctor’ (HCR Diary, 14 August 1856). For his part John may have wished to suggest the informal or temporary nature of his situation: ‘I have taken up my summer quarters here’, he told W. C. Trevelyan in July 1850,5 and in the spring of 1851 he spent four months at Brighton, frequently visiting London as well on society and research business. But this last long sojourn, necessitated by the alarming pulmonary illness of his daughter Jane, apparently cost John a projected visit to Germany,6 and he seldom again travelled farther from home than to Oxford, Brighton, or Torquay. Despite Robert Proctor’s modest affluence in the late 1830s, Robinson in 1850 observed that the occupants of Geys House, both Proctors and Colliers, ‘are all obliged to practice rigid economy in order to live’.7 John was painfully aware of how slender his means had become: to the Pycro inheritance of Pelican shares (about £300 per year) and Devonshire’s stipend of £100 he could now add only the honorarium of fi y guineas a year as treasurer of the Camden Society, which he did little to earn,8 and whatever his pen might bring in. He re-opened his campaign for the traditional sinecure of a police magistracy, but found no more encouragement from sponsors in 1850 than Devonshire had given him in 1840. Horace Twiss, the literary wit, politician, and former colleague on the

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4. Robinson, who may have been eying Geys House as a potential retirement home for himself—he frequently alluded to the possibility of living with the Colliers or Proctors—told his brother Thomas on 1 November 1851 that ‘the two families . . . make a large body and they seem united & happy’; HCR Correspondence. 5. JPC to Trevelyan, 7 May 1850, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34. 6. Or so Collier told Philip Bliss on 23 August 1851; BL Add. MS 34,578, fols. 370–71. 7. HCR to Thomas Robinson, 11 October 1850, HCR Correspondence. 8. Council meetings were held monthly except in summer, and through 1852 Collier attended regularly, missing only one or two sessions each year. His attendance was more erratic in the mid1850s, and aer the public condemnation of the Perkins Folio in July 1859 he attended only five more meetings before resigning as treasurer in April 1861 (Society minute books, Royal Historical Society). His work for the Shakespeare Society and his society publications made him next to nothing.


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Morning Chronicle and Times, ‘lost no time in recommending your request to the favourable consideration of the Commissioner of Police’,9 but to no avail; Lord Campbell, appealed to on the same score during a visit to Collier just before he le Kensington, ‘started up from his chair, exclaimed ‘‘impossible!’’, quitted the room, mounted his old grey horse, and followed by his groom le the house’.10 John made an effort in March to dispose of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Larpent play manuscripts which he still held in partnership with Amyot,11 offering them to the British Museum for their original cost of £185; but Madden was dubious about the purchase, and the trustees eventually declined it.12 Finally, cap in hand, he approached Ellesmere once more, this time seeking a civil-list pension from the government’s ‘literary services’ fund—providing a 9. Twiss to JPC, 31 May 1850, Folger MS Y.d.341 (148). 10. JPC Diary, 18 July 1881, reporting that Campbell ‘was very full of protestations of desire to serve me; but he put by every suggestion I made to advance me’, and so responded when ‘at last I grew impatient and said ‘‘I am a Barrister of nearly your standard—make me a Police Magistrate’’ ’. A very different version was published by Collier in the preface to his 1862 edition of Spenser, which he said he had intended to dedicate to Campbell, ‘but sudden death defeated what was my long-entertained purpose’: here (p. vii) John claimed that ‘his Lordship more than hinted that it might be possible to procure for me an appointment connected with the County Courts; but I at once put a negative upon the matter, on the ground that I had long ceased to attend in my place as a barrister. . . . As far back as 1832, for different, though still professional reasons, I had declined the office of stipendiary magistrate; and in 1848 or 1849 I requested Lord Campbell not to interpose in my behalf with a view to such duties.’ In 1865 he repeated this version, somewhat embellished, to William Hazlitt: ‘I might have been a Police Magistrate or a Colonial Judge [memories of Barron Field, perhaps?], but I refused the first, and my late wife would not let me take the last. She would rather have lived upon £300 a year here, than upon £3,000 a year in Ceylon or the West Indies’; letter, 4 September 1865, BL Add. MS 38,898, fols. 290–91; printed in Hazlitt 1897, ii:21–22. 11. Though still active, Amyot by now was effectively incompetent: Robinson in June 1849 thought ‘his mind is quite gone—he is quite unable to understand common conversation and is yet not in the least sensible of his infirmity’ (Diary, 27 June). Aer his death on 28 September 1850 Robinson told his brother that ‘Amyot’s mind had utterly failed him, so that I latterly avoided him at the Athenaeum, as I found it puzzled him to recollect who I was’; HCR to Thomas Robinson, 5 October 1850, HCR Correspondence. 12. Madden Diary, 4 March 1850. Collier appears not to have raided his own library for profit at this time, however: contrary to Ganzel’s assertion (p. 134) that he ‘had sold everything of value he possessed’ before quitting London, and ‘had begun to transfer the best of his library to his nephew [by marriage], Frederick [sic] Ouvry’, he had not yet begun to dispose of his book and manuscript rariora. He apparently did curtail his library’s bulk considerably, as he had done in an earlier move, for on 6 December 1851 he declared that ‘when I removed into the country, I was unable to bring more than a third part of my books with me’, putting the remainder in storage in the Pantechnicon (Athenaeum, p. 1281). Some of these he soon replaced (e.g., the publications of the Hakluyt Society), and there is no evidence of any further pruning until January 1854, when he sold some unwanted books at Sotheby’s.


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niggardly £1,200 per annum in total—and Ellesmere recommended his case to Lord John Russell on 12 June: ‘I could neither do more nor less’, the earl told his unlucky retainer.13 A yearly sum of £100 was awarded John almost at once,14 though he retained expectations (futile) of an increase to £200, and found himself on the defensive toward Robinson, Cunningham, and Halliwell over the meagreness of the award, and the grovelling it implied. Robinson in particular sniffed at it, expressing ‘some surprise and a mixed feeling of pleasure and regret’ to his diary (10 October 1850), and informing his brother that John ‘did not speak of it to me which shows his own feeling on the subject. And I dare say he will feel something like shame when it will be made public as it must in a few months’ (11 October 1850, HCR Correspondence). Cunningham was never so nice about money, as John knew in sharing with him the opinion of ‘several people’, who ‘say ‘‘You ought not to have accepted it: it only proceeds from the miserable parsimony of the Whigs. You should have thrown it back upon them’’’, which he was clearly in no position to do. And lest anyone should imagine that state pensions materialized from thin air, unsought and unsupplicated, he bluntly told Halliwell otherwise: ‘I was told, or given to understand, that £100 a year might be had by properly asking for it. I did ask, properly, and I did obtain it. I am content’.15 In the first eighteen months of his country retirement Collier’s pace of publication showed no sign of flagging. The four volumes of Heywood plays for the Shakespeare Society reached subscribers between April 1850 and May 1851, and these were no sooner in print than a new editorial project—his last, as it happened, for the beleaguered society—beckoned him. Sir Frederic Madden, examining various papers belonging to Edward (later second Baron) Mostyn, of Flintshire, came upon an unpublished autograph play of 1590–96 by the prolific Elizabethan dramatist, translator, versifier, and pamphleteer Anthony Munday, and promptly alerted Collier.16 Permission for the Shakespeare Society to print

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13. Ellesmere to JPC, 12 June, FF/K MS 647. Collier also sought and received a recommendation from Lord Brougham (JPC to Brougham, 7 and 9 June 1850, UCL, Brougham Papers MSS 726 and 709), but Henry Hallam politely refused one, being already committed to several other candidates (Hallam to JPC, 11 June 1850, FF MS 767). 14. Cunningham congratulated John on Lord John Russell’s ‘good sense’ on 22 July, although the stipend may not yet have been set (Cunningham hoped it might be £300 a year); Robinson heard of the true amount in October. 15. JPC to Cunningham, 16 November 1850, Harmsen collection; JPC to JOH, 27 November 1850, LOA 59/22. 16. John a Kent and John a Cumber (Shakespeare Society, 1851). Controversy about the date of the play, usually taken from a partly eroded subscription at the end (‘Decembris 1596’ or ‘1590’, misread ‘1595’ by Collier), has involved W. W. Greg and others: cf. Shapiro 1955; Long 1989; and Anne Haaker in Logan and Smith 1975, p. 129 (misrepresenting the terminal subscription as in



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the play was soon obtained from Mostyn, and Collier worked on it over the mid-summer, returning the manuscript to Madden on 12 August. In the event, John regarded his project as no less than ‘a book about Anthony Munday’,17 for he added three hitherto-unreprinted texts to John a Kent and provided a new ‘Memoir’ and ‘List of Anthony Munday’s Works’ extending to forty-five pages, in addition to a general introduction and critical notes. For all these he has been inadequately acknowledged by modern scholars, although forty years on Thomas Seccombe allowed that Collier’s introductory material ‘still afforded . . . the best basis for a biography of Munday’ (DNB, 1894).18 The editorial work on John a Kent is perhaps undistinguished, for the manuscript is frayed and defective in parts, and John did not really keep to his promise of signalling every textual conjecture with brackets (p. vii), nor was his transcript (which he insisted upon preparing himself: Madden Diary, 6 June 1851) free from the occasional howler; nevertheless it is absurd to say, with S. A. Tannenbaum, that ‘many fraudulent readings’ appear in the Shakespeare Society text:19 there are no indications of wilful perversion, only of carelessness. The reprints of Munday’s rare View of Sundry Examples (1580, a collection of prodigies and murders) and A Brief and True Report of the Execution of Certain Traitors (1582, one of his rabidly anti-Catholic tracts) were both doubtless based on copies at Lambeth Palace, as was that of the eccentric Advertisement and Defence of Truth against Her Backbiters (1581, another squib against ‘favourers and colourers of [Edmund] Campions’), which Collier included only ‘to render the series of publications on this event [Campion’s execution] more complete’ (p. xxxviii). He never suggested that the last was by Munday—indeed he derided the style of its anonymous author as ‘rambling’, ‘incoherent’, and ‘almost unintelligible’, and excluded it from his ‘List of Anthony Munday’s Works’—and it is hardly his fault that bibliographers from Hazlitt (1867) to Seccombe (1894) to Tannenbaum (1942, Collier’s indefatigable accuser) have leapt to that unwarranted conclusion.20

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Munday’s autograph). We feel, from independent examination, that there indeed remains ‘room for doubt’ in the reading, and Harold Jenkins (1961, p. xl) pointed out also that the subscription is ‘in a different hand [and] evidently a later addition’, hence only a terminus a quo. No one has yet suggested that the subscription is ‘modern’ or forged—nor do we. Madden first mentioned the play, ‘well worthy publication’, in his diary on 12 May; he told Collier about it on 6 June and lent it to him to transcribe at that time. Collier announced the discovery himself on 19 July in the Athenaeum, pipping Madden’s announcement (N&Q, 26 July 1851) by a week. 17. JPC to David Laing, 30 September 1851, EUL MS La.IV.17. 18. As Collier himself pointed out, his memoir and bibliography were reworked from his own notes to The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon in the ‘supplement’ to Dodsley’s Old Plays (1828). 19. Tannenbaum 1927, p. 49, n. 14. 20. Presumably from a hasty reading of the title of the 1851 volume (‘with other tracts by the


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Also in mid-1850, John engaged with the Roxburghe Club to prepare an edition of five Elizabethan plays, none of which had hitherto been reprinted. These he described as representative of an ‘intermediate’ type of drama, between the moralities and miracle plays and the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare’s era, a ‘peculiar class’ of entertainment ‘never yet especially noticed, nor sufficiently illustrated’ (Five Old Plays, Illustrating the Early Progress of the English Drama [1851], p. i). We might now call them ‘moral comedies’—semi-allegorical in theme, with characters verging on the abstract—although four of the five were part of the popular London repertoire of the 1580s and 1590s. The selection was certainly Collier’s, as no doubt was the idea of the project itself:21 he chose The Conflict of Conscience (ca. 1570, printed 1581), an old-fashioned morality by an otherwise unknown Norfolk clergyman, Nathaniel Woodes; The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (ca. 1582?, printed 1589), more nearly a mythological romance; a pair of stylized comedies now attributed to the player Robert Wilson, The Three Ladies of London (1584) and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590); and A Knack to Know a Knave (1594), whose satirical element is sometimes plausibly associated with Robert Greene and a ‘young Juvenal’, perhaps Thomas Nashe. As copy-text Collier employed his own quartos of The Conflict of Conscience 22 and Three Lords and Three Ladies, Ellesmere’s of The Rare Triumphs, Devonshire’s of A Knack, and Garrick’s, in the British Museum, of Three Ladies. His editorial performance was little more than perfunctory, although he claimed to have compared two copies of Three Lords and Three Ladies with his own, ‘because, as all who have been in the habit of examining the productions of our early stage are aware, important alterations and corrections were sometimes introduced while the sheets were going through the press’ (p. xii); to have ‘more or less availed ourselves’ of three copies of the 1592 quarto of Three Ladies (Devonshire’s, Ellesmere’s, and one at Bodley); and to have collated Devonshire’s Knack with Dyce’s copy, while dismissing the British Museum’s, which was ‘very defective in several places . . . the missing pages having been supplied in very delusive manuscript’.23 About the only significant

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same author’). Celeste Turner (1928, p. 57) properly disowned it (followed by new STC, correcting 1926 STC ), and properly exonerated Collier. 21. A meeting of the Printing Committee held on 29 June agreed to accept his proposal for the volume; archives, Society of Antiquaries. 22. This copy, now at Houghton, is of the second issue—with cancel I4 and A2—but supplied with a slightly defective title from the first issue: hence the misleading combination of the revised happy ending and de-personalized Prologue with the title naming the real-life hero ‘Frauncis Spera’. See the Malone Society reprint, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1952), p. vii. 23. Five Old Plays, p. xx; according to Richard Proudfoot (Malone Society ed. of A Knack [Oxford, 1964], p. x) the Museum copy lacks only B2–3, ‘supplied in manuscript (inaccurately) in a seventeenth-century hand’.



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textual variants in any of these plays, however, are those in The Conflict of Conscience, where the Prologue and conclusion were radically altered by cancels, and had Collier examined the Malone copy at Bodley he would have discovered this. But as he told Madden on 4 September, he was working ‘under some disadvantage, now I have taken up my residence in the country’,24 and of the twenty-four footnoted citations in his twenty-page introduction, eighteen are to his own works or to work in progress. Nevertheless, Five Old Plays took its time to complete, and predictably put off John’s work on the Trevelyan papers, a trunkload of which reached Geys House in July 1850. On 6 July John informed Sir Charles that his Roxburghe book ‘must be finished by the 25th March next’, and on 11 September told Sir Walter that it was ‘proceeding rapidly’ toward publication in June 1851; what with the Heywoods and Munday, however, and the long stay in Brighton, nothing was possible for the Trevelyans until October 1851, when Collier announced that ‘I am now in the thick of your family papers’.25 But there would be further interruptions, and of course that project was strictly honorific: the Roxburghe Club paid, if not handsomely, decently, and Five Old Plays probably brought in more than one year’s income from the new civil-list pension.26 No profit at all attached to one separatum of 1850, but John might well be excused a little frivolity amongst his family anxieties, professional disappointments, and dry editorial tasks. The Happy Man’s Shirt, and the Magic Cap, Imitated from the Italian is a lighthearted translation of two verse-novelle of G. B. Casti, ‘La Camicia dell’ uomo felice’ and ‘Il Berretto magico’, themselves adapted from tales in the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino. Collier’s ottava rima— fi y-four stanzas of it—is not unskilled, and some of the rhymes are delightfully Thackerayan: as when one of the priest-physicians to the ailing Sultan ‘urg’d a pilgrimage to Mecca, / All charges to be borne by the Exchequer’, and the moral to the second tale emerges ‘true as it is hurtless— / The really happy are the really shirtless’. The initial composition went back to about 1824, in the heyday of John’s enthusiasm for Italian poetry, but his manuscript shows heavy revision at

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24. BL Egerton MS 2845, fol. 77. Straitened reference resources may also explain his decision to curtail commentary in the Heywood editions of 1850–51, ‘deeming it a useless consumption of space to multiply authorities’ (Fair Maid of the West, pp. vi–viii). Ganzel (p. 137) elevated this to an editorial ‘principle’, which ‘Collier was among the first to articulate . . . and to discipline himself to its demands’. 25. JPC to W. C. Trevelyan, 23 October. All quotations are from Trevelyan Papers WCT 34. 26. We have no correspondence over the fee for Five Old Plays, and there are no treasurer’s accounts for the club at this period; but if Collier was paid approximately as he was for the Norfolk Household Book (1844) and the edition of Drayton (1856), he would have made nearly £120— plus a few copies of the handsome volume, one of which he presented to a surprised and gratified Dyce (Folger MS Y.d.6 [92], an undated letter from Dyce thanking Collier for a copy).


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a later date.27 It was ‘Privately Printed’—like the roughly contemporary Letters to Ellesmere—in sixteen pages, unstitched, unbound, undated, and resolutely anonymous, and it cannot have been widely circulated, for at least sixty copies were le over at Collier’s death (JPC sale, lots 635–38), and we have never seen an inscribed one. Frederic Ouvry wrote on the title of his copy (Ouvry sale, lot 750): ‘Sent to me by post (as I suspect) by J. Payne Collier, Esq., tho’ he denies it’. Still, John must have sent one as well to the Gentleman’s Magazine, where it was briefly reviewed in May 1850 (p. 512) as ‘not without cleverness and point, but . . . deficient in the continual sparkle and brilliancy which ought to distinguish this style of poem’. Periodical publication formed a major component of Collier’s literary output in his first Holyport years, and its variety was imposing. For the Athenaeum he had provided eight anonymous book reviews in 1847, seven in 1848 (including a credulous notice of Giles’s Six Old English Chronicles—one of them a fabrication—and the reflections on the Squire forgeries of Cromwell), just one in 1849 (highly laudatory of Cunningham’s Handbook for London, Past and Present), but thirteen in 1850 and twenty-six in 1851. By no means restricting himself to literature, he reviewed archaeological and historical works ranging from J. J. A. Worsaae’s Primeval Antiquities of Denmark to studies of old English brasses and Chinese vases of the Shang Dynasty, near- and far-Eastern travels, North American ethnography, and Arabic poetry (from the perspective of an ‘ordinary reader’); he heaped praise, as one might expect, on his friends Thoms, Rimbault, and Cunningham, and on the third-generation printer/antiquary John Gough Nichols, and castigated the Percy Society (‘its publications are too o en prepared by gentlemen who, having no particular qualifications, do not by reading and diligence endeavour to make up for their deficiencies’)28 and ‘unfit’ or overly pedantic editors, among them James Henry Dixon, Thomas Heywood (for the Chetham Society), and the Rev. Lambert B. Larking: Dixon ‘has rather undertaken than performed’ his editorial task, Heywood had wasted his time ‘on a production by no means remarkable for its learning or its eloquence’, Larking’s introductory remarks to a volume of Sussex Archaeological Collections ‘are in anything but good taste, and savour more of the style of the schoolboy than of the discreet and sober antiquary’.29 Thomas Corser, editing a volume of popular verse for the Chetham Society, was ‘intelligent and learned’, but once more— like Heywood and James Crossley—his task betrayed futile effort: ‘we have sel27. Beinecke Osborn MS d.199; the paper is watermarked 1824. 28. Review of Thomas Deloney, The Garland of Good-Will, ed. James Henry Dixon (5 July 1851, pp. 702–03). 29. Reviews of 5 July 1851, pp. 702–03; 20 December 1851, p. 1340; and 20 September 1851, pp. 993–94.



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dom met with a reprint edited with more completeness, or less deserving the labour that has been bestowed on it’.30 The Manchester antiquaries cannot have looked forward to Collier’s reviews. Under the cloak of anonymity John was harsh about Thomas Wright, one of whose books under review exhibited ‘little merit beyond that of industry’, while the other was in Latin, and ‘the more rarely a popular association like the Camden Society prints Latin works the better’;31 but some of the choicer aspersions were reserved for James Orchard Halliwell, lately Collier’s comrade-in-arms but in 1850 a distrusted rival. For one slight publication, however, the reviewer’s revenge was perhaps sweetest of all: A Short Guide to That Portion of the Library of Printed Books Now Open to the Public (1851), a thirty-three-page catalogue of the glass-case display at the British Museum, is signed at the end by Antonio Panizzi, who presumably also mounted the exhibition. Under the heading ‘Book Rarities in the British Museum’ (Athenaeum, 31 May 1852, pp. 580–81), Collier anonymously savaged the exhibition itself, the choice of materials, and the descriptions, all (he assumed) the responsibility of the Keeper. The titular ‘open to the public’ was ‘somewhat of a misnomer’, for in fact the books were all ‘shut away from the public under lock and key, single pages only being visible through sheets of glass’; but perhaps such mistakes were inevitable, like the ‘errors not merely of typography but of grammar’ (remember Panizzi’s scorn for Collier’s wobbly Latin), since ‘English is not Mr. Panizzi’s native tongue; and for this reason . . . we are not inclined to try his composition by too severe a test. An Englishman writing Italian’, John observed, savouring the moment, ‘would in all probability have committed errors more glaring and important.’ The bibliographical descriptions were tolerable, because ‘Mr. Panizzi has avowedly derived [them] almost entirely from the late Mr. Grenville’—whose name was shamefully misspelt ‘Granville’ on p. 20—‘and if Mr. Panizzi had relied on Mr. Grenville even more implicitly than he has, and not here and there inserted words of his own, he would have avoided the apparent mistake at p. 29, which (a er this ‘‘Short Guide’’ was worked off [i.e., printed]), he caused to be corrected with a pen in every copy that we have inspected.’ 32 Such minute faultfinding (‘a solecism in grammar’ at p. 11 could be mended ‘by the erasure of a single letter’) was clearly tit-for-tat over the Panizzi analysis of Collier’s sample book-list, but ‘these . . . are comparatively trifles’; more seriously objectionable was the choice of books singled out, top-heavy with classics, Greek and Hebrew 30. Review of Richard Robinson, The Golden Mirrour, ed. Thomas Corser (2 August 1851, pp. 822–23). 31. Reviews of 14 June 1851, p. 629; and 25 January 1851, pp. 107–08. 32. The error was the omission of the word ‘English’ in the sentence stating that John Rastell’s Interlude of the Four Elements was the ‘first English book in which reference is made to the discovery of the West Indies’; this lapse was rectified in a reissue of the Guide.


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letters, books printed on vellum, even ‘superabundant’ Caxtons—fi een, ‘when five would have been enough to show all the varieties of his typography’. All this, and the equally unwonted choice of ‘foreign works which few care to see’, was at the expense of English literature, John argued—Shakespeare and his contemporaries above all, for even Spenser’s Faerie Queene was omitted, along with poetry by the likes of Gascoigne, Daniel, Drayton, Churchyard, Lodge, Peele, and Greene, and all but one play from the Garrick Collection. Like Mark Antony exonerating Brutus, Collier affected to excuse Panizzi for these misjudgements (‘it can be no imputation on [him] that he does not understand [their value]. Perhaps, no man is better acquainted with Italian literature’); but not so his acquisitions policy, which had led to spending above £100 for a volume of French sixteenth-century farces, ‘the leaves of which are not only not cut, but not allowed to be cut, so that it is one of the most expensive as well as useless possessions’; and £50 (‘more than 1l. a page’) for a 1602 Venus and Adonis, when the 1594 first edition was already in Grenville’s collection. Perhaps the lack of ‘any intelligible catalogue’ of the library, now numbered at 450,000 volumes, might account for the mistakes: ‘How, then, is it possible that [Panizzi], or any body else, should know with any degree of certainty what books are, or are not, in the Library? Every day he may be adding to the expensive duplicates.’ John knew very well that this was unlikely, but ‘on such a state of things [i.e., the want of a catalogue] we have commented till we are weary’, and he added one more alarmist hint to the post-Commission protest. In summary, he questioned Panizzi’s command of the English material (‘it is not unnatural that he should be at fault, since no one man can be expected to be competent to all [literatures]’), perhaps implying that the appointment of a Keeper of English Books would be advisable; and in a sly note he took a last slap at Panizzi’s proprietary vanity. ‘May we ask’, he concluded, ‘how it happens that nearly all the book-rarities exhibited are such as have been obtained since Mr. Panizzi was keeper of the Printed Books? Were there no works worth notice in the Library before he was placed in his present situation?’

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On 14 December 1849 John Bruce wrote to Collier about changes in the Gentleman’s Magazine, of which he had become an advisory editor: its new character, from February 1850 onward, would be more strictly historical and archaeological, eschewing long articles, and seeking ‘good honest sensible attractive papers’, for which ten shillings a page would be paid. Could John provide something at once, ‘and put your name on it’? 33 John could, and over the next twenty-two months—a er which Bruce stepped down 34—he served up twelve literary and 33. Bruce to JPC, 14 December 1849, Folger MS Y.d.6 (10); he approached Madden with a similar proposal on 18 December (Madden Diary). 34. On 2 November 1852 Madden recorded in his diary that according to W. J. Thoms, Bruce



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bio-bibliographical pieces for GM, in addition to the letter about the Museum Commission mentioned above. There were three each on Sir Philip Sidney and Michael Drayton, two on Thomas Lodge, and two about Restoration broadsides, plus notes on the exact death date of Spenser and Spenser’s earliest monument, and on the texts of three ‘Newly Discovered Poems by Bishop Hall’.35 For these short contributions—at about £25 for the lot—John culled his notes on some favourite writers, from work in progress or le over archival research, to considerable effect: the quantity of new information, nearly all of it sound, is impressive, as is the quality of its subject-matter. At the State Paper Office he had transcribed correspondence and legal papers relating to Sidney, and now published extracts from ten letters and three other documents that shed light on Sidney’s North American ambitions (‘Sir Philip Sidney and American Discoveries’, February 1850), on the reaction to his death (‘Sir Philip Sidney, His Life and Death’, March 1850), and on the posthumous publication of his Arcadia and other works (April 1850).36 Among the important materials put in print for the first time—and never acknowledged by subsequent Sidney biographers— were the 1583 contract between Sidney and Sir George Peckham, involving Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s colonial projects; Captain Rafe Lane’s report to Sidney from Virginia in 1585; Burghley’s cautious letter to Sir Francis Walsingham on the death of Sir Philip at Zutphen; and the now-celebrated complaint of Fulke Greville to Walsingham about an intended piracy of Sidney’s ‘old’ Arcadia in 1586.37 Collier was also the first to attempt, in any detail, to disentangle the complicated printing history of Astrophil and Stella—most recently discussed (again without credit to him) by Christopher R. Wilson and Henry Woudhuysen 38—having laid out the groundwork in 1842, upon which he now elaborated convincingly. That last achievement does not lack a mystification or two. John stated (April 1850, p. 375) that ‘the only extant perfect copies of the two [1591] quarto editions . . . are in the library of the late Mr. [Thomas] Grenville’—that is, now in the British Museum—but that ‘it so happens that they both went through my had had nothing do with the editorship of the magazine since the beginning of that year; Collier’s final contribution appeared in November 1851. 35. The last were taken from the collections of verse on the deaths of William Whitaker (1596; STC 13817) and Sir Horatio Pallavicino (1600; STC 19154.3); Spenser’s death date came from a letter of John Chamberlain (17 January 1598/9) in the State Paper Office. 36. Collier stated that ‘most’ of his extracts were from materials in the State Paper Office, but as far as we can see all were, including two close rolls and letters from both the ‘Domestic’ and ‘Colonial’ series. The transcripts vary in fidelity, but the only potentially treacherous error is the date of Sidney’s letter about ‘Captain Goh’ (GM, March 1850, p. 266), which should be 1584, not 1583. This is certainly not a deliberate misreading. 37. Collier misdated and misunderstood this, however: see below. 38. Christopher R. Wilson 1979 and Woudhuysen 1996, pp. 366 ff. Collier got the order of the first two editions right; Lowndes in 1864 reversed them.


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hands before they reached that destination. I had not an opportunity of going through the second with the same minuteness, but I made a most careful collation of the text, as it appeared in [the first quarto], with the text as I found it in the folio of 1598 [i.e., the 1598 Arcadia, with poems added]’. That he examined and collated the unique perfect first quarto is certainly true, for his own 1598 Arcadia with comparative readings is now at Houghton, and in 1842 he had reprinted in full Nashe’s preface (‘Somewhat to reade for them that list’), which appears on A3–4, from the ‘single copy . . . known, [which] is in a private collection, and may never be accessible to those who are curious in such matters’.39 But that either the first or the rare second quartos ‘went through my hands’— if this is meant to imply even temporary custody—seems very doubtful, for Q1 passed from old Thomas Caldecott’s library to Grenville’s via Thorpe in December 1833 (sale, lot 1150), and if John ever possessed one of the four known copies of Q2 he would presumably have had time enough to collate it. It is simpler, if arbitrarily so, to imagine John transcribing his variants and the whole of Nashe’s preface from Q1 at Sotheby’s rooms in 1833, where his representation of Devonshire might have earned him privileged, unsupervised access. Less explicable, but also less important, are John’s misrepresentations of the rarity and condition of the 1590 Arcadia, which he harped on as well. He appears to have thought that the intended publication of the ‘old’ Arcadia, to which Fulke Greville and his informant William Ponsonby objected (Greville requesting from Walsingham ‘a stay of that mercenary book’), in fact involved Ponsonby’s authorized edition of 1590,40 and that ‘the rarity of the [1590] volume’ could be explained by ad hoc suppression. Collier’s estimates of absolute rarity are usually trustworthy, even with the retrievals of a hundred and fi y years of bibliophile searching; but his statement—repeated in BARB fifteen years later—that ‘only three copies . . . are known, and two of these are imperfect’ seems curiously askew. Elusive (and expensive) the 1590 Arcadia certainly was once thought to be, but at least twenty-one copies of two issues are now known,41 and John cannot have really believed, in 1865, that ‘there are few books of greater rarity than this first edition’. Can his enthusiasm have reflected his personal ownership of one of the supposed ‘only three’, though lacking its

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39. Pierce Penniless, pp. xx–xxvi: ‘We shall not think any apology necessary for quoting at length . . . [because] until now it has not seen the light from the period of its first publication, and although bibliographers may have been aware of its existence, not a single extract [or] quotation from it . . . has ever been made’. Beaupré Bell’s copy of the first quarto, the only other one now known, had in fact been at Trinity College, Cambridge, since 1730, but John cannot have used that, as it lacks A2–4. 40. It did not: see Ringler 1962, p. 532. 41. See Juel-Jensen 1962, p. 470; to this census can be added the Bodmer copy at ColognyGenève, Switzerland.



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title-page and two other leaves? 42 Although he granted that the Grenville exemplar was ‘perfect’, it was disingenuous of him to group his own copy with Heber’s (Part IV, lot 2467), which he slandered as ‘very defective’: Heber’s copy (now Pforzheimer-Texas), in morocco by Charles Lewis, was indeed complete, with only ‘some leaves mended’, and brought £14 5s. in 1834, whereas Collier’s made £1 7s. fi y years later. The owner of the Heber copy in 1850, incidentally, was probably none other than James Crossley of Manchester—but could Collier have known that? If we have seemed to dwell overmuch on John’s book collecting and booktrade transactions, how greatly such activity contributed to his literary output a er mid-1850 will become clear. His second series of GM articles (July, August, and September 1850) began with a full-length account of ‘An Unknown Poem by Michael Drayton’, based on a copy of Endimion and Phoebe (1595), the existence of which he had first announced in 1837, without revealing that he himself owned it (Bridgewater Catalogue, pp. 108–09). Then he believed it unique, though lacking A1–2, and dated it ‘about 1594’, correctly identifying it as Drayton’s work;43 by 1850 he had learned of a second copy in the library of Westminster Abbey, complete with title and A2 (bearing two sonnets), which enabled him later to reprint the entire text.44 While Endimion and Phoebe was never republished by Drayton himself, John recognized its kinship with Drayton’s later ‘The Man in the Moon’, which appears in his Poems Lyric and Pastoral (1606) and in his folio collection of 1619, although ‘this poem borrows only a few lines from Endimion and Phoebe and is almost completely changed in setting and story’ (Hebel 1925, p. xvi). Collier and Collier’s audience in 1850 could well regard the earlier version as an independent discovery, ‘a new and unrecorded poem’ which ‘cannot fail to attract attention’. Of its literary merit John forbore to claim much at the time, but more recent critical attention has celebrated its ‘rescue’, and preferred it by far to the 1606 recasting.45

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42. So Collier described it, but his sale catalogue (lot 970) says: ‘wanting all before B2’, that is, the title (A2) plus three leaves (A3–4, B1). It is probably the copy now in the Newberry Library (Juel-Jensen 1962, no. 10), from which eight further leaves were removed between 1941 and 1951, to make up another. 43. Apparently from an allusion in Thomas Lodge’s A Fig for Momus (1595) and from extracts in England’s Parnassus. 44. In his Roxburghe Club edition of Drayton’s Poems (1856) and again in a ‘Purple Series’ reprint of 1870. Although another perfect copy has since surfaced (Cashel–Marsh Library deposit– Robinson–Bodley, effectively unknown to scholars before 1925), every modern edition of the poem, including J. W. Hebel’s of 1925 and 1931 (in Drayton’s Works) has in fact employed Collier’s copy, later W. H. White-Harvard, as copy-text for all but A1–2. 45. Douglas Bush 1932, pp. 156 ff., describing ‘The Man in the Moon’ as ‘about half as long as


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Curiously, however, for a man who recalled playing billiards with Keats— and found Shelley’s Shakespearian borrowings worth documenting derisively— Collier did not speculate that Keats may have made source-use of Endimion and Phoebe for his Endymion (1818): perhaps the rarity of Drayton’s poem made that seem impossible. But since 1922 Keats scholars have agonized over just such a conjunction, and hence over how and where Keats might have found a copy of the original quarto to read.46 The internal evidence, based on parallels of language and plot, indeed seems compelling (Douglas Bush called it ‘a strong case’ [1932, p. 156], and most commentators on Keats seem to agree), but if that evidence is credited, historical occasion must somehow comply. C. L. Finney, who first proposed the notion in 1922, acknowledged the rarity problem, but thought it ‘not impossible that Keats discovered and read’ a copy, conjecturing that ‘he may have discovered the copy in Westminster Abbey Library’—an intriguing, if far-fetched, hypothesis—‘or the copy which Collier a erwards possessed, or a copy of which there is now no record’ (1936, i:248). The third option being of minimal likelihood, by our lights, the logic is plain: if Keats ever read Endimion and Phoebe he read either the quarto at Westminster Abbey—in which case what else did he find there?—or that which Collier, by 1837, had obtained. Where, we may ask, was the latter in 1816–17? John all but tells us, yet the trail will go cold: ‘I met with [Endimion and Phoebe] many years ago in the middle of a volume of pamphlets, ranging in point of date between 1588 and 1617, all of them of greater or less interest . . . all in one parchment cover, of which I was very glad to get possession at a considerable price, although two or three of the pieces were imperfect’ (GM, July 1850, p. 31). For general delectation (‘as a list of such bibliographical relics may amuse some of your readers’) he listed all fourteen titles each side of the Drayton, a mouth-watering assembly (by Greene, Churchyard, Heywood, Chapman, and John Davies, among others) that would supply future reprints and future dispersals, tract by tract. But while any of Keats’s bibliophile friends—Finney mooted Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb, B. R. Haydon, Charles Dilke, J. H. Reynolds, and Charles Cowden Clarke—might have possessed or have procured such a tantalizing (and valuable) volume, we have found no contemporary record of it in its unseparated state. Nor has Keats’s familiarity with any of the other highly readable constituents proved arguable, we think. Collier wound up his essays on Drayton with an account of another quarto

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the original and not half so good’ (p. 163). Bush regarded the poem as ‘rescued’ not by Collier, however, but by Hebel in 1925. 46. Keats certainly had access to ‘The Man in the Moon’, as he possessed a seventeenthcentury edition of Drayton’s Poems that included it; Finney 1936, i:247–48. Finney sums up the arguments for Keats’s use of Endimion and Phoebe at i:248–55.



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poem he believed to be unique, Idea’s Mirror (1595),47 publishing a few extracts made when ‘the late Mr. Heber . . . kindly lent it to me before his death’: these were all that ‘preserve it from entire oblivion’, he asserted, for ‘the original has disappeared from sight, and we fear, in consequence of the non-purchase of it for any of our national libraries, that it is now many thousand miles from the country to which it properly belongs, and where it ought to have been preserved’ (GM, September 1850, p. 263). Surely Collier knew better than this—it had been at Britwell Court all along, predictably—but the occasion for scoring off the British Museum’s acquisition policies (never mind that Panizzi was not in charge of them in 1834) no doubt inspired his alarmist evocation of American bibliomania at this early date. John’s third choice of an Elizabethan poet for the Gentleman’s Magazine was Thomas Lodge, another comparatively neglected old favourite, treated to one bio-bibliographical and one critical essay in December 1850 and February 1851. He provided, he said, ‘for the first time with any degree of accuracy, what I take to be a complete catalogue of the various works of Thomas Lodge’, although he had attempted the same task in 1825, and added some notes twenty years later;48 and once again his own shelves came prominently into play. Of the sixteen titles before 1596 credited by Collier to Lodge (all of them now canonical, even those he was unsure about: no more have been reliably added),49 he possessed—and said so—no fewer than five, one of them unique as perfect, plus the ‘third’ edition of Rosalynde, a manuscript of The Poor Man’s Talent,50 and a supposed presentation copy from Lodge to Thomas Dekker of Lodge’s folio Seneca (1614).51 Only three other living collectors gained a mention in Collier’s notes, Devonshire and Ellesmere with one book apiece, and ‘Mr. Miller’ with three, although of course he had others (e.g., the unique Heber copy of Robert Duke of Normandy, 1591). John’s pride in his own holdings is understandable, even if in these instances the Gentleman’s Magazine served to record and effectively advertise what would soon be for sale. Not so, at least for the moment, the source of the last two-part article in GM: a small collection of broadside poems of about 1660, said to be ‘in the

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47. STC 72303 now records a second copy (White-Folger), lacking two leaves; a third, once in Corser’s possession, seems to have vanished; see Juel-Jensen 1961, p. 274. 48. In his preface to The Wounds of Civil War (Dodsley’s Old Plays, viii:5–8) and in the Shakespeare Society Papers, ii:156–65. 49. The only ‘new’ attributions to Lodge since Collier have been three later translations (which did not really interest Collier) and one possible editorial project of 1622. But the most recent bibliography of Lodge (Allison 1973) never mentions Collier’s pioneering work. 50. On this see QD A3.1. 51. This last is a forgery; see QD A129.42.


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possession of a friend’, extracted as ‘Monk and the Restoration’ and ‘The Duke of Albemarle and Charles II’. This is the first time we hear of them (October and November 1851), but Collier returned to publish the twelve texts in full in 1863, when they were ‘in my possession’—as we must suspect they had also been in 1851.52 One of the broadsides, as described here and again in 1863, raises a familiar question, which has not hitherto been addressed as Collierian: the verse Prologue to His Majesty at the First Play Presented at the Cockpit . . . Novemb. 19 [1660] bears no author’s name in print, but Collier declared that the words ‘By Will. Davenant’ appeared at the end of the copy employed, in ‘as I apprehend [Davenant’s] own hand’, and a manuscript correction of one word (which seemed therefore authoritative) had been made to line 9. Such an attribution would appear likely enough, for Davenant did ‘conduct’ the event; but rediscovered evidence suggests that the prologue is by Sir John Denham instead.53

Notes and Queries and W. J. Thoms Few of Collier’s long-standing friends were more publicly constant to him than William John Thoms (1803–85), antiquary and editor, as events in the controversial 1850s will show. A protégé of Amyot and Douce and an intimate of John Bruce, a charter member of the Camden, Percy, and Shakespeare Societies (secretary of the first, 1838–73), Thoms took a particular interest in the preservation and exchange of scholarly minutiae, which in 1846 led to a regular column headed ‘Folklore’ in the Athenaeum,54 and in November 1849 to the establishment of Notes and Queries: A Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. (later altered to ‘Literary Men, General Readers, etc.’). For his part Collier regarded Thoms with respect both in print (‘one of the best antiquaries in England’; Athenaeum, 11 May 1850, p. 496) and in private (‘a worthy, learned & hard-working fellow, [who] merits success’), and their mutual affection seems to have ripened with the years.55 When

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52. Like so many of Collier’s pre-publicized rarities, the collection passed to Frederic Ouvry, who had it luxuriously bound; see A111. 53. The first edition of Wing (1941, no. D 335) adopted Collier’s suggestion, but the British Library catalogue, CBEL, etc., follow the unequivocal attribution of the prologue (by Anthony Wood; Athenae Oxoniensis [1691], ii:303) to Sir John Denham, as do the revisors of Wing (D 1008, later D 1007A). The Denham scholar Brendan O Hehir (1968, pp. 160–61) disapproved the reattribution to Denham, discounting ‘the demonstrated fallibility of Wood’s memory’ and suggesting that perhaps it should be ‘le with’ Davenant instead. But he gave no satisfactory reason for such a turnabout, save that the Prologue never appeared in Denham’s collection of 1668 (nor did it in Davenant’s of 1673), and he clearly did not realize what the source of Wing’s ‘Davenant’ listing had been. 54. Thoms claimed to have originated, or at least given its modern meaning to, that term. 55. JPC to Peter Cunningham, 5 May 1850; Harmsen collection. Some of Collier’s earliest



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Thoms in middle age founded the journal for which he is now best remembered, John Payne Collier was among his earliest contributors—all unpaid, of course, except with copies—and remained one of the most prolific correspondents of N&Q over the next twenty years.56 Reminiscing in 1876–77 about the first six weekly numbers, Thoms emphasized that the very first ‘interesting note’ was signed by John Bruce, and the second (‘of like character’) ‘by my esteemed old friend J. Payne Collier’, and that Bruce and Collier were joined by Bolton Corney and ‘poor’ Peter Cunningham (‘then the enfant gâté of every literary and social gathering’) in the first and the second issue.57 Going even beyond literary support of the new journal, Collier—as Thoms revealed in 1883—‘so approved its objects, and the idea on which it was founded, that he proposed to join me in the risk and management of it’. That offer would have coincided neatly with Collier’s new search for activities, but Thoms had earlier experienced the failure of a journal which cost his trusting co-proprietor a few hundred pounds, and had ‘determined that any of my literary speculations should be carried on entirely at my own risk’. Collier’s gesture did not pass unappreciated, however, for Thoms dictated the editorial policy of his new journal for twenty-three years, and ‘the result has been that dear John Payne Collier has not been a sufferer by his literary connexion with me’ (N&Q, 22 September 1883, p. 240)—indeed quite the opposite, as we shall see. Collier supplied five contributions to the first eight numbers, and between November 1849 and December 1851 twenty-five in all, under both his own name or initials and the nom de plume—transparent for anyone who knew him personally—‘The Hermit of Holyport’. Not that most were of striking originality or importance: two corrections to his Stationers’ Register Extracts 58 and one of a missing line in a new reprint of Heywood’s Pardoner and Frere,59 two more shavings from his State Paper Office research (a letter about the prevalence of deer-poaching in 1585, and particulars of Philip Massinger’s father), and three answers to readers’ queries, one of them permitting a correction of ‘the learned

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childhood reminiscences are bound into a presentation copy of Thoms’s iconoclastic Human Longevity (1873, now in the British Library), for which Collier (aged ninety) thanked Thoms on 27 June 1879 (Huntington MS HM 7257). 56. More than one hundred individual articles, queries, or replies between 1849 and 1869; only one piece appeared thereaer (1877). 57. N&Q, 5th ser., 6 (1876), pp. 102 and 221. Perhaps even more fateful to Collier was the presence in the fourth number of Samuel Weller Singer, then in retirement at Mickleham, who told Thoms that N&Q ‘had served to call him into a new literary existence’; ‘I am inclined to believe’, Thoms added, ‘that had it not been for ‘‘N. & Q.’’ the lovers of Shakespeare would never have seen Mr. Singer’s most valuable edition of their favourite poet’ (N&Q, 5th ser., 7 [1877], pp. 1–2)—and much more that involved Collier as well. 58. N&Q, 8 December 1849, pp. 84–85, and 15 February 1851, pp. 113–14. 59. By Francis James Child.


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editor’ of Skelton, the Rev. Mr. Dyce 60 and one describing Bishop Percy’s rare edition of Surrey from a copy at hand.61 His own thirteen ‘queries’ were o en more in the way of announcements, as of John a Kent and John a Cumber, or of a late ballad on the plot of A Winter’s Tale (4 January 1851, pp. 1–3), and inevitably record books and fragments in his own keeping,62 including ‘an unknown collection of amatory and pastoral poems’ by Nicholas Breton (1604), whose title John teasingly withheld.63 One quite genuine enquiry, however, met with a heart-warming response: on 4 January 1851 a correspondent calling himself ‘Janus Dousa’, from near Haarlem in Holland, provided an archaeological reference, and his choice of pseudonym caused John, a week later, to ask about his ‘great namesake’, the sixteenthcentury Dutch humanist: ‘what I am at a loss for’, he wrote (11 January 1851, p. 23), ‘is a copy of verses by Dousa . . . upon Sir Philip Sidney. It is many years since I saw [two such funerary poems] . . . and if your correspondent can furnish me with either, or both, I shall be much obliged to him’. ‘Janus Dousa’—in reality the historian Jan Hendrik van Lennep (1825–97)—most certainly could, though not through the columns of Notes and Queries: he simply sent John a copy of Dousa’s Poemata (Rotterdam, 1704), a charming vellum-bound octavo, inscribed ‘To the Hermit of Holyport this Book, As a Token of Literary Brotherhood, is offered by J. H. van Lennep, lately Janus Dousa. Amsterdam, Febr. 24. 1851’.64 In a two-part note on Fairfax’s 1600 translation of Tasso, Collier—again as ‘The Hermit of Holyport’, replying to ‘T. N.’ of Demerary—recycled a bibliographical point he had made (imperfectly) thirty-three years earlier in the Critical Review and also in the Bridgewater Catalogue, though he pointedly claimed no credit for that.65 Here he wrote that he had possessed ‘formerly’ all three ver-

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60. This note in the second issue (10 November 1849) replies fully to a query in the very first number, from ‘Hearty Well-Wisher’, which itself contains the text of a letter not ‘noticed by any of our literary antiquaries’. It is tempting to imagine that Collier was ‘Hearty Well-Wisher’ himself, generating the occasion for his answer. 61. More advertisement, perhaps: ‘I paid a very high price for it some twenty years since, at an auction’ (18 May 1850, p. 471). It is now at Folger: see A128. 62. Notably the Dutch translation of Greene’s Quip for an Upstart Courtier (8 February 1851, pp. 103–04), which passed from Collier to Ouvry (his sale, lot 716) and is now in the British Library, as well as fragments of rare books by Nicholas Breton and William Basse. The last (STC 1546, of which all known copies, like Collier’s, have been recovered from binders’ waste) set off a useful dialogue on Basse, involving Rimbault and Thomas Corser—just the sort of exchange that N&Q was designed to provoke. 63. 6 April 1850. This was undoubtedly The Passionate Shepherd (STC 3682); see QD A129.4. 64. Collier kept this touching present all his life, and it was not included in his posthumous sale; it remained with his descendants until 1998 (now FF). 65. In the Critical Review for February 1817, pp. 197–98, he had called attention to two ver-



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sions of the small folio, ‘but the late Mr. Wordsworth having one day looked particularly at that with the reprinted leaf [i.e., what Collier supposed was the final state], and expressing a strong wish to possess it, I gave it to him’. This event was supposed to have taken place ‘full twenty years ago’, and ‘I have never been able to procure, or even to see, another [copy] with the same peculiarity’ of B1 ‘revised and reprinted’ (26 October 1850, pp. 359–60; 2 November 1850, p. 377). But ‘before I gave the book away, I took care to copy . . . exactly’ the two altered stanzas ‘as they are given in Mr. Wordsworth’s exemplar’, and these he now published. ‘I apprehend’, wrote the open-handed Hermit, that this volume ‘[is] still in the library of the late William Wordsworth’; but it cannot be found in the 1859 sale catalogue of (most of) Wordsworth’s Rydal Mount library, and we have no evidence of contact between Collier and Wordsworth as late as ca. 1830.66 However, although the tale may be tangled, a copy of Fairfax’s Tasso with Wordsworth associations did once exist, and Collier either possessed it all along or re-acquired it a er 1850, for it figures as lot 1044 in his posthumous sale, described as containing ‘autograph note of H. Crabb Robinson, autograph signature of W. Wordsworth, and MS. notes by J. P. Collier’.67 Finally, two Notes and Queries contributions of 1849–50 merit special attention, in retrospect, not for what they contain but for what they do not: both are sensible and energetic responses by John to readers who proposed outlandish emendations to Shakespeare, an amateur signing himself D***N**R (17 November 1849, p. 38) and S. W. Singer (21 September 1850, pp. 259–60, hinting at his willingness to re-edit the plays). ‘D***N**R’ was indignant that in 2 Henry IV, iii.1.24, the words ‘slippery clouds’ had not been emended to ‘slippery shrouds’ by Charles Knight and other ‘recent editors’: ‘if once a blunder has been made, it is persisted in’. A week later John, proclaiming himself ‘the most ‘‘modern editor’’ of Shakespeare’, and reciting his claim to have ‘restored the text of Shakespeare, as nearly as possible, to the integrity of the old copies’, dismissed

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sions of the first stanza of Book I (B1), one of them on a paste-on cancel. By 1837 (Bridgewater Catalogue, pp. 118–20) he knew also of a third state of the same text, which he wrongly supposed to be Fairfax’s final revision: Lea and Gang (1981, pp. 69–70) showed that Collier’s ‘third’ state is in fact the very rare first version. 66. There is no independent authority for Collier’s account (OMD, i:88–90) of a June 1832 dinner party at which Wordsworth praised his Poet’s Pilgrimage. 67. We have not located this volume (£1 to Quaritch in the JPC sale). If it indeed preserved the first state of B1—which Collier always took to be the final revised version—it is a rare book: Lea and Gang (1981) located only two copies, the Hoe-Huntington, and one in a private collection at Gays House, Holyport(!) where all three versions were said then to be. If this is not merely a coincidence we cannot explain it, for Collier’s sale included two copies of the book. Can the one signed by Wordsworth have come back to him aer 1850, perhaps through the offices of Henry Crabb Robinson?


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‘shrouds’, because ‘not a single old copy warrants the merely fanciful emendation, and . . . it is not at all required by the sense of the passage’. ‘He must be a very bold editor’, John observed, ‘who would substitute his own imaginary improvement, for what we have every reason to believe is the genuine text. Shrouds instead of ‘‘clouds’’ is a merely imaginary improvement’, and what is more it was old-hat:68 ‘I am for the text of Shakespeare as he le it’. The same kind of response—though deliberately respectful—was accorded Singer (5 October 1850, pp. 299–300), to whom ‘I was indebted . . . for one of the best emendations in the edition of Shakespeare I superintended’:69 still, the crux ‘most busy lest’ in The Tempest, iii.1.15, required no conversion to ‘most busiest’ (or to Theobald’s eccentric ‘most busy-less’) since the Folio text was not incomprehensible. What may strike us in these two conservative notes is ‘the dog that did not bark in the night’, at least in 1849–50: for soon enough the annotator of John’s notorious Second Folio would be revealed to have taken an interest in both challenged passages. Supposedly a text-corrector of the early seventeenth century, he emended ‘clouds’ to the ‘imaginary’ ‘shrouds’ (which Collier said in 1853 ‘may serve to settle the question’, although he himself retained ‘clouds’ in 1858, quaintly offering his readers their choice) and ‘lest’ to the ingenious ‘blest’, reflecting (John explained) ‘the accidental dropping out of the letter b’, which ‘has been the cause of all the doubt that, for nearly two centuries and a half, has involved this passage’ (Notes and Emendations [1853], pp. 247, 11–12). Notes and Queries provided John, and many others, with an ideal forum for observations like those above, in effect reducing the old labour of personal correspondence with other antiquaries. It also rounded out a programme of scholarly journalism for the retiree, which for the time being seemed as prescribed as a newspaperman’s duties: the briefest notelets, enquiries, and advertisements for Notes and Queries; the slightly more substantial ones, and the book reviews, for the Athenaeum; 70 and longer, coherent essays on better-known topics for the

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68. Collier did not say so, but it was in fact Pope’s conjecture, followed by Theobald, Warburton, Capell, the 1773 Johnson-Steevens Shakespeare, and (aer Perkins) two Dyce editions and finally Collier’s last, of 1878. ‘Clouds’, which can stand up on its own, is now almost universally preferred. 69. ‘Rother’s’ for ‘brother’s’ in Timon, iv.3.12 (1842–44 Shakespeare, vi:559), an emendation described by H. J. Oliver (Arden edition, 1959, rejecting it) as ‘almost as famous as Theobald’s a’ babbled of green fields’, and miscredited to Collier. 70. Collier described his note on ‘Jews in Our Early Plays’ (Athenaeum, 4 May 1850, pp. 475– 76) to Peter Cunningham as ‘too long for Thoms’ (5 May 1850; Harmsen collection). In 1851 he chose the Athenaeum for an announcement of John a Kent, for a correction to his own essay on ‘Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘‘Discovery of Guiana’’’ in the forthcoming Archaeologia, and to advertise a neglected ‘second epilogue’ to Dryden’s Duke of Guise, ‘the printed copy in my hands’ (i.e., Macdonald no. 101, Collier’s novelty first included among Dryden’s poems in Robert Bell’s edition of 1854). Some of these notes were presumably paid for, at the prevailing 10s. a page.



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Gentleman’s Magazine. A fourth and last venue for John was Archaeologia, the Society of Antiquaries’ prestigious annual, where in 1851 three papers read to the membership on 13 March, 15 May, and 5 June appeared. Couched as letters to Frederic Ouvry, William Durrant Cooper, and John Bruce, these offered a host of new biographical detail about Sir Walter Ralegh, mostly from correspondence in the State Paper Office. But in a year largely free of such performances, Collier chose to present his colleagues with two full-length fabrications, for which ‘impudent’ is (for once) the best term. In his first paper (pp. 139–40) he resurrected his fake Churchyard poem of 1816 on Norris and Sidney, still ‘before me’ and ‘well worth preserving’ but now laced with tell-tale revisions—a bewilderingly incautious act, even thirty-five years a er the original hoax. In his third (pp. 160–61) he provided an extract of an anonymous letter ‘in my possession’ which gave the gossip of Sir Walter’s dalliance with Elizabeth Throckmorton (‘I feare to say who, but if you should guesse at E. T. you may not be farre wrong’) and of the monarch’s reaction (‘most furiously incensed’), for good measure echoing ‘Like hermit poor in place obscure’—a well-known poem from The Phoenix Nest (1593)—which therefore ‘ought herea er to be added to the productions of Ralegh’s muse’. This silly fraud took in some of Ralegh’s late Victorian biographers, but not all, and was convincingly dismissed by T. N. Brushfield in 1896, although its racy particulars continue to haunt popular accounts of the adventurer-poet.71

The Perkins Folio Announced: Notes and Emendations On 31 January and 7 February 1852 a two-part article appeared in the Athenaeum, titled ‘Early Manuscript Emendations of Shakespeare’s Text’. Signed ‘J. Payne Collier’, and dated from Maidenhead on 17 January and 2 February,72 it contained the first notice of what would come to be known as the ‘Perkins Folio’, and so marks the most important event in the life of its owner and publicist, and one of the key dates in the entire history of Shakespeare studies. The magnitude and duration of the debate that followed John’s modest announcement can only be estimated from published results,73 but the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books accords the ‘Collier Controversy’ one of only three

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71. Brushfield 1896, pp. 302–04, reproducing (from Collier’s own notes toward his Archaeologia series, which Brushfield had acquired) an autograph dra of the text with literal discrepancies that cannot be explained as mistakes in transcription. The ‘original’ letter, unsurprisingly, has never been seen, but the text was printed as genuine as late as 1935 in Edward Thompson’s Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 83. 72. Collier habitually dated his Athenaeum correspondence not from Holyport but from nearby Maidenhead. 73. See Appendix IV for a list of the principal contemporary literature.


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topical headlines in its Shakespeare appendix, alongside ‘Authorship Controversy’ (i.e., Baconian/anti-Stratfordian speculation) and ‘Ireland Forgeries’: this is a curious route to categorical immortality, but John chose it and earned it. At times the controversy may seem to feed on itself, or to have le John and ‘Perkins’ behind it, and the sheer mass of it has intimidated judgement for well over a century; but in the end we are le with what readers of the Athenaeum first met by report in mid-winter of 1852: a slightly defective Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (1632), marked up throughout with textual corrections, by an ostensibly contemporary, and arguably knowledgeable, custodian. With that object itself—curiously enough never properly described by friend or by foe— we begin. The book as described in 1852, and as it survives today, is imperfect and physically shabby, within and without. It lacks twelve leaves in all: A1 (the leaf of verses by Ben Jonson), A2 (the title, with portrait), ddd4 (the last four leaves, being the conclusion of Cymbeline), and six medial leaves (h1 and h6 in 2 Henry IV, m1 and m6 in 1 Henry VI, q2 in 3 Henry VI, and y2 in Henry VIII ); the last two surviving leaves of Cymbeline are frayed with loss of text, and there are a few tears elsewhere affecting text, but no other major defects. The surviving preliminaries (A3–4 and *4) are probably supplied from another copy—at least Collier thought so in 1853 74—which suggests that the book’s recent provenance involved a dealer with a stock of extra leaves—even if, as was later attested, it came from ‘the country’ in about 1846. The text-leaves are stained and spotted throughout, from what Collier conjectured were ‘wine, beer, and other liquids’, with occasional burn-holes from ‘the falling of the lighted snuff of a candle, or by the ashes of tobacco’; ‘in short’, he declared, ‘to a choice collector, no book could well present a more forbidding appearance’. The reversed calf binding is no better preserved, and no attempt to restore or repair the volume has been made since 1853, when Collier ceded it to the Duke of Devonshire.75 The date of the binding—which is important—has been variously estimated at between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, and is probably about 1750 or later (see Part Ten). On the upper cover, lettered in black ink a third of the way down at le centre, appears ‘Tho. Perkins | his Booke’, an inscription that—if the spelling ‘Booke’ is not pseudo-antique— would seem to antedate the binding itself. The annotation, which of course is the point, is of three or four sorts. The pre-

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74. ‘All the preliminary matter . . . may be said to be wanting, in as much as it has been supplied by a comparatively recent possessor, from another copy of the second folio, and loosely fastened within the cover’ (N&E, pp. iii–iv). The outer sheet of 4 has been folded ‘backward’, around a * correctly folded inner sheet, so that the leaves proceed 4, 2, 3, 1. * * * * 75. The book is now Huntington Library RB 56316.



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liminaries—independent, perhaps, of the main text-block, at least before Collier obtained the book—contain scribbles in a crude childish hand, sums and pentrials, possibly continental, probably eighteenth-century, including ‘ston’, ‘Jentius [or Jentuis]’(?), and ‘genvereii’(?); and at 1r, eighteen of the twenty-six ‘Names of the Principall Actors’ have had Greek sigla put a er them.76 Farther on we find other unrevealing scribbles, ‘F Money Barmer’ (whatever or whoever is meant) in a large childish hand at the foot of s2r, and ‘Bury’ in the outer margin of o3v, both eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century in appearance. Some of these marginalia, as well as various ink spatterings, have been shaved at the edge of the page, however, which will date them to before the rebinding of the book. The cast list for 2 Henry IV (i2v) is annotated in what appears to be a genuine late-seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century hand, adding seventeen entries. These are all names from 1 Henry IV (although Percy/Hotspur is a curious omission), but there are no further clues to the purpose. Unrelated to any of the above is the corpus of vexed annotations: several thousand verbal emendations to the text of the Folio, affecting every play in it, and ranging from a single letter ‘corrected’ within a printed word, to words and phrases replaced, stage directions and act and scene numbering altered or supplied, to (finally) thirteen entirely new lines of pseudo-Shakespearian verse inserted. These are nearly all in a consistent, legible, Elizabethan ‘secretary’ hand, which any unwary palaeographer would identify as earlier than the mid-seventeenth century, but which in fact matches, beyond any reasonable doubt, the forging hand of the Hall Commonplace Book, the Protectorate ballad manuscript, and—allowing for some deterioration over the decades—that of the Collierian spuria in the State Paper Office, at Dulwich, and at Bridgewater House.77 A few entries, notably the replacement of the speech-headings

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76. These have not hitherto been noted, and we are at a loss to explain them; they are not demonstrably in Collier’s hand. 77. The resemblance to the hand of these last was dealt with by C. M. Ingleby and others at length. Both the Protectorate Manuscript and the Hall Commonplace Book were unavailable to contemporaries, but in 1971 Giles Dawson analysed the hand of the latter, concluding that ‘we can be quite sure that it was [Collier] who copied [the ballads] into his old commonplace book’, that ‘if it can be demonstrated that the annotations in the Perkins folio are in the handwriting of the ballads, Collier’s fabrication of these will have been proved’, and that there was indeed ‘strong evidence that both were written by one hand’ (pp. 18 and 26). Dewey Ganzel’s contradictory argument is given at length in an appendix, pp. 405–16: he allowed part of Dawson’s proof (‘One can assume the ballads and emendations were written by the same hand without assuming that that hand was Collier’s’, p. 416), but elsewhere urged that the Folio emendations themselves were added in the eighteenth century (p. 151, noting that Collier himself believed that the emendations ‘were not those of a seventeenth-century man of the theatre but a compendium of eighteenth-century conjecture’, and Ganzel 1983a: ‘I make it clear [in my book] that I think the writing was made in the eighteenth century.’). Unless such an annotator was imitating much


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‘Car[dinal]’ by ‘Wol[sey]’ in Henry VIII, pp. 216–22, and some of the more careless act and scene numberings, are superficially dissimilar, and may represent either an earlier effort at regularizing a few inconsistencies, or (more likely) a deliberately diversionary tactic on the part of the ‘Old Corrector’—Collier’s own name, from 1853, for his hypothetical annotator. Collier himself said then that he ‘was once disposed to think that two distinct hands had been employed upon [the annotations]’, in part because ‘the ink was of various shades, differing sometimes on the same page’, but ‘I am now decidedly of opinion that the same writing prevails from beginning to end, but that the amendments must have been introduced from time to time, during, perhaps, the course of several years’ (N&E, p. viii); and he probably knew whereof he spoke. In addition to these ‘verbal amendments’, whose conventional form—minimal annotation, preserving whenever possible letters or part-words of the printed text—some critics likened to modern-day proof-correction, there were many thousands of revisions of pointing throughout.78 While recognizing that ‘of course, so much of the author’s meaning depends [upon] punctuation’ (Athenaeum, 31 January 1852, p. 142), Collier (like nearly all Shakespeare editors) always regarded such emendations as preferable to verbal ones;79 but when such changes prove significant some justification is required, and the wholesale use he subsequently made of the Old Corrector’s re-pointing has o en been signalled by later editors. Finally, there were deletions on more than a hundred pages, passages ranging from a line or two to an entire scene ‘struck out with a pen, as if for the purpose of shortening the performance’ (N&E, p. ix); and while these hardly affect the received text of the plays, they could be supposed—in conjunction with the many added manuscript stage directions—to reflect traditional playhouse practice, and to suggest, as Collier asserted, ‘that the volume once belonged to a person interested in, or connected with, one of our early theatres’.80 Thus the shadowy Old Corrector took on a shape; and by extension a

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older letter-forms, for whatever reason, their use is inexplicable: no one in the eighteenth century wrote naturally in a conventional secretary hand. 78. Collier himself estimated that the total did not ‘fall short of 20,000’ (N&E, p. v); we are not aware that anyone has actually counted. 79. In preferring his own ‘minimal’ emendation of the ‘most busy lest’ crux in The Tempest (N&Q, 5 October 1850, pp. 299–300), Collier claimed for it the ‘merit . . . of [only] altering the place of a comma’, and thereby ‘of making as little variation as possible from the authorities’. He would however have been well aware how radical such changes could be, if only from the re-punctuated letter in Ralph Roister Doister; a modern reader might take John Dover Wilson’s Cambridge version of ‘What a piece of work is a man’ (Hamlet, ii.2.303) as a more familiar, but equally cautionary, example (Hamlet, ed. Wilson [Cambridge, 1934], pp. 175–76). 80. N&E, p. x. The cuts include whole scenes in Henry V (iii.4), Richard III (ii.3 and iv.5), King Lear (i.3), and Cymbeline (iii.7), most of the Porter’s bawdy lines in Macbeth (which Coleridge



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source for his emendations, as well as a rationale for his zeal in recording them, was implied. Collier professed no certainty about the ‘credentials’ of his Old Corrector, or his resources (‘Was he in a condition to resort to other and better manuscripts? Had he the use of printed copies which do not now remain to us? Was he instructed by more accurate recitation at a theatre? . . . All we can do is to speculate’), and he was willing to allow that ‘his own sagacity and ingenuity’ allowed the annotator sometimes ‘merely [to] guess at arbitrary emendations’ (N&E, pp. xx–xxi); but he stood firm on the date of the annotations (‘not much later than the time when [the 1632 Folio] came from the press’), and remained ‘very certain’ that the manuscript notes ‘were made before [the volume] was subjected to all the ill-usage it experienced’, namely, the staining, blotting, soiling, and fraying of pages. He himself called attention to ‘erasures’, ‘as if the corrector had either altered his mind as to particular changes, or had obliterated something that had been written before—possibly, by some person not so well informed as himself ’ (N&E, pp. iii, v–vi, viii–ix). Much attention would subsequently be lavished on the last detail, and on some faint or erased modern pencillings that may or may not have lain under the antiqued marginalia, but we can now say, at least, that there is no evidence that the Old Corrector’s ink notes pre-date the rebinding of the book. Dewey Ganzel, whose physical description of the Perkins Folio we find misleading, claimed that in five instances ‘the binder’s knife cut through an ink emendation in the ‘‘Old Corrector’’ ’s hand removing part of the correction’, which would virtually prove their pre-Collierian existence; but this is simply untrue: not one has been trimmed in such a manner.81 In fact negative evidence, if any at all, would obtain from their untrimmed condition: had the

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thought were ‘foisted in’ by the players), and the entire conclusion, aer Horatio’s exordium, of Hamlet. Some but by no means all of them were mentioned by Collier in N&E or elsewhere, and are hence recorded in the Furness New Variorum. 81. Ganzel, pp. 339 and 441, n. 33. Ganzel’s instances are (1) Antony and Cleopatra (Perkins Folio, Tragedies p. 372), where what is trimmed is early scribbling unrelated to the Old Corrector’s handiwork; (2) 2 Henry IV (Histories p. 93), likewise; (3) The Tempest (Comedies p. 15), where the note is written to the very edge of the page; (4) Romeo and Juliet (Tragedies p. 87 [Ganzel wrote ‘p. 82’, but corrected his misprint in TLS, 20 May 1983], likewise, but with the letter ‘p’ in the stage direction ‘leaping’ simply omitted—there is no sign of its having been shaved away; and (5) A Winter’s Tale (Comedies p. 290), where a short strip, possibly once containing an emendation or other note, has been cut from the top right-hand corner of the page, but plainly not by a binder. According to Ganzel the last instance, which Madden himself noted in his examination of the Folio, ‘clearly disproves his later contention that all the notes were made aer binding’ (p. 441, n. 34, suggesting that Madden either ‘failed to connect this important detail with his conjecture about the date of the rebinding’, or deliberately suppressed it because ‘it might have the effect of exonerating Collier’). Of course it proves nothing whatever, as Madden certainly appreciated, being an excision unrelated to the binder’s work.


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vexed marginalia been written into the book at an early date, the likelihood that every one of them would have survived the rebinding intact is remote. Aware as we now are of Collier’s formidable corpus of invention and forgery, and with access to his similar handiwork (in similar hands) before and a er 1852, the true nature of the Perkins Folio and its Old Corrector would not puzzle us long, even if all we knew of it were the physical object described above. But for Collier’s contemporaries, bedazzled and challenged by such an unprecedented onslaught on that holy-of-holies, Shakespeare’s text, the only justification of doubt—other than personal animus or individual conviction—lay in philological evidence, circumstantial detail, and (when eventually the volume was made available to outsiders) rudimentary and o en unconvincing forensics. We shall return to the decade-long history of indictment and debate that finally discredited Collier’s best-known—if essentially least-misleading—forgery, and brought unwelcome scrutiny to bear on many others more trenchant. But for the present, bearing in mind that the Old Corrector’s oeuvre is, beyond any dispute, a forgery pure and simple (i.e., modern writing deceptively represented as antique), we can pursue its brief and brazen career—a rise and come-uppance worthy of a Victorian novel—in the golden literary world of its day. From the outset John was well aware that the provenance of his Folio, early and recent, would undergo scrutiny, and he began his Athenaeum announcement with a story to which he would stick all his life. ‘A short time before the death of the late Mr. Rodd’, he wrote—Thomas Rodd the younger died on 23 April 1849 following a stroke suffered at the British Museum—‘I happened to be in his shop when a considerable parcel of books arrived from the country. He told me that they had been bought for him at an auction,—I think, in Bedfordshire; but I did not look on it as a matter of any importance’. Rodd unpacked the books in John’s presence, and John was attracted by two volumes only: ‘a fine copy’ of Florio’s Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611),82 and ‘a much-thumbed, abused, and imperfect copy of the second folio of Shakespeare in 1632’. The former ‘I did not possess’, and the latter ‘I was willing to buy, inasmuch as I apprehended it would add some missing leaves to a copy of the same impression which I had had for some time on my shelves’. Rodd was obliging, and Collier paid twelve shillings for the Florio and thirty shillings for the Shakespeare, which ‘is never, even when in good condition, a very dear book’. John realized at the time that the title and ‘several sheets [i.e., leaves] at the end’ were missing, and that ‘some of the leaves [were] blotted and dirty’, but he examined

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82. He later described this as bearing the name of ‘Henry Osborn’, ‘whom I mistook at the moment for his celebrated namesake, Francis’ (N&E, pp. vi–vii); this is presumably the copy that appeared in the JPC sale, lot 718, but we have not located it.



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(he said) ‘only the commencement and the conclusion’, and was subsequently disappointed to find that it lacked several medial leaves as well. He did note the inscription ‘Tho. Perkins, his booke’ on one of the ‘greasy and shabby’ covers of the calf binding, which he thought—and still did in January 1852—‘was evidently the original’. ‘When the volume reached my house, I employed a person to ascertain whether any of the leaves in it would supply the deficiency in my other copy’, but only ‘two torn and stained pages’ would serve that turn, and, ‘somewhat vexed that I had mis-spent my money . . . I put the book away in a closet [and] did not look at it again until shortly before I removed to [Holyport, in the spring of 1850], when I selected such books as I chose to take with me’. Only then did John notice the annotations, ‘in an old hand-writing—probably not of a later date than the Protectorate’, and investigate their nature: the rest is history. This was not an implausible story, and indeed may be in some respects true. Disbelievers would later assert that thirty shillings was too cheap in 1849 for even so parlous a copy, and that Rodd would enter into no such hasty bargain; but the figure is by no means eccentric, and a bookseller of Rodd’s experience could probably tell a Second Folio from the much more valuable First quickly enough to make a price on the spot. What he would be unlikely to overlook, of course, is the massive, highly visible, and seemingly contemporary annotation; but Collier affected to have missed that himself, thus implicitly excusing Rodd for the same insouciance. That a campaign-hardened collector like Collier would have risked his money without checking the defects in his ‘other’ copy has been questioned as well, but mistakes in the heat of the moment in bookshops or salerooms are hardly unknown. John amplified his account of the purchase just one year later, in the introduction to Notes and Emendations (pp. vi–viii), and changed some details of it slightly: the date of his visit to Rodd was now ‘the spring of 1849’; the parcel still may have come (‘my impression is’) from Bedfordshire, but no mention of an auction sale was made; Rodd ‘opened the parcel in my presence, as he had o en done before in the course of my thirty or forty years’ acquaintance’, and John paid ‘money’, that is, cash, for the two books, having ‘hastily’ concluded that he could employ the Shakespeare to make up ‘another poor copy of the second folio, which I had bought of the same bookseller’ some years earlier. ‘I took it home’, he now reported (not ‘the volume reached my house’), and upon collating it found that ‘two leaves which I wanted were unfit for my purpose, not merely by being too short, but damaged and defaced’, and ‘thus disappointed, I threw it by’.83 Rather oddly, perhaps unbelievably, John now claimed to have

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83. He did not repeat his story of having ‘employed a person’ to collate the book: although he may simply have meant his wife or one of his daughters, such a claim did, unwisely, implicate


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reacted by disposing not of his useless new purchase, but of his less imperfect original copy—‘finding that I could not readily remedy [its] deficiencies’—and in the spring of 1850 to have looked out the Perkins exemplar only ‘in order that I might not be without some copy of the second folio for the purpose of reference’. Whilst packing, ‘I first observed some marks in the margin of this folio’, but a er the move ‘it was . . . placed upon an upper shelf, and I did not take it down until I had occasion to consult it’—no over-eager discoverer here! Finally, although in 1849–50 ‘I imagined that the binding was the original rough calf in which many books of about the same date were clothed . . . more recent examination has convinced me, that this was at least the second coat it had worn’. While a few of the new 1853 details may provoke new disbelief, the inconsistencies in John’s two accounts are relatively minor, and certainly not worth the extended attention that Ganzel devoted to them.84 Indeed John took some pains to document what he said—or at least to ensure that it could not easily be challenged—from Rodd’s old accounts, which Rodd’s executor John Wilkinson (of Sotheby’s) had ‘several times obligingly afforded me the opportunity of inspecting’. But Rodd apparently kept no stock-books, and entries in his daybooks were not ‘regular or particular’, so that the forty-two-shilling transaction with Collier, and the source of the incoming parcel as well, could not in 1853 be confirmed—or denied.85 We shall return to the issue of provenance with the rise of investigation by sceptics and rival claims from alleged former owners, when we will suggest that Collier indeed procured his Folio—that is, the matrix for the forgeries, not an already annotated volume—in 1849, but in December of that year, rather than before 23 April. Such a timetable would allow Collier twenty-four months to create his most extended and ambitious physical forgery, which involved penning in no fewer

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a witness. It must be said that while much of the Perkins Folio is indeed spotted and stained— which the buyer could hardly fail to appreciate—only one leaf in the volume is badly damaged, and none is ‘defaced’ in any appropriate sense of the word. Nor is it a particularly ‘short’ copy. 84. Ganzel, pp. 147–51, an ostensibly tough demonstration that ‘Collier’s account of the acquisition of the Perkins Folio was not entirely true’, but seeking to reduce Collier’s malfeasance (and his own later cri that this episode was the most ‘foolish act’ of his life) to an ill-advised ‘lie’, based on ‘vanity’, and a desire ‘to ‘‘protect’’ the book from adverse criticism’. Thus, according to Ganzel, Collier’s most ‘dishonourable act’ was not to have forged or fabricated, but simply to have ‘falsified a significant part of the story of his acquisition’ of the Perkins Folio, which ‘made [him] ultimately vulnerable to accusations of far more serious crimes’. This is what a nineteenth-century journalist might call ‘a ruse of the Old Bailey’: sternly accuse your own client of insignificant crimes, which replace, explain away, or neutralize the more serious charges. 85. N&E, p. vii n. In 1860 it was discovered that some volumes of Rodd’s accounts were missing, and Collier has been (not very convincingly) accused of destroying them.



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than 2,700 individual ‘corrections’ to the text of Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays,86 plus numerous stage directions or indications of stage-business, frequent numberings or re-numberings of acts and scenes, punctuation in extenso, and the more than eighty theatrical ‘cuts’ mentioned above. Though a formidable task, this was by no means beyond Collier’s capacity, given his command of the mocksecretary hand he had so long employed, and his familiarity with all the textual cruces in Shakespeare that his ‘Old Corrector’ addressed. And while some of the annotations demanded composing from scratch—thirteen new lines of pseudo-Shakespearian verse and prose, for example,87 and some three or four half-lines as well—others merely followed traditional emendations of the text, perhaps long discarded, from such speculating editors and commentators as Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Warburton, Hanmer, Johnson, Percy, Farmer, Ritson, Tollet, Upton, Steevens, Blackstone, Malone, Heath, and Monck Mason, and latterly even Singer, Knight, Barron Field, and Collier himself.88 Yet others—the majority, in fact—represented ostensibly ‘common-sense’ corrections of grammar, metre, and historical or geographical mistakes. We have already seen John wrestling with alternative readings like ‘clouds/shrouds’ in 2 Henry IV, and with puzzles like ‘most busy lest’ in The Tempest (when the Old Corrector’s ‘blest’ may have occurred to him); and such extravagant conjectures as ‘a table of green frieze’ (Henry V, ii.3.17, capping Theobald’s immortal ‘a’ babbled of green fields’), may have buzzed in his head for decades. Indeed, many of the Perkins emendations sound like the night-thoughts of an editor bound by his own good principles to repress them in his considered, conservative text, yet anxious somehow to air them, even claim priority for them, should they appeal: a secret hoard of inadmissible evidence, but one which—credited to an anonymous old-timer—

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86. Counting these is problematic, but the extent of the annotation has been widely underestimated. Collier’s own ‘List of every manuscript note and emendation’ in his edition of Coleridge’s Seven Lectures (1856), pp. 150–275, gives 2735 passages, some involving two- or even three-word changes, which could be numbered separately and swell the total, but also includes a few ‘substantive’ emendations of punctuation only. The 1856 list is, however, far from complete, as Hamilton and Ingleby demonstrated. On the other hand, Collier’s high early estimate of 20,000 ‘minor emendations’ (N&E, p. iv), from which he could only select ‘about 1200’ for discussion (N&E II, pp. vii–viii), enabled him later to protest that he had had neither the time nor the privacy to forge so much material. 87. Strictly speaking, there are nine new lines of verse in the main text, plus two lines of prose (in All’s Well and Twelh Night), plus a couplet which supposedly replaced the excised ending to Hamlet ‘when the tragedy was abbreviated’, but which Collier called ‘weak, inanimate stuff [that] could not have come from Shakespeare’s pen’. Ingleby’s count of ‘ten or eleven ‘‘lost lines’’’ (Complete View, p. 218) presumably omits the Hamlet couplet, and may treat the rhyming addition to Henry V, iii.2.8 (‘To all and some’), as not quite a whole line. 88. See S. W. Singer, The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated (1853), passim. Collier’s critics, particularly Singer, laboured these ‘coincidences’ as suspicious; see below.


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could be solemnly quarried (as it was, and still is) by right-minded modern editors. As for opportunity and privacy, in the spring of 1850 John had at least one month’s independence in London, when his female household preceded him to Holyport; and a er his own move there he was certainly not without shelves and a desk of his own among the many rooms of Geys House, nor was he constrained by a working journalist’s timetable. However long he laboured to conceive and transcribe his Perkins spuria, erasing false starts and resorting to different shades of doctored ink (which could suggest entry over ‘the course of several years’: N&E, p. viii), for two years he maintained strict silence about his find, perhaps not to risk someone’s recollection of fewer marks in the book than it finally bore.89 Not a word about it, in extant correspondence with Cunningham, Halliwell, Devonshire, Ellesmere, or the patient Trevelyans; and when Crabb Robinson visited Geys House in October 1850 and October 1851, he was not shown it—for that he would wait until 31 October 1852.90 Had John, during all that period at Holyport, shared it even with his brother-in-law or his own immediate family, there would be witnesses to the moment of discovery, worth gold in subsequent years. But before January 1852 there was probably nothing complete (or completed) to be proudly shared. In the Athenaeum of 31 January 1852 Collier followed his account of acquiring the Folio with eleven ‘specimen’ emendations from its pages, and added six more on 7 February and 27 March. These few tantalizing samples—plus nine others that he doled out in Notes and Queries between March and November 91—were all that he vouchsafed to publish in periodicals, but they did serve to test both the market for a new and radical text of Shakespeare, and the scholarly response it might generate. He could hardly have expected universal enthusiasm, nor docile acceptance of even twenty-six of the Old Corrector’s conjectural readings (he professed, of course, to be keeping an open mind about their individual ‘authority’), but better to provoke some dialogue in the learned press in advance than to spring the full-blown result on an unforewarned public. John no doubt judged rightly that the climate of reception for so provocative a discovery would benefit from preliminary tact, and that rival editors, if they were 89. Some suggestion was made, later on, that annotations appeared aer the book was exhibited in 1852 (when viewers were forbidden to take notes); but this has never been proved, and would seem wildly incautious of Collier. 90. ‘I looked over the folio Shakespeare [at Holyport] which Collier bought by accident containing some remarkable emendations’; HCR Diary. 91. All of these—eight one-word emendations and one hyphenation—were given in reply to a query (by W. S. D., 21 February, about Troilus) or in response to S. W. Singer’s on-going notes on Shakespeare’s text (Lear, Coriolanus, Richard II, and As You Like It: see N&Q, 6 March, 29 May, 10 July, 31 July, 14 August, 25 September (mentioning only an illegible smudge), and 20 November 1852).



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to declare themselves sceptics, would forearm him by showing their hand in advance. He announced his intention ‘to place this relic before, and at the disposal of, the Council of the Shakespeare Society at its next meeting’, which would fall on Tuesday, 10 February, and on 7 February promised also to ‘take it with me to the Society of Antiquaries on Thursday following; so that any gentleman will have an opportunity of inspecting it, and forming his own judgment’. In the event he seems to have exhibited the volume at least three, perhaps four, times in London in 1852,92 although he warned viewers to be ‘careful and cautious in handling it’, and stipulated that ‘no gentleman is at liberty to make memoranda, or in any way to give publicity to the notes or changes which he may inspect’ (Athenaeum, 27 March, p. 355). Just how many of his colleagues availed themselves of these opportunities is unclear: at its first exhibition, on 9 February, Halliwell said he had had only a ‘slight glance’ at the book, although Collier told David Laing that ‘everybody [there] was struck by it’.93 Sir Frederic Madden, who was at first highly sympathetic to the emendations as published, does not record examining their source at this time. Publication itself, in whatever form Collier might choose, remained to be arranged. His first intention, evidently, was to ‘print such a selection of the manuscript notes as may best serve to explain, illustrate, or amend the acknowledged defects of the text of the plays’ as a Shakespeare Society volume, ‘as their funds allow’ (Athenaeum, 31 January 1852, p. 144)—a serious consideration for the terminally impoverished organization, but perhaps offering hope of redemption through popular sales. To this end the council was addressed on 9 February, and the society eventually did issue the selection (Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare’s Plays) in a subsidized partnership with Whittaker and Co., the publishers of Collier’s 1842–44 Shakespeare. But although Whittaker’s was willing to co-sponsor such a volume, to be offered as a supplement to its eightvolume set, the publisher still held a considerable back-stock of the latter, and was unwilling to reprint it, ‘corrected and modified by the new materials now in my hands’; furthermore, Collier told John Murray III, Whittaker’s informed him that ‘the nature of my engagement with them in 1840 was such that I could not undertake a new Shakespeare for any body [else]’.94 This warning may have been occasioned by a rumour that Collier was dis92. To the council of the Shakespeare Society on 9 February, the date of the meeting having been changed, and to members of the Society of Antiquaries on the evening of 12 February and on 2 April (between noon and two o’clock, as announced in the Athenaeum, 27 March, p. 355; this became ‘four hours by daylight’ in the Reply to Hamilton [1860], p. 10). Neither display is mentioned in the society’s Proceedings. Collier later asserted that he had also ‘laid it before the general meeting’ of the Shakespeare Society in April (Shakespeare [1858], i:xi). 93. Halliwell, A Few Remarks on the Emendation, ‘‘Who Smothers Her with Painting,’’ in the Play of Cymbeline (1852), p. 9; JPC to Laing, 10 February 1852, EUL MS La.IV.17. 94. JPC to Murray, 27 February 1852, John Murray archives.


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cussing such an edition with Murray, either before or a er Whittaker ‘distinctly refused to have anything to do with [it]’. In mid-February therefore John consulted his old barrister friend Charles Clark of the Middle Temple, who assured him (as he told Murray) that ‘as long as I steer clear of the edition I superintended for Whittakers, it is out of the question to suppose that I may not edit a new Shakespeare for myself or any body else’, and raised also a novel temptation: ‘Mr Clark is of opinion that I, or any person to whom I might assign my interest, would have a copyright in the manuscript emendations of the text of Shakespeare which my folio of 1632 supplies. This, however, he tells me, is quite a new point, and has not been touched by any of the decided cases’. On 27 February John formally offered the project to Murray, still the most distinguished of all London publishers (‘I should like . . . to join you in a new edition; and I feel confident that there is nothing to prevent me’), and when Murray asked for a sight of the Folio itself he complied eagerly.95 John hoped that Murray’s immediate adviser might be Peter Cunningham, who was already involved in the negotiations;96 but Murray chose hard-headed John Gibson Lockhart instead. Lockhart’s judgement, as communicated to John Wilson Croker, was remarkably sharp, and remarkable also for never resurfacing in the later 1850s: ‘I have been examining the Collier trouvaille of the Annotated Shakespeare 1632’, he reported. ‘It is in my opinion a fabrication, & I have told Murray why I think so—inter alia viz. because of the modernness of the hand, the ink, & especially the perfect modern cra as to correcting of the press’—that is, the ‘proofreading’ conventions mentioned above— although Lockhart admitted that he ‘never had the opportunity of seeing how these matters were done at the period to which this annotation is ascribed’. He did however find some of the readings ‘very happy’, and being certain that ‘Collier has not brains to invent [them]’, suggested that ‘he has lit upon both an old manager’s copy & the notes of some very shrewd critic. These may have been combined’, he concluded, in what amounts to a direct charge of deceptive transcription, ‘in one set of MS corrections.’ 97 Although John Murray III obtained a favourable legal opinion on the copy-

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95. JPC to Murray, 8 March 1852, arranging to leave the Folio ‘sealed up’ for Murray at the Society of Antiquaries, ‘on the condition that it only goes into hands that you can trust’. This may be the only time in 1852–53 that Collier let the volume out of his hands, although he asserted in 1858 (without fear of contradiction) that he had also ‘le it for several days in the care of the late Earl of Ellesmere’ (Shakespeare, i:xi). 96. JPC to Murray, 21 March 1852, John Murray archives. 97. Lockhart’s letter (John Wilson Croker Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan) is undated, but his examination presumably took place between 18 March, when Collier le the book for Murray, and 21 March, when he asked Murray to lock it up pending collection.



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right potential of Collier’s new readings, a er Lockhart’s assessment he chose not to proceed. Collier repossessed his Folio at the end of March, and without skipping a beat returned to Whittaker,98 who compromised by commissioning a single-volume, unannotated text of Shakespeare’s plays, to embody as many emendations as John chose to adopt, alongside his volume of selected readings.99 John would be paid £120 for the Whittaker share of the latter, and £300 for the one-volume text—‘a small sum’, his friend and publisher’s editor F. G. Tomlins later observed, ‘when the collation of the thirty-seven plays is taken into consideration’,100 but more than half his reward for the eight-volume performance. Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare’s Plays, from Early Manuscript Corrections in a Copy of the Folio, 1632, in the Possession of J. Payne Collier, Esq. F.S.A., a plump octavo of 550 pages (plus one facsimile) issued from the press of Gilbert and Rivington, Whittaker’s printers, at the beginning of 1853. The Shakespeare Society’s copies, for which Whittaker charged only the production-cost price, are dated 1852, but distribution took place in January, with Athenaeum and Literary Gazette notices appearing on the eighth, and Madden receiving his subscribed copy ten days later. Both the society’s and Whittaker’s copies were designated as ‘forming a supplemental volume to the works of Shakespeare by the same editor, in eight volumes, octavo’, which in effect revived the sale of Whittaker’s 1842–44 edition: many sets, uniformly bound since 1853, come in the nine volumes, not eight, that the publishers now could provide. Collier’s selection of readings, which observes the same Folio order of plays as his edition, follows an introduction that retails the recent history of the Perkins Folio, offers conjectures on the intentions and mannerisms of the Old Corrector (his putative ‘theatrical purposes’, his ‘businesslike method of annotation’), his textual resources (lost prompt-books, quartos, manuscripts, ‘errors in the printed text [set right by] the more faithful delivery of their parts by the principal actors’), and while stressing the ‘indisputable emendations’ and the ‘apposite additions’, takes account of their uneven quality, characterizing some as ‘purely conjectural and arbitrary changes’—although the superior examples perhaps ‘warrant us in

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98. ‘Rather sorry than glad’, he told Cunningham, but trusting the publisher not to ‘haggle’ in the future; JPC to Cunningham, 15 April 1852, Harmsen collection. 99. Collier announced this to Laing on 14 May and to Halliwell on 4 June, telling the latter that it would consist of ‘an entirely new and improved text (the mere text) in one handsome volume, of which several thousand copies are to be struck off’ (LOA 56/2). Elsewhere he specified 3,000: to Laing (14 May, EUL MS La.IV.17) and to Sir Thomas Phillipps (27 August, Bodl. MS Phillipps-Robinson.c.518, fols. 48–49). 100. In the Critic, 27 August 1859, p. 201. The thirty-seventh play was Pericles, based on the text of the quartos.


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imputing to a higher authority, than we might otherwise be inclined to acknowledge, some of the more doubtful alterations’ (N&E, p. xxiv). Ever the professed sceptic of his own discoveries, John declared himself ‘anxious rather to underrate, than to overstate the claims of this annotated copy’, but it remained his conviction that ‘we are bound to admit by far the greater body of the substitutions it contains, as the restored language of Shakespeare’ (p. xxvi). A lifelong faith in textual conservatism, he averred, had made his 1842–44 Shakespeare ‘adhere to the old quartos and folios, wherever sense could be made out of the words they furnished’, but ‘that they were wrong, in many more places than I suspected, will now be evident’. While ten years ago ‘I allowed myself no room for speculative emendation, even where it seemed most called for’, the case was now radically altered: ‘Had the copy of the folio, 1632, the authority for nearly all that follows, devolved into my hands anterior to the commencement of that undertaking, the result would have been in many important respects different’. As it was, Collier’s 1842–44 recension ‘will remain an authentic representation of the text of our great dramatist, as it is contained in the early editions; and all who wish to ascertain the new readings proposed in the present work, will have the means of doing so without disturbing the ancient, and hitherto generally received, language of Shakespeare’ (p. xxv). With that sop to Whittaker, and indeed to his own largely honest hard work, John crossed the divide between editorial camps, from conventional responsibility, however plodding in effect, to wilful heterodoxy. Knowing full well that there was no true tradition or historical authority behind the hundreds, if not thousands, of amendments he now chose to endorse and perpetuate, he preferred his own ingenuity to the hard rules of textual evidence he had hitherto championed. This was not altogether a turnabout of principles, as we now realize—John had always, in some sense, thought himself outside scholarly law— but in its audacity and magnitude it condemned him to a progressively indefensible editorial position. As Dewey Ganzel remarked of his one-volume Shakespeare, the first truly corrupt version of the plays infected by ‘Perkins’, Collier ‘shackled himself to the defense of a textual pastiche that, under other circumstances, he would have been the first to denounce’ (p. 161). But for the immediate future his course seemed assured. Perhaps to Whittaker’s surprise, sales of Notes and Emendations were brisk. A press-run of about 1,400 copies 101—including those for the dwindling membership of the Shakespeare Society—was exhausted within a few months, even at the high price of 14s., and by the spring a second edition, ‘revised and enlarged’, was called for. While the paginary length was only slightly increased,

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101. JPC to Phillipps, 27 August 1852.



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Collier introduced some two hundred new readings ‘which I had, either by design or accident, previously passed over’, bringing the total (by his own count) to about twelve hundred.102 He again claimed to offer ‘the fairest possible representation of the appearance and contents of my folio’, by furnishing specimens ‘good, bad, and indifferent, so that an accurate judgment might be formed of the sources of the old corrector’s information, and of his capacity for discharging the duty he undertook’: this in reply to those ‘severe sticklers for the old readings’ who had denounced, or soon would, ‘points which, not only have I never defended, but which I myself have attacked for their weakness’ (N&E II, pp. vi–vii). And, as each reader was invited to form his own judgement of each emendation, it followed that some of them now downplayed by Collier might one day be rehabilitated, and he might be pardoned for advocating others that posterity would dismiss: special pleading no doubt, but a clever tactic, correctly anticipating one aspect of critical response. Whittaker published John’s second edition on 4 June 1853, and paid him a further £100 for it. The sales expectations this time were extravagant, however, and John complained that the publisher was ‘overloading the market’ with a press-run which le a stock on hand of nearly eight hundred copies in late 1856.103 Meanwhile, Collier’s one-volume Shakespeare, ‘regulated by the old copies, and by the recently discovered folio of 1632’, had come out in May, and Whittaker risked issuing 3,000 copies of that stately octavo, at the challenging price of one guinea. By mid-1853 ‘Perkins’ and the Old Corrector were a domain, in print, of their own. The reception of the Perkins Folio revelations, in the first two years of their piecemeal disclosure, swelled from a trickle of periodical correspondence and gossip in 1852—necessarily confined to the few readings and claims Collier then made public—to a comparative flood of praise, blame, and controversy in 1853– 60, embracing reviews and replies to reviews, and no fewer than eighteen dedicated monographs, each in turn generating critical response. The controversialists, besides Collier himself, included his old friends Bruce, Thoms, Cunningham, Madden, and Forster; his rivals Halliwell, Dyce, Singer, Hunter, and Knight; the Germans Nicolaus Delius, Friedrich August Leo, and Tycho Mommsen; the American Grant White; and among a number of new

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102. Grant White, Shakespeare’s Scholar (1854), counted 1,303 separate instances in the first edition, but Collier tended to group those in a single line or two as just one change. 103. Whittaker to JPC, 22 and 24 October 1856, Folger MS Y.d.6 (223–24). Ganzel cites these two letters as authority for his figures (p. 155) of 30,000 copies printed (a misprint for 3,000?) and sales of ‘nearly 4,000 copies in six months’ for the two editions combined, but no such numbers appear in the letters.


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English adversaries the persistent and solid Clement Mansfield Ingleby and the obsessed Andrew Edmund Brae. Perhaps the best way to summarize this daunting body of material is by the issues involving the Perkins Folio and its use that they addressed: first, that of copyright control of the emendations by their discloser and his publishing assigns; second, their literary merit, pure and simple, in and of themselves (what John insisted was all that mattered); third, the propriety of their presentation—whether in extract form, selectively, or silently embodied in a new text of Shakespeare; fourth, the originality of the Old Corrector’s suggestions (a red herring, in retrospect), and Collier’s failure to credit ‘coincidental’ readings by old Shakespeare editors; and finally, the ‘authority’ of the readings, as dependent on their authenticity—that is, their genuine antiquity, and the bona fides of the manuscript annotator himself. The last, which was soon to replace abstract ‘literary merit’ as the principal concern of commentators, led to an ongoing sub-investigation of the provenance of the Folio, and a growing demand that independent experts examine and judge it on palaeographical grounds. Copyright proved a dead-end issue eventually, but from the start it stirred passions among readers and editors. Good or bad, persuasive or dubious, the idea that any new reading in an out-of-copyright text could belong exclusively to the possessor of its expression in manuscript (or to the discoverer who first committed it to print) outraged nearly everyone. As early as 14 February and 6 March 1852, Athenaeum correspondents complained of the proposed restriction of Notes and Emendations to Shakespeare Society subscribers (at effectively £1 a copy, a year’s dues), and called for ‘general circulation’ of such a ‘great treasure’ at a lower price; a year later in Notes and Queries one ‘Scotus’, responding to a hint in Notes and Emendations about the ‘right to use the emendation of our folio, 1632’ (p. xiii), doubted whether Collier was entitled to any such privilege, considering that ‘if the words restored were really those of Shakespeare’, neither the Old Corrector, nor certainly Collier, could claim them. And at all events ‘it would be a pity were the public to be deprived of the benefit of the corrections by the use of them being exclusively confined to Mr. Collier’s editions’ (N&Q, 12 February 1853, p. 154). But for Collier, who of course stood to profit financially from every sub-let perpetuation of his handiwork, the prospect was enticing, and we have seen that he held it out to John Murray III in February 1852. Murray went so far as to procure a legal opinion more distinguished than that of Collier’s barrister friend Clark, from Sir John Bayley, Q.C., which held that Collier, if he registered himself as proprietor of his own Notes, which he then edited and published, would ‘acquire a copyright in the work, and may maintain an action against any one who pirates it. . . . It is not necessary that the registered proprietor should be the author, nor is copyright confined to authors’ (Seven



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Lectures [1856], p. lxxvi). But this may not have been the last word, for what of readings that duplicate those of earlier editions, whose commentaries are also in copyright? A year later Serjeant Talfourd told the publisher Edward Moxon that John ‘had no copyright’, and Moxon, who had stopped the press on his own six-volume Shakespeare in anticipation of Collier’s emendations, felt he would be justified in recommencing work. Reporting this in March 1853, Peter Cunningham urged his friend to be ‘on your guard’, and John asked him to obtain from Murray a copy of Bayley’s opinion, perhaps planning to confront Moxon with it.104 Still, any attempt to coin royalties out of what were professedly Shakespeare’s own words would reflect badly on Collier, and he later protested that all he had ever meant to protect was Notes and Emendations itself, and the 1853 onevolume Shakespeare. ‘I do not love Shakespeare as a man loves his wife or his child’, he wrote in 1856; ‘he is no exclusive possession, but the property of all mankind’ (Seven Lectures, p. lxxv). He had granted permission to every applicant ‘at home and abroad’ to make use of ‘the sound corrections in my folio’. ‘Nothing could be so repugnant to me, as any attempt to enforce the strict legal right’—which, however, he insisted was valid, quoting Bayley’s 1852 opinion in confirmation; all he asked was that his own and the Old Corrector’s contributions to the received text of Shakespeare be acknowledged by those who adopted them, and that ‘nobody should suppose emendations, and then charge them upon my folio’, which he slyly convicted one of his adversaries of doing, ‘unintentionally I am persuaded’ (pp. lxxvii–viii). This backtracking, and indeed the abandoning of a potentially lucrative entitlement, may owe something to Charles Knight, who in 1853 had coupled scepticism of the merit of the Perkins emendations with doubts about the copyright claims: ‘Was literary property ever before surrounded with such a ‘‘wall of brass,’’ with ‘‘steel-traps and springguns’’ posted up at every turn? It would seem as if the doubtfulness of the title to the possession, as an exclusive right, had rendered it necessary thus to proclaim that all intruders would be met with ‘‘the utmost severity of the law.’’ We shall not question the title, because, such is our blindness, we have small confidence in the value of the property’ (Old Lamps, or New?, p. xxxiv). Even more devastating were the opinions of Knight’s friend George Lillie Craik, a longterm Perkins Folio loyalist, which though given in private correspondence with James Orchard Halliwell may ultimately have reached John:

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104. Cunningham to JPC, 4 March 1853, Folger MS Y.d.6 (39). The edition, described by Cunningham as ‘in six 5/. volumes’ with ‘Campbell’s Life of Shake.’, never appeared, and by July 1853 Moxon was instead advertising a ‘library edition’ to be edited by Alexander Dyce (Examiner, 16 July, p. 464).


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I make short work of Mr Collier’s strange claim of copyright in the new readings. I apprehend that he cannot, upon his own plea that they are merely restorative of what Shakespeare wrote, make out any claim to their appropriation. . . . He might shi his ground, indeed, for the purpose of the action, and plead that they were not Shakespeare’s; but his taking that course is something rather too absurd to be supposed. . . . But certainly all the world must regard with astonishment the intimation which he has been so ill-advised as to put forward,—that he means, in fact, to try to prevent the text of Shakespeare from ever being again correctly printed (what he deems correctly) except by those publishers who will consent to purchase the privilege from him for a sum of money . . . he of all men, the profession of whose entire life has been an anxiety to restore and put the world in possession of what Shakespeare really wrote! I remember nothing to parallel this among all the curiosities, or monstrosities, of literature.105 For most of Collier’s earliest critics the authority, and even the authenticity, of the Perkins Folio readings seemed more a function of their perceived literary merit than the reverse: that is, contemporaries decided for themselves whether the changes seemed ‘right’, and reasoned thence to a position on the credibility of the Old Corrector, whose purposes and sources they might reconstruct from his own implicit testimony.106 Spoon-fed at first a few dozen, and later some hundreds of supposed pre-Restoration manuscript corrections or amplifications, they passed judgement on individual examples, and if they approved a significant number (as the majority of early readers did), they might well draw the conclusion, with John Bruce, that the Old Corrector had existed and had had access to authoritative texts no longer extant, and that ‘we have here, in all probability, a genuine restoration of Shakespeare’s language in at least a thousand places in which he has hitherto been misunderstood’ (Athenaeum, 8 January 1853, p. 41). The beginning of this congenial sequence of reasoning—precisely what John had urged on his public—was the acceptance of certain of the Perkins Folio emendations as superior to the readings in all the traditional printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays. That acceptance began early, but it was not universal. Only one week before

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105. Craik to JOH, 13 January 1854, LOA 51/28. 106. Early critics for the most part assumed, as Collier led them to do, that the Old Corrector was a man of the theatre—a one-time player or prompter, with access to playhouse tradition and text. It was however up to the Dublin University Magazine reviewer (J. W. Cole) to make the final leap: ‘The corrector may have known Shakspeare personally. He may have conversed with him on the mistakes of the first quartos printed during his life [or] discussed with Heminge and Condell the errors of the first folio’ (March 1853, p. 367).



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Collier’s Athenaeum announcement, Notes and Queries had begun publishing a series of ‘Readings in Shakespeare’ by Andrew Edmund Brae, an amateur antiquary of Leeds; other correspondents joined in, and inevitably the new revelations dominated their dialogue. Chief among the earliest speculators, besides Brae, was Collier’s old editing scapegoat (but of late the recipient of unctuous footnote credit), the venerable Samuel Weller Singer, now in semi-retirement at Mickleham, Surrey. Singer began (N&Q, 8 May 1852) by praising two ‘happy corrections’ recently proposed (‘Who can doubt [them]?’ he asked; ‘a glance at the passages as they stand in the old print of the first folio would convince the most skeptical’), of which one was Collier’s: ‘bisson multitude’ for ‘bosome multiplied’ in Coriolanus, iii.1.131.107 On 22 May James Orchard Halliwell, while concerned with what he deemed the ‘mere guesswork’ of most of the emendations so far published (‘it is not safe to adopt MS. corrections, unless we know on what authority they are made . . . and it was rather alarming to see the readiness with which they were received’), heartily approved ‘bisson multitude’, as ‘clearly one of those alterations that no conjectural ingenuity could have suggested’, and considered it ‘almost beyond a doubt that that particular correction was made on authority’—adducing, therefore, that it ‘opens a reasonable expectation that the MS. corrector had, in some cases, recollection of the passages as they were delivered in representation’ (p. 485). No better example of the back-to-front logic Collier inspired can be isolated, coming as it did from a declared sceptic of unsi ed evidence. On 12 June Singer repeated his endorsement of the emendation, but reserved judgement on ‘conjectural ingenuity’, and on the yet-unpublished corpus of novelties, regarding ‘one truly happy conjectural emendation’ as ‘sufficient to convey a favourable notion of the acuteness of the writer of the emendatory notes, and nothing more’ (p. 556). Six weeks later, a er a courteous exchange with Collier over three passages in King Lear, he returned to the positive side: ‘had Mr. Collier’s second folio only afforded this one very happy correction, it would have done good service to the text of a play in which the printer’s errors are numerous’ (24 July, p. 85).

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107. The Folio text, considered puzzling by many, reads: ‘How shall this bosom multiplied digest / The Senate’s courtesy?’ Modern editors tend to retain it, glossing ‘bosom multiplied’ as an image of the common populace, a ‘beast with many heads’ as it later is figured. Collier’s emendation and its variants proved popular for years, ‘bisson’ (or ‘beesome’) meaning ‘purblind’, as in ii.1.64. Singer’s second instance, ‘infinite cunning’ for the nonsensical ‘insuite comming’ (All’s Well, v.3.216), derived from a conjecture of the late William Sidney Walker, published by his editor-tobe W. N. Lettsom in the Athenaeum of 17 April 1852. It is also, perhaps coincidentally, a Perkins reading, and Collier—seemingly perplexed, or concerned that some viewer of his Folio had betrayed him—enquired about Singer’s source (‘I have a particular reason for wishing to trace the suggestion’: N&Q, 29 May 1852), to which Singer replied in print (N&Q, 12 June 1852).


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Throughout 1852 Singer professed himself willing, at least in the pages of Notes and Queries, to accept the representations of the Old Corrector and his sponsor at face value. Exchanges over textual variations—two of which, claimed by Collier to be stop-press corrections in his Folio, turn out in fact to result from the scraping away of printer’s ink followed by pen alteration 108—occurred in August, September, and November, when John was in the midst of correcting the last proofs of Notes and Emendations. His ongoing correspondent, by then well advanced in revising his own outmoded 1826 Shakespeare, shared with Moxon (and Halliwell, Knight, and Dyce as well) apprehensions about what the wider release of the Perkins material might reveal, and may have put off completing his task.109 Polite as he had remained in print, however, when annotating in private Collier’s Notes and Emendations of January 1853, Singer chose terms less temperate for those readings he disliked, running the gamut of ‘unnecessary’, ‘improbable’, ‘unwarranted’ and ‘unhappy’, past ‘rash’, ‘absurd’, ‘impertinent’ and ‘meddling’, to ‘mischievous’, ‘capricious’, ‘intolerable’, ‘violent’, ‘vicious’, and ‘perverse’. Others were still signalled as ‘good and legitimate’, ‘very plausible’, ‘admissible’, ‘desireable’, ‘judicious’, and ‘quite unexceptionable’, while ‘bisson multitude’ received his unqualified approbation, remaining ‘excellent’ and ‘an undoubted and acute rectification of an evident misprint’.110 But Singer was now pointing toward a full-scale critique of the emendations, independent of his forestalled edition. Shakespeare Vindicated, the result of an intense if precipitous examination of the published evidence—but not of the Perkins Folio itself, which Singer declared, even boasted, that he had never seen—was the first substantial monograph devoted exclusively to ‘Perkins’; we shall return to it below. Halliwell, meanwhile, had already leapt into print, anticipating even the periodical critics with a slim booklet addressed to just one of Collier’s specimen passages. A Few Remarks on the Emendation, ‘‘Who Smothers Her with Painting,’’ in the Play of Cymbeline (John Russell Smith, March 1852) considers and rejects the alteration of ‘Whose mother was her painting’ (Cymbeline, iii.4.50), which Collier, in the Athenaeum of 7 February, had claimed ‘must produce instant conviction’. Halliwell prefaced his sensible demolition of that unnecessary change with the challenging if debatable assertion that ‘the English language underwent

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108. These are ‘fire’ to ‘sire’ in Measure for Measure, iii.1.29, and ‘sly slow hours’ to ‘fly-slow hours’ in Richard II, i.3.150—echoes of the ‘sear’d/fear’d’ forgery in the Ellesmere First Folio. 109. The first specimen sheets of Singer’s new edition were printed for Pickering in June 1852, and composition began in earnest in December (Chiswick Press production ledger, BL Add. MS 41,894, fols. 119 and 169v); but with Pickering’s bankruptcy (May 1853) and death (April 1854), the edition, published in ten monthly volumes, did not begin to appear until early 1856; see N&Q, 1 December 1855, p. 442. 110. Copy in FF.



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greater changes between 1600 and 1630 [in respect of idiomatic usage] than have since taken place, even were we to include the two centuries and upwards which have now elapsed’ (p. 5); hence, owing to ‘the great changes in the English idiom made before the year 1632’, the Perkins annotations were of a comparatively late date for Shakespeare, however well-intentioned the Old Corrector may have been. He therefore urged strict selectivity in crediting the manuscript readings, through two simple and sound rules that forbade their adoption ‘where good sense can be satisfactorily made of the passage as it stands in the original’, and ‘where a similar turn of language can be produced in any contemporary writer’ (pp. 7–8). That said, however, Halliwell flattered Collier’s ‘exertions in this department of literature . . . so arduous, so meritorious, and what perhaps is still better, so successful’ (remarking that ‘it is only a student who can really appreciate the labours of a student’), and paid qualified homage to his discovery: ‘in the slight glance I had of it, at a meeting of the Council of the Shakespeare Society, I observed more than one [emendation] of very great value, which may assist in determining the conjectures of Gifford and others’ (p. 9). This was hardly a telling blow against Perkins, though Collier was tweaked for asserting that ‘the emendation of his folio must ‘‘instantly carry acquiescence with it.’’ No conjectural alterations can be so received’ (p. 14). John took that criticism good-naturedly, thanking Halliwell ‘heartily’ for his tract, ‘especially a er the manner in which you have spoken of me in it’. Of the one emendation involved, however, he remained confident: ‘I think you have made (like an ingenious advocate) a good defence in a bad cause, but it will not obtain you a verdict’, he wrote, adding five days later: ‘ ‘‘Scratch my baby’’ as much as you like, for I have such a parental opinion of her good looks, that you cannot disfigure her in my eyes.’ 111 Halliwell had by now announced by prospectus his own magnificent and prohibitively expensive twenty-volume folio Shakespeare, and no doubt, like all other Shakespeare editors, awaited with interest the fuller disclosures of Notes and Emendations in the new year. And although John would tell him in August that he anticipated ‘a permanent hold’ on their copyright (eminent counsel having assured him that ‘whatever you may make, if new, let the authority for them be what it may, is your own property’),112 this was a period of close friendliness between the two, and there was never a suggestion that John would prevent or restrict Halliwell’s use of the emendations.113 Indeed his onevolume Shakespeare, he assured Halliwell playfully, ‘cannot interfere with your

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111. JPC to JOH, 29 March and 3 April 1852, LOA 49/62 and 47/27. 112. JPC to JOH, 18 August 1852, LOA 56/1. 113. Ganzel (pp. 165–66) seriously misrepresents the sequence of events and reaction: Collier’s dismay over Halliwell’s suspicions of the Bridgewater forgeries, and its effect on the relationship, began only in May 1853.


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20, nor your 20 with my one . . . I aim at the mobility—you at the nobility— only one letter difference. Strange, that a single letter should make all the odds between 20 vols & 1 vol!’ 114 Early reviewers of Notes and Emendations also dwelt on the excellence of its individual readings, touching only in passing on those deemed weak or superfluous, and they competed with one another for superlatives in praising the whole. Bruce in the Athenaeum of 8 January 1853, certainly a Collier partisan in what was then Collier’s own forum, called it ‘a book that . . . knocks out a thousand errors . . . and substitutes emendations so clear that we cannot hesitate to accept them’, of which he reprinted a sample of fi y-five, including two of the entirely new lines of verse. The Literary Gazette of the same date signalled one of the latter and three more, whose presence ‘makes it clear beyond a doubt, that [the Old Corrector] made his corrections upon some good authority’, since they occur ‘where an omission of something to complete the sense or the couplet was obvious’, and exhibit ‘a fitness which proves them to be not the result of happy conjecture’ (p. 30). ‘Obstinate sticklers for the old text’—a sneer calculated to infuriate conservatives—‘may contend that in [two] instances no new lines were needed’, but in one other ‘the want of a line is manifest’, and in a fourth, the reviewer asserted, ‘the passage is unintelligible’ without the eightword addition. Beside these revelations, and a dozen others to celebrate, those ‘comparatively few . . . where the proposed emendations seem not to be justified by necessity or fitness’ paled into insignificance: the improvements were, finally, ‘of more value than the labours of nearly all the critics on Shakespeare’s text put together’ (p. 29). John Forster, in the Examiner (29 January, pp. 67–69), also championed ‘the ample harvest of true and rich illustration’ against the ‘rare and very occasional misses’ among the manuscript readings, again highlighting the new lines (six of them) contained in Collier’s ‘latest and most valuable discovery’: ‘We hardly think that anyone will be bold enough to question that in these various instances we have the poet’s genuine text restored.’ All in all, ‘it is not for a moment to be doubted, we think, that in this volume a contribution has been made to the clearness and accuracy of Shakespeare’s text by far the most important of any offered or attempted since Shakespeare lived and wrote’. The Fraser’s reviewer (quite possibly W. G. Clark, later one of the Cambridge editors) echoed these sentiments in March: Notes and Emendations marked ‘an epoch in the annals of Shakespearian criticism’, as some two dozen examples of its bounty would show. They included the ‘facile’ correction to Cymbeline that Halliwell had effectively refuted, and the decasyllabic novelties ‘worthy of Shakespeare, and quite

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114. JPC to JOH, 11 July 1852, LOA 56/39.



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in his inimitable manner’, among them the already-celebrated interpolation to A Winter’s Tale, v.3 (‘I am but dead, stone looking upon stone’): ‘A noble line, Shakespeare’s, and none but Shakespeare’s!’ (p. 251). J. W. Cole in the March Dublin University Magazine selected some forty specimens from those (‘the majority’) that ‘will surely be adopted in future as the standard text of Shakespeare’, and even the sober Gentleman’s Magazine accepted that ‘some at least of these old additions [of entire lines] are so necessary to the sense, and have so much the air of the poet, that it is difficult not to believe them the work of Shakspere’ (April 1853, p. 342). With the supply of one line in Coriolanus (iii.2, ‘to brook control without the use of anger’), the Old Corrector ‘not only discovered a rent which has escaped the eyes of all subsequent observers, but succeeded in mending it with a fragment which, in colour and texture, is utterly indistinguishable from the original material’. Notes and Emendations, the GM reviewer believed, ‘will do more for revolutionizing and more for amending the printed words of the poet, than all the critics whose labours fill the one-and-twenty volumes of the Variorum Edition’ (p. 339).115 Many a literary man—poet, novelist, critic or scholar—could pass a lifetime without experiencing such acclaim in the periodical press, and not a few would sell their souls for it. Individual readers chimed in: even Madden, receiving his copy on 18 January 1853, remarked that ‘on looking cursorily into it, many of the corrections seem indisputable, and prove beyond question, that all the editors and commentators have not had the wit or sense to correct passages obviously corrupt’ (Diary). The eminent Shakespearian Charles Cowden Clarke was ‘greatly struck by most of [the emendations]’, and his wife and collaborator Mary warmly approved the new reading ‘blankness’ for ‘blanket’ (Macbeth, i.5.53), as ‘a fine, true, poetic image’.116 Tennyson himself, the new Laureate, a lifelong dabbler in Shakespeare scholarship and text, ‘adopts almost every alteration’, according to Cunningham, who heard it from Moxon.117 Elsewhere, however, sceptics husbanded their adversaria. In Notes and

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115. Walter Bagehot’s long review-essay on recent Shakespeariana (Prospective Review, July 1853, pp. 401–47) treated N&E briefly, barely mentioning Collier’s name: ‘What would [Shakespeare] have thought’ of the Old Corrector’s suggestions? he asked, and rather pointlessly answered that ‘it is difficult to fancy Shakespeare perusing a volume of such annotations, though we allow that we admire them ourselves’ (p. 443). 116. M. C. Clarke to Robert Balmanno, 22 March 1853; printed in Clarke 1902, p. 177. The Literary Gazette had commented (8 January) that ‘blanket of the dark’—a perfectly sufficient original reading—‘has hitherto been a stumbling-block, as embodying an image at once false in itself and too homely for the occasion’, whereas ‘blankness’ was ‘a word in every way appropriate’. Collier’s dissatisfaction with ‘blanket’ may have stemmed from Coleridge, who conjectured (absurdly) ‘blank height’. 117. Cunningham to JPC, 4 March 1853, Folger MS Y.d.6 (39).


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Queries a correspondent debunked ‘prigging tooth’ for ‘pugging tooth’ (Winter’s Tale, iv.3.7),118 and a month later W. N. Lettsom picked out ten passages in which ‘the old corrector appears to me to have corrupted, rather than improved, the text’—a charge, varying in its particulars, that critics of the emendations would continue to prefer. In May one Cecil Harbottle identified fi een more ‘simply unnecessary’ changes, from ‘a list of forty odd, selected from only eight plays’, including ‘Warwickshire ale’ for ‘sheer ale’ (Taming of the Shrew, Ind.2.23), which would later provoke an ingenious American response. By 2 April Collier was well aware of an accumulating reaction: ‘five—or, as some say, six— gentlemen (including editors and would-be editors) . . . are vehemently whetting their knives to cut me up for a carbonado’, he wrote in the Athenaeum, not quite disarmingly: ‘I shall soon have so much ink spilt upon me, that I expect to be blacker than my own name.’ One of these had already ‘rushed into print’, namely Charles Knight, who had hitherto held his peace. In a prospectus for his duodecimo Stratford Shakspere (15 March) Knight announced his intention to examine the new readings individually, ‘with the utmost candour and impartiality’, but his specimen text of King John accepted only one unequivocally, out of the twenty-eight offered by Collier—while remaining mindful, to various degrees, of the merits of three or four others. John pointed out, tellingly, that crediting even four improvements in one play (‘of course I by no means admit that only four excellent corrections to ‘‘King John’’ are contained in my folio’) would extrapolate to 144 in the entire corpus, and that Knight’s ‘unwilling evidence’ proved us deeply in the debt of the Old Corrector: ‘Have all the speculations of all the commentators during the last century and a half added anything like as much to our positive knowledge of the true language of Shakespeare?’ Collier’s plea for at least proportionate credit for any partial adoption of the Perkins readings would recur and recur. But Knight, stung by a hostile review of his Specimen emendations in the Examiner (26 March, accusing him of ‘hatred of the poet’s last known but best commentator’, i.e., the Old Corrector), immediately revised and augmented his remarks as Old Lamps or New? (preface dated 31 March). Now, while prudently eliminating the point-by-point assessment of the King John readings—and hence his implicit endorsement of several—he repeated his estimate of the ‘prosaic’ quality of the whole collection, which repeatedly reduced flights of poetical fancy, when eccentric or challenging, to bland, all-too-comprehensible tropes and images: a fair criticism, had Knight known to invoke it, of Collier’s own muse. And in ten of twenty-one hastily workedup new pages he dwelt on the ‘original’ entire lines, concluding that four ‘ought to be rejected, and three submitted to the reader as possible ‘‘Emendations’’ ’,

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118. ‘H. B. J.’ of Carlisle, N&Q, 12 March 1853.



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although he seemed pessimistic about even these. The by now familiar Winter’s Tale interpolation, ‘I am but dead, stone looking upon stone’, Knight acknowledged ‘is held to look decidedly Shaksperean’, but its conceit merely echoed one twenty-five lines earlier, and ‘it would scarcely require the genius of Shakspere to repeat the idea’ (p. xlvi). Knight’s self-taught judgement of literary text, as we have observed, was uncannily astute; but once again the measure of the Perkins emendations remained ‘upon merit’, selectively, and their historical authenticity a secondary concern. In May, Singer published his Shakespeare Vindicated, and Alexander Dyce his A Few Notes on Shakespeare, with Occasional Remarks on the Emendations of the Manuscript-Corrector in Mr. Collier’s Copy of the Folio 1632. The latter is a rather patchy collection of notes on some 170 passages, largely critical of the Old Corrector, but sometimes merely explanatory or illustrative. Dyce passed over in silence many of the more challenging emendations, including all but one of the new lines, and his objection to ‘I am but dead, stone looking upon stone’ only duplicated Knight’s point made a few weeks before—that the image repeats one a few lines earlier, which Shakespeare, ‘whose variety of expression was inexhaustible’, would never have done (p. 82). Dyce did reject several of the Perkins readings as ‘altogether erroneous’, and damn them individually as ‘tasteless and absurd’, ‘forced and awkward’, ‘akin to nonsense’, and the like; but he was at pains in his brief preface to concede that the Folio ‘occasionally presents corrections which require no authority to recommend them, because common sense declares them to be right’.119 His own penchant for imaginative emendation led him to offer rival conjectures, among them the lame ‘roving eyes’ for the crux ‘run-away’s eyes’ (Romeo and Juliet, iii.2.6), where the Old Corrector had hazarded ‘enemies’ eyes’,120 and ‘retorts’ for the Folio’s ‘retires’ (Troilus, i.3.54: ‘the thing of courage . . . Retires to chiding fortune’), where most editors had read ‘returns’, and the Old Corrector ‘replies’;121 indeed he warmly approved (pp. 87–89) the Perkins ‘drowsy ear of night’ (for ‘drowsy race of night’, King John, iii.3.39), feeling ‘assured that it is the poet’s word. The same correction occurred, long ago, to myself: it occurred also to Mr. Collier, while he was editing the play, and . . . he would have inserted it in the text, had not his better judgement been overpowered by a superstitious reverence for the folio.’ A er this startling remark (and the extrapolation that ‘we may now be pretty sure

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119. Dyce in fact presented Collier with a copy of his Few Notes; JPC sale, lot 170. 120. Knight, and Collier in 1844, had followed Zachary Jackson’s eccentric solution ‘unawares, eyes’. 121. Modern editors disagree: Alice Walker (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1957) accepted Dyce; Daniel Seltzer (Signet Shakespeare, 1963) chose ‘returns’; Kenneth Muir (Oxford Shakespeare, 1982) ‘rechides’; and Kenneth Palmer (Arden, 1982) retained ‘retires’.


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that ‘‘race’’ was a mistake’) it is hard to take Dyce very seriously on matters of editorial principle: what pleased him, he found credible, and pleasing emendations—as he began by proposing—‘require no authority to recommend them, because common sense declares them to be right’.122 Within a few weeks Joseph Hunter, whose opinions Dyce had also targetted in his Notes, added his mite to the summer’s Shakespeariana. John Bruce, in the Athenaeum of 2 July, reviewed him succinctly: ‘Mr. Hunter’s title-page sufficiently explains his pamphlet’,123 which touched only lightly on the Perkins material. Hunter disputed two readings, but courteously, and declared himself ‘happy to express my thanks to Mr. Collier and to the unknown corrector’ for a third, which he considered ‘one of the most decisive and most valuable of the suggestions of the old corrector’ 124—although Collier himself had claimed only that it was ‘probably right’. ‘There are several others which are good, very good’, Hunter added (A Few Words, p. 12), ‘though perhaps not so many as to justify all the clamour with which these corrections have been introduced.’ Rounding out these slighter reactions—we reserve three more pamphlets by Halliwell, as part of an independent fracas—came the inevitable parody. The Grimaldi Shakspere is a clever little squib,125 first announced in the Literary Gazette of 2 July (when it fooled S. W. Singer),126 published in full in August by John Russell Smith, with mock-facsimiles of the marginalia. Its premise is the discovery, on an Islington book-stall, of ‘a grim old folio [of 1816!], a mere bundle of dirty leaves, without a beginning or end’, priced by the illiterate stallkeeper 2s. 6d., ‘as it’s a biggish book’. The enraptured buyer discovers emendations and added stage directions by the great Regency clown, including ‘drawn

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122. Dyce’s close friend John Forster, in the Examiner for 18 June, thought it ‘inconsistent’ to reject the Old Corrector ‘on all points as an authority’ and yet accept his word ‘where he falls in with common sense’; but of course Dyce was effectively treating the Perkins emendations as independent conjectures—as, later on, Collier himself would prefer readers to do. Forster also ‘infer[red] from Mr. Dyce’s silence on a very large portion of these emendations that they receive his sanction’, and appealed to him to employ ‘his fine critical powers’ on a more extended assessment. 123. It does: A Few Words in Reply to the Animadversions of the Reverend Mr. Dyce on Mr. Hunter’s ‘‘Disquisition on The Tempest’’ (1839); and his ‘‘New Illustrations of the Life, Studies and Writings of Shakespeare’’ (1848); Contained in His Work Entitled ‘‘A Few Notes on Shakespeare: with Occasional Remarks on the Emendations of the Manuscript-Corrector in Mr. Collier’s Copy of the Folio, 1632’’. The pamphlet itself (John Russell Smith again) runs to twenty-one pages. 124. ‘O heresy in faith [for fair], fit for these days’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, iv.1.22). 125. Subtitled ‘Notes and emendations on the plays of Shakspere, from a recently-discovered annotated copy by the late Joseph Grimaldi, Esq., Comedian. N.B.—These notes and emendations are copyright, and must not be used by any editor in any future edition of Shakspere’. 126. Singer to JOH, 1 October 1853: ‘I was goose enough to take the announcement seriously!’ (LOA 47/3).



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by a team of little attornies’ (for Mercutio’s atomies) and ‘the rump and onion fries’ for ‘the rump-fed ronyon cries’ (Macbeth, i.3.6). Gratuitous instructions (the hanging-up of Macbeth’s imaginary dagger) and specific echoes of Notes and Emendations abound—a ‘dropped letter’ variant, a transfer of the conspicuously prosaic ‘new line’ from 2 Henry VI to The Tempest—leading the possessor to feel ‘that I have but one rival, and that one is Mr. Thomas Perkins, who lived about 1660’. ‘No future edition of Shakspere can ever dare to appear without all these [3,000] additions and corrections’, he exults; ‘and as they are all copyright, and may not be used by any one but me, it follows that the Bard is in future my private property, and all other editors are hereby ‘‘warned off ’’ ’ (p. 3). The burlesque is pointed and well-informed, and Peter Cunningham, who reviewed it at surprising length in the Athenaeum (20 August), called it ‘tolerably smart in its way, [but] only tolerably so’, expecting that ‘if Mr. Collier should see occasion to look into it, [it will] afford him a laugh’, but cautioning that ‘a squib against Mr. Collier is a squib against all the Shakespeare commentators from Steevens down to Knight and Halliwell’, and that ridicule of ‘an honest attempt to render good service to Shakespeare . . . cannot substantially attaint’ what was genuine and praiseworthy. The authorship of Grimaldi remains problematic: Cunningham rejected the rumour that it represented ‘the joint labours of a well-known wit, and his friend, a distinguished editor of Shakespeare’s works’, but had ‘a tolerably good idea of the source’. Madden in 1860 (Diary, 20 April) attributed it to F. G. Fairholt, Halliwell’s illustrator and friend; and Halliwell’s complicity is implied by a letter to him from W. O. Hunt of Stratford (23 August 1853), referring to ‘your Grimaldi Notes and Emendations’, which ‘caused me such a hearty laugh as I have not indulged in for a long while’.127 If Halliwell was indeed involved as a principal, The Grimaldi Shakspere exhibits a range of wit on his part invisible elsewhere.

Germany From well across the Channel, Nicolaus Delius (1813–88, professor of Sanskrit, Romance, and English literatures at the University of Bonn) mounted the first non-British contribution to Perkinsiana in June 1853, with his 100-page J. Payne Collier’s alte handschriliche Emendationen zum Shakspere. Delius took a sceptical view of the general standard of the new readings, in what is essentially a categorization of the contents of Notes and Emendations: unlike Singer and Dyce

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127. LOA 47/5. Hunt may have meant ‘your gi’, but he also thanked Halliwell at the time for a signed pamphlet on the Perkins affair, Curiosities of Modern Shaksperian Criticism. Internal evidence is perhaps useless in a declared parody, but the spelling ‘Shakspere’, adhered to throughout in Grimaldi, is more characteristic of Charles Knight at this date than of Halliwell.


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he considered all Collier’s chosen examples, dividing them into those which he thought merely corrected the typographical errors of the Second Folio; those ‘self-evident’ changes (nearly all also proposed by commentators earlier than Collier); those ‘conjectural but good’, but again frequently anticipated; and those evidently original, but inferior to published alternatives. He counted finally, amongst a ‘sea of chaff ’, just eighteen ‘ears of wheat’—including at least one, ‘infinite cunning’ in All’s Well, that W. Sidney Walker had independently suggested—and considered even those ‘too dearly purchased if we must accept the whole’. All in all, he concluded, the Old Corrector seemed to have been so enamoured of emending that he corrected not so much what struck him as odd, but rather whatever came in his way.128 Delius worked only from Collier’s first published selection, like Knight, Singer, and Dyce, and without even a sight of the original, nor any exposure to the opinions of his English contemporaries:129 German Shakespearians more o en than not kept clear of Shakespeare’s homeland. Nor did Collier himself ever visit Germany (a planned trip in the summer of 1851 was ‘unexpectedly prevented’); but he had long maintained a presence there through correspondence and translation, and Bernhard Tauchnitz had reprinted his text of Shakespeare, in seven pocket volumes, at Leipzig in 1843–44. Hence a more favourable response to Notes and Emendations is not surprising, such as that provided by Friedrich August Leo of Berlin within less than four months. Leo’s Die Delius’sche Kritik der von J. P. Collier aufgefundenen alten handschrilichen Emendationen zum Shakespeare gewürdigt published all the Perkins readings, with a spirited defence against Delius; still in 1853, Julius Frese translated the whole of Notes and Emendations as an Ergänzungsband, or supplementary volume, to the standard German version of Shakespeare by Schlegel and Tieck. The next edition of that national text, supervised by the philologist Karl Johannes Tycho Mommsen (Berlin, 1853–55), in fact incorporated ‘hundreds’ of Perkins readings in German translation, which of course gratified Collier.130 Mommsen (1819–1900), younger brother of the great Roman historian, would prove to be the Old Corrector’s most zealous advocate in Germany—or elsewhere—trumping all the English and German controversialists with a volume of over five hundred pages, published in late 1854: Der Perkins-Shakspeare. This splendidly opaque volume is a triumph, if a perverse one, of categorical method-

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128. ‘Er corrigirte nicht mehr was ihm auffiel, sondern was ihm einfiel’; all translations are our own. 129. Singer, who was delighted that Delius ‘joins in the war’, remained ‘incredulous about what he says of not having seen any of the Polemics against Collier’ (Singer to JOH, 1 October 1853, LOA 47/3), but that is just what Delius claimed in his preface. 130. See Seven Lectures (1856), pp. lxx–lxxi.



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ology, in which ten ‘types’ and six ‘classes’ of emendation are discriminated and analysed with the precision and respect normally accorded the classics, and buttressed by literally thousands of historical and philological parallels, ancient and modern. Its conclusion, based on the accumulation of individual debits and credits, is simply that in the annotated Folio ‘we have gained the copy of a better original than is to be found in any printed edition’. The last is the paraphrase of John Oxenford, whose review in the Athenaeum (12 May 1855) called Mommsen ‘this Ajax of criticism’ and marvelled at the way ‘he classifies, and he conjectures, and he deduces, and he rectifies’: it was ‘perfectly astounding’, and ‘good news for the Perkins party’. No wonder that Collier applauded his new friend’s corroborative ‘skill and discretion . . . his keen perception and extensive knowledge’ (Seven Lectures, p. lxxi); indeed, a recent critic has described other Shakespeare studies by Mommsen as surpassing ‘in textual sophistication . . . the work of any English editor of the Victorian period’.131 But once again Mommsen, like most early commentators, was considering the Perkins readings on their perceived individual merits—even if ‘confirmed’ by philological parallels—and from the standpoint of a non-native speaker and reader. That disadvantage may have been balanced to some degree by linguistic dispassion (freedom from selfassured ‘taste’, or Dyce’s personal ‘common sense’), but it cannot be entirely discounted. Another Athenaeum reviewer expressed a chauvinistic extreme: ‘no foreigner, how profound soever may have been his studies of English in general, and of Shakespeare’s in particular’, was competent to weigh or pronounce on matters of ‘diction, verbal sense, and rhythm’; the fate of the Perkins emendations ‘must be decided, if at all, in England’, for ‘no foreign discussion can have any conclusive effect whatever’.132 Impolitic as such reflections may be (was Bentley unfit to unseat Phalaris?), Mommsen’s Perkins-Shakspeare is, a er all, a monument to scholarly misdirection—the accreditation of the untrue—from which intimacy with the modern idiom might have preserved that formidable critic.

Richard Grant White and America Although it may fairly be said that the first substantial work of Shakespeare scholarship by an American was called forth by the Perkins affair,133 John Payne

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131. Gary Taylor in Wells et al. 1987, p. 56. 132. John Rutter Chorley, reviewing Delius and Leo on 8 October 1853. To Richard Grant White is credited the immortal slur, that the German critic of Shakespeare ‘dives deeper, stays down longer, and comes up muddier than any other’; Shakespeariana 7 (1890), p. 125. 133. A few critical essays, notably Emerson’s in Representative Men (1841) and H. N. Hudson’s two-volume Lectures on Shakespeare (1848), preceded Grant White. Three years aer Shake-


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Collier’s transatlantic reputation had been claim-staked before that. Oliver W. B. Peabody (1799–1848) in 1836 published at Boston a seven-volume Shakespeare that may be ‘little more than an intelligent reworking’ of Singer’s 1826 Chiswick edition, but its occasional use of First Folio collations made Peabody ‘in a sense the first American editor of Shakespeare’ (DAB). It underwent numerous reprintings in the 1830s and later, and among its contents is a piracy of Collier’s New Facts. In 1844–47 appeared Gulian Crommelin Verplanck’s threevolume version, its critical ‘Life’ an original study,134 but its text based in large part on Collier’s of 1842–44, with ‘illustrations’ from Knight. And Francis James Child of Harvard, whose Four Old Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1848) is apparently the earliest American reprint of the old English drama, there saluted ‘the excellent authority of Mr. Collier’, which ‘is always confidently followed, and his words . . . frequently used’ (p. viii n.). Finally, a thick duodecimo piracy of Notes and Emendations itself, from the New York press of J. S. Redfield, appeared in 1853. But it was Richard Grant White, ‘the first American Shakespearean of any consequence’, who brought Collier’s name to a wider American public.135 White (1821–85), a proud Mayflower descendant reduced to journalism in New York, cherished Shakespeare from boyhood as a solace, like music, in the employment and society he loathed.136 White’s account of the progress of his passion, given in the autobiographical preface to his Shakespeare’s Scholar (1854) is engaging: he considered it ‘one of the happiest circumstances of my intellectual life’ that he first read the plays ‘pure and simple’ in a plain one-volume text, ‘my Father’s bookshelves [being] guiltless of an annotated copy’, and developed his devotion to Shakespeare unguided. As a sixteen-year-old freshman at New York City University, however, he discovered the annotations of Pope, Warburton, Reed, and others with ‘surprise and disappointment’, being especially repelled by their ‘cold and pragmatic approval or censure of works which I thought should be spoken of only with enthusiastic admiration, tempered with reverence’ (pp. ix–x). In particular he was ‘shocked, wounded [and] repelled’ by Dr. Johnson’s aspersions on Cymbeline (Imogen remained White’s favourite heroine, ‘the finest female creation of Shakespeare’s genius, that paragon of perfect womanhood’: p. 452), and ‘with a sense of personal wrong . . . flung the

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speare’s Scholar the ‘scholarly’ floodgates were opened by another American, Delia Bacon (The Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Plays Unfolded, 1857), whose own controversy soon dwarfed Collier’s. For a survey of the early literature, see Rawlings 1999. 134. See Ralli 1932, i:264 ff. 135. Taylor 1990, p. 199. 136. See G. H. Genzmer in DAB: White ‘detested’ New York City, ‘shunned [its] commonplace literary and journalistic society’, and cultivated instead the friendship of such Harvardians as James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, and F. J. Child.



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book aside, and mentally registered a solemn vow never to read again a criticism or comment of any kind upon Shakespeare’s works’ (p. xi). But later he purchased the popular Pictorial Shakspere, and found that Charles Knight’s ‘were altogether different comments . . . his Shakespeare and mine were the same’, and he warmed also to the Romantic commentary of Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Schlegel. At the same time he began to appreciate, he said, that the text of Shakespeare before Knight (and Collier) had been hopelessly corrupted, o en by ‘the very editors whose labors had impressed me so unpleasantly’, and so he ‘instantly began the critical study of the text. From that time to this [i.e., five years], excepting my indispensable daily duties, I have done little else than labor in this field’ (p. xii). White’s harvest of textual investigation remained merely an accumulation of ‘memorandums, sometimes extending themselves almost into short essays . . . written with no intent that they should see the light in this form’, until Notes and Emendations gave his study a focus. Not that such research had ever been easy in America: he could consult copies of the First Folio in the yet-unopened Astor Library, through the kindness of its curator, and in the private collection of William Hill Burton, which was ‘not wanting in a copy of any edition of even the least critical value’; but early quartos were unobtainable (White relied on the two-volume Steevens reprint, whose faults Collier had gleefully signalled), and, knowing of no copy in America of the 1640 Poems (p. xvii n.), he made do with quoting from Boswell-Malone. Even modern works could be elusive, for although White—unlike the dismissive Delius—familiarized himself with most up-to-the-minute Perkinsiana (Knight, Singer, Halliwell, Dyce, Hunter, and Delius too), he could muster only ‘half a dozen old odd numbers, picked up here and there’ of Notes and Queries, ‘and a set for 1853, lacking November and December, received while [Shakespeare’s Scholar] was passing through the press’.137 Thrown entirely upon his available resources, White nonetheless produced two articles in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (whose circulation, he estimated to Dyce, was 50,000) for October and November 1853. The first, ‘The Text of Shakspere: Mr. Collier’s Corrected Folio of 1632’ (lightly revised as pp. 3–30 of Shakespeare’s Scholar), is an account of the history of Shakespeare editing, from the Folios to Collier and Knight, which for clarity and judgement might still be consulted—its estimates of all the editors are uncannily ‘modern’—while the second (‘Mr. Collier’s Folio Shakspere of 1632:—Its Most Plausible MS. Corrections’) offered a statistical breakdown of the Perkins emendations more deliber-

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137. Halliwell himself supplied White with ‘a set’ of his mid-1853 pamphlets in November (White to JOH, 23 November 1853, LOA 230, fol. 87), and White was earlier in touch with Dyce, to whom he sent an advance copy of his first Putnam’s article on 22 September (Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 [56]).


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ate and ostensibly precise than Delius’s.138 ‘Some whose judgements I respected’ suggested to White that a book-length expansion of these articles might be welcome, and within less than a year it was published by Appleton’s of New York, for distribution in London by Trübner—Shakespeare’s Scholar: Being Historical and Critical Studies of His Text, Characters, and Commentators, with an Examination of Mr. Collier’s Folio of 1632, out-paging even Mommsen at nearly 550, with a title-page epigraph from Herodotus, in Greek, and a Latin dedicatory inscription. The curious main title is White’s character of himself, not (as one might think from its main thrust) of the Old Corrector. Yet for all White’s dedication and level-headedness, his handling of Perkins in Shakespeare’s Scholar is more frustrating than pointed. His tally of the corrections (‘exactly’ 1,303, ‘setting aside trivial stage-directions’) and his confident break-down of their nature and merit is presented quite nakedly, with no accompanying lists of which were supposedly which, and on what perceived evidence;139 and the nearly four hundred pages of ‘Notes and Comments’ on individual passages do little to establish his standards of judgement or confirm his arithmetic. Of the cruces so treated (about 310, some at great length, in essayistic fashion), fewer than 125 actually involved Perkins emendations, and a considerable proportion of these found the Old Corrector to be more or less in the right, somewhere between ‘plausible’ and ‘entirely convincing’. True, a few novelties were laboriously addressed: White sided with Halliwell on ‘Whose mother was her painting’, and supplied further citations; he devoted fi een pages to ‘runaway’s eyes’ / ‘enemies’ eyes’ (plumping hard for ‘rumour’s eyes’ instead);140 and to Christopher Sly’s ‘sheer [or ‘Warwickshire’] ale’ he brought a somewhat cocksure Yankee perspective to bear.141 But he omitted to consider any of the eleven

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138. Mommsen and White worked without knowledge of each other. 139. White found ‘at least’ 249 duplicate readings from the Folios, quartos, or editions before 1853, of which 173 were commonly perpetuated in the ‘received text’ of Shakespeare, 47 usually unadmitted but having ‘a certain plausibility’, and 29 ‘long ago . . . rejected by common consent’; of the 1,054 readings ‘peculiar to Mr. Collier’s folio’, 818 ‘are to be utterly rejected, as unworthy of the least attention’, 119 were ‘inadmissible, though not unworthy of notice’, and the 117 that remained ‘seem to be plausible corrections, if, indeed, the passages to which they apply need correction’ (pp. 67–68). 140. White had conjectured ‘rumoures’ himself, but learned from Singer that Benjamin Heath had long anticipated him (p. 378). Upon its value he pinned considerable hopes of his own: ‘He who discovers the needful word for the misprint ‘runawayes eyes’ . . . will secure the honourable mention of his name as long as the English language is read and spoken’ (p. 80). 141. ‘This passage has presented a difficulty to all the English editors of Shakespeare, which could never have occurred even to an American boy. . . . This, and many similar difficulties of the commentators, . . . are only amusing to Americans, for whom the perplexities do not exist, because of the survival of good old English expressions and customs with us, which seem to have died out in the mother country’ (pp. 57–58; see also pp. 343–44 on such atrophied ‘American-



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new one-line additions to Shakespeare, not even ‘I am but dead, stone looking upon stone’ or ‘To brook control without the use of anger’, and his estimate of the Perkins Folio as a whole is highly impressionistic. Its annotation, he believed—on the basis of just one facsimile page and ‘much [unrelated] manuscript which I have seen’—was in more than one hand, between 1650 and 1750; the principal annotator had no ‘acknowledged authority’ on which to base his corrections (p. 66) and ‘in several instances . . . made his changes simply because he did not understand the text’ (p. 62); nonetheless many were in some measure valid, and the bona fides of Collier himself—‘a far more learned Shakespearian scholar that I shall ever be’ (p. xxxviii)—brooked no challenge. White made a particular point of rejecting the ‘incessant insinuations’ of Singer that ‘Mr. Collier’s folio is a fabrication in which the possessor is implicated. . . . Without a doubt Mr. Collier believes in the antiquity as well as the value of the emendations in his folio; and that some of them are about a hundred and seventy-five years old, there can be no question’ (p. 71). So White wobbled on, and though certainly no advocate of the Perkins Folio itself—he would finally assert that ‘the entirely original emendations are, with very rare exceptions, the thousand which are worse than worthless’ (p. 274)—neither can he be reasonably described as ‘one of the first to detect the spuriousness of J. P. Collier’s forgeries’ (DAB), nor even among those who, in 1852–54, suspected a trace of foul play. White ended his stout volume with a ‘Supplementary Notice of Mr. Collier’s Folio’, taking account of the second edition of Notes and Emendations (some of whose modifications he applauded), touching on the vexed copyright issue, and—in large part—replying to a lengthy review article in the North American Review of April 1854. ‘The Battle of the Commentators: Restoration of the Text of Shakespeare’, by Francis Bowen, that journal’s former editor, now professor of philosophy at Harvard, confirmed that in the United States, as in England and Germany, opinion on Perkins was already sharply divided. Bowen took Collier’s Folio on absolute faith, highlighted eight of its most salient readings (including four of the ‘new lines’ that White had ignored), and concluded that the text of Shakespeare should depend, in future, on collations of ‘the three leading authorities’, namely, the four Folios, the early quartos, and Perkins. Making matters more confrontational, Bowen saw no reason that Collier should not himself claim copyright and possess a ‘monopoly’ of his text; and he dismissed Singer as ‘beyond all question the blindest and most bigoted of the corps of edi-

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isms’ for which ‘our English cousins twit us’). White’s paraphrase (that ‘Sly’s ‘‘sheer ale’’ is simply ‘‘ale alone’’ ’) had been obvious also to an English correspondent of N&Q, as White conceded in a stop-press (p. 59n).


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tors and commentators that have attacked the recently discovered corrections’ (Dyce, by contrast, was ‘an able and gentlemanly critic, all of whose suggestions are deserving of respect’), and ridiculed as ‘delightfully silly’ Singer’s assertion ‘that the old MS. Annotator has stolen from him’—as if unaware of the thrust of Singer’s accusation. White called Bowen’s ‘the ablest defence of Mr. Collier’s folio . . . which put the most specious arguments in the most plausible and telling way’ (p. 487), and having himself granted that Notes and Emendations provided 173 old but ‘acceptable’ corrections, plus 117 ‘admissible’ and ‘peculiar’ to the Old Corrector, replied at once to Bowen’s rhetorical question (‘What one editor, critic, or commentator . . . can claim the original suggestion of an equal number of conjectural emendations, which are admitted to be sound or plausible?’): ‘I answer . . . Nicholas Rowe’ (1709), who ‘only forestalled the others in making them, because he was the first’ (p. 496). By implication, any sensitive seventeenth-century reader could have suggested as much. British reviews of Grant White were largely complimentary, welcoming the ‘proof that our brethren across the Atlantic are not totally absorbed in politics, or cotton-growing, or making bread-stuffs’ (Literary Gazette, 2 December 1854), though the Athenaeum reviewer complained about ‘a tone of somewhat supercilious Americanism in some parts . . . as if he had a conviction that the faculty of understanding or elucidating Shakspeare had quite ceased to exist among us poor Cis-Atlantic folks, and crossed over to America’.142 Collier himself grasped at the long straw provided by White: ‘Why, even the most determined opponent [in America] is obliged to acknowledge that a hundred and seventeen emendations cannot possibly be resisted. . . . Show me the annotator, or the whole body of annotators from Rowe down to Collier, of whom it can be truly affirmed, that they have afforded a hundred and seventeen instances of improvement in the text of Shakespeare, so indubitable, and so important, that no edition can herea er be printed without them.’ 143 Of this kind of pleading, with its tactically reduced claims, we shall hear more and more.

The Issue of Presentation: Extracts and the 1853 Shakespeare Shortly a er Collier’s first announcements of the Perkins Folio, one correspondent of the Athenaeum called imperiously for ‘a carefully printed volume, adapted for wide circulation, containing every minutest alteration, in either the text or the punctuation, which has been made in the folio’, together with a prole-

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142. 9 September 1854, p. 1087. This was either David Masson or his brother George; the marked file copy gives only the surname. 143. Seven Lectures, pp. lxxi–lxxii.



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gomenon and notes by the discoverer. No doubt ‘J. F. K.’ (Athenaeum, 27 March 1852) had little idea what such a production would entail, and in the event even Collier’s initial selection of more than a thousand examples seemed too generous to some readers, and the some two hundred that he added in June 1853 satisfied most appetites. But any selection based upon what was ‘deemed essential’ (p. iv) by one man was bound to affect the proportions of new and old, original and derivative, valid and worthless readings, as tabulated by analysts of Notes and Emendations; 144 in fact it made a mockery of Grant White’s precise statistical analysis. Some of John’s later adversaries said as much, in a kind of armyfood quibble (terrible, and not enough of it), and in 1856 Collier attempted to defuse such complaints, and professedly guard against the imposition of spurious novelties, by providing in Seven Lectures a list of ‘every manuscript note and emendation’. While still omitting the re-pointing, and even ignoring some of the previously signalled stage directions, this new tally more than doubled his first and second selections, yet it represents only about half of what a close inspection of the Folio will reveal. Notably absent is any record of the hundreds of minor literal corrections of Second Folio misprints or conventional re-spellings, unmistakably derived from a First Folio—or, in 1850–51 at Holyport, from Douce’s facsimile—a correcting practice worth noting by Perkins sceptics, as it goes against nearly all seventeenth-century precedents in textual criticism.145 And many other small changes that match or reflect editorial tradition since Rowe—some now universally accepted, some not—are present in the Old Corrector’s inkings, but were never identified or discussed by Collier (or anyone else) in print. What does embody, if somewhat erratically, nearly the whole of the Perkins corrigenda is the one-volume Whittaker Shakespeare of April 1853.146 This began life, as we saw, in a compromise between John and his publishers, the latter un-

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144. Collier at various times insisted that he had furnished a balanced sample, ‘the fairest possible representation of the appearance and contents of my folio, [with] specimens, good, bad, and indifferent’ (N&E II, p. vi); these were said to include some of the more dubious emendations towards which ‘concurrence must either be withheld, or doubt expressed’ (N&E, p. xiii), but their wholesale inclusion in his 1853 Shakespeare must have cast doubt on the process of selection. 145. One early reviewer—W. G. Clark in Fraser’s (March 1853, p. 254)—suggested that ‘this copy of the second folio has been corrected from a stage copy of the first folio, which had itself been corrected for theatrical purposes by a comparison with the poet’s own MSS. (or some transcript thereof)’; but that will not account for such minute word-by-word restorations. Who but a modern editor, with modern respect for the earliest Folio text, would pursue such a course, through so laborious a collation? 146. Some delay, calculated or not, may have attended it: as early as July 1852 John told Halliwell that ‘I am at this moment printing 3000 copies’ (JPC to JOH, 11 July 1852, LOA 56/39), but its appearance would have been unpropitious, if not incomprehensible, before that of Notes and Emendations.


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willing to reprint eight volumes with the new readings in place and their adoption documented in commentary.147 In proposing, or acquiescing in, the radical alternative—a Shakespeare shorn of all annotation, but involving only the labour of marking up his own 1842–44 text with what now was before him 148— John attempted to make a virtue of necessity: his very brief preface compared the double-column format and even the typeface of the volume with that of the Second Folio itself, and pointed out that in both versions ‘the letter-press is unencumbered by notes, the latter being less necessary, on account of the additional elucidation so many difficult passages and words have received’. The editorial criteria of the 1853 Shakespeare were more radical still, and arbitrary in the extreme. The title announced a text ‘regulated by the old copies and by the recently discovered folio of 1632’, and while cautioning readers from the start (‘It is not to be understood that the Editor approves of all the changes in the text . . . contained in the present volume’), the preface explained that Perkins readings ‘considerably exceeding a thousand, are duly inserted’, and that other emendations ‘which, during the last century and a half, have recommended themselves . . . have also been incorporated’. All this went without any signalling, which might be thought inevitable in any single-volume Shakespeare, but it was certainly a departure for a devotee of citation like Collier— especially given that the novelties, which the edition was designed to feature, could not even be identified in the main text by recourse to Notes and Emendations. Collier had indicated a fuller use of his private source in the Athenaeum of 2 April 1853 (p. 417: ‘My single-volume Shakespeare will embrace . . . all the new [readings] . . . which appear on any account to merit notice or perpetuation. Not a few of these are, of course mentioned in my recent work’), and in his preface he repeated the warning: ‘various alterations (most of them, indeed, of a minor character) have been introduced . . . which did not seem to require distinct and separate mention among the ‘‘Notes and Emendations’’ recently published’. The precise extent of the use of Perkins—emendations and traditional corrections, stage directions and re-pointing combined—is impossible

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147. On the eve of publication Collier corrected a report in the Athenaeum that he was also ‘busy . . . with a revised reprint of his edition of 1844 in eight volumes’ (26 March): ‘Such is not the case—for I do not know that the publishers of that impression will ever reprint it,—certainly they have made no proposal of the kind to me;—and, for aught I know, they may intend the eight-volume edition to remain, as it unquestionably is, the most authentic representation of the text of Shakespeare as contained in all the old printed copies, quarto and folio’ (2 April). Here is bookseller’s logic indeed: one edition of Shakespeare is already in its way perfect, but another is revolutionary, and you really need both. 148. ‘I adopted, as my foundation, the edition in eight volumes octavo, which I completed in 1844. . . . Upon that stock I engraed the manuscript alterations in my folio 1632’; N&Q, 23 July 1853.



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to specify without a full-scale collation (which we have shirked), but sampling suggests that nearly all the emendations hitherto published are employed (including a few that John must already have regretted),149 and perhaps as many again from the yet-unpublished reserve.150 The eleven new lines all feature, of course, although the Old Corrector’s theatrical cuts are nowhere indicated, nor the absurd alternative ending of Hamlet. Apart from the literary text, all the stage directions, whether from ‘old copies’, from Perkins, or from editorial tradition, are expressed in bracketed italics, which renders them indistinguishable, but dozens, if not hundreds of Perkins marginalia lurk among them; and while the punctuation of Shakespeare had rarely hitherto followed anything but the whim of an editor, we can reasonably suppose that most of the re-pointing now visible in the Folio is reproduced on the 1853 pages. But none of the above was made clear at the time, and for those who wished to examine the new readings in context, Collier’s 1853 Shakespeare offered no joy at all—nor was it intended to accommodate such an inquisitive readership. Could not the innovations have been printed in contrasting type, and Collier have ‘in some way marked’ those which he found unpersuasive? a ‘vexed’ C. M. Ingleby enquired in May 1853. ‘I never expected to satisfy every body’, Collier politely replied, but italicizing all ‘the changes from the received text . . . would render the book unsightly’, and ‘those [unlike Ingleby] who are not so familiar with [the old text] must take the trouble to refer . . . to any edition of reasonably good authority’: case closed.151 The public were supposed to decide, and perhaps sales justified Whittaker’s sanguine press-run of 3,000—or perhaps not, as an 1856 letter to John seems to imply.152 Those few reviewers who took up the new edition were lukewarm or cooler,

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149. Collier did note (N&E II, p. ix n.) that a few alterations were ‘designedly omitted’ from the edition, as being ‘unquestionably wrong’: two examples found in a rough collation are ‘conversion’/ ‘diversion’ in King John, i.1.189, and ‘But then, more why’ / ‘But more than that’ in Richard II, ii.3.92. 150. For one scene in The Tempest (i.2), N&E provides nine single-word emendations, all of which are incorporated in the 1853 Shakespeare. Seven Lectures omits one of these, but lists six others, of which three appear in the 1853 Shakespeare; and we count fourteen more (excluding, as always, re-pointing and stage directions) in the Perkins Folio itself, of which thirteen—mostly well-known corrections—appear in Collier’s 1853 text, and one (an unnecessary double emendation of i.2.53, which goes back to Pope) does not. 151. CMI to JPC, 5 May 1853, Houghton MS bMS Eng. 1106.1; JPC to CMI, 7 May, Folger C.a.26 (1). 152. Whittaker to JPC, 24 October 1856, recalling that ‘we, of course, printed the 3000 copies of that work at our own Risk, but we do not remember that you ever suggested that it was too large a number’ (Folger MS Y.d.6 [224]). Bulky though it is, for some reason the 1853 Shakespeare remains a relatively uncommon book today—as opposed to N&E, especially N&E II, which is ubiquitous.


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save for the Illustrated London News, which called it (28 May) ‘the most intelligible text yet extant’—an assertion that may beg a question about intelligibility. The Literary Gazette at first (30 April) faintly praised the volume as ‘handsome’, ‘curious and valuable’, and ‘an interesting addition to the Shakespearian library’, but rejected its very premise of incorporating all the Perkins material: Collier ‘most certainly . . . would have produced a more valuable book for the general, if not for the merely critical reader, had he exercised some discretion in his selections . . . . The bad ‘‘new readings’’ of the unknown commentator ought to have been treated like any other bad new readings’ (pp. 425–26). Five weeks later the same journal found Collier ‘in a great measure to blame’ for provoking a ‘sea of speculative criticism’, not only through the uneven quality of the emendations he initially published, but now through ‘an edition of the poet, in which he perpetrated all the suggestions of his MS. notes, without mark or sign to show where or how far they differed from all other authorities’, whereby ‘he transgressed . . . all legitimate bounds, and did as much disservice in one way as he had done good in another. . . . Much of what is new in it is undoubtedly good, but much is as utter rubbish as at any time has disfigured the text of any previous editor’ (4 June, p. 543). Bruce and the loyal Athenaeum, which might have been expected to champion the latest Perkins manifestation, did not review the book; and Blackwood’s (October 1853, p. 474) nailed it to a cross of Scotch irony. The publication of the single-volume Shakespeare, already ‘a blunder past all mending’, had been so widely discredited that ‘we do not [any longer] grudge it any amount of success’. ‘We are rather desirous to promote its interests’, Blackwood’s gloated, as ‘even now . . . a very singular book’, but one ‘herea er . . . entitled to take high rank among the morbid curiosities of literature, and to stand on the same shelf—fit companion—with Bentley’s edition of Milton [i.e., the infamous Paradise Lost of 1732, into which the great classicist introduced his own wildly speculative readings]. . . . Every Shakespeare collector ought, beyond a doubt, to provide himself with a copy’, and while ‘people who intend to be satisfied with only one Shakespeare, ought certainly not to take up with this edition . . . those who can indulge themselves with several copies, ought unquestionably to purchase it. We say this in all seriousness and gravity’. Collier’s single-volume Shakespeare of 1853 was never reprinted, save by American pirates, and soon vanished from the list of the publications in which he took pride.

Coincidental Suggestions

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As early as 31 July 1852, in Notes and Queries, Collier warned his prospective readers that although the great majority of emendations in the Folio discovery were ‘not only entirely new, but . . . self-evident’, others ‘confirm in a remark-



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able manner the speculative proposals of Theobald, Pope, &c.’—that is, they appeared to duplicate or anticipate suggestions by various post-Folio editors of Shakespeare. He was responding, in part, to a letter to the Athenaeum from William Nanson Lettsom (17 April), pointing out that the now-standard correction of ‘insuite comming’ to ‘infinite cunning’ (All’s Well, v.3.216) had been independently mooted by the late William Sidney Walker. Mindful of the extent of such ‘confirmations’, Collier subsequently took pains to identify any Perkins emendation that coincided with a published suggestion, mentioning among others Pope, Theobald, Warburton, and Hanmer, and pleading that when credit was omitted ‘it has arisen from my ignorance of the fact, or from pure inadvertence’.153 Grant White included such coincidental readings among the 249 ‘old’ examples he could count; Knight spoke of ‘scores . . . which have been suggested by Rowe, Pope, Warburton, Hanmer and others’ (Old Lamps, p. xlix); and a quantifying Delius raised the assessment to 329 instances in which Collier himself cited ‘parallel’ emendation (p. 33). Among those not credited to prior speculators, however, were the celebrated —but now abandoned—emendation ‘Aristotle’s ethics’ (for ‘checks’, Taming of the Shrew, i.1.32), a pet speculation of the legal authority William Blackstone, which had been available, through Steevens, to any reader of Boswell-Malone;154 and a considerable body of less persuasive conjectures by the printer Zachary Jackson, who in Shakespeare’s Genius Justified (1818) had attempted to explain misreadings in the old copies as compositors’ errors in handling the type-cases. Charles Knight, who had read Jackson with care, itemized five Perkins amendments that coincided with his; and J. W. Cole, the Dublin University Magazine reviewer (March 1853), added two more. Collier took notice, and in N&E II provided references to Jackson in four of the seven instances.155 And in Shakespeare Vindicated (May 1853), Singer’s assiduous search came up with dozens of unacknowledged precedents in the commentary of Johnson, Ritson, Steevens, Farmer, Malone, Percy, Monck Mason, and ‘mad’ John Upton, as well as further echoes from Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Warburton, and Hanmer, and more recently Heath, Hunter, Knight, Barron Field, and Singer himself—and above all, Collier’s own 1842–44 text.

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153. N&E, p. xxi n. With characteristic misdirection, he also noted (p. 421) that an Aberdeen correspondent (‘whose name we have no authority to give’, but ‘who had not the slightest notion [of] the manuscript reading in the folio, 1632’) had independently suggested to him the reading— fatuous as it is, though persistently affected by Collier—of ‘boast’ for ‘beast’ in Macbeth, i.7.47. 154. Singer (N&Q, 19 February 1853) pointed out that he had followed Blackstone in his 1826 Shakespeare, which Collier acknowledged in N&E II, p. 144 (‘we apprehend, that it has been adopted only by Mr. Singer’). 155. In N&Q, 27 August 1853, C. M. Ingleby ran the Jackson tally up to nine ‘verbatim’ echoes, and nine more ‘very approximate’.


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Aside from diminishing the importance, by way of novelty, of the Old Corrector’s contributions, or buttressing a reluctance to adopt them (‘are we to reject [some emendations] upon the authority of Jackson, and receive them upon the authority of the ‘‘corrector’’?’, demanded Knight), what was the point of such investigation? Collier or Collier’s partisans might well ask, for there is no reason why any good guess might not repeat itself, nor why any dedicated Shakespearian might not ‘conjecture’ what happened to be the textual truth, and no outward evidence that the Perkins version of each coincidental reading followed, rather than anticipated, what had come into print since the seventeenth century. Grant White accepted as much, while dismissing a change made by ‘Malone, and others a er him, and Mr. Collier’s MS. corrector—before him or a er him, who can tell, and what does it matter!’ (p. 94), but somewhat incoherently accounted for ‘the many coincidences with the conjectures of editors of the seventeenth century’ (did he mean eighteenth century?) as ‘doubtless, the result of the fortunes of the volume, which threw it into the hands of two or three emenders of that period’ (p. 71). The Gentleman’s Magazine reviewer of Singer (September 1853) also felt that ‘the coincidences of correction . . . [may] be explained as the result of independent exertions of common taste and common sense . . . and the more probable and obvious the correction the more likely of course it is to be discovered by different minds.’ 156 But Singer’s Shakespeare Vindicated, the earliest full-length critique of Collier and Perkins, did reason darkly from the evidence of repetition: ‘these [many cases] Mr. Collier would treat as coincident anticipations, but, as they form the greater bulk of the corrections, they are far too numerous to have been fortuitous, and there can be no doubt that they have been engra ed in his book by some later hand’ (p. x). Singer accepted that ‘the stage directions and striking out of passages, with some few of the alterations of the text’ might be attributed to ‘the earlier theatrical possessor’—it must be remembered that he never examined the volume, even for Knight’s ‘five minutes’ or with Halliwell’s ‘slight glance’—but internal evidence was enough for him: ‘A few fortuitous coincidences we might admit, but it is not within the doctrine of probabilities that two writers, at distant periods, without any communication or knowledge of each other, should in hundreds of instances coincide so exactly. . . . Where the error, as in some cases, is what Mr. Collier calls ‘‘self-evident,’’ coincidence would be possible, but where, as in many instances, the corrections take the form of acute and happy conjecture, such extraordinary sympathy would be something miraculous.’ Put plainly, ‘the greater part of [the manuscript readings] are adopted

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156. GM, p. 255, exemplifying (as Collier indeed might have hoped) the example of the ‘Aberdeen correspondent’.



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from recent annotators’ (p. xii), and the implication of that is plain too. Furthermore, the Old Corrector on numerous occasions chose readings unique to some earlier quarto, and ‘it would be wonderful, truly, if he should have fortunately hit upon the very copies which furnished these readings’ rather than have come upon them in ‘one of the variorum editions’ (p. 111); again, ‘that the correctors had all the quartos at their command’ was highly improbable, ‘unless we are to suppose they lived in our times, which is most probably the case’ (p. 263; increasingly toward the end of his book Singer referred to plural ‘correctors’). Finally, Singer alleged, ‘the corrector has a most wonderful sympathy’ with the latter-day conjectures of John Payne Collier himself, for ‘wherever Mr. Collier has thrown out a suggestion of a reading for which ‘‘authority’’ is wanting to introduce it into the text’, the Perkins Folio ‘comes to his aid’—and again ‘the doctrine of probabilities is entirely opposed to such happy concurrence on all occasions’ (p. 146). Despite Singer’s declared opinion, at the very beginning of his book, that Collier had been the victim of a hoax, rather than its perpetrator, the implication of the last finding was obvious enough. No casual reader could miss it, nor certainly John Bruce in the Athenaeum (refusing to speculate on the ‘exact meaning’ of Singer’s ‘flowers of rhetoric’, but challenging him to clarify his charges), and not Richard Grant White, who reasonably interpreted the ‘incessant insinuations’ as suggesting ‘that Mr. Collier’s folio is a fabrication in which the possessor is implicated’ (p. 71). But in fact Singer’s ‘wherever’ and ‘all occasions’ are vulnerable exaggerations, even if he cited twenty-five such ‘confirmations’ in Perkins of Collier’s 1842–44 flyers (some by no means unique to Collier). As with the inappropriate ‘two writers’, Singer overplayed his hand badly, and logic was never his strong suit. Reviewers in particular made hash of his attempt to reason, from his own possession of two annotated Folios whose corrections were largely worthless, that Collier’s ‘similar’ Folio must be worthless too,157 and complained of his offhand statistics, and his representation of arguments (‘the very thing in dispute’) as données. In addressing each of the eleven new lines Singer at least grasped a nettle which Grant White did not, but a parade of unelaborated dismissals (‘impertinent’, ‘gratuitous’, ‘wanton’, ‘absurd’) cannot have seriously shaken the faith of believers. Nor did the temper of his remarks serve their purpose. Singer’s hard-won textual evidence, dispassionately presented, might have been difficult to resist—and it did shorten the tasks of later Perkins investigators—but he sacrificed much public sympathy by the vehemence and crude irony of his ex-

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157. Singer made the same mindless leap on the question of multiple hands: Collier’s ‘first impression that (the ink being of various shades) two distinct hands have been employed on these corrections, is undoubtedly correct; for in the case of both the second and third folios with manuscript corrections which I possess, this is evidently the case’ (p. x).


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position.158 The Literary Gazette (4 June 1853), which considered Collier himself ‘in a great measure to blame’ for the Perkins adversaria (because of his ‘rushing from extreme to extreme’ in editorial policy, above all with his meretricious one-volume Shakespeare), nonetheless ‘must condemn in the strongest terms the bad temper and wretched taste in which much of Mr. Singer’s volume is conceived’, while Bruce in the Athenaeum (28 May and 4 June) found Singer’s ‘sneers and insinuations . . . needlessly and improperly offensive’. The Illustrated London News (28 May) spoke of Singer’s ‘splenetic state of mind’, implying that, at seventy, he was all but senile; and Madden, presented with a copy of Shakespeare Vindicated on 23 May, professed himself ‘heartily sick of this verbal criticism! . . . weary of such squabbling among Editors . . . who are always ready, like dogs, to snarl at each other’.159 Indeed Singer’s intemperance is hard to explain, given the civility of his exchanges with John in Notes and Queries in 1852;160 but if he realized what he had jeopardized, he remained unrepentant. ‘I am accused of having made it too personal’, he wrote to Dyce on 30 May, ‘and it is true that my indignation was extreme at having my faith disturbed in ‘‘our National Bible,’’ and’—again missing the point of the exercise—‘Mr Collier must thank himself for having roused it by the manner in which he assailed and has since treated Shakespeare!’ 161

The Case for Forgery: Early Warnings Literary forgery was much in the air in March 1852, when the Athenaeum itself had announced on the sixth that almost an entire volume of new Percy Bysshe Shelley letters, published in good faith by Edward Moxon, was spurious, and that a large quantity of Byron material recently purchased by John Murray shared the same damning provenance.162 Hence it was no direct reflection on

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158. A mocking set of thirteen ‘Canons of Criticism’ for Collier’s editorial use—a travesty of Thomas Edwards’s famous skewering of Bishop Warburton—is particularly heavy-handed, and drew inevitable fire from reviewers. 159. Diary, 23 May 1853. Madden was as usual contemptuous of the philological opinions of all the rival editors, ‘who, aer all, know but little of the Old English language’, but he had recently found N&E rewarding. 160. Singer’s annotated copy of N&E does exhibit resentment over Collier’s failure to cite his 1826 Shakespeare in the few places where the Old Corrector coincided (e.g., ‘here again he has taken a leaf out of my book’), and Collier probably did not improve matters by admitting, truthfully or not, that he had never consulted Singer’s edition at all (N&Q, 26 February 1853). 161. Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.5 (21). For Dyce, on this controversial occasion the model of restraint, Singer’s incaution may have yielded an unexpected benefit: his own unfocused, unmemorable, but comparatively polite contribution was welcomed by more than one reviewer with relief and gratitude. 162. Twenty-three of the twenty-five items in Shelley Letters (1852) are printed from fakes by



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Collier, perhaps, that led ‘J. F. K.’ three weeks later to urge ‘depositing the folio in the British Museum, together with written verifications of its history’, as ‘the astounding imposition of the Shelley Correspondence renders such a precaution desirable’ (Athenaeum, 27 March, p. 363). That ‘history’ was of particular significance, remarked the Literary Gazette (9 January 1853, pp. 29–31), since ‘the suspicion of forgery on the part of the annotator must not attach to any work of this kind’ (i.e., Notes and Emendations). Happily, ‘no one has ventured to suggest such a doubt’. Elsewhere, but privately, J. G. Lockhart had long since judged Perkins a ‘fabrication’, which for reasons far from complimentary he would not blame on John (‘Collier has not brains to invent [the new readings]’), while others who doubted the antiquity of the volume also stopped well short of accusing its publicist. Grant White’s reproof to Singer sums up the position of the gentlemanly world, from Bruce and Forster to Dyce, Knight, and Halliwell: ‘Mr. Collier’s previous service in the cause of Shakespearean literature should have protected him against so needless, and therefore unjustifiable, an accusation’—that is, of being implicated in the fabrication (Shakespeare’s Scholar, p. 71). And even Singer, for all the weight of his own findings, may genuinely have believed Collier guilty of no more than credulity and wilful misuse of evidence. Initially, he admitted, he had suspected that Collier ‘meant to mystify the Shakespearean Scaligers of this age’ (as Marc Antoine Muret had Joseph Scaliger, with a fabricated scrap of classical drama), but as Collier ‘had been such a staunch defender of the integrity of the old text, I could not bring myself to believe that he would indulge in a hoax which might lead to mischievous results. I am constrained, therefore, to imagine it possible that he has himself been made the victim of such a delusion by some ‘‘Puck of a commentator’’ ’ 163 who came upon a tattered, theatrically marked-up Folio, and ‘gra ed upon it all that he could glean from some edition or editions with notes, and added conjectures and interpolations

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‘Major’ George Gordon Byron, one of the most skilful of modern forgers: see Ehrsam 1951, pp. 88–91 and passim. The Athenaeum exposé of 6 March (following a positive review of the book on 21 February) was reprinted by the bookseller William White in The Calumnies of the ‘‘Athenaeum’’ Journal Exposed: Mr. White’s Letter to Mr. Murray (2d ed., 1852), pp. 15–16. The sleuth in this instance was Francis Turner Palgrave, who noticed by chance—in a copy presented by Moxon to Tennyson—that the text of one letter reproduced part of an article published by his father, Sir Francis, in 1840, including even a tell-tale misprint. Aer confirming the bad news, Moxon withdrew the book, and most of the forgeries, which had changed hands at high prices, eventually passed to the British Museum. Richard Monckton Milnes was victimized by similar Keats material, and volumes lavishly ‘annotated’ by Byron also featured in the four-year-long deception. 163. Singer here cited (in translation) Tieck’s Mittsommer Nacht, but ‘Puck of Commentators’ was already a familiar sobriquet, coined by Gifford, for George Steevens.


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of his own, foisting in rhymes and whole lines without reserve or scruple’.164 While the tortured accumulation of qualifiers might suggest irony on Singer’s part (one thinks of Iago’s sublime prevarication, ‘I dare be sworn I think that she is honest’), two years later, still certain ‘that the book is a fabrication to a great extent’, he told Halliwell that ‘I should be better pleased to place it to the account of Steevens than a more recent falsifier. He was fully capable of it, and clever enough for all its suggestions’.165 Between exemptions and etiquette—credit for past literary service, the benefit of the doubt, and mid-Victorian public decorum—Collier had not been obliged, so far, to confront any direct accusation of fabrication or forgery. Those (if any) who knew, those who must have suspected simply would not, to this date, commit the unutterable to print, nor, as far as we can now tell, circulate private inklings as rumour. But in 1852–53, on the eve of independent indictments of the Bridgewater and Dulwich manuscript spuria, two new sceptics took their place in the controversy, unconstrained by old codes of investigative conduct. With their rise began the downfall of Collier’s hard-won reputation. Clement Mansfield Ingleby (1823–86), destined to serve, more than any other contemporary, as John Payne Collier’s critical nemesis, was the only son of a successful Birmingham solicitor. Though beset by ill health throughout his youth and later life, and educated privately, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at twenty, and proceeded B.A., M.A., and L.L.D. between 1847 and 1859. Although he followed his father’s profession for at least ten years, his preference for philosophy, mathematics, and literature led him away from the law, and from Birmingham to London, and he is now best remembered as the first compiler of the ‘Shakespeare Allusion Books’ (Shakspere’s Centurie of Prayse, 1874) and other Shakespearian studies distinguished by the habits of his training: methodical reasoning, dispassionate exposition, and attention to detail. As the author of three works on metaphysics and logic, he was far better equipped than Singer or White to pursue the rationale of Shakespearian emendation, whose inconsistencies and abuse fascinated him, as well as the evidence of documentary fraud that had hitherto provoked only casual ‘questions’ from Croker, Hunter, and others.166

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164. Shakespeare Vindicated, pp. v–vi. This reconstruction betrays Singer’s failure to consult the physical evidence: the ‘theatrical’ cuts were clearly penned in aer the emendations in the relevant passages. 165. Singer to JOH, 31 May 1855, LOA 48/56. 166. The life of Ingleby written by his son for DNB, emphasizing throughout his ill health, is of little use; S. Schoenbaum (1991, pp. 263–64), stressing his ‘sombre disposition’, quoted an interesting, and characteristically severe, MS self-appraisal (Folger MS M.b.25). Ganzel’s remark (p. 214), that Ingleby’s ‘concern with literature was ratiocinative rather than aesthetic or critical,



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Still in Birmingham in 1852, the would-be critic plunged into correspondence with Notes and Queries, publishing nineteen slight contributions in nine months, on topics as diverse as Scottish topography, optics, superstition, Coleridge (several), Tennyson, and the death-watch beetle, only once submitting a ‘query’ about Shakespeare. But 9 April 1853 saw his first comment on Collier’s new readings: like Knight, who anticipated him by ten days, he had found a coincidence in Zachary Jackson, whose emendations, he asserted, were ‘invariably bad’.167 Later in the month (30 April) he approved two Perkins changes in All’s Well as ‘easily shown to be correct’, but rightly protested a third. On 5 May, ‘encouraged by the conclusion of your preface to Notes and Emendations’ (inviting ‘in whatever terms . . . any just correction thankfully’), Ingleby wrote directly to Collier, through Whittaker’s, expressing his dissatisfaction with the one-volume Shakespeare just out; Collier’s answer was polite but firm (‘every man must judge for himself, with such lights as he may enjoy’), and a trifle patronizing—Ingleby had mentioned two coincidental guesses of his own, and John thought them ‘something like ‘‘a prophecy a er the event’’ ’. Ingleby wrote again, this time ‘certain’ that one of the new entire lines was genuinely Shakespeare’s, and ‘almost equally certain’ that another was not, but concluding in warm praise of Perkins as a whole: ‘your new volume is a very great acquisition to Shakespearean literature. What Commentator or Collection of Commentators has so certain a claim upon our admiration as the ‘‘old Corrector!’’ ’. This mixed bouquet John acknowledged in high spirits, for he had just visited London and met F. C. Parry (see below), and would ‘at all times . . . be happy to hear from you on any question relating to the common object of our, & mankind’s admiration’.168 Perhaps Collier thought matters might rest here; if so, he misjudged his correspondent. Ingleby resorted once more to print, complaining about the silent alterations (‘that Mr. Collier should be the greatest of such offenders is no very cheering sign of the times’), and challenging Collier to offer ‘a public reply’ about two of them.169 Providing this two weeks later, John seemed slightly miffed

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and his interest in the Perkins Folio . . . more to do with the puzzle of the book’s provenance than with the quality of its emendations’, is probably fair, but should hardly be counted against him. See also the affectionate obituary in Shakespeariana 3 (1886), pp. 543–47, written by Ingleby’s Birmingham friend Samuel Timmins, although his comment that Ingleby ‘never made an enemy and never lost a friend’ is perhaps open to dispute. 167. ‘So worn’ for ‘sworne’ (Winter’s Tale, iv.4.13); Theobald had conjectured ‘swoone’, which is oen adopted, but Collier had contented himself with the original ‘sworne’ in 1842–44. Ingleby’s alternative suggestion, ‘and more’, has convinced no one. 168. CMI to JPC, 9 May 1853, Houghton MS bMS Eng. 1106.1; JPC to CMI, 14 May 1853, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (135). 169. N&Q, 28 May and 9 July 1853. One of the emendations Ingleby signalled as not referred to in N&E (‘ambler’ for ‘angel’ in Shrew, iv.2.61) is first assigned to Perkins in Seven Lectures, p. 186.


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at Ingleby’s tone (‘as if he fancied I should be unwilling to answer his questions, whether public or private’) and his choice of a forum, for while ‘I am not personally acquainted with him, we have had some correspondence, and I must always feel that a man so zealous and intelligent is entitled to the best reply I can afford’.170 Indeed he strove to pacify his critic, sending him a set of his privately commissioned Perkins facsimiles with a mild rebuke (‘there seems no reason why either of us should entertain any feelings of discourtesy one towards the other. I care very little for abuse, though a great deal for correction, when I deserve it’), to which Ingleby responded at once and at length.171 He intended no discourtesy, and denied ‘ever [having] written a word of abuse against you’, yet he minced no words in setting out his beliefs: I will be perfectly candid. In 1844 [i.e., Collier’s first Shakespeare of 1842– 44], I have long thought that you stood on the highest pinnacle of Shakspeare Criticism. In vain have I endeavoured to understand why you have abandoned that position. To me you are an utterly changed critic. You will I trust pardon me, if I venture to compare J. Payne Collier of 1844 with J. Payne Collier of 1853. In the one we have a just discrimination for the authentic texts, a keen appreciation of the finer traits of Shakespeare’s genius & a strong susceptibility to the charms of real poetry. In the other we have an indifference as to the old copies, an apparent insensibility to the delicate lines of Shakespearean writing, and a readiness to substitute on an unknown authority the most tasteless, and at times the most meaningless readings for the staple beauties of the bard. This is what I see—or else I am blind, or under a strong delusion. . . . May I take the liberty to ask you, when you have closed the labours of the day, and feel at peace within yourself, and with all the world, to enter your study, and take down the 1st Vol of N & Q, and your own Notes & Emendations, and first read steadily your own glorious letter in N & Q on Clouds & Shadows, and then your note in N. & E., on the ‘‘old corrector’s’’ substitution, and say honestly whether you are not a changed man in respect of Shakespeare. My own opinion on this point would perhaps seem very impertinent in print; I venture to express it to you by private letter, as a means of enabling you to understand my own feelings towards your recent labours as an Editor of Shakespeare.

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John can have received few letters in his life as confrontational as this one —from a thirty-year-old correspondent he had never met, with no claim on 170. N&Q, 23 July 1853. 171. JPC to CMI, undated retained copy, and CMI to JPC, replying on 7 August 1853, both Furness Collection.



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his battered indulgence beyond a declared love of Shakespeare and truth. It is perhaps to his credit that he answered at all, without questioning the ‘liberty’ Ingleby took, nor pouncing upon certain verbal openings he had le . With crisp dignity he addressed the central indictment (‘Let me remark that a man who, to use your own words, at one time shews ‘‘a keen appreciation of the finer traits of Shakespeare’s genius’’ cannot entirely, or in any degree, lose that faculty, unless he lose his taste and reason. If I had it, I have it.’), but his handling of Ingleby’s specific instances was painfully woolly. ‘It does not follow that because I have published these alterations (to call them no better), and inserted them . . . in a ‘‘mono-volume’’, that I bind myself conclusively to the support of them’, he repeated, mechanically. ‘This I maintain as a matter of logic; that if I meet [something] in the same book and the same hand-writing with many good emendations it warrants some pause in the condemnation even of the bad’, begging questions of how long ‘some pause’ should be, and what the editor’s task really is. And about ‘clouds’/ ‘shrouds’, which the Old Corrector’s note ‘may serve to settle’, he took refuge in semantics and plain misdirection: ‘I never meant that it did absolutely and finally decide the point; but if I could ascertain that the old corrector was guided by some good authority I should say (unwillingly, perhaps, because opposed to my old opinions) that it would ‘‘settle the question.’’ ’ 172 With that, the known correspondence of Collier with Ingleby comes to an end. Ingleby was a hard man, and he may have regarded any further personal contact with John as prejudicial or pointless. His own major part in the demolition of the Perkins material was still years away, and while he never confided to print such ad hominem strictures as Collier received in the post, unpublished manuscript memoranda leave no doubt of the depth of his eventual feelings: of Memoirs of Alleyn and Henslowe’s Diary he later wrote that ‘the great literary slug has crawled over both. What wonder if we shall still be able to trace his slime.’ 173

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If Ingleby would one day personify Nemesis to Collier, Andrew Edmund Brae (1801–81) played the part, in the mid-1850s, of Collier’s Magaera—that Fury whose jealousy for reputation, unfairly assailed, is implacable. Little is recorded of Brae, biographically,174 beyond his scholarly passion for Shakespeare’s text and for Chaucer: he was the first modern editor of Chaucer’s Treatise on the 172. JPC to CMI, 10 August 1853, Folger MS C.a.24 (1). 173. Schoenbaum 1991, p. 264, quoting a manuscript in the possession of Louis Marder. 174. An affectionate obituary by Ingleby in N&Q, 21 October 1882, p. 323, suggests that Brae was ‘of Irish extraction’; he retired from Leeds to Mont Durand, Guernsey, where he is buried, having died of bronchitis on a visit to London (10 December 1881). He le ‘a mass of finely written manuscript on all his favourite subjects’, mostly unpublished, which Ingleby hoped would soon see the light: it has not.


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Astrolabe (1870), praised by W. W. Skeat for ‘much skill and knowledge . . . patience, minuteness, and critical ability’ (Chaucer, Works [1894], iii:lxxi–lxxii), and no mere monomaniac about Collier and Perkins.175 A railway engineer by profession, residing at Leeds, he—like Ingleby—found the pages of Notes and Queries ideal for his first literary speculations, which like Ingleby’s embraced many topics; but his column of ‘Readings in Shakespeare’, beginning on 24 January 1852, immediately preceded Collier’s announcements, and for the next eighteen months far outweighed his other submissions. He first mentioned the Folio on 22 May, and only twice more before the publication of Notes and Emendations (objecting to ‘bisson multitude’ on 10 July, and enquiring about a stage direction in Hamlet);176 thenceforth, however, his campaign against Perkins assumed an urgency matched only by Singer’s. On 19 February 1853 he repeated his query about Hamlet ‘writing’ (i.4), although this was not obviously a Perkins crux, and implied that Collier had earlier ignored him.177 On 23 April he questioned the need for a change in All’s Well (iii.2.110), and raised the possibility that the Folio was a ‘pseudo-antique’. On 21 May he devoted three columns to ‘Aristotle’s checks’/ ‘ethics’, demolishing that emendation— for which Blackstone’s priority had been evinced, in February, by Singer—in masterly fashion, and likewise ‘circles’ for ‘sickles’: both old readings remain standard, thanks partly to Brae. On 18 June he detected another unnecessary alteration (‘wants’ for ‘means’, Lear, iv.1.20), but unhappily proposed an equally pointless alternative of his own (‘recuse’ for ‘secure’ in the same line). Though pugnacious in debate, and insistent upon being acknowledged in print, Brae clearly cherished his own anonymity, ever signing himself ‘A. E. B.’, with no local address;178 this diffidence may account in part for Collier’s neglect of his ‘queries’, which Brae perceived as a slight. But in April 1853, no doubt recognizing a kindred spirit, he entered into a correspondence with Ingleby, in which the provocations of the moment bulked large.179 To Ingleby Brae could

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175. Ganzel’s account of Brae’s early contributions to N&Q (pp. 189–97) is substantially accurate, though accompanied by tendentious commentary. 176. Brae’s remarks on 3 April about ‘sickles/sheckels/cycles/circles’ (Measure for Measure, ii.2.149) do not mention Collier and Perkins at all, pace Ganzel (pp. 187–88), although W. J. Thoms may have cut out Brae’s citation. 177. Although Collier had replied briefly on 26 February (flattering Brae’s ‘acuteness and learning’, but deeming ‘his conjectures rather subtle and ingenious than solid and expedient’), he was away from his books, in Torquay, and could not yet help; on 7 May Brae asked again, again hearing nothing. Brae later privately complained that Thoms had this time altered his query, changing the words ‘again inserting it’ to ‘again referring to it’, so that he could avoid printing the actual query (Brae to CMI, 28 November 1853, Folger MS W.b.105 (19)). Ingleby too reproached Collier for ignoring the query (CMI to JPC, 7 August 1853). 178. Save in one discreditable instance: see below, page 887. 179. Folger MS W.b.105, assembled by Ingleby himself, contains more than sixty-five very substantial letters from Brae ‘on Shakespeare criticism’. Many have nothing to say about Collier, and



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declare what Notes and Queries and Thoms (he was certain) would not let him print: his belief that the new Shakespeare source, besides harbouring a mass of corruption and nonsense, was a modern concoction, whose malign effect on Shakespeare’s text may have been deliberate from its inception. ‘As for me I declare war to the knife against Mr Collier’s folio’, he wrote on 9 May. ‘From its first announcement in 1852 I have continued to be more and more convinced of its being an enormous manufactured humbug—at present wrapped in mystery but sure of being brought to light some day or other.’ At this early date, however, he thought Collier innocent of ‘any part in the deceit’—guilty only of self-delusion, brought on by ‘the vanity of discovery’ and ‘the decadence of human judgement’. Brae seemed angriest at ‘the influence of the public press’, taken in by ‘the prestige of Mr Collier’s name’, upon ‘the public at large, who will not, or cannot, judge for themselves . . . [while] all we, poor mice, can do will be to gnaw at the meshes one by one which have been cast over Shakespeare’s text, and so assist in freeing it from the coil’. Precisely how and by whom Brae thought the Perkins spuria had been forged he did not then speculate; his target was the Folio itself, and his mission was clear: ‘Hitherto I have only attacked indirectly by a side wind. . . . I shall now attack more openly, providing that no objection on the part of the Editor intervene’.180 The last possibility, as it happened, was a real one. But for the moment Thoms allowed his controversialists their heads,181 and Brae managed a nearly direct charge of malfeasance in the columns of 21 May: ‘Shall we now be less wise than our fathers [in rejecting Blackstone’s ‘ethics’ emendation]? Shall we—misled by the prestige of a few drops of rusty ink fashioned into letters of formal cut— place implicit credence in emendations whose only claim to faith, like that of the Mormon scriptures, is that nobody knows whence they came?’ To Ingleby (24 May) he added, teasingly, ‘I shall not give utterance to all my surmises about this folio. I shall not hazard a guess as to its fabrication, but I have strange suspi-

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it should be kept in mind that all Brae’s remarks on him, singled out here, appear in the context of a much larger critical correspondence. 180. Folger MS W.b.105 (3). 181. Not without some interference, however: Brae told Ingleby (9 May 1853, Folger MS W.b.105 [3]) that he had ‘long since’ expressed his convictions about the Folio’s modern origins, in notes that Thoms had ‘withheld (with my consent) from motives of private delicacy and friendship which I was most happy to acquiesce in and to respect’; this apparently in 1852, before the publication of N&E, for with that ‘the embargo is taken off—the Corrections are public property’. He also complained that Thoms had refused to repeat his query about Hamlet, and he may have been the correspondent whom Thoms admitted censoring for including in ‘an article on the Notes and Emendations which lately appeared in our columns . . . an argument against their genuineness, based on the use of a word unknown to Shakspere and his contemporaries. This appeared to us somewhat extraordinary, and a reference to Richardson’s excellent Dictionary proved that our correspondent was altogether wrong as to his facts’ (17 September, p. 262).


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cions—the sign of the beast is very apparent.’ 182 Notes and Queries, unsurprisingly, was not ready for literary warfare on this scale, and a er another month of acrimonious exchanges, Thoms called his unruly contributors to order: ‘Our attention has been called to the sharp and somewhat personal tone of several of the recent contributions to ‘‘N. & Q.’’ ’, he wrote (2 July, p. 21). ‘We are perhaps ourselves somewhat to blame for this, from our strong indisposition to exercise our editorial privilege of omission. . . . But being conscious that, when treating on the subjects with which we deal, no one would willingly write anything with design to give offence, we shall in future ‘‘play the tyrant’’ on all such occasions with more vigilance than we have done.’ The effect on Brae’s stepped-up campaign was immediate. He had temporarily abandoned his analysis of individual readings, as he told Ingleby (‘now that so many have turned from former admiration [of Perkins] to present execration . . . I leave the game in their hands’), and begun to pursue a new, philological tack: ‘From the first moment I heard of these corrections . . . I felt convinced that [they] were subsequent to all the commentators—at the same time the proof is extremely difficult’, since ‘almost every correction is rather transplanted either from Shakespeare himself or his contemporaries, than invented afresh’, Brae explained. ‘But I do not despair, and I have now a test-word under investigation!’ 183 He informed Thoms about this—a ‘test word’ that did not exist in 1750—and made it clear what conclusions his demonstration would draw: ‘If the employment of this test word cannot be proved by the Collier party for more than 100 years back, then the very simulation of greater antiquity in other respects . . . must convict the whole affair of illicit fabrication!’ And unwisely, perhaps, he declared his intentions (‘to attack the honesty of the production, which, as you know, I always suspected’); ten days later he revealed the test word itself: ‘cheer’, as a singular noun, meaning applause (OED, sb. 8a: ‘a shout of encouragement, welcome, approbation, or congratulation’), which he traced only to ‘modern parliamentary conventionality—used in reporting debates’, but which the Old Corrector employed, replacing ‘chair’, in Coriolanus, iv.7.52.184 Thoms surely appreciated what Brae was getting at—‘reporting debates’ cannot have been lost on him—and he took a firm and frank line with the would-be contributor. ‘It is one matter to differ with Mr Collier on questions of literary criticism’ he wrote, ‘& another to charge him with being a party to a gross imposture.’ Collier was (as if Brae had not known) ‘a very dear friend of mine’, and ‘a man of unimpeachable character’; and ‘that he is a man utterly incapable of participating in anything so gross, as the putting forth as genuine [emenda-

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182. Folger MS W.b.105 (5). 183. Brae to CMI, 29 August 1853, Folger MS W.b.105 (11). 184. Brae to Thoms, 20 and 30 August 1853, Huntington MSS HM 27855 and 27857.



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tions] a series of modern fabrications, no one who knows anything about him will for one instant doubt.’ 185 To this unambiguous rebuke Brae could mount no more than a gesture of protest; a more robust response would have risked severing his relations with Notes and Queries. ‘Of course with the personal complexion you are pleased to confer upon the matter it is impossible I can trouble you any further upon a subject which to me is merely one of great literary interest’, he replied, with laborious irony; ‘but I utterly repudiate and protest against the doctrine . . . that any doubt as to the genuineness of matter which happens to be in the possession of, and believed in by Mr Collier, must necessarily be a reflection upon that gentleman’s personal honour.’ Indeed his insistence upon the latter seems almost overdone, or again tongue-in-cheek: ‘I never doubted Mr Collier’s pure and unsullied honour and I firmly and literally believe every tittle of his account as to his acquisition of this folio in its present state—but I can no more see any necessary connexion between Mr Collier’s honour and the treatment this book may have received before coming into his possession than I should between my dearest friend’s possession of a counterfeit banknote and his guilty knowledge of its true character deduced from an attempt to utter it.’ 186 Brae sensibly stopped seeking to publish his more contentious Perkins adversaria in Notes and Queries—for whose Shakespearian crossbiting in 1853 Blackwood’s rechristened it ‘Gnats & Queries’—and bided his time, reporting to Ingleby his solitary progress with ‘cheer’ and with his hobby-horse stage direction in Hamlet, over the next twenty-two months. He regarded Collier and Thoms as in league (‘Thoms Collier & Co.’, he called them),187 and considered the further interdiction on ad hominem controversy (17 September 1853, pp. 261–63) as Collierinspired.

The Search for Provenance Even before the first publication of Notes and Emendations, Collier realized that the provenance of the Perkins Folio, prior to his serendipitous purchase from Rodd, would excite curiosity; as we have seen, he tried to determine Rodd’s source from old stock-records, without success,188 although Rodd ‘told me that [the books in the parcel containing the Folio] had been bought for him at auc-

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185. Thoms to Brae (dra), 2 September 1853, Huntington HM 27862. 186. Brae to Thoms, 4 September 1853, Huntington HM 27858. 187. Brae to CMI, 1 December 1853, Folger MS W.b.105 (20). 188. On 12 September 1852 he told Sir Thomas Phillipps: ‘I can find no trace of it in Rodd’s . . . Day-book & Ledger, both of which I have examined’; Bodl. MS Phillipps-Robinson.c.518, fols. 54–55.


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tion,—I think, in Bedfordshire’ (Athenaeum, 31 January 1852), and ‘I am confident that the parcel came from the country’ (N&E, p. vii). On the very eve of his revised reprint, however, an alternative suggestion presented itself. John Carrick Moore, the nephew of the hero of Corunna, wrote to Collier from Kensington—unacquainted and unbidden—on 25 April 1853, with a curious tale: he had recently discussed Collier’s Notes with an elderly visitor, Francis Charles Parry, a retired public official living in St. John’s Wood.189 Parry, reported Carrick Moore, ‘told me he many years ago possessed a copy of the Folio 1632 which had marginal notes in manuscript, and which, being in bad order, he never consulted. This copy he lost, he did not know how’.190 But when shown Collier’s frontispiece facsimile of an annotated ‘Perkins’ page, ‘Mr. Parry told me he had no doubt that the copy was the same as that which he lost, as he remembered very well the hand-writing, and the state of preservation.’ Moore ‘pressed him to give me all particulars about the work, and how it came into his possession’, and learned that it had been a gi (among ‘many old books’) from ‘an uncle of the name of Grey, who was a literary man, and fond of curious works. Mr. Parry believes that Mr. Grey got the copy at the sale of the Perkins library’, though ‘all I could learn of these Perkins’s is, that they were related to Pope’s Arabella Fermor,191 and that all the family were dead when the sale of their library took place’. Moore ‘urged Mr. Parry to inform you of these circumstances’, but ‘whether from indolence or from modesty . . . I find [that he] has not communicated with you’, and therefore Moore had chosen to do so. Seven years later Parry himself would contradict several minor points in Moore’s letter, some unimportant, some not: it was ‘Miss Moore’ who showed him the facsimile; George Gray (not Grey) was not an uncle, but a distant relation of his mother’s, and, far from being a collector, ‘parted with the folio Shakespeare and the other books [none of which went to Parry] simply because he had no interest in them’ (Ingleby, Complete View, p. 54n.). About ‘the Perkins library’ (at U on Court, Berkshire, about eight miles from Newbury, where George Gray lived), Parry insisted ‘he never believed this; but merely threw out an antiquarian suggestion that the folio might have been obtained from U on Court’.192 Finally, Parry emphatically disputed ‘a copy of the folio 1632’—

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189. 1780–1878, educated Winchester and University College, Oxford (B.A., 1802), Middle Temple; called to the bar 1806; commissioner of bankrupts, 1810–31; deputy registrar in the Court of Bankruptcy, 1831–45. 190. The original of Carrick Moore’s letter is not known; the text is given by Collier in his Reply to Hamilton (1860), pp. 12–13. 191. Francis Perkins (1675–1736) had married the heroine of The Rape of the Lock in 1715: see A. M. Sharp, The History of Uon Court (1892), pp. 114 ff. 192. This testimony admittedly provides something of a crux: Parry also told Ingleby (Com-



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which indeed sounds far more like Collier’s phraseology than that of a bibliographical amateur like Carrick Moore—having long maintained that his was a First Folio (1623) and that he had never suggested otherwise, nor appreciated that ‘Perkins’ was a Second. Could these discrepancies all stem from misunderstandings of Parry by Carrick Moore in April 1853, or from a erthoughts by the former in 1859–60? One cannot imagine that Collier would have been so rash as to misrepresent or misquote, in 1853, the words of a very recent and sympathetic correspondent; but Moore’s original letter seems not to exist, and when Collier himself published its text in 1860 it is conceivable that minor adjustments— especially ‘the Folio 1632’, which is rendered in capital letters, as if editorial— might pass Carrick Moore’s own scrutiny. To Moore’s fortuitous communiqué John reacted at once, writing to Parry on 26 April with a series of specific questions, perhaps designed to sound out the seriousness of his claim and the tenacity of his memory. ‘Can you at all describe the book to me? How was it bound, and was it shabby and defective? Had it titlepage or conclusion?’ he began, and ‘Can you at all bear in mind the character & nature of the MS. notes & were they almost entirely written in the cropped margins of the book?’ Most importantly, ‘Had it the name of Thos. Perkins on the cover?’ 193 The last question had a sting in its tail, for if Collier himself had supplied the words ‘Tho. Perkins his Booke’, and Parry were to assert that his copy bore these words, Collier would realize that Parry was (in this instance at least) misremembering or lying, and deal with his other claims as selectively as he chose. But if Parry were to recollect, however hazily, having once possessed such a Folio with annotations, his testimony could prove a godsend. Parry, however, failed to write, and a er waiting impatiently ‘about ten days’ John contacted Moore again. The timing of all this, in the first week of May 1853, could not have been more fraught for him: he had all but completed his preface to the new edition of Notes and Emendations, yet ‘the press was kept waiting’ for Parry’s response. On 1 May John had received, and replied to, Halliwell’s bombshell declaration of disbelief in the Bridgewater documents (see Part Nine), and six days later confronted Ingleby’s unexpected indictment of the

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plete View, p. 68) that it was only when Collier himself ‘informed him that the folio at Maidenhead had on it the name of Perkins’ that ‘he thought it not unlikely that his relative might have gotten his folio from the library at Uon Court’. But as we have seen, Moore recorded this as Parry’s own speculation from the start, even if he was prompted by the name ‘Perkins’ from Collier’s Preface—as relayed to him by Moore, for Parry appears never actually to have read Notes and Emendations ( pace Collier in the Athenaeum, 4 June 1853, stating that Parry ‘read my description of the book’; Moore never said this). 193. Ingleby provides a facsimile of Collier’s letter (from the original lent by Parry) in Complete View, plate III.


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monovolume Shakespeare. An enthusiastic acknowledgement by the Duke of Devonshire (4 May) may have kept up his spirits, but any chance of Parry’s memory turning against him on Perkins cannot but have troubled John’s sleep. He went up to London, learning from Moore that Parry had suffered an injury to his knee in a fall on 22 April, and was convalescent at home and bedridden; thence Collier proceeded, met the septuagenarian for the first time, and conducted ‘a long interview’ on Folio matters.194 But neither at this time, nor on a subsequent visit (25 May), did Collier bring along the Perkins Folio itself to show his informant, so that Parry’s conviction that his lost copy was one and the same rested entirely upon Collier’s powers of description. Parry, wrote Collier, ‘gave me such an account of the book as made it certain that it was the same which, some fi y years ago, had been presented to him. . . . Mr. Parry described both the exterior and the interior of the volume, with its innumerable corrections and its missing leaves, with so much minuteness that no room was le for doubt.’ 195 Summing up, John asked Perry ‘whether he had any doubt on the point of his previous ownership’, and the convalescent ‘answered me most emphatically . . . ‘‘I have no more doubt about it than that you are sitting there’’ ’ (Athenaeum, 4 June 1853, p. 677). The rest of the interview was taken up with the supposititious U on Court provenance. Parry had visited the Berkshire house in about 1806, ‘when a Roman Catholic clergyman, eighty years of age, who had remembered the books there all his life, showed him the then empty shelves upon which they had been placed in the library’ (N&E II, p. v); and while Parry was ‘strongly of opinion’ only that George Gray of Newbury ‘became the owner of this copy . . . considerably before the end of the last century’, he apparently permitted Collier to connect Gray with that putative source. On his return to Holyport John wrote excitedly to Ingleby—perhaps simply the first correspondent to hand—about his visit, ‘which has ended more satisfactorily than I could well have anticipated’,196 and he hastened to set out ‘the particulars with which Mr Parry had so unreservedly favoured me’, which he sent first to Moore, and then to Whittaker,

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194. Just how fit Parry was to depose may be in question: Collier ‘was, I think, the first person whom Mr. Parry saw aer his accident’ (Athenaeum, 4 June 1853), and Parry ‘was not in a condition to state any distinct evidence to show out of what library [his Folio] had come’ (N&E II, p. iv). 195. N&E II, p. iv. In the Athenaeum version, Parry ‘was well acquainted with the fact that various leaves were wanting; and . . . perfectly recollects its state and condition, the frequent erasures [sic, for crossings-out?] of passages, as well as the handwriting of the numerous marginal and other corrections’. 196. JPC to CMI, 14 May 1853, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (135). Curiously, Collier here referred to Parry’s having owned the book ‘thirty years ago’, or ‘thirty years ago, if not more’, whereas in print he always wrote ‘fiy years’ or ‘half a century’—which Parry never disputed.



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as part of the stop-press preface to N&E II. On 25 May he carried the proofs of the ‘particulars’ back to St. John’s Wood, for Parry to confirm and correct 197— again, however, omitting to take the Folio along.198 Parry then added ‘a circumstance [he] had previously omitted’, that his benefactor Gray lived at Newbury, near U on Court, which John thought almost clinched the chain of descent. On 28 May John sent a full account of his dealings with Moore and Parry to the Athenaeum, an account that differs slightly from the version in N&E II, pp. iii– vi. Parry never objected to either until 1859, for (Ingleby reported) he was ‘still under the impression that Mr. Collier had the folio which he (Mr. Parry) had lost’, and ‘did not think it material to be precise in the details of his conversation with Mr. Collier on his first visit’ (Complete View, p. 69). But can he have read at all carefully what Collier had written, even in proof, and not pointed out what he later insisted upon—that his own Folio was the First, of 1623, not the Second (1632)? One must wonder just what text he was shown, or how much his own incuriosity blinkered him in mid-1853. But with a new peg to hang Perkins upon—provenance, attested to by a living (perhaps not long-to-live) witness, with no axe to grind—Collier’s grip on the situation seemed stronger than before. His revision of Notes and Emendations had so ened many of the more vulnerable claims, and he had appeased some critics by crediting prior claimants, like Blackstone and Zachary Jackson, for coincident suggestions. Singer’s zeal had betrayed his own cause (and even he would proffer a ‘peace offering’ in 1854);199 Notes and Queries and the Athenaeum were solidly in his corner; Germans and Americans would never have much of an impact on British opinion; and Ingleby was yet to be heard from. Brae might believe that readers had turned ‘from former admiration to present execration’, and there would always be those, like George Daniel, who thought Perkins ‘a barefaced, transparent Hoax’,200 but the literary establishment was unlikely to unite either in rejecting the Perkins emendations en bloc, or in convicting their sponsor of anything worse than bad taste: Dyce, Knight, even Halli-

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197. Even in his Athenaeum version of 28 May (published 4 June) Collier was at great pains to document the approval of his sources: Carrick Moore ‘returned the manuscript with his full approbation as regarded what had originally passed between himself and Mr. Parry’, and Parry made ‘few, but not unimportant’ corrections to the proof: it is almost as if he anticipated the challenges he would face seven years on. 198. In 1860 Collier confirmed that ‘I did not, on that occasion, carry the volume itself to St. John’s Wood’ (Reply to Hamilton, p. 16), but his claim that ‘I aerwards did so’ had already been contested by Parry in 1859. 199. JPC thanked him for this on 3 March 1854; original letter bound in Boston Public Library G.3920.14 (3), a copy of Collier’s Reply to Hamilton, where the letter is printed at p. 64. 200. Daniel to JOH, 2 November 1853, LOA 1/27: ‘I grieve that my respected friend Collier should be the innocent dupe of such’.


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well and Hunter would never, by the evidence of past performance, carry their war against certain objectionable readings to accusations of fraud or malpractice by their old colleague. If anything remained prone to risk—or so it must have seemed to John, in the quiet eye of the controversy—it was the Folio itself, whose thousands of manuscript spuria might one day undergo such scrutiny as Ireland’s sad relics had received, and as the far more skilled forgeries of Constantine Simonides were just now attracting. The Bridgewater and Dulwich forgeries remained beyond recall, but were perhaps esoteric enough to benefit from public indifference; nothing of the sort could be expected to shield Perkins, should its enemies ever gain access to it. In October 1853 the Perkins Folio changed hands: it belonged henceforth to the sixth Duke of Devonshire, and reposed out of harm’s way in his unchallengeably private library. The terms of the transfer have never been clear. On 4 October 1853 Collier wrote to Bolton Corney that ‘the volume (not for any valuable consideration in the legal sense of the words) is about to leave my hands’; he would retain, ‘rather more for my own satisfaction than for any other reason’, only the four facsimile plates of eighteen annotated passages that he had commissioned from Nethercli .201 Six years later, a er Devonshire’s death, he placed the transaction in June, and stated that it was ‘a free gi on my part’, although the duke, ‘knowing of my family bereavements and consequent expenses, unsuccessfully endeavoured to persuade me to accept 250£ for the volume’, and he printed a brief and improbable letter of thanks (‘It is impossible for me to express how much I am gratified by your present’), dated from Chatsworth 20 June 1853.202 Rumour, however, put the price at £500 203 or even a mad £1,000–1,500, and the seventh Duke confirmed to Madden that he thought it had been freely given.204 But Collier’s own

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201. Collier’s letter still accompanies Corney’s set of the facsimiles, now BoPL G.3920.14 (11). Other recipients included Ingleby and F. J. Child, who was asked to forward others (without mentioning Collier) to Richard Grant White (2 December 1858, Houghton MS bMS Am 1922 [37]); White’s own reference to the facsimiles in Shakespeare’s Scholar, p. 499, indicates that another set had already reached America by late 1853. Collier apparently did not present a set to Halliwell: the latter’s, annotated ‘Very few Printed. I bought these leaves unbound of Russell Smith for £1.1.0.’, are part of Folger PR2951 A5. 202. The Times, 7 July 1859. The original of Devonshire’s letter does not seem to exist, despite the fact that Collier and his descendants religiously preserved his correspondence with the duke, and would scarcely have discarded such a memento aer 1859. The early date of the ‘present’— which Devonshire acknowledged as having already received—also contradicts Collier’s letter to Corney. Further evidence of Devonshire’s great interest in the Folio (that he ‘came up from Chatsworth [in 1852] purposely to inspect it’: Shakespeare [1858], i:xi)) is likewise impossible to confirm, as the duke’s MS diaries for 1852 are incomplete. Ganzel (pp. 173–74) accepted all these claims at face value. 203. Ingleby’s report to Madden; Diary, 22 February 1858. 204. Madden Diary, 8 July 1859. Records at Chatsworth of the sixth Duke’s regular and ex gratia disbursements are incomplete for this period.



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qualification to Corney (‘in the legal sense’) does suggest that some terms were agreed. If they concerned access or John’s own privilege of screening applicant viewers, they were certainly honoured: for as far as we know only one person was permitted to examine the Perkins Folio in London or at Chatsworth before the death of the sixth Duke in January 1858.


part nine

Away from Perkins

The ‘family bereavements’ of which John spoke in 1859 indeed seriously influenced his activities of 1851–53. His second daughter, Jane Emma, had contracted tuberculosis at some time before October 1850, and by January 1851 her condition was alarming.1 John took her to Brighton for the sea air, with the rest of his household, who remained there for at least four months, John cancelling an intended visit to Germany.2 Mary Louisa was now also, if temporarily, an invalid, suffering perhaps from some form of the cancer that killed her seven years later; and while Jane Emma outlived expectations by nearly two years, the eldest daughter, Mary Frances, soon fell ill with the same pulmonary infection.3 At Christmas 1852 the Colliers were at Torquay, where Mary Frances’s condition had become ‘severe & dangerous’, and John was in constant attendance for more than a month, while the last sheets of Notes and Emendations passed through Gilbert and Rivington’s presses.4 At this time it appeared that whereas Mary’s illness was ‘hopeless’, Jane might recover, being ‘also very unwell, but in a different &, I hope, more cureable way’ (Collier to Halliwell, 23 January 1853); but in the event the younger sister died first, at Torquay, on 8 March, followed by Mary Frances at Geys House on 26 August—‘a release from intense suffering’, wrote Robinson (Diary, 30 August 1852). Collier buried both daughters in Brompton Cemetery, close to his former Kensington house; his letters throughout the last

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1. HCR Diary, 7 October 1850; JPC to Devonshire, 31 January 1851, Chatsworth, sixth Duke of Devonshire’s Correspondence, 2d ser., 17.10. 2. He was himself at Brighton ‘much’ between January and June, perhaps lodging with the George Proctors; he was back at Holyport by 12 June (JPC to W. C. Trevelyan, 30 March and 12 June 1851, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34), but the family were still at Brighton when JPC wrote to Halliwell on 22 June (LOA 48/48). 3. They were both ‘great invalids’ when HCR next visited Holyport in 1852; HCR Diary, 30 October 1852). 4. JPC to JOH, 24 December 1852 and 23 January 1853 (LOA 46/9 and 46/21); and JPC to John Murray III, 2 February 1853 (‘I have this moment reached London from Torquay’; John Murray archives). John noted that he completed Notes and Emendations ‘with some rapidity, and under many disadvantages: not a few of the later sheets were corrected, and several of them written, two hundred miles from home’ (N&Q, 26 February 1853).

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months of their lives—the very period of Singer’s, Ingleby’s, and Brae’s first attacks against Perkins, Parry’s revelations, and the crisis with Halliwell, detailed below—betray anxiety and exhaustion, and a for-once justified sense of persecution by fate. Yet Robinson’s friend Samuel Naylor, who wrote John a letter of condolence on Jane Emma’s death, was also ‘glad to perceive in the last week’s ‘‘Athenaeum’’ that his mind can be moved to forget for a moment the ‘‘great woe’’, thro’ the absorption of his great pursuit & passion’.5 The loss of two of four unmarried Collier daughters ‘has thinned their family’, Crabb Robinson wrote, but ‘they are nevertheless going to live apart from the Proctors’. The double ménage divided ‘on very good terms’ and ‘without any coolness’,6 but the indignity of seeming dependence at Geys House had long troubled John, and the family peregrinations of the preceding three years may have inspired one final move. By the end of November 1853 the four remaining Colliers—John, Mary Louisa, twenty-six- and twenty-seven-year-old Henrietta and Emma Letitia—with Aunt Emma Pycro (now nearly seventy, and fragile), were ‘in the agony of removal’ to nearby Maidenhead.7 ‘Riverside’, described by Robinson as ‘a small neat house’, and by John himself as ‘a very small neat cottage . . . between the old stone-bridge of Maidenhead and the Railway-bridge’, lay at the edge of a town well served by transport from London, with a view of the nearby Thames from the garden.8 Though less capacious than Geys House, it accommodated the family and the books, and offered a spare bedroom to guests like Robinson, who observed that John ‘being now in his own house . . . receives attentions from the Gentry of the neighbourhood which he had not when he was the inmate of Robert Proctor. This flatters him as it ought, for he feels he is justly appreciated—he perhaps was never so happy as now’ (Diary, 14 August 1856). The Colliers took up residence on 2 December 1853, paying £31 10s. rent per annum to their landlord, Mr. Cooper;9 and Riverside remained John’s home for the rest of his life: fortunately for him, his friend Frederic Ouvry—who married John’s niece Emily in September 1854— purchased the property when it later came on the market, and kept his wife’s uncle on at an annual rent (deliberately generous, by the late 1870s) of £50.

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5. Naylor to HCR, 6 April 1853, HCR Correspondence. Naylor alludes to John’s spirited letter about his new text of Shakespeare, Knight’s criticism of Perkins readings in King John, and ‘the five—or, as some say, six—gentlemen (including editors and would-be editors) who are vehemently whetting their knives to cut me up for a carbonado’; Athenaeum, 2 April 1853. 6. HCR Diary, 24 September 1853; and letter to Thomas Robinson, 1 October, HCR Correspondence. 7. JPC to John Pycro Collier, 28 November 1853, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 33. 8. HCR Diary, 14 August 1856; JPC to W. Wardlaw Reid, 13 June 1859, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (161). 9. JPC Diary, 26 May 1878; also 29 June 1873 and 2 December 1879, noting the twenty-fih anniversary (in fact the twenty-sixth) of his move.


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John took particular delight in his proximity to the river—one recalls his idyllic Hammersmith boating days—and in his last years, explaining the informality of his religious credo to the Rev. Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth, he celebrated the natural prospect he had so long enjoyed: ‘I go to Church every day of my life when I look out of my windows at the Thames and all its accompanying beauties’.10 The vista from the Thames-side villas of Maidenhead, between the old bridges, is little altered today. Collier’s resources were no doubt strained by the events of 1851–53, despite his new pension and his income from Whittaker’s. On 26 January 1854 he sold books to the value of £105 8s. at Sotheby’s, but these were mainly space-saving discards upon moving house.11 Four months earlier he had renewed his offer to the British Museum of the Larpent dramatic manuscripts ‘at cost’—his partner Amyot having died in September 1850—but again the collection was rejected, Madden complaining that Collier would not provide the trustees with a list of the plays, so that ‘it is impossible to form any opinion of their value’ (Diary, 27 September 1853 and 22 January 1854). Fortunately for John the Earl of Ellesmere stepped in, purchasing the more than twenty-five hundred scripts in January 1854, which accounts for their present-day separation from the post-1824 material in the British Library.12 Ellesmere paid Collier’s price of £180—which John presumably divided with Amyot’s widow—and £20 over, ‘which I think, if I am not at present in your debt for any Shakespeare purchases, will leave some margin for the latter’.13

Halliwell Again Relations between Collier and James Orchard Halliwell had improved considerably since the beginning of 1851, when John thought his young colleague ‘slippery and insincere’ and blocked his access to Devonshire’s Hamlet; the thaw may have derived partly from John’s realization that the grand Halliwell Shakespeare, highly priced for a rarefied circulation, would never compete publicly

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10. JPC to Ebsworth, 14 September 1880, FF MS 330. 11. Sotheby, Catalogue of a Valuable Collection of Books (23–26 January 1854), lots 1133–1356 on the last day. Collier told T. J. Pettigrew (23 January 1855, Beinecke Osborn Pettigrew MSS) that he had then disposed of ‘all my needless books’, which included multiple copies of many of his own publications: sixty-seven of Reasons for a New Edition of Shakespeare, up to twenty copies each of various Percy and Shakespeare Society volumes, etc. A few books by Dyce (Specimens of English Poetesses and the superseded 1828 Peele), Halliwell, and Fairholt may have been victims of temper. 12. They are now in the Huntington Library, with the rest of the Ellesmere-Bridgewater collections. See Conolly 1976, p. 4, lamenting the failure of the Museum to act: ‘a good early illustration of British lethargy and impecuniosity in the preservation of important literary documents’. 13. Ellesmere to JPC, 25 January 1854, Folger MS Y.d.6 (117).


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with his own. As we have seen, Halliwell’s pamphlet on the Cymbeline reading ‘who smothers her with painting’ found Collier welcoming of its compliments, and from 29 March 1852 through mid-February 1853 their correspondence remained familiar and friendly, more than a letter a month each way. John praised Halliwell’s enterprise in book-buying (‘you are not a churl nor a dog in the manger’) and gave him a tracing of his (forged) ‘Tempest’ ballad;14 from Torquay he reported the worsening condition of his two daughters, and played down a mildly condescending note in Notes and Emendations that Halliwell had taken ‘wrongly’ (‘I respect you too highly, & interest myself in your undertakings too deeply ever to mean to speak at all slightingly of you or them’).15 Most important, in this climate of colleagual familiarity, Collier unblocked Halliwell’s access to the pseudo-Shakespearian documents at Bridgewater House, by interceding on his behalf with Lord Ellesmere. That unprecedented concession, rendering Halliwell the first independent scholarly examiner of the forgeries since the Rev. Joseph Hunter in 1846, proved almost instantly fatal, and it is difficult to understand Collier’s turnabout. Perhaps he thought Halliwell now so reconverted a friend that his view of the manuscripts would reflect personal trust, and that his published assessment—expected to be positive—would pre-empt the inquiries of others; perhaps, as on not a few recent occasions, he simply underestimated his man. Five years earlier Halliwell’s application had foundered without Collier’s support, if indeed Collier had not actually recommended against him; but on 12 September 1852 John himself reopened the matter: ‘What do you intend to do [in the forthcoming Shakespeare] about the documents at Bridgewater House, which I found? I hear that you have applied to Lord Ellesmere, and as far as my advice has influence, I have recommended him to let you have the use of them, and I hope that he will comply’, adding as teaser that ‘I made one blunder, from ignorance, when I described them, which I dare say you will detect. It is not one of much consequence.’ 16 In October further negotiations ensued, and dragged on until February, with Halliwell’s request to have facsimiles made first discouraged by Collier, then agreed, for one only, ‘if you much wish for it’.17 With Collier in company, up from Torquay, Halliwell at last paid his visit to Ellesmere’s Belgrave Square house on 10 February 1853.

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14. From which JOH made a facsimile for use in the first volume of his folio Shakespeare; JPC to JOH, 6 August 1852, LOA 53/36. 15. JPC to JOH, 2 February 1853, LOA 58/9. The note (p. 512) calls Halliwell’s Cymbeline pamphlet ‘a clever tract’, but twits his ‘ingenuity in sometimes applying to his purpose what in no way makes in his favour’; it was omitted from N&E II. 16. JPC to JOH, 12 September 1852, LOA 60/71. The unspecified ‘one blunder’ may have been a precautionary concession, to cover whatever Halliwell might dispute. 17. JPC to JOH, 5 and 13 February 1853, LOA 50/3 and 50/36; see Spevack 1996a, p. 140.


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The purpose of Halliwell’s dogged quest, he later declared, had nothing to do with a priori suspicion: indeed, ‘I firmly believed in the genuineness of the papers till the day on which I examined the originals—and that my own convictions on the subject are sincere may be gathered from the fact that, on the evening of that day, I cancelled at the printer’s that portion of the biography [his Life of Shakespeare, much enlarged since 1848, and occupying the first half of his first folio volume] in which I had previously inserted copies of the documents, and I also omitted the fac-simile of the Southampton letter, the expense of lithographing which had already been incurred.’ 18 He had simply resolved ‘to make a personal inspection and examination of every document of the slightest importance respecting the history of Shakespeare and his family’, and ‘to hazard the possibility of rejecting a genuine paper by an excess of caution, [rather] than to impair the value of the biography by the insertion of any that were subject to the expression of the slightest doubt’ (Shakespeare, i:185). The existence of ‘ingenious’ and ‘skilful’ modern fabrications, inspired by ‘the scantiness of the ascertained particulars respecting the biography of Shakespeare’ (p. iv), was however a matter of record, and rendered such ‘severe regulations’ for his research essential. Halliwell was also at pains to point out that the Bridgewater documents were ‘not the only manuscripts that have been rejected from the biography’ following a fresh survey. On 10 February, at Belgrave Square, he handled four of the five manuscripts published by Collier in 1835, and came down swi ly and firmly—and silently, for he said nothing to John at the time—against them. His precipitous instructions to his printer ‘on the evening of that day’ are confirmed by his wife’s diary entry: ‘James . . . was much disappointed to find them forgeries, & has had to alter the sheets of his new Shak. in consequence.’ 19 Yet what Halliwell determined on the spot spoke for considerable homework, whatever he said of his own open-mindedness. The royal warrant of 4 January 1609/10, appointing Daborne, Shakespeare, Field, and Kirkham instructors of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, seemed to him ‘unquestionably . . . a modern forgery’, but not primarily because of its physical appearance: it could not be, as Collier had described it, a preliminary dra of the surviving Privy Council warrant, because it was ‘written book-wise’, that is, vertically on a folio sheet, and dated (a stupid mistake, for a supposed dra differing in considerable detail, with the direction ‘stayed’ at its foot) on the same day as the completed warrant—which of course does not mention Shakespeare. Nor could it be an abridged transcript of the warrant of the same day, because ‘the contents . . .

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18. Curiosities of Modern Shaksperian Criticism (July 1853), p. 25. Halliwell made use of some of his stock of the facsimile in his Observations on the Shaksperian Forgeries at Bridgewater House of the same month. 19. Henrietta Halliwell diary, 10 February 1853; printed in Spevack 1999, p. 59.


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are altogether inconsistent with the circumstances detailed in the real patent’. Given the latter contradictions—which Halliwell double-checked the very next day at the State Paper Office and Rolls Chapel, examining the Privy Council warrant itself 20—it became clear ‘that no genuine dra or transcript, of the nature of that printed by Mr. Collier, can possibly exist’ (Shakespeare, i:186–87, repeating Curiosities, p. 22). That conclusion might have been reached without even consulting the original forgery, but Halliwell was no doubt wise, given the mystifications so o en invoked in such matters, to insist upon his ‘severe’ procedure. Palaeographical evidence remained difficult for him to assess and convey, although he found the Daborne warrant itself ‘so badly executed, that it will not even pass muster in a facsimile’ (Curiosities, p. 25). The ‘H. S.’ letter, on the other hand, was more challenging, for ‘the calligraphy is of a highly skilful character, and judging solely from a fac-simile of the letter, I should certainly have accepted it as genuine’, as indeed he had done in 1847; but ‘an examination of the original leads to a different judgement’. Halliwell could not explain why very sharply (‘the paper and ink not appearing to belong to so early a date’), yet his belief that the H. S. letter and the certificate showing the Blackfriars sharers of 1589 were ‘written . . . by the same hand ’ led him to reject them from his biographical canon as ‘suspicious’, ‘without offering a decisive opinion as to [their] spuriousness’. Of the spuriousness of the Daborne warrant he remained confident, but he recorded only as ‘my opinion’—as distinguished from ‘an absolute conviction’, but ‘gathered from the appearance of the papers themselves’—‘that all the Bridgewater Shaksperian MSS. which I have seen are forgeries’. And like other sceptics of late he evoked ‘the interests of literature’, and called for the documents—two of which, the Samuel Daniel letter and the Othello performance record, he had never been shown—to be ‘submitted to a careful and minute examination by the best record-readers of the day’, instancing his old enemy Madden among those qualified to judge (Curiosities, p. 25). Halliwell did not instantly circulate his findings, and personal considerations may have affected the timing of their eventual publication. Collier was of course curious, even anxious, following the joint visit to Belgrave Square. Three days later, writing from Torquay, he asked whether ‘you are satisfied with the opportunity you have had of inspecting the papers & collating them with the printed copies’, and responded warily to a new request for a facsimile (‘if you very much wish for it I think his Lordship would not refuse to comply’). But why did Halliwell need any more such evidence, having already determined to omit the Bridgewater documents from his biography? Can he have had any motive 20. Henrietta Halliwell diary, 11 February.

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but to shore up his case against their authenticity? He seems to have pleaded uncertainty about literal readings, which led John to complain two days later that ‘I fancied that in your collation you would have ascertained precisely how the names were spelled. I hope that you were not hurried.’ 21 Here the flurry of Collier-Halliwell correspondence apparently ceased for ten weeks, during which Mary Frances remained critically ill and Jane Emma died. Halliwell may have been unwilling, purely from delicacy, to confront Collier with his findings in this feverish period; but by the end of April his first volume was all but through the press, and he approached Ellesmere himself once again, with an enquiry that we can infer from Ellesmere’s reply. ‘I presumed that your object [in viewing the Bridgewater papers] was to form your own opinion on their value & authenticity’, wrote the earl; ‘I neither desired nor proposed that you should in any respect restrict or suppress the expression of any such opinion.’ 22 With that out of the way, Halliwell had no option but to inform Collier as well—a bombshell of an announcement that apparently has not survived—and Collier’s indignant reply brought their correspondence to a close for three years: Geys House Maidenhead 1 May 1853 My dear Sir I am very much astonished by your opinion respecting the documents you saw in my company at Lord Ellesmere’s. I am the more surprised because you did not utter one word of doubt, or suspicion, to me at the time: nor have you done so since, until now, although some months have elapsed in the interval. As my wife, who sees all my letters, has only just partially recovered from a severe illness, and as I have another daughter daily sinking under a pulmonary complaint, you will oblige me (if you have anything farther to say on the subject of your last) if you will address me at the Library of the Society of Antiquaries. I am, My dear sir, Yours very sincerely J. Payne Collier 23

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21. JPC to JOH, 13 and 15 February 1853, LOA 50/36 and 50/67. 22. Ellesmere to JOH, 30 April 1853, LOA 59/21. 23. JPC to JOH, 1 May 1853, LOA 49/81. We have seen only thirteen letters from Halliwell to Collier (three of them bound in books), a number that may be compared with the nearly 370 from Collier that his correspondent preserved; if kept for any length of time at all by the recipient, they


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Halliwell did of course have a choice about how to couch his disclosures— whether to play them up or down—and while he characteristically avoided the newspapers and the public literary press, he made a great splash with them in his folio Shakespeare, the first volume of which appeared in late May. There the discreditations were highlighted in a deliberately short preface (dated March 1853), in which Halliwell emphasized the hazards of sorting out Shakespeare’s biography, caused in part by ‘the ingenuity of some of the most skilful fabricators of modern times’ in creating historical impostures. He instanced (alone) ‘the celebrated Bridgewater manuscripts, which have heretofore held so prominent a place in modern critical works on Shakespeare’, remarking upon ‘the consummate skill with which one of these papers [i.e., the H. S. letter] is executed’, and ‘the necessity that existed for scrutinizing the originals’. He expected that Ellesmere would encourage further investigation, ‘as it may hardly be believed that the noble owner will retard the discovery of truth, where such important materials for criticism are involved, by delaying to submit them to the consideration of really competent judges’.24 Neither here nor in the more extended discussion (pp. 182–89), however, did Halliwell ever directly suggest that Collier was himself ‘the fabricator’ who must have planted the spurious manuscripts in the ‘large bundles of papers’ that had appeared (to Collier) to have lain undisturbed since the time of Lord Ellesmere’s chancellorship: ‘a more recent enquirer, investigating the collection under the impression it had not been examined for upwards of two centuries, would be inclined to receive every paper as genuine. . . . Suspicion would be disarmed; and it is possible that in this way Mr. Collier has been deceived’ (p. 186). Halliwell’s readers, of course, were free to draw whatever disrespectful conclusions they wished. Printing 150 copies of a large folio set for subscribers, at forty guineas before publication 25—and, in the event, twelve years in the completion—Halliwell cannot have expected many reviews. Nor can he have anticipated the hostility with which John Bruce in the Athenaeum (anonymously, as always) received the first long-promised instalment of his magnum opus. Six and a half columns on 2 July 1853 (slightingly placed aer a three-sentence notice of a pamphlet by Hunter) ridiculed Halliwell’s design of ‘superseding entirely’ the Boswell-

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may have been destroyed in the early 1870s, when Collier apparently burned a large quantity of correspondence (JPC Diary, 22 July 1879, regretting his act). But Halliwell is likely to have saved all of Collier’s, and from 2 May 1853 to 26 December 1856 there are none in his files. 24. Shakespeare, i:iv. Collier was among those thanked for providing other materials, but the Duke of Devonshire was singled out for not helping (his ‘refusal . . . to let me have a fac-simile of the first edition of Hamlet’, which of course Collier inspired). 25. By July 1853, with the subscription list not full, the price had already risen to sixty guineas, and it eventually reached £105.


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Malone variorum of 1821,26 his qualifications for the task, his harping on the cash value of the work (the ‘permanency of a high price . . . not only retained but in all probability greatly raised within a few years’), and the shortcomings of his text and apparatus. The new ‘Life of Shakespeare’—half the first volume— was distinguished from Halliwell’s 1848 octavo version by ‘only one important alteration’, the rejection of the Bridgewater documents which he had previously endorsed; but ‘his present arguments con. do not seem to be much more valuable than his former arguments pro’.27 Stratford records submitted as novelties were nothing of the kind (Halliwell would indignantly dispute this), the Stratford illustrations had ‘all been borrowed from other works of Mr. Halliwell and Mr. Fairholt’, and while the essay on the formation of the text was ‘perhaps the best of Mr. Halliwell’s additions to Shakespeare criticism’, it exhibited ‘but slender claims to originality’. The text of The Tempest—the one play included—was unimproved, ‘all the difficulties . . . remain[ing] entirely untouched by Mr. Halliwell; not one of them—so far as we have noticed—is got rid of, or even lightened’,28 and even the glossarial notes were ‘sadly overdone’. Above all—an undocumented charge that infuriated Halliwell—both the ‘Life’ and the apparatus of The Tempest were said to be riddled with errors of expression and transcription (‘We could present a rare garland composed of strange peculiarities in phraseology and grammar, mistakes in copying and errors of the press . . . but we forbear’), and while ‘such carelessness may go down with an audience of 150, [it] would never find favour with the general public’. That last reviewerly thrust, irrefutable because lo ily unspecified, must remind us of Collier at his most slyly abusive, and, given the events of the past few months, Halliwell can hardly be blamed for suspecting the fine hand of his old colleague and friend.29

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26. In fact Halliwell deliberately disowned any attempt at recording all prior scholarship (the point of a ‘variorum’): his idea, misrepresented by Bruce (‘the edition now offered is, in fact, another Variorum’), was to provide a plainly-printed ‘definitive’ text with full glossarial and explanatory notes (removed to a section of their own), accompanied by illustrative texts, facsimiles, and ‘archaeological engravings’ by his collaborator, F. W. Fairholt. Although its format is unmanageably extravagant, the work was long regarded as ‘the most extensive repository of literary, historical, and archaeological information regarding Shakespeare’, and ‘typographically, the most sumptuous edition’ (Jaggard 1911, p. 530). 27. Bruce agreed, however, ‘that it would be desirable that these documents should be submitted to the special examination of a number of competent persons. On a proper representation to their noble owner [which implicitly Halliwell had botched], we have no doubt that he would permit them to be produced for that purpose.’ 28. Bruce seemed to attribute this failing to Halliwell’s textual conservatism, which Collier himself had now all but abandoned: ‘We fear that the bias of [Halliwell’s] mind is against all alteration. Because some conjectures are rash, he suspects all; and not having any taste or talent that way himself, is afraid of what he terms, in a kind of contempt, the ‘‘conjectures’’ of other people.’ 29. One particular charge concerned ‘two or three’ documents relating to the Shakespeares’


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Of course Bruce may indeed have derived some of his adversaria from Collier, even in casual exchanges; moreover Halliwell would have flagged the reviewer’s shrugging-off of his Bridgewater stance, and one remark about ‘Perkins’: in the text of The Tempest, ‘the new readings of Mr. Collier’s manuscript annotator [are] generally dismissed very contemptuously’. To that rap on the knuckles (alone) he immediately replied, in a sixteen-page pamphlet: ‘I am not only accused of being severe on the errors of others’, he complained (with ‘astonishment’), ‘but also of speaking contemptuously of Mr. Collier’s new work— an accusation which is . . . exceedingly unfair’.30 Instead, he maintained, it was Collier who had ‘thrown out one of the most uncourteous implications ever suggested in literary controversy, by plainly intimating that every one who rejects the new readings can only do so from interested motives’. As for the text of The Tempest, ‘I have not at present discovered a single new reading in Mr. Collier’s volume that will bear the test of examination’, a position he spelled out line by line (Observations, pp. 5–10). Passing on to the matter of ‘coincident suggestions’, he noted that ‘Aristotle’s ethics [for checks]’—Blackstone’s conjecture, widely recognized as such by Perkins critics—‘has been introduced into the text by no fewer than five editors’, beginning with Joseph Rann in 1787 (p. 14), and that among the ‘most valuable emendations’ praised by reviewers, one (the speech-heading ‘Que[en]’ for ‘Qui[ckly], Merry Wives, v.5) ‘was proposed by Mr. Harness, in 1825 . . . [and] has actually been adopted both by Mr. Knight and Mr. Collier’ (p. 12). For these oversights, and for eight anticipations in The Tempest unnoted in N&E,31 Halliwell professed not to fault Collier, who had ‘compil[ed] his volume of Notes with unusual rapidity, and under circumstances which rendered access to many books exceedingly inconvenient’; he thought it might ‘fairly be stated, without any discourtesy, that Mr. Collier, who so long and in many respects so judiciously adhered to the early editions, has not paid much attention to the vast range of conjectural emendation which ap-

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Henley Street house, hitherto published by Halliwell ‘only in ordinary type’, in his 1848 Shakespeare. They were now given in full-page facsimiles, of which ‘the only use . . . is, to enable readers to correct the mistakes in Mr. Halliwell’s copies . . . both in his former and in his present editions. A gentleman who is very sharp on the blunders of other people should be a little more accurate himself. Mistakes which Mr. Halliwell sets down as evidence of the ignorance of the scrivener are shown by these fac-similes to be mere mis-readings by himself.’ To this Halliwell rejoined that there was only one such document, and that the single ‘error of the scrivener’ adverted to (Shakespeare, i:33: an example of ‘not very good’ Latin) was in fact correctly transcribed: ‘What can one say to criticism of this kind?’ (Curiosities, pp. 8–9). 30. Observations on Some of the Manuscript Emendations of the Text of Shakespeare, and Are They Copyright? (July 1853), p. 3. 31. Halliwell found precedents for these in the Dryden/Davenant adaptation (two); in eighteenth-century suggestions by Hanmer, William Kenrick, and John Holt; and more recently in those of Douce, Dyce, and Hunter.


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peared during the last century’ (p. 13): ‘the sources of conjectural Shakespearian criticism are so various, and so widely scattered, [that] it will be long before it can be definitively pronounced that any of the readings in Mr. Collier’s volume are unquestionably new’ (p. 11). This was probably the first time such a point had been clearly made, although Delius and others would soon devote themselves, somewhat uselessly, to its documentation. The existence of such a mass of anticipatory readings, Halliwell reasoned, rendered any claim to copyright by Collier ‘improbable’, and once the potential for royalty raising or even the exaction of editorial acknowledgement was counted out, those ‘disbelievers’ (Halliwell clearly among them) should be spared ‘the imputations of interested motives which have been so freely, and, I cannot help thinking, so injudiciously attributed to them’: the provocation, ostensibly, from which the pamphlet took form. ‘Mr. Collier’s Notes on [the emendations] are of course copyright’, Halliwell conceded—as if anyone coveted these—and he permitted himself one more significant reversal of opinion. On their initial publication some of the Perkins readings had seemed ‘apparently so good’ that they gained immediate acceptance by the general readership, and ‘even so eminent a critic as Mr. Dyce confess[ed] he had at first received several as happy corrections which proved to be questionable on examination’. Halliwell himself admitted that ‘bisson multitude’ (the Perkins version of ‘bosom multiplied’, Coriolanus, iii.1.131) ‘appeared [to me] to be so peculiarly happy and incontrovertible, I could not resist the conclusion it was not only truthful, but that it indicated the MS. annotator had derived his alterations from pure sources’. But ‘a hasty assent will probably not be lasting’, and A. E. Brae’s article in Notes and Queries (10 July 1853), followed up by further research, had dampened, if not extinguished, his enthusiasm: re-appraisal of the emendation ‘has furnished reasons that justify the gravest doubts as to the propriety of its reception’. With that, Halliwell all but cancelled his headstrong original endorsement, and proclaimed himself free to proceed unconstrained: ‘not having otherwise written directly or indirectly against the emendations’, he denied any animus, repeated that ‘my reasons for rejecting the whole of those which occur in the first play in the volume are before the public’, and begged leave to appraise the rest, as they would come up for consideration in his Shakespeare, ‘by fair argument, not by mere expression of opinion’ (pp. 14–16). But the Athenaeum review still rankled, and Halliwell’s close friend Thomas Wright urged him to refute it point by point. ‘I think if I were in your place’, advised Wright, ‘and could point out some gross blunders . . . I would print a few pages in reply, of which I would send a copy to all the subscribers, and sell or give away the rest.’ He advocated ‘great severity, treating the Athenaeum with the utmost scorn and contempt’, and volunteered to touch up the text of it him-


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self: ‘let me have a proof with a copy of the [Athenaeum] Article, and I’ll try if I cant add a extra-dose of bitterness to it.’ 32 The result was Halliwell’s Curiosities of Modern Shaksperian Criticism (John Russell Smith, [July] 1853), which devotes eighteen pages to ‘the rancorous attack on my folio edition’, itemizing twelve ‘bare matters of fact’ in which the Athenaeum reviewers—Halliwell persistently used the plural—had misrepresented his work. The remaining eleven pages proceed from linking ‘their animosity’ with Halliwell’s position on Collier, which Halliwell, perhaps goaded by Wright,33 summed up succinctly: ‘If I am correct in thinking that the whole of the Shakesperian MSS. in the possession of the Earl of Ellesmere are modern forgeries,—that an important letter, discovered at Dulwich College, has been misinterpreted,—or, that some remarkable ballads are of comparatively recent date [our italics: this is a new charge]—it is unnecessary to say that the chief of the far-famed Shakesperian discoveries of Mr. Collier are of small value indeed; and Mr. Collier is generally understood to be one of the Athenaeum reviewers!’ Since the Athenaeum had only mentioned in passing ‘his present arguments con.’, and since their circulation was thus far limited to Halliwell’s subscribers, he obligingly reprinted the entire passage regarding the Bridgewater documents (Shakespeare, i:182–89; Curiosities, pp. 20–25). He then added an extract from his 1848 Life of Shakespeare regarding the letter of Joan Alleyn, whose exculpation of Collier from all charges save that of haste in transcription, he maintained, was ‘actuated . . . by the sincerest feelings of kindness’ (p. 26). Halliwell evidently did avail himself of Wright’s offer to sharpen his invective,34 and Curiosities, with its first widely broadcast exposure of any Collier forgery, was in circulation by the beginning of August.35 The Athenaeum, which had dismissed Observations (30 July, a catch-all review by John Bruce) as ‘a peevish pamphlet’ (‘the judgement displayed . . . is on a par with its logic’), turned a full column of its arsenal on this butterfly. T. K. Hervey (the recently retired editor-in-chief) termed it ‘one of the rarest displays of egotism that we remember to have seen perpetrated in print’, and offered a ‘grave rebuke’ to Halliwell’s charge that some interested party—namely, Collier or ‘his friend’—was respon-

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32. Undated letter, docketed ‘July 1853’ by JOH, LOA 43/21. 33. Wright, who received Halliwell’s Observations along with the proofs of Curiosities, predicted Collier’s discomfiture with delight: ‘you may depend [on it,] that review will do Collier mischief . . . . Have you sent a copy to Whittaker’s[?]’; undated letter docketed ‘July 1853’, LOA 43/22. 34. ‘I am going laboriously through your proofs, and doing what I can to put additional point in them’; Wright to JOH, LOA 43/22. Wright successfully urged Halliwell to omit a retaliatory reflection on the reviewer’s ‘grammatical errors’, in the interest of presenting ‘nothing but what is strong and telling’. 35. Antonio Panizzi thanked JOH for a copy on 6 August; LOA 50/65.


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sible for the offending review: ‘with a gentleman who can do this [i.e., imply ‘that the Athenaeum is lent to one of the parties in a literary question’] we decline further argument’. Halliwell, who maintained cordial relations with John Bruce over the next sixteen years, seems never to have realized who in fact had assassinated his Shakespeare. A er two ‘public’ pamphlets touching Collier and the Bridgewater documents, a private one might seem de trop, but Halliwell still possessed a stock of the facsimile ‘H. S.’ letter that he had cancelled from his folio Shakespeare. Having re-captioned it (‘Letter of H. S. mentioning Shakespeare, purporting to be from Lord Southampton, but believed to be a modern Forgery’), he issued it ‘for private circulation only’ with a brief text, largely replicating his earlier remarks, as Observations on the Shaksperian Forgeries at Bridgewater House (1853), the first title-page use of the term ‘forgeries’ in relation to Collier. The concluding paragraph, however, was suggestively new: ‘Only one record-reader, as far as I know, viz. the Rev. Joseph Hunter, has made a personal examination of these MSS. He has not yet expressed any opinion publicly, but I have reason to think that his views on the subject coincide with my own. It is clearly Mr. Collier’s duty, as a lover of truth, to have the originals carefully scrutinised by the best judges of the day.’ With that challenge Halliwell closed his case, and never again addressed the public on Collierian issues.

The Hillier Affair In January 1853 Sir Frederic Madden embarked on a brief but ill-starred programme of manuscript acquisition, from a vendor he later would call ‘one of the most dangerous and subtle . . . I have ever yet known’. This unattractive episode would not long detain us, save for its effect upon the relationship between Collier and Madden. George Hillier (1815–66), a record-researcher and antiquary from the Isle of Wight, became a reader of manuscripts at the British Museum late in 1849, where he formed a friendship with Madden’s gi ed but erratic assistant Richard Sims.36 Three years later Hillier began to offer manuscripts to Madden, and over a period of eighteen months (January 1853–June 1854) Madden purchased on behalf of the Museum one ‘roll’ (at £3, still unidentified) and some

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36. On Sims, who was arrested for debt in 1847, see Harris 1998, pp. 235–36. Sims eked out his income with semi-scholarly writing—for which, as trespassing on Museum time, he was rebuked by Ellis and Panizzi—and by transcribing documents for, among others, Sir Thomas Phillipps and Collier himself (Madden Diary, 3 August 1854). He was apparently Hillier’s agent in offering stolen Mostyn material to Phillipps in 1854 (Madden Diary, 10 October), yet he remained in Phillipps’s confidence four years later (Munby, Phillipps Studies, iv:74) and long survived Madden at the British Museum, serving from 1841 to 1887.


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forty charters and bundles of documents, for a total of £49 8s.; in July and September 1853 a large number of the loose papers were bound up in volumes, on the Keeper’s instructions. As Hillier had had access to various private muniment rooms in England and Wales, including the Mostyn Hall seat of Lord Mostyn, Madden was right to concern himself with the provenance of these offerings, but not cautious enough, at the outset, to reject them or demand evidence of their descent: scrupulosity about source and title was never a long suit among nineteenth-century acquisitors, institutional or private, as Collier and Devonshire (Kynge Johan) could themselves testify. So that while Madden continued to worry about Hillier’s Welsh charters (‘I hope they do not come from Mostyn’, he wrote in his diary on 7 November 1853), he went on purchasing them— cheaply enough—along with other independent sixteenth-century material. Indeed, Madden knew something of the Flintshire collections, for in mid-1851 he had examined a group of manuscripts belonging to Edward M. Lloyd-Mostyn, M.P., in which he had discovered the then-unknown play John a Kent and John a Cumber and borrowed it for Collier to edit for the Shakespeare Society.37 Madden did not, however, investigate further, until on 17 March 1854 Edward Mostyn himself—informed by a fellow M.P., H. W. W. Wynn of Peniarth, that Madden ‘had bought some Seals and Charters supposed to have come from his muniment room’—introduced himself at the Museum, and was shown ‘all that [Madden] had bought of Hillier, and also the lot of MSS. now offered for purchase, but not yet bought’.38 But Mostyn’s woolliness on this occasion scarcely settled the issue for Madden: although ‘he confidently expressed his conviction that some of the MSS. and Charters had been obtained from his muniment room’, Mostyn was ‘quite unable to identify any of them as being his (since, as he owned, he had a cartload of similar things)’, and he indeed thought it possible, as Hillier had asserted, that a local solicitor had accidentally retained or appropriated the lot; moreover, his parting injunction (‘he begged me to receive any others offered by Hillier for sale’) was impractical, to say the least, in terms of Museum procedure. Still, Madden appreciated that ‘Mr H. has been employed by Mr Mostyn confidentially in his muniment room for a long time’, and so ‘the case, as it stood, had an awkward appearance’. ‘I begin . . . to think that Mr Hillier is a great scoundrel, and quite in the Halliwell line’, Madden told himself, but three months later he purchased another manuscript for £4, ‘as I have heard nothing more from Lord Mostyn on the subject’, and therefore ‘thought I was justified in buying it’.39

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37. See Madden in N&Q, 26 July 1851, pp. 55–56. 38. Madden Diary, 17 March 1854. 39. Madden Diary, 17 March and 8 June 1854. E. M. L. Mostyn had succeeded his father as


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Here matters might well have rested, but Hillier foolishly challenged Madden himself over rumours from Flintshire that ‘some people have been offering things for sale at the British Museum taken from Mostyn’, and in what Madden deemed ‘bold and offensive’ terms he demanded an explanation.40 Characteristically, Madden reacted by taking umbrage (‘my suspicions . . . of Mr Hillier have increased rather than diminished’), and sensing as well the danger of a subsequent investigation, resolved ‘to try and get some private information on the subject’ (Diary, 6 October 1854). To that end he at once wrote several letters of inquiry, including one to Collier at Maidenhead, regarding a document ‘relative to an Association of the Members of Lincoln’s Inn for the defence of Q. Elizabeth, signed by ‘‘Tho. Egerton’’, Solicitor General, and many more’. Collier’s reply of 9 October reached Madden ‘whilst I was at dinner . . . and on reading it, I felt as if I had received an electric shock!’ For (as John pointed out, no doubt with some satisfaction) Madden ought well to have consulted Collier’s Egerton Papers (1840), where the full text, transcribed from the Bridgewater archives, appeared on pp. 108–11. Now Madden did so, becoming ‘convinced’ that other documents purchased from Hillier in September 1853 were Ellesmere’s as well,41 ‘so it would appear, that this hypocritical rascal has played the same game in regard to the Ellesmere Muniments as he has done with the Mostyn archives!’ He at once asked Collier to call in to examine the whole lot of Hillier purchases, soliciting ‘your advice how to communicate with Lord Ellesmere’ (Madden to Collier, 10 October), and even before Collier could visit he quizzed Hillier urgently, received a sequence of evasive replies, and a er consultation with Thomas Butler, the secretary of the Museum, suspended the suspect’s reading privileges. On 12 October Madden and Collier spent two hours going over the relevant manuscripts—now all in Museum bindings—and between them identified five that Madden ‘suspected’, and John was ‘morally certain’, were Ellesmere’s: furthermore, ‘Mr Collier is, fortunately, enabled to swear’ that Add. MS 19,632 was at Bridgewater House in 1839, as it appears in the Egerton Papers (pp. 437– 41), and ‘there still remains on it his own private mark, which he made, a er he had transcribed it’.42 While no doubt embarrassed, Madden was also plainly re-

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second Baron on 3 April, less than three weeks aer his visit to the Museum: obviously there was more then on his mind than the local ‘inquiries about the Papers’ he had promised to make. 40. Hillier to Madden, 5 October 1854. Hillier’s letter is preserved in Madden’s file of notes and correspondence concerning the affair (Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 541–610), the source of all otherwise-unattributed quotations below. Many of the documents were printed by A. S. G. Edwards (1978), the best published account of the episode. Frederick Hockey’s article appeared almost simultaneously (1977), with further biographical information about Hillier. 41. Add. MSS 19,631–32 and 19,641: see Edwards 1978, pp. 209–10 and n. 9. 42. Madden’s ‘Memoranda of Business’ (BL Add. MS 62,010, fol. 44r) and Diary, both 12 October 1854.


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lieved to find so clear a case made against Hillier, who might—like Halliwell— take legal steps against unproven charges, and who had already attempted to pass off the matter as the result of an accident to his shelves, when ‘two boxes of Papers the property of Lord E.’ had become ‘mingled’ with his own. This claim Madden found incredible, and he shared his indignation with Collier, who was delegated to approach Ellesmere; Madden himself kept Sir Henry Ellis closely informed, and Ellis approved of his actions so far. But at this point Hillier’s original victims proved less than vitally concerned. Mostyn’s solicitor, whom Madden visited on 13 October, ‘treated the matter lightly’, saying that ‘he thought the MSS. were much safer in the B.M.’, and that ‘Lord M. could not possibly identify them’; he was unwilling to question the integrity of any former employee (Hillier deliberately being unnamed), and thought that ‘if the MSS. ever belonged to Mostyn, they were lost long ago’. Madden concluded that ‘there is an end to this part of the transaction . . . Requiescat in pace’, and while the Museum’s title ‘it seems, is not to be questioned’, he remained convinced ‘that Mr H. obtained the Papers & Charters by unfair means’: ‘I wish Lord M. would send me all the rest of his Papers!’ (Diary, 13 October). Nor was Ellesmere at this time any more helpful: he had never heard of Hillier, and could not say that he had shown any such material to anyone since Collier himself. ‘Strange indeed!’, Madden reflected.43 There again matters might have rested, but neither Collier nor Madden would abandon the investigation, Madden in particular worrying about the possible complicity of his assistant Sims (Diary, 21, 23, and 24 October); and finally Ellesmere remembered having lent a box of loose Bridgewater manuscripts to a Mr. Dendy, secretary to the Earl Marshall, who—it transpired—had entrusted a portion of them to Hillier, without Ellesmere’s knowledge. Collier brought in this box on 7 November, and Madden recognized two manuscripts in it that Hillier had shown him in May 1853; at the same time John re-examined the papers in Add. MS 19,641, and confirmed the presence there of ‘a series of numbers in pencil made by himself when they were in the possession of Lord Ellesmere’. Madden was once more convinced, both of the abstraction and of the true title: ‘Of course, this amounts to legal proof of ownership’ (Diary, 7 November). The Museum trustees, however, to whom Madden reported at length, reacted with caution bordering on truculence, perhaps mindful of some barbs from Ellesmere during the Royal Commission hearings. Much as they had done with Trinity College over Halliwell’s manuscripts, they sought to shi the burden of prosecution onto the victim of the the , saying that the manuscripts

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43. Ellesmere to JPC, 16 October, forwarded by Collier to Madden; Madden Diary, 17 October 1854.


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‘would not be given up, unless a prosecution [by Ellesmere] & conviction had previously taken place’ (Madden Diary, 14 November). This response hardly sat well with Ellesmere, who had expected cooperation; nor with Collier, who told Madden bluntly that ‘were the case my own, I should not hesitate in applying at Bow Street for a search warrant. . . . It would be an odd exhibition to see Mr Hillier at the bar of the Old Bailey, as the thief, and the Trustees, at his side, as the receivers of stolen goods. It strikes me, but I do not presume to give any opinion, that when the Trustees know (as they must) that they are in possession of stolen goods, they ought at once to do all in their power to set themselves right with Lord Ellesmere and the public. If I am not mistaken, they will next hear from Lord Ellesmere’s Solicitor’ (letter, 15 November 1854). Although Madden considered this letter to be ‘evidently written with angry feelings’ (Diary, 16 November), these were presumably ‘on account of the letter of the Trustees to Lord E.’, and not toward Madden, who had represented the case fairly in a long memorandum, and never thought of distraining Ellesmere’s family papers. John called in the same day with a further note from Ellesmere, who would ‘hold no further communication with the Trustees’ save through his solicitors; but in late November Ellesmere did write to Sir David Dundas (a trustee) with the novel allegation—Madden recorded, outraged—‘that subsequent to the discovery I had caused the MSS. to be bound, in order that the marks might be obliterated, by which the Papers could be identified!’ At this point Madden felt himself personally challenged, and suspected, perhaps with good reason, his former comrade-in-arms: ‘I feel extremely surprised and indignant at such an insinuation, which whether it comes from Mr J. P. Collier or from Lord Ellesmere himself, I utterly repel and deny. If either of them has really said I had any such intention, I say He lies! ’ (Diary, 28 November). He exhibited to Dundas the departmental binder’s book, which showed that the four volumes now thought to contain Ellesmere’s papers had been sent by Madden for binding in mid-October 1853 and late March 1854, nearly six months before the tell-tale annotations on the documents were identified—and in fact never ‘obliterated’. Dundas was satisfied, agreeing to transmit ‘the facts’ to Lord Ellesmere, and Madden calmed down; he made no further diary reference to the slight, or to Collier’s suspected part in it, until a er the case was resolved. Then, meeting Collier as usual in the Museum, ‘I told him plainly my mind in regard to the insinuations made by Lord E. as to our taking the marks out of his MSS. He said [that this] could not have been meant seriously.’ 44

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44. Madden Diary, 18 January 1855. Ganzel’s elevation of this episode to a ‘crime’ (obliteration of the provenance was ‘precisely what [Madden] intended’; he ‘carefully kept the trustees from knowing the whole story’ and ‘embarrassed [them] and condemned himself ’), and of Madden’s temporary resentment of Ellesmere or Collier to ‘hatred’ and ‘bitterness . . . unbounded’, leading


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Ellesmere’s solicitors soon concluded that any prosecution of Hillier on the available evidence would fail, and on Ellesmere’s instruction took a suddenly firm line, threatening legal action if the manuscripts were not released within one week. ‘This is certainly bringing [the] matter to a crisis’, wrote Madden (Diary, 20 December), his tone almost admiring;45 and two days later Sir David Dundas confirmed that the trustees would probably capitulate: ‘I confess’, Madden noted, ‘I do not see how, under the circumstances, they can act otherwise.’ In January the Attorney General and Solicitor General gave their ‘decided opinion, that in case of an action being brought by Lord Ellesmere against the Trustees . . . the Trustees would have no ground of defence’ (Diary, 6 January), but that Hillier could himself be prosecuted if the trustees chose to proceed. The trustees, however, grudgingly as always, voted to give Ellesmere back his own property—still in Museum bindings 46—and to Madden’s disappointment forbore to pursue Hillier.47 him to ‘nurture revenge’ (pp. 187–88), is perhaps the most astounding tissue of misrepresentations in his book. When in March 1856 Madden was passed over (inevitably) and Panizzi was named Principal Librarian, nothing in Madden’s well-packed diary suggests that he connected his loss of the post with Collier, or Ellesmere, or the Hillier affair. He wears his heart on his sleeve in these private pages, and evidence ab silentio is almost always significant—especially when resentment is involved. Madden’s only references to Collier immediately aer this period are to his being ‘very touchy, if found fault with’, apropos the ‘slovenly’ editing of the Trevelyan Papers— scarcely a new or aggravated slur—and to Collier’s ultimately helpful intercession in the sale to the Museum of the Bentinck correspondence, by Tycho Mommsen (Diary, 27 March, 6 September, 6–9 October, and 10 November 1857). In September 1858 Collier presented Madden with his facsimile of the Devonshire 1603 Hamlet; Madden thanked him, and a day later recommended him as an authority on Shakespearian holograph (Diary, 6–7 September), though continuing to lament Collier’s ‘habitual inaccuracies’ in transcribing: ‘what a sad thing it is, to find a man who has printed so much from MSS. yet who is incapable of writing a dozen lines from a MS. without almost as many faults!’ (15 September). These professional complaints reflect, if anything, no personal animosity such as Madden’s for the ‘rascal’ Hillier, the ‘scoundrel’ Halliwell, or that ‘cursed fellow’ Panizzi. 45. Madden clearly considered the strategy of the trustees all but indefensible (‘how far the Trustees are justified in withholding the MSS. aer H.’s avowal that they belonged to Lord E. the lawyers must decide’: Diary, 14 November), and he freely showed Harding, the Museum’s solicitor, all his correspondence with Hillier and Collier, and ‘pointed out [on the documents] the marks made by Mr Collier’ (13 December). 46. Voting to do so on 13 January, instructing Madden to draw up the list, and effecting the return on 30 January. 47. For the later career of Hillier, who ‘had, in some ways, the last word in the affair’ (Edwards 1978, p. 215), see Hockey 1977, pp. 26–28. He never repaid the Museum; he retained the patronage of Lord Mostyn and access to his muniments; but his reader’s privileges, aer several applications and even a threatened lawsuit against Madden personally (March 1855: Madden almost welcomed the prospect, as ‘the whole case shall come out, please God!’), were never restored, and his History and Antiquities of the Isle of Wight, perhaps for this reason, was never completed. He retired from London in December 1856, having ‘decamped under very odd circumstances’ in the middle of the


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By 16 January Madden considered that ‘my part of this business is now at an end’, yet there remained one sting in its tail. Peter Cunningham, seeking copy for the Illustrated London News, begged Collier to ‘send me the story about the Ellesmere MSS.’, adding, perhaps with a wink between old journalist conspirators, ‘I will use it in such a way as will give no offence’.48 The result, printed on 24 February, did precisely that, at least to the ultra-sensitive Keeper, who summed it up thus: In the Illustrated News of today is a nasty paragraph (apparently written by Collier) relative to the MSS. bought of Mr Hillier, and restored to Lord Ellesmere. The writer states, that the person who bought the MSS. (i.e., myself) ought to have known they had been printed!! What are the facts. Out of a mass of miscellaneous Papers (now bound in three volumes) one paper of a single leaf, and one Document on parchment, were printed in 1840 in a thick 4to volume, containing 485 pages of miscellaneous documents and papers. Could Mr Collier, or Mr anyone else have carried in his memory the contents of this Camden volume, fi een years a er it was published? I deny it. Add to this, I never had read the volume, but merely turned over the leaves when it came to me in 1840. But Mr C. who is, apparently, so ready to accuse me of want of memory, is so forgetful himself, that he cannot actually say whether the Document he copied from in Lord E.’s collection, & printed for the Camden Society, was on parchment or paper. Here is a fine memory! and yet I am to recollect the contents of a volume of [blank] pages, so as, at a moment’s notice, to recall every page to my mind. It is scandalously unjust!! In December 1853 the beleaguered Shakespeare Society followed the Percy Society into dissolution, ending an era of antiquarian reprinting.49 For all of its thirteen years Collier had served as director and editorial lynchpin, with twenty-one of its forty-eight book-length titles to his personal credit, and nearly half of its ninety-two critical ‘papers’, to say nothing of contributions to other men’s projects, achieved or abandoned. So ended as well, insofar as the society had provided them, John’s professional ties with contemporary editors Halliwell, Dyce, Laing, Cunningham, and Durrant Cooper, and—among those deceased whose work he perpetuated—Amyot and Field. So too, perhaps unlamentedly, his conflicts with elected council members, rare though they seem

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night, aer ensuring that his landlord was drunk (Thomas Wright to Joseph Mayer of Liverpool, 20 February 1857, BL Add. MS 33,346, fols. 120–21). Hillier died at Ryde, Isle of Wight, in 1866; his short biography in DNB does not mention the Museum affair. 48. Cunningham to JPC, 20 February 1855, Folger MS Y.d.6 (40). 49. HCR Diary, 16 February 1854, referring to the break-up of the society ‘at Christmas’.


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to have been, and his subjection to the complaints of the rank-and-file participants, even such as Madden or Hunter or Robinson. In the end the society fell victim to a dwindling and dilatory membership (of the 451 subscribers on the books in April 1851 only 126 were paid up) and unmanageable debts for paper and printing, hardly relieved by the Chandos Portrait debacle, the Shakespeare birthplace fund-raising, or the failure to elicit a subscribers’ premium for the Heywood series of 1850–51. Frederick Shoberl the younger, an unsung hero of the society’s later years, had indulgently tolerated a long-overdue printing account, but he died leaving debts in March 1852, followed by his father in March 1853. The Shoberl executors, John recalled six years later, ‘required immediate payment of what the members owed’, and having no way to pursue outstanding subscriptions, ‘we therefore sold our stock, paid them, and there was an end of the affair’.50 The last volume produced by the Shakespeare Society—following the special issue of Collier’s Notes and Emendations, which may actually have yielded some profit—was David Laing’s edition of three tracts by Thomas Lodge, including the hitherto-unprocurable copy of The Defence of Stage Plays sequestered by William Miller at Britwell Court since the Heber dispersal. Laing’s access to the Miller library, which Collier could certainly never have obtained, led him ‘somewhat incautiously’ to edit the collection himself, ‘instead of leaving it wholly in the more competent hands of Mr. Payne Collier, a gentleman to whom the Society is under such manifold obligations; but with his friendly assistance, the task has not proved very arduous’ (p. vi): a generous acknowledgement, and an appropriate valediction. Now reduced to just two non-remunerative publishing sodalities, the Society of Antiquaries and the Camden Society, Collier might well draw a breath.51 To the latter the Trevelyan Papers had been committed since mid-1850, but although John was ‘devot[ing] my time almost exclusively’ to this tortured project in November 1851, ‘Perkins’ of course intervened, and he did little if anything more with the archive until mid-1853, when yet again he claimed to be ‘solely engaged’ on Trevelyan family history.52 The first tangible evidence of that is a thirty-four-page foolscap dra forwarded to Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan in October, covering events through 1500, followed by a section up to about 1539 sent in January 1854; in the event John’s laborious biographical essay was never

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50. JPC to W. Wardlaw Reid, 19 March 1859, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (158). The stock was sold at Puttick and Simpson’s on 29 March 1854, bringing just over £450. Extra titles were printed and supplied gratis to the purchasers ‘to enable the classification of two or more volumes on cognate subjects, and to save expense in binding’, and many uniformly rebound sets of the society’s publications undoubtedly date from this period. 51. The Camden still supplied him with a useful annual stipend of fiy guineas as treasurer. 52. JPC to CET, 5 July 1853, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34.


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to be published in his own words. Both Sir Walter and his cousin Sir Charles expressed their approval and gratitude, however, and in June Collier received authorization from the Council of the Camden Society to ‘proceed to press . . . at his convenience’. Late in November Sir Walter heard that ‘the first sheet of the body of the volume of ‘‘Trevelyan Papers’’ has been set up, & is now before me’; this consisted of documentary transcripts, the family history having been either postponed or abandoned.53 But although proofs continued to emanate from Nichols, the society’s printer, in 1856 progress was yet again arrested by Perkins-related activities, as well as by the cousins’ stop-press desire to incorporate more documents than Collier had chosen, some of them in the Public Record Office. Thomas Duffus Hardy, no slapdash amanuensis, was engaged to transcribe and annotate the latter, and by now the editorial procedure had become maddeningly cumbersome. For two years (1855 and 1856) the four correspondents in London, Maidenhead, and Somerset exchanged further polite but minute and revisionary suggestions, and even in 1857 private matters—the last illness and death of Mary Louisa—and the a erthoughts of Sir Walter conspired to delay what seemed imminent publication. In or away from London, John remained dedicated to the Society of Antiquaries. A vice-president since April 1849, he chaired fi y-one meetings over the next seven years, and between 1848 and 1856 presented a dozen or more papers, long and short, to the membership. His generosity to the society’s library was not unremarkable: aside from his own publications, he donated a number of significant broadsides, beginning in May 1852 with the ‘Bull of Pope Innocent VII’ that he had published in 1847.54 In the same month he gave seventeen proclamations (dated 1591–1713) not already in the society’s collections, and in February 1854 added the proclamation of James I regarding the fire of July 1614 at Stratford-upon-Avon (STC 8541), of which only one other copy is now recorded. In 1853, despite what he considered lukewarm appreciation,55 he presented at least seven more early specimens,56 two in verse (including Wing D 1724, two

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53. JPC to WCT, 3 October 1853 and 18 January 1854; CET to JPC, 16 January 1854; JPC to WCT, 10 and 26 October and 26 November 1854 (all Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34 and WCT 35); Camden Society minute books. 54. This is STC 14096 (1486), and the printer is not Caxton, as Collier thought, but William de Machlinia; only two other copies are now known. 55. In a late manuscript account (Folger MS Y.d.612) he remarked: ‘Had our Society deemed this gi [of the Innocent VII bull] and others of the same description worthy of any but the most formal acknowledgement, [I] was prepared to have added to the library many other ancient broadsides both in verse and prose’. 56. Robert Lemon dated the gi of seven broadsides to 1853; two other undated donations (nos. 551 and 608) were probably also of the same year.


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copies recorded), and in March 1854 a group of fi een undated pictorial broadsides, hand-coloured, which ‘have lately been rescued from destruction, on the pulling down of an old mansion in Berkshire’—perhaps near Maidenhead— ‘[where] they were made the decorations of the kitchen and servants’ hall’.57 Finally, also in 1854, he added a unique ballad by Matthew Rhodes on the collapse of the Blackfriars gatehouse in 1623, for which fellow collectors would no doubt have paid a good price.58 Collier’s interest in the society’s ballad collection, which had supplied him with text for both use and misuse, led its first serious cataloguer to consult him in 1854 regarding what would eventually serve as the standard handlist.59 Robert Lemon the younger (1800–67), chief editor of the Calendars of State Papers and a veteran of the State Paper Office itself, remained John’s ‘great friend’ and ‘thick-and-thin supporter’ in the last stages of the Perkins investigation,60 so John’s somewhat patronizing response to his critical designs must not now have offended him. John acknowledged the demands of the project (‘I am very glad that the task of arranging those [ballads] of the Society has fallen into your hands, instead of mine’) and congratulated Lemon on the bare bones of his compilation, but stopped short of approving his ‘Introductory Remarks’—a proposed full-scale essay on ballad history, twenty-four pages of which Lemon had submitted in dra in April 1854. Asserting his own authority in no uncertain terms (‘my acquaintance with such matters is very ancient, general & extensive’), he alerted Lemon to ‘some works which you seem not to have consulted, & which, I apprehend, you should look at’, and inserted ‘a few pencil-notes regarding them in your margin, which you can rub out easily’—but which in fact le much to be re-worked or altered. He himself, Collier declared, ‘should not have taken the trouble you have done in writing an Introduction’, which ‘at the rate at which you have begun . . . when printed must make a volume’, and he doubted that the society would approve it ‘so much at large; especially with the quotations from the original ballads in their own library, and to which any body may refer’.61 Whether or not Collier’s discouraging response stemmed from ter-

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57. Collier described these survivals in detail in a brief paper delivered on 30 March 1854 (Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, 3 [1853–56], pp. 86–89); Lemon (nos. 640–54) thought them all ca. 1750. 58. STC 20961.5, Lemon no. 205, the rarest of the ‘Fatal Vespers’ ephemera: see Arthur Freeman 1978, pp. 75 and 84; and T. H. B. M. Harmsen’s edition of John Gee’s Foot out of the Snare (1624) (Nijmegen, 1992), pp. 84–85. 59. Catalogue of a Collection of Printed Broadsides in the Possession of the Society of Antiquaries of London (1866). 60. He was so described by W. S. W. Vaux in the Critic, 25 February 1860, p. 230. 61. JPC to Lemon, 26 and 29 April 1854, the latter reiterating that ‘in my opinion some of your quotations are hardly required, in as much as the ballads &c. are in the Library to speak for


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ritorial jealousy, Lemon seems to have heeded his friend’s warning: no more survives of his attempt to weave the evidence of the society’s ballad collection into an extended historical essay, which perhaps—as John may have hinted— he was a er all ill-equipped to furnish. When his Catalogue finally appeared in 1866 Lemon was ill, and one year from death, and although ‘it was hoped that he would have consummated his work by prefixing an Introduction’, the brief anonymous preface records only that ‘some present infirmities have interfered with his accomplishment in this respect of his meditated design’ (p. v). Collier’s zeal in Society of Antiquaries affairs extended, inevitably, to Archaeologia, the formal repository of ‘papers’ addressed to its membership; and here he effectively undid what good he had done the society elsewhere. In 1851, as we have seen, he revived the faked Churchyard verses of his youth, and aired an audacious fabrication concerning Sir Walter Ralegh. In December 1852 he communicated a notice of three minor Shakespearian discoveries, which the secretary read in his absence,62 so that he was spared the need to display a mid-sixteenth-century letter ‘very recently fallen in my way’, from one Rychard Cockes ‘to the right worshipfull Lady Lucy at Saynt Giles-in-the-Feld, beside London’, bearing on the old biographical crux of a deer park at Charlecote. This fabrication—for such it certainly is—once again involved serious risk-taking, for the teasing abundance of circumstantial detail (names of local personalities, relations, dates, and observation of church holidays) all but courted historical contradiction, and no doubt some of John’s colleagues in the society could have provided just that.63 In June 1853 and March 1854 he read two further papers on

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themselves’, and that the society, for whom the expense of 8d. in postage-stamps (which Lemon had asked Collier to restore) was ‘a large item in the Account of the Treasurer’, would certainly bridle at the cost of printing Lemon’s essay; both letters, Lemon’s dra (annotated by Collier), and other notes by Lemon toward his projected ‘Introductory Remarks’ are in our collection (FF MSS 248–49 and 349). 62. Collier was at Torquay, helping to care for his consumptive daughters. 63. Samuel Schoenbaum (1971) reprinted the Archaeologia text and rejected ‘the engagingly rustical, if somewhat rambling, epistle’, which he characterized as ‘no jeu d’esprit’, but a conscious effort to refute Malone’s ‘powerful assault on the deer-poaching tradition’; Schoenbaum’s evidence against it, however, was merely that Collier ‘with more than customary prudence’ indicated no provenance for the document, which ‘needless to say . . . has not surfaced again’, and that he did not reprise its contents in his 1858 Shakespeare (or elsewhere). Some of the phraseology may seem self-convicting, but the least credible internal detail is Cockes’s account of ‘the hay making’ at Charlecote: this was supposed to have been interrupted by two consecutive religious holidays (‘the translacyon of Saynt Leonard and the dedication day’) following a Sunday, so that the vital and weather-sensitive operation was suspended, on the authority of the local church of Saint Leonard’s, for three consecutive days in mid-summer. Even more unlikely, perhaps, is the conjunction of Collier’s date of the letter (Cockes wrote only ‘the eve of Saynt John day’, somewhat preceding ‘Saynt Thomas day’, which calls for a remarkable local re-orientation of saints’ days


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Sir Walter Ralegh, the earlier meant to round off his 1851 series of biographical novelties, in which he again mingled true with false testimony: the signature of the incarcerated Ralegh (‘W. Ralegh. Turr. Lond.’) in a copy of Robert Gray’s A Good Speed to Virginia (1609, described as ‘one of the most interesting literary relics I possess’) is now condemned as a physical forgery (see QD A114.1), and twenty-four lines of verse, which John claimed to have transcribed from ‘a manuscript in the library of the late Mr. Heber’, are likewise highly suspect. The initial extract, figuring ‘the summer’s nightingale, / Immortal Cynthia’s sometime dear delight’, now become ‘an owl . . . hated of all’, which ‘swanlike now . . . make[s] his dying moan’, was explained by Collier as alluding (with ‘poignancy increased’) to Spenser’s epithet of 1596,64 while the second (‘well worth quoting’) was offered as illustrating the comparative indifference with which contemporaries regarded Ralegh’s execution. The entire poem was said only to be hitherto unpublished, and the Heber manuscript, ‘which contained several poems, of great severity and considerable coarseness, against Ralegh a er his fatal voyage to Guiana’, has never been heard of again. Collier’s last paper on Ralegh, and on the rivalry between Sir Francis Vere and the young Earl of Northumberland, presented two new—and genuine— documents from the Ellesmere archives. Also trustworthy are the accounts of two texts from a manuscript prepared for Sir Christopher Hatton, which Collier possessed.65 The particular appeal of the first is a cautionary reference by Thomas Norton, the co-author of Gorboduc, to ‘that unnecessary, and scarcely honest, resort to plays . . . and especially the assemblies to the unchaste, shameless, and unnatural tumbling of the Italian women’: ironically, considering the widespread credit given Collier’s fiction about French actresses on the London stage in 1629, this genuine reference to female performers in public in Lon-

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in July or August) as ‘shortly before Elizabeth ascended the throne’, with the Lucys themselves— ‘Lady Lucy’ (who Collier declared ‘was then a widow’) and Cockes’s ‘master’, described by Collier as ‘probably the Mr. Thomas Lucy, who was aerwards knighted, and whose deer Shakespeare and his young friends were charged with stealing’. For there was no Lady Lucy at Charlecote or elsewhere between the death of Thomas’s grandmother in 1530 and his own knighthood of 1565. Before 1551 Charlecote was merely a small, somewhat run-down family house, nothing like the rebuilt Elizabethan manor with its outlying estates; and there is no conceivable explanation for Sir Thomas’s wife’s presence in what was then a suburb of London, receiving administrative and financial details of Charlecote—where Sir Thomas remained very much in control—aer 1565; cf. Fairfax-Lucy 1958. 64. In one of the dedicatory sonnets of The Second Part of the Faerie Queene, written to Ralegh as ‘the sommers Nightingale’. 65. Read on 25 March 1855 and 6 March 1856. These were published in full by Collier in 1866 (A147); the MS was purchased in his sale by the British Museum (lot 996) and is now Add. MS 32,379.


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don about 1574 has passed largely unnoted.66 Finally, a report of an interesting volume of Henrician accounts, addressed to Peter Cunningham and read on 7 December 1854,67 is unexceptionable, save for a gratuitous assertion at the very end—that John Leland, the antiquary, had been imprisoned in the King’s Bench a er revealing ‘certen grevous poyntes of great treason comytted by a Knyght now yn England’. This biographical detail—otherwise unknown, and indeed impossible in terms of Leland’s career before 1530—derived from a petition that Collier had published in 1849 (not in Archaeologia, as he stated, but in the society’s more informal Proceedings), in which one John Leyland begged Cardinal Wolsey to procure his release. John claimed in 1849 to have found this ‘whilst turning over the portfolio of an intelligent friend’, and to have ‘easily’ recognized the autograph endorsement in Wolsey’s hand, but ‘being unacquainted with Leland’s actual hand-writing’ to have reserved judgement on ‘whether the above Letter were really by the great antiquary or by some member of his family’. By 1854 the identification seemed certain to Collier, but the petition and the event go unmentioned by modern biographers of Leland,68 and we might well have supposed both imaginary. Yet the letter exists (item 7 in BL Egerton MS 2602, from the Frederic Ouvry sale, lot 1082)—it merely relates to a different John Leyland, whose hand in no way resembles his namesake’s. It seems hard to believe that no one among John’s fellow antiquaries of London, Oxford, Cambridge, and beyond—historians in particular—cast a sceptical eye on his papers in Archaeologia. The extravagance of some of the impositions may suggest serene (or purblind) overconfidence on John’s part in the first Perkins years, but while so rarefied a publishing venue might escape the attentions of Shakespearian zealots, his audience would certainly have included Singer, Hunter, Halliwell, and Wright, if not non-fellows Dyce, Knight, Brae, Ingleby, and Madden, the last of whom had resigned from the society in 1845. On 23 April 1856 Collier’s term as vice-president ended, by the new rules of rotation, and his nephew by marriage Frederic Ouvry excused the conduct of Lord Stanhope, in not publicly adverting to John’s long service and retirement, as a practical constraint.69 But while there survives no evidence of any formal

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66. E. K. Chambers mentioned it twice (ES, i:282 and ii:262), without citing Collier or Archaeologia. 67. A transcript of ‘The King’s Boke of Payments’ (1528–31) by Brian Tuke, Treasurer of the King’s Chamber, then in the Trevelyan archive and later presented to the PRO by Sir Walter Trevelyan (see Trevelyan Papers [1857], i:vi; and Letters and Papers of Henry VIII [1880], v:303–26, giving lengthy extracts). 68. See John Chandler, ed., John Leland’s Itinerary (Stroud, 1993), pp. xi–xii, with references to earlier studies. 69. Collier must have enquired or complained, for Ouvry explained in detail what he conjectured to be Lord Stanhope’s reasons for the perceived snub: Ouvry to JPC, undated but soon aer


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ri between Collier and the Society of Antiquaries, nor any attempt on the part of his colleagues to curb or audit his contributions to Archaeologia, a er that date he published no papers; and until 1873, when he presented one last broadside to the society’s library, his name never appears in the Proceedings as donor, correspondent, participant in meetings, or officer. Apart from his contributions to Archaeologia, John’s periodical publications of 1852–56 declined, numerically, as abruptly as they has risen in 1849–51. While Notes and Queries remained a favourite venue for Perkins-related Shakespeariana, and later Coleridgeana,70 John Bruce le the Gentleman’s Magazine in about January 1852, and Collier’s brief career there was over. For the Athenaeum he continued to review intensively in 1852 (twenty-seven items), but his output shrank each year almost precisely by halves (thirteen in 1853, six in 1854, three in 1855), until there were no reviews at all in 1856, and only one each in 1857 and 1858. Whether this tailing-off reflected editorial policy or John’s own selectiveness we cannot tell: the 1852 bumper crop ranged from near- and far-Eastern literature and folklore to British topography, archaeology, and philology, with only a few assignments squarely in John’s field of expertise. Among the latter he was predictably kind to John Nichols and the Camden Society (5 June 1852), hard on Thomas Wright (17 July 1852) and the neophyte editor of Chettle’s tragedy Hoffman,71 and cautiously favourable to William Bell’s blending of folklore and historical criticism in Shakespeare’s Puck (2 October 1852). He half-praised the final two publications of the Percy Society, W. H. Black’s Interlude of John Bon and Mast Person (24 July 1852) and T. C. Croker’s edition of a William Browne manuscript (15 May 1852), but scored off the latter (and Croker’s adviser, James Orchard Halliwell) for providing just nine ‘merely ver-

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23 April 1856, FF/K MS 638. A particular irritation for Collier may have been that his effective replacement in the vice-presidential rotation was the Rev. Joseph Hunter. 70. Three other N&Q contributions in this period offer a record of the stationer Thomas Woodcock, from the Lansdowne MSS at the British Museum (3 January 1852); an account of Collier’s unique printed fragment of the early ballad Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudesly (7 May 1853); and a notice, by way of query, of a letter from Edmund Anderson to Sir Francis Bacon, also in the British Museum (7 July 1855). 71. 18 September 1852: Collier professed ignorance of the identity of ‘H. B. L.’ (i.e., H. B. Lennard), presuming him to be ‘a young man as well as a young editor’, although, having apparently corresponded with him briefly, he must have known once. Lennard, of whom nothing else of this sort survives, thanked Dyce for having ‘materially assisted him in his endeavours to restore the text’, which is particularly erratic, and Collier guessed that Dyce, with his famous conservatism, might wish ‘to withdraw his approbation’ from some aspects of the finished product. Some of Lennard’s errors may stem from the fact that his copy-text ‘had the inner forme of F and both formes of G in the uncorrected state’; Harold Jenkins, Malone Society edition of Hoffman (Oxford, 1950), p. viii.


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bal’ notes, which ‘would occupy only a single page had they not, by the skill of the printer, been ingeniously extended over two pages’. He considered The Household of Sir Thomas More, a fictional diary of Margaret More Roper, to be ‘clever and agreeable reading’, but found its language anachronistic, like that of its model, Lady Willoughby’s Diary, and judged its writer—here authority spoke indeed—‘no adept at this species of literary masquerading’ (17 January 1852). He welcomed J. G. Bell’s new project of reprinting Tracts on British Topography, History, Dialects, &c. (4 September 1852), but questioned some of the choices, and calculated, again from considerable experience, that Bell ought to ‘realize a considerable profit’ from furnishing between twenty and forty per year to subscribers. And in noticing at some length (3 July 1852) Joseph Hunter’s The Great Hero of the Minstrelsy of England, a pioneering if dubious attempt to ‘historicize’ Robin Hood, John indulged in the sort of playfully ironic complimentcum-censure that might well infuriate his old adversary: Hunter’s ‘pamphlet’ was ‘learned, elaborate, and ingenious’, affording ‘considerable amusement and instruction’, but as scholarly argument it did not ‘in the smallest degree convince us on any of the points which the reverend author endeavors to establish’. Nonetheless ‘we cannot help admiring the skill with which, having taken up an improbable, if not an impossible, position, he appropriates to his purpose everything that comes within his reach, and contrives to twist into the shape that best suits his wishes apparently intractable materials. . . . He is perhaps the first writer of historical tracts who has been ready to ‘‘swear to the truth of a song’’ ’. In passing, John offered two emendations to correct compositors’ ‘blunders’ in the text of A Lyttel Geste of Robyn Hode, neither of which seems necessary or persuasive,72 but which served to show that Hunter drew his text, slavishly, from Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood (1795, 1832). In the mid-1850s Collier’s rarer, more specialized reviews could properly demolish a silly performance, like Hastings Elwin’s edition of Macbeth with ponderous annotation and abject reliance on Folio lineation (Shakespeare Restored, reviewed 21 January 1854), or Charles Whitehead’s meretricious biography of Sir Walter Ralegh (16 September 1854). Collier’s account of the latter book, by a poet and playwright and a friend of Charles Dickens, is deservedly devastating, although his principal complaint centres on Whitehead’s ignorance of the five Archaeologia papers of 1851–54. In documenting this fault John recycled, for a more popular audience, their main novelties—including the faked gossiping letter that adds ‘Like to a hermit poore’ to Ralegh’s poetical canon, and the ‘remarkable stanzas . . . copied from a manuscript of the time in the library of the

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72. They are of one word each in stanzas 355 and 442 (Child iii:73 and 77). Hunter’s biographical theses are discussed—and largely rejected—by J. C. Holt (1989, pp. 45 ff.).


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late Mr. Heber’, which he professed himself to have ‘met with’ only by consulting that journal, ‘in which matters of historical and individual importance have not been o en treated’.

The Roxburghe Club Drayton Regardless of the ongoing challenges mounted against his Folio Shakespeare, or in conscious defiance of all hostile criticism, Collier in the mid-1850s undertook one new editorial project based partly upon a ‘contemporary’ annotated text; and he at least contemplated a second. Following up his series of articles on Michael Drayton in the Gentleman’s Magazine, he engaged to prepare a collection of Drayton’s shorter verse for the Roxburghe Club, as an unsponsored volume, for a gentlemanly but not insignificant fee.73 As with Five Old Plays John may himself have proposed the idea: on 27 June 1855 the club agreed to proceed, with Beriah Botfield again delegated to liaise with the editor. John’s work progressed smoothly in 1855–56, his task facilitated by the presence of rarities on his own shelves (Idea [1593], Endimion and Phoebe [1595], and Poems [1605]). Bolton Corney lent a fourth volume (Poems Lyric and Pastoral [1606?]), James Christie provided the Britwell copy (ex-Heber) of Idea’s Mirror (1594), and two or three more could be consulted at the British Museum.74 By mid-March 1856 he was ‘drawing towards the close’ of the work, and on 21 June copies, handsomely printed in quarto by J. G. Nichols, were ready for members. By now John had been paid £50, and would later receive an additional £62 13s. 6d., perhaps in part reflecting out-of-pocket expenses.75 Collier’s 1856 Drayton is a substantial and competent performance, which though costly and scarce by design remained the only edited version of most of Drayton’s lyric verse—apart from Collier’s own later reprints of two individual volumes—until the mid-twentieth century. ‘I think I rather over-annotated my Drayton for the Roxb. Club’, Collier told W. C. Hazlitt in 1865. ‘They put no limit upon me, and I wanted to make the book as complete as I could’.76 Indeed

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73. Collier’s edition, titled Poems by Michael Drayton, from the Earliest and Rarest Editions, or from Unique Copies, omits the historical ‘legends’ as ‘too bulky for the present volume’ (they are mooted for a companion reprint on ‘a future occasion’) and the massive Poly-Olbion. 74. Collier’s claim to have employed the Bodleian-Malone copy of Mortimeriados (1596) as his principal copy-text is perhaps an exaggeration (see A86), but he did consult it on 9 November 1855 and copy from it the medial gathering missing from British Museum C.39.c.8. 75. JPC to Philip Bliss, 19 March 1856, BL Add. MS 34,580, fols. 364–65; Roxburghe Club archives, Society of Antiquaries. 76. JPC to WCH, 24 October 1865, BL Add. MS 38,898, fols. 309–10. Collier subsequently added that ‘if Mr. Botfield had lived I should have completed the work [i.e., with the ‘reserved’


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the apparatus is imposing: sixty-one pages of ‘Introduction’ and ninety-eight pages of notes. But the merits of the edition are compromised, once again, by its evident corruptions. As copy-text for Idea: The Shepherd’s Garland (1593) John chose what he described as an ‘especially valuable’ exemplar, in his own possession, which had ‘once belonged to Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Essex, and has his autograph on the title-page, together with various manuscript corrections, of which we have availed ourselves in our notes’ (pp. xvii– xviii). Collier’s copy of this rare quarto is now in the British Library;77 it contains forty-eight manuscript corrections, of which Collier signalled thirty in the notes to his 1856 text (pp. 123–44). Here and elsewhere he was at pains to dissociate Essex himself from the corrector(s),78 but he did indulge a ‘visionary speculation’ about Drayton’s presenting the volume to Essex, and the relationship such a gi implied—including the identification of ‘Robin-redbrest’ in the third eclogue as Essex himself.79 John mercifully restricted the manuscript improvements, in all but two instances, to his apparatus, although he characterized the majority as ‘material’ or ‘singularly judicious’;80 hence their effect on Drayton’s established text has been minimal. But J. W. Hebel suspected the title-page ‘Essex’, and in 1936 Kathleen Tillotson and H. I. Bell, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, agreed in finding it ‘quite a good imitation of an early hand, but not like Essex’s other signatures’. Tillotson went on to reject the textual emendations as forgeries by Collier, betraying ‘many of the tendencies of the Perkins Folio corrector’, among them ‘insistence on smoothness of metre and accuracy of rhyme’, and impatience with unusual spellings and ‘ambiguous punctuation’: three gratuitous hyphenations in the second, fourth, and eighth eclogues, converting ‘lightning flame’, ‘widow world’, and ‘city builder’ into compound words, are indeed particularly reminiscent of the Old Corrector. Tillotson also pinpointed two

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Legends] in the same manner & form’; 26 November 1865, BL Add. MS 38,898, fols. 316–17. Botfield died in 1863. 77. C.30.e.21, from the Ouvry sale (lot 482, £17 10s. to Ellis). As John never mentioned this volume in his 1850 GM articles, it would seem probable that he acquired it between then and 1855. It is rather badly cropped and unprepossessing, and we have not traced its ownership before Collier. 78. It is ‘corrected throughout, apparently by more than one contemporary (not the Earl)’ (Drayton, p. 123); and ‘we dare not impute to [Essex] various MSS corrections’ (BARB, i:227). 79. Kathleen Tillotson (1936) dismissed the identification, and Collier’s notion that Essex was Drayton’s patron, as ‘extremely unlikely if not impossible’. 80. Drayton, p. 123. In BARB (i:227), ‘most of them [are] singularly judicious’, including the silly alteration of ‘good olde Godfrey’ to ‘good olde Geffrey’ in the fourth eclogue: although Chaucer is no doubt meant by Drayton, the literalism is mindless. The two emendations inserted in the text (iv.22 and iv.82) are, by the evidence of other annotated copies, genuine early corrections.


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changes suggesting ‘an imperfect knowledge of Elizabethan English’ (‘unfitting’ for ‘unsitting’—‘a blunder occasioned by the ordinary mistake between long s and f ’, as Collier explained it [v.36]—and ‘loving’ for ‘lovely’ [ii.3]), the second justified by a citation to Notes and Emendations, which Tillotson considered ‘using one fabrication to bolster up another, both . . . based on ignorance of the meaning of the word in question’. Curiously enough, however, John’s copy of Idea may well contain genuine contemporary emendations, like the Perkins Folio itself, for four specimens in the fi h eclogue and one each in the fourth, sixth, and seventh are also present in a copy then at Sion College, which Collier almost certainly did not know.81 Those at vi.95 and vii.5 are also found in two other copies; and at least two further emendations in Collier’s copy (v.8 and v.26) correct typographical errors in the outer forme of sheet E, which are unique to it, and which may be of printing-house origin.82 Tillotson wondered if Collier might have consulted the Sion copy in creating his own construct, but it seems far likelier that the ‘Essex’-Collier copy contained several contemporary corrections long before some forty more were added: that, too, would explain John’s prudent allusion to ‘more than one contemporary [hand]’ in the text. In a footnote (p. xxiv) Collier afforded the public its first glimpse of a volume that subsequently would complete, with the Perkins Shakespeare and Essex’s Drayton, his major trio of pseudo-annotated texts: ‘We quote’, he remarked of a passage from Amoretti, ‘from Drayton’s own copy of Spenser, in the edit. of 1611, with his autograph at the back of the title.’ John had earlier spoken of this resource to his American correspondent F. J. Child, in a discussion of Spenser (‘I have now two old editions which are valuable & interesting—One which belonged to the poet John Marston . . . and the other with Michael Drayton’s autograph’), though neither then nor in 1856 or 1858 did he mention the copious manuscript ‘corrections’ by Drayton, which centrally served his edition of Spenser in 1862: perhaps these were not yet in place.83 The 1590–96 Faerie Queene ‘signed’ by Marston also made its appearance in Collier’s Drayton, where ‘now before us’ was ‘a copy . . . once belonging to John Marston, the dramatist’ (p. 128). Two or three other old canards were perforce recycled in Collier’s notes, and one somewhat tortured semi-novelty involved Joseph Hunter and the authorship of Sir Philip Sidney’s Ourania, by ‘N. B.’ (1606; STC 1598). Once casually attributed to Nicholas Breton, this long, dull poem was persuasively claimed by

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81. Cf. Hebel 1961, v:13 and 272; we have no evidence that Collier ever resorted to the library of Sion College (London). The Sion copy, sold at auction in 1977, is now at Bodley. 82. Cf. Juel-Jensen 1961, p. 272. 83. JPC to Child, 25 October 1855, Houghton MS bMS Am 1922 (36); and JPC to David Laing, 4 December 1858, EUL MS La.IV.17.


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Hunter in 1845 for Sidney’s Greek tutor, Nathaniel Baxter.84 At that time Collier acknowledged Hunter’s priority in publicizing the re-attribution (‘he deserves the credit of the first announcement of the discovery’), but he simultaneously described a copy of the book ‘now before us’ with ‘Back-Star’ written on the title ‘in a hand-writing contemporaneous with the printing of the pamphlet’, the existence of which ‘was pointed out (though not in print, as Mr. Hunter has placed it) some fi een or twenty years ago. We do not mention this matter for the sake of detracting from the merit of Mr. Hunter’s discovery, without the aid to which we have been indebted, but merely to show that others had previously stumbled upon the same conclusion’ (Athenaeum, 1 February 1845, in a discussion of the late B. H. Bright’s library). By 1856, however, the ‘contemporaneous’ hand had become Baxter’s own, and the volume a ‘corrected copy . . . [which] belonged to the author, and is signed with his own name, Backster’ (Drayton, pp. xiii–xiv). Nine years later Collier further enhanced his account, recalling that ‘we, many years ago, communicated to the late Rev. Joseph Hunter . . . our authority’, namely, that of ‘a copy of the work signed and throughout corrected by the author, now before us’.85 Whether because such a detail failed to square with Hunter’s published argument (which is entirely internal and mentions no such ‘authority’), or in painless deference to the dead, Collier backtracked slightly in his ‘Additions, Notes and Corrections’: now ‘we are not sure whether [Hunter] was not the first to point out’ the Ourania attribution, but ‘we think that we confirmed his statement by the production of our volume, signed and corrected by Baxter, which we subsequently lent to him’ (p. v*). The last now-unchallengeable statement effectively made Hunter a witness, if not even an endorser, of ‘Baxter’s copy’, annotations and all. The book remained in Collier’s collection, fetching £9 at his 1884 sale (lot 220, ‘with autograph signature and MS. Corrections by the Author’).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge The dazzling opinions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Shakespeare unquestionably informed, if they did not largely shape, Collier’s own critical views from young manhood onward—although Collier was never comfortable with literary criticism in general, and cannot be said to have developed or extended Coleridge’s famously unsystematic approach to the plays. Coleridge furnished his admirer with an arsenal of quotable aperçus, which passed for commentary in all his editions of Shakespeare, almost to the exclusion of other authorities: indeed

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84. New Illustrations of Shakespeare, i:355. 85. BARB, i:59. In all references to Baxter Collier mistakenly called him ‘Nicholas’.


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there is little evidence that John absorbed more than the occasional judgement of critics from Johnson to Schlegel, or Hazlitt, De Quincey, or Lamb, to any convertible profit. No doubt his personal memory of the great talker’s delivery, as much as the substance of what he said, inspired such loyalty in citation, the first cause of it surely being the seventeen Corporation Hall lectures given by Coleridge in 1811–12, at the height of his early renown. John’s hero-worshipping attempt, at the age of twenty-two, to record these in newspaper shorthand suggests how deeply Coleridge impressed him, and, more important, it preserved the only (imperfect) texts of these lectures that remain to us.86 For Coleridge himself kept no permanent record of the 1811–12 series (nor of several others, given between 1808 and 1819), and cannot entirely have repeated himself in his Biographia Literaria (1817) or in miscellaneous writings elsewhere. On his death in 1834 the task of editing and publishing his uncollected and manuscript remains devolved principally upon his daughter, Sara, his son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, and his philosophical acolyte and literary executor, the physician Joseph Henry Green. Sara, a er the death of her cousin and husband, compiled Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists (2 vols., 1849), which appeared to assemble all of Coleridge’s surviving Shakespeare criticism;87 on her own death in 1852 her brother Derwent and other family-endorsed editors continued to refine the Coleridgean Nachlass, a project effectively still in progress today. But in the early 1850s two outsiders raised complaints, in the pages of Notes and Queries, about the dolingout of such precious remains. ‘Are we ever likely to receive from any member of Coleridge’s family, or from his friend Mr. J. H. Green, the fragments, if not the entire work, of his Logosophia?’ asked ‘Theophylact’ (22 November 1851, p. 411). ‘We can ill afford to lose a work the conception of which engrossed much of his thoughts . . . towards the end of his life.’ To this Clement Mansfield Ingleby added an enquiry about manuscript additions to Aids to Reflection, long promised by Sara Coleridge (4 December 1852, p. 533), and seven months later he revealed (‘from an interesting conversation I had with Dr. Green in a railway carriage’) that Green possessed three substantial unpublished Coleridge manu-

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86. Collier’s longhand transcripts of his notes, his miscellaneous diary remarks about Coleridge, and expanded extracts from his surviving shorthand notes were published with commentary by R. A. Foakes (1971). A more extended discussion of the lectures, accompanied by complete transcriptions of both longhand and shorthand notes as well as by Collier’s 1856 text, appears in Foakes 1987. 87. The 1849 collection was advertised as ‘for the most part a re-print of volumes I. and II. of the Literary Remains’ (i:v). Included in both were accounts ‘taken at the delivery’ of the first two of Coleridge’s 1818 lectures, one by Green and the second by William Hammond; portions of the eleventh lecture were also given ‘partly from Mr. Green’s note’. The ‘Prospectus of Lectures in 1811’ was reprinted (i:334–35), but no further mention of that series was made.


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scripts which he had no intention of editing, as they ‘contain nothing but what has already seen the light’ in some form. ‘This appears to me to be a very inadequate reason for withholding them from the press’, Ingleby wrote (9 July 1853, p. 43), and he later revived Coleridge’s own editorial charge laid to Green in 1820–21, accusing Green of betraying ‘this solemn trust’, and of shirking ‘his duty to his great master’ in the instance of four missing works. Cheekily, he made Green a ‘public offer’ to edit and publish these himself, if Green could not ‘afford the time, trouble, and cost of the undertaking’, and would ‘entrust me with the MSS.’ (27 May 1854, pp. 496–97). Goaded into response, J. H. Green protested the ‘inconsiderate, not to say coarse attack . . . which might have been spared had the writer sought a private explanation of the matters’ (10 June 1854, pp. 543–44). Green denied all knowledge of one work, and described two others as unintelligibly incomplete: ‘I believe I have exercised a sound discretion in not publishing them in their present form. . . . I can assure the friends and admirers of Coleridge that nothing now exists in manuscript which would add materially to the elucidation of his philosophical doctrines’. The last, a report of Coleridge’s lectures on the history of philosophy (1819), commissioned at considerable expense by John Hookham Frere from ‘an eminent shorthand writer’, Green dismissed as ‘wholly unfit for publication’, because (as Coleridge himself had told Green), ‘the person employed confessed a er the first lecture that he was unable to follow the lecturer in consequence of becoming perplexed and delayed by the novelty of thought and language, for which he was wholly unprepared by the ordinary exercise of his art. If this History of Philosophy is to be published in an intelligible form, it will require to be re-written’.88 Needless to say, Ingleby thought Green’s scrupulosity overwrought (24 June 1854, p. 591), and reiterated his plea for some kind of ‘intact’ text of the two unfinished works, and ‘as far as possible’ the History of Philosophy—thus tacitly acknowledging the problems any shorthand report might present. The InglebyGreen dialogue went no further, but Collier would evoke it within just one week, in relating his own shorthand adventures with Coleridge: ‘At a time when you are discussing in your columns the important question, What has become of Coleridge’s original manuscripts?’, he wrote (1 July 1854), ‘this discovery by me of seven of his lectures, nearly altogether devoted to Shakespeare . . . cannot be without interest.’ Collier’s engaging account, which led off the tenth semi-annual volume of

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88. Cf. Holmes 1998, p. 489; and Foakes 1987, i:lxxxiii. The shorthand writer was Joseph Gurney, who complained that with most speakers ‘he could almost always, by long experience in his art, guess the form of the latter part, or apodosis of the sentence by the form of the beginning; but that the conclusion of every one of Coleridge’s sentences was a surprize to him’.


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Notes and Queries in grand style, told the story of his attendance at Coleridge’s 1811–12 lectures, his shorthand record of seven of them, and his rediscovery of those notes forty years later ‘in the highest drawer of a high, double chest, to which servants and others could not conveniently resort for waste paper. I knew that I once had them in my possession, and when I was printing the edition of Shakespeare, which I superintended nearly ten years ago, I looked for them with great diligence, but in vain; and even now I might not have recovered them had it not been necessary, on my removal to this place [Riverside], to turn out the contents of every receptacle in order to destroy what was rubbish, occupying space that could not be worse filled.’ At this juncture John contented himself with a extract from his own short-lived early diary, about Coleridge’s manner of address, and with transcribing the prospectus for the 1811–12 lectures, which he believed to be unreprinted.89 He described his original shorthand memoranda as ‘generally very full, and in the ipsissima verba of the author’, for ‘I was taught short-hand as a part of my early education; and although in 1812 . . . I was quite a young man, I could follow a speaker with sufficient rapidity’—unlike, as it seems, Joseph Gurney. ‘Hence the confidence I feel in what I have so lately brought to light; and now my original notes are all written out, they extend to from ten to forty sides of letter-paper for each lecture, apparently according to the interest I took in the particular topics.’ But although ‘each lecture is finished, and, in a manner, perfect in itself ’, the reports ‘only apply to seven of the fifteen lectures. . . . What has become of the others I know not; they are probably utterly lost’.90 On 8 and 22 July and 12 August 1854 Collier continued his recollections of Coleridge for Notes and Queries, printing Coleridge’s letter written to him on the verso of the 1818 lecture prospectus,91 and summing up, ‘in the words of my [1811] diary’, the substance of Coleridge’s table-talk on the evenings of 13 and 17 October 1811; and from shorthand memoranda he gave the gist of the first, ninth, and twel h public lectures. At no point in these four illuminating

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89. It had in fact been reprinted by James Gillman in his 1838 Life of Coleridge (as A. E. Brae soon pointed out) and in the 1849 Notes and Lectures. 90. Indeed these notes have never turned up, and to some degree their existence in 1812 is uncertain. Although the prospectus announced only fieen lectures, Coleridge in fact delivered seventeen. Independent shorthand transcripts of the first eight were prepared by J. Tomalin, but these too are lost, apart from transcripts of three made by J. D. Campbell (see Foakes 1987, i:160– 61). Holmes (1998, p. 266 and n.) erred in thinking that Tomalin’s transcripts ‘covered a further eight lectures’ from Collier’s seven, and that had they survived ‘this would have been virtually a complete set’. 91. Which he copied as well, ‘as I cannot find that [it] was ever reprinted’, a mistake that Brae ridiculed in Literary Cookery (1855, pp. 10–11): it had been reprinted at least three times, in 1836, 1838, and 1849.


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articles did John seriously misrepresent his originals,92 but through carelessness he recorded the date of events throughout as 1812–13, rather than 1811–12, and the commencement of the lectures, as announced in the undated prospectus, as ‘Monday, November 18th (1812)’, rather than 1811. There can have been no reason for a deliberate conversion to a biographically impossible year, and these were certainly innocent, if unreassuring, mistakes.93 Yet they would prove nearly fatal to what was, ironically—from the perpetrator of so much literary mischief—an unimpeachable contribution to the heritage of Shakespeare criticism and Romantic belles-lettres. Perhaps the all-too-immediate timeliness of his Coleridge revelations, so hard upon Ingleby’s quarrel with Green, as well as the implicit hazards of shorthand itself, rendered suspicion inevitable. For the moment, however, the literary world greeted Collier’s discovery with appreciative respect,94 and Ingleby at least held his peace, or bided his time. A. E. Brae, in the grip of his own Perkins megalomania, did neither.

Coleridge Pursued: Literary Cookery Since September 1853 Andrew Edmund Brae had appreciated that the pages of Notes and Queries were effectively closed to him, in his campaign against Collier and Perkins.95 When, two years later, he commenced what he later described as a ‘flank movement’ against Collier’s new Coleridge texts (leaving the ‘direct attack’ on the Shakespeare emendations to ‘able representatives in other quarters’),96 he understandably sought a different, if an even less likely venue. On 3 October 1855 he addressed a public letter ‘on Literary Cookery’ to the Athenaeum, a long-time Collier stronghold now under the editorship of the popular historian William Hepworth Dixon (1821–79). Signing himself only ‘A Detective’, Brae fastened at length upon Collier’s error in dating his copy of the Coleridge prospectus ‘(1812)’,97 attempted to demonstrate its source in a misuse

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92. Apart from some inevitable refinements, between the shorthand report of 1811–12 and its retrieval in 1854, of Coleridge’s ipsissima verba, hardly more than what J. H. Green himself proposed, and Ingleby assumed necessary, in having the History of Philosophy ‘re-written’. 93. Richard Holmes, with no more reason to misrepresent dates than had Collier, made the counterbalancing error of referring to ‘the lectures of 1810–11’ (1998, p. 264). 94. See readers’ responses in N&Q, 5 August and 4 November 1854. 95. His position had in the meantime hardened: if he ever really did think Collier an innocent dupe, by early 1854 he was agreeing with Ingleby that ‘even Mr Collier’s honesty requires defence’; Brae to Ingleby, 28 February, Folger MS W.b.105 (27). 96. Brae, Collier, Coleridge, and Shakespeare (1860), p. 18. 97. Brae may in fact have discovered the error, as Collier himself could have done, through N&Q for 4 August 1855, where William John Fitzpatrick reprinted dated contemporary accounts of two of the lectures from a Dublin newspaper.


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of De Morgan’s Book of Almanacs, and deduced that Collier had doctored or ‘cooked’ the printed prospectus accordingly. By extension, Brae argued, none of the novel Coleridge material was trustworthy, and while the error of date ‘may seem slight and unimportant . . . it is precisely by such ill-considered trifles that deception is betrayed and unmasked’: if Collier had tampered with the Coleridge prospectus—which Brae rashly, and wrongly, assumed—what else might he not have done? All the ‘private notes and memoranda, for which Mr. Collier is alone responsible’, became ‘subjected to one common self-convicting blunder’, and suspicious at best; and Brae’s indictment concluded by dragging in Perkins (‘there is a strong family resemblance between the discovery of these marginal corrections and the find of the Coleridge notes’), fulminating against the emendations ‘which, to the shame of the nineteenth century, have been permitted, like the unclean birds of old, to settle down upon [Shakespeare’s] text, tearing and mangling, and befouling where they could not destroy’. These were always Brae’s true target, and Collier himself, whose ‘prestige’ was solely responsible for their acceptance: without it ‘they would have been at once cried to scorn’. He urged the Athenaeum to ‘assist in undoing the mischief ’—at least by publicizing his impeachment—as it had helped to create the problem by initially endorsing ‘those wretched libels on the text of Shakespeare’. Coleridge was all but forgotten in the heat of the summing-up, where Brae wrote of ‘dishonesty’ and ‘the taint of contrivance’ (as well as the ‘presumption’, ‘plagiarism’, ‘vulgarity’, and ‘imbecility’ of the emendations themselves), and le no doubt of his animus, and the graver offence with which he now charged his foe: ‘To dispel [Collier’s] prestige . . . is the real object of this exposure; if the scent now opened be effectively followed up, it may, perhaps, at length extort a second confession, similar to Ireland’s, of Shakespearean forgeries.’ ‘Forger’ and ‘forgery’ were not terms to be lightly employed in the press, and Brae did so four times in seven pages, alongside ‘literary peculators’, ‘preposterous discoveries’, ‘evil doers’, and ‘imposture’. Moreover, he insisted upon every word of it, informing the Athenaeum that ‘this letter is sent . . . under this condition: that if published at all, it shall be intact and entire, without addition or curtailment. Should this condition not be complied with, or should publication be altogether refused, it is the writer’s intention to have the letter immediately printed for diffusion through the post-office’ (Literary Cookery, p. 8). Hepworth Dixon, one of Collier’s stoutest supporters throughout the Perkins controversy, unsurprisingly declined Brae’s philippic, through a paragraph in the Athenaeum more reasonable, perhaps, than the importunate correspondent deserved: ‘A detective is declined. His manuscript is le for him at our office. The insertion of the year within a parenthesis is a clear intimation that it was not printed on the document from which the writer was copying, and


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was therefore conjectural; Detective’s comment is therefore a mere waste of words.’ 98 Brae, who can hardly have expected the Athenaeum to publish his letter ‘intact and entire’, was immediately true to his threat. Adding an introduction in which he defended his pseudonymity (‘So long as the accusation is of public import . . . [it is] a fair and legitimate subject for an anonymous writer’), and a postscript (dated 10 October) inspired by Dixon’s rejection,99 he enlarged his Athenaeum submission to a sixteen-page pamphlet, titled Literary Cookery, with Reference to Matter Attributed to Coleridge and Shakespeare: this constitutes the earliest public denunciation of Collier as an active forger (for despite its resort to innuendo Brae’s indictment is clear), although its particular charges in re Coleridge are entirely misguided, and its persuasive force—even more than that of Singer’s Shakespeare Vindicated—is mitigated by its nastiness. One can hardly imagine any commercial publisher eager to associate himself with Brae’s cause, but John Russell Smith, whose back-list of controversial Shakespeariana included Halliwell, Dyce, Hunter, and the Grimaldi Shakspere, issued Literary Cookery at one shilling, in grey printed wrappers, in mid-November 1855.100 Brae dealt with Smith through an unnamed intermediary, and Smith later told the American Shakespeare collector Thomas P. Barton that he was ignorant of the author’s identity until years a erward; even Ingleby, whose Coleridgean enquiries had set the whole episode in motion, remained long unaware of his friend’s part in it.101

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98. Athenaeum, 6 October 1855, p. 1164. Collier had transcribed for N&Q the commencement date in the second line of his prospectus as ‘Monday, November 18th (1812)’; Brae, referring to Gillman’s Life of Coleridge, quoted ‘Monday, November 18th, 1811’. The original (reproduced by Foakes 1971, p. viii) has no year date at all, and, as Collier later pointed out, ‘Mr. Gilman [sic] was right in his date, but wrong in his mode of printing it. I was wrong in my date, but right in my mode of printing it’; Seven Lectures, p. x. 99. Here Brae mainly repeated his point about the dating of the 1811 prospectus, but also listed anterior publications of the prospectus of 1818 which Collier claimed he could not find, even in the 1836 Remains, cited and quoted by him in N&E. In defending his own concentration on Collier’s parenthesized ‘(1812)’, he again stressed ‘the impossibility of that date, and consequently . . . the extreme improbability of its having been obtained from any bonâ fide or really contemporary source’, adducing finally that ‘as a corollary to that conclusion . . . no faith ought to be placed in any other antiquities that may have issued from the same laboratory’. 100. Ganzel’s condescending characterization of Smith as ‘a Soho publisher with a modicum of reputation who was oen the conduit for shady publications’ (p. 200) should be set against H. R. Tedder’s account in DNB and the encomium by W. C. Hazlitt (1897, ii:367). Smith was a distinguished bookseller and a productive editor and bibliographer, with an abiding interest in Shakespeariana. While his earlier publications may seem all to be ‘anti-Collierian’, he subsequently published monographs on both sides of the Perkins controversy. 101. Brae to CMI, 22 July 1859 (Folger MS W.b.105 [57]), and Barton’s note in his copy of Literary Cookery (BoPL G.3920.14[2]), referring to a letter from Smith (not now known) of 25 Sep-


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Smith was by no means a timid or thin-skinned publisher, but he swi ly regretted his involvement with Literary Cookery. ‘I had like to have got into trouble about this’, he told Barton; ‘I suppressed it a er selling 20 copies’. On 20 November 1855 he wrote to Thoms at Notes and Queries, asking him not to review the tract, as ‘it has been withdrawn from sale’, and cancelling an advertisement he had ordered.102 Collier later asserted that ‘it was withdrawn from circulation, when it was known that it was about to be made the subject of a judicial proceeding’, but Smith’s action was certainly independent of this.103 But the ‘judicial proceeding’ over Literary Cookery did take place, one of the two occasions in his life, as far as we know, that Collier resorted to litigation—or even to the threat of it, despite the legalistic cast of his mind and his hard-won professional qualifications.104 He was ‘first informed of, and first saw the pamphlet’, on 21 November 1855, and while Smith had already withdrawn it from sale, John consulted Fred Ouvry, and on 8 January 1856 in the Rolls Garden, Chancery Lane, swore a nine-part affidavit toward filing a criminal information (i.e., charge) against the publisher. This is an interesting document, prepared the preceding day, with Ouvry astutely revising what must have been Collier’s original dra ,105 and it embodies the only account of the Perkins Folio, as well tember 1860. In Complete View, p. 38, Ingleby claimed that he did not know Brae was the author until ‘long aer the publication of my ‘‘Shakspeare Fabrications’’’, i.e., aer August 1859. Brae had in fact revealed his authorship the previous month, saying there was ‘one avowal which, aer mature consideration, I think I am bound to make to you unasked . . . . I was the author of ‘‘Literary Cookery’’!’ (letter of 20 July 1859; Folger MS C.a.28 [1]). From Brae’s comments it appears that Ingleby had thought that the pamphlet was Halliwell’s work. 102. Note in Barton’s copy, as above, citing Smith’s letter to him (now unknown) of 9 May 1856; Smith to Thoms (Huntington HM 27861), mentioning that he had sent the cancellation to ‘other journals’ as well—all presumably warned off, as we know of no contemporary notice. 103. The rumoured lawsuit could only have followed on Collier’s hearing of the pamphlet, which he asserted under oath took place on 21 November; see Seven Lectures, pp. iv–v. Brae himself declared that ‘neither author nor publisher . . . knew anything of these law proceedings until they were quashed and over, and even then only from the newspapers of the day in common with the rest of the public’ (Collier, Coleridge, and Shakespeare, p. 12), and told Ingleby in 1859 that ‘J. R. S. backed out of his engagement to publish not that he was cowed by law proceedings but as he alleged that he might be injured in his business as book-seller by the powerful literary influence of Collier’ (letter of 22 July 1859, Folger MS W.b.105 [57]). The extreme rarity of Literary Cookery suggests its wholesale destruction; no copies that we have seen appear to derive from a cache or remainder, and our own is inscribed ‘Bought at Mr. J. R. Smith’s, 19 Nov. 1855’. 104. The second was in 1859, when he seems to have considered a libel action against Ingleby’s Shakspere Fabrications. 105. It is scribal and annotated by Ouvry, with a note from him to his clerk R. Dyson (7 January 1856): ‘Engross the aff for swearing by 10 oclock tomorrow’. On one blank quarter-sheet Collier has pencilled a list of fieen dates—those of Coleridge’s 1811–12 lectures (FF/K MS 683). Collier made a fair copy of the final form of it (FF/K MS 682), and published a slightly tidied-up version in Seven Lectures, pp. ii–v. Despite the subsequent rejection of Collier’s motion, in May 1856 a


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as of the Coleridge transcripts, that John Payne Collier gave under oath. He repeated the story of purchasing the Folio from Rodd ‘in the spring of the year 1849’, with its ‘great number of manuscript notes . . . made, as I believe, by the same person, and at a period nearly contemporaneous with the publication of the said folio itself ’ (the last clause being Ouvry’s revision of ‘at a period commencing very shortly a er the said year 1632 and ending a few years a erwards’, with ‘continued during subsequent years’ struck out). Ouvry inserted a paragraph describing Collier’s exhibition of the book to the Shakespeare Society and ‘three times’ to the Society of Antiquaries and recording its recent transfer to the Duke of Devonshire, and he qualified (‘to the best of my knowledge and belief ’) Collier’s vulnerable declaration ‘that I have not in either of the said Editions [N&E and N&E II ] inserted a single word, stop, sign, note, correction, alteration, or emendation . . . which is not a faithful copy of the said original manuscript’. In his affidavit Collier went on to recount his attendance at Coleridge’s 1811– 12 lectures, his rediscovery of his notes, and his error in dating them (he annotated the prospectus ‘in pencil’, the Early Diary ‘in ink’—Ouvry’s addition— but ‘the writing of the said figures on each of them is mine’). He declared that ‘I never read or saw ‘‘Gilman’s Life of Coleridge,’’ or ‘‘The Coleridge Lectures’’, or [De] Morgan’s Book of Almanacks mentioned in the pamphlet’, but Ouvry struck out ‘‘‘The Coleridge Lectures’’ ’, as perhaps too broad a title. The plaintiff submitted in evidence copies of N&E II, the four relevant issues of Notes and Queries, a portion of his 1811 diary, and the shorthand originals of two lecture transcripts, the others having been destroyed—a er deciphering—‘as being of no [further] value’.106 Finally he offered a copy of Literary Cookery, whose statements and imputations, ‘except so far as relates to the mere inaccuracy of the date [and one other trivial misprint]’, he dismissed as ‘wholly, and I believe maliciously, false’. Precisely what Collier hoped to achieve through his action is unclear, although damages for libel could be sought if the filing of a criminal information against Smith were allowed. On 17 January in the Court of Queen’s Bench, Sir Frederick Thesiger—briefed by Farrer, Ouvry, and Farrer, accompanied by Robert Lush—moved for the ‘rule’ against Smith, but received only a sympathetic denial, suggesting that the cause was itself ill-conceived. None other

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copy was placed on record by Ouvry in the Court of Queen’s Bench, at Collier’s request; Ouvry to JPC, shortly aer 23 April 1856, FF/K MS 638. 106. These, the records of lectures nine and twelve, are in fact all that now survive (see Foakes 1987, ii:435–58), but why Collier should have discarded five and saved two is unclear. The first three numbers of N&Q are in FF/K, inscribed on receipt by William Clark, court commissioner (8 January 1856); the diary, also marked as evidence, is Folger MS M.a.221.


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than Lord Chief Justice Campbell presided, and one of three examining justices was Sir John Taylor Coleridge, nephew of the poet, who enquired if the Perkins annotations were ‘put forward as those of Shakespeare himself ’, provoking Thesiger’s gentle reminder of the date of the Second Folio, sixteen years a er Shakespeare’s death. Coleridge then asked what the alleged libel ‘imputes’, and Thesiger replied: ‘That Mr. Collier published [as] a genuine note [that] which he either forged himself, or knew had been fabricated by some other person’ (Daily News, 18 January), adding that ‘the applicant had no objection to discussion or to a fair consideration of the genuineness of the notes’, but that ‘no one had a right to attribute to him falsification or forgery of documents. Such charges would be fatal to the character of any man’ (The Times, 18 January). Lord Campbell, however, while cordially acknowledging his acquaintance with and esteem of the plaintiff (‘He is a most excellent and honourable man, and has been of infinite benefit to the literature of this country’), explained that ‘the court cannot grant a rule of this kind in regard to a mere literary criticism’, and that ‘although the court is most anxious to do whatever is necessary for [Collier’s] protection, we do not consider that we can properly interfere’. Collier, he declared, ‘has cleared himself to my entire satisfaction, and, I believe also, to the entire satisfaction of all who are acquainted with the controversy’. Vindication in so many words, perhaps, if not quite what a litigant would wish to be told. ‘I never entertained a suspicion’, added Campbell in closing, ‘that [Collier] could resort to such mean and fraudulent acts, but’—the three other judges concurring—‘we cannot make this matter the subject of a criminal information’ (Daily News). John consoled himself six months later by alluding to Campbell’s character of him, couched ‘in terms too flattering for repetition here’, and his ‘conviction that I had cleared myself from all imputation’, despite the fact that ‘the forms and practice of the Court did not permit me to obtain . . . that species of redress’ which he sought.107

Seven Lectures Whether goaded by Brae, or encouraged by readers of his Notes and Queries articles,108 John now determined to publish the entire text of his Coleridge rediscoveries. In the absence of the Shakespeare Society he again approached Whittaker’s, who proved unresponsive, and early in 1856 contracted with Chapman

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107. Seven Lectures, p. i. Save for the newspaper notices of its dismissal, the case attracted little attention at the time: Crabb Robinson, notably, never mentioned it in his diary, nor did Madden, nor Collier himself in any correspondence that we know. 108. At least two correspondents had called for more: John Mathew Gutch (5 August 1854, pp. 106–07) and the Rev. William West, as ‘Eirionnach’ (4 November 1854, p. 373).


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and Hall, having already completed all but the preface, and being ‘very anxious to lose no time with the work’.109 His contact with the publishers of Carlyle and (off and on) Dickens was very possibly John Forster, their long-term literary adviser, who at this very moment was corresponding with John over Perkins developments, and standing up staunchly for the Folio;110 if he did not initiate or prompt the negotiation, Forster would certainly have been involved in it at some point. Collier deliberately avoided any contact with the Coleridge family and literary estate,111 and Chapman and Hall, who had never had Coleridge in their list, may have welcomed a chance to score off his two traditional publishers, Moxon and the late William Pickering. Collier’s one surviving letter on the subject shows him dictating terms (‘I believe that we understand each other’), although he appears to have demanded no payment beyond fi een free copies and others (‘as I have many friends’) at the trade price. He granted only the rights to the first 1,000 copies (‘It is to be my book a erwards’), with Chapman and Hall to bear all costs of production and publicity; and ‘I presume, indeed, you say, that you wish the vol. to be a handsome one: so do I’. He himself even nominated the printers, Gilbert and Rivington, whom ‘I prefer . . . as I understand them, & they me’. On the surface of it, Chapman and Hall had made a good bargain—a royaltyfree gi , if the first print-run sold well. John’s motive for such an arrangement may have lain partly in their good name as independent, non-controversial publishers, and in the extraordinary make-up of the book he outlined. The text of the seven lectures (‘printed in a large bold type, so as to make them the main feature’) was to be accompanied by a preface ‘of considerably more length than usual, containing notes of conversations opinions &c. by Coleridge, Wordsworth and C. Lamb; a vindication of my folio, 1632; and notices of many gross blunders in the editions of Old Dramatists published within about the last 20 years’. Finally, there would be ‘a view, (as brief as possible so as to be intelligible) of all the emendations in my folio 1632 of Shakespeare’, in effect a full but unannotated list of them, ‘giving the new readings in Italics’. It is hard to resist the notion that Collier hoped, in this single volume, to stifle the various attacks upon Perkins, by associating under one respectable publisher’s flag the 1632 Folio evidence (fraudulent) with that of Coleridge’s lectures (genuine), and by floating in a general counterattack on his enemies under cover

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109. JPC to Chapman and Hall, 22 February 1856, FF MS 538. 110. Peter Cunningham, Collier’s regular go-between, was at the time an even closer associate of Forster: see Davies 1983, p. 86. 111. To the alarm of Henry Crabb Robinson, who was ‘anxious’ about the publication (Diary, 12 November 1856), having earlier noted that ‘he publishes on his own authority without any communication with the Coleridges’ (15 August 1856).


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of the latter. Reviewers were baffled by the tripartite structure of Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton 112 (‘why the Lectures of Coleridge, the Emendations of the Folio, and the controversial and anecdotical Preface . . . should have been bound together we are at a loss to conjecture’, wrote Charles Wentworth Dilke in the Athenaeum), and even now each part begs independent consideration. The text of the seven 1811–12 Coleridge lectures on Shakespeare, which we owe almost entirely to John’s shorthand note-taking, has proved more or less satisfactory since 1856,113 although in 1971 and 1987 R. A. Foakes went back to Collier’s seven longhand transcripts of 1811–12 (collated with the two surviving shorthand reports), which arguably remain, by virtue of being closer to the event, ‘the best texts [of Coleridge] available’ (1987, i:172). Collier’s own re-explanation of his procedure in preparing the lectures for publication raised further questions, however. Here (Seven Lectures, pp. v–xiii) he elaborated on his account in Notes and Queries and in his Queen’s Bench affidavit, stating (p. xii) that the rediscovered documents comprised ‘several brochures and fragments of a Diary in my own handwriting, not at all regularly kept’, commencing 10 October 1811;114 ‘five other small brochures, containing partial transcripts, in long-hand, of Coleridge’s first, second, sixth, and eighth lectures’;115 and ‘several brochures, and parts of brochures, of my original shorthand notes, two of which (those of the ninth and twel h lectures) were complete, but entirely untranscribed’.116 Collier did not, however, mention the existence of his contemporary longhand transcripts of the ninth and twel h lectures

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112. The full title faithfully adds ‘by the late S. T. Coleridge. A List of All the MS. Emendations in Mr. Collier’s Folio, 1632; and an Introductory Preface by J. Payne Collier, Esq.’ 113. Collier’s 1856 text was reprinted by Thomas Ashe, Coleridge’s Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets (1883), and by T. M. Raysor, Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), and has been employed by hundreds of critics, editors, and anthologists, with or without citation. A characteristically misleading example of the failure to credit Collier is Ralli 1932, i:126 ff., citing the non-existent ‘Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare, 1811’. 114. Now Folger MSS M.a.219–21, the last brochure containing the beginning of Coleridge’s first lecture; see Foakes 1971, pp. 154–56. 115. These are now Folger MSS M.a.222–25, in fact four brochures, and including the seventh lecture—which Collier must have accidentally omitted mentioning: it is divided between the brochures containing lectures six and eight. As Foakes pointed out (1971, p. 14; 1987, i:168), the word ‘partial’ is misleading: all are substantially complete. 116. The shorthand reports of lectures nine and twelve, in three brochures, are now in the Furness Collection; photocopies have been in the Library of Congress since 1937, but the originals were unearthed only in the 1980s: see Ziegler 1985 and Foakes 1987, ii:435–36. The other shorthand survivals—which Collier implied were available to him in 1854 (‘I had employed myself in collating my early transcripts with such of the original short-hand notes as I had recovered, and [our italics] in transcribing the ninth and twelh Lectures, which still remained in their original state’)—have disappeared. His affidavit declaration that all but the two last shorthand brochures ‘I destroyed . . . as being of no value’ could describe action at any date between 1812 and 1854.


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(now Folger MSS M.a.226–28); indeed he repeatedly denied knowledge or use of them, insisting that he had prepared the text of these lectures fresh from the shorthand reports—testimony that Foakes thought ‘simply untrue’.117 Just why John should have lied about this one detail of his editorial preparation is a mystery, unless he wished to enhance—unnecessarily—the credibility of his shorthand note-taking, and the value, as evidence of the deciphering process, of the two surviving ‘brochures’. A preliminary aside extolled the use of shorthand in general, lamented the inability of compositors to cope with it (‘I should have been spared an infinity of labour in my time’), and urged ‘fathers of families to have their children taught stenography with as much diligence as they are now instructed in any other branch of knowledge. Only let us once agree upon a system—let the simplest and clearest be ascertained and preferred,—and we may soon make this mode of recording thoughts or opinions in some sort compete with the rapidity of railroads, and almost with the lightning of the telegraph’ (pp. v–vi). The other editorial claim, reasserted anew, concerned the verbal accuracy of the renditions. ‘I cannot but be sensible of their many and great imperfections’, John granted, including omissions (owing to ‘want of facility on my part’ or ‘a mistaken estimate of what it was, or was not, expedient to minute’), mishearings (‘the inconvenience of my position among other auditors’), and the effects of distraction by genius itself (‘I was not unfrequently so engrossed, and absorbed by the almost inspired look and manner of the speaker, that I was, for a time, incapable of performing the mechanical duty of writing’; p. xiii). Nonetheless he perversely reiterated his old cry of ipsissima verba, declaring not only that ‘I did not knowingly register a sentence, that did not come from Coleridge’s lips’ (credible, pace Brae), but also that ‘in completing my transcripts . . . I have added no word or syllable of my own’ (pp. vi–vii)—which is demonstrably, even self-confessedly, untrue. But John can hardly have meant that claim seriously, since he himself called attention to the liberties he took, early and late, with his own notes: even in 1811–12 ‘in some cases I relied upon my recollection to fill up chasms in my memoranda’, and in 1854–56, faced with inconsistencies in form (‘the early transcripts were not in the first person’, whereas the shorthand notes were), ‘I therefore re-wrote the whole . . . putting the earliest Lectures, as well as the latest, in the first instead of the third person’, making his text ‘more conformable to the very words Coleridge had employed’.118 Clearly, Collier’s idea of 117. Foakes 1971, p. 158. Foakes persuasively demonstrated (1971, pp. 159–66; 1987, ii:461 ff.) that Collier’s 1856 text depended in part on readings in his own 1812 longhand transcripts that could not, save by incredible coincidence forty years on, have derived from the shorthand alone. This reasoning would appear to eliminate the possibility that Collier found the three longhand brochures at some date aer 1856. 118. Seven Lectures, pp. xii–xiii. Foakes indicates many examples of such editorial arbitration


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providing a faithful reconstruction of Coleridge’s ‘criticisms, observations, and opinions’, as well as his ‘eloquence’, was not far removed from Ingleby’s and J. H. Green’s implied preference for a ‘re-written’ History of Philosophy. Modern readers uncomfortable with Collier’s tidying-up may prefer the barer bones of his notes on the 1811–12 lectures—an option they cannot exercise for much of the 1818 series, known only from reports (by J. H. Green and William Hammond, now lost) that were similarly ‘edited’ by Sara Coleridge in 1849—but Collier’s 1856 version was hardly pernicious, nor in broad terms irresponsible. Nor was it, despite the best efforts of Brae, and the summary judgement of Ingleby, by any means fraudulent. Although Brae devoted part of a subsequent monograph (1860) to proving Seven Lectures a wholesale ‘fabrication’, concocted of passages from other Coleridgean texts, and Ingleby regarded Brae’s work as furnishing ‘the finishing stroke in the demolition of the genuineness of the ‘‘Seven Lectures’’ ’,119 it was soon obvious that Collier had not taken his texts from thin air. ‘It is a compliment I heartily wish I merited’, he wrote (p. vii), ‘to have it supposed (as must have been supposed by the writer of ‘‘Literary Cookery,’’) that I possess taste, knowledge and originality, sufficient for the composition of such productions.’ In 1869 the publication of extracts from Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary showed John to have been on the spot, with his father and Robinson, at the lectures themselves, and the resurrected reports in the Morning Chronicle of lectures three, five, seven, and eight, which Robinson noted elsewhere were ‘sometimes by Mr. [John Dyer] Collier, sometimes by John [Payne] C., and sometimes by myself ’,120 bear ‘enough similarity to Collier’s notes to support his claim that he was presenting an authentic text of Coleridge’s lectures’ (Foakes 1987, i:166). Nonetheless some of the mud stuck, and in DNB (Leslie Stephen on Coleridge, 1887), wary students still read that ‘doubts have been cast on the authenticity of these reports’.

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The 120-page preface to Seven Lectures is a crowded and disorganized, but not unreadable, gallimaufry of anecdote, analysis, and indictment, much as Collier had promised his publishers. It begins with a full transcript of his Queen’s Bench affidavit, ‘in answer to certain charges and insinuations contained in an anonymous tract . . . entitled ‘‘Literary Cookery’’ ’, which the Literary Gazette remarked ‘haunts you like a spectre all through the book’ 121—and which would return to (1987, ii:461 ff.); Brae—attempting to discredit more than Collier’s editorial method—made a heavy point about Coleridge’s supposed reference to ‘Sir Humphrey Davy’, Davy having received his knighthood only in April 1812 (Collier, Coleridge and Shakespeare, pp. 39–42). 119. Brae, Collier, Coleridge, and Shakespeare (1860); Ingleby, Complete View, p. 343. 120. HCR to his brother Thomas, 16 December 1811, HCR Correspondence; printed in Foakes 1987, i:40–910. 121. Literary Gazette, 25 October 1856, p. 821, altogether disapproving of the lawsuit and its


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haunt John himself when C. M. Ingleby dwelt on its testamentary implications. There follows an account of the Coleridge discoveries, with forty pages of extracts and paraphrases from John’s 1811–12 diary concerning Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Rogers, and Wordsworth, and transcripts of letters to John from Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb. Halfway through, however, the focus abruptly shi s to Notes and Emendations, with twenty pages devoted to Singer’s animadversions and his undeclared use of the Perkins emendations, their endorsement in Germany, and the ‘furious’ American response. The Parry/U on Court provenance story is retold, a few specific emendations are recited and defended, and the text of John Bayley’s opinion on copyright is transcribed, ‘only for the purpose of showing, that in anything I said on the subject of copyright, I was not guided only by my own notion of what is the law, but by the well-considered judgment of a much better authority’ (p. lxxvii). Perkins gives way, at last, to a typology of modern editorial ‘blunders’, stemming from what Collier diagnosed (p. xcvii) as ‘errors of shorthand, errors of hearing, or errors of mispronunciation’ by Tudor and Stuart theatrical reporters, and typesetting mistakes (misreadings, reversals of letters) by the old compositors.122 His thirty pages of examples—from Beaumont and Fletcher, Greene, Peele, Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster—come entirely from texts edited by Dyce, save one (p. xciv, in The Revenger’s Tragedy), chosen from Collier’s own Dodsley of 1825–27, ‘in order that it may not be said that I spare myself ’. ‘I ought perhaps to apologise to my friend, the Rev. A. Dyce’, he concluded (p. cxx), with the usual wry twist, ‘for so o en bringing forward his name in connection with decided errors; but it has been his fortune to reprint so many more old plays than I have done, that, although I have studiously not spared my own mistakes, he is necessarily responsible for a greater number.’ Furthermore—butter unmelting in John’s mouth—although Dyce ‘has thought my labours in the same department of letters so important as to call for the publication of two separate octavo volumes’ (i.e., Remarks in 1844 and A Few Notes in 1853), instead of ‘feeling at all annoyed by [their] somewhat disparaging tone . . . I am obliged to him for the hints and information they supply: he will find, herea er, that while I never abandon my ground as long

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subsequent publicity: ‘Much is it to be regretted that . . . Mr. Collier did not follow the classical example of leaving his life to speak for his character’, for ‘people who do not believe a gentleman’s word are not likely to be convinced by his oath’. 122. This last leap in the preface is linked to earlier apologies for Perkins by a (dubiously) logical twist: because, as he professed to demonstrate, ‘the ablest editors [of plays other than Shakespeare’s] have failed in their undertakings’, and because ‘the text of Shakespeare is very much upon a par with that of his dramatic contemporaries’ (i.e., corrupt from the start), therefore ‘particular passages’ in Shakespeare, ‘oen admitted to be defective or disputable’, ought to attract latter-day emendation, like that in Perkins (p. cxix)—much as the non-Shakespearian texts he puts forward demanded.


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as I think I am right, I never perversely maintain it when I know I am wrong’. Yet again John’s poisoned courtesy won him respect, even from the negative reviewer of the Literary Gazette, who acknowledged the ‘remarkable gentleness and urbanity’ of Collier in controversy, and the ‘unruffled . . . serenity of his temper’ with which he ‘frequently encounters Mr. Dyce, and on most occasions comes off victorious’.123 The more perceptive reviewer for Bentley’s Miscellany, however, discerned the ‘considerable glee, of a quietly suppressed but not wholly sub-surface kind’, with which John convicted modern editors (‘the most prominent [among them] Mr. Dyce’) of leaving the text of old dramatists ‘in a condition, in some instances, almost ridiculous from the blunders that remain in it’ (January 1857, p. 94). In terms simply of verbiage, the bulkiest component of Seven Lectures is its last, 122 double-column pages in eight-point type headed ‘A List of every manuscript note and emendation in Mr. Collier’s copy of Shakespeare’s Works, Folio, 1632’. The only introduction to this professedly definitive compilation appears in the preface, where (p. lx) Collier offers it to ‘those interested in such matters [who] are anxious to see the entire body in the shortest form’ (N&E and N&E II having been personal selections), keyed by act, scene, and line number to ‘the one volume Shakespeare which I edited in 1853’. To this end (p. lxxix) ‘I have recently re-examined every line and letter of the folio 1632’, and having recovered two new emendations ‘of considerable importance, which, happening not to be in the margins, and being written with very pale ink, escaped my eye . . . I can safely assert that no other sin of omission on my part can be discovered’. Of course the new tally of some 2,735 emended passages still woefully underrepresented what the Perkins Folio contains, but this would be a matter for Brae, Hamilton, and Ingleby to address. In the meantime Collier received, and probably deserved, a rebuke from Whittaker’s, noting that his new list undercut his old annotated selection, and will ‘much diminish our chance of selling the second edition of ‘‘The Notes and Emendations’’ of which we have a large stock (nearly 800) on hand, and we must confess that we do not think it quite handsome in you to have thus republished ‘‘the Emendations’’ which we purchased from you, without consulting us in the matter’.124 In a carefully dra ed reply, John pointed out that he had offered the Coleridge lectures to Whittaker’s first,

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123. Literary Gazette, 1 November 1856, p. 847. Dyce himself appears to have been quite undismayed, at least at first glance: thanking John for a gi copy (undated letter, FF MS 744), he noted that ‘I perceive that you have been mending sundry passages of B. & Fl., Greene, &c.’, and asked Collier to ‘try your hand’ on a passage in Webster’s White Devil (now ready for reprinting) and to ‘send me ere long a satisfactory emendation of it’. On the other hand, Dyce thought that one of Collier’s suggestions (p. xcvii, ‘which I have this moment happened to light on’) ‘conveys no sense at all ’. 124. Letter of 22 October 1856, Folger MS Y.d.6 (223).


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intending that ‘your house should publish everything I had written or contemplated’. Only when Whittaker’s declined the book, to his great disappointment, in terms ‘so decisive that it precluded any remonstrance’, did he seek out Chapman and Hall, and ‘I shall receive nothing for it’. The list of emendations— which of course was all that Whittaker’s complained about—was ‘a mere list, without a word of context or explanation’, and ‘entirely an a erthought with me, because I found that Coleridge’s Lectures and my Preface would not be enough for a volume’.125 Although Collier’s 1856 text of the Coleridge lectures is comparatively dependable once one allows for the conscious polishing-up of its style, his preface embodies an astonishing range of literary and historical dubia and spuria. What for many readers must seem the most attractive feature of Seven Lectures, the youthful diary-recollections of celebrated English Romantics, turn out to be riddled with revisions and, in all likelihood, whole-cloth inventions, which signal a new departure for John: the fabrication of his own written testimony. The direct source of his extended reports of Coleridge and others—as he himself repeatedly avowed—was his briefly maintained diary of 1811, from which he professed in 1856 to have quoted verbatim, and which survives to expose his abuse of it.126 He claimed that he had recovered only ‘the fragments of a diary of mine’, otherwise ‘several brochures and fragments . . . not at all regularly kept’ (pp. iii and xii), with ‘some dislocation and derangement’ (p. xliv); but the extant manuscript is entirely continuous, filling 150 pages of three sewn gatherings or ‘brochures’, with consecutive entry-dates for 10–18 and 20–30 October and 1, 3– 11, 13, 15, and 17–18 November [1811]—at which point the Coleridge lecture notes begin, and the diary itself is abandoned. Other miscellaneous memoranda cited by John (p. xxxii, ‘without date or place’; p. xlv, ‘upon separate papers . . . some of them . . . without day or year’; and p. l, ‘10th February 1814’) have not survived, if they ever existed, and certain descriptive details—for example, ‘a er ‘‘Nov. 6’’ follows an entry of ‘‘Oct. 29th’’ ’ (p. xliv)—are simply untrue: Collier’s misrepresentation of his diary as fragmentary, with ‘missing portions’ perhaps ‘irrecoverably lost or destroyed’ (p. xlv), only serves to shield his inventions from any attempt to confirm them, much as the lacunae in Machyn’s diary served Thomas Warton a century earlier. And while some of the undocumented passages in Collier’s preface might be imagined to reflect loose fragments or the mysterious ‘undated memoranda’, no hypothetical parerga can justify the changes and interpolations visible in

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125. JPC to Whittaker’s, 23 October 1856 (retained dra), FF MS 740. 126. Folger MSS M.a.219–21; the surviving brochures are described in full by Foakes 1971, pp. 154–56.


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the diary as quoted.127 In the very first account of Coleridge and his ‘character of Falstaff ’ (13 October 1811, pp. xv–xx), a diary note of some three hundred words is padded out to more than twelve hundred, with dozens of minutiae inserted or altered,128 and many striking details brazenly improvised: there is no source whatever in the original text for Coleridge’s ‘gentle manners and unaffected good humour’, his ‘kindness and considerateness for young people’, his willingness ‘to talk on the most familiar topics, if they seem pleasing to others’, nor for his effortless quality of speech (‘with a sort of musical hum, and a catching of his breath at the end, and sometimes in the middle, of a sentence, enough to make a slight pause, but not so much as to interrupt the flow of his language’). Of course all these observations might well have been grounded in personal observation or contemporary report, but in Seven Lectures John reported them as noted in writing by him at the time, and that leap is converting reminiscence to record. Worse, the anecdote of the ‘very talkative Frenchman’ foisted on Coleridge is baseless (p. xvi: cf. Foakes 1971, pp. 30–31); and worse still, the entire disquisition by Coleridge on the order of composition of Shakespeare’s plays— with its dismissal (twice) of Malone’s opinions, its stance on disputed authorship, and its high estimate of Two Noble Kinsmen—is spurious, in terms at least of the diary.129 The party at Lamb’s on 16 October included Coleridge and ‘many more’ (Early Diary, 17 October), who in 1856 became ‘Hazlitt, [Charles] Lloyd, [Thomas] Rickman, [George] Dyer and [Martin] Burney, with Lamb and his sister’—and never a nonentity! Coleridge’s opinions of Shakespeare and Jonson are partly as documented, partly not, and there is no source in the diary for his pronouncements on Beaumont and Fletcher, Dryden, or Mrs. Siddons (whom he ‘warmly applauded’), nor of Garrick’s revision of Romeo and Juliet. Cole-

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127. Foakes printed, in a regularized form, those passages that relate immediately to Coleridge (1971, pp. 2–4, 30–44), and the text of the Coleridge material as presented in 1856 (pp. 129–53), remarking that ‘the extent of Collier’s omissions, changes, and additions can be seen by comparing [them]’—and it is indeed startling. Collier himself alleged flatly that he never altered the original: ‘That these were Coleridge’s ipsissima verba I cannot, at this distance of time, state; but they are the ipsissima verba in my Diary’ (p. xxv). 128. E.g., ‘A few months ago I was in Coleridge’s Company several times’ became ‘Two or three months ago I was in Coleridge’s company for the first time’, which necessitated changing the date of the remarks on Falstaff ‘at my Father’s House’ from the specific ‘December 23rd 1810’ to ‘a little while since’—a curiously uncharacteristic alteration, as it shortens the term of John’s acquaintance with Coleridge. 129. Collier may have adapted this long passage from his memories (undocumented) of Coleridge’s fourth lecture, about which he claimed (p. xix) to have preserved some notes by his mother—who ‘took the liveliest interest in literary people and literary questions, without the slightest tinge of blue-stockingism’. But Coleridge’s high opinion of Two Noble Kinsmen was also published in the Table Talk of 1835 and 1836, under the date 16 February 1833.


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ridge was actually harder on Sir Walter Scott’s poetry than Collier now made him out to be (p. xxvi), but while dismissive of Thomas Campbell (pp. xxxvii– viii, ‘1 November’ [in fact 21 October]) he did not condescend to instance borrowings and ‘bathos’ in The Pleasures of Hope—that is Collier’s own axe being ground. In discussing religion (‘20 [i.e., 21] October’) Coleridge did not cite Sir Thomas Browne, nor Bacon’s essay ‘Of Atheism’, nor did he—here—prefer the Odyssey to the Iliad or Boccaccio to Ariosto and Tasso, abominate Voltaire, praise Dante, assess George Chapman’s versification in his Homeric translations (pp. xxxi–xxxii), quote Spenser at length from memory (‘with a very little prompting’; p. xxxv), profess ‘great reverence’ for Chaucer (p. xliv), nor admit to knowing by heart ‘nearly every line Southey had written’, or to having ‘just finished’ Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (p. xxxvii). An extended and surely imaginary conversation, between Coleridge, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, and Charles and Mary Lamb, involved one more pet Collierian text, Fairfax’s translation of Tasso, of which a copy ‘was produced’, finding the stellar assembly (save Wordsworth, who ‘had no copy, and was not well acquainted with it’) uncannily familiar both with its merits and with its bibliographical history.130 Whence Collier derived, if he did not wholly invent, Coleridge’s reflections on ‘the singular manner in which the number three triumphed everywhere’ (pp. xxix–xxxi) is obscure, but Dilke in the Athenaeum liked the ‘merry’ exercise well enough to extract it, and to twit Collier with having ‘taken a hint from Coleridge’ by producing ‘three Essays under one cover’ (25 October 1856, p. 1299). It is probably safe to consider this uninspired flight of fancy as spurious too. The conversation between Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and John Dyer Collier (pp. xlvi–xlix), which John Payne claimed to have found in a separate, undated memorandum ‘of about the same period’—which has not survived—must remain suspect as well. Coleridge’s interpretation of Sir Scudamour’s troubled sleep in The Faerie Queen, iv.5, may possibly stem from John’s recollection of talk, as may the three-way critique of Samuel Rogers’s poetry; but the most provocative detail concerns Rogers and ‘my father’: they are said to have known each other ‘almost from boyhood’, to have corresponded regularly when John Dyer was in Spain (‘some of these letters I have seen and read’), and to have fallen out over Rogers’s unwelcome addresses to one of Jane Collier’s sisters, occasioning John Dyer’s ‘very gentle measures to keep an unwelcome suitor at a distance’.131 Biographical dubia like these abound, from the undocumented details of Coleridge’s first collection of poems to Mary Lamb’s critical sensi-

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130. The copy exhibited preserved the first stanza in two forms, one a paste-on cancel, and ‘another of the company’ observed that ‘Fairfax . . . changed his mind a third time, and had the whole of the first leaf cancelled, in order to introduce a third reading’ (pp. xxxii–xxxv). 131. This hint seems just credible, in terms of Rogers’s personal history: but cf. OMD, ii:62–64.


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tivity (p. xxxiii) to Wordsworth’s ‘warm praise’ of his own poem ‘The Cuckoo’.132 One tale of provenance above all has troubled Coleridge’s editors: a long passage dated ‘6 November’ (absent from the diary, which does contain a different two-page entry for this date, sandwiched between entries for 5 and 7 November) recounts an unlikely exchange between Coleridge and John concerning the yet-unpublished Christabel. Coleridge, ‘my journal’ tells us, ‘lent me a manuscript copy of Christabel . . . for the purpose of comparison’ with one that Collier already possessed, ‘made some years before by a lady of Salisbury’, namely, Sarah Stoddart, married to William Hazlitt since 1808. Coleridge ‘recognised the handwriting’, pointed out several changes that he had made subsequent to this ‘first draught’, and permitted John to collate his latest version with the Stoddart transcript. John made a handful of notes in the best tradition of textual critics— this from a youth who was (just now) reading Paradise Lost for the first time!— and ‘returned Coleridge’s copy, probably the next time I saw him’. Completing his suite of variants, Coleridge ‘gave me a printed copy when Christabel first came out, I think in 1816: it had his autograph and a few words on the title-page, but I have in some unaccountable way lost it’ (pp. xxxix–xliii). Collier’s ‘Salisbury MS’ indeed exists,133 but the story he told in his 1856 footnote (citing a diary entry of ‘November 1811’) sounds shaky. Supposedly it ‘was given to me by W. Hazlitt soon a er he married’—a curious present to a nineteen-year-old acquaintance 134—and later repossessed by Hazlitt when ‘one day he called on me . . . [and saw] it on my shelves’. ‘Not very long before his death [in 1830] . . . he again presented it to me’, Collier now wrote, and ‘I was the more glad to receive it back, because in the mean time Hazlitt had used some of the blank leaves of it as a note-book’, registering memoranda of speeches by various parliamentarians, written ‘while he was in the pay of Perry of the ‘‘Morning Chronicle’’ ’. That account fairly describes the manuscript as it is now, but one can only speculate what its true movements before 1856 had been.135

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132. Perhaps derived from the preface to Wordsworth’s Collected Poems of 1836, which Collier revealingly cited (p. liii), as if to confirm his own report of ‘1814’. The convenient fact that ‘not one of the persons, whose names are introduced in my Diary, is now alive’, ostensibly brought up to justify the publication of gossip and extracts (p. xiv), speaks for itself. 133. Once in the collection of Harry B. Smith (see his catalogue, A Sentimental Library [New York, 1914], p. 150), it is now in the Berg Collection of the NYPL; see entries CoS 58, HzW 100.5, and LmC 338 in IELM, vol. 4. 134. Hazlitt married Sarah Stoddart in May 1808 and promptly moved into her cottage at Winterslow, Wiltshire; by 1811, when Crabb Robinson started his diary, Hazlitt was making regular stays in London. 135. Sarah Stoddart’s bookplate in the volume suggests that it was originally hers; there are album amicorum entries by Charles and Mary Lamb, and Hazlitt’s parliamentary notes are followed by several pages of recipes added by Sarah. Harry B. Smith speculated that it was she who gave the MS to Collier, presumably aer her husband’s death. IELM notes that ‘the autograph MS


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A long anecdote about Wordsworth and ‘which of his own poems he liked best’ (pp. li–liii), transcribed from a memorandum (now unknown) dated ‘10 February 1814’, ‘probably on one of those pleasant occasions, when my father received friends to tea and supper’, cannot be confirmed, any more than ‘the patience, I may almost say indulgence, with which the great poet listened to me, then a young man’; and there are certainly no ‘other particulars in my Diary’ concerning Lord Byron (‘whose merits by the aid of the Edinburgh Review were then, I think, beginning to attract notice’), nor of George Crabbe nor Thomas Moore (pp. xlix–l). At pp. lv–lvii Collier printed three letters written to him, concerning Coleridge’s 1818 lecture series, from Wordsworth, Lamb, and Coleridge himself, only the last of which is now known from an original.136 The openness of both Wordsworth and Lamb in discussing Coleridge’s ‘depression’ and ‘bad health, and worse mind’ seems most improbable, as do Wordsworth’s rhetorical flights (Coleridge ‘talks as a bird sings, as if he could not help it’); and both letters, with their emphasis on Collier’s ‘long’ friendship with Coleridge (‘he means to call upon you’, writes Wordsworth; ‘he does not know that I am writing’, writes Lamb), must remain highly suspect. Seven Lectures was dedicated by Collier to Joseph Sandars, of Taplow, Buckinghamshire, as one of ‘three men, in no way related to me, to whom I am indebted for the greatest kindness and most effectual encouragement’. The first two (‘nameless here’) were clearly Devonshire and Ellesmere, ‘and such small means as I possessed of making any return to them have been already employed’. Sandars, a septuagenarian near-neighbour of John’s (Taplow is not far from Maidenhead), ‘took great interest about me & my pursuits and used to invite people from London to stay with him that he might make parties to meet me’;137 in offering the dedication John acknowledged ‘my sense of obligation, both personal and literary’, but intimated it might come as a surprise: ‘when our friendship began, I dare say you little expected that it would lead to such a result’. Perhaps he meant to distance himself from the cut-and-thrust of literary politics that his own circle of friends represented; perhaps no one of them would have been grateful for such a mixed bag of a gi . Despite Collier’s anxiety, in February 1856, to ‘lose no time with the work’, the dedication is dated 10 July, and Henry Crabb Robinson, visiting Maidenhead on 14 August, heard then

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lent to J. P. Collier [by Coleridge] . . . remains unlocated’; E. H. Coleridge, while remarking that the existence of both MSS ‘rests on the authority of John Payne Collier’ (Complete Poetical Works [1912], i:214), assigned them sigla and noted their variant readings. 136. BL C.61.c.10 (1), printed by Griggs, iv:825; the Lamb letter has been reprinted by E. V. Lucas (Letters [1935], ii:220), and Wordsworth’s by de Sélincourt, ii:664. 137. JPC Diary, 10 August 1873; he was earlier associated with George Stephenson in the construction of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, and died 4 October 1860, aged seventy-five.


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only that it was ‘soon to come out’. Robinson received his presentation copy on 12 November, although the earliest reviews had appeared three weeks earlier.138 By and large Seven Lectures was favourably, if unecstatically received in the front-line literary press: summary estimates included ‘acceptable to many persons, and to all Shakspearian scholars’ (Athenaeum), ‘a contribution as welcome as it is late-come to our stores of Shakespearean and Coleridgeian literature’ (Bentley’s Miscellany), and ‘a very agreeable addition to the table-talk of a great man’ (Gentleman’s Magazine), although the waspish Literary Gazette thought the preface ‘exceedingly dull’ (‘the gossip is very flat and dreary’), Collier’s selfdefence ‘both useless and derogatory’, and the volume ‘upon the whole . . . unworthy of Coleridge’s reputation’. Posterity would however confirm the value of Collier’s text(s) of the lectures, through a host of reprints, editions, and extracts; but if John had hoped simultaneously to set the emendation controversy to rest, through his ‘complete list’ and his prefatory meanderings—linking Coleridge with Shakespeare and Perkins itself—he was to be disappointed.

Shakespeare Pursued During the preparation of his Poems of Drayton and Seven Lectures, published in June and October 1856, Collier had repeatedly put off the Trevelyans, but in March 1857, ten years from the inception of the project, Trevelyan Papers prior to A.D. 1558 (‘the first portion of the selection from the domestic and other papers of the Trevelyan Family’) at last saw the light. Collier’s mere five paragraphs of preface supplied the place of the laboriously discussed ‘preliminary memoir’, which was promised instead for the second instalment, along with a table of contents—which Sir Charles had proposed at the last minute—and an index to both parts.139 The slender result was perhaps disappointing, at least to Sir

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138. HCR Diary. Robinson told Collier on 21 November: ‘The Preface I must not speak of unread, but as I presume it is controversial & in self vindication I wish it unwritten—for even the successful defence implies the having suffered injustice’; HCR Correspondence. For full references to the reviews, see A87. 139. CET’s desire for a table of contents must have been expressed just before 15 March 1857, when Collier approved of the idea, but as the book was already printed and bound—John Pycro Collier had his copy by 13 March—he suggested that it accompany the second volume, along with the index (‘indeed a book without an index, is only half a book, and to me the worst half ’). Possibly CET jibbed at this, for on 27 March John told WCT that ‘I have not yet seen a complete copy’, and that ‘Sir Charles had the circulation stopped until a Table of Contents could be prepared and printed’ (all letters from Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34). An index to the first two volumes appeared in Trevelyan Papers, Part II (1863), but Collier’s forestalled ‘memoir’ never materialized as such: the ‘Introduction to Parts I. II. and III.’ that prefaces Part III (1872) is by Sir Charles himself, and does not even mention Collier.


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Walter;140 but one party to the project offered a heartfelt testimonial, which the editor preserved all his life. ‘I have tenfold more reason to thank you’, wrote John Pycro Collier on receiving his gi copy, because I feel that your reason for originally undertaking it, & for carrying it through at a much greater cost of time & application than at first appeared, was to make an acknowledgement to Sir Charles of the great benefit he had conferred on me. One receives so much from one’s parents as a matter of course, that thanking them in this way seems an out of the way thing; but, My dear old Dad, this affair seems to me only a completion of what you began by spending more than you could afford on my education, which enabled me to take advantage of the kindness which you have in some sense enabled me to acknowledge. Many thanks to you for all this.141 Relieved—for the moment—of one literary burden, Collier briefly considered assuming the editorship of such political verse and ‘pasquils’ as might be printed in the ongoing series of Record Office calendars, for which Sir Francis Palgrave thought he would be an ‘admirable’ choice. ‘I should be very glad to be involved, in any creditable & becoming way, upon such an undertaking. I have many documents of my own that would aid it’, John told Sir Charles Trevelyan, in acknowledging the suggestion and the compliment. But although ‘I would very willingly serve under Sir F. Palgrave and the Master of the Rolls [Sir John Romilly]’, he was deterred by the thought of ‘serv[ing] under men I know to be my inferiors’ and ‘attempt[ing] to perform a duty for which I feel myself incompetent. I am too old, and too stiff in the back, to go crouching about for employment.’ 142 Instead, almost simultaneously, he contracted with the Fleet Street publishers Bell and Daldy for an edition of Spenser, to figure in their handsome ‘Library of English Worthies’ series.143 However this, and all other editorial projects must defer, John insisted, to his prior commitment to Shakespeare: ‘You are aware’, he told Bell and Daldy, ‘that of course my first object is to finish the 2d edit. of my Shakespeare. Upon that I have staked my

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140. Collier said as much to Sir Charles on 8 April 1857, pointing out with some sense of injury that ‘no man can serve two masters [and] I have had to serve three—indeed four’, namely the Camden Society, Sir Charles and Sir Walter, and ‘J. P. C., F.S.A & Editor’, of whom ‘my earliest master has been the first—my hardest, the last’. For Frederic Madden’s dismissive estimate of the volume (Diary, 27 March 1857) see A88. 141. 13 March 1857, FF/K MS 608. 142. Palgrave to CET, 16 March 1857, and JPC to CET, 17 March 1857, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34. 143. Collier was introduced to Bell and Daldy by W. J. Thoms, who also appealed (unsuccessfully) to Madden to furnish their Chaucer; Madden Diary, 23 December 1857.


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credit, & nothing shall interfere with it, so as to make it worse than it would have been otherwise. I would rather do nothing more, and die, than neglect it.’ 144 The ‘2d edit.’ was in fact what Collier had unsuccessfully mooted to Murray and to Whittaker in 1852, as the revisal or reissue of his 1842–44 text, with readings from Perkins incorporated. Whittaker may have relented—despite the galling episode of the ‘Complete List’ in Seven Lectures—when stocks of the earlier edition dwindled,145 for by 9 September 1856 John could tell Thomas Thomson of Stratford that he was correcting proof for ‘another edition of Shakespeare’, though ‘it will take some time’; by November the text of Henry V (the penultimate play in vol. 3) was ‘in the press’, although in March 1857 the labour was still only ‘half done, rather more’.146 Domestic cares had by then played havoc with John’s working schedule, but in the meantime pressure had accumulated in the form of rival editions. Halliwell’s ongoing folios may have meant little to Collier’s intended readership, but Singer, with his ill-judged adoption of selected Perkins readings, came finally to press in ten monthly volumes, beginning in January 1856,147 while Charles Knight recycled his good text in an inexpensive ‘Stratford Shakespeare’ (20 vols., 1854–56) and in a six-volume ‘Student’s Shakespeare’ of 1857. In December 1856 the first monthly part of a new ‘Routledge’s Shakespeare’ appeared, prepared by a newcomer soon to bulk large in Perkins affairs, Howard Staunton;148 and at the very end of December 1857, Alexander Dyce’s version—announced as long ago as July 1853—was at last published, in six volumes, by Moxon. The bookshops were full of new Shakespeares and reprints of old ones, with still more (like Richard Grant White’s) in the wings;

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144. JPC to Bell and Daldy, 26 April 1846. Folger MS Y.c.1055 (12). 145. Collier claimed, in the preface to the 1858 edition (i:v), that the earlier version was ‘exhausted’. 146. JPC to Thomson, SBT-RO ER1/45, fols. 17–18; N&Q, 1 November 1856 (cf. Seven Lectures, p. lxix: ‘the new edition . . . I am now in the act of printing’); JPC to Bell and Daldy, 11 March 1857, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (9). 147. For the delay of this edition, through the bankruptcy and death of William Pickering (1853–54), see N&Q, 1 December 1855, p. 442; and Ing 1985, p. 208. 148. Seventeen plays were published by the time Collier’s edition appeared in April 1858; Richard Knowles 1987, pp. 195–97. Staunton (1810–74), arguably the strongest chess player in the world in the 1840s, is remembered as the author of the long-standard Chess Player’s Handbook (1847), Chess Player’s Companion (1849), the tournament book of the great London International Congress of 1851 (1852), and Chess Praxis (1860), and as chess correspondent of the Illustrated London News from 1844 to his death; Bobby Fischer famously described him (1964) as ‘the most profound opening analyst of all time’, and his biographers R. D. Keene and R. N. Coles, stressing his pre-eminence over all English players and the ‘modernity’ of his ideas, called him ‘a profound thinker . . . a master both of theory and practice’ (1975, p. v). Staunton’s play at high level is characterized by preparation, caution, patience, and a partiality for flank developments and close manoeuvring, and his analytical notes by clarity and self-confidence—all qualities which were not unparalleled in his campaign against the Perkins Folio.


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if Collier’s were to compete and prevail, it could not permit countless others to consider and employ (or, worse still, to reject) all the provocative Perkins suggestions, while their discloser and promoter offered no canonical choice of his own.149 Most of Collier’s specifically Shakespearian activities of 1855–58—publications, negotiations, new research, and new impostures—may be regarded as part of that urgent task. The Athenaeum provided the venue, in 1856, for interim reports on The Passionate Pilgrim (17 May, correcting ‘an error I committed in my edition of . . . 1843–4 [sic]’ respecting Richard Barnfield’s claim to the first three poems) and Richard II (6 December, a new document relating to its politically inspired revival in 1601, by which ‘I am afraid that I shall further exasperate my Shakespearian adversaries’).150 Notes and Queries, meanwhile, hosted further observations on Richard Barnfield and The Passionate Pilgrim,151 and in November 1856 a devilishly tendentious ‘query’ about a ballad due to appear ‘in my new edition, now in the press’, titled ‘Agin Court, or the English Bowman’s Glory; to a pleasant new Tune’ (1 November, p. 349). This Collier purported to have found in broadside form, ‘printed for Henry Harper, in Smithfield’ but undated, and ‘what I want to know is, whether any of your readers can give me any tidings of such a production? Have they seen it printed, or quoted, or noted any where? Do they know its date?’—and specifically, could they confirm the word ‘women’ in the last line of Collier’s copy-text, or was it (as ‘I am persuaded’) a misprint for ‘bowmen’? 152 Predictably, John’s friend E. F. Rimbault took the bait, pointing out two weeks later what John certainly knew, that the initial stanza of this ‘fine old ballad’ (beginning ‘Agincourt, Agincourt! Know ye not Agincourt?’) appeared in Thomas Heywood’s First Part of Edward the Fourth, iii.2. Rimbault obligingly recollected having seen ‘a black-letter broadside of this ballad’, probably in the

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149. Collier had promised (Seven Lectures, p. lxix) that in his new edition ‘I shall carefully exclude all questionable introductions’ of Perkins material, and while his authority to discriminate ‘admissible’ from ‘questionable’ must have seemed to his rivals no better than anyone else’s, the reading public might credit him with at least a head start, and direct access to the original. 150. The testimony of Augustine Phillips of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (February 1601) concerns the private staging of the play for the Earl of Essex’s adherents on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion. Doubt was later cast on this document by N. E. S. A. Hamilton, but it is quite genuine, and in the PRO; see Chambers, ES, ii:205. 151. 5 and 12 January 1856 and 13 June 1857. The first article is largely a critique of the accuracy of E. V. Utterson’s private ‘Beldornie Press’ reprints, made public—to some extent—in the belief that Utterson, whose various kindnesses to him Collier went out of his way to acknowledge, was dead; the second, a week later, apologized for that misapprehension, and rejoiced at Utterson’s ‘continued health’. Utterson died, aged eighty, just seven months later. 152. In 1858 Collier judiciously so ‘emended’ the word, with an explanation in terms of compositorial misreading.


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Pepysian collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge—confusing it, in all likelihood, with the entirely different ‘New Ballad of Agen-Court in France’ (Pepys Ballads, i:90). Collier’s own ballad in eleven stanzas, which he published in full in 1858 (Shakespeare, iii:538–39), is simply a tenfold amplification of the fragment in 1 Edward IV (1600), to whose integrity Rimbault had effectively testified.153 In fact no early broadside version is known; and no other imprint of ‘Henry Harper in Smithfield’ (active ‘not long anterior to the Civil Wars’, Collier guessed) has ever turned up, although one Richard Harper did indeed operate there in the 1630s. Doubtless encouraged by such unwitting endorsement, John proceeded to publicize, from a ‘private note’ he had received, another supposed notice of his Agincourt ballad ‘by our mutual friend, Mr. W. Chappell’, which in fact has nothing to do with it,154 and seized the opportunity to enquire about ‘another historical effusion of the same sort’, licensed to Henry Carre and others in August 1586 as ‘A Tragical Report of King Richard III’. ‘Has this production come down to our day in any shape, either printed or manuscript?’ he asked hopefully, wondering if such might be identical with a ballad he had once copied ‘from a volume of short popular poems, in a handwriting of about the time of Anne or George I’, in the possession—surprise!—of ‘the late Mr. Heber’. In January 1857 John gave his readers three stanzas of this dubious composition to consider, and published its entirety in 1858, when he called special attention to a ‘new fact’ about Richard: the line ‘And he look’d two ways with his eyes’ suggests that the king had a squint. Furthermore, two other lines found telling parallels in Queen Margaret’s description of Richard in 3 Henry VI, and ‘these points seem remotely to connect the ballad with Shakespeare’. By now (Shakespeare, iv:222–23) ‘there can . . . be little doubt’ that the eight-stanza text, as transcribed from Heber’s (lost) MS, ‘was at one time in print’, as ‘it is just such a performance as would be calculated to gratify a street-audience’. No other version of it, in print or in manuscript, has ever materialized.

Hamlet, 1603 In autumn 1856 Collier’s gratuitous intervention in the fuss over a newly discovered ‘bad’ quarto of Hamlet (1603) muddied an already confusing episode,

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153. F. J. Furnivall, later one of Collier’s wariest debunkers, also accepted the ‘Agincourt’ ballad in 1868. 154. N&Q, 3 January 1857, p. 10, citing ‘the new edition of [Chappell’s] Popular Ballad Music of England, a work of the greatest interest and industry’ (i.e., Popular Music of the Olden Time, 2 vols., 1855–59). The ballad mentioned by Chappell, i:39, has a chorus beginning ‘Deo gracias, Anglia, redde pro victoria’, and was printed by him from a MS version in the Pepysian collection.


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which has been widely misunderstood. This once again involved Halliwell, who had purchased the volume in September 1856, from T. & W. Boone of New Bond Street, for the grand sum of £120: this for an ‘inferior’ version, scruffy, cut down, and lacking its title, but with a last leaf that supplied the text missing in Devonshire’s copy, the only other one known. Halliwell’s had turned up in Dublin, where M. W. Rooney, a shrewd general bookseller, had purchased it cheaply, and offered it first to Devonshire, who never replied; then at 100 guineas to Halliwell, who balked at the price; then, travelling to London, to the British Museum, where John Winter Jones pleaded poverty and declared that ‘we do not buy imperfect books’.155 Rooney next approached Halliwell in person, to hear only that £40 ‘was over its value to him’, whereupon Rooney sold it to Boone for £70 and went home. Within two days more Halliwell, thoroughly outmanoeuvred, agreed to pay Boone a £50 profit, although some haggling may subsequently have reduced the price.156 Rooney, assuming the stance of aggrieved party—disdained by the collecting elite as ‘merely an Irish bookseller’, never credited in the press as ‘the restorer and late possessor of this literary gem’—swi ly took his revenge by publishing, with an absurdly self-serving account of the affair, a quasifacsimile of the hitherto-unknown last page, thus frustrating Halliwell’s hope ‘of producing a complete copy for the first time in my own edition of the Poet’s works’ (Athenaeum, 25 October 1856, p. 1303), and in the process of his preemption made no fewer than eighteen errors in transcribing twenty-five lines. Understandably annoyed, Halliwell published a ‘correct transcript’ in the Athenaeum (making eighteen literal errors of his own), and may well have thought to renege on the transaction with Boone; within eighteen months the vexed copy changed hands once again—appropriately enough to the British Museum, at a price no doubt newly escalated, if now undeclared.157 The publicity given the discovery by the Athenaeum, in ‘Our Weekly Gossip’, inevitably attracted correspondence from Collier. On 4 October, a er noting that ‘I am now daily engaged in preparing a new impression of my eight volumes octavo [of Shakespeare]’, he reminisced about Devonshire’s 1603 Hamlet,

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155. Jones later stated (Athenaeum, 4 October 1856, p. 1221) that he would willingly have paid £100 as asked, but that Rooney refused to leave the book on inspection ‘for a reasonable time’. 156. Boone held the book for three months, exhibiting it to visitors (Madden among them), and Sir Thomas Phillipps later claimed that Halliwell ‘attempted to defraud Mr. Boone the bookseller’; Phillipps to W. S. W. Vaux, 6 February 1858; quoted by Munby, Phillipps Studies, ii:79. 157. Halliwell sold it, with a parcel of other quartos not individually priced, for £1,000 (John Winter Jones to JOH, 12 July 1858, LOA 72/40). An absurd but persistent canard, charging that Halliwell in fact stole the 1603 Hamlet from Sir Thomas Phillipps, and somehow involved Rooney and Boone (and by extension Devonshire, Panizzi, and Jones) in a laundering operation to conceal its true source, is laid to rest (we trust) in Freeman and Freeman 2001, where a more detailed account of the affair may be found.


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purchased from Payne and Foss in 1824 ‘in a volume consisting of six or seven old dramas (all rare,—R. Greene’s ‘‘Alphonsus,’’ 1599, being one of the commonest among them)’, for ‘only 100£, or 100 guineas—I forget which’; and he praised the 1825 Payne and Foss reprint of the Hamlet as ‘extremely accurate . . . the most accurate I ever so examined’, perhaps in a coded message to Halliwell, whose access to the original he had helped to block in 1851. On 18 October Henry Foss acknowledged John’s compliment, but tersely corrected his account of the transaction (‘incorrect throughout’): there were twelve plays, all by Shakespeare, which he listed, and Devonshire ‘gave 250£ for the volume’, which would be worth £400 ‘today’.158 Collier, whose principal aim must have been to trump the new find, immediately admitted his ‘great mistake’, explaining in self-defence that a er ‘some years in the Duke’s possession’, the 1603 Hamlet had been ‘separated from its old companions (enumerated by Mr. Foss), and bound up with Greene’s ‘‘Alphonsus’’ and some other plays of about that period’, and that Devonshire may have estimated the cost of Hamlet alone, ‘apart from the rest of the contents’, at £100:159 perhaps this was true, but if so the assembly was broken up subsequently, for the Shakespeare quartos when described by Sotheby’s in 1914 were all ‘cut down and inlaid in large white [or blue] paper’—in emulation of J. P. Kemble’s eccentric practice—and individually ‘disbound’.160 Collier also reported (4 October) having been offered, at some time a er 1844— for ‘a comparatively low price’, no more than £10—‘a large portion of a copy of the ‘‘Hamlet’’ of 1603’, which ‘had formed the flyleaves and lining of the binding of an old book [and] was considerably damaged’. He did not purchase it, he said, because he did not then contemplate a new edition of Shakespeare, and ‘my belief is, it was ultimately sold to an American bookseller for less’.161 Nothing of the sort has ever resurfaced. Once again Collier ventured to explain the true nature of the 1603 text of Hamlet with reference to shorthand stenography (‘as I have written short-hand all my life . . . I may be excused for speaking with some positiveness on the sub-

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158. Athenaeum, 18 October 1856, p. 1277. The list and the terms of the sale had been available since at least 1838 (Sir Henry Bunbury, ed., Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer, p. 80), although Bunbury, who discovered the volume ‘in a closet at Barton [Hall, Suffolk], 1823’ and traded it for books to the value of £180, thought that Devonshire paid £230, not £250. 159. Athenaeum, 25 October 1856; letter dated 19 October. 160. Chatsworth Library: Kemble-Devonshire Collection of English Plays & Play-Bills (Sotheby, 1914; sold by private treaty to Henry E. Huntington). Collier repeated the story about the inclusion of Alphonsus in OMD, i:22–23, there describing the volume as containing five plays (Hamlet 1603, Merry Wives 1602, Alphonsus, and ‘two others . . . of later dates’) and reporting that Devonshire, ‘in consistency with all the rest of his Kemble plays, had had all the old leaves inlaid, a course that, to the Duke’s surprise, I regretted’. 161. A letter to Halliwell (3 January 1857, LOA 60/32) also refers to this as being in America, ‘I think’.


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ject’) and adduced one striking example of literal error in Q1 (‘right done’ for ‘writ down’, i.2.222), which he attributed to the reporter’s misinterpretation of his own memorandum—something like ‘rt dn’—a thesis occasionally adopted without credit to Collier by later editors.162 Halliwell, bridling at Collier’s representation of his quarto as ‘a garbled, imperfect version of the . . . edition of 1604’, replied (Athenaeum, 25 October, p. 1308), citing passages that ‘appear very unlike a shorthand writer’s version’, and argued that the discovery of the last leaf of Q1 ‘will strengthen the opinion, that we possess in the edition of 1603, though it may be in a corrupted form, the tragedy as originally composed by the great dramatist’. He had come around to Collier’s position by 1865, however, describing Q1 in his folio edition as ‘a surreptitious and imperfect transcript of portions of the tragedy, taken probably in part from short-hand notes made at the theatre, and partly completed from memory’ (Shakespeare, xiv:150). By then, of course, he no longer owned his expensive exemplar.

The Taming of the Shrew, ‘1607’ Collier’s anecdotes of Shakespeare quartos, prompted initially by the Rooney/ Halliwell episode, were not restricted to Hamlet or the Bunbury-Devonshire volume. In no more than a last two-sentence paragraph (‘while upon this topic’), perhaps calculated to tantalize Halliwell beyond all readers, he casually announced that ‘I have recently obtained the most irrefragable evidence that Shakespeare’s ‘‘Taming of the Shrew’’ was published in quarto long before it found a place in the folio 1623. It is capable of most distinct and undeniable proof, that Heminge and Condell [the 1623 Folio editors] printed that comedy from a previous edition in quarto’ (Athenaeum, 9 October 1856). This claim could raise eyebrows indeed, as the only early quarto of The Shrew then known was dated 1631, and was thought—as it still is—to have been based on the Folio text; Collier of course would never confuse Shakespeare’s finished play with the analogous Taming of a Shrew (1594, 1607), the unique first quarto of which he had laboriously procured for Devonshire in 1834. He must also have realized that in October 1856 Halliwell was on the verge of issuing to subscribers the sixth volume of his folio Shakespeare, in which The Shrew was to figure, and that if a pre-1623 quarto of that play existed, no modern version could afford

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162. Cf. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (Arden, 1982), p. 23: ‘sometimes the sound of a word is retained while being associated with a wrong meaning. So Horatio bids Hamlet to ceasen, not season, his admiration (i.ii.192) at what is right done, instead of writ down, in their duty to inform him (i.ii.222)’. Kathleen O. Irace, The First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge, 1998), p. 96, suggested instead that this may be an ‘aural error’, but noted that ‘the phrase makes sense as it stands in Q1’. The last is surely irrelevant: the words hardly have evolved from one pair to the other.


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to ignore it: once again, as the spectre of the undisclosed Perkins emendations had frustrated Singer and Dyce in 1851, a late-breaking novelty threatened to rout a rival editor, whenever Collier chose to elaborate. Halliwell was too far committed to hold back, however, and contented himself with a stop-press acknowledgement, understandably barbed: ‘A statement has . . . lately been made that a quarto edition of the Taming of the Shrew, printed before the year 1623, has been discovered; but no particulars whatever have at present been given respecting it, and, as it is asserted to be in the hands of a critic who has been successfully imposed upon by several Shaksperian fabrications, it is earnestly to be hoped that so important a discovery may be submitted to a very careful examination’ (Shakespeare [1856], vi:298). What John had up his sleeve, and would keep back for his own revised Shakespeare of 1858, was—as Halliwell suspected—his own copy of a ‘special’ Shrew quarto. Lacking the title leaf with John Smethwick’s 1631 imprint, it bore a severely cropped manuscript note on the first extant page, which, with other considerations, led him to posit an entirely new theory of textual transmission. The book had always been thought of as ‘1631’, Collier allowed (Shakespeare, ii:437– 38), for the title-page is so dated, ‘but that title-page must have been struck off long subsequent to the printing of the body of the comedy to which it is attached; and upon examination the most unpractised eye will discover that the type used throughout was considerably older than 1631’. So much is pure bluff, for the type and ornaments are typical of William Stansby at that period, yet Collier proceeded to instance ‘the mutilation of two of the only known copies’ as rendering the true date problematic. In a gross misrepresentation of its rarity,163 Collier named the ‘only three copies’ as the Capell (at Trinity College, Cambridge, complete), the British Museum (Garrick’s, with imprint missing but title otherwise quite recognizable), and his own, which ‘has no title-page at all, but a memorandum in manuscript at the top of the first page (sign. A2), the upper half of which has been cropped away by a careless binder, so that only the lower half of the figures and letters remains; enough, however, to enable us to read, as well as the inscription can be made out, ‘‘1607 stayed by the Author.’’ The date may be 1609’. That reported inscription allowed Collier to conjecture that Shakespeare himself had somehow ‘stayed’ the publication, in the interest of keeping the play fresh for the stage, and that when the suppressed sheets were finally issued some

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163. Bartlett and Pollard (1916, pp. 107–08) cited twenty-one located (plus ten ‘unidentified’) copies, several of which Collier could easily have consulted, in addition to his trio: Halliwell, who frequently disposed of duplicates when he had completed the appropriate volume of his folio Shakespeare, sold three of his own in May 1856, May 1857, and June 1859, and there had been copies in the sales of George Steevens (1800), William Barnes Rhodes (1825), and Thomas Jolley (1844).


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twenty-four years later by Smethwick, the 1607 or 1609 title had been cancelled and a new one provided.164 Meanwhile, however, the quarto had come into the hands of Heminge and Condell, and ‘as was usual with the player-editors [of the First Folio], they printed from the 4to . . . and not from any original manuscript’. Collier instanced three ‘emendations’ by the Folio editors as ‘proof that the folio, 1623, must have been printed a er the 4to’:165 in each of these the Folio text, by supplying one extra word, had ‘cured . . . obvious defects’ and restored ‘the true reading’. Collier seems not even to have considered the far likelier explanation—that the quarto compositors, setting from the Folio, simply dropped out the words in question through carelessness. His contention that the punctuation of the Folio represented similar ‘emendation’ is likewise non-indicative, and that ‘in nearly all cases, the orthography of the folio is more modern than that of the 4to’ is undocumented and moot. Collier’s whole theory of transmission, original enough in 1858, has been virtually forgotten by modern Shakespearians, although the Cambridge editors of 1863 took it seriously enough to reject it, a er ‘a minute comparison of this Quarto edition with the First Folio, extending to points which are necessarily le unrecorded in our notes’ (iii:vii– viii). Their conclusion (‘that the Quarto was printed from the Folio’) is hence something of a matter of trust, although they also pointed out that the 1631 titleleaf of Capell’s copy was conjugate with A4 and on the same stock of paper as the rest of the play, and quite rightly judged that ‘the passages from the Quarto and Folio which Mr. Collier quotes in support of his theory seem . . . to make strongly against it’.166 As for Collier’s quarto itself, the whole matter of ‘1607 [or 1609] stayed by the Author’ has, for what it is worth, remained largely uninvestigated since 1863. Collier did admit (Shakespeare, ii:437) that ‘the top of the six, and of the seven, or nine, has fallen a sacrifice to the shears’, and a er his death the Sotheby’s cataloguer of his books (lot 952) transcribed the mutilated inscription as ‘1607 played by the Author’, while the purchaser, Bernard Quaritch, took a non-committal, if tendentious, stance on both the words and the date. In fact the inscription, which appears to be genuinely seventeenth-century, cannot be

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164. Reasoning that ‘this will account for the Editor’s copy being without a title page’, Collier in effect dismissed the importance or cash value of that leaf. 165. Ind.1.25, ii.1.145, and ii.1.349. Occasions where ‘various corruptions of the 4to. are transferred to the folio’ and ‘trifling circumstances [which] show that the folio, 1623, was, in general, merely a repetition of the 4to’ are indicated in Collier’s notes at ii:449, 456, 462, 463–64, 470, 475, 485, 486, 496, and 511; none of these in fact suggests any such order of dependence. 166. Alexander Dyce, whose indifference to bibliographical evidence we have already noticed, quoted this passage in his third edition of Shakespeare (1875), iii:102n., remarking—as he had in his 1864 second edition—that the order of the quarto and Folio (in copying one from the other) ‘is, aer all, a matter of not the slightest importance’.


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‘read’ at all with any certainty: the cropped date might just as well be 1667 or 1669, referring to a Restoration revival, and ‘played’ or ‘stayed’ could even be ‘payed’, as in an old owner’s record of his cost, since the ensuing three lettergroups are simply illegible.167

Mommsen and Pericles On 23 April 1857, by invitation, Collier presided over the Birthday Dinner festivities of the Royal Shakespearean Club at the town hall of Stratford, an honour he keenly appreciated: ‘it was one of the pleasantest days of my life’, he later recalled.168 To one hundred assembled enthusiasts he proposed the principal toast ‘to the immortal memory of William Shakespeare’, praising their common hero’s ‘musical mode of expression . . . originality, and adaptation’, which ‘could not be equalled on this side Heaven’, and asserting that he ‘was not the bard of one nation alone, but of all nations’; a er which he was loudly applauded, and had his health drunk ‘with three times three’ by the company (report in the Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser, 25 April). John’s personal guest at Stratford, and no doubt the occasion of his pannational emphasis, was his German colleague and ally, Tycho Mommsen— whose heath was drunk too—on his first visit to England. Mommsen, author of the imposing Der Perkins-Shakespeare (1854), principal of the college at Oldenburg, near Bremen, had been in close touch with Collier since the beginning of February over a new literary find: a copy of the prose version of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608) that had turned up in Switzerland, containing a hitherto unknown dedicatory preface by its author, George Wilkins. To appreciate the significance for Collier of this discovery one must recall his use of the NassauHeber copy, supposedly unique, in Farther Particulars (1839), and consider a further tiff with Halliwell at a low point in their relations, the winter of 1850– 51. Halliwell, it would seem, had at some time before December 1850 tracked down the novella, sequestered as it had been for fi een years in the library of George Daniel, and had volunteered—perhaps short of a promise—to provide Collier and the Shakespeare Society with a transcript, if he could procure one. But Daniel proved determined to profit from his investment, which he counted at £23 ‘including Commission’, plus the cost of an elegant rebinding by Lewis;169

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167. One later annotator, the Cambridge librarian Charles E. Sayle, suggested ‘1667 Played by the Children’, but we find this also unpersuasive. 168. JPC to Dr. Henry Kingsley (Stratford physician and fellow trustee of Shakespeare’s House), 20 and 25 April and 7 June 1857, SBT-RO ER1/46, fols. 7–12. 169. George Daniel’s characteristically sly letter to Halliwell (26 December 1850, LOA 64/11) proposes a meeting the next day at a ‘half-way house between yours & mine . . . the classical old


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and a er a tease or two and some appropriate flattery (‘I so much appreciate and approve your editorial pursuits’) the canny old marchand amateur succeeded in selling it to Halliwell for £55—throwing in another rare specimen of Shakespeariana, Westward for Smelts (1620), at the ‘moderate’ figure of £25.170 Faced with these imposing costs, and no doubt mindful of Daniel’s report of a £25 offer for a mere transcript of Pericles, Halliwell now retracted his offer to supply one to the Shakespeare Society—to Collier’s indignation. In a period that crystallized differences between them, John eloquently remonstrated with his wealthier colleague: ‘I thought, in my simplicity, that if you promised a transcript, while the book belonged to somebody else, if you could get the use of it, the S. S. would be quite sure of it, now the book was your own. It makes me sorry that you have got the book, if the effect be that it locks it up from the purpose for which you yourself designed it. As to depreciation, I dissent from your doctrine. . . . Pray sell the book for your own pocket’s sake, and that we may have a chance of a reprint. The then owner may possibly think as I do, and as I always have done.’ 171 There matters remained, with Halliwell intent on preserving the full text of the prose Pericles for his own Shakespeare commentary—which his edition would reach only in 1865—until once again his design was anticipated. On 7 February 1857 the Athenaeum announced the discovery of a new copy, among other early English rarities, in Switzerland, citing ‘a letter from Saxony’ (p. 183). The unnamed reporter was Tycho Mommsen, who had been scouring continental libraries for Shakespeariana, and the communicator of the news was almost certainly Collier, with whom Mommsen had renewed correspondence a few months before.172 The far-flung exemplar had turned up in the Stadtbibliothek of Zurich, and on 4 February Mommsen suggested to John that the two share the cost of a reprint (about £10 for 500 copies), and that ‘you would perhaps not

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D’oyley’s Warehouse’, where ‘I will gladden your eyes with a sight of this Book; though I will not promise to part with it’—although he reported an offer by the late Thomas Rodd of £55—‘Cash, and a tempting Tome, to boot’, or (incredibly) ‘twenty-five pounds if I would only permit a Copy to be made of it’. 170. Halliwell wrote an account of the transaction in the volume itself, not mentioning Daniel by name, and declaring—apparently without irony, but at this point the book (now BL C.34.l.8, purchased in 1858) was probably destined for re-sale—that ‘its owner, feeling the necessity of my having it for literary use, very kindly allowed me to obtain it . . . [for] a sum much less than it would undoubtedly realize by auction’. 171. JPC to JOH, 2 January 1851, LOA 46/53. On 11 January Collier reported the events to Peter Cunningham, remaining incredulous about the price paid by Halliwell: ‘he has paid for it through the nose, most cruelly. I hear strange stories about the prices he gives, and I cannot believe all I hear’; JPC to Cunningham, Harmsen collection. 172. Mommsen to JPC, 7 September 1856, thanking Collier for Perkins facsimiles sent six months earlier; FF/K MS 640.


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dislike to write some introductory words or letter belonging to it’.173 Collier apparently declined co-proprietorship, but agreed to supply an introduction; and Mommsen found a publisher in Oldenburg, Gerhard Stalling, who would take on the reprint and give Collier fi y free copies.174 Collier now contributed to the Athenaeum (7 March 1857) an extended and glowing account of the original (‘certainly, on every ground, the most curious [tract] that has fallen under my observation in the course of my life’), noting that ‘it is now being reprinted in Germany, and . . . well deserves the distinction’, although he said nothing about the dedicatory epistle signed by George Wilkins, which Mommsen had not realized was unknown, and so had neglected to describe in his earlier communications. John learned of it only when proofs of the reprint arrived (posted by Mommsen with his own preface on 8 March, urgently requesting Collier’s text), and his introduction to the finished product reflects some annoyance about the lack of forewarning, and about the hurriedness of the publication. ‘I did not become acquainted with the circumstance that Wilkins was the writer . . . until a er I had sent the following communication to the ‘‘Athenaeum’’’, he wrote, providing only that three-column text as the substance of his introduction and adding: ‘I should have been happy to have said a great deal more upon the subject, had I been aware, at an earlier period, that some prefatory matter was expected from me by my accomplished friend’.175 A fuller exposition of the Wilkins connection, together with a full transcript of the dedicatory epistle (since the new reprint ‘is utterly unknown in England’), was supplied by John to the Athenaeum of 27 June, reviving the Wilkins biographical theories treated in Memoirs of Actors and promising that ‘in the new edition [of Shakespeare] I am now passing through the press’, evidence derived from the prose Pericles would help to ameliorate the text of Shakespeare’s notoriously misprinted play.176 In his introductory remarks to Mommsen’s reprint John chose not to remember the events of 1851 and Daniel’s parting with his copy to Halliwell: aside from a ‘fragment’ he himself claimed to possess—and which has never again been seen—the only known exemplar, ‘hitherto deemed perfect, . . . is in the hands of a private English gentleman, who bought it at the cost of more than £20 at the sale of Heber’s Library in 1834 [sic, for 1835]. Here the Dedication ‘‘to the right worshipful and most worthy Gentleman, Master Henry Fermor’’ is want-

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173. Mommsen to JPC, 4 February 1857, Folger MS Y.d.6 (174). 174. Mommsen to JPC, 28 February, letter bound with other correspondence relating to the reprint in Folger N.a.64. 175. Pericles (1857), pp. xxvii and xxxv; a touchy refusal to have his name on the title-page was successfully parried by Mommsen on 23 March (‘the publisher will think to lose much by it and reproach me with the same’), for in the event Collier’s name does appear, in the same type-size as Mommsen’s. 176. Cf. Shakespeare (1858), vi:388, etc.


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ing’. It is possible that Collier still thought this a Britwell Court hostage (he had suggested to Halliwell in 1851 that ‘two perfect copies’ existed, presumably the Nassau-Heber and the Daniel, which are in fact identical), but Halliwell swi ly disabused him: ‘My copy was that formerly in the Nassau collection, a erwards in the Heber Library’, he wrote to the Athenaeum (21 March 1857, p. 375), ‘and is, I believe, the only one which has appeared in sales’. Describing it as ‘a perfect and beautiful copy’, and ‘certainly well worth reprinting’, Halliwell signalled ‘my intention to introduce it in an edition of Shakespeare I am now passing through the press’, although ‘it will be a long time before I can make any use of my collections on this drama [Pericles], which will be printed last of all’. He seems however to have misunderstood the nature of Mommsen’s forthcoming edition, for he declared that his own design ‘will hardly be rendered superfluous by the reprint which Mr. Collier informs us is now in progress in Germany, especially if such reprint is taken from a transcript made in England, and not from a copy of the original work’. Did he suspect, or intend to suggest, that the newly discovered Swiss exemplar was merely a blind, meant to disguise the recycling of Collier’s own transcripts of about 1835? 177 At this point Collier, having learned for the first time from Mommsen of the dedicatory epistle in the Zurich copy, must have relished informing his colleague (and the whole world, via the Athenaeum, 28 March) that Halliwell’s ‘perfect and beautiful’ and very expensive copy ‘is not complete. It was not complete when it went through my hands (by the favour of the late Mr. Heber) many years ago. It wanted the Dedication then, and I apprehend that it wants the Dedication now’—a doubly regrettable defect, because Wilkins’s authorship opened up new areas of biographical and critical speculation, and because (deliciously) it would disappoint Mr. Halliwell, ‘who, from his enterprise and expenditure, deserves to have everything in his possession that will illustrate Shakespeare’.178 John went on to say something of Wilkins (he would expand upon this in June), to adduce a link between the dedicatee, Henry Fermor, and the supposed U on

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177. Halliwell seems never to have believed in the existence of Collier’s ‘considerable fragment’, which indeed sounds very dubious (his Shakespeare [1865], xvi:71: ‘only two copies . . . are known to exist’), but it is hard to explain his imputation of ‘a transcript made in England’, unless he had overlooked or disbelieved the Athenaeum announcement of 7 February. Mommsen too expressed surprise at hearing of John’s fragment (Mommsen to JPC, 15 March 1857, bound in Folger N.a.64), and made no mention of it in the finished version of his reprint. 178. Unbeknownst to Collier, however, Halliwell had been in correspondence with Mommsen since March, in response to Mommsen’s announcement (Athenaeum, 28 February 1857, p. 280) of his discovery, ‘in an old library’, of a copy of the John Wright issue of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). By 1 April Halliwell had already tried to purchase the Zurich Pericles from the Stadtbibliothek itself, rather offending the curator, Dr. Horner: see Mommsen to JOH, 1 April 1857, LOA 24/66. Mommsen promised him a copy of the dedication from ‘the photographist at Hannover’, but the negatives eventually proved to be ‘very bad’; Mommsen to JOH, 16 July 1857, LOA 24/71.


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Court provenance of the Perkins Folio, and to enumerate some other recent Shakespearian discoveries in Germany and Switzerland. Finally, he contrived in a ‘P.S.’ to forget, once again, what he had known very well in January 1851: ‘Until I saw Mr. Halliwell’s letter [of 21 March] . . . I was not aware that the novel of ‘‘The painful Adventures of Pericles’’ was in his possession, and that he intended to reprint it. . . . Had I known that Mr. Halliwell was now the owner of the novel, and that he had recently bought it, as an illustration for his great work, I should never have aided in the reprint of it in Germany.’ This was in fact the first time that Collier mentioned, in print, his involvement in Mommsen’s project—and it may explain why he had wished to keep his name off the title-page—but the subtexts of his deliberately insincere protestation would have been apparent to the parties involved. Not that Halliwell, who could hardly rake over his churlish conduct of six years earlier, did not richly deserve the pre-emption. He did not in fact ever reprint the novella in his folio Shakespeare, for Mommsen’s text is quite satisfactory. And whereas in March 1857 he declared that ‘no edition of ‘‘Pericles’’ can be complete without a particular examination of this most interesting relic’, whose ‘unrestricted use is indispensable to an editor’, by 1865 it was merely a ‘very rare and curious tract’ and, as based only on ‘hasty notes taken [by Wilkins] in shorthand’, was no longer ‘of great importance in correcting the text of Pericles’ (Shakespeare, xvi:71–72). On the flyleaf of his (now) less precious copy he descended to bibliographical petulance: the Zurich copy ‘has a dedication by G. Wilkins, but such dedn is in a different type, of longer form, & if at all belonging to the work (which I doubt) was unquestionably a subsequent introduction’. And in late 1858, with no novelty-value to hoard or protect, the Nassau-Heber-DanielHalliwell Painful Adventures joined Hamlet (1603) on the shelves of the British Museum, no doubt for a solacing compensation. A er a punctilious exchange of proofs during March, Mommsen’s modest octavo reached Collier before 18 April, perhaps from the hands of its editor, who was paying his first visit to England.179 Although his reception at Stratford

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179. Collier may never have realized that Mommsen was in close touch with Halliwell too, for commercial as well as scholarly reasons. On 12 April Mommsen dined at Brixton Hill, and sold Halliwell a tract volume he had dislodged from the old Bentinck library at Varel, near Oldenburg. Its history is curious: William Gustavus Frederic, Count Bentinck of Holland and greatgrandson of the first Earl of Portland, had died in 1835 without legitimate male issue, and aer a lawsuit his Sovereign Lordship of Kniphausen and Varel was annexed to the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg in 1854, at which time his books and papers were dispersed. Among the former was a forty-one-volume collection of pamphlets bound for Randolph Greenway Jr. of Thavies Inn, Holborn, ‘about 1728 and 1729’, but apparently earlier assembled by ‘a certain Dr. Ashhurst’ (possibly the London merchant Henry Ashhurst (d. 1680). From this series Mommsen had extracted one precious volume, containing Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), as well as seven other items of no outstanding value, apparently STC 1334/4.5, 3537, 18097, 22071/2, and Wing D 491, E 3127, and L 2816


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may have gratified Mommsen, as it did his sponsor and host, in one respect the trip proved a disappointment: as the author of a 500-page monograph on the Perkins Folio, and its champion in a forthcoming edition of Shakespeare for German readers, he had earnestly sought a first-hand look at the volume. But though provided with an introduction to the Duke of Devonshire from the Grand Duchess of Weimar, as well as what he thought was the ‘mediation’ of Collier himself, ‘I never got any reply to my letter, nor was admitted to the library’.180 This outcome is not altogether inexplicable, for the duke was in the last year of his life and confined to a wheelchair.181 And although Mommsen was in England again in October (Madden Diary, 6 October 1857), if he did not remain there all summer, there is no evidence of his ever having visited Riverside. With Mary Louisa terminally ill, John would not be expected to offer hospitality; and the non-existence of the ‘Pericles fragment’, if we are right to suppose it, would be reason enough for him to have kept Mommsen away from his shelves. But relations between the two remained cordial, Collier flattering his ally in print at every opportunity,182 providing him help in another commercial negotiation,183 and at some point standing godfather to one of his daughters;184 (Mommsen to JOH, 3 March 1857, LOA 24/61). In subsequent correspondence, and sight unseen, Halliwell had agreed to pay £84 for the Sonnets, and in the event gave £120 for the entire volume (Henrietta Halliwell’s diary, 13 April 1857; printed in Spevack 1999, p. 93), which he broke up: and within little more than a year he sold the Sonnets at Sotheby and Wilkinson’s—extracted and rebound by Bedford, as ‘found in a volume of tracts bound up about the year 1725’ (sale, 14 June 1858, lot 321). There the bookseller Joseph Lilly paid £154 7s. for it, for the newly dominant collector Henry Huth, from whose library it passed to the Elizabethan Club, Yale (EC 194; see Parks 1986, p. 229). Throughout this transaction Mommsen (who represented himself merely as agent) craved anonymity, ‘because I should not like to be named together with Mr. Rooney’, and asked Halliwell, were he to publish any account of his discoveries, to ‘leave away everything regarding Mr. Collier, who has shown much kindness to me and whom I would not like to contradict publicly’. 180. Mommsen to JPC, 16 May 1860, FF/K MS 642. 181. His staff may have shielded him to some extent from new importunities, but there is no extant record of any ‘mediation’ from Collier. 182. E.g., ‘The Preface [to The Painful Adventures], written in English by Professor Mommsen, is a pattern of its kind, both for that species of learning for which German scholars are distinguished, and for perspicuity, for which they are not always so remarkable’; Shakespeare (1858), vi:383n. 183. At some time before 5 September 1857 Mommsen offered Madden, for the British Museum, a substantial collection of the letters and papers of William, Count Bentinck of Holland, including some of William Bentinck, first Earl of Portland. These, which now occupy fiy-three volumes in the British Library (Egerton MSS 1704–56), were at first priced £150, a figure somehow raised to £300 in October and then reduced (through Collier’s intercession) to £150 again, at which price the Museum acquired them; see Madden Diary, 6 September, 6, 8, and 9 October, and 10 November 1857; JPC to Madden, 7 October 1857, BL Egerton MS 2846, fols. 243–44; Mommsen to JPC, 18 January 1858, Folger MS Y.d.6 (175). 184. Mommsen to JPC, 11 March 1860, FF/K MS 641.


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while Mommsen in 1860—as we shall see—never wavered in his support for both Perkins and Collier, offering his own trust and testimony, both at home and abroad, for whatever use John could make of them. If Collier’s tribulations in public, by way of challenge and discredit, were moderated—temporarily—during an effective cease-fire of 1856–57, personal afflictions seem all but inevitably to have supplied their scourging place. On 4 November 1856 Emma Pycro , who had resided with John’s family for forty years, died.185 John was then, as o en in winter, suffering from what must have been congenital arthritis;186 but it was Mary Louisa, now bere of a sister and two daughters in less than four years, in whom a cancer made its fatal appearance. By late October 1857 her condition was desperate: ‘She cannot bear chloroform!’ wrote Henry Crabb Robinson; ‘What a pity! Death would be a blessing’;187 and during November John spoke of her as ‘rapidly sinking’, while he struggled with his own indisposition (‘of no serious kind’ and ‘produced mainly by bad nights and anxiety on behalf of my poor wife’).188 He continued ‘in constant attendance on my poor dying wife’, with ‘my mind . . . in the most confused and distressed condition’,189 until on 10 December Mary Louisa’s miseries ended. Five days later, at the Proctors’, Crabb Robinson ‘met with an unexpected funeral party’, and reflected that ‘she was a good mother & wife and in every way respectable’—adding the inevitable sober balance, that ‘there was no manifestation of great sensibility [in her]—nor the want of it’ (Diary, 15 December 1857). He dispatched his usual gi of a Christmas turkey to John, who replied simply (with thanks) that ‘I have lost 4 out of seven [i.e., Mary and Jane Collier, Emma Pycro and Mary Louisa] since I quitted London’.190 The sixth Duke of Devonshire, himself in failing health, condoled feelingly with his old seneschal: ‘I read in yesterday’s newspaper the sad intelligence of your bereavement. Your last letter had informed me of your being in expectation 185. The cause of death is given as ‘epilepsy [and] disease of the brain’. John had told Robinson (HCR Diary, 29 August 1854) that she was ‘losing her memory’; Mary Proctor added (letter to HCR, 25 September 1855, HCR Correspondence) that ‘she oen has fits, and they seem to impair her memory very much’. 186. He blamed ‘illness, rheumatic and other’, for making correspondence impossible (JPC to CET, 14 January 1857, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34); at other times ‘lameness’ and ‘lumbago’ prevented ‘his walking as much as he usually does’ (Mary Proctor to HCR, 25 September 1855). 187. Diary, 25 October 1857, citing information from William Durrant Cooper. Robinson was enthusiastic about the anaesthetic benefits of chloroform, having tested it himself in 1849; see Morley 1935, p. 128. Collier told Halliwell on 5 November 1857 that her illness had begun ‘not quite a year ago’; LOA 63/35. 188. JPC to JOH, 5 November 1857; JPC to F. G. Tomlins, 8 November 1857, Harvard Theatre Collection; JPC to CET, 10 November 1857, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34. 189. JPC to CET, 3 December 1857, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34. 190. JPC to HCR, 26 December 1857, HCR Correspondence.


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of that calamity. I can only offer sincere condolences, and I trust that your active mind will have constant employment that may assist in relieving you.’ 191 Patronage, such as it remained, was mortal as well in this year: the Earl of Ellesmere had died at Bridgewater House on 18 February, although since the Museum Commission debacle Collier may have imagined their relationship under strain. In public he maintained its steadiness, however, naming Ellesmere in 1858 as ‘a nobleman never weary of showing kindness and of affording assistance . . . who, shortly anterior to his death, wrote me his strong opinion in support of the emendations in my corrected folio, 1632, when he said that ‘‘they were so excellent, that they would almost make old Tieck turn in his grave’’ ’,192 and renewing the encomium (‘that gi ed, enlightened and liberal nobleman’) seven years later (BARB, i:vi). But in very late life, and in private, he turned almost savagely upon the memory of his benefactor, alluding to him as ‘only half my friend & . . . afraid of taking my part’, wanting in ‘moral courage’, and ‘a man of no originality of mind, or real independence of character’.193 And on 18 January 1858, one week a er John’s sixty-ninth birthday, Devonshire himself—‘the kindest man in the world to me’, John told W. O. Hunt in 1865 194—was found dead in his bed. John was hardly alone in his sense of profound loss, for the duke’s patronage had almost always inspired personal affection and loyalty. ‘He raised me to his level, he did not condescend to mine. . . . I lost indeed a friend when he died’, John remembered two decades later (JPC Diary, 13 October 1881), and while he lost no time in enlisting Devonshire’s cousin and successor as dedicatee of the imminent Shakespeare edition, the seventh Duke’s ongoing patronage would never transcend, in his mind, a kind of respectful formality.195

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191. Devonshire to JPC, 14 December 1857, Folger MS Y.d.341 (38). 192. Shakespeare, i:xxxv–xxxvi; Ellesmere’s flattering letter apparently does not survive, and it would have been uncharacteristic of Collier to destroy it. 193. These consistently bitter aspersions on Ellesmere and on his ‘betrayal’ of his protégé pepper Collier’s late diary, perhaps reflecting the coldness of his widow (‘Lady E. did not like me’), or the understandable hostility of his successor, the second Earl, aer the revelations of 1859–60; see 16 August 1877, 19 March 1879, 8 July 1878 (‘Lord Ellesmere never was my patron; he deserted me when I wanted him most’). A passage at the end of Collier’s MS Memoirs asserts that ‘from that day [i.e., the end of the commission] to his death Lord Ellesmere utterly discarded me & my opinions’, apparently forgetting his government pension of 1850, Ellesmere’s face-saving purchase of the Larpent MSS in 1853, and the ‘strong’ support of the Perkins Folio claimed above, ‘shortly anterior to his death’. Collier’s resentment—expressed only in a private diary, and very late in life—may also have stemmed from his own multiple abuse of Ellesmere’s archival trust, the betrayer’s guilty conscience rounding on the betrayed. Ellesmere’s literary pretensions (so fawningly approved by John, in his courtship) as well as his all-too-human familiarity in correspondence (as contrasted with Devonshire’s tactful but lordly reserve) also exposed him to such ungrateful aerthoughts. 194. JPC to Hunt, 18 February 1865, SBT-RO ER34/2/19 (40). 195. Described as ‘pious’ and ‘kind-hearted’ by Lees-Milne, he continued the sixth Duke’s an-


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The 1858 Shakespeare Unlike his edition of 1842–44, issued volume by volume over twenty-five months, Collier’s revised Shakespeare was offered by Whittaker only when completed, as a six-volume set priced £4, in April 1858. Although he had been submitting copy and correcting proof for at least two years, and had anticipated publication in late 1857, ‘the preliminary matter has been unavoidably delayed by the severest domestic afflictions’ (p. xxxv), and John dated his long ‘Preface to the Present Edition’ from Maidenhead on 24 March 1858. But despite the long preparation, and high hopes for a ‘standard’ edition to outshine those of Singer, Knight, Staunton, and Dyce—upon which, as John told Bell and Daldy, ‘I have staked my credit’—the result was scarcely a triumph. The principal raison d’être of the edition, a er all, had been to incorporate (with indication) all those Perkins Folio readings that John now deemed judicious,196 and for that reason alone Shakespearians have ever since shied away from it. Its other novelties, too, are a mixed lot: a somewhat updated and newly indexed ‘Life of Shakespeare’ (though clearly set, like the rest of the text, from a corrected copy of 1842–44), individual prefaces occasionally enlarged (but as o en as not with false evidence), some additional commentary, and a very few altered readings, other than Perkinsian, from editorial reconsideration or conjecture since 1844. John himself signalled most of the new material in his preface (pp. v–vii), including what he had recently published in the Athenaeum and Notes and Queries, and a spurious discovery concerning John Marston—an innocent mistake, as it happens, though complicated by an episode of misappropriation.197

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nuity: Collier was still listing this £100 as part of his income in 1876 (JPC Diary, 8 May). However he told W. O. Hunt in 1865 only that ‘I know much less’ of him than of the sixth Duke, and that he had no idea of Devonshire’s plans for the collection of plays. 196. In at least one instance he was carelessly unfaithful to his own declared source: the famous added line in Coriolanus, ‘To brook control without the use of anger’ is here misquoted as ‘To brook reproof ’, etc. 197. In or before January 1858 Collier obtained, from his friend Peter Cunningham, an undated letter to Lord Kimbolton, signed ‘John Marston’, alluding to a conspiracy against the government; Collier assumed the signatory to be the playwright and poet (1575?–1634), whose handwriting was then otherwise unknown, and the conspiracy to be the Gunpowder Plot (1605). He made much of the discovery (Shakespeare, i:vii and 178–80), and commissioned a private facsimile of the letter, thinking it ‘not impossible . . . that this very letter from Marston to Lord Kimbolton . . . was the means of disclosing the whole scheme, and of saving the lives of the king, and of hundreds of the nobility and gentry’. Of this misapprehension Collier was speedily disabused (the barony of Kimbolton was created only in 1620, and the letter, datable to 1641, relates to a quite different conspiracy), though he persisted in identifying ‘John Marston’ (in fact the rector of St. Margaret’s, Canterbury, deprived and imprisoned in 1642) with his literary namesake— whose death date Halliwell had ascertained in 1856, although John chose to resist this. The letter itself, however, had been abstracted, along with other documents—whether borrowed or stolen is


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Curiously, he omitted to mention what is perhaps the only biographical novelty of lasting significance in his entire work: the suggestion (i:115n; cf. vi:526) that the interlocutor ‘W. S.’ in Willobie His Avisa, a splendidly cryptic long poem of 1594, might represent Shakespeare himself.198 This was an entirely plausible conjecture, which has dominated discussion of the poem in our time, and John might well have made a fuss about it; but he took no occasion, in 1858 or later, to elaborate, and the most recent full study of the text fails to mention his undoubted priority in starting this hare.199 The principal innovation in the commentary to the 1858 Shakespeare, however, was also its principal new deceit: to the individual play prefaces, again based literally on those of 1842–44, John added ten illustrative ballads, some of which he had cited or briefly extracted in his earlier edition. Three of these are by Thomas Jordan, the ‘City Poet’ of the mid-seventeenth century (illustrating Much Ado, Merchant of Venice,200 and Winter’s Tale); and one, relating to Troilus, is taken from Halliwell’s 1846 Shakespeare Society edition of The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom. The remaining six are all partly or wholly fabrications. ‘The Inchanted Island’ and ‘The Tragedie of Othello the Moore’, first printed by Collier in 1839 and 1836, are revived in prefaces to The Tempest (i:7– 11) and Othello (vi:4–8);201 and a ‘much improved version’ of ‘The Lamentable Burning of the Globe Play-House’—substantially re-written since its appearance in HEDP (1831)—adorns Henry VIII (iv:356–58). The ballads ‘Agincourt, or the English Bowman’s Glory’ and ‘Of King Richard the Third’, announced by way of extracts in Notes and Queries in 1856–57, were now printed in full (iii:538–39 and iv:222–23); and a version of the ballad on King John’s poisoning, augmented and altered from Thomas Deloney’s Strange Histories (1607) but purporting to reproduce an otherwise unknown ‘undated broadside, evidently anterior to Shakespeare’s tragedy [sic], and probably earlier than 1591’, is quite new (iii:121–23). Perhaps only because of subsequent events—the exposures of 1859–60—these last three constitute Collier’s final substantial literary fabrica-

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unclear—by Cunningham, from the muniments of the Duke of Manchester at Kimbolton Castle. Collier, at the urging of John Forster and Charles Wentworth Dilke, apparently returned it to its owner in 1860: see QD A89a.4. 198. Collier does seem to have been the first to propose this identification: see Marie Louise Edel’s ‘Appendix XI’ in the New Variorum Sonnets, ed. Hyder Rollins (1944), ii:302. Two years later W. C. Trevelyan, who owned a copy of the rare original, made the same suggestion in N&Q (28 January 1860, pp. 59–60), writing that ‘I do not find [it] in any of the commentators on Shakespeare’, to which the editor, Thoms, subjoined a note crediting his friend. 199. De Luna 1970, esp. p. 100. 200. Here Collier also reprinted (ii:265) four spurious lines from the ‘Funeral Elegy’ on Burbage. 201. Halliwell had already reprinted ‘The Inchanted Island’ as genuine, together with a facsimile of the first stanza provided by Collier, in the first volume of his folio Shakespeare (1853).


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tions, and one marvels at his gratuitous audacity, while wondering why, in preparing what the Athenaeum would generously call ‘the crowning labour of his editorial life’, John chose to challenge his sceptics with such inglorious impostures. Mechanical habit (only?) can explain the exercise, for there was practically nothing to gain from it, although in 1856–58 John may have thought he had routed his more strident opposition. Speaking of the Perkins Folio in a long prefatory complaint, he all but tempted fate with the ‘absurd’ hypothesis that ‘I had been the author of the . . . changes in my corrected folio, 1632, and had palmed them off as the emendations of some person who had lived and died two hundred years ago’ (p. x). ‘Out of thine own mouth (wicked scribbler) will I judge thee’ indeed! But Collier’s predicament in 1858 was beyond diplomacy or compromise; any backtracking with Perkins would surely have encouraged his committed critics to look elsewhere, and unravelling of his earlier fakery would have le his career in a shambles. Like Macbeth (he may well have reflected) he could no longer retreat: I am in blood Stept in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er. Accordingly, it would seem, he pursued the unswerving course of the hardened literary criminal, deliberately re-baiting his critics, and raising the stakes of the dispute from innuendo to indictment. The 1858 Shakespeare, embodying the all-but-final form of his great textual challenge, is the high-water mark of that state of resolve. By its reception, Collier as much as declared, he would stand and be judged.

Collier and Dyce: The Last Act ‘A knife will divide this work into three unequal parts’, wrote W. H. Dixon of Collier’s 1858 Shakespeare, ‘containing a commentator’s quarrel, a life of the Poet, and the text of his poems and plays. Of these three parts the first may be cut away (when it has been read) without permanent loss to the volumes’ (Athenaeum, 1 May 1858, pp. 557–59). Here Collier began simply enough, by defining his textual approach and his editorial principles, and took his stand on the authenticity and authority of the Perkins emendations; but soon enough he was mired in assailing his two perceived enemies, Singer and Dyce.202 His case against Singer (i:xvi–xxi and passim) remained much as it had been in Seven

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202. Although he alluded to ‘four angry editors’ who ‘the moment I began upon the works of Shakespeare . . . sprang up in the field’ (i:xxxvii), he never identified Halliwell or Staunton (nor Grant White, for that matter) as rivals, and ignored the particular criticisms of Brae and Ingleby.


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Lectures, basically that Singer had abused the Old Corrector ‘without measure or mercy’ while silently adopting some of his readings—true enough, as we know—but now the invective was sharpened: Singer was ‘thus strutting before the world in pillaged plumage’, deficient in ‘editorial morality’, and guilty of ‘barefaced—fraud I will not call it—but . . . such a barefaced borrowing . . . from my corrected folio, 1632, as would astonish the most expert practitioner in plagiarism’. Singer may have considered a reply, for despite his protestation to Dyce that he did not intend to ‘throw away money’ in purchasing Collier’s six volumes, he knew them well enough to find fault in their choice of copy-text,203 and he kept well up-to-date in the anti-Perkins campaign.204 But by July he was in ill health, and on 20 December he died suddenly, at Mickleham, his Surrey retreat. ‘So poor Singer is gone’, wrote Halliwell to Collier, who may not have welcomed the summing-up: ‘all his gall was in his pen, for I never heard [him] say an unkind word of any one’.205 The principal target, however, of Collier’s acrimonious preface, and of a parade of hostile footnotes throughout the text, was once again Dyce. A er so many twists in their personal relationship, this time John virtually abandoned any prospect of peace: although Dixon perceived ‘present resentment . . . so ened by remembrance of ancient love’ in the prefatory narrative, the unrelenting assault upon Dyce’s editorial expertise—much of it irrelevant to the Shakespearian text it supposedly illustrated—le no room for a rapprochement, unless Dyce were to be unprecedentedly insensitive or forgiving. John reprised at greater length than ever the history of his ‘intimacy’ with his old friend, Dyce’s freedom with Collier’s own manuscripts and printed rarities (towards Dyce’s

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203. Singer to Dyce, 20 April 1858, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.5 (32); Singer to JOH, 9 June 1858, LOA 72/1. 204. Singer to JOH, 9 June (‘I am every day finding fresh instances of the escapades of Collier’) and 16 July 1858 (LOA 72/58), the latter concerning the Rev. W. R. Arrowsmith’s The Editor of ‘Notes and Queries’ and His Friend, Mr. Singer. Arrowsmith’s principal target was Singer, whom he accused of ‘falsehood and fabrication’ for having published a ‘garbled and doctored’ version of a passage by Fulke Greville in N&Q, 10 April 1858, p. 289; see N&Q, 5 June 1858, pp. 467–68, for Thoms’s defence of Singer and his reasons for not publishing Arrowsmith’s letter. In passing Arrowsmith also cast doubt on the Perkins emendations: ‘Mr. Collier must pardon me for affirming that he would best consult his well-earned reputation by discarding the spurious old commentator, & acquiescing in the settled conviction of every scholar, whose opinion is worth a rush, that in this instance he has been made the victim of an egregious hoax’ (p. 10). Singer approved, telling Halliwell that ‘the spirit in which the whole [of Arrowsmith’s pamphlet] is conceived renders it harmless’, and adding that he was ‘especially pleased’ to see that Arrowsmith ‘takes the same view of Collier’s old commentator with me, and . . . Collier will not be very well pleased, aer what he has recently said and done in his Shakespeare, at this confirmation of my views’. 205. JOH to JPC, 10 January 1859, bound in a copy of Halliwell’s Early Editions of Shakespeare (1857); C. K. Ogden Collection, University College, London.


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editions of Peele, Webster, and Middleton), and their sharing of information and confidences—all of which, as we have heard before, turned sour with Collier’s decision in 1841 to edit Shakespeare. The story of Dyce’s withholding advice and corrections until his negative Remarks (which ‘I never read one line of ’ until a er N&E II ) was repeated, and even who-gave-whom gi s totted up (Dyce ‘did not send me his ‘‘Remarks’’ . . . [but] I presented him with my ‘‘Notes and Emendations’’), while Dyce’s inscription of his five-volume Middleton to Collier provoked only an unworthy (if not maudlin) forecast: ‘when [he] republishes it . . . he will then probably withdraw the dedication for which I felt so obliged in 1840’.206 John all but represented the reconciliation of 1846 as generosity on his part (‘seven or eight years had elapsed, my vexation had in a considerable degree passed away, friends had interposed, and my intercourse with the Rev. Mr. Dyce had been partially renewed’; p. xiv), and took care to cite his own recent testimony in Seven Lectures to Dyce’s ‘good taste and extensive reading’ (which ‘abundantly qualify him’ to edit Shakespeare), as well as to his ‘accuracy’ in another, unrelated affair. The last item, supplied as evidence of fair-mindedness, may hold a clue to the embarrassingly personal nature of these revelations. In February 1856 Dyce had published a selection, compiled from his own memory, of Samuel Rogers’s table talk, which received a devastating notice in The Times of 27 February, charging Dyce (whose name did not appear, but who was widely known as the ‘anonymous Boswell’) with misrepresenting Rogers and degrading his celebrated eloquence. The Athenaeum soon published a similar attack (1 March), and Collier, whose feelings about Rogers we have earlier remarked, took the opportunity to supply an anecdote—true or false—lending credence to a challenged passage in Table Talk. In doing so he called attention to his own moderate esteem of Rogers, and his uneasy friendship with the unnamed editor, as indicative of non-partisanship (‘I have known [Dyce] for many years . . . although I have seen less of him since he undertook to comment upon Shakespeare in opposition to me. . . . I do not suppose that [he] requires, or perhaps will thank me for, my testimony in his favour: I have seen him only once since that book was in preparation’), but he insisted upon the editorial honesty of his colleague: ‘I can bear willing witness that he is utterly incapable of the slightest intentional misrepresentation . . . I am fully aware of the strength and tenacity of the memory of the Editor, as well as of his entire and conscientious veracity’.207

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206. Dyce in fact never revised or republished his Middleton. 207. Dyce, ed., Table Talk, 3d ed. (1856), pp. v–vii; for the episode, see Schrader 1972, pp. 16– 17. Collier’s report (p. vii) of ‘an early copy of [Rogers’s] The Pleasures of Memory’, inscribed to John Dyer Collier ‘in the neatest of all possible hands’ and ‘also altered and corrected . . . in several places’, was once more provocative: ‘This book I have seen since I was grown up, so that I can


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Dixon, at the Athenaeum, preferred to print another letter on the matter, and Collier withdrew his. Rather surprisingly, but touchingly, Dyce himself asked to publish it in his third edition of Table Talk (March or April 1856), where it led off the volume, preceded by a note from John (‘I wrote it as an act of justice to you’) and Dyce’s references to John as ‘my old friend’, whose ‘proof of his kindly feeling toward me’ le him ‘highly gratified’. Perhaps these reciprocal gestures suggested to John that a true settlement had been reached, or at least that Dyce ought to be grateful: that was certainly the thrust of his 1858 note on ‘my letter of exculpation’ which Dyce had seen fit to print (i:ix). But John nonetheless went ahead with his laborious assault on Dyce in Seven Lectures (issued in October 1856, several months a er the publication of Table Talk), and this perpetuation of their quarrel cannot have been lost on the latter, however ‘gratified’ he might have been earlier. Dyce’s old coldness—his inevitable reaction to Collier’s pseudo-sentimental remonstrances—is clearly discernible in the preface to his new Shakespeare, which appeared in December 1857, while John’s own revision hung fire. Two pages (and a long note objecting to a castigation of his Webster, which Collier in turn parried in his own Shakespeare, i:xi–xii) took a narrow-eyed view of the Perkins emendations, ‘with their particles of golden ore and their abundant dross . . . still the subject of acrimonious dispute’ (i:xiii–xvi). Dyce blamed Collier himself for having ‘create[d] a prejudice against, if not . . . a spirit of opposition to, the Corrector’s labours en masse’, by his over-endorsement of ‘the most unnecessary changes ever devised by perverse ingenuity’, and by having ‘paraded as novelties’ a number of familiar alterations, this ‘from his limited knowledge of what conjecture had been attempted on the poet’s text during the eighteenth century’. ‘It would seem that Mr. Collier’s judgement, nay, his recollection of the phraseology of our old writers, was at times affected by his blind admiration of the Corrector’, wrote Dyce, but at no point did he suggest that the emendations were anything other than what Collier had claimed them to be, in terms of their provenance and date: indeed the Old Corrector ‘must be allowed the honour of having anticipated several happy conjectures of Theobald and others’. Moreover, in his ‘Some Account of the Life of Shakespeare’ (i:i–xxxiv) Dyce credited without question two of Collier’s Dulwich forgeries (the 1609 Clink assessment list and the 1696 list of Southwark inhabitants), as well as the 1596 players’ petition in the State Paper Office. But what he would not take on faith, for the first time, were the six Bridgewater documents, impugned most recently by Halliwell, whose continued investigation may have seemed even more dangerous to Collier than potshots at Perkins.

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speak positively to the fact. I presume that the corrections have been introduced into the more modern editions of The Pleasures of Memory.’ Could this have been a trailer for an unconsummated revelation of textual improvements? See also OMD, ii:94–95.


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‘It is well known that the genuineness of these papers has been violently assailed’, declared Dyce (i:xxxiv), ‘and wherever they are quoted in the present memoir, I leave the reader to determine whether they are to be relied upon as authorities or not.’ This he achieved by printing them all within square brackets and saying no more, an approach which Dixon, in his Athenaeum review, thought indicative of Dyce’s ‘timidity’. Dyce may have considered it prudence, or simply good manners. But clearly for Collier these not-unwarranted reflections signalled a declaration of renewed intransigence. They could not, of course, have come at a more provocative time, while Whittaker’s printers awaited John’s own volume one, and as Mary Louisa—who thirteen years before had persuaded John to suppress his overheated Letter to Dyce—lay on her deathbed. Nor was John unaware of his susceptible state. ‘The text of the ensuing volumes was completed some months ago’, he deposed (Shakespeare, i:xxxv), ‘but . . . the preliminary matter has been unavoidably delayed by the severest domestic afflictions’—the loss of ‘a wife, two daughters, and a sister’ as well as ‘the noblest and most generous patron’ in Devonshire; and he had suffered ‘not long before . . . another calamity in the demise of the Earl of Ellesmere’. ‘All these distressing visitations have come upon me since I sent the first of the following sheets to press’, he continued—disingenuously, his victims might say—‘but I only allude to them here because I am afraid that in some few instances my sorrows may have soured my remarks, and that in one or two of my notes more asperity may have been evinced than I really feel.’ In fact the delayed volume one would accommodate most of the asperity, for the rest of the text had already been printed,208 but John managed to include two dozen richly documented pages on Singer and (principally) Dyce in his thirty-eight-page preface, and to supply one new footnote deriding Dyce in ‘The Life of William Shakespeare’ (i:89), and twenty-one more in the ‘Supplemental Notes’ to the six volumes (i:261–67), of which sixteen are stridently negative. Not, however, that Collier addressed, or even mentioned, the doubts cast by Dyce—or by anyone else—on the Bridgewater documents: perhaps time was short, perhaps qui s’excuse s’accuse, but the text of the ‘Life’ involving all six of these is unaltered from that of 1842–44. ‘I have read your Preface & like it very much’, wrote Peter Cunningham to Collier upon publication; ‘one or two points deeply affected me . . . but Dyce’s ingratitude—you have hit him in the very centre of his Aberdeen granite heart’.209

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208. Incorporating, of course, those footnotes of the 1842–44 edition already critical of Dyce, and to which Dyce replied as well in his Strictures. 209. Cunningham to JPC, 9 April 1858, Folger MS Y.d.6 (42). John Bruce was also warmly supportive, as ever: ‘My opinion is, and always has been, that you have been most wickedly ill-


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Dyce himself took no immediate offence, for he purchased the edition only very late in the year, and then only ‘on learning, from several quarters, how Mr. Collier had assailed me throughout the whole book’ (Strictures, p. v). Then, however, he was by no means unmoved, finding ‘some of [Collier’s] statements about me . . . so monstrously false, that I mean to answer them publicly’;210 and no doubt the visitations and sorrows with which John excused his tirade impressed Dyce less than Cunningham. Collier soon learned of Dyce’s intentions—the forthcoming counterblast was announced in print by 5 February—and he now offered that ‘if . . . you could show that I had done you any injustice, however slight, I would eagerly seize the occasion of acknowledging it, and would make the acknowledgement public in the most effectual manner’—signing himself, unctuously, ‘with the most vivid and painful recollection of our former and long-enduring friendship’.211 Dyce did not deign to reply. Collier, whose insensitivity in such matters sometimes transcended the mere politics of the quarrel,212 may actually have hoped that this overworked love-hate relationship could be prolonged or replayed once again; but this time he had, apparently, gone too far. Dyce’s Strictures on Mr. Collier’s Edition of Shakespeare, 1858 appeared in May 1859, with the simple and brief apologia that ‘the main object of this little work [is] to expose the ungentlemanly treatment which I have received at the hands of one who seems to take a pleasure in proclaiming that he was once my friend’.213 The terms of chastisement are succinct and uncompromising— the Literary Gazette (2 July) described Strictures as ‘as unsparing of good sound abuse as if [it] had been written in the choicest editorial Latin’—Collier having

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used by Messrs. Dyce & Co., and for your own sake, and the sake of your memory in time, of course, I have thought it necessary that you should say your say in reply. You have done so, and I hope and trust you will never more be disturbed upon the subject. May you live to publish many more editions, and may the next give us the Poet and his Editor only, without a word of allusion to the envious mean-spirited crew, who remind one of nothing so much as of a pack of dogs quarrelling over a bone’; Bruce to JPC, 10 April 1858, FF MS 747. 210. Dyce to JOH, dated by the latter January 1859, LOA 67/1. 211. Collier printed a ‘copy’ of this letter of 5 February 1859 in his Reply to Hamilton (1860), p. 67; the original is unknown, but one assumes that he would not have invented it at this juncture. 212. An astonishing estimate of the situation appears in a letter from JPC to W. Wardlaw Reid, 22 December 1858, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (156): ‘I knew that he was envious (to a degree) and selfish (to an excess), but his manners are extremely agreeable, his scholarship remarkable, and his labours unceasing. I wanted to do him all the justice in my power, in spite of the manner in which he had treated me. I was willing to fancy myself superior to resentment’. 213. Strictures, p. vii. The complaint is echoed in a letter from Dyce to Halliwell of June 1859 (JOH’s dating), calling Collier’s attack ‘throughout most ungentlemanly: & his attempts to deceive the reader with respect to my ‘‘Remarks’’ & ‘‘Notes’’, are quite abominable’ (LOA 67/22). Elsewhere he added that ‘in my little vol. about Collier’s new ed. of Shakespeare, I have taken the opportunity of partly avenging the wrongs which Collier did to poor Singer’; undated letter [1859?] to S. Sharpe, Beinecke Osborn Files 4752.


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brought ‘against me in his Preface sundry charges which are utterly false’, and ‘over and over again, when speaking of me in his Notes, had recourse to such artful misrepresentation as, I believe, was never before practised, except by the most unprincipled hirelings of the press’. The last personal stroke was deliberate, and perhaps calculated to preclude reconciliation. Dyce’s Strictures, not unexpectedly, is a completely unreadable book, consisting solely of passages from Collier’s Shakespeare commentary that concern Dyce—though by no means all of them—and which Dyce could controvert. His individual replies are usually convincing (the Literary Gazette judged that ‘the forty stripes which have fallen on the back of the luckless Collier are not wholly undeserved’), but the matter of Strictures is tediously selective, and its general effect is as bleak as the feud itself: the Critic (18 June) summed it up as ‘an able specimen at once of the scholarship and petulance of Shakespearian annotators’, concluding (unrealistically) that if the two men had continued as friends, ‘they might, united, have produced as nearly perfect a verbal commentary on the dramas as could be expected’. John himself told W. Wardlaw Reid that ‘how fairly or how foully I have [been attacked] I have no means of knowing, seeing that [Dyce’s] volume (for such I suppose it to be) has not reached me. . . . If he be abusive I can bear it; if he be justly critical, I can wait’.214 Collier may have anticipated further exchanges, polemical or ‘justly critical’, but for Dyce this stout (237-page) monograph was summary and final. He would never again enter the lists publicly beside or against his old friend, save to deny misquotation, and there is no record of any more personal intercourse between them. Within two months of the publication of Strictures, moreover, the far more emergent charges about Perkins-as-forgery would render all such adversaria, based on commentarial haggling, secondary to the full-scale prosecution of a primary text. 214. JPC to Reid, 9 June 1859, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (160).

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part ten

The Perkins Folio (II)

The death of the sixth Duke of Devonshire in January 1858 deprived Collier not only of a patron and friend, but also of an implicit, if unwitting, ally in the great deceit of his literary life. Had the duke lived, we must speculate, the prolonged investigations of the Perkins Folio in 1859–60—and the consequent re-awakening of other suspicions—would not have occurred, or, if pursued without access to the key volume itself, would have led to a far less persuasive exposure. For despite his liberality with Collier, Devonshire was notably cautious about exhibiting his treasures to applicant scholars, whom Collier himself usually had the privilege of screening, and long-term loans from the libraries at Chatsworth and Devonshire House were unheard of. Above all books this magnet of controversy—the more demanding of trust if a gi from a faithful adherent—would scarcely have been turned over to off-site inspectors, against John’s wishes or advice, by the high-minded beneficiary.1 But the seventh Duke, despite his loyalty to his predecessor’s commitments, held no such particular brief. In mid-May 1859 Sir Frederic Madden wrote to him, on behalf of a distinguished German visitor, Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt,2 soliciting a view of the famous Folio (‘a volume which formerly belonged to my friend J. P. Collier’) at the British Museum ‘for two or three days . . . [where] I would engage, that the volume should be most jealously guarded, in the same manner as our most valuable MSS are, & not be seen except in my

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1. In very late life, apparently conflating the sixth and seventh Dukes in his fading memory, Collier admitted his original intentions (‘I intended the Duke of Devonshire to keep my Corr. folio 1632’) and his disappointment at the seventh Duke’s actions: ‘he found himself so pestered about it that he sent it to the B. M. to be used there just [as] they liked, & I did not like’; Diary, 19 February 1881. 2. 1819–92, poet, Persianist, professor of Slavonic (and subsequently early English literature) at Munich, translator of Pushkin, Lermontev, Turgenev, Hafiz, Omar Khayyám, and Shakespeare. His Russian connections (tutor to the family of Prince Galitzin in Moscow, etc.) would have recommended him to the sixth Duke, and Madden may well have counted on that: however casual his interest in Perkins, von Bodenstedt was a far more plausible applicant than Tycho Mommsen had been.

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presence’. He named Dyce, ‘the editor of Shakespeare’, as also desiring a sight of it, ‘and I may add, that I myself share their wish to be allowed to inspect this volume’. He was reasonably candid about their purposes (‘the manuscript corrections in this volume have called forth a good deal of criticism . . . and it is on this account that I am now induced to address your Grace’), and offered to consult it at Devonshire House ‘some day next week’ if that were deemed preferable. In reply the duke promised to send it along promptly, without stipulating any further conditions or any term to the loan;3 and on 26 May 1859 the Perkins Folio arrived at the Museum for what turned into a sojourn of just over two months. During the past year John Payne Collier had been about his literary business as usual. The new Shakespeare elicited few periodical reviews,4 but was clearly a succès d’estime in most quarters; and the edition of Spenser now proceeded apace, with the continuation of the Trevelyan Papers (as ever) still in the wings. In the summer of 1858 John completed the last of the sixth Duke of Devonshire’s commissions, overseeing a lithographic facsimile of the 1603 Hamlet,5 followed eleven months later by one of the 1604 ‘good’ quarto for the seventh Duke;6 and in April 1859 he announced his intention of editing ‘all the old plays that have been imputed to Shakspeare, but are not included in the folios, 1623 and 1632’, to be printed uniformly with his 1858 Works.7 And in passing he assisted Lord Campbell—apparently not only through editorial suggestions and references, but also by guiding the little volume through the press—with his Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements Considered, which Campbell addressed to his ‘old and valued friend’ as ‘a Letter to J. Payne Collier’.8 This John diffidently de-

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3. Madden to Devonshire, 14 May 1859 (dra) and Devonshire to Madden, 21 May, BL Egerton MS 2847, fols. 52–56. 4. We have found only two, in N&Q and the Athenaeum, the latter praising it as ‘the crowning labour of [Collier’s] literary life’. 5. Instigated ‘at my suggestion’, Collier told Halliwell (21 November 1857, LOA 64/25), from the copy lent him in May (Devonshire to JPC, 14 May, Folger MS Y.d.6 [57]). Forty copies were issued, distributed (mostly by Collier) on behalf of the seventh Duke; Madden received his copy on 4 September 1858. 6. The seventh Duke seems however to have cooled to the idea of further quarto facsimiles, perhaps in view of Perkins developments: see JPC to JOH, 15 July 1858, LOA 72/43, mooting the 1597 and 1599 Romeo and Juliet; and Devonshire to JPC, 28 July 1859, Folger MS Y.d.6 (85), holding back. 7. N&Q, 23 April 1859, in what was effectively a ‘birthday issue’ of the new ‘Shaksperiana’ column. Nothing more came of this project immediately—probably a casualty of the 1859–60 Perkins discreditations—although Collier’s later editions of Edward III (1874) and of Two Noble Kinsmen, The Yorkshire Tragedy, and Mucedorus (1877) essentially reflect it. 8. In July 1858 Campbell asked Collier to ‘refer me to the books from which I am likely to draw most assistance’, and in January 1859 sent him five copies of the book, specifically thanking


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scribed as ‘not very complete, but good as far as it goes, and written (to me) in an easy gossiping style’;9 but he was proud enough of the gi to accuse Madden, one year later, of bitter jealousy of ‘the honour’ it conferred (Athenaeum, 18 February 1860, p. 237).

The Museum Inquisition Madden’s approach to the seventh Duke in May 1859 was not an inspiration of the moment. Clement Mansfield Ingleby, still intent on his anti-Collier campaign,10 had come into touch with the Keeper in February 1858, seeking his opinion on the Perkins handwriting, and his help in gaining access to the volume. Madden regarded him at first with some scepticism—he had long since washed his hands of such ‘verbal criticism’—but saw him again, probably at the end of August, and listened at greater length to his arguments.11 In the meantime Ingleby’s request had been seconded by a new Shakespeare editor, Madden’s chess-master crony Howard Staunton,12 who likewise questioned the antiquity Collier for ‘the trouble you have taken in helping me through the press’; Campbell to JPC, 24 July 1858 and 10 January 1859, FF/K MSS 631–32. 9. JPC to JOH, 21 January 1859, LOA 67/14. 10. Ingleby had continued his efforts outside the pages of N&Q: as ‘A Painful Student and a Charmed Listener’ he had contributed an account of the Perkins affair to the Birmingham Journal (8 November 1856), taking care not to accuse Collier of forgery or even of being ‘particeps criminis’, but rather of ‘indecent haste’ and venality in publishing the emendations, his ‘once sound judgement . . . swamped’ by the ‘vanity of discovery’ and the ‘morbid veneration of antiquity’; Brae (letter to Ingleby, 11 November 1856, Folger MS W.b.105 [49]) assumed, probably correctly, that Ingleby’s true meaning was deliberately cloaked (‘I quite envy your talent—derived from a study of Antony’s speech over the dead body of Caesar—of bringing into strong relief the most damning facts and in the same breath declaring your belief that Brutus is an honourable man’), but called for naming names (‘as long as [your hints] are directed against an imaginary culprit they can serve to little purpose’). Ingleby also dilated upon Perkins in a well-attended public lecture at the Midland Institute (‘The Neology of Shakespeare’, 24 November 1856), calling the emendations ‘fabrications’ and Collier ‘a dupe . . . though an honourable man’; Birmingham Journal (supplement), 29 November 1856. 11. At their first meeting, the barrister Augustus F. Mayo having brought Ingleby along to the Museum, Madden did not note down the name of the ‘gentleman [who] believed the notes to be a forgery, and the language later than the 17th century’ (he inserted ‘Mr Mansfield Ingleby’ later), and recorded only that ‘of course I could not help him, nor could I give an opinion as to the writing, except to express my surprise that it should have been questioned’ (Diary, 22 February 1858). Madden subsequently published an account of this fateful meeting (he expressed ‘great surprise’, and ‘manifest[ed] the utmost unwillingness to believe that so large a body of notes could have been fabricated, or, if fabricated, could escape detection’; Critic, 24 March 1860), which Ingleby confirmed (Critic, 31 March 1860; echoed in Complete View, pp. 95–97), noting also that on another occasion Madden reiterated that opinion and ‘added, with some warmth, that he was a friend of Mr. Collier’s, and was satisfied that Mr. Collier’s faith was above suspicion’. 12. Madden was an enthusiastic amateur, and at one time had apparently contemplated writ-



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of the language (although ‘I should not like to fix my faith upon Mr S.’s verbal criticism’; Diary, 8 May 1858), and so Madden agreed, somewhat tentatively, to approach the seventh Duke on behalf of the doubters. This he did not quite do, for he instead wrote to Collier on 6 September 1858, asking—a er thanking him for the gi of the 1603 Hamlet facsimile—‘if he could gain me access to the folio Shakespeare with MS. notes formerly in his possession, & now belonging to the Duke of Devonshire. Mr C. never answered my letter’,13 Madden noted indignantly, although later he said that he took no offence. He resolved ‘in my own mind, to prefer my request to the Duke of Devonshire himself; but official and other business constantly interfered to prevent my carrying out my intention until May, 1859’.14 Of course since January 1858 the Folio had had yet a new master. Ingleby, urged by Staunton and perhaps despairing of Madden’s assistance, had in fact ing a history of chess together with Staunton. Although in 1858–59 he remained widely known as British (or even ‘World’) Champion, Staunton was no longer seriously active as a player, and this was just when the great challenge of his life was offered and ultimately went unmet: backers of Paul Morphy, the meteoric American champion, proposed in 1858 a match to be held in New Orleans, in declining which the ILN spoke of Staunton’s ‘labourious literary occupation’, which had ‘compelled [him] to abandon the practice of chess beyond the indulgence of an occasional game’ (3 April; reprinted in [F. M. Edge], Exploits and Triumphs, in Europe, of Paul Morphy [1859], pp. 21–22), but hinted that Morphy’s forthcoming visit to Europe might find him available, among those ‘in this country, in France, in Germany, and in Russia . . . whose names must be as household words to him’. Morphy accordingly crossed the Atlantic in June 1858, but Staunton refused to play even offhand games against him (Exploits, p. 59), pleading literary obligations (‘subjecting the publishers [of ‘a great work’] to the loss of thousands, and myself to an action for breach of contract’), and the young American was forced to content himself with defeating everyone else. In August–October 1858 the Staunton-Morphy controversy raged in the press (Exploits, pp. 86–139; cf. Keene and Coles, pp. 21–22), and while the former survived it, his reputation in some quarters continues to suffer. Morphy returned to New York in April 1859, leaving Staunton to Shakespeare. 13. Madden Diary, the entire passage about the Perkins Folio a later addition to the entry for 6 September 1858. In his Reply to Hamilton (1860, p. 69) Collier acknowledged receiving the letter, noting that it had contained a query about ‘a signature of Shakespeare on a map of some county of England’; see Madden Diary, 3–7 September, for discussion of this supposed autograph, which he thought not written by Shakespeare ‘or in his time’. Collier claimed to have answered this part of Madden’s letter, but to have ‘postponed that incidental portion which related to the Perkins Shakespeare, because the present Duke of Devonshire was then in Lancashire’. 14. Critic, 24 March 1860. In this account Madden remarked that Collier not only failed to answer, but ‘to the best of my belief ’ had never since written to him. Certainly Collier’s alleged reply is absent from Madden’s carefully preserved correspondence, which contains nothing from John later than October 1857. Years later W. J. Thoms, writing to Collier about other letters lost in the post, recalled the incident: ‘You yourself doubtless remember . . . Madden’s offence at not receiving a reply to his letter to you, which reply you persist you sent. No doubt you were both correct. You did answer his Letter, but he never received that answer’; 16 February 1867, Folger MS Y.d.6 (210).


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already contacted the sixth Duke’s successor, who located the volume a er some effort and le it at Devonshire House for Ingleby’s inspection. But Ingleby had fallen ill, and was bedridden on the appointed day, so that Madden’s application replaced his—no doubt advantageously for Ingleby himself and all the other sceptics.15 For Sir Frederic remained, a er all, the most authoritative general palaeographer of his day in the English-speaking world—and a man with no slight experience with forgery, ancient and modern, to back up his opinions. Madden’s interest in forgery may have originated in dispassionate intellectual curiosity, but his emotional response to it—and to its dupes as much as to its perpetrators—was intense: literary chicanery, great and small, seems always to have a struck a deeply personal chord in the Keeper’s heart, and to have unleashed furious personal resentment, at least in the privacy of his diary. The forgeries of Chatterton and W. H. Ireland seemed to him ‘thoroughly contemptible’ and ‘utterly unworthy of the controversy they occasioned’; Chatterton’s teastained membranes exhibited ‘the most decisive proofs of the impudence of the imposture, and the obstinate ignorance of those who were to the last its champions’, while the believers in Ireland’s clumsy relics merited only ‘contempt’ for their credulity.16 And when in July 1856 one Mr. Evans, the new owner of the notorious ‘bellows portrait’ of Shakespeare by P. H. Zincke—a fantasy exposed by Abraham Wivell thirty years earlier—showed Madden his prize, ‘very little time sufficed to prove to me, that neither the language, the orthography, the punctuation . . . nor the forms of the letters [in the inscription around the head] were of the time of Shakspere’—which again reflected shame on the dupe: ‘What an ass this Mr Evans must be, to buy a portrait of such a character, a er the fraud had been detected & exposed so publicly! Verily, the number of fools is infinite!’ 17 But even professionally cautious curators like Madden could err when the cause was their own—as the Hillier affair showed—and when younger the Keeper himself had fallen victim to one of the more insidious Shakespeare deceptions, a copy of Florio’s 1603 Montaigne signed on a binding-liner, formerly a flyleaf, by ‘Willm Shakespeare’. This enticing inscription on a known Shakespearian source-book Madden had firmly endorsed in 1836–37 (‘on comparing

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15. Staunton had already told Ingleby that ‘nothing will be gained unless Sir F. Madden can be induced to accompany you or us’ to Devonshire House, should the duke make the volume available, since ‘our opinion . . . will go for nothing in the world’ while his would ‘carry great weight. Of course if there is deception, it has been very cleverly contrived. The annotations are probably the close labour of many years & detection cannot be easy’; Staunton to CMI, undated but probably December 1858 or January 1859, Folger MS C.a.26 (2). Ingleby’s initial application to the seventh Duke (5 February 1859) was answered only on ‘28 April 1858’ (sic, for 1859), for the duke was away from London and had ‘much business on his hands’. 16. Diary, 23 December 1835; Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere (1838), pp. 5–6. 17. Diary, 2 July 1856; cf. Schoenbaum 1991, pp. 213–14.



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[it] with the genuine signatures . . . there is a sufficient resemblance to warrant the conclusion that they are by the same hand, although enough variation to preclude the idea of imitation’),18 and in June 1838 the Museum had purchased it for a sum in excess of £100 and placed it on permanent display. Only in 1872 was it quietly removed to the locked shelves, under the keepership of Madden’s successor, Edward Maunde Thompson, who much later—and ‘with a natural pang of regret’—particularized its discreditation.19 More recently, Madden had become involved with, and intermittently enraged about, the stock of ‘ancient’ manuscripts on offer, in 1853–54, by a mysterious Greek visitor to western Europe. Constantine Simonides, whose career as a wandering palaeographer had taken him to Mount Athos, Constantinople, Odessa, and Moscow, carried genuine biblical and classical codices and fragments in his capacious portmanteau, out of which Madden purchased a group for £46 in February 1853, but he ‘unhesitatingly rejected’ others, ‘a er a very short examination . . . as (in my opinion) evident forgeries’ (Athenaeum, 8 March 1856, p. 299). To his opposite number at the Bodleian Library, the Rev. H. O. Coxe, Madden ‘expressed without reserve my opinion of the forged character of the manuscripts I had refused to buy’, and when in May 1854 Sir Thomas Phillipps proudly showed him a trio of venerable scrolls he had acquired from the same vendor, Madden ‘did not hesitate a moment to declare my opinion, that they were all by the same hand and gross forgeries’. They were ‘worthless specimens of modern knavery’, and for Phillipps’s esteem of them Madden felt only the ‘profoundest contempt’: ‘there are some very weak spots in the cranium of my Middle Hill friend’.20 Against such a background of Madden’s exposure

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18. Observations, p. 7; reprinted from the Archaeologia of 1837. 19. Thompson 1917. Some ineffectual attempts at rehabilitation (notably by Tannenbaum) have subsequently been mounted: see Schoenbaum 1981, pp. 100–04. 20. Diary, 5 May 1854; Madden’s remark about Coxe occurs in a letter written to S. L. Sotheby on 23 April 1856 and published by Sotheby in his Principia Typographia (1858), ii:136c–e. The tale of Simonides’ expedition is told in Munby, Phillipps Studies, iv:114–31 (1956), and a full account of him is projected by Bruce Whiteman; for discussion of the forgeries with extended quotations from the contemporary press see also Elliott 1982, esp. pp. 122–72. Though arrested for fraud and nearly imprisoned in Germany in 1856, Simonides was back in England between 1858 and 1864, and Phillipps, who deliberately added to his collection other dubia, maintained a curiously ambivalent attitude toward both the adventuring salesman (d. at Alexandria, 1867, of leprosy) and his wares, and continued to cosset him. Madden, who had made public his opinions in 1856 (see in particular his letter to the Athenaeum, 8 March 1856, pp. 298–99), remained adamant in his condemnation of the more luminous Simonides forgeries. He crossed paths with Simonides again in early 1863, when several of the forgeries were exhibited at the Royal Society of Literature. By then Madden’s interest in the Perkins affair had receded and for him ‘the forgeries of Chatterton, Ireland & Collier are as nothing compared to the series of frauds practised by this Greek’; Diary, 25 January 1863.


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to, distrust of, and contempt for modern literary impostures, the Perkins Folio arrived at the British Museum in late May 1859. The ‘Museum Inquisition’— Ingleby’s term, in his retrospective account—commenced on the very evening of its delivery. ‘I spent the evening [of 26 May 1859] in examining this much talked of volume’, wrote Madden in his diary. He took note of its physical imperfections and binding, finding the inscription on the cover (‘Tho. Perkins his Booke’) to be ‘in a hand that looks strangely modern’. ‘The manuscript corrections do not satisfy me’, he continued, ‘and I observed that the forms of the letters differ very much from each other, and yet evidently all proceed from the same pen. There has also been a great deal of painting certain letters and altering the forms, particularly I. N. f. w. g. s., apparently for the purpose of making the writing look older than it is. I cannot believe it to be a genuine hand of the 17th century’, he concluded, declaring that ‘Collier is certainly mistaken, in supposing the writing to be nearly as early as the date of the volume (1632)’. Madden seems not to have suspected wholesale forgery at this stage, professing himself only ‘puzzled’ about ‘the object of the corrector, who seems partly as if he were altering the Plays for the Stage, and partly as if he contemplated a new edition’. Though ‘disappointed at the result of my investigation’, he was ‘exceedingly pleased . . . to have the volume in my hands’, and wrote at once to Dyce and to Thoms to invite them to view it. The next day Madden’s overall impressions hardened considerably: ‘I was employed all the morning in the examination of the folio Shakspere with Mr Bond [E. A. Bond, the Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts], and the more I look at it, the more fixed my opinion becomes, that the hand is not a genuine writing, either of the 17th or 18th century.’ The ink appeared ‘fictitious’, that is, not of the period, for where it had been nearly obliterated it did not respond to applications of hydrosulphate of ammonia;21 some few words seemed to have been ‘written quite recently, and in modern ink’; and there were some inexplicable erasures. Madden thought (as we do) that the annotations to the Dramatis Personae of Henry V were ‘in a perfectly genuine hand, possibly as old as the reign of Anne or Geo. I’, and that a three-line stage direction by this annotator had been ‘very carefully erased’. ‘Why were these directions erased? ’ he asked himself: ‘I cannot at present unravel the mystery’ (Diary, 27 May 1859). On the following day Alexander Dyce asked Madden to make public his estimate of ‘the fictitious character of the writing in the ‘‘Perkins Folio’’ ’, which

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21. One of several compounds used to restore the intensity of faded writing in MSS written with iron-gallotannate inks; others (proposed as early as 1787 by Sir Charles Blagden) included potassium ferrocyanide and hydrochloric acid. See Mitchell 1937, p. 197.



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Madden declined to do, but ‘gave him leave to state, that it was my fixed opinion, the writing was not of the 17th century, nor a genuine handwriting of any period’. The distinction, if any, seems nugatory, but Madden insisted upon it, stressing that the hand was ‘not a natural hand of any period’—that is, it did not correspond to conventional forms—but that adducing its true nature was not his brief. ‘I do not know what to think’, he declared on 2 June, for inevitably his visitors would strive to elicit a firmer condemnation from him. As he tells it, he was not to be rushed, and at this very moment he had pressing business elsewhere. The sale at auction of the great residue of Dawson Turner’s manuscripts, at which Madden would buy heavily for the Museum, fell on 6–10 June, with a claim on the Keeper’s attention more demanding than Perkins.22 But meanwhile the visitors came: on 28 May Dyce spent three hours with the Folio, regretting that he had not seen it before publishing his Strictures. ‘He complained much of the treatment he had received of Mr C.’, wrote Madden in his diary. Thoms called the next day, and in Madden’s absence le only a note ‘saying that ‘‘if I had any doubts’’ as to the genuineness of the Shakspere, he does not think he could look at it . . . for he thinks ‘‘it would kill Collier if it should turn out that he had been deceived’’ ’. ‘His nerves must be strangely influenced by his friendship for Mr Collier!’, Madden chaffed (Diary, 30 May), but Thoms was himself at risk, having all but committed Notes and Queries to accrediting Perkins. William Macready and John Forster (on behalf of the Examiner) came in also on 30 May, and on 31 May at last Bodenstedt, whose application had set everything in motion. Bodenstedt had meanwhile met Devonshire, who sent word that Madden might ‘retain the volume in my hands as long as I required’. The beginning of June saw Howard Staunton and John Bruce, men with diametrically opposed predispositions, awkwardly together in Madden’s office: ‘Of course, Mr Staunton takes an open part against Mr Collier’s MS. Corrector, and is delighted to find that my unbiased opinion of the writing supports his views. Mr Bruce, on the contrary, can see nothing in the writing which could excite suspicion, and, I confess, I am much surprized at this, since Mr B. has had much experience in examining papers of the 17th century’ (Diary, 1 June). The reaction of Dr. J. H. Todd, librarian of Trinity College, Dublin, who examined the Folio on the same day is unrecorded; Bruce returned on 2 June to reiterate his conviction, which bore some weight with Madden and Bond (‘even Mr Bond seems to waver’). But by now the sceptics had begun to marshal their forces, Staunton calling

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22. Madden, who had long followed Turner’s collecting career, received his copy of the Puttick and Simpson sale catalogue on 18 May, and by 24 May was estimating that the Museum might have to spend £2,000, in competition with Phillipps and others. In the event their purchases amounted to well over £1,500.


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again with C. M. Ingleby, whose first sight of the long-loathed object was on 4 June. A er two days of note-taking Ingleby wrote formally to Madden, requesting permission to make a facsimile of one tell-tale page of the text of Hamlet, and he was candid about his intentions: ‘It would be disingenuous in me to disguise from you the fact that in all human probity the evidence I allude to would inculpate one whose reputation you may wish to spare. You will probably say that as the authority of the MS. annotations can be damned without affecting that gentleman’s honesty, you prefer sparing him. For myself, I am convinced that the two stage directions I have mentioned and the erasure of ‘‘writing’’, were all the work of the gentleman alluded to. I cannot resist the evidence before me. Still, I may be wrong.’ ‘Of course Mr Collier is meant’, Madden noted in his diary, sending the following reply: ‘In spite of friendship truth should & must always prevail, but I really can hardly bring myself to believe the case to be as you infer.’ 23 For his application Madden referred Ingleby back to Devonshire, without whose word he could authorize no facsimile, but five days later, when the duke visited the Museum, Madden himself ‘strongly advised [him] to give permission, which he said he would do’. Meeting the seventh Duke for the first time, Madden found him ‘a very affable, straightforward gentleman, without the hauteur of his predecessor’, and felt sufficiently at ease to point out the evidence (although ‘it much affects the value of the book’) which ‘rendered it certain that the writing was fictitious, & not of the 17th century, as stated by Mr Collier. The Duke was exceedingly civil & said I might keep the book as long as I wished’ (Diary, 13 June 1859). The Dawson Turner sale past, Madden renewed his own examination of the Perkins Folio, now in informal conjunction with other Museum colleagues. Assistant Keeper Edward A. Bond (later Sir Edward; Madden’s successor as Keeper in 1866, and finally Principal Librarian) had been with him from the start, although he had ‘seem[ed] to waver’ (2 June) before being ‘convinced of the fraud that has been committed’ (20 June). Thomas Watts and John Winter Jones of Printed Books, who had helped Panizzi to expose Collier’s cataloguing inadequacies in 1849, had a look on 28 May and 1 June respectively, and finally on 22 June Panizzi himself, who—perhaps not unexpectedly—felt ‘convinced’ that the annotations were in Collier’s hand. A late entrant ‘with a very powerful microscope’ (30 June) was the new Keeper of Minerals, M. H. N. Story Maskelyne, of whom more below; but the most profoundly involved of all Madden’s

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23. Ingleby to Madden, 7 June 1859, BL Egerton MS 2847, fols. 69–70; Madden to Ingleby, 8 June, Folger MS C.a.14 (1).



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professional colleagues, it became rapidly clear, was to be his young departmental assistant, Nicholas Esterhazy Stephen Armytage Hamilton. Alongside Ingleby, he remains the most persistent and effective contemporary discreditor of Perkins and Collier, and a bit of a mystery. N. E. S. A. Hamilton (Stephen to his family and friends), whose birth date we have been unable to confirm, was the son of Anne Armytage and Charles Claude Hamilton, author of at least two translations from the French and German, one poem, and An Essay on the Art of Flying, with an Indication of the Materials Best Adapted for Wings (1841; 2d. ed. 1842). His two older brothers, Hans Claude and William Douglas, were palaeographers too, with distinguished careers in the State Paper/Public Record Office:24 Hans Claude (1813–95) was the editor of State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1509–96 (1860–90) and other works, and William (F.S.A., d. 1894) the author of Outlines of the History of England (5 vols., 1852–69) and editor of a Camden Society sourcebook for Milton (1859) and, with John Bruce, of the Calendar of State Papers for the reign of Charles I (1858–97). Stephen joined the Manuscript Department of the Museum in 1852, and a year later published a small trilingual dictionary (English-French-German), but his career seems to have advanced slowly: in 1860 he was still ‘sixth and junior assistant of the third class’ (Herman Merivale in the Edinburgh Review, April 1860, p. 483), although Madden encouraged him in various literary projects.25 Poor health may have impeded him, for he was away ill for two months in late 1860, and ‘still convalescent’ in September 1861,26 and he retired prematurely in 1872, having edited in his second Museum decade a he y National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868, over 900 pages in thirty-five parts) and a Rolls Series text of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum Anglorum. Hamilton married, on 18 November 1862, Edith Elizabeth Vulliamy, daughter of the well-to-do Gothic revival architect Lewis Vulliamy,27 and on leaving the Museum quitted London for Edith’s old home of Glasbury (near Hay, in south Wales), where he became Justice of the Peace for Radnorshire.28 In later life the couple were in Geneva (1878) and by 1881 settled at Champéry, in the Valais—perhaps for reasons of health, although Hamilton was in London in the autumn of 1883, corresponding on stationery of the Savile and Albemarle Clubs—and it was there that he died on 21 November 1915, a rival in longevity to Collier himself.

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24. See Cantwell 1991. 25. Hamilton dedicated his last work, an edition of Cambridgeshire property inquisitions (1876), to ‘the memory of Sir Frederic Madden . . . the greatest palaeographer of his age’. 26. Madden Diary, 10 December 1860; Ingleby to Hamilton, 17 September 1861, Mostyn Papers. 27. Their courtship in 1860–61 was conducted in secret, via letters smuggled between Finchley and Clapham, an appealing specimen of which survives in the Hamilton correspondence at the National Library of Wales. 28. J. F. Kirk, Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary (Philadelphia, 1891), ii:754.


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Young Hamilton was conversant with the new Perkins speculations by 2 June, when Madden recorded that ‘my Assistant Mr Hamilton completely coincides with myself [against Bruce and the ‘wavering’ Bond], and even does more, by declaring that some of the writing is very recent’. Already Madden seemed to regard Hamilton as embodying the extreme anti-Perkins/Collier position, and was perhaps glad to have such a firebrand in his camp, a situation that allowed him to downplay his own convictions (‘I do not know what to think’, etc.). With Hamilton as spokesman—or ‘mouthpiece’, as the Athenaeum would less kindly phrase it—for the Museum’s disbelievers, Madden could retreat slightly from the front lines of debate—as the dignity of his position as Keeper, and his old friendship with Collier might urge—without risking the loss of his cause through lukewarm prosecution.29 Not that Madden’s own interest had cooled, however: on 16 June, a er Devonshire’s encouraging visit, he directed the Museum bookbinder to ‘damp up the leaves pasted down to the covers of the Collier Shakspere’, one of which revealed a watermarked ‘crown with the letters G. R. below’—a terminus post quem for the binding, as Madden reasoned, and for the marginalia within, which he supposed to have been entered aer the volume, as it now stood, was bound.30 The next day, Friday the seventeenth, Hamilton showed Madden flyleaves with the same watermark in a volume of statutes of George II, and further examination of the binding exposed boards of ‘brown milboard & not white, which would prove them to be later than 1750’.31 On the same day—or perhaps somewhat before—Madden noticed, ‘for the first time’, what would become the key factor in the indictment of the Perkins Folio and the association of its forged annotations with Collier himself, ‘a great number of pencil marks in the margins of the Shakspere, and in some instances, I think I can perceive traces of pencil under the ink, which, in that case, must have been subsequently written. The importance of this discovery is such that I shall sub-

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29. Madden deliberately pursued such a course, even aer his discoveries of 20 June: Hamilton and Bond, he wrote then in his diary, ‘wish me to put myself forward to make [my findings] public, but I shrink from this. Aer my long acquaintance with Mr C. and many of his friends, I cannot undertake to pull off the mask he has worn hitherto successfully. He fully deserves reprobation, but let another do it.’ 30. He might also, and perhaps better, have instanced the ‘Tho. Perkins his Booke’ inscription it bore on the front cover, which of course could not pre-date the binding. Madden’s argument that the depth of the marginalia in the inner gutter of the bound book reflected the constraints of the eighteenth-century binding is somewhat impressionistic. 31. Madden was discriminating between millboard, made from rope fibres (always grey or grey-brown), and pasteboard (usually whitish), composed of layers of unsized paper. In fact, as Mirjam Foot has kindly informed us, millboard began to replace pasteboard in all but cheap bindings by 1700, not Madden’s ‘1750’; see Bernard C. Middleton, A History of English Cra Bookbinding Technique, 4th ed. (1996), pp. 64–69.



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ject the volume to a very searching examination leaf by leaf, to satisfy myself on the subject.’ 32 This was a potentially devastating observation, if or if not made ‘for the first time’, and Madden followed it up over the weekend. On Saturday, 18 June, he returned briefly to another aspect of the investigation, and ‘suggested to my Assistant Mr Hamilton that he should make a list of all the readings in MS. in Collier’s folio, which had been partly obliterated and which Mr C. had omitted to notice. The amount of authority claimed for the MS. Corrector will receive much light, I am convinced, from the abortive or neglected corrections, and it seems marvellous to me, how Mr Collier should have passed them over so lightly.’ But on Saturday or Sunday as well he made good on his promise to himself, and his findings were arresting:33 32. Although Madden used the words ‘for the first time’ in his diary entry of 17 June, and implied that he himself made the discovery, in a letter to the Critic nine months later (24 March 1860) he credited Ingleby and Hamilton instead. ‘It was on the 6th of June [1859]’, he then wrote, ‘when Dr. Mansfield Ingleby was examining certain passages of the volume very closely, that he first directed my attention to a pencil mark which appeared to him to be under the ink; but I did not then pursue the inquiry. Within a week, however, aerwards, Mr. Hamilton again spoke to me on the subject of the pencillings he had discovered on the margins, some of which seemed to be underneath the writing. On this being pointed out to me, I again looked through the volume page by page, and was inexpressibly astonished to discover hundreds of marks . . . in pencil, more or less distinct, in an apparently modern hand’. Ingleby told a similar story in his Complete View, pp. 99–100, reporting that on 6 June, ‘while I was very closely examining certain passages in the folio, I was surprised by the appearance of a pencil mark or line; and on tracing it by the eye I concluded, perhaps hastily, that it passed under the ink word. I accordingly directed Sir Frederic Madden’s attention to it. But Sir Frederic Madden did not appear to attach any importance to the remark, and did not pursue the inquiry I had suggested. Within a week aer this occurred Mr. Hamilton, while poring over the volume, discovered that its margins were covered with minute and half obliterated pencil marks, some of which appeared to underlie the ink, and, what was a new feature, that all of them appeared to correspond with the ink writing. He at once called Sir Frederic Madden’s attention to these circumstances. Sir Frederic accordingly again looked through the volume page by page’, and it was during this examination that the words in an ‘apparently modern hand’ were discovered. Ganzel saw both of these last accounts as ‘fabrications’, the result of Madden’s desire to ‘separate himself ’ from the discovery and ‘put not only Hamilton but also Ingleby between him and the discovery of the prime evidence against Collier’ (p. 333). But it is far more likely that the published version is the correct one, and that Madden in his retrospective diary entry of 17 June simply did not bother to record Ingleby’s or Hamilton’s guidance, or the exact date of their findings: Ingleby himself stated that the Keeper did not seem to ‘attach any importance’ to them at first, and on 6 June Madden was no doubt more concerned with his bids at the Dawson Turner sale than with the Folio. 33. Madden’s habit was to ‘write up’ his journal from his ‘rough notes’, including his ‘Memoranda of Business’ (now preserved as BL Add. MSS 62,001–17) and other now-perished dras, shortly aer the dates indicated, but not so long aerward as to admit of calculated misrepresentation, of which he has been rashly accused—although of course the record of instant personal


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To my great surprise I ascertained beyond doubt, that a perfectly modern hand has made hundreds, perhaps thousands of corrections in pencil in the margins, partly for the correction of the punctuation, partly for new readings, and partly to draw attention to passages to be altered. These corrections are most certainly in a modern hand, and from the extraordinary resemblance of the writing to Mr Collier’s hand (which I am well acquainted with) I am really fearful that we must come to the astounding conclusion that Mr C. is himself the fabricator of the notes! It is most certain that the pencil marks are anterior to the corrections in ink, & served indeed, as the guide to them, added at top of page, with arrow to point of insertion: and it is not less certain in my opinion, that the same hand wrote both the pencil and ink corrections. Not only does the correction in ink invariably follow the pencil, but in several instances the pretended old hand is written over the modern pencil corrections, which are still distinctly visible!! The fact is most overwhelming, & I now begin to think that Dr Ingleby & Mr Staunton were right in denouncing from internal evidence, Mr C. as the forger. But what a position does this place Mr C. in! I really see no escape from the proofs afforded. . . . I really feel so astounded at the fact, that I know not how to describe it. I never could have suspected Mr C. of fraud, & in fact, have always defended him, but now the evidence seems overpowering against him. And if he is the forger, what terms could be too harsh to apply to his conduct in this affair! It is really too monstrous! I regret much I had not made this discovery about the pencil marks when I shewed the volume to Mr Dyce & Dr Bodenstedt, but I shall feel it my duty to let them know the fact, and then they can draw their own conclusions. I made a series of eye facsimiles of the various forms given to the same letters of this pretended old annotator, and the evidence is complete, that the whole is a gross fabrication. The hand that wrote Tho. Perkins his Booke on the cover of the folio, certainly wrote the whole of the marginal annotations. q.e.d. On Monday, 21 June, Madden shared his observations with Hamilton, who went over a portion of the volume with his superior and ‘discovered many more

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reactions or feelings may well be dressed-up or altered. He openly described the process in an entry for 3 July 1859: ‘Wrote up my Journal from the rough notes. I do this constantly, at any leisure hour I can find’; subsequent amplifications, insertions, or corrections, mostly to do with factual errors, are (incidentally) undisguised. Here Madden’s ‘Memoranda’, which primarily detail auction visits, cataloguing chores, etc., place his weekend inspection on Saturday, 18 June, when he ‘examined the Shakspere volume again most carefully & made up my mind that the writing throughout is a modern fabrication, being later than the recent pencil notes of correction on the margins. By whom were the pencil notes made? Let Mr Collier answer’ (BL Add. MS 62,013, 36v–37r). His far more elaborate diary entry is dated Sunday, 19 June.



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examples of the very recent handywork’. Hamilton presented the evidence to Bond, ‘who is now convinced of the fraud’, and Madden dra ed an awkward letter to Staunton, declaring that ‘a er a very minute & laborious investigation I have now come to the conclusion (which I tell you in confidence but should like to shew you the proofs) that the whole of the notes from beginning to end are the production of a recent hand—quite recent! It is with great pain I have come to this conclusion, which is directly opposed to my feelings and conviction, before I had the volume placed in my hands. I believe ‘‘Tho. Perkins his Booke’’ to be a complete piece of Humbug!’ 34 While previously Madden had fought shy of public exposure, he clearly could no longer withhold his evidence, even if he guessed (as was true) that Staunton would not long respect his injunctions to ‘confidence’. To Hamilton, the designated assassin, ‘I suggested . . . that he should draw up an article on the subject, and he said he would do so, and send it to the Saturday Magazine’ (Diary, 20 June). Hamilton’s account of the preliminary investigation appeared on 2 July 1859, couched as a long letter to The Times.35 The two-week delay in publication—for Hamilton had dra ed it overnight—was due in part to its rejection by the Saturday Review (‘because it is a letter & not an article’, he heard; Madden Diary, 25 June), but also apparently because that weekly, fearing libel action, asked him ‘to dock the head & tail [of the] exposure’),36 and in part to The Times’s holding it over for a Saturday number,37 during which time one provincial newspaper leaked the story,38 and three or four more distinguished visitors ‘appeared perfectly satisfied’ with Madden’s demonstration of his claims.39

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34. Dra, 20 June, BL Egerton MS 2847, fol. 65. 35. It has been reprinted in full in Hamilton’s own Inquiry, pp. 131–38, and in Ingleby’s Shakspeare Fabrications, pp. 63–71, and extracted at length in Ingleby’s Complete View, pp. 106–11. 36. Staunton to Hamilton, letter postmarked 1 July 1859, Mostyn Papers. 37. Hamilton had proof by 27 June, and Staunton thought the five- or six-day delay ‘inexplicable’. 38. Birmingham Journal (supplement), 25 June, in a review of Staunton’s Shakespeare (‘at present our information is confidential’), which Madden no doubt correctly traced to Staunton himself, although Ingleby or Samuel Timmins (both of Birmingham) may well have been involved. Staunton sent clippings of the review to both Madden and Hamilton, observing—perhaps in anticipatory self-defence—that ‘the thing had got wind even as early as Saturday [25 June] & I have no doubt if the result of your examination is not immediately published in London it will be printed first in the Country Journals’ (Staunton to Madden, 29 June 1859, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 108–09). A hint of the Museum findings—though confined to philological evidence, which played no part in them—appeared simultaneously with Hamilton’s Times ‘Letter’ in the Literary Gazette of 2 July. 39. Diary, 25 June: the Hon. Spencer Walpole, the Home Secretary, and Sir David Dundas (both Museum trustees); and Henry Hart Milman, Dean of St. Paul’s. The antiquary Charles Edward Long viewed the Folio on 28 June, but his opinions are unrecorded by Madden.


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While restricting himself to a physical analysis of the Perkins Folio, and leaving completely aside the philological and critical considerations which had (necessarily) preoccupied earlier critics, Hamilton began, aggressively, by terming his subject ‘a most extraordinary deception which has been practised in the republic of letters’. He named Collier at once as its publicist, though never—explicitly or implicitly—as its perpetrator: the ‘Letter’ of 2 July is refreshingly free of innuendo. A er a brief recapitulation of the book’s supposed provenance and its use by Collier (1849–56), and of its recent deposit in the British Museum (to be ‘kept by Sir Frederick Madden in the strictest custody’), Hamilton dated the rough calf binding, from the watermark evidence of its pastedowns, as ‘probably about the middle of George II.’s reign’, and asserted that ‘there is evidence to show that the corrections . . . could not have been written on the margins of the volume until a er it was bound’.40 He devoted some space—rather a blind alley, in fact—to the ‘two kinds’ of manuscript notes, ‘those . . . which have been allowed to remain, and those which have been obliterated with more or less success’, following up Madden’s suggestion of 18 June, and declared that those erased, chemically treated, scraped, torn, or partly cut away were ‘almost as numerous as those suffered to remain’—which was certainly an exaggeration, as was Hamilton’s claim that ‘in the hands of Shaksperian critics’ the obliterations would inevitably ‘furnish a clue to the real history of the corrector and the corrections’. Finally Hamilton pinned his case to ‘the most astounding result of these investigations’, the presence of ‘an infinite number of faint pencil-marks and corrections, in obedience to which [our italics] the supposed old corrector has made his emendations’, some of which, distinctly modern, ‘can be seen underneath the old ink corrections’. ‘These pencil corrections have not even the pretence of antiquity in character or spelling, but are written in a bold hand of the present century’, he announced—without hazarding an opinion of whose hand it was— and if the inked words of the ‘Old Corrector’ sometimes lay over them, ‘I conceive it positively established that the emendations, as they are called, of this folio copy of Shakspeare, have been made in the margins within the present century’. Hamilton closed by leaving ‘others to determine’ the implications of the erasures (‘they may or may not be the means of identifying particular persons or particular dates’), and himself promised shortly to ‘lay before the public, in another form and in fuller detail, other particulars relating to this remarkable volume’. And while claiming the approbation of his colleagues (‘men having greater ability and experience in such matters than I can lay claim to’) he repre-

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40. This last contention, which echoes Madden’s of 16 June (based on how deep in the margins the marginalia begin), is less than rock-solid, like the vague ‘evidence’ cited.



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sented the physical observations throughout as his own (‘I at once seized the opportunity . . . to attempt an accurate and unbiased description of the volume’) and held himself ‘personally responsible for the conclusions I have been driven to by the discovery of the above-mentioned facts’—although, strictly speaking, the ‘conclusions’ concerned only the recent date of the annotations. Nonetheless he signed himself, with official gravitas, from ‘Department of MSS, British Museum, June 22’, and while no doubt this valediction met with Madden’s approval, it implied—prematurely, perhaps, but in retrospect undeniably—that the Museum itself, through its expert curators and staff, had already aligned itself with the disbelievers. Reaction to Hamilton’s letter was swi from all quarters. Joseph Hunter, silent in print about his Collierian suspicions since 1845, visited Madden and the attainted volume on the very day of publication, a Saturday, followed on Monday, 4 July, by the new Earl of Ellesmere, bearing his own annotated First Folio of Shakespeare. Ellesmere was accompanied by his physician-cumlibrarian, George Henry Kingsley, brother of two novelists and himself a rising man of letters. Visitors on the same day from within the Museum included the future Keeper of Printed Books George Bullen and his departmental colleagues Thomas Watts, Isaac Pinto, and the Grenville cataloguer and Elizabethan specialist W. B. Rye; and from without, Staunton and Ingleby. On Tuesday Bruce called again, ‘to see the pencil marks in the Shakspere, & on my pointing them out to him’, Madden all but gloated, ‘went away much grieved, almost with tears in his eyes! Mr C. has indeed much to answer for, both as regards his friends and enemies!’ But on Wednesday a Perkins/Collier partisan proved more obstinate: William Hepworth Dixon, who would commit the Athenaeum to a defence of his friend, seemed to Madden not only ‘a supporter of Collier’ but also ‘a little conceited coxcomb, perfectly ignorant & self sufficient, and determined to see nothing that he did not choose to see’.41 Meanwhile Sir Thomas Phillipps, obsessive as ever, pestered Madden with a request for facsimiles of the pencillings, hoping to identify not the established suspect, but his own son-in-law as the forger (Madden Diary, 5 July). On Thursday, 7 July, John Payne Collier’s first formal reply to Hamilton— and, he professed, ‘the last word I shall ever submit to say upon the subject in print’—appeared in The Times, dated two days earlier. John represented his defence as unstudied (he ‘take[s] in only a weekly publication’ and ‘did not see your paper containing that letter until an hour ago’), made an oblique reference to his ‘ancient connection’ with The Times and his adventures of 1819 on

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41. On more than one occasion Madden, who loathed Dixon, later referred to him in his diary as ‘Hemp-worth Dixon’.


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its behalf, and took a firm line on Hamilton’s description of the pencilled words and phrases as ‘written in a perfectly modern hand’, on occasion underlying the ink annotations. ‘What is clearly meant, though somewhat darkly expressed’, John came to the point, ‘is that I am the author both of the pencillings and of the notes in ink.’ But although he recalled having scribbled on the rear pastedown ‘various words, and made several notes, which I never attempted to erase’, that had been the extent of his verbal annotation: ‘I never made a single pencil mark on the pages of the book, excepting crosses, ticks, or lines, to direct my attention to particular emendations.’ If, therefore, the pencillings identified by Hamilton existed, ‘they may be compared with my writing on the last board, and by that writing I may be convicted’—but here Collier raised a new issue— ‘unless somebody, which I do not believe [our italics], have taken the pains to imitate my hand’. Bearing in mind that ‘I have not seen [the Folio] in four or five years’, how immune from tampering had it been? Collier himself had ‘asserted the contrary [of his being author of the notes] on oath in an affidavit sworn and filed in the Queen’s Bench, on the 8th of January, 1856’, and he was prepared to ‘confirm [the assertion] by my vivâ voce testimony, and to encounter the most minute, the most searching, and the most hostile examination’. Brave words! The twin prongs of Collier’s denial were thus, at this stage, his own ‘sworn and filed’ word, yet unchallenged in public, and the hint of chicanery, even criminal forgery, on the part of his adversaries—a stout counterchallenge to those who might think him easily cowed.42 Less impressive were a reassertion of the Gray-Parry provenance (‘shewn and sworn’ in 1856 also, but only on Parry’s hearsay testimony) and a quibble about the binding evidence: Collier declared the rough calf exterior ‘considerably older than the reign of George II’, and ‘the same [our italics] as Lord Ellesmere’s copy of the same edition’ (while nonetheless being ‘the second or third coat the book had worn’), and dismissed the late watermark of the pastedown that Madden had ‘damped up’ from the boards as that of a ‘fly-leaf ’. Flyleaves, he explained, ‘are o en added at a subsequent period for the protection of the title-page, because the original ones have been torn or destroyed’, and for that reason ‘the date of the fly-leaf affords no criterion as to the date when the leather covering was put on’.43 Finally, Collier repeated his claim to ‘the indisputable character of many of

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42. The hint was underlined in Collier’s rehearsal of his displaying the Folio in 1852 at meetings of the Shakespeare Society and the Society of Antiquaries, when (although ‘I did not see Mr. Hamilton there’) ‘no one who inspected it discovered, or at least pointed out, any of the pencil marks which it seems are now visible’. 43. Here Collier offered in evidence one of several ‘distinct proofs . . . upon my own shelves’, a copy of Samuel Daniel’s Panegyrike Congratulatory (STC 6259), ‘which the poet presented to the Countess of Pembroke’: ‘Daniel wrote her name on the gilt vellum cover, and she put her signature on the title-page. It is likely that Daniel also placed an inscription on the fly-leaf, which has



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the emendations’—that is, their intrinsic value—by once more quoting Dyce’s initial praise of them,44 and arguing yet again that if he had represented the emendations as his own, and ‘burnt the corrected folio, 1632, I might have established for myself a brighter Shaksperian reputation than all the commentators put together. . . . I certainly preferred a different course, in spite of a warning given me by a friend in the outset, that my enemies would never forgive my discovery, and that their hostility would outlive my existence.’ But ‘I am determined not to make the poor remainder of my life miserable by further irritating contests’; and therefore, unless ‘the matter be brought before a proper legal tribunal [at which] I shall be prepared in every way to vindicate my integrity’, the rest would be (he implied) the silence of Hamlet’s Horatio—or perhaps that of Iago. Not, of course, that it could be, or was. Collier’s innuendoes about tampering may have only piqued Madden, but the Keeper’s reaction was predictably blunt: ‘a weaker & more shuffling composition never was read! He does not venture to deny that the notes are a modern fabrication, but merely says he did not write them, & tells the old story of Rodd and Mr Parry, as having possessed the volume, previous to himself. I think his friends even must now give up the case. Henceforth the authority of the famous Perkins folio is gone, and its notes must be taken as the gleanings and conjectures of Mr Collier. It is an atrocious imposture!’ (Diary, 7 July). Staunton concurred: ‘Mr Collier’s answer has at length appeared and to my mind any thing more pitifully impotent in reply to so grave a case of suspicion it is hardly possible to conceive. His refusal to write any more upon the subject will be taken, I fear, like his refusal to read Mr Singer’s ‘‘Vindication’’ as a convenient mode of escaping an encounter, in which he feels assured of defeat.’ 45 By Saturday the weeklies were revelling in the dispute, with the usual partisanship, although the Illustrated London News—home to both Staunton and Peter Cunningham—maintained its neutrality. Dixon in the Athenaeum remained loyal to Perkins and Collier, calling Hamilton’s revelations ‘most dubious’, and his manner of presentation ‘bold, hasty, and indecent’; as to the emendations themselves, they ‘stand or fall by their own strength’, and Collier was no doubt gratified to hear—an astonishing endorsement of his own sophistry—that ‘the Folio derived no part of its authority from the supposition that it traced back to the seventeenth century,

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disappeared’, being replaced by ‘a comparatively modern substitute’ (for discussion of this book, see QD A129.8). Ingleby, Complete View, pp. 129–31, treated the ‘fly-leaf ’ question at some length. 44. ‘The Rev. Mr. Dyce has declared, in his own handwriting, that ‘‘some of them are so admirable that they can hardly be conjectural’’’. Collier had cited the same (now embarrassing) letter in his 1858 Shakespeare, i:xxi, moving Dyce to a tart reply in Strictures, pp. 4–5. 45. Staunton to Madden, 7 July 1859, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 116–17.


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nor would it lose any part of its authority were it proved to have originated in the nineteenth century’ (9 July, p. 51). On the sceptical side, the Critic found Collier’s disclaimer about the pencillings oddly sensitive (‘he has taken the strangest way of replying’), as Hamilton had not specifically taxed him with them—rather a disingenuous technicality—and raised the spectre of the Bridgewater House ‘H. S.’ letter, ‘which has always appeared to us as fanciful a production as anything in the regions of fiction’ (9 July, p. 29). And at an anti-Collierian extreme, a correspondent of the Supplement to the Birmingham Journal professed to have conducted ‘a long personal examination of the volume’ which indicated that ‘Mr. Hamilton has very much understated his case’ and that ‘there cannot be the shadow of a doubt that the general statement of Mr. Hamilton is correct, and that all the annotations are of a very modern date, made in obedience to pencilled instructions, and all in a uniform and very modern hand’ (9 July, p. 4). This Birmingham critic was evidently not Ingleby (‘our townsman’, whose forthcoming study ‘will prove . . . that the Perkins folio annotations have been fabricated within the present century, if not within the last few years’), but Samuel Timmins (1826–1902), an enthusiastic Shakespearian who helped to establish the great Birmingham Central Library collection.46 He placed the responsibility for the imposture squarely on Collier’s shoulders (how could ‘so accomplished an antiquary’ be so duped?), and found Collier’s reply in The Times of 7 July ‘not wholly satisfactory’, despite ‘our respect for his long and honourable career’. Back at the Museum the curious continued to stream in. ‘We do nothing else all day but shew the volume to persons deeply interested in the question’, wrote Madden on 11 July,47 when Whitwell Elwin, editor of the Quarterly Review and an experienced reader of early handwriting, ‘loudly confessed his opinion, not only of the recent fabrication of the notes, but that Mr Collier was the author!’ By 20 July three formidable new recruits had joined the sceptical faction, James Sherrin Brewer (1810–79, the editor of Letters and Papers of Henry VIII ), the historian James Gairdner (1828–1912), and Thomas Duffus Hardy (1804–78), Assistant Keeper of the Public Records. Hardy, who had worked with Collier on the Trevelyan papers in the mid-1850s, ‘is not only convinced of the notes being a modern forgery’, Madden reported, ‘but declares that he is well acquainted with Mr Collier’s handwriting, & that he is sure Mr C. is the forger!’ (Diary, 20 July, adding that ‘I am also certain of this, but I cannot state so publicly’). Hardy went on to suggest that ‘an attestation should be drawn up, declaring the notes to be

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46. The identification is Madden’s; Diary, 12 July. 47. He soon was obliged to delegate: ‘Mr Hamilton acts as showman, for I cannot spare the time to do so’; Diary, 15 July.



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a modern fabrication, to be signed by those who had convinced themselves of the fact’, a list which Madden declared himself willing to head, but only if accompanied; he refused—when approached by Staunton ‘to publish a certificate of the forgery of the Shakspere’—to testify alone. E. A. Bond’s caution went even further, however: the Deputy Keeper declined to sign Hardy’s attestation on the grounds that it was unnecessary (‘as Mr Collier had not at all disputed the assertion that the notes were in a modern hand’ 48—which was hardly the case, nor the point), and the idea of a joint statement seems to have been dropped. Madden expressed some annoyance at the inaction of some extramural critics (‘In spite of all their boasts of what they would do, I do think that Dyce, Staunton, Hunter & Co. have been remarkably lukewarm since the discovery of the forgery’), and was unimpressed by an article in the Saturday Review (23 July), in which Hamilton attempted some heavy-handed humour. ‘I do not like its tone’, he grumbled, and he professed himself surprised (25 July) by Ingleby’s offer to dedicate his forthcoming Shakspeare Fabrications—the only full-scale account in immediate prospect—jointly to A. E. Brae and himself. ‘I should dislike much the position it would place me in, in regard to Mr Collier and his friends’, he told himself, and told Ingleby as much, in declining: ‘I have always disliked my name being put forward in any matter. Notwithstanding my decided opinion respecting the fabrication of the notes in the Perkins folio, and which you are at liberty to quote, I still feel deeply grieved at the result, and have many friends who are also friends of Mr Collier’.49 Meanwhile Collier’s friends and the believers in Perkins had made their presence known. On 11 July Herman Merivale, Under-secretary of State for India, and a powerful Collier/Perkins enthusiast, called to examine—or re-examine, as it would later emerge—the impugned volume. Madden remembered him, not disrespectfully, as ‘the author of an article in the Edinburgh Review on the subject of the emendations, the value of which he strongly advocated’, and recorded that ‘he feels of course, very unwilling to believe that they are the conjectures of Mr Collier or any other living person’.50 Henry Crabb Robinson, who thought Collier’s response to his accusers ‘short & quiet & so far dignified’,51

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48. Madden Diary, 22 July. 49. Madden to Ingleby, 25 July 1859, Folger MS C.a.14 (4). In the event Ingleby’s tract was dedicated solely to Brae, ‘who first publicly protested against the adoption of the most specious of the MS. readings of the Perkins Folio, and who first, by a philological process, discovered and proved that they were modern fabrications’. 50. Madden Diary, 11 July 1859. Merivale’s important testimony on the whole Perkins affair, spanning five years, will be considered below. 51. HCR Diary, 7 July. While subsequently ‘sorry to find that in general the public voice is against Collier about his volume of Shakespeare’, he could not ‘believe in his being a party to the fraud’ (28 July).


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concentrated his efforts on converting the Rev. Joseph Hunter from his prejudice against John, while defending himself ‘for not venturing to pursue the inquiry’.52 William Chappell and George Lillie Craik wrote warm personal letters of support to their friend, Chappell congratulating John on his ‘most temperate & most convincing’ reply to ‘the preposterous and most abominable insinuations that have been made’, and assuring him that ‘no one who has the happiness to know you’ could require a denial. Craik on 9 July, in Belfast, had just read Collier’s ‘manly and touching letter [in The Times]’, and remained ‘thoroughly convinced . . . that, whatever difference of opinion there may be on the subject of the Annotated Folio, any doubt of your perfect personal honor in the matter is too absurd and ludicrous to live beyond the party heat and passion of the day, and even now, if it exist at all, must be confined to a very few excited individuals to whom you are personally unknown, or who at least have failed entirely to comprehend what manner of man you are’. Nonetheless, Craik added, ‘I do wish . . . that you would look at those recently discovered pencil-marks, and tell us what you think of them.’ W. Wardlaw Reid, another staunch loyalist, wrote to Hamilton directly to enquire if he were quite certain that ‘the Book in question has been identified as the very one given by Mr J. P. Collier to the late Duke of Devonshire’—as if the whole episode might hinge on a silly confusion.53 The pencillings continued to dominate speculation. ‘I could tell you some queer things from the enemies camp’, G. H. Kingsley teased Hamilton, ‘and the way they account for the pencil marks, but I am afraid I must keep them to myself for the present . . . possibly you may hear more about them before long’.54 Presumably the conspiracy theory, hinted at by Collier in The Times, had begun to circulate (‘you have no idea how [the explanation] would amuse you and Sir Frederick’, Kingsley added, improbably), but with the Folio itself captive among the sceptics, opportunity for such counter-accusation was limited indeed. Hence, perhaps, Collier’s appeal to the seventh Duke of Devonshire (before 26 July) to ‘allow the Shakespeare volume to be placed where he and his friends might examine it’.55 In implying that the Manuscript Department of the British Museum was not neutral ground he was backed up in the Athenaeum

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52. Diary, 29 July: Hunter ‘shewed himself to have some feeling this Evening’, Robinson recorded, but nevertheless ‘he assumes the tone of one who punishes a superior’. 53. Chappell to JPC, 7 July 1859; Craik to JPC, 9 July, both Furness Collection; Reid to Hamilton, 8 August 1859, Mostyn Papers. 54. Kingsley to Hamilton, n.d., but before 18 August 1859, Mostyn Papers. 55. Madden Diary, 26 July, stating that Devonshire had shown him the request and ‘said, very properly, that he thought Mr C. and his friends might very well have come to look at it, while it was under my care at the Museum, and added of his own accord, that he thought he ought not to let Mr Collier have the volume at his own disposal’. Collier’s letter itself does not appear to survive.



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by Hepworth Dixon, who—masquerading as two correspondents, ‘A. A. P.’ and ‘An Antiquary’—complained of the ‘system of privacy on which the inquiry is being conducted . . . [by] an anti-Collier faction’, and remarked that the custodians showed a ‘strange disinclination to exhibit the Shakspeare folio to any but those of the anti-Collier clique’ (6 and 13 August). Devonshire may indeed have sympathized with the Museum examiners,56 but with Madden’s concurrence he transferred the vexed object from the Museum’s keeping to that of his solicitor, William Currey, in Old Burlington Street. From 1 August onward it might be seen at his offices (‘yet with every precaution that it should not be tampered with’, Madden hoped), and various concerned parties consulted it there until December 1860, when Devonshire took it home once again. But turnabout was fair play, and Collier’s antagonists no longer enjoyed preferential treatment, or even a warm welcome: Ingleby, for one, was outraged in mid-October when Currey’s clerk ‘asked me if I had a letter from Collier. I ‘‘chewed him up very small’’ ’, Ingleby reported to Hamilton, ‘by reminding him that Collier had nothing to do with it’; but Currey’s partner, summoned from upstairs, ‘refused point blank to shew me the folio unless I had a letter from Mr Collier’, or at least ‘a line from the Duke’, and grudging access was granted only ‘a er a long wrangle’.57 By the beginning of August, however, Ingleby’s own monograph on the affair—anticipating Hamilton’s, and to some extent pre-empting a revision of Literary Cookery by ‘the ponderous Brae’ 58—had issued from the press of (once again) John Russell Smith. The Shakspeare Fabrications, or, the MS. Notes of the Perkins Folio Shown to Be of Recent Origin, a handsomely cloth-bound duodecimo of 144 pages, sporting the facsimile passage from Hamlet that Devonshire

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56. Ganzel (p. 253) rejected this possibility, asserting that Madden’s account of his conversation with Devonshire on 26 July was ‘fabricated’, since Devonshire ‘had no suspicions of Collier’ and ‘there is no evidence that Devonshire supported Madden’s opinion’. But in fact Madden’s letter to Devonshire returning the Folio (1 August) makes it quite clear that the two had discussed the matter in person, and mentions ‘the discovery of some forgeries at Dulwich College since I last had the honour of seeing your Grace’ (i.e., on 27 July, one day aer their meeting) as exacerbating ‘the peculiar circumstances in which Mr Collier now stands’, and rendering it advisable, ‘even for the sake of Mr Collier himself ’, that access to the Folio be carefully supervised (dra, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 123–24). On 28 July Devonshire had paid Collier for superintending the 1604 Hamlet facsimile, but had politely deferred committing himself to any further quarto reprints (Folger MS Y.d.6 [85]). 57. Ingleby to Hamilton, 11 October 1859, Mostyn Papers. 58. Ingleby to Hamilton, 19 September 1859, Mostyn Papers. Brae himself later told Ingleby that ‘before your book came out I caused an overture to be made to J. R. S. for a second edition of Literary Cookery greatly augmented and enlarged—he discouraged the idea on the plea that your book then shortly to come out would extract the pith and substance of Lit. Cookery’; letter of 4 March 1860, Folger MS W.b.105 (62).


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had sanctioned, offered a somewhat sketchy chronology of the controversy from 1852–53 to July 1859, with backward glances at provenance, and concentrated its fire upon the emendations themselves—derivative or patently inventive, insensitive or anachronistic, as Ingleby argued anew. In that respect Shakspeare Fabrications was already curiously outdated,59 a kind of personal epitome of Brae, Singer, White, Delius, et alii, prior to the examination of the Folio itself; its emphasis on internal evidence, despite the few novelties (Brae’s test word ‘cheer’, Collier’s extraordinary 1858 gaffe in misprinting ‘reproof ’ for ‘control’ in his supplied line in Coriolanus)60 would hardly have converted anyone who had resisted such arguments in the past. And the somewhat perfunctory and unelaborated account of Madden’s and Hamilton’s post-examination disclosures hardly warranted the conclusion that ‘nothing further is needed to show that a monstrous fraud has been, by some one, palmed off upon the ignorance and credulity of the Shakspearian public of our times’ (p. 97): Ingleby had yet to pursue what were still moot points of fact and accountability, and his indictments are vigorous but hollow. Indeed Dixon in the Athenaeum, predictably defensive of both Perkins and Collier, might well deride Ingleby’s ‘very weak case and . . . very warm spleen’ (20 August, p. 233), for what Shakspeare Fabrications lacked in persuasive presentation it made up for in bluster. Even its chapterheadings promise more than their contents provide (‘Base Insinuations’, ‘The Process of Manufacture’, ‘Remarkable Coincidences’, ‘Remarkable Discrepancies’), and Ingleby’s lumpish prose style is peppered with hackle-raising overemphasis (‘that atrocious volume, Notes and Emendations’, etc.), while the unstated rules of the game against naming the culprit led once again to what critics found ‘unmanly’ or shabby—broad hints only that Collier himself, explicitly censured as publicist of the spuria, was also their perpetrator. The Critic, normally keen in the hunt, lamented Ingleby’s ‘concentrated acrimony’ and ‘continued series of innuendoes’ against the yet unnamed forger, and its reviewer,

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59. In referring to the forthcoming book on 9 July the supplement to the Birmingham Journal had noted that it had in fact been ‘ready for the press, when the damaging disclosures of Mr. Hamilton appeared’. The title was there given as ‘Shakspeare Forgeries—Ireland and Perkins’, and it was promised to contain ‘internal and independent evidence that the Perkins folio annotations have been fabricated within the present century, if not within the last few years’. 60. Ingleby failed to pursue this significant slip, beyond sarcasm (‘I must say that I thought the original line good; but I think that the new line out-perkinses Perkins’, p. 45). Several months later he remarked to Hamilton that ‘I begin to think Collier put ‘‘reproof ’’ in the place of control on purpose—in order to be able to shew a failing which may account for his oversights & errors—& put his blindness to the same account’ (undated letter thanking Hamilton for a copy of his Inquiry; Mostyn Papers). Elsewhere in Shakspeare Fabrications (pp. 50–61) Ingleby’s devotion to the evidence of an eradicated stage direction in Hamlet remains puzzling, as it leads almost nowhere.



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F. G. Tomlins,61 took particular exception to the tendentious appendix, which laboured a comparison of the Perkins material with the Norfolk Street forgeries fi y years earlier. Ingleby had—pointlessly, it now seems—stressed the responsibility of ‘that remarkable family, the ‘‘Irelands’’ ’, for the latter, alleging that Samuel W. H. Ireland ‘trained his whole family to trade in forgery’, and that William Henry Ireland (‘the son of his own father’ and ‘perhaps, the most accomplished liar that ever lived’) was no loner. Ingleby clearly intended his parallel to bear on the Perkins affair, and Tomlins pounced on him for it: his insinuation that the Colliers were ‘a family of forgers’ was ‘the more cruel, as every one knows that Mr. Collier’s eldest daughter, a most high-principled and accomplished lady, was taken from him by consumption in Torquay, during his superintending the publication of [Notes and Emendations]’. Ingleby deserved this remonstrance for so ill-timed and ill-judged a sally.62 Other periodical reviewers of Shakspeare Fabrications also complained about its ‘acrimoniousness of spirit’ and ‘strong language’, much as they had about the adversaria of Singer and Dyce. The Literary Gazette however approved Ingleby’s implicit conclusions, if only by reviving the cloudy issue of provenance: ‘It is clear . . . that an imposition has been practised by somebody, and that must have happened either before or a er the volume came into Mr. Collier’s possession. If before, it is odd that Mr. Rodd, the original owner of the book, and a man of well-known archaeological tastes, should not have discovered the multitudinous emendations which are scattered through the volume. If a er, what is the inevitable inference?’ 63 Madden read his gi copy while on summer holiday in Richmond, finding that it ‘states the case against Collier fairly, & I believe [Ingleby] is right in all he says. . . . I wrote to thank him for the book and said I had myself quite made up my mind as to the forgery & the forger, but I wished to keep myself out of print as much as possible.’ Yet Ingleby was disappointed in the press notices, especially from the Birmingham Journal (‘less favourable than I expected from that quarter’, he told Hamilton, who was unable to oblige with a piece in the Saturday Review),64 and he could hardly regard his own task as completed. Shakspeare Fabrications laid nothing to rest about Perkins.

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61. A surprising choice, but identified both by W. D. Cooper in a letter to JPC (1 September 1859, Furness Collection) and by Ingleby in Complete View, p. 33. 62. Collier himself seems to have considered libel action against Ingleby, though professing not to have read him: ‘I [set] my lawyer against Mr Ingleby’s book’, he wrote to W. W. Reid on 19 September, ‘for I hear that some parts of it are actionable. Is it so? I only want to know the fact; for even if it be actionable I am not sure that I should not be playing the author’s game by proceeding against him’; Folger MS Y.c.1055 (168). 63. Literary Gazette, 17 September, pp. 275–77. 64. Ingleby to Hamilton, 10 and 16 August 1859, Mostyn Papers.


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The next six months, moreover, saw little but what the Literary Gazette called ‘the temporary repose in which the Shaksperian combatants seem to be indulging’ (1 October). Rival papers proposed rival panels to assess the evidence and pronounce judgement. The pro-Collier Athenaeum (20 August) suggested ‘a committee of the Society of Antiquaries’, to be assisted by ‘chemists, papermakers and such other practical men as might be found necessary’; on the same day the Illustrated London News mooted an even more obviously partisan jury in John Bruce, Thomas Carlyle, John Forster, Hepworth Dixon, Robert Lemon, the auctioneers S. Leigh Sotheby and Thomas Puttick, the lithographer and facsimilist Joseph Nethercli , Mary Anne Everett Green,65 ‘Mr. Young of Blackheath’,66 and Peter Cunningham, who in all likelihood concocted the article. The anti-Collier Critic (27 August, p. 197) retaliated with its own elite nominees, Master of the Rolls Sir John Romilly, Bodley’s Keeper of Manuscripts the Rev. H. O. Coxe, the Somerset and York Heralds William Courthope and T. W. King, Garter King at Arms Sir Charles Young, and the PRO’s Thomas Duffus Hardy, retaining only Lemon of the State Paper Office from the ILN list. In the event the format proposed by the Athenaeum bore limited fruit, for on 30 August four fellows of the Society of Antiquaries inspected the Folio for two hours, examining ‘every instance of Hamilton & Ingleby’, and found ‘nothing to support the infamous charges against the book’ They were all old friends of Collier’s, however (William Durrant Cooper, Bruce, Lemon, and Thoms), and sought no advice from ‘chemists, paper-makers and such other practical men’; still, their conclusions were allegedly formed—as Cooper told Collier—‘not . . . as friends but as impartial men & antiquaries trying to see whether you might not yourself have been taken in. We could see no evidence of it’, he cheerfully reported, contradicting Hamilton and his associates on two key readings and other specifics. ‘There is not in any of our opinions a shadow of doubt as to the ink alterations being all before 1750’, although ‘they have been evidently made by 4 or 5 different persons & at various times. . . . The binding appears to be about the time of Geo. I [i.e., 1714–27] & so does the mark Tho Perkins his booke on the outside.’ The last finding cannot have altogether pleased Collier, but the vindication of the Antiquaries must have done: Lemon, in particular, ‘is clear that the mass of the alterations were made earliest’, that is, ‘before the end of the 17th century’; and Cooper added two days later that ‘with my own Eyes or Glass’ he could perceive none of ‘the hundred, &c. of pencillings made by somebody & written over a erwards’ which Hamilton had claimed to identify. ‘The ‘‘clear

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65. Editor (1857–95) of forty-one volumes of the State Papers Domestic; the Critic (27 August) objected that it ‘would not be seemly to drag a lady into such a discussion’. 66. Unidentified by us, and equally unknown to the writer in the Critic of 27 August.



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modern hand’’ was I fancied to be microscopically seen some where, tho’ your eye had not caught it; & I was surprized to find it no where’.67 This was powerful testimony on Collier’s behalf, and it is surprising that neither he nor the Athenaeum (which announced the investigation on 10 September, and hinted at its findings on 1 October) ever published it in any form. Perhaps the inspectors were not quite unanimous; perhaps one or more of them did see the pencillings that had been ‘written over a erwards’. G. H. Kingsley told Hamilton that ‘I have the Duke of Devonshire’s authority, through Lord Ellesmere, for stating that there is not one word of truth in the Athenaeum statement [of 10 September]!’;68 and both Hamilton and Ingleby denied in print that any ‘committee of examiners [had ever been] formally sanctioned by his Grace’.69 For whatever reason, the whole episode, and the rare instance of independent support for the Perkins Folio itself, lay unrediscovered until 1985.70 Elsewhere in the press the new Universal Review devoted ten pages to ‘The Shakespeare Controversy’ in September, supposing Collier innocent of ‘actual fraud . . . or even intentional desire to palm the frauds of others on the public’, but guilty of (and blinded by) an ‘excess of zeal’. Madden thought the article ‘written by a friend of Mr Halliwell, or perhaps Mr Hall. himself ’, but Halliwell was in fact on an extended holiday from 29 July to 27 October, explanation enough—apart from his personal reluctance to become involved—for his silence ‘throughout the whole of the Museum Inquisition’.71 From July onward the American press followed the affair, with a series of reprints and commentaries in the New York Daily Tribune and New York Times (Collier at least ‘selfdeluded . . . poor in judgement, dull of apprehension, and most untrustworthy as to his memory’, if not yet proven guilty of ‘a great literary fraud’; New York Times, 26 August), and by Grant White, reprising his own earlier accounts, in the Atlantic Monthly (Perkins a fake, but Collier not an intentional deceiver).72

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67. W. D. Cooper to JPC, 30 August and 1 September 1859; Furness Collection. 68. Kingsley to Hamilton, 15 September 1859 (Mostyn Papers). 69. Ingleby, Complete View, p. 320. The refutation in the Critic for 24 September 1859 was supplied by Hamilton (Madden Diary, 24 September), who was probably also responsible for placing a similar story in the Literary Gazette of the same day; Ingleby noted that ‘at least two provincial newspapers’ also carried the story. 70. See Ziegler 1985. 71. Ganzel, p. 252. Halliwell did not in fact examine the Perkins Folio until 24 February 1860. Regarding the controversy in The Times, he told Collier from North Wales: ‘I regret to see a great deal of unnecessary personality about it, & only hope you are not vexing yourself with the attacks being made’; JOH to JPC, 1 August 1859, FF MS 755. 72. White allowed—‘very foolishly and ignorantly’ thought Madden (Diary, 14 October 1859) —that the pencillings might actually be seventeenth-century, a suggestion rarely encountered but not de facto absurd (Altantic Monthly, October 1859). T. J. Arnold, contrarily, was ‘rather struck


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In London, the long wait for Hamilton’s ‘fuller detail’ and ‘other particulars’ continued. In October Thomas James Arnold (1804–77), a barrister and policecourt magistrate with a considerable literary background, projected an article— it turned out to be a series of three—for Fraser’s Magazine, in which Madden heard he would ‘treat [the Perkins Folio] with a rougher hand than had hitherto been employed’.73 In si ing through the evidence with the Keeper and Hamilton, Arnold joined those urging the latter to forward his publication. ‘I suppose you must be out by Xmas’ he wrote (26 November), hoping not to conflict;74 but in fact new suspicions and new evidence had been swelling Hamilton’s arsenal since July, and widening the scope of what Arnold described as his ‘pamphlet’. On 8 December Hamilton sold to the publisher Richard Bentley, for a respectable £80, the copyright of his essay-in-prospect, The Shakspere Question: An Enquiry into Recent Additions to Shaksperian Literature,75 and on the fourteenth gained permission from Ellesmere to facsimile one of the Bridgewater documents; by the end of the month Bentley had determined to publish the work as a hardbound book priced 5s., instead of a 2s. 6d. pamphlet (Madden Diary, 31 December 1859). On the last day of the year Hamilton read his preface aloud to his head of department, who thought it ‘not very well written’, though he clearly was flattered by the attribution to himself of the initial Perkins discoveries, which had hitherto been credited to the younger man. ‘He has assigned to me . . . the merit of being the first to declare positively my opinion that the Notes in the Collier folio were not genuine, and also to prove the modern character of the pencillings beneath them’, he wrote two days later, determining not to resist. ‘This is perfectly true, and I feel that the time is come to disguise no longer from the public my real sentiments on this scandalous affair’—as if public service required such a sacrifice—for what with his name being ‘prominently introduced’ in Arnold’s first Fraser’s article he could no longer avoid ‘taking decisive steps at once to let the world know, as well as Mr Collier and his friends, my opinion of this unparalleled forgery’. Behind Madden’s self-dramatizing declaration lay perhaps more than vanity, for his normally immoderate indignation toward perceived fools and rogues had lately reached fever pitch: ‘I really am tired and

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by [White’s] ingenuity’ (Arnold to Hamilton, 30 October 1859, Mostyn Papers), and Herman Merivale also questioned whether the pencillings were truly in a ‘modern’ hand (Edinburgh Review, April 1860, p. 472). 73. Diary, 25 October. Madden added: ‘So much the better!’ Arnold was the son of the playwright and theatre manager Samuel James Arnold, the grandson of the poet laureate Henry James Pye, the son-in-law of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and the close friend of Thomas Love Peacock, another Fraser’s contributor in this period. As well as writing on law (Arnold’s Municipal Corporations of 1851 reached a seventh edition in 1935) he translated Anacreon and Goethe. 74. National Library of Wales, Mostyn Papers. 75. BL Add. MS 46,617, fol. 223.



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disgusted with the whole business!’, he told his diary on 15 October, seven weeks a er declining Ingleby’s dedication: ‘I believe Mr C. to be, in a literary point of view, the greatest swindler & impostor the world has ever yet witnessed, & posterity, I am certain, will confirm my verdict.’ Madden read Hamilton’s proofs in mid-January, as did Arnold, who predicted no less than glory: ‘I think your book will create an immense sensation. You have stated the case as it seems to me, in a plain, straightforward, scholarlike & temperate manner’, toward which he gently suggested ‘the modification of one note’, its tone ‘rather too sarcastic’.76 But on the eve of publication a new and potentially devastating discovery arrested Hamilton in his tracks, and once again the definitive exposé was delayed. Ideally, one must imagine, Hamilton would have preferred to hold back until his case was unanswerable; but as the month expired Staunton expressed what must also have been Bentley’s concern: ‘Already there is getting up a general feeling, if I may judge from communications received, that the case against Perkins cannot be so very clear since so much preparation is required to state it’,77 and Hamilton or his publisher waited no longer. An Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakspere, Folio, 1632; and of Certain Shaksperian Documents Likewise Published by Mr. Collier saw the light in the first week of February 1860, a smartly cloth-bound, wide-margined square octavo of 155 pages, priced not five but six shillings. Even its title, now echoing Malone’s famous commentary on the forgeries of W. H. Ireland, seems to reflect a late change of mind, for the spine is unconventionally blank and the front cover is firmly gilt-stamped ‘The Shakspere Question’.

Provenance Revisited Before considering the effect of Hamilton’s Inquiry, we must backtrack to three special aspects of the ‘Museum Inquisition’ whose allegations it prominently reflected. Provenance is the first. It will be remembered that elderly F. C. Parry— seventy-three in 1853—had offered a convenient, if somewhat wobbly, history of the Perkins Folio before Rodd and Collier, which Collier had opportunistically pursued and exploited. Six years later, however, this witness was to prove worse than embarrassing to John, and the testimony upon which he had heavily relied next to worthless. The reversal was in fact set in motion by John Carrick Moore, who had put Collier in touch with Parry in the first place, and now hoped to help in ‘establish[ing] your innocence of such imposture’.78 He had

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76. Madden Diary, 21 January 1860; Arnold to Hamilton, 15 January, Mostyn Papers. 77. Staunton to Hamilton, 26 January 1860, Mostyn Papers. 78. Moore to JPC, 16 July 1859, Beinecke Osborn Files 10486.


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written to Parry, he told Collier, a er reading Hamilton’s first letter to The Times, and urged him to ‘corroborate the whole history of the Folio as given by you’. Parry’s answer ‘was to the effect ‘‘I will do what I can for Mr Collier, but before I can take an affidavit that his copy was my copy, of which I have not the smallest doubt, I must see it’’. I accordingly sent him off to the British Museum’, Moore explained, where Madden received him with ‘surprise and gratification’, having independently sought to reach the old witness through common friends, and to procure some kind of deposition.79 ‘On placing [the volume] before him’, Madden now recorded (13 July), ‘he at once declared that it was not the same that belonged to him . . . that his copy was bound in smooth dark leather, had been rebacked, was thinner than Mr Collier’s volume, and was lettered on the back, with the date 1623. . . . Mr Parry further assured me, first, that he had never seen Mr Collier’s copy of the Shakspere, and secondly, that he [Collier] had never been to call on him.’ ‘The conclusion is irresistible’, Madden gloated, ‘that Mr Collier fabricated the falsehoods respecting Mr Parry’s having recognized his volume. . . . Thus the last shadow of defence held up by Mr Collier’s friends has proved a lie’. But Parry’s last statement—if Madden understood him correctly—that Collier ‘had never been to call on him’ does pose a problem: there is no reason to doubt that the two met twice in May 1853 while Parry was convalescent at home, and once more, as it emerged, in the street outside Parry’s house. Some lapse of memory may indeed have afflicted the seventy-nine-year-old, as Collier and his advocates would later insist; but anyone’s recollection of unsolicited encounters when ill or out walking is unlikely to match that of a cherished possession, and it must seem inconceivable that Parry could so emphatically fail to recognize his own property—whose physical characteristics he could firmly describe—even when primed and prepared to approve the identification, and within days of telling Moore he had ‘not the smallest doubt’ of it.80

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79. Madden Diary, 13 July. Moore and his sister Julia had also contacted Lady Fellows, wife of the archaeologist Sir Charles Fellows and a friend of both Parry and Lady Madden, and she had passed on the information that Moore was ‘very indignant that any doubt should be thrown on Mr Collier’s statements or the authenticity of the Perkins folio’ (Madden Diary, 11 July). From this, Madden might have expected that Parry would be a hostile witness, but he nonetheless asked his wife to have Lady Fellows approach the man. 80. Attempts to portray Parry as weak-minded and subject to intimidation by Madden and Hamilton, or as chronically forgetful, find no substantiation whatever in what we know of him— a self-sufficient man of means with extensive legal experience, a strong sense of delicacy in personal and public transactions, and great firmness about what he would or would not testify—as Madden discovered. There are moreover no evidence and no reason to expect that in 1853 Parry had taken the whole matter as seriously as Collier or the Perkins combatants, or even followed the controversy in the press, so that his comparative indifference to matters as seminal as First versus Second Folio is unsurprising. Ganzel, affecting to seek ‘the most logical explanation of Parry’s



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Before quitting the Museum Parry wrote out a brief statement, the substance of which Hamilton immediately incorporated in his own second letter to The Times (16 July, dated 13 July), answering Collier’s ‘last word . . . in print’ in his defence.81 Parry testified only that ‘on being shewn an old edition of Shakespeare’s plays, I think I can positively say that it is not the book which Mr. Gray gave me in or about 1806’, and identified with some legal precision just what he was shown: ‘Sir Frederick Madden stated to me that this copy of Shakespeare, which he now produced to me, was once in Mr. Collier’s possession.’ With this prop so unexpectedly knocked out from under him, John could hardly preserve his own dignity with silence: on 16 July he ‘most unwillingly’ wrote a reply to The Times, recounting his visit(s) to Parry at home in May 1853 (he conflated two as one: see Ingleby, Complete View, p. 69), and adding a completely new story, which would provoke a denial from Parry, an elaboration by Collier, and an exhaustive analysis by Ingleby in 1860. According to Collier (Times, 19 July 1859), in May or early June 1853 ‘I brought the corrected folio of 1632 from Maidenhead to London, and took it to St. John’s-wood, but I failed to meet with Mr. Parry at home.82 I therefore paid a third visit to that gentleman, again carrying the book with me. I met him coming from his house, and I informed him that I had the corrected folio of 1632 under my arm, and that I was sorry he could not then examine it, as I wished. He replied—‘‘If you will let me see it now, I shall be able to state at once whether it was ever my book.’’ I therefore shewed it to him on the spot, and, a er looking at it in several places, he gave it back to me with these words:—‘‘That was my book, it is the same, but it has been much ill-used since it was in my possession.’’’ Neatly shi ing the onus of truthfulness onto his unwilling witness, Collier told The Times that ‘I took Mr. Parry’s word without hesitation’, adding with a straight face that ‘it certainly gave me increased faith in the emendations’. Parry took understandable umbrage at this tale, which effectively accused him of recanting a declared earlier judgement without explanation or apology, and of misleading Collier and his public six years before. He called on Madden

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behaviour’, theorized ‘that he felt himself under suspicion of having had a hand in forging the emendations himself. . . . It is very probable that Madden sought him out, impressed him with what Madden believed was irrefutable evidence of the folio’s fabrication, and suggested that he, Parry, as the source of the book, ought to have an explanation ready. Parry, a man in his seventies [as was Collier now, and no weakling] . . . feared scandal and attempted to extricate himself. It seems unlikely that Hamilton and Madden believed his explanation, but it was useful to them and they shaped it to their own ends’ (p. 250). The far simpler rationale is that Parry looked carefully at the Perkins Folio for the first time and found it not to be his. 81. Parry’s two-sentence statement, from which the following quotations are taken, is printed in Ingleby, Complete View, p. 76. 82. This claim is of itself somewhat suspicious, as Parry was convalescent in this period.


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at once, ‘for the express purpose of decrying Collier’s statement, and placed in my hands to read, a dra of a letter to the Times to that effect’. Clearly to Madden’s disappointment, however, Parry was ‘unwilling to do, what any other man would, i.e. boldly accuse Mr C. of falsehood’, and from a ‘misplaced delicacy to Mr Collier’ he did not send the letter immediately, and might never have done (Madden Diary, 19 and 28 July). But Hamilton prodded him, and nine days later he returned to the Museum with a revised version, in which, Madden pointed out with some exasperation, ‘one or two paragraphs destroyed the effect of the rest of the letter. A er his assertion that he never was shown the Shakspere volume by Mr Collier, he adds, ‘‘A er all, Mr C. may be right and I wrong.’’ I wished this sentence to be withdrawn, as it will certainly be caught hold of by Mr C.’s friends, but Mr P. said it was only meant, as an expression of courtesy to Mr C. so it is to remain.’ Parry was not to be bullied, and the letter as he wished it to be appeared in The Times on 1 August. A er quoting Collier’s account of the roadside encounter, Parry confirmed that they met (‘I was then very lame . . . and was using sticks to assist me in walking’), and ‘well remember[ed] some of the conversation we had during out walk’, but—the crux—‘I have not the slightest recollection that the volume of Shakspere was then under his arm, or of my having asserted that ‘‘it was my book’’’. What Collier had shown him earlier, he recalled, was one of the facsimiles prepared by Nethercli in 1852, and ‘I immediately said, on seeing it, that it was from my book. I now believe that I was mistaken, and that I was too hasty in identifying the volume from a fac-simile of a part of a page of it.’ And here Parry explained, in the most credible terms, what Collier and others professed to find mysterious and suspicious, his own unthinking certainty— his ‘instant conviction’ and his ‘word’, as Collier put it—in 1853: ‘At that time I did not know that there was any other corrected folio in existence, and I therefore supposed that Mr. Collier’s fac-simile could only have been taken from my book.’ Collier, he pointed out, ‘knew that there were several corrected folios of Shakspere in existence, but he did not tell me that there were. . . . It was not till the 14th of this month that I learned from Sir Frederic Madden that there are five or six corrected folios now in being, but’—lest Madden be suspected of confusing the witness—‘he (Sir Frederic) did not tell me so till he had laid on the table Mr. Collier’s corrected folio, and then he seemed surprised that I did not recognize it.’ Simply, then, while Parry had repeatedly of late ‘tried to recollect everything’, he could not confirm Collier’s key assertion: ‘I cannot remember that Mr. Collier ever showed me the book, but I well remember his showing me the fac-simile.’ Furthermore, ‘I have a very strong impression that my book was a copy of the edition of 1623, and was rather surprised’—though not bothered enough to protest, it appears—‘when I saw Mr. Collier’s ‘‘Supplemental volume’’ (1853) [i.e., N&E II ] to find that his book was of the edition of 1632’.



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But Parry, forever the gentleman, would not call Collier a liar in print: it was a matter of ‘Mr. Collier’s memory and mine [being] in question’, and ‘I believe Mr. Collier to be utterly incapable of making any statement which is not strictly in accordance with his belief ’; and—the words Madden deplored—‘I may be wrong, and Mr. Collier may be right’. That le enough of a loophole for the moment, and Collier, no doubt relieved, did not find it necessary to comment. Hamilton, however, would not let go of one improbability, brought up in conversation with the witness: the recuperating Parry was out walking with two sticks (they would later be identified, with circumstantial solemnity, as holly and barberry, pruned years before from trees in Parry’s own garden), which ‘must certainly have totally prevented his handling a folio volume’ (Inquiry, pp. 62– 63). But Hamilton could not resist picturing the old man ‘halting along the road on two crutches’, and Collier a month later pounced on that detail: Parry, he insisted, was ‘walking with a [single] stick’ (which ‘Mr. Hamilton has, possibly only by error, exaggerated into crutches—a word employed by nobody’), and which Collier ‘held . . . while he looked at the book in several places, including the cover’. When Parry ‘returned it to me . . . I then gave him back his stick’.83 By now the focus of dispute was narrowing risibly, but Ingleby procured from Parry a kind of last word on the two sticks, in a fresh manuscript narrative that addressed all the points of contention.84 In aiding Ingleby, Parry may have put his delicacy and diffidence aside at last, a er Collier had published yet one more patronizing reflection on old age and memory: Parry, John declared in his Reply (pp. 18–19), ‘is like myself, advanced in years, and certainly little able to compete with the imposing authorities at the British Museum. When he went there . . . for the purpose of inspecting the Perkins folio, in the presence of Sir F. Madden, Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Maskelyne, and others, he may easily have been confused by the rapid passing and repassing of the folios of 1623 and 1632 before his eyes; and at last he may not have been able to remember which edition had really been his book . . . and he may have been, as it were, cajoled out of his own conviction.’ 85 This ‘most discreditable charge’ (Ingleby) Parry refuted in a letter to Madden which can hardly reflect 83. Reply to Hamilton (1860), p. 16. 84. This provided the substance of Parry’s own version in Complete View, pp. 53–78, where Ingleby (quoting the Saturday Review for 23 July 1859) considered it ‘providential’ that ‘Mr. Parry has not gone the way of the old bibliopole, Mr. Rodd’. The original MS is unknown to us, but Ingleby stated (p. 78) that ‘the proof sheets containing Mr. Parry’s evidence were revised by him before being sent to the press. He is answerable for every statement I have made about him.’ One might add that even for a young and healthy man, holding a 1632 Shakespeare Folio in both hands while standing up, and examining it closely ‘in several places’, is no easy task. 85. Collier suggested that Parry may have also confused the two Folios because ‘the figures 1623 and 1632 are precisely the same, only with an inversion, which may have added to Mr. Parry’s confusion’.


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fear or coercion: ‘I have no hesitation whatever in flatly contradicting that assertion. While I was conversing with you on the subject, you brought a large old book and placed it on the table. I looked at it several times whilst we were speaking together, and was greatly surprised when at length you took it up and said that was the book in question. I felt perfectly assured that I had never seen that book before. I also now must add that you did not show me any other book whatever, or speak of any other book on that occasion.’ 86 With a new sense of purpose, perhaps, Parry next searched his papers and came up with what he thought was the flyleaf of his lost Shakespeare Folio—measurably shorter and broader than the Perkins text leaves, and with eighteenth-century manuscript notes, including an extract from Alexander Pope’s 1725 preface.87 Its evidence remains nebulous, for nothing identifiable with Parry’s lost Folio—First, Second, or later—has ever resurfaced. But the depositions of 1859–60 leave it virtually incontrovertible that, whatever happened between F. C. Parry and Collier in 1853, the former had never possessed the latter’s 1632 Folio Shakespeare. Collier’s original story about Rodd and the country-auction parcel of books remained unshaken, however, although his key allegation—that the volume was already annotated throughout when Rodd bought and sold it—could not now be proven. Among the early visitors to the Museum was the bookseller Henry Bohn, who told Madden on 8 July that his assistant, one Holmes, had been Rodd’s shopman in 1849 and was ‘positive’ that Rodd had never stocked such a volume, and if he had, would not have sold it for thirty shillings. But that was indeed an appropriate price for a battered and defective Second Folio, as Rodd’s own catalogues and his stock-sale will confirm, and one could not and cannot rely on such casual assertions. Even less persuasive is the recollection of Rodd’s nephew Walter, who told Madden on 27 July that he had been present, ‘when quite a boy’, at the time of the transaction itself, and that Rodd had paid £10 for the Folio and asked £20 from Collier. Madden placed no faith in this tale, nor should we. But a different kind of witness—unsolicited, disinterested, and highly respectable—emerged at this point from among the informed public. Dr. Henry Wellesley, the upstanding and scholarly principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford, and a kinsman of the Duke of Wellington, told his friend Samuel Leigh Sotheby that he remembered the Folio from Rodd’s shop ‘some years ago’, when Rodd had shown him it but declared it ‘put by’ for another. Sotheby at once told Collier, who impatiently awaited confirmation,88 and on 13 August Welles-

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86. Parry to Madden, 12 March 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 184–86, with another letter of 14 March elaborating on the first; printed in Ingleby, Complete View, p. 77. 87. Madden compared its measurements with those of the Perkins Folio at Currey’s offices on 27 March 1860. 88. JPC to Sotheby, 6 and 9 August 1859, Folger MS C.b.8 (1) and (2).



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ley provided him with a testamentary life-line. ‘Although I do not recollect the date’, he wrote, ‘I remember some years ago being in the shop of Thomas Rodd on one occasion when a case of books from the country had just been opened. One of those books was an imperfect folio Shakspeare, with an abundance of manuscript notes in the margins. He observed to me that it was of little value to collectors as a copy, and that the price was thirty shillings. I should have taken it myself; but, as he stated that he had put it by for another customer, I did not continue to examine it; nor did I think any more about it, until I heard a erwards that it had been found to possess great literary curiosity and value. In all probability, Mr. Rodd named you to me; but whether he or others did so, the affair was generally spoken of at the time, and I never heard it doubted that you had become the possessor of the book.’ 89 Wellesley’s statement, as John would point out word-by-word, splendidly confirmed his own account of the temporary Rodd provenance, the ‘country’ source of the book, its price, and, most important, the presence of ‘an abundance of manuscript notes in the margins’ while still in Rodd’s keeping. Of course Wellesley’s memory may have conflated to some extent what he saw at Rodd’s shop and what he heard or read later; but these were no vague assertions, and Wellesley was no Parry (or Holmes, or Walter Rodd), to be lightly dismissed or reasoned away. Nor, it transpired, was he at all interested in joining the fray, although at Madden’s request he subsequently inspected the volume, and gave as his private opinion that ‘it is the same which I saw at Rodd’s shop’.90 Efforts to press him further were in vain—the question of how great ‘an abundance’ of annotation he had seen being central, of course—and Ingleby sulked that the principal ‘refuse[d] to be cross-examined’ (Complete View, p. 65). There being no reason whatever to doubt Wellesley’s sincerity—he was never even acquainted with Collier, nor part of any pro-Perkins faction—nor to discount his basic memory of the event, one must simply concede the high likelihood that Rodd once owned the book. Not, of course, that the enemies of Perkins had sought to deny that, nor that some annotations in the volume (including perhaps some now partly eradicated) preceded those of the Old Corrector.91 But ‘an abundance of manuscript notes in the margins’ was precisely what John would

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89. Wellesley to JPC, 13 August 1859, printed (with emphatic italicizations, probably editorial) in Collier’s Reply, pp. 9–10. The original is not known—which is odd, given Collier’s lifelong retention of such supportive correspondence. And while it would have been madly reckless for him to have made serious alterations in Wellesley’s letter as published, there is always the possibility that—as we suspect in the instance of John Carrick Moore—Collier risked ‘misreading’ a word or two. 90. Wellesley to Madden, 23 February 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 154–55. 91. Our own hypothesis of the transmission of the Folio to Collier, given below (pp. 809–10), takes Wellesley’s evidence more or less at face value.


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have wanted to hear, in the dark hours a er Parry’s defection, and he did not waste the effect of Wellesley’s godsent testimonial on yet another squib in The Times. Instead he shrewdly reserved it, perhaps hoping that Hamilton or Ingleby would cast doubt on the Rodd story too, and (best of all) link that doubt with the others. A surprise witness always impresses.

The Scientific Approach When Nevil Story Maskelyne brought his ‘powerful microscope’ to the Manuscript Department of the British Museum on 30 June,92 he initiated a partnership between palaeographical and literary expertise and forensic technique that seemed formidable to contemporaries. His observations on the Perkins Folio, communicated to The Times on 13 July, deliberately avoided two of the ‘three kinds of evidence that may be brought to bear on a literary forgery’, namely, ‘the intrinsic literary character of the document’ and testimony ‘of a palaeological kind, [whose] value is to be estimated by the amount of experience and antiquarian erudition and skill of the critic’; he claimed only to provide ‘that [which] rests on the physical scrutiny of the document by the aids which science has placed in our hands’.93 To this effect he addressed two discrete aspects of the annotations only: the nature of the ink, and the presence of pencillings, whether plainly visible or partly or wholly eradicated, and above or beneath the ink where the two coincided. Where Madden instinctively had thought the ink ‘fictitious’ or ‘painted’, Maskelyne, employing his microscope, at once remarked its failure to sink into the paper (which ‘suggested the idea of its being a water-colour paint rather than an ink’); likewise, its ‘remarkable lustre, and the distribution of particles of colouring matter in it’ seemed uncharacteristic of any conventional writing inks, ‘ancient or modern, that I have yet examined’. He also noted, as Madden had, that it was water-soluble, and when Devonshire permitted him to analyse a removed sample he found that ‘its colouring matter resists the action of chymical agents which rapidly change inks, ancient or modern, whose colour is due

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92. Mervyn Herbert Nevil Story Maskelyne (1823–1911), nephew of the Astronomer Royal and a distinguished mineralogist, first at Oxford then at the British Museum, where he was appointed the first Keeper of Minerals in 1857. 93. The Times, 16 July. He acknowledged a fourth ‘direction in which such an inquiry may be pursued’, namely the evidence of ‘individual handwriting, or the tracing of analogous documents into a single channel’, which he considered might be ‘highly interesting to the literary ‘‘detective’’ [a recollection of A. E. Brae’s pseudonym, perhaps?], but not congenial to an officer of the British Museum’, who might ‘owe a duty to the public, and, in a certain sense occupy a judicial position in questions like this under discussion. Thus, while our object is not to trace the hand in a forgery, it is our duty to denounce the forgery itself ’.



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to iron’.94 From this Maskelyne supposed that, although ‘in some places . . . this paint seems to have become mixed, accidentally or otherwise, with ordinary ink’—that is, presumably it showed traces of iron—‘its prevailing character is that of a paint formed perhaps of sepia, or of sepia mixed with a little Indian ink’.95 But while the peculiarity of the ink might suggest conscious fakery, it might as well, for aught anyone in 1859 knew, reflect the idiosyncrasy of an old penman. While Hamilton evinced ‘the spurious character of the ink itself ’ as part of the ‘scientific demonstration, that the antique-looking alterations in ink were . . . modern fabrications’ (Inquiry, p. 26), Ingleby would more wisely refrain from stressing the chemical evidence. Far more to the point were Maskelyne’s observations on the pencillings, and the interdependence of pencil and ink. First, ‘as to any question that might be raised concerning the presence of the pencil-marks asserted to be so plentifully distributed down the margin, the answer is, they are there’. Some were almost eradicated, but ‘the microscope reveals the particles of plumbago [i.e., black lead or graphite] in the hollows of the paper’, and elsewhere ‘whole syllables or words in pencil are not so effectually rubbed out as not to be still traceable and 94. These ‘chymical agents’, unspecified by Maskelyne, would have included ammonium hydrosulphate (which Madden also reported applying on 27 May), which brightens old ironbased ink (see Nickell 1996, p. 185), and possibly potassium ferrocyanide or hydrochloric acid, which turns iron-based ink bright blue or blue-green (Osborn 1929, p. 453). In a letter to Madden discussing the examination of the ‘Uranius palimpsest’ forged by Simonides (see below), Dr. G. H. Pertz of the Berlin Royal Library noted that when ‘hydrosulphuric acid’ was applied to the writing it did not produce ‘the usual greenish . . . tint’; Pertz to Madden, 15 January 1863; printed in Elliott 1982, pp. 127–29. 95. Sepia, the dark juice of the cuttlefish, contains normally less than one percent iron, and India or China ink—a non-fading mixture of lampblack or soot with a solution of glue or gum—is iron-free. The ‘ordinary ink’ of Shakespeare’s and Maskelyne’s day (iron-gallotannate or iron-gall ink) combines the iron salt ‘copperas’ (hydrated ferrous sulphate) with a tannin (usually gallotannic acid obtained from nutgalls) and some gum for viscosity; with age it turns a rusty brown because of the oxidation of the iron, and it usually contains six percent or more iron by weight (Mitchell 1937, pp. 126–27). But Maskelyne’s tests were non-quantitative, and his sampling no doubt prescriptively minimal, so that it is probably fair to say only that the iron content of the Perkins ink was abnormally low—as we might expect when ordinary ink is diluted with some other substance to make it look faded or brown. This was essentially confirmed in 1987, when four particles from the Perkins annotations were analysed as containing between two and four percent iron, more than Maskelyne might have anticipated (and putting paid to his sepia and India-ink hypothesis), but less than any true writing ink would reveal—the variation in content presumably reflecting different admixtures during different writing stints: see David C. Jenkins 1988. Jenkins’s design, implemented in two laboratory tests of radically dissimilar sampling and methodology, was to seek ‘a ‘‘bridge’’ between ink in the Hall [Commonplace] Book at the Folger and the Perkins Folio at the Huntington’ (p. 97), which the tests did not finally confirm—unsurprisingly, given the time-frame of the productions involved, and the sub-industrial standards of their perpetrator.


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legible, and even the character of the handwriting discernible’.96 These pencillings were all ‘in a modern-looking hand’, whereas sometimes ‘in near neighbourhood to them the same syllable or word is repeated in the paint-like ink before described . . . in a quaint, antique-looking writing’. And crucially, ‘in several cases . . . the ink word and the pencil word occupy the same ground in the margin, and are one over the other’, and ‘the question of whether the pencil is antecedent or subsequent to the ink is resolvable into a physical inquiry as to whether the ink overlies the pencil, or the pencil is superimposed upon the ink’. Here Maskelyne once more resorted to ‘the use of an instrument which has already done good service in an analogous case (that of the Simonides’ Uranius) —the microscope’. His allusion to the celebrated exposure of the Simonides palimpsest—when in 1856 C. G. Ehrenberg and others had shown that the ‘ancient’ uncial chronology of the kings of Egypt written by one Uranius actually overlay the twel h-century texts it was supposed to lie under—indicated his presuppositions about Perkins, no doubt, although Collier himself professed to regard ‘Simonides’ Uranius’ as ‘the imposing and scientific name’ of Maskelyne’s microscope.97 That instrument confirmed, however, what Madden’s naked eye had supposed, that in all instances considered the coinciding pencil and ink yielded one common result: ‘I have nowhere been able to detect the pencil-mark clearly overlying the ink, though in several places the pencil stops abruptly at the ink, and in some seems to be just traceable through its translucent substance. . . . But the question is set at rest’, he declared, ‘by the removal by water of the ink in instances where the ink and pencil intersected each other.’ This experiment,

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96. Expert evidence on erased pencilling had featured in the 1838 trial of Thomas Williams, for forging the will of Jones Panton, when Joseph Nethercli—Collier’s own facsimilist—had testified at length that erased but still-legible pencillings lay below the ink text of the disputed will: see Ingleby, Complete View, p. 318; and contemporary reports in The Times, 10–16 April 1838. ‘Scientific’ testimony in court on the age and nature of paper and ink, by contrast, remained speculative: at the Stirling peerage trial (Edinburgh, 1839) one expert witness, a lecturer in chemistry, found ‘little difference’ between the paper of a suspect charter and that of ‘some old leaves of books’ that he also tested, and was unable to suggest any experiment to determine the age of the writing on the document. But Jean Baptiste Alexandre Theulet, Joint Secretary of the French Archives, declared that the ink of two other documents was such as ‘is used to imitate ancient writings’; and Stanislaus Jacobs, Geographical Engraver at the Institut de France, thought another specimen ‘not such ink as is in common use’ but one that ‘must have been composed to imitate ink turned old, which through age assumed a brownish tint’. Yet another witness, the engraver William Home Lizars, suggested that the fake ink might be concocted of ‘sepia and umber’, whose water-solubility would give it away. See Archibald Swinton, Report of the Trial of Alexander Humphreys (Edinburgh, 1839). 97. Athenaeum, 18 February 1860, p. 237: ridiculed by Ingleby (Complete View, p. 102), perhaps misunderstanding a joke. Collier also had playfully challenged Maskelyne to ‘discover that the plumbago of my pencil was the same as that of other marks, said to be in connexion with some of the emendations’ (The Times, 16 July 1859), as if unaware of the limits of ‘science’.



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which of course rendered it impossible to re-examine the original evidence, revealed an ‘unbroken’ line of pencil underneath one ink or paint annotation to Richard II, and ‘had the pencil been superimposed on the ink, it must have lain superficially upon its lustrous surface and have been removed in the washing. We must, I think, be led by this to the inference that the pencil underlies the ink—that is to say, was antecedent to it in its date; while, also, it is evident that the ‘‘old commentator’’ had done his best to rub out the pencil writing before he introduced its ink substitute.’ ‘Now, it is clear that evidence of this kind cannot by itself establish a forgery’, Maskelyne concluded—knowing well that it did and that if readers accepted his word and the evidence of his examination it would be hard to hold out for Collier and Perkins at all. Grant White and a few diehards might propose that the ‘modern-looking’ pencillings were in fact ancient, and thus indicative only of pre-Perkins scribbling, but the only viable opposition to Maskelyne’s claims would ultimately be abject denial—or the assertion of tampering by the overzealous indictors. The next stage of the Museum Inquisition, in fact parallel in time, took the dra -pencilling evidence one fatal step further.

The Search Widens Although so much critical fire-power in 1859 was concentrated upon the Perkins Folio alone, the most devastating result of the Museum Inquisition may have been what Maskelyne dismissed as ‘not congenial to an officer of the British Museum’—namely, ‘the tracing of analogous documents into a single channel’. For what Hamilton and others turned up, in their parallel investigation of other Collierian discoveries, proved so rich a vein of imposture that whatever legal weaknesses remained in the case against Perkins, the case against Collier himself would at last seem unanswerable. Without the spur of a ‘Shakespeare Question’, perhaps, the sleeping dogs of Collier’s past might have lain undisturbed for decades; as it was, the attentions of a professionally qualified and articulate class of co-workers turned to what had hitherto concerned only individual scholars like Dyce, Halliwell, and Hunter, none of them keen to prosecute a distasteful long-term exposé. But those who deemed themselves owing ‘a duty to the public’ and occupying ‘a judicial position in questions like this’ found little reason not to retrace whatever tracks the presumed forger of Perkins had le . It was the Rev. Joseph Hunter, indeed, visiting the Museum on the very day of Hamilton’s initial letter to The Times, who first set Madden thinking about analogous or parallel forgeries: having ‘unhesitatingly condemned the notes in the folio’, Hunter ‘spoke to me respecting the letters & papers published by Mr Collier from the Muniments at Bridgewater House, and declared his opin-


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ion that they were forgeries. I have not examined this matter, but feel much curiosity about it. Hunter added, that whoever had forged the letter of H. S. at Bridgewater House had, in his opinion, forged the notes in the Perkins folio’ (Diary, 2 July 1859). Madden duly took up Halliwell’s Observations on the Shaksperian Forgeries at Bridgewater House for the first time, and ‘on looking very carefully at the facsimile [of the H. S. letter] prefixed, I have no hesitation in pronouncing it a forgery, and more than that, I am positive that the same hand that forged it, fabricated the notes in the Perkins folio. So that my opinion completely substantiates what Mr Hunter said’, he confirmed (Diary, 5 July), going on pell-mell to judgement with only the evidence of Halliwell’s facsimile: ‘And what other person has had access to the papers in Bridgewater House & published these letters but Mr Collier? The conclusion is irresistible, that he is the forger, which I firmly believe to be the case.’ It was not until 17 November, however, that the Keeper visited Bridgewater House and viewed ‘minutely’ the suspect documents, finding them to be (as expected) ‘forgeries, and, as I believe, executed by the same hand that fabricated the notes to the Shakespeare’.98 He also re-examined Ellesmere’s celebrated First Folio, which the seventh Earl had brought into the Museum on 4 July: at that time Madden had judged the annotations to be ‘in the same fictitious hand as those in the Perkins folio’, finding ‘underneath some of them . . . tracings in pencil!’ There were also ‘some pencil notes . . . in Mr C.’s undisguised hand’, and ‘Lord E. was very angry on being told the fact, & complained that persons when admitted to a library should take the liberty to scribble in the best books!’ (Diary, 4 July). On 17 November Madden remained ‘positive’ that the ink and ink-overpencil notes had been written by Collier, whose cumulative mischief outraged him anew: ‘He is the greatest literary knave that ever lived, not excepting even Simonides, and that is saying much!’ A month later Ellesmere gave Hamilton permission to take and publish facsimiles of the documents, a privilege he would renew for Ingleby in 1860. Still in July, Hamilton and G. H. Kingsley, Ellesmere’s clever librarian,99 had

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98. ‘They are five in number (all printed by Mr Collier in his ‘‘New Facts!’’) and bound up with them is a sixth genuine paper, but not relating to Shakspere’ (Diary). This last document, an opinion of Chief Justices Sir Christopher Wray and Sir James Dyer on city jurisdiction in Blackfriars, also mentioned by Collier in New Facts (p. 9), was subsequently questioned by Hamilton, James Gairdner, J. S. Brewer, and W. B. D. D. Turnbull, but Madden continued (rightly) to insist on its authenticity: at Ingleby’s request he re-examined it on 27 July 1860, noting in his diary that ‘this is decidedly genuine’ and telling Ingleby that he was ‘of decided opinion that [it] is perfectly genuine & I can perceive no reason whatever to doubt its genuineness’; 28 July 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 354–55 (copy). 99. George Henry Kingsley (1827–92), the second of the three famous Kingsley brothers, was by training a medical doctor, who developed ‘a special line of practice, the charge of individual



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extended the investigation to Dulwich College. Following up Halliwell’s 1848 note about the letter of Joan Alleyn, with its invisible reference to ‘Mr Shakespeare of the globe’—the only Henslowe/Alleyn document so far impugned, although Halliwell had charged Collier only with ‘haste’—they immediately unearthed a new forgery, the letter to Henslowe from ‘John Marston’ that Collier had published in 1841. As in Ellesmere’s First Folio, they reported to Madden, ‘beneath the ink, the pencil tracings of the letters are still clearly to be seen, and demonstrate the fraud!’, driving the diarist to new levels of indignation.100 Hamilton promptly leaked word of the new findings to the Critic,101 which reported on 6 August the existence of a ‘whole chain of facts connected with the Perkins-Collier folio, the documents at Ellesmere House, and some late discoveries connected with papers at Dulwich College’; but the Dulwich librarian Alfred J. Carver went on holiday in August, and no further inspection was immediately possible.102 Nonetheless Kingsley regarded the ‘new Dulwich Shell’ as a potentially lethal missile, pending a fresh examination of the manuscripts, and while warning Hamilton that ‘Collier’s answer will of course be that they were forged by Malone, or that they are copies by him. The only safe shot is Mrs Alleyn’s letter—if he escapes that I’ll be what he certainly will be [i.e., damned]’.103 In October Kingsley suggested to Hamilton that should he revisit patients’ (DNB), in which foreign travel featured uppermost: he is now best remembered for his own travel writing (South Sea Bubbles [1872], ‘by the Earl [of Pembroke] and the Doctor’). As medical adviser to the Earl of Ellesmere’s family he assumed the care as well of the library at Bridgewater House, and in 1858 compiled notes toward an elaborate ‘Catalogue of Early English Dramatic Literature in the Bridgewater Library’, which remains in manuscript: ‘Vol III, Nabbes to Woods’, a stout quarto of ca. 250 pages, is in FF, citing Collier passim. 100. ‘I now give up Mr C. altogether, and think he deserves to be chased from all literary society’ (Diary, 27 July 1859). This careless but common error has betrayed other forgers: ‘In attempting to reproduce a signature’, wrote C. Ainsworth Mitchell (1911, p. 99), ‘a forger will probably make a preliminary outline with a blacklead pencil and then go over this with ink. The imperfect removal of the pencil marks may then betray the fraud. . . . In some instances the particles of graphite may be seen with the aid of the microscope to project beyond the upper layer of ink.’ The pencilled guidelines are faintly visible even in a recent facsimile of the ‘Marston’ letter (Foakes 1977, ii:103). 101. A weekly London ‘journal of literature, art, science, and the drama’, edited from 1843 to 1863 by James Lowe (d. 1865). In the months to come the Critic was to devote many columninches to the Perkins affair, nearly always from the viewpoint of the anti-Collier camp, as opposed to the pro-Collier Athenaeum. Events suggest that from the beginning the Critic’s inside information came principally from Hamilton, with Madden, T. J. Arnold, Daniel Parkes, and W. S. W. Vaux later also taking part; at least some of the articles and reviews were written by Lowe himself, and it is likely that he was responsible for the final form of all of them. 102. Letter from Carver to Hamilton, postmarked 3 August 1859, Mostyn Papers. 103. Kingsley to Hamilton, postmarked 18 August 1859, Mostyn Papers. A few months later Kingsley added: ‘You should make out the end of Mrs Alleyn’s letter very clearly, it would be better not to prove the whole a forgery. The piece interpolated [i.e., the words that do not appear in


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Dulwich, Henslowe’s dra -letter about Thomas Lodge as a player might bear examination, as it looked ‘very much like a ‘‘plant’’ ’;104 but while Hamilton identified two more Dulwich forgeries before February (the ‘Sweet Nedde’ verses and the 1604 list of players including Shakespeare’s name), the Lodge imposture remained unexposed until 1867. Associated charges were meanwhile raised or re-raised. On 2 July Sir Henry Ellis reminded Madden of the Freebooter episode, ‘many years ago’, when ‘Mr Collier had quoted from a letter of old Isaac [Walton], which he said he had discovered among the Lansdowne MSS. but no such letter has ever been seen by other persons, and Mr C. was always suspected to have forged [i.e., fabricated] it’ (Diary, 2 July 1859). Hamilton was pursuing this old spoor in November, and T. J. Arnold made it part of his Fraser’s series in February, a er which Alexander Dyce also half-remembered Collier confessing to it ‘as a joke’.105 Doubts about the Shakespearian ballads resurfaced in October, when Hamilton showed Madden one or two facsimiles from Halliwell’s folio Shakespeare, and Madden thought what he saw ‘extremely suspicious & I should not be surprised if the MS. of Ballads should prove to be a forgery altogether!’ 106 Inevitably, the thrill of the chase led the huntsmen too far, and on at least three occasions Collier was wrongly suspected. On 10 November Hamilton told Madden about a volume containing ‘a supposed Autograph Sonnet of Milton’, which ‘had been proved to have come out of the hands of Mr Collier and strong suspicions existed of his having forged the Sonnet. From internal evidence Mr [Robert] Carruthers rejects it, & I have a perfect recollection of having myself seen this volume when on sale at Putticks some years ago, and being struck with its want of authenticity.’ The poem in question—hardly a sonnet, but two complementary quatrains in a 1646 edition of Alexander Rosse’s Mel Heliconium—is signed merely ‘J. M.’, and is neither in Milton’s hand nor, patently, an attempted forgery, in spite of its controversial history.107 And there is no reason at all to

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the damaged but genuine original] is the crucial portion’; he noted also that while ‘I know nothing about the means used for detecting forgeries . . . there can be no question about the Marston letter’; Kingsley to Hamilton, undated but aer 11 October 1859, Mostyn Papers. 104. Kingsley to Hamilton, 24 October 1859, Mostyn Papers. At this time Kingsley was collecting material for a life of Lodge, never published; see Kingsley to CMI, 21 May 1868, Folger MS C.a.8 (2). 105. Madden Diary, 5 November 1859. 106. Madden reported ‘two’, but Halliwell in fact reproduced only one stanza of one, ‘The Inchanted Island’, at i:312. Madden followed this up in the course of investigating other matters (see William Chappell to Madden, 10 February 1860, BL Egerton MS 2847, fols. 105–06), and Hamilton tacked on to his stop-press dubia ‘The Inchanted Island’, as the ‘most noticeable’ of the ballads discovered and publicized by Collier in the 1830s. 107. Madden’s ‘want of authenticity’ is ill-judged, or ill-recollected from ten years before: the handwriting is certainly contemporary, the text perfectly credible, and the initials as common as



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connect it with Collier: the consignor to the Puttick and Simpson sale where Madden recalled seeing it (19 April 1849, lot 322) was one T. A. Evans, and the unremarkable verses appear in no publication, earlier or later, by Hamilton’s and Madden’s preferred culprit. Similarly, when Madden and Hamilton visited Bridgewater House on 17 November, G. H. Kingsley’s exhibition of ‘the facsimile of the signature of Ralegh given by Collier in his Catalogue of the Bridgewater rarities’ (i.e., Bridgewater Catalogue [1837], p. 248) provoked Madden to an equally hasty reaction: ‘I agree with [Hamilton and Kingsley] that it has every appearance of being a forgery!’ The ‘signature’ is in fact merely a contemporary attribution to Ralegh of a letter to Sir Robert Carr which is known from several early transcripts,108 and while Collier was wrong to suppose it a rare form of Ralegh’s autograph, there is nothing spurious about it. Two days later Hamilton and Madden fastened on another old revelation, the note by Inigo Jones describing a costume as ‘like a Sir Jon fallstaff ’, which Collier had published in New Facts (1835, pp. 38–39). Madden ‘believe[d] it to be gross forgery, both from the absurd diction and from the orthography’, and Hamilton enquired further of J. R. Planché, who had failed to mention it in his brief ‘Remarks on the Costume, etc., of some of the Sketches by Inigo Jones’.109 Planché remembered neither the sketch nor the inscription from his handling of the originals years before, but told Hamilton that those reproduced in the Shakespeare Society volume—not including the Falstaffian costume—had been selected by Collier.110 No doubt that whetted the appetites of the investigators, although Madden pursued matters only in February 1860, when although Devonshire gave him permission to inspect the Jones drawings, none of the costume designs could be found (Diary, 19 and 27 February 1860). Madden appears then to have abandoned the search, which was just as well, for the inscription—though somewhat misread by Collier—is quite genuine;111 another enquiry about the authorship of an article on Thomas Lodge (GM, August 1834)—perhaps because it (correctly) identified Lodge as the son of the Lord Mayor of London—met a dead end.112

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any. The owner of the book in 1859, William Tite, M.P., optimistically believed the lines Milton’s (An Account of an Autograph Sonnet by Milton, 1859), an opinion gallantly supported by his bookseller Henry Bohn (‘who authorises me to say that he knows Milton’s autograph well’) and by the ever-charitable Samuel Leigh Sotheby (Ramblings in the Elucidation of the Autograph of Milton [1861], pp. 111–12, with facsimile); but see N&Q, 29 October 1859; Parker 1968, ii:860; and IELM, ii:2, pp. 80–81. 108. See Latham and Youings 1999, pp. 307–09. 109. In Peter Cunningham, J. R. Planché, and J. P. Collier, Inigo Jones (A69). 110. Planché to Hamilton, 26 November 1859, Mostyn Papers. 111. See Orgel and Strong 1973, ii:616–17. 112. Madden Diary, 30 November and 5 and 6 December 1859. Kingsley had suspected that


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Luckily for the prosecution, Hamilton resisted including these three or four false scents in his catalogue of suspect material. But one other he mistakenly did, casting doubt on the entirely genuine testimony of Augustine Phillips relating to Richard II and the Essex Rebellion, which Collier had found in the State Paper Office in 1856 (‘a remarkable document’, Hamilton called it, ‘which, so far as I am aware, no one has yet seen’).113 Ingleby was probably to blame for suggesting this tactical blunder, for on 11 August 1859 he confidently informed Hamilton that the document ‘was obviously forged to support [Collier’s] theory that the additions to Rich. II were made to suit the occasion of Essex’s insurrection’, and ‘to prove that this led to Lord Southampton’s intimacy with Shakspere’.114 Madden may in fact have known better, had Hamilton checked with him;115 but the charge was Hamilton’s very last, confined mostly to a long footnote (pp. 104–07), perhaps added in proof. Collier would find it a godsend. The true stop-press of Hamilton’s Inquiry, however, for which Collier cannot have been fully prepared, involved the State Paper Office as well. In late January 1860, with Staunton, Arnold, and no doubt Bentley the publisher all urging him to finish, Hamilton opened an entirely new case. The Blackfriars players’ petition of 1596, as reproduced by Halliwell in his folio Shakespeare (1853, i:137), had attracted the suspicions of Madden, Bond, and himself on palaeographical grounds, as ‘a forgery, similar to those in Bridgewater House’, and an examination by Hamilton of the original on that day corroborated this, Madden reported.116 ‘On his return, he assured me that the paper was certainly spurious, so much so, that he had thought it right to communicate the fact to Mr [Thomas Duffus] Hardy to be laid before the Master of the Rolls, in order that some official inquiry might take place respecting it’, the supposition being that the document was ‘forged & placed . . . surreptitiously among the State Papers’. A meeting was swi ly convened at the Rolls Office, where on Monday, 30 January,

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‘Collier may have had something to do with this article’ and its citation of an unlocated will, but John Gough Nichols advised Madden that ‘it was communicated through Pickering, and perhaps was drawn up by the late Mr. [John] Lodge, Librarian of Cambridge’. Kingsley appears not to have pursued this. 113. See B439. 114. Ingleby to Hamilton, 11 August 1859, Mostyn Papers. 115. Madden’s annotated copy of Hamilton’s Inquiry (Bodl. Malone adds.105.e.1) refers to the document as genuine, citing Halliwell’s facsimile in his folio Shakespeare (1859, ix:5), where the document is described as ‘recently discovered by Mr. Collier’; but of course this may have been wisdom aer the fact. Howard Staunton also suggested to Madden that the document was a forgery, but Madden annotated his letter ‘It is genuine’; Staunton to Madden, 20 February 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 144–45. 116. Madden Diary, 25 January 1860. The fatal historical error (naming the Globe Theatre two years before its construction) did not figure in the condemnation.



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six formidable authorities took turns in assessing the paper: Lord Romilly (the Master), John Sherrin Brewer of King’s College, London (Reader at the Rolls), Sir Francis Palgrave and Thomas Duffus Hardy (Deputy and Assistant Keeper of Public Records), and Madden and Hamilton. ‘We all of us examined it, very carefully, one by one, and then together’, Madden wrote, ‘and we all came to the conclusion that the paper was a Forgery!’ Madden himself ‘firmly believe[d] that it is executed by the same hand that forged the Ellesmere Papers’, but the declaration signed by all six, and ordered by Romilly to be attached to the document itself, states merely that ‘we are of opinion that the document in question is spurious’.117 But this would serve Hamilton’s purpose, even though his and Madden’s conviction ‘that it had been executed by the same hand as the fictitious documents [at Dulwich and Bridgewater House] already discussed’ remained moot. ‘Where is all this to end?’ asked Madden (Diary, 25 January). ‘The further inquiry extends, the wider the circle of fraud and deception seems to extend. It is the most villainous series of forgeries ever planned or executed by man!’ And if that were not enough, further tales of Collier among the State Papers began to accumulate, first one about his ‘borrowing’ and returning papers around 1850.118 In February Hamilton told Madden that the letter of the Earl of Pembroke about Middleton’s Game at Chess, described by Collier in New Particulars (1836, p. 49) as ‘preserved in the State Paper Office’, could not now be found there.119 And even a gi of some munificence from John to the State Paper Office, nine letters of Cardinal Reginald Pole, Thomas Cromwell, Michael Throckmorton, and Thomas Starkey, for which the donor had thought himself insufficiently thanked, was looked at hard in the mouth: ‘on examination these Papers were found to have certain marks proving them to have been abstracted at some time or other from the State Paper Office. Mr C. merely says that he bought them of Thorpe many years ago, but they do not appear in any of Thorpe’s Catalogues, and the whole transaction has a very mysterious look about it.’ 120 But these were essentially private suspicions, and none of them would figure in the alreadymultiplied charges to come.

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117. Transcribed in Hamilton, pp. 101–02. Romilly’s direction is dated 2 February 1860, only days before the Inquiry finally appeared. 118. Madden Diary, 5 November 1859; see above, p. 459. 119. Diary, 11 and 16 February 1860. The history of this (genuine) letter remains puzzling: see QD 24.7. 120. Madden Diary, 27 January 1860. See A179 below, and Palgrave to JPC, 9 August 1859, thanking him for the letters; Folger MS Y.d.6 (182).


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1860: Expostulation and Reply Hamilton’s long-delayed Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakspere Folio reached the public in the first week of February 1860.121 The first seventy pages presented succinctly the case against Perkins, with special attention to the Parry provenance controversy, but perhaps insufficient stress—beyond quoting Maskelyne’s testimony—on the pencil and pen evidence, and (as with Ingleby’s Shakspeare Fabrications) with unnecessary weight placed on Collier’s incomplete ‘Complete List’ of the marginalia. Hamilton’s ‘various and irrefragable proofs of [physical] forgery’ in the Perkins Folio went further than Ingleby’s, and le literary evidence almost completely aside,122 but there remained a certain shrillness and lack of specificity in the charges that would leave room for rejoinder. The real heart of the Inquiry, however, followed (pp. 71–108): the ‘fresh discoveries’ to which, as the partisan Critic declared, ‘the postponement has been entirely due . . . and to no laxity on the part of Mr. Hamilton’. Although rushed at the end, Hamilton had managed to incorporate, among ‘certain Shaksperian documents likewise published by Mr. Collier’, evidence of ‘a series of systematic forgeries which have been perpetrated, apparently within the last half century’—namely the five Bridgewater House papers, the Ellesmere First Folio annotations, four questioned documents from Dulwich College, and, ‘most remarkable’ of all, the State Paper Office players’ petition, impugned no more than a fortnight before. Finally, the case against ‘The Inchanted Island’ was le mainly to rest on its improbable text (reprinted in full, pp. 124–30), the Augustine Phillips hiccup occupied a long footnote, and the Times correspondence of 2 July–1 August 1859—seven letters from Collier, Hamilton, Maskelyne, and Parry—provided a terminal appendix. Hamilton apologized for the ‘dry and technical’ aspect of his book (‘inevitable from the very nature of the inquiry’), but hoped that ‘a sense of its importance . . . will animate my reader’; and to make the best of his presentation in a largely pre-photographic age, he supplied three lithographic facsimiles—one each from Perkins, Dulwich, and Bridgewater House, executed by Frederick Nethercli , the son of Collier’s own usual facsimilist. If one credited the strict accuracy of these plates, Hamilton’s argu-

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121. It was announced ‘within the next week’ in the Critic for 4 February; Sir John Romilly received his copy on the evening of 6 February, and T. J. Arnold thanked Hamilton for his on the ninth; Mostyn Papers. 122. Evidence other than ‘extrinsic’ is casually cited: ‘The internal proofs of its spurious character are no less powerful, and have long since been independently urged against it by Singer, Dyce, Knight, Staunton, Halliwell, Ingleby, Grant White, and the whole phalanx of Shaksperian Commentators. That anyone, using due consideration, can maintain the authority of the volume, seems not possible’ (p. 70).



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ment was mightily buttressed; but lithography has its limits, and even Halliwell, who considered the material reproduced to be ‘undoubted forgeries’, thought the facsimile of juxtaposed pen and pencil corrections ‘unfair’.123 Before and a er Hamilton’s Inquiry, the first two parts of Thomas James Arnold’s essay in Fraser’s raised similar points, with less claim to scholarly expertise, but palpably superior argumentation.124 Arnold’s legal-minded approach was more than a match for Collier’s, and his dismissal of John’s special pleading for the intrinsic excellence of the emendations (i.e., that he might have done better to claim them as his own, and burn the Folio) was effortless: ‘it is the authority under which they are put forward . . . which gives their weight an importance’, and those that were inferior or unnecessary ‘we [sometimes] accept . . . perhaps too blindly, and though o en with reluctance, because we feel the authority is too strong to contend against’. As to the weight of the evidence, Arnold’s remarks on the ‘ingenious argument’ of Grant White touching the possible antiquity of Perkins might be etched in stone for the whole controversy: White ‘seems to have forgotten that in every case of circumstantial evidence each individual link in the chain taken by itself may prove but little, but that it is the concatenation of the whole that gives the evidence its binding force’ (p. 62). That ‘concatenation of the whole’ of the circumstantial evidence available was indeed all that Arnold, Hamilton, and Ingleby—or posterity—could finally muster against Collier himself in re Perkins, although as the investigation advanced, the individual links so strengthened and increased in number as to make Arnold’s case binding indeed. Moreover, as Madden had been promised (25 October 1859), Arnold treated the matter with ‘a rougher hand than had hitherto been employed’, not scrupling to name names and propose direct questions.125 The nature of the Fraser’s inquiry was simple enough: were the Perkins annotations indeed ‘modern fabrications,126 written in imitation of an ancient hand’, and, if so, ‘who was the fabricator?’, and—without mincing words—‘is Mr. Collier a dupe or an impostor? Has he merely committed an error of judg-

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123. Henrietta Halliwell diary, 24 February 1860, quoted in Spevack 1999, p. 123; this followed Halliwell’s first inspection of the Perkins Folio, at Currey’s offices. 124. The final part appeared in May. Collier was later to accuse Arnold of some kind of family prejudice, perhaps based on old incidents or newspaper reviews (‘If Mr. Arnold be the son of the late S. J. Arnold the dramatist [which he of course was], perhaps I can understand part of the cause of his undeserved animosity towards me’; Reply, p. 7), but in neither Arnold’s articles nor his private correspondence with Hamilton is there any suggestion of a personal animus. 125. By contrast, Hamilton in late February 1860 still persisted in the evasive technical claim that ‘I have nowhere accused [Collier], personally, of the forgeries I have exposed’ (dra of letter to The Times, Mostyn Papers). 126. Arnold legalistically preferred the term ‘fabrication’ to ‘forgery’, as the latter ‘implies something more than a fabrication; it involves the intent to defraud’ (p. 63).


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ment or has he been guilty of an act of scandalous dishonesty?’ (p. 53). To that end, in January Arnold reviewed the disputed accounts of discovery and provenance, the literary and palaeographical objections (matters of opinion), and the physical evidence (matters of ‘fact’), concluding that ‘it seems hardly possible that stronger evidence could be adduced to prove that the notes are a fabrication’ (p. 63). In February, taking the last as established, he asked flatly ‘whether the evidence points to any particular person as the fabricator’, and proceeded to sum up the case against Collier himself—the first time, in so many words, that that charge had been publicly made. No doubt Arnold’s professional attainments convinced himself, and Fraser’s, that his conclusions were unactionable: while Collier’s personal benefit from the Perkins discovery ensured that ‘suspicion would certainly fall in the first instance on Mr. Collier himself ’, this was ‘nothing but suspicion . . . if not corroborated by facts’, which Arnold methodically detailed. They had mostly to do with Collier’s inconsistencies and misleading statements, and le the direct responsibility for perpetration essentially unproven, although Arnold direly predicted that the ‘considerable profit to [Collier] himself ’ would constitute ‘a very important ingredient in the charge should it ever assume another and graver character—viz., that he had published the notes knowing them to be fabrications’ (p. 187). And more hurtful yet, Arnold contested the evidence of character, which ‘in such a case . . . is of the highest importance’, dismissing Collier’s ‘hitherto unblemished integrity’ as (to say the least) unestablished: ‘various ancient ballads and other pieces of poetry, which he has professed to have discovered in his researches’, were now ‘suspected, from internal evidence, not to be genuine; and it is reported that some of his acquaintances have asked to see the originals, but have never succeeded in doing so’ (p. 186). This again was a first stone cast publicly against John’s glass house of primary documents, and Arnold followed it up with an account of the Freebooter episode and the Bridgewater House and Dulwich (Joan Alleyn) suspect papers, commenting drily that ‘it cannot be said that Mr. Collier’s literary character is, independently of [the Perkins] MS. notes, above all suspicion’. However determined Hamilton may have been to pin down Collier to the defence of specified dubia, Arnold’s silkier and yet blunter general indictment may have seemed the more telling to readers in 1860. John would noticeably shy away from refuting it, save ‘with the utmost brevity’ on a detail of the Freebooter story (Reply, p. 7).

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Well before the appearance of Arnold’s first article and Hamilton’s completed Inquiry, Collier had begun to formulate a full statement of his own, in effect a reply to the anticipated attack, which he circulated amongst his supporters—including John Forster, John Bruce, and Frederic Ouvry. An apparent



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dra of one page (all that survives) repeated his old contention ‘that without any reference to their origin or antiquity . . . the emendations should stand or fall by their own merit’, and suggested an almost sporting bargain: ‘if I am [the fabricator of the corrections], let my baseness be counterpoised (if anything can counterpoise it) by the credit of so much ability and knowledge as went to the composition of the notes. If I am not, let me at least enjoy the reputation of an honest man, who produced his authority for the reversal of his own long-retained judgement . . . that the old copies ought to be scrupulously followed.’ 127 The enemies of Perkins would hardly accept Collier’s loaded alternatives, but Forster at first urged him to publish without waiting for Hamilton, for ‘so complete an answer on the personal part of the charge, made so quietly, so unpretendingly, & with nothing of the over anxiety of a man who doubted his case . . . [would be] pretty nearly decisive with all honest people’. Hearing from Bruce that Hamilton’s publication was imminent, however, Forster counselled delay, and invoked one ‘reservation’: ‘Dyce has taken no part in the base imputations against you’, he wrote, for although Dyce in his Shakespeare had le the credibility of the Bridgewater documents ‘an open question’, ‘there is the widest possible distinction between critical conflicts of this kind, and the dishonouring imputations you are replying to’.128 Loyal John Bruce, whom Madden had described (Diary, 5 July) as ‘almost with tears in his eyes’ a er viewing the pencillings, likewise urged Collier ‘to spare Dyce’, in a letter worth quoting in its entirety: One last word. You ask me why you are to spare Dyce. I begged you not to mention him. Three parties are to be considered in your reply.—Your friends, your opponents, and the readers of Shakespeare who in many far off places, as well as here, are waiting to know what is the truth. Your friends know yourself and require no more. Your opponents have made out a case which is deemed to be entitled to an answer. The last are the persons whose judgments are to be swayed. To convince them you should deal simply with the book, its story and its contents. If you involve them in any personal feuds, they will throw aside your answer unread. They will pronounce it, ‘Another Shakespeare squabble!’, and hold that, as to the points which they deem essential, you allow judgment to go by default. May God bless you, my dear friend, and guide you rightly. You know

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127. Furness Collection. In the MS the last clause is struck through. 128. Forster to JPC, 26 November 1859. Furness Collection; see Ziegler 1985, p. 227.


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now, I fancy, all my opinions, and it will probably be better that for the present, at any event, we should not pursue this discussion.129 In the event Collier deferred to his friends, and Dyce’s only appearance in both forms of his rejoinder to Hamilton was in the unlikely role of defence witness for both Perkins and the H. S. letter. John’s use in these instances of old correspondence, no doubt now bitterly regretted by Dyce, can hardly have been any less welcome to the latter than the squabbling remarks that Bruce and Forster deplored. Meanwhile John bided his time, keeping out of the public press a er the flurry of exchanges in July, and indeed cutting no figure in London in late 1859.130 He worked on his Spenser and on the endless Trevelyan project at home, with excursions to Bodley; and if rumours of the widening Museum inquiry reached him, he may have drawn confidence from the testimony of Dr. Henry Wellesley, secure in his own hands and as yet unexploited. The impending marriage of Henrietta, his youngest daughter, to her cousin Charles Jones—uncle Joshua’s grandson—must have cheered him as well.131 But Collier in November cannot fully have anticipated the range of Hamilton’s targets beyond Perkins, and to make a viable reply in mid-February required quick work and further support. This time the support came from W. Hepworth Dixon, Madden’s ‘little conceited coxcomb’, who effectively dedicated the Athenaeum to Collier’s defence—and to a counterattack upon the Museum Inquisition itself. His own four-page leading review in the issue of 18 February (pp. 229–33) was followed by three pages from Collier himself, headed ‘The Imputed Shakspeare Forgeries’, and the two men clearly coordinated their remarks and divided between them the presentation of evidence and the summing-up for the defence. Collier (pp. 237–40) took a deliberately gentler approach, which seemed ‘manly and simple’ to Robinson, contrasted with Dixon’s ‘acute and contemptuous’ review (HCR Diary, 15 February 1860)— a time-honoured technique, permitting John to lavish patience, if not quite forgiveness, on his enemies, while Dixon showed them his fangs. John appealed

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129. 24 November 1859, FF/K MS 637. 130. Though still serving as salaried treasurer of the Camden Society, he attended none of the monthly meetings between August 1859 and October 1860, when he appeared in person to discuss problems with the second volume of the Trevelyan Papers. Nor does Robinson mention seeing him in town between 13 July 1859 (when he entertained Collier to dinner with eight others; HCR to JPC, 5 July 1859, Folger MS Y.d.6 [193]; and HCR Diary, 13 July) and 2 May 1860 (‘a friendly call’; Diary); and had Collier ever visited the British Museum in this period one must think that Madden would have mentioned it. 131. He told W. C. Trevelyan about their plans before Christmas, noting that ‘the affair will not ‘‘come off’’ until May or June’; JPC to WCT, 20 December 1859, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34; the wedding eventuated, with considerable ceremony, on 5 July 1860.



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to his readers on the grounds of his age (‘at the age to which I have arrived, no man can calculate upon having much time to spare’), his good character (‘I have always been a hardworking man . . . and how much I have worked gratuitously for friends and Societies I need not say’), and his domestic circumstances, which would never have allowed him the privacy to carry out the forgeries described by Hamilton: no one was more astonished at the charge than his own children, and ‘if my wife had lived’ she could have refuted it ‘in an hour’. Another ‘dear and dead friend of mine’—presumably Amyot—was invoked as witness to the correctness of Collier’s transcription of the Joan Alleyn letter: ‘were he fortunately now alive’ he would confirm that Shakespeare’s name had indeed been present in the letter when seen twenty years earlier. Ellesmere and Devonshire were likewise gone, but among the living Halliwell’s 1848 acceptance of the H. S. letter was instanced, though not his 1853 denunciation. And then Dyce, the surprise character witness: John not only noticed, for the third time in print, Dyce’s private comments about the ‘admirable’ Perkins emendations, but also quoted from another letter in which Dyce had declared that Joseph Nethercli ’s facsimile of the H. S. letter had ‘removed from my mind all doubts about the genuineness of the Letter’. Indeed, Collier was not satisfied with citing Dyce’s praise of the emendations once (‘He must pardon me for once more employing his very words, for . . . I cannot refuse myself the satisfaction of quoting them whenever an occasion fairly presents itself ’), but returned to it in the closing words of his article. The authorities of the British Museum had offered no opinion concerning the ‘positive and intrinsic value’ of the emendations, he said: ‘On this point, therefore, I may confidently refer them to the Rev. A. Dyce.’ With that, John introduced four new witnesses, by no means an unimpressive display at first sight. Having suggested that old Mr. Parry had been ‘confused’ by the Museum’s investigators, he printed Wellesley’s letter in full, crisply predicting that its evidence would ‘at once put an end to the discreditable insinuations . . . that I am the real author of the MS. notes in the Perkins Folio’. With the Bridgewater House documents, however, he took the path of discretion (‘they may be forgeries, but I do not believe they are so’), but nonetheless presented the opinion of Joseph Nethercli —offered ‘within the last few weeks’—that the H. S. letter ‘was a genuine document’.132 Even the present Lord Ellesmere was enlisted, for his decontextualized opinion that the handwriting in his predecessor’s First Folio was ‘quite different’ from that in the Perkins

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132. From Collier’s careful phrasing it is not clear whether Nethercli actually reconsulted the original in 1859–60, or merely looked at the facsimiles he had prepared for Collier in 1853. Nethercli himself wrote to the Athenaeum on 22 February to disassociate himself from his son’s work in Hamilton’s book, but he did not then, or ever, publicly confirm Collier’s account of his ‘expression of conviction’; 25 February, p. 269.


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Folio; and finally the Robert Lemons, father and son, of the State Paper Office. The challenged players’ petition, Collier maintained, was not his personal discovery, but ‘was found for me’ thirty-five years earlier, by Robert Lemon senior, ‘the father of a very able and learned public servant, now high in the office in which the discovery was made’. The implication (that to accuse the document was to accuse the Lemons) was of course specious, for if Collier had forged it and introduced it into the archives (as Hamilton and others suspected), whoever discovered it there hardly mattered. To all these slyly overinterpreted testimonials Madden and other close readers would soon address their attention, but for the moment the new evidence must have reassured Dixon at least. For Dixon professed faith in all but (perhaps) the Bridgewater House documents, and contempt for the quasi-official intimidation and ‘offence against good manners’ of the anti-Collier crew. He challenged their generalizations about orthography and usage, singling out the Brae-Ingleby test word ‘cheer’ (which in fact Hamilton had never mentioned) for particular refutation: Robert Lemon had informed John Bruce, who told Collier, who clearly told Dixon, that the word, confidently asserted to be ‘modern’, occurred no fewer than eight times—‘precisely in the sense in which it is used in ‘‘Coriolanus’’ ’—in the seventeenth-century diary of the Rev. Henry Teonge.133 Dixon ridiculed the insistence of the sceptics in dwelling upon Collier’s incomplete 1856 list of annotations, which, far from indicating wrongdoing on Collier’s part, implied the very opposite (for ‘would not a forger know what he had forged?’); and like Collier he published in full Wellesley’s statement, which ‘disperses and destroys forever the gross insinuations against Mr. Collier’s personal honour’. While his defence of the Bridgewater and Dulwich documents was no more than arbitrary (he regarded Collier as possibly ‘credulous’ about the former, and of the Dulwich dubia he mentioned only the Joan Alleyn letter, where ‘the idea of forgery . . . is inconceivable’),134 Dixon set great store by Lemon’s testimony on the players’ petition. He himself had written to Lemon at the State Paper Office, who replied on 14 February that the document—branded as a forgery by his colleagues, and now known to be historically impossible—was ‘well known to my father and myself, before Mr. Payne Collier began his researches in this Office’.135 Armed

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133. A naval chaplain from Warwickshire, his sea-diary was first published in 1825. Cf. Bruce to JPC, 13 February 1860, Furness Collection. 134. Between 18 and 25 February Dixon visited Dulwich and examined the Joan Alleyn letter for the first time, finding it so damaged that ‘the fragments which remain are incapable of yielding any decisive proof either way’ (Athenaeum, 25 February 1860, p. 269). On 28 February Madden claimed that the Rev. A. J. Carver, the librarian, told Hamilton and himself that when Dixon examined the Joan Alleyn letter he had ‘said that the lines printed by Collier could never have been [there], but added that it was hard to hang a man for a scrap of paper like that!’; Madden Diary. 135. Lemon never modified or withdrew this allegation, in public at least, and it remains one



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with that unambiguous statement, Dixon brought his review to a triumphant close: ‘Here is proof—official, incontrovertible proof—that one of the documents forged, as the Manuscript Department has it, by the same hand, could not by any earthly possibility have been fabricated by Mr. Collier. Ergo, none of the papers in the same hand could have been the work of Mr. Collier.’ Defence now gave way to counter-attack. Collier, for all his ‘gentler spirit’ in rebutting specific accusations, did not entirely spare his assailants: the ‘obscure hands’ of young Hamilton, to whom the case had been entrusted by his colleagues in the Manuscript Department, suggested to him ‘the corrosive couplet of the satirist’— Some creatures are so little and so light, We hardly know they live, until they bite and more delicate reflections were reserved for the man whom John thought, not unreasonably, to be at the bottom of it all.136 ‘From Sir Frederic Madden’ he wrote, ‘with whom I have been acquainted for more than thirty years, with whom I have o en corresponded, and with whom I have exchanged books, I looked for rather different treatment.’ But perhaps his own ‘trifling neglect’ of Madden’s first enquiry about Perkins had been blown up into ‘personal offence’, exacerbated by ‘the fact, which I was told he had once taken seriously, that I had not, in the outset, solicited his opinion as to the real date of the emendations’. Or, on an even more petty account, had Madden procured the loan of the volume only ‘when a noble and learned Lord [i.e., Campbell] did me the honour to address to me a small lucubration on the legal acquirements of our great dramatist’? Such evidence of ‘how small a reputation in an inferior department of literature is sufficient to secure the bitterest hostility’ reached its climax, John declared, at that moment. Apart from Maskelyne and his microscope, only Madden and his ‘mouthpiece’ Hamilton were named among Collier’s professed enemies, who besides ‘hunting in every direction, and searching in every hole and corner’ for evidence against him, ‘have been so charitable as to have assigned [the recently discovered pencillings] to me’: ‘I never saw them’, John solemnly repeated, ‘and they were never seen by anybody [including the late Duke of Devonshire and the lithographer Nethercli , who ‘made for me no fewer than nineteen fac-similes’] . . . until the Perkins Folio had found its way

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of the more puzzling loose ends in the whole saga. It simply cannot be true; but whether Lemon’s memory was at fault or his friendship for John led him to exaggerate or invent, we cannot even speculate. 136. As early as 4 August he had told Halliwell: ‘I know where and why [the attacks] originate, and I am prepared for them. Cat’s-paws [i.e., Hamilton] are sometimes very useful and needful. You know what a literary stalking-horse is, as well as a sporting one’; LOA 179/14.


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to the British Museum. There, and there only they originated’, he concluded, adding ominously, ‘I mean of course the discovery of them’. Here Collier terminated, for the time being, his counterthrust at the Keeper; but Dixon observed no such limits. ‘In the case of the Manuscript Department corps’, he remarked, ‘the colonel who gives the law to his subalterns is not hard to find’, for ‘Sir Frederic is the Caesar of this band’, and while he might boast a considerable reputation in his field and department, the memory of ‘certain purchases for the Manuscript Department’—a veiled reference to the Hillier fiasco—would cause us ‘most assuredly [to] hesitate to place him high above all his fellows. Europe may have many a worthier son than he’. So that, ‘having found out who are the assailants of Mr. Collier’, the question remained ‘why they are his assailants’—and Dixon answered in no uncertain terms, blaming the Museum itself for an ‘ancient grudge’ or ‘Vendetta’ against John, stemming from the 1848–49 Royal Commission controversy. ‘It has been no secret in literary society for the past dozen years, that a most violent feeling of hostility to Mr. Collier existed in Great Russell Street’, and while ‘the disputes [in 1848–49] were chiefly personal . . . the officers in possession held their ground against Mr. Collier, and against his powerful friends the late Duke of Devonshire and the late Lord Ellesmere’, especially when ‘these noblemen . . . wished to put Mr. Collier at the head of the Museum’. Dixon professed to withhold an opinion on the wisdom of such an appointment (‘the principle of putting a distinguished man of letters over the heads of officers trained to their work, may, on literary and moral grounds, be open to debate’), but he distinctly credited a rumour in which perhaps only Collier believed, and suggested, in so many words, that the present-day officers of the Museum (‘who are only mortal’) ‘may not be sorry to show that a gentleman who assailed their competency in years gone by . . . would have been no safe guardian of the national treasures’.

18 February–15 March The reaction at the Museum was instant. Madden as always professed astonishment at Collier’s duplicity (‘he does not scruple to write the grossest falsehoods . . . merely to deceive those who have no means of detecting the lies’), but though seemingly frustrated by the task still in progress (‘Mr C. is so thoroughly dishonest in all his reasonings, that it is a waste of time to pursue them further’) he summoned up strength to contradict what he could in a lengthy diary entry (18 February). Dixon’s idea that Devonshire and Ellesmere had hoped to install John as head of the Museum was ‘really too absurd’,137 and of course Madden

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137. Madden may not have been sure at first that Dixon had written the leading review, but when Staunton later alleged that ‘the scandalous article [was] a joint production . . . of Mr Bruce



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and Collier had been on the same side in the catalogue controversy. The suggestion that Madden had resented being excluded from the Perkins revelations was impertinent (‘Did he suppose that I was the man to indorse a forgery, merely because he had printed it!’), and the imputation that Parry had been misled when shown the Folio was an ‘infamous and dishonest attempt to throw a slur on myself and others in the Museum’. That Collier ‘would almost seem to suggest that the pencil marks originated in the Museum’ betrayed ‘how utterly lost [he is] to all feeling of truth and honour’. Madden’s rhetoric, as ever, seems to combine spontaneous rage with more calculated self-justifying obloquy—what response did he expect, a er all, from a ‘thorough villain’ whom he was bent on unmasking?—and were it not that his entire diary bristles with similar imprecations, against Halliwell, Panizzi, Simonides, and others, one might question the sincerity of his crusade.138 But he remained cool enough to observe that Collier had misapplied the testimony of Malone in one instance,139 and worked out three alternative explanations for Henry Wellesley’s jarring evidence. Beginning with the puzzle of how Wellesley, at Rodd’s shop, might have noticed ‘an abundance of manuscript notes in the margins’ when Collier (as he said) did not, and Rodd himself either missed them or considered them unworthy attention, Madden proposed that Wellesley had confused this Folio with some other; that if he had indeed seen it about 1849, it ‘could only have then contained the few MS. notes in a hand of the last century, which are really in it, and which Dr W.’s memory has confused with the account a erwards given by Mr C. of his copy’; or that it was already full of Collier’s forgeries, and by him ‘designedly . . . forwarded or introduced into Rodd’s hands’. The last speculation, which borders on the conspiratorially obsessive, ‘would make Mr C. blacker still’, Madden thought, although ‘the man who has not hesitated to introduce forged documents into the archives of Dulwich College and Lord Ellesmere, and into the State Paper Office, would hardly hesitate to take knavish means to assure his end, as to the Perkins folio’. What Madden seems not to have considered is that, in such a laborious scenario, Rodd might have noticed the marginalia and taken commercial advantage, leaving the forger unable to repossess his insinuation save at prohibitive cost. That what Wellesley saw was a lightly annotated book made subsequently famous by accretions was a far better guess, and remains so, although Wellesley never backed down or consented to interrogation. Madden

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and Mr Hemp-worth Dixon’, he noted that ‘Mr B. aerwards denied this’; Staunton to Madden, 23 February 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 159–60; and Madden Diary, 27 February 1860. 138. Madden was preoccupied with more than Collier and Perkins during this period, being even more distracted by the reckless affairs of his eldest son, Fritz, which reached a climax on 29 February. 139. He rightly contradicted Collier’s statement that the doctored 1609 assessment list at Dulwich had been ‘seen by Malone when I was only seven years old’ (Athenaeum, 18 February, p. 239).


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was soon reduced to a grumpy dismissal of the principal’s evidence: ‘not at all satisfactory’,140 like the awkward testimony of Robert Lemon, which he did not immediately address. For whatever reason, Collier’s two new witnesses were not to be shaken. Faced with re-formulating his credo on the extended Perkins debate, Madden set down seven points: (1) the pencil marks in the Perkins Folio were ‘recent’; (2) they lay ‘in some cases’ beneath the ink notes, which themselves were written ‘in a fictitious hand, in imitation of a hand of the 17th century’; (3) five documents at Bridgewater House, and one at the State Paper Office, were forgeries, executed in the same hand; (4) the notes in the Ellesmere/Bridgewater First Folio were in the same hand as the Perkins Folio notes; (5) the five ‘gross forgeries’ at Dulwich were in the same hand as well; (6) all these, and the pencil notes in the Perkins Folio, had been made by the same person; and (7) all were in the hand of John Payne Collier (Diary, 18 February 1860). No opinion could be less guarded, and it is very much to Madden’s credit that every one of his uncompromising charges now appears to be incontestable. But in February 1860 the Museum’s officers worried more about adverse publicity: E. A. Bond urged Madden to answer Collier, but the Keeper resisted, reflecting that Staunton, Dyce, Hunter, and Halliwell ‘have been a great deal too silent’. John Winter Jones claimed to have written to the Athenaeum ‘to deny any hostility on the part of the Museum towards Mr Collier’ (Madden Diary, 1 March), but if he did so his letter was never published, which seems odd. Hamilton too dra ed and re-dra ed a reply for The Times, but perhaps because a key part of his evidence was withdrawn it may never have been sent. Two versions of it survive, however, numbering among their points the observation that Collier, in citing the early views of Halliwell and Dyce, ‘has passed over altogether the matured judgement of those gentlemen’.141

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140. Madden wrote on 19 February to ask Wellesley to inspect the Folio at Currey’s office, and Wellesley immediately complied; Madden Diary, 23 February. 141. Mostyn Papers, bearing no resemblance to the short protest, dated 7 March, that Hamilton sent to the Athenaeum, objecting to being called ‘the ‘‘mouthpiece’’ of the officers of the British Museum’ (Athenaeum, 10 March). Dixon ridiculed Hamilton’s sensitivity, insisting that ‘we never used such a word . . . it is not in our style’, but Hamilton was referring to ‘Mr. Collier and your reviewer’, and the word was, of course, Collier’s. Writing for The Times, Hamilton may have counted upon a letter ‘which I have received from [Mr. Dyce], since my pamphlet issued from the press’ and which ‘I have Mr Dyce’s permission to print’, but this does not survive among Hamilton’s papers at Aberystwyth, and whatever text was once present is carefully excised from both his dras. Dyce himself would publish a statement in the Critic in mid-March, but for the moment he remained unwilling to speak out: when on 11 February the Critic had numbered him among the sceptics (for his remarks about the Joan Alleyn letter), Dyce wrote that ‘I have always avoided giving any opinion concerning the genuineness of the various Shakesperian documents published by Mr. Collier’; Critic, 18 February.



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Hamilton’s abortive letter to The Times was transcribed, and considerably shorn of its hyperbole, by a new player in the controversy, his Museum colleague William Sandys Wright Vaux. Vaux (1818–85), a member of the Department of Antiquities and (from January 1861) the first Keeper of Coins and Medals, had been among those who inspected the Perkins Folio while at the Museum—once ‘accidentally, before I had heard anything about it’, and ‘a second time . . . more closely for my own satisfaction’ 142—and he alone of the Museum staff put his post-Athenaeum thoughts into print, albeit pseudonymously. Writing as ‘Vindex’, he provided a column and a half for the openly partisan Critic on 25 February, principally in vindication of the Museum personnel. Dixon had made the error of lumping T. J. Arnold in with the ‘young gentlemen’ at the Museum; he had ‘trump[ed] up a cock-and-bull story’ about Collier’s prospects there, and the supposed hostility of the then-younger staff (‘an accusation . . . as false as it is childish’); and his complaint that the Folio had been made difficult of access to Collier and his friends could be contradicted by John Bruce ‘and the redoubtable Mr. Hepworth Dixon himself ’. Going on to the new evidence, Vaux called Wellesley’s note ‘hazy and unsatisfactory, and descriptive rather of what he learnt subsequently (when the folio had become famous) than of what he actually recollects’—an arbitrary imputation which may owe something to Madden—and reminded readers that Robert Lemon was ‘well known as one of Mr. Collier’s thick-and-thin supporters’. Collier himself, ‘by his own letter, and his friend’s defence, is in far worse plight now than he was a week ago’, and ought to realize that his case is ‘far too serious for banter, or for appeals ad misericordiam’; his recourse to ridiculing Hamilton’s obscurity was ‘wholly beside the question’, and ‘if he has nought better to urge than such puerilities, he had better resign the pen, even to his indignant supporters’. As an apologist for his colleagues Vaux scored a few points, but his countercounterattack was no more persuasively documented than what he disputed, and hardly free of the abuse he censured in Dixon’s review. He described himself, curiously, as ‘a by-stander, who has not been an idle or unintelligent lookeron’, and the Critic compounded the mystification by calling him ‘a gentleman whose name stands so high in the world of letters, that we regret he has not thought it right to make it public’.143 Could the author of Nineveh and

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142. Vaux to W. H. Dixon, undated but probably March 1860, FF MS 410. 143. The secrecy may have soon broken down (Madden, for one, knew Vaux was the author by 17 March); but Dixon, who was deliberately unnamed by ‘Vindex’ as ‘the writer of the [Athenaeum] article’, appears to have been on civil terms with his antagonist: at some stage—before or aer 25 February is unclear—he asked Vaux to supply his ‘honest impressions on the Shakespere controversy’, which Vaux did in detail, in an undated letter (FF MS 410). He indicated that he himself had seen the pencillings ‘distinctly’, and ‘without any glass’, declared his certainty ‘that


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Persepolis (1850), one Handbook to the antiquities in the British Museum (1851), and various numismatic articles be candidly so described? Whatever the intent, immediately following his remarks the Critic formally examined Collier’s Athenaeum reply and Dixon’s review, offering the second of what became a three-part commentary on ‘the most important literary question of the day’.144 Among the novel observations were that until ‘a very recent period’ Collier and Madden were known to share a ‘friendly intercourse’, belying the idea of any long-standing rancour; that if, as Collier clearly implied, the pencillings ‘have been introduced in the British Museum . . . for the sake of ruining [him]—can he tell us how they got the pencil under the writing?’; and that Dixon’s triumphant refutation of ‘cheer’ as a test word was irrelevant, for ‘there is not one word about ‘‘cheer’’ in Mr. Hamilton’s volume. The criticism . . . was started by Dr. Ingleby’, and ‘Mr. Hamilton has nothing to do with it’. The Critic was well up on Dyce’s and Halliwell’s published opinions, and made mincemeat of Collier’s ‘unwarrantable use’ of their names, but professed puzzlement over his dark hint about purchases for the Museum made by Madden.145 About Wellesley’s evidence (besides reminding readers of his advanced age) the reviewer made another shrewd point: Collier in 1852 (‘when the circumstances of the purchase were fresh in his memory’) had declared that on first finding the Perkins Folio at Rodd’s shop he ‘paid money for it’ and ‘took it home’, while Wellesley recalled that when he saw it, Rodd had ‘put it by’ for his client. This slight inconsistency Collier resolved only by tinkering with his story, eight years a er the fact: John now wrote that he had ‘le the volume to be sent home’, which, as the Critic observed, ‘is an account of the transaction that very conveniently fits the terms of Dr. Wellesley’s letter’. Such a familiarity with the evidence and so sharp an eye for detail suggest more than a working journalist’s serendipity, and what the Critic commanded,

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the inken words in some instances are . . . written over the pencil ones & that the pencil words so written over, are as modern in every respect, as those which remain . . . on the side of the lines’, and proposed a ‘jury of Palaeographers’ to examine all the suspect material, to include both Lemon and E. A. Bond, ‘who so far as I know has expressed no opinion on these questions’. The last assertion may be disingenuous, if not deliberately misleading, given Vaux’s close contact with Hamilton. 144. The Critic writer was probably James Lowe himself, although he was almost certainly supplied with new evidence by Hamilton or his Museum colleagues. The first instalment (11 February) is essentially a summary of Hamilton’s indictment, which ‘as members of the grand jury [of English scholars], we are bound to say that we find . . . a true one’. The second and third (25 February and 3 March) take up Collier’s and Dixon’s replies, reprising some of the Inquiry’s material. 145. ‘The only purchase by Sir F. Madden that we ever heard impugned was that of the ‘‘Florio’’, with the supposed autograph of Shakespeare’, which ‘is a moot point to this day’. Collier may have been spurred by this challenge to spell out his charge in his expanded Reply.



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no doubt, was the entire evidence arsenal of the Museum Inquisition itself, from which the reviewer (or editor) selected his weapons. The point about Wellesley’s noticing, and Collier’s and Rodd’s being seemingly blind to, ‘thousands of notes and emendations’ may owe something to Madden, and in the third instalment (3 March) a familiarity with the staff of the State Paper Office required some level of inside knowledge.146 Robert Lemon senior, we are told, had been active in the Society of Antiquaries in the late 1820s, and ‘was in the habit of communicating to that learned body such important discoveries as his position in the State Paper Office enabled him to make’: if the players’ petition had indeed been ‘well known’ to himself and his son before 1829, why had it never been publicized—by the Lemons, or by Madden, or Amyot, or Sir Henry Ellis, when ‘the attention of the society was very much taken up with Shakespeare and Shakespearian documents’? Would the Lemons, father and son, have ‘concealed it for years, in order to show it to Mr. Collier, whenever he should come to the office’? The Critic thought this incredible, but without accusing the younger Lemon of perjury (‘We impugn not his honour, but we doubt his memory’), or stooping to remark on his personal friendship with Collier, its reviewer determined that ‘his statement cannot be in accordance with the facts’. The reasoning to support this harsh assertion is not unpersuasive. Finally, the Critic levelled its aim at the Joan Alleyn letter, reproducing F. G. Nethercli ’s facsimile,147 and summarizing Hamilton’s demonstration (pp. 86– 93) that ‘Mr. Collier’s passage [i.e., ‘Mr Shakspere of the Globe’, but perhaps involving other phrases as well] never was in the letter at all’. This key fabrication (not a forgery, although, as Hamilton wrote, Dulwich was ‘not without its forgeries’ too) seemed to the Critic ‘the clearest and most indisputable evidence’ of Collier’s guilt, of such a ‘plain and straightforward character that nothing can gainsay it’—although the charge against him was reduced to his having ‘garbled its text, by introducing a passage which never could have belonged to it’. Dixon’s

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146. The reviewer knew that Hans Claude Hamilton was ‘the brother of that ‘‘obscure’’ Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton’, and that Charles Lechmere had been senior Assistant Keeper under Robert Lemon’s father, and might confirm or refute Lemon’s testimony if he chose. 147. Something of a lithographic family tiff between Collier’s friend Joseph Nethercli and his son Frederick had already occurred in the press. On 25 February the former told the Athenaeum that he was not, as had been stated, Hamilton’s facsimilist: it was ‘my son, F. G. Nethercli, who is separated from me and in business alone’, adding that ‘under no circumstances would I have attempted to show pencil-marks over or under any ink writing by any mode of printing’. On 3 March the younger Nethercli addressed the Critic, complaining that the Athenaeum had ‘impugned the correctness of my fac-simile’ and refused to print his own letter in reply; he went on to explain his process, whose results, he said, ‘have astonished many literary gentlemen, by their faithfulness to the original’. Father and son oen appeared in court as expert witnesses opposing each other; see The Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins, Baron Brampton, ed. Richard Harris (1904), ii:15–17.


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plea, that ‘the fragments that remain are incapable of yielding any decisive proof either way’, was rejected as ‘simply untrue’, and, sic probo, Collier himself was responsible for a fraud.148 Wherever the to-and-fro arguments about Perkins might lead, the Critic regarded this charge as proven. Renewing its perhaps disingenuous appeal to Collier himself, if he were innocent, to ‘address himself to the real question at issue, by lending his aid to discover who was the ‘‘Old Corrector’’, and whose is the guilty hand . . . traceable throughout the whole series of documents’, the Critic concluded with a bleak offer of limited clemency: ‘That the case of the Dulwich letter has been brought to [Collier’s] own door is too painfully apparent; but it is possible that he may satisfy the world that this has been his only offence’. Elsewhere, commentary on ‘the most important literary question of the day’ had been scattered, but rarely to John’s advantage. The Literary Gazette noticed Hamilton’s Inquiry on the same day as the Athenaeum, in five columns that simply reported and credited its disclosures (sometimes echoing its very words), but stood away from the subsequent furore. The Spectator on 25 February and 3 March noted the ‘weakness, shi iness, irrelevancy, and deliberate shirking of the evidence’ in Collier’s reply and Dixon’s review: ‘Mr. Collier has at last broken his self-imposed rule of silence; he has appealed to the public, and invoked their decision; we are therefore free to declare our conviction that the reply he has published to Mr. Hamilton’s book is, with [certain] exceptions’—Lemon’s testimony struck the Spectator as admissible—‘entirely nugatory. Has he anything better in reserve?’ Personal responses are harder to assess, depending for us on who saw fit to record or preserve them. John received a ‘cheering and approving note’ from W. C. Trevelyan; another ‘note of support’ from a fellow editor, the Rev. Richard Hooper of Reading; and encouragement from Tycho Mommsen, mentioning ‘the miserable attacks that have last summer been levelled against you’.149 Thoms too remained loyal, and continued to insist in late 1863 that his friend had ‘nothing to do’ with the Perkins Folio forgeries.150 Henry Crabb Robinson (Diary, 19 April 1860) considered Collier’s defence ‘manly and simple’, and

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148. Dixon’s rambling and somewhat pointless postscript to his review, aer visiting Dulwich (Athenaeum, 25 February), in which he presented ‘collateral evidence disgracefully suppressed by the Manuscript Department’, was justly dismissed, and the evidence ab silentio from Malone was evinced—indication again of how deep the investigation tapped by the Critic had gone. 149. JPC to WCT, 23 February 1860, Trevelyan Papers, WCT 34; Hooper to JPC, 3 March 1860, FF MS 757; and JPC’s reply, 4 March, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (130); and Mommsen to JPC, 11 March, FF/K MS 641. 150. Madden Diary, 9 December 1863; Ingleby made the same point about Thoms’s loyalty in a letter to Hamilton, 18 February 1860, Mostyn Papers.



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thought it would ‘propitiate many’, adding that ‘I see no fault in any part of his reasonings, though some faults may have escaped me’. Madden, on the other hand, sampled opinion at the Athenaeum Club on 20 February, but of the six members he canvassed—T. D. Hardy, Herman Merivale, Henry Foss, the antiquary Charles Edward Long, one Mr. Young, and Henry Hart Milman, Dean of St. Paul’s—he noted only what the last said: ‘that the article in the Athenaeum would injure Mr Collier immensely’, and ‘that although to some it might seem difficult to suppose Mr Collier to have had anything to do with the Shakspere notes . . . it would be a far greater difficulty to find another person who could have written them’. And Hamilton, writing to Madden from Cambridge on 14 March, reported that ‘Clarke’ 151 and the palaeographer H. R. Luard ‘consider the matter [i.e., Collier’s guilt] as concluded’, and that if the Dulwich papers were to be laid before a committee of inquiry, Luard would take part ‘with the greatest of readiness’.152 Henrietta Halliwell, calling with James on their old friend T. J. Pettigrew, found him ‘full of Hamilton’s book’, and wrote that ‘everybody is talking about the forgeries & say that Collier must answer now’. A week later, following the Athenaeum response, Halliwell and Dyce met and ‘conversed . . . about Shakespeare forgeries’: Dyce’s reactions are, alas, unrecorded, but ‘James does not think he favors Collier’.153 On 24 February Halliwell examined the Perkins Folio for the first time, at Currey’s office, and ‘returned to dinner very glad he has seen [it]’;154 yet as Thomas Wright informed Madden on 12 March, ‘he has the greatest unwillingness to come forward at all in the matter’.155 On or about the ides of March, however, all the debate, gossip, and crossbiting would halt for a new—or refreshed—statement in evidence. John had worked up his eight-column Athenaeum response (‘necessarily written on the spur of the moment’, he claimed, although parts of it had been gestating for months) into a seventy-page pamphlet roughly four times its word-length. Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Reply to Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton’s ‘‘Inquiry’’ into the Imputed Shakespeare Forgeries, bearing the imprint of Collier’s new publishers, Bell and Daldy, was in the hands of an eager if numerically select public by the sixteenth of the month. It was to embody Collier’s last published words—apart

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151. Very likely William George Clark (1821–78), projector and principal editor of the Cambridge Shakespeare of 1863–66. 152. Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 192–93. 153. Henrietta Halliwell diary, 13 and 20 February 1860; quoted in Spevack 1999, p. 122–23. 154. Ibid., p. 123. 155. Wright to Madden, 12 March 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fol. 178. Halliwell confirmed this reluctance in a letter to Hamilton ten weeks later: ‘I am most anxious not to be involved in any way in the controversy’, he wrote, ‘unless I could assist in terminating it’. But ‘the plan I was about to suggest’—now unknown—he believed ‘on reflection . . . would [not] succeed’; 29 May 1860, Mostyn Papers.


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from a few repetitions—on the Perkins affair and the extended forgery charges against him, and to perpetuate the final form of his narrative and defence. The scrutiny it has undergone since then rivals that accorded some textual aspects of Shakespeare himself. Explaining his aim as to meet ‘the charges against me [which] have been printed in so imposing a shape’ with ‘something like a corresponding form of permanence and prominence’, so that ‘one publication may accompany the other, and that the bane and the antidote may be taken together’, Collier pursued the individual indictments as never before—and never again. ‘That I am myself the author of the pen and pencil emendations in the Perkins folio’ was the real burden of the Inquiry, ‘got up with such elaborate pomp and circumstance by the Manuscript Department of the British Museum, of which Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton is [again!] the mouthpiece’; Hamilton’s ‘supplemental and subsidiary imputations, all of them trumped up with the view to giving some plausibility’ to the main charge, he would answer as well, but ‘I really have not patience, and, well as I can usually command my feelings, I fear not temper, to enter into detail’ (Reply, p. 34). As to Perkins and provenance, Parry’s considered recollections were simply contradicted (‘he spoke to the best of his memory, but his memory was bad’), and John repeated the charge that Madden and Hamilton had ‘confused’ him, and ‘cajoled him out of his own conviction’. But while he remained ‘far from relinquishing’ Parry’s old, and now withdrawn, evidence about his own Folio, his uncle Gray, U on Court, and the Catholic Perkins family, Collier relied more heavily on Dr. Wellesley’s brief statement. The principal’s view of the Folio with its ‘abundance of manuscript notes’ at Rodd’s shop ‘some years ago’ was now firmly pinned down to 1849, ‘for Rodd died in that year’;156 and the nagging contradiction of ‘took home’, ‘put by’, and ‘had sent home’ was resolved anew by a re-recollection: John’s habit in the late 1840s was to visit Rodd en route from Kensington to the City, and to pick up his reserved purchases on the way home; hence Wellesley’s visit must have occurred, serendipitously, during that one daytime interim. All this had been ‘an unworthy cavil’, and ‘my enemies must be hard pressed to rely on such a paltry quibble as this . . . as a reason for doubting the veracity of my statement’, although some might reply that a twice-revised minor detail, critical to reconciling two narratives, scarcely won trust. Wellesley’s success in perceiving marginalia where Rodd and Collier had not, incidentally, came because ‘he examined [the Folio] more than Rodd and I

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156. On 19 March 1860, however, the bookseller Henry Foss reported to Madden that Wellesley ‘had said to him, he was of opinion that the volume he saw at Rodd’s with MS. notes, was seen by him long before the time (March 1849) that Mr Collier states he bought the copy of ‘‘Tho. Perkins’’ ’; Madden Diary.



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had done’—nothing Wellesley had claimed—and ‘perhaps by a better light’, as ‘the front shop, where the parcel had been opened by Rodd, was dark from the books in the window, but the back shop was lighted by a large sky-light’ (Reply, pp. 8–9). Such fine-tuning continued. Collier could no longer dismiss the evidence of the pencillings, and eight pages of new and sometimes ingenious rationalizations address Hamilton’s findings (pp. 19–27). Perhaps a er all, as Grant White had suggested, the Old Corrector occasionally used pencil and even inked over his first thoughts 157—the ‘bold modern character’ of the pencil was not indisputable (‘for my own part I do not perceive [it]’), and may even have derived from ‘the unconscious lithographer who, under such watchful instructions, made the single fac-simile with which we are favoured’. And were all the perceived declivities in the paper surface indicative of old handwriting erased? Might they not rather signal the lithographer’s own hard pencil or ‘dry pen’, employed in the course of reconstructing the script from the ‘specks and atoms’ found there? Such a technique would leave ‘some suspicious indentation on the so paper of the old book’, Collier reasoned, and in the process ‘some atoms of new plumbago may have found their way to the paper . . . and have been, on all hands, innocently mistaken for old plumbago’. Although ‘I certainly do not mean that this unworthy trick has been played’—that is, deliberately connecting the available dots into incriminating letters and words—‘what I mean to say is, that if such specks and spots of plumbago be made, there is no word in our language to which, with the smallest ingenuity, they may not be adapted’ (pp. 21–22). Thus Collier (who elsewhere denied ‘pretensions to science of any kind’) countered the somewhat woolly forensics of the investigators with pseudoscience of his own. What was more, he argued, Maskelyne’s experiments might themselves have corrupted the evidence, for ‘having tested the ink by his tongue . . . a portion of the writing may have been thus removed, which was valuable as an emendation, or with reference even to the question of authenticity’.158 This image proved understandably irresistible to John (‘how many pages or parts of

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157. This hypothesis might well have been raised earlier, at least regarding the Ellesmere First Folio annotations, since old pencillings ‘strengthened’ in ink by their scribblers are hardly uncommon. Collier noted that this oen occurred with his own annotations, for ‘I have . . . sometimes resorted in the first instance to pencil, and when next I had a pen and ink at hand, I have written in ink over my own pencillings. Such a course is surely not unnatural, and therefore, I apprehend, not unusual.’ But ‘that I did so in the case of the Perkins folio I utterly and absolutely deny’ (p. 20). 158. Reply, pp. 20–21. Maskelyne’s letter to The Times did indeed describe his tasting the ink and observing its solubility—apparently, as John alleged, before Devonshire was consulted—but the tests through which ‘the suspicion previously entertained regarding the ink were confirmed’ took place aer Devonshire’s visit and permission, and presumably were more dignified.


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pages may have been licked over, and licked out, by the tongues of the officers and under-officers of the Manuscript Department, it is impossible for me now to ascertain’), and later he developed it into a comic indictment: ‘Mr. Maskelyne and Mr. Hamilton licked over the Perkins folio ad libitum, and were delighted to find that they could manage to get off some of the supposed colouring matter. They do not tell us how much of the so surface of the old paper they destroyed in this process’ (p. 56). The principal Museum allegation about pencil and ink, however—that some of the modern pencil underlay the ‘old’ ink—was not to be reasoned nor blustered away, and John simply ignored it. ‘I am tired of this subject of pencillings’, he wrote, calling Maskelyne ‘mysteriously great’ on the question of which substance overlaid which, a consideration ‘too paltry and puerile for a man of Mr. Maskelyne’s scientific attainments’. Instead, with a dazzling leap of false logic, he fastened upon the report that ‘in several places the pencil stops abruptly at the ink’, demanding: ‘Is this not decisive? Why does it ‘‘stop abruptly at the ink’’, but because the ink had been previously written, and the person who made the pencil-mark went no farther than the ink would allow him? . . . If, as [Maskelyne] tells us, the pencil sometimes stops at the ink, there is an end of the question, as far as every word so circumstanced is concerned’ (p. 27). Which of course is an arguable point at the ‘several places’ involved, but in no way relevant elsewhere. Collier here seemed to be bracing himself for the inevitable judgement that the pencillings he disputed were indeed present, abundant and modern, and more than eked-out ‘specks and atoms’ or accidents of mishandling; and he had readied his last line of defence—the alternative scenario touched on in February. Toward this he repeated what he had so o en said, that he himself had never noticed any of the incriminating pencil in 1852–53, nor had the viewers at the Shakespeare Society and the Society of Antiquaries, nor his facsimilist Joseph Nethercli (who ‘assures me, in a letter now before me, that he and his assistants never once discovered a pencil-mark from the first page to the last’), nor therea er the sixth Duke of Devonshire; Collier ‘never yet heard of an individual who saw pencil-marks, until a er the volume had been deposited in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum’, and he instanced a new witness, ‘a very intimate and most intelligent Shakespearian friend in my own neighbourhood’, who had once borrowed the book for a week, and ‘examined every page of it [and] never saw a single pencil mark’. This unnamed neighbour (who incidentally ‘doubted many of the [emendations] as a matter of criticism’, hence was no blind enthusiast) had indignantly composed a remonstrance to Hamilton and his associates, which Collier now professed to extract, as a reconstruction of events less ‘charitable’ than his own: ‘Gentlemen of the Manuscript Department,



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who impute fraud and forgery to Mr. Collier, what could you reply to any one who declared his suspicion, that, to serve your turn, you had fabricated the pencillings on the side of the old corrector’s notes and emendations?’, and so forth (p. 25). This ‘I [myself ] do not impute’, John declared, but lest anyone should suppose ‘that such and such a word or letter in Mr. Hamilton’s lithograph is not unlike my hand, I can only say that for the last fi y years my handwriting must have been familiar to many in the British Museum; and that if the likeness have been more than accidental, the fact has an origin not much to the credit of our national establishment’. Furthermore, ‘I never saw Mr. Hamilton’s writing, but he must, from his position, o en have seen mine’, John reiterated, adding menacingly (but incomprehensibly, if he had never seen Hamilton’s script) that ‘I will venture to say, that his lithograph of supposed pencil-words is quite as like his hand as mine’ (pp. 24–25). One last suggestion of Museum chicanery concerned the watermarked eighteenth-century pastedown, which Hamilton had described in July but le unmentioned in February. Collier seized upon that omission, and mistakenly identified its subject as a flyleaf, which had been ‘abstracted from the book’ while in Madden’s keeping, for ‘when it came [back] from the Manuscript Department, no fly-leaf was found in it’. He speculated, ingeniously, that the investigators might have misread the royal initials ‘G. R.’ as ‘C. R.’, indicating that the binding was from the time of Charles I or Charles II a er all, and thus conspired to remove and suppress the flyleaf.159 And one unrelated but characteristic mystification deserves notice: a passage from Hamlet (iii.2.61–62, ‘And crooke the pregnant Hindges of the knee, / Where thri may follow faining’) had been illustrated by Hamilton, with ‘begging?’ pencilled beside it. Without mentioning the question-mark, Collier pointed out (pp. 22–23) that ‘there is actually no corresponding emendation of the old printed copy, so that ‘‘begging’’ must have been written in the margin, not as a suggestion for a change of language, but merely as an explanation, and a bad explanation too, if it refer to ‘‘pregnant’’ in the poet’s text. No man who pretends to understand Shakespeare would think of

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159. Reply, p. 28. Madden pointed out Collier’s error: ‘Mr. Hamilton, in his letter to The Times on the 1st of August last, spoke of the ‘‘watermark of the leaves pasted inside the covers.’’ Mr. Collier in his ‘‘reply,’’ chooses to convert these leaves into a ‘‘fly-leaf,’’ and having thus made a foolish blunder, concludes by charging the manuscript department with the crime of having abstracted a leaf which in reality had no existence!’ (The Times, 22 March 1860). It remains unclear whether Collier at any time re-inspected the Perkins Folio aer it went to Currey’s office, i.e., aer the intentional or accidental tampering he attributed to the Museum investigators had (supposedly) occurred. Except for this item of evidence—misconstrued, as it happens—nothing in his Reply, nor in his correspondence, suggests renewed personal examination, and even the flyleaf detail may derive from a friendly reporter such as Durrant Cooper. His adversaries no doubt would have made much of his incuriosity, had they suspected it.


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placing ‘‘begging’’ in the margin as the true sense of ‘‘pregnant.’’ ’ But of course ‘begging’ is merely a suggested emendation of ‘pregnant’, an adjective that has puzzled some commentators,160 and indeed, though clearly abandoned, has a kind of Theobaldian rationale to it. By mistranscribing and misrepresenting the point of the one pencilled word, and dismissing it as ‘a bad explanation’, Collier was able to compound doubt about the pencilled marginalia in general: ‘supposing . . . that such a word as ‘‘begging’’ . . . were ever so plain in the Perkins folio, what is gained by it?’, and so on. Of the supplementary charges that Collier reluctantly addressed, he owned that the weakest part of his case concerned the Bridgewater House documents, but only because ‘nobody was with me at the precise moment [of my discovery], although the noble owner of the papers had been in the room only a few minutes before’ (p. 34). Indeed ‘they may be ‘‘forgeries’’ ’, he conceded, perhaps thinking one day to lighten his cargo, but ‘I never suspected the papers to be anything but what they purported to be’, and he considerably amplified his earlier accounts of finding and publishing them. The usual suspect, George Steevens, had supposedly frequented Bridgewater House,161 but ‘I do not believe he had any more hand in the ‘‘forgeries’’ than the Rev. H. J. Todd’, the former librarian, who had supposedly le a letter-cover addressed to himself as a bookmark among the suspect leaves. A typical misdirection ensued, Collier announcing a hithertounmentioned discovery (a summary of the claims of the players and proprietors of the Blackfriars Theatre in November 1633, with a memorandum by Sir George Buc subjoined), which ‘subsequently turned up in the same collection’, and which ‘Lord Ellesmere insisted that I should keep . . . as it was no necessary part of the other documents’ (p. 39). John argued that the text of this novelty ‘rendered it most probable that the account of the claims of the Players . . . on their proposed removal’—that is, the certificate from the Justices of the Peace concerning the Blackfriars playhouse, first printed in New Facts (pp. 27–29)— was authentic, and by extension, perhaps, authenticity rubbed off on the other manuscripts. Hamilton had in fact never questioned the 1633 certificate, which was not among the Bridgewater House papers at all, but in Collier’s own hands in 1835;162 but that hardly matters, as Collier was only defending what had not been impugned.

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160. Notably Thomas Keightly, who proposed to read ‘pliant, or some such word’; New Variorum Hamlet (1877), i:232. 161. Collier ‘at that time . . . had never heard the fact, since mentioned [by Hunter, but later privately withdrawn], that Steevens had formerly been admitted into the rooms’; but there is no evidence for this ‘fact’, which resulted from Hunter’s faulty memory of a note in Egerton Brydges’s Censura Literaria, (1808), vi:391–93. 162. See QD A22.9; it later passed to Frederic Ouvry and J. O. Halliwell. Ingleby indeed would



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Needless to say the early, glowing endorsements of Dyce (1844) and Halliwell (1848) were recited in full (pp. 41–43), even if Halliwell had ‘seen ground to alter his decision’ and Dyce had in 1857 ‘reiterated the suspicions some have expressed’: for ‘it was then, be it remembered, that he was actually engaged on an edition of Shakespeare intended to rival mine; and it was then that he, for the first time, threw all sorts of discredit on my discoveries’. Henry Hallam (d. 1859) had told John at a dinner party that he credited the Bridgewater House manuscripts,163 and a more unlikely advocate was summoned in John Wilson Croker (d. 1857), who reportedly had had the documents ‘tested’, and on two occasions expressed himself ‘perfectly satisfied’ and ‘now a believer’.164 Collier took a perhaps greater risk in extracting a (genuine) letter of the new Earl of Ellesmere, contradicting Hamilton and Madden on the uniformity of the annotating hand in his 1623 Shakespeare and the Perkins Folio. ‘There is no pretence, whatever’, Collier quoted, no doubt supplying the emphasis, ‘for saying that the emendations in the Perkins Folio are in the same handwriting as those in my first folio: on the contrary, except as they are (or profess to be) of the same period, they are quite different’. The letter itself does not survive, but Ellesmere later confirmed that he had sent to Collier ‘a few remarks . . . telling him he might make what use he pleased of them’; however, these observations also included one, Ellesmere noted, ‘to the effect that there certainly were pencil marks. It would have been wiser, in my opinion, as well as more candid, if Mr Collier had quoted this also.’ 165 The Dulwich College discoveries, having been ‘most unfairly thrown into the scale . . . with the rest of Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton’s accumulation of trash and trumpery’, also called for a scapegoat, and Edmond Malone supplied that role to perfection. Although John offered his usual charitable construction (‘if

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question it later, under a careless misapprehension, but the certificate is (or was: we cannot now locate it) certainly genuine: see Chambers and Greg 1911, p. 386; and Bentley, vi:27 ff. The newly described ‘memorandum’, however (Folger MS X.d.459 [1]), is at least partly a forgery. The sevenline estimate of the value of the playhouse (£6,166 13s. 4d.) may or may not be genuine, but the comment below (‘Which is more then it is woorth by 2000li deleted 1500li’), signed ‘G Buc’, is manifestly a fake: as Chambers and Greg pointed out, in 1633 Sir George Buc had been dead for ten years. 163. Hallam also ‘as I always understood . . . was a maintainer of the excellence (and of their genuineness from their excellence) of the notes and emendations in the Perkins folio’ (p. 44n.). 164. If Croker’s later remarks were expressed in a letter, as Collier implied (p. 44), it cannot now be found, either in the form Collier received or among Croker’s retained copies at the William L. Clements Library. 165. Reply, p. 45; Ellesmere to Ingleby, 9 January 1861, Folger MS C.a.14 (28). Ellesmere had obtained permission from Devonshire to borrow the Perkins Folio ‘shortly aer [it] had been put into the custody of the solicitor of the Duke of Devonshire . . . for the purpose of comparing it with my folio’.


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any of the documents returned to Dulwich College a er Malone’s death appear to have been tampered with, I most distinctly acquit him of any such misconduct’), he cheerfully detailed Malone’s long-term borrowings, his mutilation of documents, and his ‘success in persuading unsuspecting people [to exchange books worth] hundreds of pounds, for others not worth as many shillings’— at which ‘he must have chuckled amazingly’. And while ‘I feel sure that he was a man of honour and principle . . . it must be admitted that Malone, with all the documents in his private room for years, had infinitely the advantage over me, as far as the commission of fraud and forgery is concerned’, Collier himself having never been ‘anywhere but in a public library-room [at Dulwich College], always open’ (p. 54). Yet beyond those alternative hints John could only repeat his claim that the words ‘Mr. Shakespeare of the globe’ were visible in 1841 (the rest of Hamilton’s textual discreditations he dismissed simply as unimportant), while belittling the investigation itself as pointless in literary terms. ‘Whether [the words] did or did not [occur] is not of the smallest interest’, he now argued with infuriating irrelevance, since ‘there were two, if not three, other Shakespeares ‘‘of the Globe’’ Theatre, then resident in Southwark’, and hence the only motive in inventing the phrase must needs be ‘mere love of deception’. Summing up Hamilton’s charge as ‘that . . . I imagined the part of the letter in which the name of Shakespeare occurs’ (which is true enough), ‘and corrupted the immediately adjoining portions for the purpose of giving my invention support’ (which was never charged, nor hinted at, by Hamilton or anyone else), Collier devoted two and a half pages to his own efforts to preserve the decayed leaf. Those efforts in fact consisted only of folding it into a new paper wrapper;166 but the gesture, John argued, displayed far-reaching candour: ‘If, indeed, I had so misrepresented the contents of the crumbling relic, what was to prevent my rubbing away a little more of the old paper, and who then would have been able to detect the trick I had played?’ 167 166. A manuscript note on the wrapper, calling attention to the importance of the document and its perilous condition, was attributed by Dixon to Collier as evidence of his innocence (Athenaeum, 25 February 1860, p. 269): ‘Would any man in his senses sedulously guard from harm a document which he had consciously misread? Would any rogue guilty of foisting a paragraph into a public paper take pains to call instant and incessant attention to the very document which would witness to his crime? No one out of Bedlam.’ Responding to that prompt, John recollected that ‘either I or my friend [Thomas Amyot] wrote [the note]’, but it eventually emerged that the annotator had been Halliwell, who according to Ingleby ‘in late 1872 . . . confessed to me that he did write the endorsement on the cover of Mrs Alleyn’s letter’; Ingleby’s note on Folger MS C.a.14 (14), a letter of 3 June 1860 from Madden discussing the problem of identifying the writer. 167. Collier seems not to have worked out that a greater lacuna, especially if examined shortly aer his ‘transcript’ was made, would hardly support the extended text he recorded: the hypothetical argument is akin to ‘why did I not destroy the Perkins Folio and claim the emendations as my own’, and the answer is that their acceptance as genuine depended upon some kind of physical evidence, however vulnerable to examination that might one day prove.



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Hamilton’s devastating revelation that the entire ‘John Marston’ letter had been written in ink over pencil tracing was met by Collier, perhaps shrewdly, with serene silence, and the summary condemnation of the ‘Sweet Nedde’ acting challenge with a rare, but perhaps canny, willingness to bargain: whereas Halliwell in 1848 had collated it with the original, and did not ‘drop the remotest hint that he thought it a forgery . . . it now seems to me that the reduplication of consonants, and other points of orthography in it, might possibly raise suspicion’ (p. 54). Collier may here have been preparing to concede that some forgeries had been introduced into the Dulwich archives—doubtless by Malone— without compromising all his discoveries. Against Hamilton’s final exposure, however, the spurious list of players subjoined to a genuine document, he stood firm, producing a new forgery/fabrication to sustain it: a transcript of the same list, on the back of a letter-front addressed to Malone, which ostensibly proved that the Dulwich list had been seen by Malone ‘very many years before I was at Dulwich’. This feeble imposture, inserted in Malone’s copy of his own 1796 Inquiry, is not even in the mock-hand of Malone, but simply in Collier’s recognizable, if slightly disguised, autograph.168 Finally, to the ‘very grave charge, that I was guilty of manufacturing a State paper’, the evidence of Robert Lemon the younger was all that Collier submitted, while offering his own memories in support of it. Lemon senior ‘undoubtedly did bring the Players’ Petition under my notice’, he ‘kindly procured it to be copied for me’ on the spot, and while Collier employed the transcript directly for his HEDP, ‘I never saw [the original] again’: hence, ‘it cannot now be disputed that I was not the discoverer of the document’, and Lemon junior’s chronology rendered it impossible ‘that I had first forged the Petition, and then smuggled it into the State Paper Office’. To which John added—perhaps unwisely, as ruffled feelings could be supposed to motivate a man—that Lemon junior ‘was apparently excluded’ from the inquiry of January 1860 at the Rolls Office, when ‘he knew perfectly well that the document in question was in the State Paper Office before I commenced my researches in that department’, such knowledge suggesting ‘very sufficient reasons for not inviting Mr. Lemon to assist’ (pp. 60–61). But of course the Rolls committee had deliberately avoided speculating on the authorship of the alleged forgery, and Lemon’s position was somewhat more involved with the document itself than Collier saw fit to reveal.169 Having reviewed a selection, at least, of Hamilton’s charges,170 Collier re168. See QD 36.6. 169. Lemon simply believed in it: unbeknownst to his colleagues he added a dissenting codicil to the Rolls committee’s pronouncement in December 1860, stating that ‘the document in question is not spurious’, and Romilly later placed it on record that Lemon acted ‘without his knowledge or sanction’; see Cantwell 1991, p. 200n. 170. Collier did not respond at all to Hamilton’s condemnation of the Marston letter at Dul-


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turned with a vengeance to the personal aspects of the inquiry, which he had ever professed to find painful or pointless. ‘How and why the Manuscript authorities of the British Museum have been heated into such animosity towards me I cannot begin to explain’, he declared (p. 28), and promptly supplied his own answers: Madden and his colleagues might have been annoyed at not being consulted about the discovery of the Perkins Folio, or ‘took it ill that I presented [it] to the kindest, most condescending, and most liberal of noblemen, instead of giving it to their institution’.171 Perhaps Ellesmere and Devonshire indeed ‘had [a] design of placing me in a distinguished but invidious position in the British Museum, which . . . secured me enemies there’, but ‘whether they attempted and failed in doing well for me in this respect, I cannot decide. I heard of it, it is true, but not from them’; and ‘if the Duke and Earl had succeeded in any such project, I could hardly have experienced more bitter hostility than has been displayed towards me in my merely private capacity, as a writer’ (p. 30). And at an extreme of pettiness ‘it may even be doubted whether those officers [of the Manuscript Department] do not owe me some ill-will for finding them work’: namely, having to deal with Tycho Mommsen’s large collection of Bentinck Papers, which ‘I procured [for them], for a comparative trifle. . . . These manuscripts may, for aught I know, be yet uncatalogued . . . and such industrious workmen as Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton may have suffered in point of labour, from the occupation I was thus the innocent means of procuring for them’ (p. 62). Hamilton, of course, was merely the callow spokesman of the Manuscript Department (‘I only used the word ‘‘mouthpiece’’ ’, Collier wrote in his Additional Note, p. 72, ‘as it is defined by Johnson,—‘‘one who delivers the sentiments of others in the same design’’ ’), and it was Madden himself whom John accused of the principal animus, founded in petulance or guilt-ridden ingratitude. ‘Some men can forget an injury who never can forgive an obligation’, he reflected, and spelled out what he had hinted at in February, his own embarrassing ‘service’ to Madden in the Hillier affair, ‘when [Madden] had involved himself in an awkward scrape by purchasing manuscripts, which he ought to have known had been dishonestly come by’. Collier recounted the episode in salacious detail (pp. 28–30), representing himself as both amicus curiae and apologist for the luckless Keeper (‘finding, as I of course expected, that Sir F. Madden wich, nor to his remarks on ballads in general, and ‘The Inchanted Island’ in particular. While he successfully exploded the doubts cast by Hamilton upon the genuine Augustine Phillips examination (pp. 61–62), for some reason he omitted to defend the equally genuine Inigo Jones ‘Falstaff’ costume description, which Hamilton (p. 84) had wrongly followed Madden in suspecting. 171. ‘When I placed it in the hands of the Duke of Devonshire’, he added, brazenly, ‘I knew that, for any literary purpose, it would be just as accessible . . . in his Grace’s library, as in that of the British Museum’ (p. 11).



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had innocently, though ignorantly and most incautiously, become possessed of the documents’), and implicitly responsible for the material’s having been restored to Ellesmere and the matter dropped. Still, Madden’s escape was by grace of the earl and his representative, for ‘really and truly, if Sir F. Madden had then been indicted for receiving stolen goods, knowing them to have been stolen’— behaviour never suggested by anyone—‘it might have gone hard with him. I should willingly have been’, Collier added, with exquisite provocation, ‘one of his witnesses to character.’ And quite apart from the Keeper’s ignorance and incaution in this matter, there was also the doubtful Shakespearian Florio to poke fun at, ‘for which alone Sir F. Madden paid out of the public purse no less a sum than £130’ (p. 55). ‘If the Trustees of the British Museum would give me leave’, John offered—in support of his contention that water- or chemical-solubility was ‘no test of the genuine or the spurious’—‘I could promise, with no other means [than ‘‘the simplest application’’ of some unnamed liquid] to expunge every vestige of the famous signature, ‘‘Willm Shakespere’’ . . . [but] I am sure that [Madden] would not let it stand the test even of a sponge and water’.172 The contribution of T. J. Arnold to his troubles John dismissed ‘with the utmost brevity’ (pp. 7n., 18–19n.), imputing his motives to an old family grudge. On the positive side, he published evidence of his late rapprochement with Singer, thanked Halliwell, almost wistfully, for prior support, and persisted in torturing Dyce with indiscreet protestations: ‘I still say of him, as the great Saint said of the greater Sectary, ‘‘I loved thee once; I almost love thee still’’ ’. And what Vaux called his ad misericordiam appeals incorporated a litany of dead friends: Thomas Amyot foremost, Barron Field, Thomas Rodd, Thomas Thorpe (d. 1851), Robert Lemon the elder, and (less and less probably) John Allen, the old master of Dulwich, Frederick Devon of the Chapter House, H. J. Todd, Henry Hallam, and J. W. Croker, all of whom might have testified in his behalf. Among Collier’s immediate family ‘my late wife and my eldest daughter . . . knew more or less of almost everything of a literary nature that proceeded from my pen’, and the former ‘was well aware that [the accusations against me] could be refuted in [eight] minutes’.173 He himself, ‘as almost everyone who knows me can bear witness . . . have never enjoyed facilities absolutely necessary to such 172. The apparently inconsistent vigilance of the Museum authorities when handling materials lent to them ‘would make people almost afraid of owning that they have on their shelves any books of value with contemporary notes’, Collier wrote (p. 15n.), itemizing six books in his own possession, ‘for some of which, in my sanguine days, I gave high prices’. Two of these have been noticed above; two were here mentioned by Collier for the first time; and several are suspect (see A90). A saucy challenge about the parish register evidence on actors (‘I may here express my wonder that the MS. Department . . . has not contended that I invented and forged most of the particulars I derived’, p. 49n.) would await taking-up for 130 years. 173. Reply, pp. 33–34. This hyperbole is reduced from ‘an hour’ in Collier’s Athenaeum defence.


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trickery [as forging the Perkins emendations, inter alia]. I have not only wanted time and skill, but place and means’, for ‘in five out of the eight houses I have . . . occupied [since his marriage forty-four years ago], I never had a study to myself ’, nor had he had opportunity ‘by day and by night’ to generate forgeries unobserved.174 Furthermore (p. 30), through the demands of his profession and literary practice (‘generally keeping me up so late at night that I seldom got to bed until others were rising’), he ‘never had the leisure, even if I had possessed the inclination, to devote myself to the writing and acquisition of feigned hands of any period, much less to the extremely difficult task of imitating the writing of two or three centuries ago. The general reader must here take my word for it, but I have not a relation or friend who does not know that in every way I was incapable of it.’ Collier’s newly elaborated intimations of misconduct by British Museum officials required some kind of answer, and Madden, for all his desire to remain in the background, was the obvious choice to provide it. Three days of spleen following the appearance of the Reply may have primed him,175 and when Maskelyne, Bond, and Panizzi himself urged him to write to The Times he had already looked over his own journals for 1854–55 and 1857–58 toward such a response. This appeared, in a succinct form, in The Times on 22 March, Madden issuing ‘the most unqualified denial to such calumnies [as] Mr. Collier has insinuated, on no obscure terms’. ‘During the time the folio Shakspeare was committed to my charge’, he wrote, ‘it was kept strictly under my own custody and responsibility, and I deny most positively that any note, either in pencil or in ink, was made in the volume.’ Nor had anyone ever ‘abstracted a fly-leaf from the folio Shakspeare’, and ‘as to the offensive personalities of Mr. Collier towards myself, they appear to be designed only to divert attention from the real points at issue, and I shall not notice them here further than to declare that Mr. Collier has knowingly misrepresented the facts.’ In spite of what would soon pass as a vow of silence toward his critics, John did dra an answer to Madden’s letter, denying having implied that the pencillings had been added at the Museum,176 offering further detail about Madden’s

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174. Reply, pp. 32–33. In confirmation of his domestic circumstances Collier quoted a letter from ‘an old friend of eighty-four, now residing in the west of England’—clearly John Gutch, d. 1861—who recollected affectionately a visit when ‘one of your daughters was in the front part of your parlour, while you retired into the back part to examine your book-shelves’. 175. Maskelyne showed him a copy on 16 March, and he purchased one for himself the next day. Collier was ‘a blackguard ’ (Madden Diary, 16 March) and ‘a forger and a liar, and a man void of all honorable or gentlemanly feeling’ (17 March): ‘Damn the fellow! It affects my nerves & my health, to be so basely treated’ (18 March). 176. In his expanded response for the Critic, Madden pointedly summed up Collier’s rhe-



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incautious purchases from Hillier, and expressing his willingness to submit the whole Perkins case to ‘a proper tribunal of competent persons’, as Madden had routinely suggested. Such a tribunal, however, ‘must consist of individuals who have taken no part in the pending controversy, and who are entirely uninfluenced by the denunciations of the volume by the Manuscript Department of the British Museum on the one side and by my declarations regarding it on the other’—criteria which it is hard to imagine any jury of ‘competent persons’ satisfying—and once again this implausible proposition was dropped.177 On 28 March Hamilton told Madden that Collier had sent his letter to The Times, ‘but it was so weak, that they declined to print it’, a result which (if so) may have stiffened Collier’s resolve to make his Reply his last published words on the matter.178 But he may also have thought better of it on reading Madden’s fuller communication to the Critic of 24 March, in which the Keeper amplified his remarks in The Times. A er a meticulous chronology of his own involvement with Perkins (bent on refuting Collier’s charge that he had initiated the witch hunt), Madden provided Parry’s latest rejection of Collier’s ‘intimidation’ scenario (his letter of 12 March) and a thoroughgoing account of the Hillier episode, in which ‘I have good reason to believe that Mr. Collier prejudiced Lord Ellesmere’s mind against me’: with the last so spelt out, much of Collier’s dra ed reply would have been pointless. In letters to the Critic of 31 March and 7 April, both Ingleby and Staunton corroborated Madden’s report, confirming that he had undertaken the investigation reluctantly, being at the outset ‘satisfied that Mr. C.’s good faith was above suspicion’ (Ingleby, 31 March). The very first published notices of Collier’s Reply, in the Birmingham Journal and in the Critic (both 17 March), found largely against him, as one might expect from the press treatment of Hamilton’s Inquiry and of its Athenaeum review; but the balance soon swung around. In the Birmingham Journal for 17 March Samuel Timmins was unsatisfied: ‘we cannot say that Mr. Collier’s Reply is full, or candid, or complete, and shall wait with much interest the further development of this very remarkable case’. In the Critic of the same day W. S. W. Vaux (as ‘Vindex’) again summed up the dispute, concluding that Collier’s defence was evasive at best (‘it will not, I think, escape observation that, in his various replies,

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torical method: ‘he has, in no obscure terms, insinuated (although, in his usual style of writing, pretending to disbelieve the insinuation) that [etc.]’. 177. Collier’s rough dra of a letter to The Times, dated 25 March 1860, is Folger MS Y.c.1055 (216). The Athenaeum of 24 March reprinted Madden’s letter, and added its voice to the ‘tribunal’ idea, with an even less likely suggestion that Madden and Collier each name two referees, who would agree on a fih, and ‘let these five, if they can, agree on a common report as to all the facts of the case’. 178. On 1 April he told Samuel Leigh Sotheby, regarding Madden, that ‘my answer is in my ‘‘Reply,’’ & I mean that, as far as I can, to be final ’; Folger MS C.b.8 (4).


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he nowhere states that these documents are not forgeries’), but allowed that ‘it remains for the public to decide’. Immediately below ‘Vindex’, one ‘Aliquis’ denounced the denunciation, in the Athenaeum, of the Rolls Office inquiry, and referred to Robert Lemon’s memory as ‘shown [to be] fallacious’. The Critic’s reviewer himself, presumably James Lowe, treated Collier’s Reply to a four-anda-half-column savaging: on the key issue of pencillings Collier remained ‘if possible, more shiy than before’ and never addressed the question of ‘how the gentlemen in the Manuscript Department could have introduced the pencil under these [inked] words’; the Wellesley identification was still ‘vague and unsatisfactory’; Parry’s evidence was ‘still [to be] disproved’;179 Lemon’s statement as to the players’ petition was as yet ‘entirely unsupported’; and the jest about Maskelyne and Hamilton ‘licking over’ the pages of the Perkins Folio was ‘as absurd as it is filthy’. The ‘abundance and acrimony of [the personal] abuse’ in the Reply supplied the place of cogent argument, although Collier ‘at least deserves some credit for the ingenuity with which he varies his modes of vituperation’; but in the end ‘the spectacle of an old man covering himself with shame as with a garment is not an agreeable object of contemplation’, and ‘when he accompanies the performance with execrations and accusations against all around him, the sight becomes still more unlovely’. Incorporated within this implacable text was also a letter to the Critic dated 15 March from Alexander Dyce, protesting a footnote in which Collier accused him (Reply, p. 65) of crediting two emendations to Singer, ‘as if [Dyce] wished to deprive the Perkins folio of the sole merit of such great improvements of the text’. Dyce pointed out that in both cases the ‘improvements’ appeared in Singer’s corrected Folio as well, and called Collier’s complaint ‘a striking instance of the something more than boldness with which, when remarks of mine are in question, Mr. Collier is in the habit of asserting what is positively false (vide his Shakespeare, 1858, passim)’.180 On the positive side, the Literary Gazette (24 March) shocked Madden and no doubt others by wholeheartedly endorsing Collier’s position, and treating him as the victim of organized calumny. The charges against him were ‘nowhere . . . any more serious . . . than that he ‘‘must have known,’’ and ‘‘he must have observed’’’, and ‘all resolve themselves into palming off upon the world of

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179. The published text in fact reads ‘still disproved’, but the meaning is obvious. 180. Italics as published, but probably supplied by the Critic. Perhaps with this rare public comment in mind, Madden wrote to Dyce on 22 March, seeking further evidence about the Freebooter episode. Dyce half-confirmed the old story, adding that Thomas Rodd had believed it, but reiterated his refusal to participate in the campaign of exposure: ‘I have quite made up my mind not to meddle in the Collier-Shakespeare Controversy, except when I find it absolutely necessary to refute Collier’s gross mis-statements about myself: were I to bring forward anything against him in matters which do not immediately concern me, I might justly be taxed with vindictiveness’; letter of 24 March 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 252–53.



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letters fictitious and fabricated documents’, but ‘the proofs in support of [such] accusations are slender and suspicious—so much so as to raise in any dispassionate mind a suspicion of some private source of ill-will’.181 That source ‘time may bring to light’, but no one ‘with brains in their head, can for a moment suppose that Mr. Hamilton is anything but the mouthpiece—perhaps ‘‘tool’’ would be a more appropriate designation—of men of better standing and more inveterate rancour’. And if so, ‘if Mr. Hamilton has been merely put forward as a sort of cat’s-paw to do the dirty work for men ashamed to own to it, we can only say the attack is the most cowardly ever conceived’. Finally, ‘One word more. Is this the work for which we pay our British Museum authorities and subordinates?’ So much for ‘the attack on poor Mr. Collier . . . a gentleman whose name is a household word in the literary world’. The victim himself ‘may be and is, as we understand, an odd man, a crotchety man, a man who on numerous, if not numberless occasions, has proved . . . that he is his own enemy’, but ‘throughout the whole of his literary career he appears to have gone to work with an honest straightforward aim’, and deserved ‘the literary world’s suffrage’ and ‘the just attribute of an honest intent’. As the best way of settling the whole question, the reviewer proposed—as usual—a sort of ‘scientific jury’, to be made up of ‘practical men, a little more to be relied on [than] Mr. Hamilton and his tonguelicking’; but even if the Perkins annotations were pronounced forgeries, ‘we should still have to bring them home to Mr. Collier, to justify what is alleged— or, rather, insinuated—against him’. And should they be found genuine, as the reviewer seemed to anticipate, ‘the amplest apology which injured sensibility can suggest would be due from Hamilton and Co., to Mr. Payne Collier’. This astonishing turnabout in the Literary Gazette (which had handled Collier roughly on 18 February) led Madden to suspect that ‘the paper must have changed hands’, which was not far from the truth.182 A week later Collier gained further support from an unlikely source, the Freemasons Magazine and Masonic Mirror (31 March), where an article on ‘The British Museum Slander and Bro. John Payne Collier’ again reflected—rather more than belief in Perkins or John—hostility toward the British Museum officers and staff. Its author, a disenchanted Museum reader named Matthew Cooke, complained that such

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181. Scarcely any attempt was made here to evaluate the charges, beyond repeating Collier’s rejoinders. Even the ‘flyleaf ’ dispute was judged to be unresolved, as if Collier had stood by his misunderstanding: Madden ‘broadly asserts that there was no fly-leaf; Mr. Collier as broadly says, there was. The question is, which is right?’ 182. A month later John Morley, the new sub-editor, told Hamilton that the March article had been written by the bookseller George Willis, ‘at a time when there was no one really responsible for the Paper’, and promised to make up for it with a new article ‘on your side’.


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functionaries ‘treat the literary man as their natural enemy . . . impeding [his] progress by every petty impediment art can devise and insolence invent’; are ‘far too well paid for the niggardly duties they render’; and ‘in general take their ease, attend to their own private avocations, and when not so employed are known to loll for hours in front of a stove totally regardless of the interests of the public’. N. E. S. A. Hamilton was just such a slacker, and had subjected ‘Bro. Collier’ (‘a veteran in literature, a man of high standing, of unimpeachable veracity, a brother of whom the Cra may justly be proud’) to ‘unparalleled calumnies’, which the victim had ‘triumphantly refuted’, leaving his assailant himself effectively ‘convicted of fraud and falsehood’.183 All this predictably infuriated Madden (‘a most blackguard article . . . it is really scandalous that such lying statements can be put forth’), who may have induced Maskelyne (a Freemason himself) to reply;184 but the mystery in this instance concerns ‘Bro.’ Collier. ‘I have not the pleasure of being a Freemason’, John unequivocally corrected his apologist, on receiving a dra of the curious article, and that disclaimer is certainly true. John assumed—rightly, as it transpired—that that misrepresentation would make little difference to Cooke, and declined to comment on Cooke’s yet-unpublished text: ‘I am greatly obliged to you for your exertions in my cause; but I have made it a point to read over nothing in my favour, until it appears regularly in print, lest any one should have the power to say that I exercised any undue influence regarding the productions of my literary brethren.’ 185 Meanwhile, loyal William J. Thoms had reopened the columns of Notes and Queries to the Perkins controversy, once more to Collier’s advantage. On 18 February Hamilton’s charges were briefly described as ‘of so grave a character that

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183. The article continued with a selection of assertions by Collier (from his Reply) and undocumented opinions (e.g., ‘the result of a gentleman’s examination’ of the players’ petition—an unnamed witness with ‘great experience in these kinds of MSS’—that the document was in no manner suspect). Cooke, to whom Madden bitterly remembered granting privileged access to an unaccessioned MS (Diary, 5 April 1860), may have been put off from viewing the Perkins Folio while at the Museum, for he complained that some were turned away if they did not agree to ‘take part in the controversy’. He was apparently a professional copyist, as Collier acknowledged his offer of such services. Cooke concluded with an appeal to the Archbishop of Canterbury— a Museum trustee, and a Freemason—to intervene. Hamilton’s activities spoke for ‘the abuse of public time’ in the Manuscript Department, and as ‘too many drones [are] already employed’, he himself (‘the delinquent’) should be sacked. 184. Ensuing correspondence in the Freemasons Magazine included a letter from ‘M. M.’, dated 12 May and published on the nineteenth, defending Hamilton apparently from personal acquaintance (‘sound scholarship and varied accomplishment, united with amiability of temper and honesty of purpose’), and deploring such partisanship in the Magazine, as ‘there are several distinguished brethren in the British Museum’. Other letters however took Cooke’s side against the Department of Manuscripts (‘Fellow Cra’, 5 May) and against ‘M. M.’ (G. M. Passenger, 2 June). 185. JPC to Cooke, 29 March 1860, Beinecke Osborn Files 3532.



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we are sure every reader of right feeling will suspend his judgment upon them until he has before him Mr. Collier’s explanations’, and on 24 March a conclusion was formally reached: ‘we hold it to be impossible for any one to peruse [Collier’s Reply] with unbiased mind, and not to conclude that it is a genuine honest explanation, which may be implicitly relied upon’. Thoms staked his own personal examination of the Perkins Folio against that of Hamilton et al., and while conceding that Maskelyne’s observation was accurate—that there were pencillings under the ink—he blithely declared this ‘perfectly consistent with the genuineness of the MS. notes’. Without confronting the most obvious and awkward examples (like Collier himself, ‘we think a great deal too much has been said about these pencil marks’), Thoms argued that some of the underlying writing was ‘clearly in a hand as old or older’ than what covered it, but unfortunately mistook his sole specimen claim—the word ‘Cliffes’ beneath ‘Rockes’ in Cymbeline, iii.1.20—for a pencilling, when, as Madden confirmed three days later, it was ‘clearly in ink (although partly rubbed out) and not in pencil,’ 186 and therefore irrelevant to the charge. Thoms’s persuasions as ever embodied what he appealed to for others to grant, the benefit of the doubt, and the courtesy of mutual respect—even Madden admitted that his review exhibited ‘a tone of moderation’, though ‘entirely one sided, very unfair, & in parts quite untrue’ (Diary, 24 May)—and while urging the usual ‘impartial inquiry’, Notes and Queries condemned as the ‘great fundamental error’ of the entire investigation its failure to involve Collier from the start. Madden, Thoms felt, should have told John at once of his awakened suspicions, and sought his cooperation, without which gesture the inquiry had turned into a ‘bitter and envenomed personal dispute, which, pursued as it has been, can never lead to the discovery of truth’. But of course that diplomatic collapse may have been precisely what one party counted upon.187

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186. Diary, 24 March 1860; this error was also noted by ‘Scrutator’, Strictures on Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton’s Inquiry (1860), p. 11. 187. Having broken the silence of N&Q toward Collier and Perkins with this peace-seeking review, Thoms as abruptly resumed his embargo. He declined to print a letter of protest from T. D. Hardy concerning his remarks on the Rolls Office inquiry (Madden Diary, 26 March), and while on 31 March he published a confrontational letter from Madden himself, enquiring ‘whether the pages of ‘‘N. & Q.’’ are open to the Replies of himself and friends, or whether it is to be merely a one-sided Apology for Mr. Collier’, Thoms commented that that would depend on the ‘tone and spirit’ of such correspondence: none in fact followed. Three years later Thoms approached Madden hoping that he would again become a contributor to N&Q, but Madden declined on the grounds that ‘in the Collier affair he had taken up the side opposed to my own, and . . . I was most shamefully treated by Mr C. and his friends’ (Diary, 9 December 1863). Asked why he had not remained neutral, Thoms ‘declared he had been goaded into the course he had pursued’, but ‘at the same time he expressed his conviction that Mr Collier had had ‘‘nothing to do’’ with the Perkins folio!’ ‘We will part personal friends’, Madden concluded, ‘but my name will not again appear in N. and Q. as a contributor.’


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Nor was the pro-Collier reaction abated in April: the Saturday Review, a newly popular and even-handed weekly for which Hamilton had intended his own first revelations, had delayed its summing-up ‘because we had some reason to expect a rejoinder to Mr. Collier’s reply from his accusers’, but in its absence declared (21 April) most of the charges unproven. F. G. Nethercli ’s ‘so-called facsimiles . . . are, we must beg leave to say, not facsimiles but restorations’ of originals ‘barely visible and not legible with the naked eye’; early manuscripts exhibiting ‘ink-writing over pencil tracings’ abounded; attempts to identify ‘fatal anachronisms of orthography and diction’—Ingleby’s ‘cheer’ above all—‘appear to us to have broken down’; and the literary quality of the Perkins emendations, toward which the Saturday Review (or its editor, John Douglas Cook) remained positive, rendered the idea of ‘forgery in a fraudulent sense . . . difficult to believe’. Wellesley’s testimony was independently persuasive, and replaced ‘the breaking-down of Mr. Collier’s other witness, Mr. Parry’, for whatever reason; Lemon’s deposition exonerated Collier insofar as the players’ petition was concerned, and if the Ellesmere Folio, Bridgewater papers, and Dulwich materials were ‘put in the same boat . . . they all sink together’. Only the Joan Alleyn letter ‘seems to call for further explanation on Mr. Collier’s part’, and for Collier’s own conduct and contradictory evidence the Saturday Review found a less-than-complimentary excuse: ‘He is evidently a man of a loose and inaccurate, which is different from a fraudulent habit of mind. He cannot help distorting even the statement of Dr. Wellesley’s letter, though he has no interest in doing so. . . . His own defence of himself is as weak and unskilful as anything can be. We confess that, to our judgment, it is almost damning proof of his innocence. Could the author of Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Reply have forged the most remarkable collection of emendations on a first-rate poet which the literary world has ever seen?’ This line of lawyerly exculpation was indeed ‘favourable to Collier’s integrity but not to his talents’, as Henry Crabb Robinson put it, adding drily that ‘it would mortify a vain man’ (Diary, 22 April).

Herman Merivale

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But the high-water mark of support for the Collier cause, and indeed the last major statement of belief in the genuineness of the Perkins material, came in April as well, from a constant yet all-but-disinterested literary ally. Herman Merivale (1806–74) was a true mid-Victorian minor eminence: son and grandson of scholars, outstanding at Harrow and Oxford (D.C.L., 1870), fellow of Balliol, barrister and jurist, professor of political economy (Oxford, 1837–42), and by 1859 Permanent Under-secretary for India; throughout his career he indulged a literary and historical bent, mostly in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Re-



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views, and latterly the Pall Mall Gazette. Madden, not unexpectedly, regarded him as unprofessionally glib, but Edward Bulwer-Lytton compared him with Macaulay for ‘massiveness’ of intellect, and thought Merivale’s opinions worthy of adoption by ‘any one, however powerful his mind’ (cited by Leslie Stephen in DNB, 1894). One such opinion, however, maintained for at least a decade, held the Perkins emendations in unwavering respect, as representative of how ‘the true Shakespeare would correct the folio’, even if such changes would disappoint us by their unexpectedness, or their elimination of fanciful conceits ‘to which we are really attached’.188 As early as 1853 Merivale (almost certainly, over the initials ‘H. M.’) had made the same point in a letter to Notes and Queries (30 July), and in November 1855, toward a full-scale review of the controversy as it then stood, he procured a view of the Folio itself. This rare privilege was arranged through John Forster, who told Collier of Merivale’s intentions—the account was to be ‘in a most friendly & favourable spirit’ 189—and Collier responded at once by offering help, and then by accompanying the colonial secretary to Devonshire House, where the two men ‘examined [the Perkins Folio] with some care together’ (Merivale in the Athenaeum, 25 August 1860, p. 259). At this time Merivale observed what Collier professed not to have noticed, an emendation to Macbeth, i.7.47, ‘Who dares no more is none’, altered by the Old Corrector to ‘do more’, etc., by re-shaping the initial ‘n’;190 and his discovery—upon which John played masterfully—not unnaturally increased his faith in the Old Corrector, and seemingly confirmed Collier’s fallibility as a transcriber. Merivale appears to have written to Collier to point out the change, for on 2 December John replied, praising what ‘your quick sight detected’, and flattering the detective: while John had ‘made [notes] with all care & diligence, of every minute change that I could discover . . . this discovery, which escaped me, makes me much wish that you would follow me in my examination, as far as is compatible with your other engagements’. At the very least, if Merivale were able to inspect the volume again (‘I told the Housekeeper at Devonshire House to keep the book at hand’), he would do Collier—and literature, by implication—a considerable ‘service’.191 Merivale was indeed flattered to be enlisted: he revisited Devonshire House on his own, and duly informed Collier of his findings—bracketed lines in The Tempest, corrections to the dramatis personae of 2 Henry IV in ‘a different

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188. Edinburgh Review, April 1856, p. 367. 189. Forster to JPC, 10 November 1855, Folger MS Y.d.6 (122). 190. This is in fact an all-but-standard emendation, beginning with Rowe; among Collier’s contemporaries only Hunter rejected it. In N&E Collier himself had silently converted the ‘no more’ of the four Folios to ‘do more’, without mentioning the Old Corrector’s change, but aer Merivale’s ‘discovery’ he included it as a Perkins correction in both Seven Lectures and the 1858 Shakespeare. 191. JPC to Merivale, 2 December 1855, FF MS 250.


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hand from the mass of annotations’, and ‘traces of a different hand’ elsewhere, while ‘the corrections of the text certainly seem to me, as to yourself, to be all in the same distinct & not easily mistakeable handwriting’.192 All quite true, if only the fruit of a solemn fool’s errand, and all curiously self-persuading: for although Merivale’s direct contact with Collier ended here,193 the unique (and partly unsupervised) early access to the volume which he had enjoyed clearly impressed him, and may well have confirmed his long-standing belief in it. His first essay, in the Edinburgh Review for April 1856 (pp. 358–86), suffered no doubts whatever about the antiquity of the production (‘we ask our readers to assume throughout the genuineness of Mr. Collier’s discovery’; p. 377), and concentrated instead upon the authority of the emendations. These, Merivale argued, demonstrated in their great and unwieldy abundance—dazzling alone in that respect—that ‘the Corrector had under his eyes large portions of the authentic text of Shakespeare’, although ‘in what shape it is impossible to say’, and that he ‘transcribed from his mysterious original in the most painstaking manner’ (p. 384). It was impossible that such a mass of corrections should be ‘simply the production of the leisure hours and ingenious brain of some long deceased possessor of the volume’ (p. 361), and even the least convincing of them should never be dismissed out-of-hand: ‘we almost regret’, he concluded, ‘that this remarkable instance of literary treasure-trove did not fall into less critical hands [than Collier’s]’, for a less selective discoverer would have presented ‘the whole body of the Corrector’s annotations’ at one time. Until such were provided by Collier—a daunting twenty thousand, at least!—‘most people will continue to doubt the value of his treasure, and some its reality’ (pp. 385–86). That unique plea for completeness, echoed in the next few years only by those seeking negative evidence, anticipated (in a sense) modern scholarly predilections, as did Merivale’s warning that the revised Shakespearian text might ‘disappoint us exceedingly’, yet still be historically and artistically valid. But perhaps his rationale, informed by the ‘vigorous, if not combative’ spirit Leslie Stephen

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192. Merivale to JPC, 6 December 1855, Furness Collection. Merivale’s letter is legibly dated by him 8 December 1853, but it clearly follows another of 3 December 1855, in which he commented further on the Macbeth emendation and proposed ‘Friday next’ as a convenient day to reinspect the Folio in Collier’s company (FF/K MS 635). Collier’s reply to this is lost, but in the letter we have redated to 6 December 1855 Merivale referred to ‘your last note’, which reached him ‘too late to allow of my waiting on you on Wednesday’—apparently the day Collier had proposed in preference to Friday—and said that he instead called at Devonshire House ‘today (Thursday)’. Two months later John Forster told Collier that ‘I was pleased to hear from Mr Merivale some little time back that the examination of the Volume had thoroughly satisfied & interested him’; letter of 12 February 1856, Folger MS W.d.341 (70). 193. ‘I have never since seen or corresponded with Mr. Collier’, he wrote in August 1860 (Athenaeum, p. 259).



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remarked, overtrumped his own literary instincts. The inexplicable horse-sense about what is genuine or incredible, which animated the enemies of Perkins from Lockhart and Hunter and Knight to Brae, Singer, Dyce, Halliwell, Madden, and Ingleby, seems never to entered into Merivale’s assessment of the annotations, in respect of either physical or literary shortcomings. But what Merivale believed in in 1856 he adhered to in 1860, when a new vindication of Perkins and Collier appeared in the same hallowed quarterly (April, pp. 452–86). He took much the same line as before, devoting three-quarters of his thirty-five pages to the Perkins Folio itself, though ostensibly reviewing Ingleby’s Fabrications, Hamilton’s Inquiry, Arnold’s two articles in Fraser’s, and Collier’s Reply. Again—music to John’s ears—the literary quality of the emendations was such that ‘if they are proved to be modern forgeries, we shall remain persuaded that they are the work of a forger possessed of very extraordinary powers of Shakespearian criticism’ (p. 457). And the ‘very great multitude’ of the corrections, as well as the presence of some that were ‘manifestly absurd’, argued in vacuo for their genuineness, for why would a forger perform ‘an enormous mass of unnecessary work’, and why would their publicist, with all his Shakespearian learning and experience, ‘imperil the credit’ of the better ones by admixing such dross? Nor were philological considerations (in particular the vexed test word ‘cheer’) clear evidence of anachronism, especially as the precise dates of the Old Corrector remained unestablished. As for the ‘external proofs’, Merivale had re-inspected the Folio in July 1859 (when Madden described him as ‘very unwilling to believe that [the emendations] are the conjectures of Mr Collier or any other living person’), and found its condition much as Hamilton had described. But the accusations of fraud ‘reduce themselves to one alone: the alleged modern character of the pencil marks’. These, he conceded, were abundant, but so faint that earlier viewers—including himself, although he did not say so—might be excused for overlooking them; now that they had been detected, however, ‘even the most sceptical observer can hardly doubt that the mode of correction was, as alleged for the prosecution, by pencil first and ink a erward’, and there were indeed instances ‘where no pencilling can be read’, but where ‘there is an appearance as if it had been rubbed out’ (p. 472). Yet having so reported, Merivale evaded his own question: the ‘real issue of this complicated case’, namely, ‘are these pencillings in a modern hand?’, was abruptly dismissed as ‘one which we must leave to better eyes and more experienced judges, whenever this unfortunate volume shall be honestly examined’. True enough, ‘the faint and feeble ghosts of [pencilled] words and letters . . . do wear the appearance of a hand more like that now in use, than the stiff Gothic [i.e., secretary] ink writing’, but ‘even in Elizabeth’s reign the mixture of cursive with Gothic was very common’, and ‘such a cursive an old Corrector may


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have used in his freer pencil jottings, to be replaced by elaborate half-printing in penmanship’. And at all events, Nethercli ’s facsimiles were ‘infinitely too distinct’ to be representational, ‘if they are intended to be verified by the naked eye or by an ordinary glass’. Going on to the question of provenance, Merivale accepted the implications of Wellesley’s ‘opportune’ testimony and Collier’s version of the Parry encounters, reserving his censure for Collier’s conduct in exploiting his discovery ‘in so strangely inconsistent and inadequate a manner, as to rouse not unnaturally the suspicions of his many ill-wishers’ (p. 476).194 Collier ‘scarcely ever gives a detailed account of anything without a blunder’, Merivale wrote, employing what the Critic would call ‘an old ruse with our ‘‘Old Bailey’’ barristers’:195 ‘he scarcely ever tells the same story twice without variations of more or less importance. . . . Even his vindications of himself are rendered unsatisfactory by his apparent incapability of grappling in a vigorous and effective way with the charges against him.’ But while his enemies had proved that Collier possessed ‘a loose, forgetful, imperfect, wandering kind of understanding’, this censure only added to the unlikelihood that he could have perpetrated a ‘singularly curious and elaborate system of forgeries, of surprisingly vigorous execution’. Collier’s antiquarian researches had been ‘useful’, but his criticism ‘of small account’, and he was at best ‘an indifferent editor of Shakespeare’; it was thus highly improbable that he could be responsible for ‘a series of corrections which have attracted the attention of the whole literary world’ (p. 478). However timely and necessary such a defence, as Crabb Robinson observed of the similar line in the Saturday Review, this string of exculpatory slurs might well ‘mortify a vain man’. But while Merivale’s heart, and his powers of argument and apology, lay firmly with Perkins, he had little interest in Hamilton’s other charges, and practically nothing of substance to say about them; hence his vindication of Collier, insofar as the charges were linked, remained feeble.196 He himself had not consulted the Ellesmere First Folio; hence he ‘must . . . leave the question’, quoting

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194. Merivale presumably still thought ‘the whole body of the Corrector’s annotations’ a desideratum. 195. I.e., ‘when they begin to despair of their client’s case, to turn round and pretend to abuse his intellect. To prove that he cannot be a rogue, they wish to make him accept the other alternative, by showing that he really never could have had the wit to do so clever a trick. It is aer this fashion that the Edinburgh Reviewer treats Mr. Collier’; Critic, 14 April 1860. 196. Madden’s concern about the article (Diary, 7 and 12 April), like the Critic’s three-column review of it, reflects the prestige of both Merivale and the Edinburgh Review, but hardly the weight of its reasoning: Madden concluded, with some hint of relief, that it was ‘really a weak performance’ and that the admissions were ‘too numerous, against Mr Collier, to allow any unprejudiced readers to be led away by the sophistry of the argument in favour of the emendations’. Ganzel regarded it (p. 311), as ‘a careful and comprehensive analysis’ of the entire controversy.



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only the second Earl’s denial of ‘similarity’ in the handwriting. The Bridgewater House forgeries ‘we must omit, not from their want of importance, but from our want of space’. The Joan Alleyn letter appeared indeed to be mistranscribed (‘if Mr. Nethercli , junior’s fac-simile is correct’), but ‘anonymous friends of Mr. Collier . . . have reported that the letter is in a very crazy condition’ (i.e., likely to fall to pieces), and ‘may have contained passages now lost’; and the other ‘minor cases of suspicion’ at Dulwich, including the Marston letter with its pencilled tracings, were again passed over ‘for want of space’. Space was however available (more than three pages) to tell Lemon’s tale from the State Paper Office, and to disparage the make-up of the Rolls Office committee, with Hamilton, ‘sixth and junior assistant of the third class in the MS. department’, undeservedly part of ‘such august company’. And Merivale did at least glance at ‘The Inchanted Island’, regarding the ballad as both banal and far from ‘ancient’, ‘but we know not whether Mr. Collier in this particular instance is either deceived or deceiver’. In the end, ‘the theory which would dispose of the whole question by a charge of wholesale forgery against any individual, requires a far greater amount of evidence before it can be accepted’, and while ‘there is a mystery and an obscurity hanging over the Corrected Folio, and some of the Shakespeare documents, which we cannot pretend to remove’ (p. 486), the case against Collier—and more significantly, for Merivale, against Perkins—remained from his viewpoint ‘unproven’.

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After the pleasure, the pain: the flurry of articles sympathetic to Collier and Perkins effectively ended with Merivale and the Saturday Review, leaving the field to the inexorable, and all but indefatigable, opposition. In April 1860 the New Monthly Magazine gave a late, somewhat bantering notice, with echoes of Othello, to Hamilton’s Inquiry, in which Collier himself escaped serious censure, but not the disgraced Old Corrector (‘Is Perkins alive, and still in work? If so, his occupation’s gone’), and the Museum’s ‘intelligent staff of detectives,— Sir Frederic Madden at their head’ were applauded, as having ‘in this instance ‘‘done the state some service’’ ’. The Critic, describing Merivale’s essay as ‘doubtless the strongest defence capable of being urged in Mr. Collier’s favour’, proceeded on 14 April to pick it apart, effortlessly dismissing the vague counterclaims about the Dulwich and State Paper Office documents, and revelling in the ‘Old Bailey barrister’s plea-bargaining: ‘ ‘‘Call you this backing of your friends?’’ may perhaps be Mr. Collier’s exclamation when he reads this—at least, if he be disinclined (as we suspect he will) to accept this vindication of his honour at the expense of his understanding.’ Still in early April, Whitwell Elwin of the Quarterly Review planned to publish an account of the controversy in which Collier would have been ‘thoroughly


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shewn up’, as its author, one Daniel Parkes, told Madden.197 ‘My own mind is fully made up’, Elwin told his publisher, John Murray III, having viewed the Folio itself in July 1859; ‘it is clear that there has been a forgery, & the evidence that Collier did the deed is very strong’.198 Parkes assembled his evidence—including a new revelation from Madden—but the resulting article was ‘a signal failure’, as Elwin reported, ‘much of it . . . irrelevant, much of it weak, many of the strongest points . . . altogether omitted’, and in the event the Quarterly dropped it. ‘What makes the case against Collier so overwhelming’, Elwin complained, ‘is the numerous distinct arguments all tending to one point. To give two or three of these arguments is useless. It is the combination of them, like the strands in a rope, which gives the strength to the indictment against him. . . . I see a quantity of points which will almost demonstrate the guilt of Collier, but [we should] . . . not be in haste in such a matter to pronounce an opinion. To make a mistake & that upon the accusing side of the question would be very damaging.’ 199 On 28 April and 12 May, however, the Literary Gazette made good on its promise to counterbalance the pro-Collier review of 24 March. This time Collier was called upon to, among other things, abandon his ‘childish obstinacy’ and produce for inspection the manuscript of ‘The Inchanted Island’, which ‘he steadfastly refuses to do . . . thereby increasing the suspicions against him a hundredfold’; Robert Lemon too had been guilty of ‘obstinate silence’ with regard to the players’ petition, and the Master of the Rolls, ‘animated doubtless by motives of friendliness and gentlemanly courtesy’, had done nothing to further the investigation. Also in May T. J. Arnold’s third paper for Fraser’s finally saw the light, with its rejoinder to Merivale and other Perkins apologists, its rehearsal of the evidence against the annotations being ‘genuine and ancient’, and against two of the other documents indicted by Hamilton.200 A line-by-line reading of

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197. Madden Diary, 5 April. Parkes, who corresponded with Hamilton, was frequently mentioned by Madden in this period. He may have been associated with The Times: on 6 April he gave Madden an account of John’s 1819 Times ‘scrape’, and the following day told Madden that he himself was the author of an article in the paper about the new Museum Reading Room. 198. Undated letter, preceding another dated 13 April, John Murray archives. 199. Elwin added that ‘I have taken the opinion of two persons (who are against Collier) upon the paper, & they both unite in saying that it would never do to come out with such an abortion in the Q.R.’ (letter to Murray, dated 13 April but docketed 30 April by the recipient, Murray archives). Parkes showed Madden proofs on 17 April, but told him the piece had been ‘burked’ to make way for a political essay, and would appear later; Madden, believing the article only deferred, lamented that ‘it would be of much more importance to have it published now, to counteract the influence of the Edinburgh, than three months hence’. Elwin’s own alternative (‘If the Review had not been full . . . I should have been disposed to sit down tomorrow & write a paper myself ’) never materialized. 200. Five paragraphs in which Arnold defended Madden from ‘the unjust imputations cast



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the Joan Alleyn letter proved Collier’s version ‘impossible’, and the Folio emendations, Arnold concluded, were ‘fabrications’. Yet Collier himself had not been proved to have been ‘mixed up in that transaction [of forgery]’, and ‘is therefore entitled to the English verdict of Not Guilty’, although ‘it cannot be said that suspicions that hang about various portions of his dealing with the folio have been successfully cleared up. At all events’, Arnold summed up, ‘Mr. Collier cannot avoid the unenviable notoriety that must henceforward attach to his name, of having put forward more spurious or suspicious documents connected with the history of Shakespeare than any other person of credit in all our literary annals’ (p. 738). Also in May Howard Staunton, who had so frequently and hotly pressed others to the fray,201 devoted parts of the final instalments of his own Shakespeare (the preface and ‘Life’, printed as i:i–lxiv in the three-volume book form) to a caustic dismissal of Perkins, and unsparing reflections on Collier himself. Regarding the former, ‘we may rest satisfied that [its] authority . . . is at an end’ (p. xii); and the recent disclosures had cast suspicion upon ‘every Shakespearean discovery of the last forty years’ by the latter. Staunton printed the still-controversial players’ petition in full (pp. xxx–xxxi) as an ‘extraordinary figment’, together with the Rolls Office certificate condemning it, and in an appendix (pp. lv–lviii) described no fewer than ten other ‘supposititious’ documents, five each from Bridgewater House and Dulwich, all ‘hav[ing] been found to present unmistakeable evidences of being counterfeit’ (pp. lv–lviii). Staunton himself had been the first to denounce a sixth Dulwich forgery, the letter from Richard Veale to Henslowe conveniently mentioning the players’ petition, but at this date it ‘has been sought for in vain’.202 Yet, ‘like nine-tenths of the socalled ‘‘New Facts’’ relative to the life of Shakespeare, [it] is not entitled to the smallest credence’ (p. xxxi).203 May ended with a curious squib from an unlooked-for contributor: under the pseudonym ‘Scrutator’ one Alexander Rivington, a youth of eighteen or

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upon him’ (Arnold to Hamilton, 25 April 1860, Mostyn Papers) were cut from the overlong text of the article, for which Madden (Diary, 24 April) was ‘not sorry’; proof of the excised portion is among the Mostyn Papers. 201. Most recently Madden had found him ‘very fiery and violent, but really [doing] little or nothing in the Collier inquiry’; Diary, 28 March. 202. On 15 March Staunton suggested to Madden that this must be, on internal evidence, a forgery—which it is (see QD A46.14). Presumably some inquiry at Dulwich between then and 20 April, when Staunton showed Madden proofs of his ‘Life of Shakespeare’, failed to locate the original. 203. The completed edition was reviewed for the Athenaeum by W. H. Dixon on 13 October 1860, p. 475, who regretted that Staunton had not ‘kept himself free from direct participation in the personal controversies connected with Mr. Collier’s discoveries and publications’; instead, ‘Preface, Life, Text, Notes—every main part of the work—is infected with the Collier-morbus’.


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nineteen,204 published Strictures on Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton’s Inquiry into the Genuineness of the MS. Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakespeare, Folio, 1632 (John Russell Smith, 25 pp.). Rivington had himself examined the Perkins Folio in some detail, and he defended Collier, but was mainly concerned to disparage the findings of Hamilton and Maskelyne, in what Madden called ‘a disgusting style of flippancy and ignorance’. His one novel proposal was that the pencilling was in three different hands: the rough dra s under the ink by the Old Corrector himself, Collier’s tick-marks and aides-mémoire in the margins, and some comments and glosses in the hand of a third party, whom Scrutator lightheartedly called a ‘Mr. Jones of the nineteenth century’, and who might be, for aught anyone knew, the sixth Duke of Devonshire himself (p. 14). The Literary Gazette of 9 June was scathing (‘we have not o en met with a more puerile effusion, nor one more unworthy of its subject’, an opinion echoed by the Critic of the same day: ‘quite unworthy of serious treatment’), and even the Athenaeum (16 June) could find nothing better to call it than ‘a clever pamphlet, which carries the war into the enemy’s camp’.

The Will Warner Episode Another interloper of a quite different sort muddied the waters in April. Madden by then had returned to investigating the provenance of the Perkins Folio, in an effort to prove either that it was not what Wellesley had seen in Rodd’s shop, or, if it was, that it ‘could only have then contained the few MS. notes in a hand of the last century, which are really in it’ (Diary, 18 February). In late March he came up with the record of a Second Folio in Rodd’s stock in January 1847, which seemed to him a more plausible candidate, and one that would blow up Collier’s account of his purchase in 1849. If whoever sold this copy to Rodd would ‘come forward to give evidence’, he told Ingleby in Birmingham, ‘the case would be decided’;205 and so Ingleby enquired, through the correspondence columns of the Birmingham Daily Post, a er such a key witness: ‘Who sold, either by public auction, in London or elsewhere, or by private contract, in or about the month of December, 1846, an imperfect copy of Shakespeare, edition 1632, bound in rough calf, which was purchased by Thomas Rodd, of Great Newport Street, London?’ 206 No doubt to everyone’s surprise, a volunteer came forward at once. One Will Warner, a stonemason formerly of Stratford-upon-Avon, with a reverence for

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204. According to Madden: Diary, 5 and 8 June 1860. 205. Madden to Ingleby, 6 April 1860, Folger MS C.a.14 (5). 206. Post, 13 April 1860. Madden asked Staunton to place a similar notice in the ILN, apparently without results; Madden to Staunton, 8 April 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 295–96.



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Shakespeare, a trade in Shakespeare memorabilia, and an appetite for publicity, replied on 16 April to the Birmingham Daily Post. Dating his letter from the Tamworth Arms, a Birmingham public house, Warner deposed that in 1846 ‘I sold Thomas Rodd an old copy of Shakspeare’, which ‘came from Clopton House, near to Stratford-on-Avon. When I le Stratford-on-Avon, Mr. Rodd visited my house in the Borough, and was one of my kindest patrons with my cast of Shakspeare;207 and there he saw the old but imperfect copy of Shakspeare. It contained notes which much interested him. As regards the binding, I could not answer whether it was sheep or calf, but that it was in good state of preservation, and I could own it immediately if I saw it.’ Ingleby lost no time in interviewing Will Warner, and reported the stonemason’s fuller testimony to Madden on 20 April. Warner claimed that his Folio had belonged to his late wife, whose former husband ‘had it from Clopton’, and that Rodd had paid him £5 for it—early in 1847, not in 1846—‘on account of the notes . . . and he did so because he knew a customer who wanted such a copy’. These notes were ‘many’, and ‘written at the top, bottom & sides of the page—& on many pages—o en with a X to indicate reference’, and ‘on the fly leave or title-page was the name of *** Perkins’; Warner was ‘sure about the name Perkins because there was a family of that name at Stratford—& he speculated on the probability of the fo: having belonged to that family’. It was ‘deficient in a few leaves’, ‘stained very badly at the end’, and bound ‘in rough calf or sheep—very sound’. Of course Warner’s description suggested a muddled dependence on the published details of Collier’s Folio (‘his Memory is very lo[o]se’, Ingleby wrote), yet although he professed to know Collier personally (and Charles Knight, and Halliwell), Warner ‘knew . . . nothing about the Collier Controversy’—which Ingleby rightly thought ‘odd’.208 Madden agreed, and, like Ingleby, felt it ‘certain . . . that Warner’s copy cannot be the one inserted in Rodd’s January Catalogue 1847’ (which was priced 30s., without mentioning notes),209 nor indeed the ‘annotated Collier folio’ in its present state (30s. again, but not ‘very sound’, not stained at the end, and without either flyleaf or title).210

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207. Warner seems to have assumed that his readers would know about his plaster-casting activities: see below. 208. Ingleby to Madden, 20 April 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 317–18. In his letter to the Critic (dated 19 April 1860, published nine days later) Ingleby appeared not to have considered that Warner was tricking him: ‘Mr. Warner knew nothing of the Shakespeare controversy, and until I told him (which I did not till aer he had mentioned the name of Perkins) he did not know that Mr. Collier’s folio possessed the name of Thomas Perkins’. 209. And must also have been in Rodd’s possession before 1 January 1847, as Ingleby pointed out in the Critic. 210. Diary, 21 April; Madden’s physical descriptions are contested, unpersuasively, by Ganzel, p. 317.


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Indeed the contradictions implicit in Warner’s description ought to have doomed it at once: he was ‘sure’ of the Perkins inscription (although he mislocated it on a flyleaf or title-page), and he emphasized the ‘many notes’ in the imperfect book as its claim to importance—these were simply delimiting details of the Perkins Folio itself, as no doubt Warner intended. Yet Rodd was supposed to have been ‘much interested’ in the annotations, for a known ‘customer who wanted such a copy’, and to have given £5 for what—according to both Collier and Wellesley—he later priced thirty shillings, overlooking or ignoring the notes altogether.211 The very first public response to this ‘new act . . . in the comedy of the Shakspeare Controversy’ (Athenaeum, 21 April 1860) in fact treated Warner’s tale as a publicity-seeking ‘hoax’, despite its implicit support of the Collierian cause: ‘Is there a Tamworth Arms? Is Mr. Warner known there? Is he the landlord? Does the house desire to see itself in print?’ The new Birmingham witness, concluded the columnist, ‘is not the only person who has recently discovered that he sold an old Shakspeare to Mr. Rodd in the year 1846’. But the Perkins investigators, concerned that Warner’s tale might somehow vindicate Collier in the minds of a war-weary public, took the witness more seriously. Ingleby, who described him to Madden as a ‘weak and impressible man’, remained satisfied that he was ‘not deficient in consciousness’, and was ‘strongly disposed to accept his statements as to the so-called Clopton folio’.212 Madden felt that ‘the real owner of the Collier folio, before it came into Rodd’s hands, is still to be sought for’,213 but nonetheless struggled to account for Warner’s supposititious ‘Clopton folio’, thinking it just possibly identifiable with Parry’s,214 or some kind of prototype for the forgery, whose old provenance had been somehow transferred, and the original concealed or destroyed. T. J. Arnold as well tried to fit Warner’s loose end into his scheme of four rival Folios,215 holding the identification with Parry’s ‘a strong probability’ in spite of the rough versus smooth calf distraction—and thus wonderfully matching up two copies known only by unconfirmed report. Warner himself, however, never again troubled the press with his story,216

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211. In his communication to the Critic (28 April) Ingleby expanded upon the matter of the sale price, writing that Warner tried to make Rodd a present of the volume, but ‘the latter objected . . . and gave Mr. Warner a 5£. note, as a present for his little daughter’. This pseudotransaction might be thought to justify a subsequent loss-taking, but can hardly explain Rodd’s forgetting the point of his purchase. 212. Ingleby to Madden, 27 April 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 324–25. 213. Madden to Ingleby, 23 April 1860, Folger MS C.a.14 (10). 214. Diary, 21 April, a notion later discarded, ‘since Parry’s copy was in smooth calf—Warner’s (if he speaks the truth! ) in rough calf ’. 215. Critic, 26 May 1860, p. 643. 216. Ganzel suggested (p. 318) that Warner’s silence might have reflected intimidation by ‘those who feared the dissemination of his story’. Of this there is no evidence.



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nor did he ever examine the Perkins Folio, and Ingleby, on 18 April 1860 and again early in June (Critic, 9 June), was apparently the only controversialist to approach him in person. At their first meeting Warner boasted as well of his acquaintance with Wilkie Collins ‘in whose book—Mr. Wray’s Cashbox’, Ingleby wrote, ‘Warner figures as the hero!’ 217 And to some extent Collins’s fiction helps to explain Will Warner, whose slight and soon all-but-forgotten testimony has procured for him a small niche in the literature of Perkins. Mr. Wray’s Cash Box, Collins’s second published novel (1852), concerns a retired actor so devoted to Shakespeare that he hides himself in the Holy Trinity Church at Stratford and takes a surreptitious plaster cast of the famous bust—and flees Stratford when his ‘felony’ is discovered. Collins himself gave as his historical source the true tale of ‘a stone-mason at Stratford-upon-Avon’, employed a few years earlier to make repairs in the church: While thus engaged, he managed—as he thought, unsuspected—to take a mould from the Shakspeare bust. What he had done was found out, however, and he was forthwith threatened by the authorities having care of the bust, with the severest pains and penalties of the law—though for what special offence was not specified. The poor man was so frightened at these menaces, that he packed up his tools at once, and, taking the mould with him, le Stratford. Having a erwards stated his case to persons competent to advise him, he was told that he need fear no penalty whatever, and that if he thought he could dispose of them, he might make as many casts as he pleased, and offer them for sale anywhere. He took the advice, placed his masks neatly on slabs of black marble, and sold great numbers of them, not only in England, but in America also. It should be added, that this stone-mason had always been remarkable for his extraordinary reverence of Shakspeare, which he carried to such an extent, as to assure the friend from whom I derived the information here given, that if (as a widower) he ever married again, it should be only when he could meet with a woman who was a lineal descendant of William Shakspeare! That Will Warner was Collins’s model for Reuben Wray—at least as regards this germinal episode in the novel—is clear from Warner’s own career, as well as his evident pride in claiming that honour.218 Eight years on his taste for

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217. Ingleby to Madden, 20 April 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 317–18. Ganzel, who did not pursue this rich hint, miscited ‘Mr. Gray’s Cash Box’ (p. 316). 218. He was indeed a stonemason of Stratford; as a widower he married a widow at Holy Trinity Church in 1847, and apparently le Stratford soon aerward. His plaster-cast busts of Shakespeare enjoyed some reputation, although there is no evidence that Thomas Rodd was among Warner’s ‘kindest patrons’; one was presented to the museum of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1868 by W. O. Hunt, but has ‘disappeared in the past century’ (information kindly


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‘notoriety’, as Ingleby divined it, may have been reawakened by the Perkins events, or simply by the reading of Ingleby’s advertisement in a Birmingham pub—which at any rate gave him leave to puff his own ‘cast of Shakspeare’ in print. Although he claimed to know Collier personally, there is no evidence of any correspondence between John and this potentially invaluable ally at any time, nor of any attempt by John’s friends in 1860 to make contact with him— which Collier’s modern apologist thought ‘impossible to comprehend’.219 But that is surely not puzzling at all: Collier, for his part, knew perfectly well that the Folio which Warner described—imaginary or not—was not his, and yet somehow duplicated its characteristics. What kind of a witness would such a man make? A er eight years of struggling with Parry, and latterly rejoicing in Wellesley, it would have been madness for John to endorse a new claimant. For the prosecution as well, Warner remained an embarrassment: not worth pursuing, and not quite worth disparaging or disproving. Conveniently for all concerned, Will Warner himself quit the controversy as abruptly as he had entered it, never again to be heard from. In retrospect his contribution must put us in mind of the forgeries of the forgeries of T. J. Wise (Swinburne, George Eliot), whose ‘fraudulent’ design so incensed the original perpetrator (Ashley Catalogue [1929], vi:53).

The Investigation Continues Despite Collier’s final withdrawal from his own piecemeal trial, the investigation of Perkins and linked matters continued apace. The Warner episode, distracting as it may have seemed, sprang in effect from Madden’s renewed search for the source of the Perkins-Collier-Devonshire Folio, which began at the end of

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provided by Mairi Macdonald, SBT-RO). Aer the ‘Opera House Riot’ in New York in May 1849— when stones and other projectiles were hurled at Macready by Edwin Forrest’s devotees—Punch whimsically reported that ‘500 casts of the head of Shakspeare, taken from the monumental bust of the Poet in the church of Stratford-upon-Avon, by Will Warner, the artist of that town’, had been shipped to New York City at Forrest’s behest (November 1849, p. 195). 219. Ganzel, p. 318, suggesting only that Collier’s supporters ‘may have feared a trap of some kind’, or ‘did not see the importance of Warner’s testimony’, and maintaining that ‘the details of Warner’s ‘‘affidavit’’ [i.e., Ingleby’s letter of 20 April] were kept secret’ and that Warner’s ‘identity and whereabouts were known only to Ingleby and Madden’—although Ingleby made both quite public in the Critic of 28 April. Ganzel (pp. 313–18, 327–28, and 331) took Warner’s selfdefeating evidence at face value, and regarded the failure of Madden and Ingleby to pursue it as calculated and dishonest (‘when they found the evidence they had looked for, they buried it because it unexpectedly vindicated Collier and disproved their preconceived conclusion’), culminating in Ingleby’s omission of any mention of Warner (‘the most momentous discovery of all— a discovery made by Ingleby himself ’) in his Complete View, since ‘to publish it would destroy the case Ingleby had been building for over three years’.



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March. The bookseller Henry Foss—a fellow member of the Athenaeum—informed Madden on the nineteenth that Henry Wellesley, who had steadfastly refused to make further comment in public, was now ‘of opinion that the volume he saw at Rodd’s with MS. notes, was seen by him long before the time (March 1849) that Mr Collier states he bought the ‘‘Tho. Perkins’’ ’, and ‘if this be so’, Madden hopefully noted, ‘Dr Wellesley’s evidence is worth nothing in Mr C.’s favor, but on the contrary is directly against him’ (Diary, 19 March 1860). But where could such a parallel copy be found? Ten days later Madden looked through a box of old Rodd catalogues, and came up with a Second Folio in a List of Books Recently Added to the Stock of T. Rodd dated 1 January 1847, described—with astonishing similarity to the prototype he sought—as ‘wanting the title, and four leaves at the end, cut, and in soiled condition’, and priced thirty shillings (p. 18). His tasks now seemed to him simply to show that Collier had bought just this copy, in which the deceased bookseller indicated no significant body of annotations; and then to trace where Rodd had obtained it, so as to confirm its comparatively unannotated state at that date. Unfortunately such a search, thirteen years on, proved all but impossible: Rodd’s account books for the immediate period were missing,220 and the only result of a newspaper appeal turned out to be Will Warner’s dubious claim. Nonetheless Madden regarded his discovery as telling, and made a point of allowing Daniel Parkes exclusive first rights to reveal it,221 although Ingleby went ahead with his ill-fated advertisement (13 April), and the Critic saw fit to drop hints on the fourteenth: ‘Almost daily fresh discoveries are being made, and in a very short time will be laid before the public a case such as cannot, we believe, leave a single unprejudiced mind in doubt.’ And when Parkes’s article for the Quarterly was cancelled, the Critic held back no longer, proud that ‘it will be through these columns that the new features of the case will first be presented to the public judgment’ (21 April). Stretching Madden’s discovery somewhat rashly, the editor proclaimed that Collier’s account of his purchase in 1849 was ‘in direct variance with the facts’, and that Collier’s Folio must be what Rodd had listed in January 1847, since its general condition (‘cut and soiled’) and its price were the

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220. On Rodd’s death his account books had passed to Sotheby’s, who had wound up the business, and James Lowe, editor of the Critic, now undertook to look at the books on Madden’s behalf. He soon discovered that those for the period between March 1845 and Rodd’s death in April 1849 were missing, having been lent several years previously to a barrister but never returned (Lowe to Hamilton, 2 April 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 277–78). The first reaction of both Hamilton and Madden was to suspect that Collier himself had somehow got at the missing volumes, but this was not a line of inquiry that either pursued. 221. ‘I do not wish this important discovery to be publicly known, until it appears in the Quarterly Review, which will be out in about a week’, he told Ingleby; 11 April 1860, Folger MS C.a.14 (6).


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same, and ‘the imperfections specified are exactly identical’.222 Furthermore, the sale—and Wellesley’s examination of the volume—must have occurred ‘shortly a er January 1847, because in the next catalogue issued by Rodd there is no mention of it’.223 Such overbold certainty deserved a rebuke, and within seven days the Athenaeum provided one—with a small bombshell that le Madden and his allies in temporary confusion. ‘We are in a position to stop the run of the little farce got up in the Birmingham public-house’, wrote Dixon smugly in ‘Our Weekly Gossip’, summarizing the new charge: the ‘ ‘‘discoverers’’ of [the 1847 Rodd listing] conclude that this Folio can be no other than the Perkins Folio’, and because ‘they find it in Rodd’s catalogue only once . . . they infer that it must have been sold; and, of course, to Mr. Collier’, and so ‘Mr. Collier’s statement that he bought the Perkins Folio in 1849 must be false’. But in fact the Folio listed by Rodd in 1847 remained on his shelves, for ‘a er his death [in April 1849] it was sold with his books by public auction’, when (‘from Messrs. Sotheby & Wilkinson’s well-kept accounts’) we find that ‘this very Folio, described as ‘‘wanting the title and four leaves at the end, soiled’’, was bought at Rodd’s sale by Mr. Pickering for 10s.’ Wherever it came from, the Athenaeum crowed, ‘it was certainly not the Folio seen by Dr. Wellesley and purchased by Mr. Collier’. Although the certainty of the Athenaeum in interpreting its evidence was hardly more warranted than that of the Critic, this new fillip shook Madden, who immediately consulted Sotheby and Wilkinson’s catalogue of 17 December 1849, where the book (lot 1365) was described as a First Folio of ‘1623’; a visit to Wellington Street two days later, however, revealed that in the house copy the publication date had been altered by John Wilkinson himself to ‘1632’, reflecting what must have been a humiliating saleroom announcement.224 ‘This seems very strange’, Madden now allowed, ‘and renders the question more perplexing than before’. He reduced the options to two: ‘either it must be a different copy from the Collier folio—although exhibiting exactly the same deficiencies!—or

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222. The Critic went on to assert, mistakenly, that ‘the Perkins Folio wants the title and four leaves at the end, and wants nothing else’, whereas in fact it also lacks seven other (scattered) medial leaves—a discrepancy that had not bothered Madden either. Madden probably assumed that Rodd would not bother to collate so cheap a copy save at the beginning and end, which is arguably true; and of course the internal losses could also have been inflicted between 1847 and 1855. 223. Once again that is not a foregone conclusion, for Rodd could easily have decided to ‘rest’ an unsold item. Madden had however looked through Rodd’s later catalogues, and those of other booksellers, in search of further listings of this or other 1632 Folios, without finding any (Diary, 5 April 1860). 224. No doubt the price of ten shillings—low even for a defective Second Folio—was in some measure the result of the climb-down: Sotheby’s claim of ‘1623’ had caused N&Q (8 December 1849, p. 94) to list the volume among the eight most interesting lots in the forthcoming sale.



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else . . . Mr Collier, instead of buying it of Rodd, as he asserts, in March 1849, bought it of Pickering subsequently’ (Diary, 30 April 1860). The latter explanation cannot have seemed easily arguable at the time, and Madden’s next step (‘it will be necessary if possible, to trace the book from Pickering’s hands’) may not even have been taken, or if it was, brought no recorded result. Perhaps frustrated by the difficulty of manoeuvring the various ‘Perkins’ Folios into a logical sequence of ownership, Madden—on the evidence of his diary at least—effectively gave up this aspect of the investigation. T. J. Arnold, however, pursued it in earnest, for the Athenaeum disclosure upset the neat reconstruction of the Perkins provenance he had counted upon in his three Fraser’s articles. ‘I am more bothered about this folio sold by S[otheby] & W[ilkinson] than by any other part of the case’, he wrote to Hamilton on 2 May, and by the eighteenth he had worked out a new scheme of identity and descent to account for ‘the multiplicity of the Rodd folios’, which appeared in the Critic of 16 May.225 But even the most dedicated follower of the controversy could by now be excused for regarding the provenance issue as blurred past all hope of resolution, with the questioned testimonies of Collier, Parry, Wellesley, and Warner, and the alternative theories of Madden and Arnold, yielding no hope of consensus or proof. In the end this whole line of inquiry must have seemed fruitless, both to the controversialists and to their long-suffering readers—for the pro-Collier camp a quagmire of inconsistencies, for the anti-Collierites a distraction from so many other proofs, as they deemed them, of deliberate forgery. The search for the true source of the Perkins Folio ‘in matrix’, however appealing it remains to the problem-solver, has languished since mid-1860, and as the spuriousness of the latter-day annotations is now long beyond dispute, there is no compelling reason to revive it. Simply for amusement, however, we have permitted ourselves a hypothetical reconstruction of events in the Rodd-Collier transaction(s)—bearing in mind that it is no more than that, adds no weight to the case against Perkins, and (if one day refuted by evidence unknown to us) exposes that case to no damage. Suppose Collier did purchase a defective Second Folio from Rodd—the very

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225. Arnold to Hamilton, 2 and 18 May 1860, Mostyn Papers. What Arnold found most remarkable was the recurrence of the name Perkins on the Devonshire Folio and in the independent descriptions of Parry and Warner: ‘the improbabilities that there should have been three imperfect folios . . . all traceable to a person or family of the name of Perkins, seem to be enormous. That there should have been even two seems extraordinary enough.’ Arnold—barrister and magistrate—was ever careful to steer clear of libelling the independent witnesses, and hence never mooted the idea that the testimony of both Parry (at first) and Warner might be muddled or untrustworthy, in both instances reflecting the publicity Perkins had already received. All he could suggest, in the end, was that in 1847 Collier did indeed purchase from Rodd the Warner Folio (possibly once Parry’s copy as well), to which he later added his forged annotations.


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one listed in Rodd’s catalogue of 1 January 1847, and in which Dr. Wellesley at one time observed some genuine early manuscript notes—and discovered, as he said, that it was of no practical use to him, or indeed that there were more leaves missing than Rodd’s casual description had indicated. Rather than simply ‘throw it by’ (who would waste thirty shillings?), suppose that he returned it to Rodd at some later date, perhaps for cash or in trade, while retaining the ‘excellent copy’ of Florio’s New World of Words (JPC sale, 1884, part of lot 718). But when the same article fetched a third of Rodd’s price in December 1849, why not secure it from Pickering on the spot, at a modest mark-up? 226 Surely Collier would have followed, if not attended, the stock-sales of his old bookseller and friend. The Folio would then have been his both more cheaply and— as the Sotheby cataloguer mistook it for 1623—without any obvious record of its appearance at auction. And if indeed it was the same copy that Rodd had once sold him and taken back, John risked little in conflating events: he would not, of course, wish to disclose a saleroom provenance for his book, when any cataloguer or careful viewer might recall just what it looked like. The above is pure speculation, but it allows for the gist of Wellesley’s evidence (we can safely dismiss Parry’s and Warner’s), and reconciles the alternative Perkins ‘originals’ that so plagued Madden and Arnold. Collier’s date of ‘the spring of 1849’—which Wellesley came to doubt—may be fiction, but the price of thirty shillings is fact, and if Rodd’s old records had survived they would show it. Half-truths can wonderfully gild an invention, and with a little luck, like Wellesley’s providential memory of his visit to Rodd, Collier again eluded summary exposure. Where the Perkins Folio came from, before 1847–49, and exactly what it looked like before 1851, will probably never be known. Apart from the increasingly futile search for its provenance, the investigation of Perkins settled into refining the literary and palaeographical charges against it. One new suggestion came in March from a shorthand historian named Matthias Levy, who deciphered four hitherto-unexplained words in shorthand in the margin of Coriolanus, and declared them to be in the system of John Palmer (A New Scheme of Shorthand, 1774), itself an adaptation of John Byrom’s of 1767. ‘Whatever opinion may obtain as to the other pencillings in the Folio’, he concluded, ‘the four shorthand words [representing ‘struggles, or instead, noise’] were not placed there until the year 1774’.227 But other than

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226. T. J. Arnold attempted to locate Pickering’s records, but they proved no more available then Rodd’s; Arnold to Hamilton, 2 May 1860, Mostyn Papers. 227. Literary Gazette, 17 March 1860, followed up in the Critic of 26 May, and in Madden Diary, 21 and 27 March. R. A. Foakes has shown (1971, p. 159) that Collier used a modified version of Byrom’s system, perhaps that popularized by T. Molineux in 1804.



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showing that Collier himself—if indeed it was he, as it appears—had pencilled a few shorthand notes in his Shakespeare, this discovery was hardly like ‘driving a stake through a dead body’ (Daniel Parkes, quoted by Madden), and the anti-Collierites did better to cast their nets elsewhere.228 In mid-May Hamilton, accompanied by James Gairdner and W. B. D. D. Turnbull, revisited Bridgewater House, and found Arthur Mainwaring’s account for the playing of Othello ‘as rank a forgery as any other of Lord Ellesmere’s, no mistake about it’; G. H. Kingsley concurred, telling Madden that ‘to my unlearned eye the Othello MS. looks infinitely more like a laboured copy of another man’s handwriting than any of the others’.229 Right they were, as it happens, but some palaeographic indictments still hung in the balance: J. S. Brewer, at this juncture supported by Hamilton, Gairdner, and Turnbull, believed that one other Bridgewater House document, the opinion of Chief Justices Wray and Dyer on city jurisdiction in the Blackfriars (New Facts, p. 9; Complete View, pp. 250–52), was a forgery. T. D. Hardy’s suspicions were more tempered (‘its genuineness seems questionable’), but Madden remained staunchly, and correctly, opposed. On 27 July, at Ingleby’s request, he re-examined all the Bridgewater House documents, finding this one ‘decidedly genuine’ (Diary, pointing out that ‘it is the only document [among those suspected] on a whole sheet’). ‘I can perceive no cause whatever to doubt its genuineness’, he told Ingleby, and by now Hamilton agreed with his chief (Complete View, p. 252). Ingleby himself, more remarkably, had wavered on one of the oldest and most confident discreditations, that of the too-good-tobe-true H. S. letter, with its praise of Burbage and Shakespeare. ‘The H. S. letter greatly amazed me’, he wrote on 6 June, a er viewing the Bridgewater originals for the first time, as ‘certainly a most dexterous fabrication’. A month later, still worried, he asked Madden if it was ‘beyond question’ a forgery;230 to which Madden’s reply, reinstating the Wray and Dyer document while condemning the rest of the suspects in unflinching terms, le him guardedly satisfied.231 Meanwhile, further inquiries at Dulwich had wasted time on the question of who had recommended that the Joan Alleyn letter ‘not . . . be handled until bound, and repaired’, and had foundered, for the time being, while the librarian could not locate Henslowe’s diary.232 In July Madden, egged on by Record Office

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228. Madden Diary, 27 March 1860. Ingleby at one point found more examples of shorthand and sent them to Levy (Madden Diary, 7 June 1860), but this trail led no further. 229. Hamilton to Madden, 18 May 1860; and Kingsley to Madden, 19 May, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 335–36 and 338. 230. Ingleby to Madden, 6 June and 26 July 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 347–48 and 351–52. 231. Complete View, p. 258: ‘I must confess that the matter of the letter would have made me doubt its authenticity long before I received any suspicion of its genuineness from the writing.’ 232. That this key document remained unexplored by Ingleby and others may stem from its


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colleagues, addressed a fresh lead in the Stationers’ Registers, but toward only another dead end (see above, page 501). Through these months of public and private evidence-gathering four antiCollierites were busily preparing their next fusillade. N. E. S. A. Hamilton had already announced his intentions (‘other particulars . . . in another form and in fuller detail’ than those of An Inquiry); A. E. Brae had been ‘writing a pamphlet’ since at least September 1859; T. D. Hardy was also working on ‘a pamphlet . . . in which he means to shew up Mr Lemon’; and by 10 May Ingleby had reached an agreement with Nattali and Bond for a full ‘history’ of the Perkins controversy.233 But Hamilton’s project—he was still ‘getting on with another pamphlet’ on 28 May (Madden Diary)—never materialized, and Ingleby proceeded slowly, so that in August 1860 Hardy and Brae shared the next public exposure, under a perhaps dimming spotlight. Next to Madden himself, Thomas Duffus Hardy was by far the most distinguished and experienced palaeographer involved in the entire Perkins affair, and in the absence of any extended public commentary by Madden, Hardy’s Review of the Present State of the Shakesperian Controversy remains the most authoritative account of the suspect material from the viewpoint of a handwriting expert. His ‘pamphlet’ of seventy-five pages, issued by Longmans, concentrated first upon just those characteristics of Perkins and the other physical forgeries about which Hardy knew best: the Shakespeare annotator’s hand varied, even on the same page, between ‘the stiff laboured Gothic hand of the sixteenth century’ and ‘the round hand of the nineteenth’—‘a fact most perceptible in the capital letters’—and ‘it bears unequivocal marks also of laborious imitation throughout’. The pencillings, pace Grant White and Merivale, were in a cursive hand ‘utterly unlike’ that of the seventeenth century, and Hardy quite reasonably asked why the same man would employ a modern cursive or italic hand for his rough notes, and a retrograde secretary hand for his inked final dra . The frequency of erasure ‘by penknife or wet cloth’, Hardy declared, was at

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having been temporarily mislaid. Along with other of Collier’s MS sources Hamilton had looked for it, and at one point Kingsley suspected the worst: ‘where the deuce is Henslowe’s diary? If it is not produced by the time I want it I shall ask the question in a louder tone. It is either in Mr Collier’s possession or nowhere, if not at Dulwich’ (letter to Hamilton, undated but written before 29 May 1860, Mostyn Papers). A. J. Carver eventually found it, however, in a locked cupboard, and so informed Madden on 29 May (BL Egerton MS 2847, fol. 138); but the more active investigators had by then ‘done’ Dulwich, and nothing more was attempted immediately. In April 1862 Staunton and Kingsley seem to have hoped to take up the matter, inviting Madden to join them, but he declined. 233. Ingleby to Hamilton, 19 September 1859, Mostyn Papers; Madden Diary, 18 April and 10 May 1860.



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odds with seventeenth-century practice (pp. 6–8 and 10–12). Turning elsewhere, Hardy noted that the ‘Sweete Nedde’ challenge at Dulwich was ‘neatly written’, and ‘would not improbably deceive a person inexperienced in palaeography’— like Ingleby, who confessed himself struck by its verisimilitude—but the Bridgewater House documents ranged from ‘cleverly executed’ (the paper showing the interest in 1608 of Shakespeare and others in the Blackfriars company: but ‘the more . . . it is examined, the more suspicious it appears’) to ‘the most transparent fabrication of any that has been put forth as an original’ (the Daborne warrant). The Daniel letter was a contemptible effort (‘neither in the handwriting, the ink, nor in any other particular, does it bear any characteristic of the reign of Elizabeth’), and ‘we cannot forbear expressing our surprise that any person should venture to call [the ‘1589’ certificate of the players] an original of the 16th century’.234 Hardy was even less charitable toward the champions of the infamous players’ petition, which of course he himself had condemned with his Rolls Office colleagues—and here a political issue, hinted at by Madden in April, reemerged. ‘If Mr. Lemon, Senior, really did produce this Petition, and pronounce it genuine, his judgement was marvellously at fault’, Hardy wrote, ‘for we say, and say advisedly, that anyone who could pronounce the ‘‘Players Petition’’ to be genuine, would be totally unfit to hold the office that Mr. Lemon, Senior, held’ (p. 47). But that censure need not be invoked, he cuttingly conceded, for ‘of the two alternatives, we should be inclined rather to doubt the accuracy of the son’s memory than the father’s skill as a palaeographer’. Would Lemon senior, who had retired from the State Paper Office in 1825, have concealed such a discovery from fellow antiquaries and his own chief, Henry Hobhouse, until at least 1829, when Collier first came there? 235 Lemon junior in fact may have ‘spoken somewhat too hastily upon subjects which could hardly come within his knowledge’, for between 1825 and 1835 he was not officially employed in the State Paper Office, but at work for the independent State Paper Commission established to publish the papers.236

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234. Review, pp. 56–69. Hardy’s scepticism overextended itself to declaring the Wray and Dyer opinion ‘questionable at least’, but he acknowledged that ‘gentlemen of acknowledged skill in such matters’—i.e., Madden and latterly Hamilton—considered it genuine. 235. By contrast (although Hardy did not mention this), when Lemon senior discovered in 1823 the manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana, attributed to Milton, that work was immediately edited, translated, and published by royal command at the Cambridge University Press. For a recent suggestion that the attribution is based in part on a Collier forgery, see Appendix II. 236. These intimate details of Record Office appointments were clearly a trump card for Hardy, whom Madden had reported as intending ‘to shew up Mr Lemon’ in his Review. The Deputy Keeper, Sir Francis Palgrave, had for many years campaigned for the union of the State Paper Office and the Public Record Office, and in April 1854 the merger was effected, Lemon and


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Most of Hardy’s other points—on the literary value of the emendations, the provenance, the incivility of the debate, and ‘the discredit that this controversy, under its present aspect, must of necessity throw on the character of English literary men’—were not new, but the level-headed approach of his essay, its apparent impartiality, and his own professional reputation won him good notices in the Literary Gazette, the Critic (of course), and even the Athenaeum, whose editor, Dixon, was friendly with Hardy.237 Only Merivale, the ‘Edinburgh Reviewer’ whom Hardy had frequently contradicted, counterattacked, complaining in a six-column letter to the Athenaeum of Hardy’s ‘bitter style’, and disputing his character of the pencillings: were there indeed ‘words and letters (relics, that is, or shadowy traces of them)’, he asked, ‘which wear a modern appearance? Is that appearance so clear as to be conclusive? I deem him a very bold man who will hang his faith on so slight a peg’ (25 August 1860, p. 258). Here Merivale published the last version of his own examination of the Perkins Folio, in 1855 with Collier in tow, and reaffirmed—somewhat hollowly—his faith in the text;238 Hardy, given two columns to reply, merely repeated his palaeographical conclusions, denied being ‘bitter’ (‘I have never used a strong expression when a mild one would convey my meaning, and I have abstained in every instance where I found it possible, from even mentioning Mr. Collier by name’), and pointedly contrasted his own declared authorship with the continued ano-

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the twelve other members of staff not only losing their autonomous status but also having their hours of work increased from five to six daily, in line with PRO practice. In 1854 Lemon and Hardy were both Assistant Keepers of the first class, with equal service (although Lemon was four years older), but Hardy received the maximum annual salary of £600, and Lemon, who had vigorously opposed the PRO reorganization, only £500. See Cantwell 1991, pp. 107–08 and 163–69. 237. Madden, perhaps disappointedly, found it ‘more moderate in tone than I had expected’ (Diary, 5 September), and Hardy himself told the lawyer and antiquary Sir Edward Smirke that ‘I have much more in reserve, to be said if necessary, but I do most sincerely hope and pray that there may be no necessity to publish any thing further on the subject’; Hardy to Smirke, 10 September 1860, Folger MS Y.c.1316 (4). 238. Re-arguing the case mostly on the grounds of ‘internal evidence’, he admitted that ‘I shall not be utterly astonished . . . if it be some day fairly proved that the corrections are forgeries’ (p. 258); Madden (Diary, 10 September) was particularly contemptuous of this bet-hedging. Five years later, perhaps with Perkins in mind, Merivale was not so trusting with regard to another group of documents. In September 1865 he published in the Fortnightly Review a long article questioning the authenticity of the Paston letters; James Gairdner, who was to re-edit the letters in the 1870s, replied in their defence the following month; and on 30 November John Bruce and Richard Almack addressed a packed meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, giving further evidence. Merivale recanted on the spot, and within two weeks the society had established a commission to report on the matter, inviting both Merivale and Madden (who had also defended the letters in N&Q on 5 February 1859) to take part. On 10 May 1866 the investigating body reported that the letters they had seen were ‘unquestionably genuine’, that is, ‘undefaced, uninterpolated, and untampered with’.



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nymity of the ‘Edinburgh Reviewer’ (‘I think the least [he], or any other defender of the Devonshire Folio, can do, is to give his name to the public’). Poor ‘ponderous Brae’—as his one friend and partisan, Ingleby, described him to Hamilton 239—fared predictably worse in the press, if indeed anyone read him at all. His Collier, Coleridge, and Shakespeare: A Review, a 150-page tract, was complete by the beginning of 1860, but remained ‘quietly reposing in my portfolio’, he told Ingleby on 4 March, ‘for a ridiculous reason enough—the want of a publisher’. John Russell Smith, no doubt still smarting from Literary Cookery, twice declined Brae’s manuscript, and on 26 May it was still languishing, despite being ‘just ready’ three months before.240 Above all Brae wanted the ‘zealous cooperation’ of a backer who would risk his own money and reputation alongside him, but it is probable that in the end he paid for the printing himself.241 He was candid enough about his stance: while he ‘has never even seen Mr. Collier’ in person, and ‘neither has, nor pretends to have, any knowledge of him, directly or indirectly, other than [what] he has obtained from his literary acts, and public writings’, the very name ‘J. P. Collier’, as a ‘literary entity’, provoked his ‘dislike and distrust’—designating as it did ‘the originator of the most successful and pernicious corruption of Shakespeare’s text, under false pretences, that modern times have produced’ (p. 13). But Brae’s old suspicion of the 1811–12 Coleridge lectures continued to plague him, and he began by reasserting that Collier’s transcripts consisted of no more than ‘vapid and worthless rubbish’ of Collier’s own, into which ‘old materials’— that is, genuine Coleridgean nuggets, as already published—were ‘shovelled . . . at random, and le to find places as they can’ (p. 19). His demonstration of this claim was sometimes ingenious, but (we now know) simply wrongheaded. Yet the argument itself of Collier, Coleridge, and Shakespeare depended upon the parallels between Collier’s text of Coleridge, as Brae conceived it to be, and the Perkins emendations: Brae never counted upon, nor even mentioned, the accumulated new charges that so buttressed the indictments of Hamilton, Arnold, Hardy, and Ingleby, nor any of the provenential, palaeographical, or ‘scientific’ evidence. His attack on Perkins now came down to a minute analysis (pp. 55–119) of one play—Love’s Labour’s Lost—with its ninety-nine emendations signalled by Collier in 1856. This was really no more than the sort of literary

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239. Letter of 19 September 1859, Mostyn Papers. 240. Brae to Ingleby, 4 March 1860, Folger MS W.b.105 (62); Ingleby to Madden, 26 May 1860, BL Egerton MS 2847, fols. 135–36; and Staunton to Madden, 20 February 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 144–45. 241. The book bears the imprint of Longmans, but Brae had almost resigned himself to having it printed at Leeds, with its title-page awaiting a publisher, as early as 4 March; in the event it was printed there, by Edward Baines and Sons.


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commentary that Singer, Dyce, Knight, and White, among others, had already provided, and Brae’s few admirers regarded his work more as ‘useful’ Shakespeare criticism than as a new challenge to Collier.242 Indeed, the entire sixth and last chapter, on ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’—which Brae argued to be Much Ado about Nothing 243—has practically nothing to do with Collier or Perkins. With the passage of summer, and in the calculated absence of any further comment from Collier himself, the heat of the Perkins furore may have seemed all but spent, or the debate so repetitive that even the Critic chose not to weary its readers by ‘too frequently returning to this vexed controversy’ (13 October, reviewing Hardy and Brae). Or was it merely a lull before the final assault, as Ingleby, now alone in the prosecution of his own Complete View, might have preferred? Still hoping for ‘a thorough investigation of the Devonshire folio’, T. J. Arnold reminded Hamilton of the transience of public attention, and worried that ‘interest about the question is [now] dying out’: ‘It was first excited by your letter in the Times: it was all but dead when your Inquiry & Mr Collier’s Reply revived it with increased vigor—but it is now rapidly sinking again’, and ‘a few months hence [the general public] will probably think it a bore to have it forced again on their notice’.244 A summary of the controversy to date by Samuel Neil, a writer of popular self-help and school texts, appeared in the British Controversialist in the autumn of 1860, but drew no conclusions.245 At home in Maidenhead John may or may not have followed all the latest developments, but he stuck by what he had told Samuel Leigh Sotheby in April: ‘My answer [to Madden and others] is in my ‘‘Reply,’’ & I mean that, as far as I can, to be final.’ 246 His non-combatant friends continued to lend him support: William

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242. The Literary Gazette (18 August) took this line, while considering the Coleridge remarks ‘forceful collateral evidence’; Ingleby maintained his odd faith in his friend’s critical sagacity, telling Madden that ‘I firmly believe [Brae] to be the best verbal critic in England at this time’ (letter of 26 May 1860, cited above). For the committed Critic (a late mention on 13 October) Brae’s book was no better than ‘not without interest to those who are investigating the authenticity of the other papers’, while to the Athenaeum (11 August, a one-paragraph dismissal) it was just ‘a mere waste of passionate words’. 243. Brae is widely credited as the originator of this suggestion. 244. Arnold to Hamilton, 11 August 1860, Mostyn Papers. The Critic (13 October) still counted on Hamilton ‘to bring his case to a conclusion’, for ‘if he does not, he will give occasion to the upholders of untruth’; but perhaps the full-scale performance of Ingleby, his own confidant and correspondent, absolved him. 245. This was largely reprinted in Neil’s Shakespeare: A Critical Biography and an Estimate of the Facts, Fancies, Forgeries and Fabrications Regarding His Life and Works, Which Have Appeared in Remote and Recent Literature (1861). 246. JPC to Sotheby, 1 April 1860. Seven months later he told the same correspondent that the controversy ‘has given me more annoyance—I may say distress—than any other occurrence in my life’; Folger MS C.b.8 (4) and (5).



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Hazlitt in mid-March, Tycho Mommsen in May, and the formidable William Whewell in September.247 One old comrade-in-arms deserted him, however, W. B. D. D. Turnbull, who had been friendly from Scotland since at least 1835, and had long exchanged information and presents.248 Turnbull (1811–63), nicknamed ‘Alphabet’ for his cumbersome string of initials, was a native of Edinburgh, a wellrespected antiquary and editor, and a convert—or ‘pervert’, in contemporary usage—to Roman Catholicism. He came to London in 1852, and in 1859 Sir John Romilly recruited him to calendar the series of PRO foreign state papers from 1547 to 1688. Fears that his professed faith would affect his work, and perhaps even threaten the preservation of sensitive source materials, led to a massive campaign against his appointment, in which various activist Protestant groups, most of the public press, and some six thousand individual English and Scottish petitioners denounced it 249—the Athenaeum, for example, warning that through Turnbull’s input ‘the whole series of Calendars may become tainted with the leprosy of doubt’ (24 September 1859), and the Daily Telegraph explaining that ‘the Roman Catholic principle of dealing with history is one of systematic falsification’ (16 February 1861). While Romilly stoutly defended his choice, and subsequently eight hundred counter-petitioners (including Palgrave, Froude, Jowett, J. S. Brewer, James Martineau, and Dean Stanley) endorsed it, Lord Palmerston finally told his Master of the Rolls that ‘the selection [for the work] of a bigoted pervert was an unfortunate one’, and Turnbull resigned in late January 1861, having completed his first two volumes only.250

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247. JPC to Hazlitt, 22 March 1860, BL Add. MS 38,898, fols. 99–100; printed in Hazlitt 1897, ii:18–19; Mommsen to JPC, 16 May 1860, FF/K MS 642: ‘Could I in any way be useful, I would do it with all my heart’; and JPC to Whewell, 8 September 1860, grateful for ‘your kind and zealous advocacy of my cause’; TCC, Add. MS c.75 (10). 248. See C5 below; there are friendly mentions of Turnbull in letters of Collier to Laing (23 November 1835 and 31 March 1842, EUL MS La.IV.17) and to another Edinburgh correspondent, probably James Maidment (22 December 1841 and 6 January 1842, Harvard Theatre Collection and Folger MS Y.c.1055 [209]), as well as direct correspondence (20 January and 1 March 1850, EUL MS La.IV.17; and 3 June 1850, Corporation of London, London Metropolitan Archives Q/WIL/117/1). In 1851, before moving to London, Turnbull auctioned a portion of his own library which included a number of Collier’s rare publications, and Collier bid defensively on them: ‘take care that the following lots do not go under the [indicated] prices’, he wrote to Laing before the sale (7 November 1851), perhaps annoyed by their unexpected exposure. In the event, however, John desired only to repurchase The Poet’s Pilgrimage—‘the rest . . . I merely wish to be in proper hands’; JPC to Laing, 2 December 1851, EUL MS La.IV.17. 249. The Athenaeum of 28 July 1860 recorded one ‘memorial’ to the Prime Minister’s office signed by 2,500 persons, including 10 peers, 10 baronets (Sir Thomas Phillipps prominent among them), 18 members of Parliament, 85 magistrates, 518 clergymen, and 553 dissenting ministers; another petition from Scotland was said to have been signed by 3,500. 250. His successor, Joseph Stevenson, himself went over to Rome in 1863, but was spared


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John Payne Collier’s opinions of this sordid controversy, nearly coeval with his own,251 remain unrecorded, but for all his unconcern with religious belief John regarded the new faith of his friend with less than deferent respect. ‘Poor blind Papist’, he called him, writing to Laing in 1851; but added wistfully—or with double-edged mock-envy—that ‘I only wish that I could make up my mind to swallow half of what every R. C. must gulp down. A firm & unhesitating belief is a great blessing.’ 252 Turnbull however was no meek creditor of scholarly pretensions, nor backward with his opinions, as his correspondents well knew, and by 1860 his stance on Perkins and Collier was untempered by friendship: ‘One person’, wrote Madden to Ingleby on 6 April, ‘I have heard openly say that he knew Mr C.’s writing well, and that he could swear the pencillings were his’, identifying the witness as ‘Mr B. [i.e., ‘Barclay’, as he was known] Turnbul[l]’. On 15 May Turnbull told Madden that he had visited Dulwich ‘to see the forgeries’, and he positively gloried in Ingleby’s Complete View, telling Hamilton in December that ‘we now only want the ‘‘Confessions of J. P. C.’’ and the public denigration of his friend Lemon—the abettor, if not the promoter, of these literary felonies’.253 The last startling insinuation about Lemon, which goes beyond any charge hitherto noted, cannot but also reflect Turnbull’s personal feelings toward his Record Office colleague during his own doomed appointment. If the home front proved undependable, John’s far-flung partisans provided some comfort in the dark hours of mid-1860. Charles W. Frederickson, a prominent New York book collector,254 addressed his privately printed Review of ‘An

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such persecution; see Levine 1986a, pp. 113–14; and 1986b, pp. 34–35. Even aer his resignation the Protestant Alliance, which had joined in the initial protests, attempted to blame Turnbull for the subsequent disappearance of some state papers—an insinuation firmly rejected by Romilly, but which no doubt contributed to the ‘ill health and anxiety’ preceding Turnbull’s early death (DNB, 1898). 251. In Turnbull’s case once again the Athenaeum and the Critic took opposite positions, the former leading the attack upon him (24 September and 1, 22, and 29 October 1859), the latter zealous in his defence (2, 9, and 23 February 1861). 252. JPC to Laing, 15 February 1851, EUL MS La.IV.17. 253. Madden to Ingleby, 6 April 1860, Folger MS C.a.14 (5); Madden Diary, 15 May 1860; Turnbull to Hamilton, 7 December 1860, Mostyn Papers. 254. Richard Grant White described Frederickson to Ingleby as ‘a creature as ignorant as a cart-horse of humane letters, & indeed of every-thing except mere type-setting & cotton-broking, in which occupations he has passed his life: a man who could not obtain the slightest consideration in cultivated circles, not to say among scholars’ (letter of 8 June 1861, Folger MS C.a.14 [34]). Frederickson later ‘convinced himself that Shakespeare’s writing had been done by others’, and abandoned all the ‘spurious’ works in his early collection, concentrating thereaer upon the Romantics (see Dickinson 1986, pp. 125–26); he remains a pioneer, with T. J. Wise and Harry Buxton Forman, in the movement of ‘sentimental’ or ‘association’ book collecting, which John Carter has chronicled (Taste and Technique in Book Collecting, rev. ed. [1970], pp. 19, 22). Among



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Inquiry’ and the Reply of J. Payne Collier (32 pp., reprinting the Athenaeum articles of 18 February 1860) to ‘the admirers of Mr. John Payne Collier, in the United States’, described himself as one ‘who appreciates [Collier’s] character as an honest man, an accomplished scholar, and a worthy elucidator of the text of Shakespeare’, and sent twenty copies to his hero.255 A more serious Americanbased Shakespeare amateur, Robert Balmanno, organized an elaborate year-end tribute to Collier, whom he and his friends considered an ‘ill used man’.256 For John ‘to have committed what is called Forgery in the Perkins folio is considered [by us] absolutely absurd’, Balmanno told T. J. Barton on 19 November. And at the cost of $100—subscribed by eighteen contributors ‘in hearty condemnation of the manner in which Mr. Collier has been treated by the critics of the British Museum, and their gratification at his satisfactory reply to the unworthy attacks made upon his literary reputation’—the self-styled enthusiast commissioned a silver-gilt inkstand ‘in form of the celebrated Warwick vase, upon a silver salver, encircled by a wreath of mulberries and mulberry leaves’.257 It was designed by Balmanno’s wife, Mary, an accomplished artist, poet, and composer, and the Athenaeum described it (12 January 1861) as of ‘more delicate perfection as a work of art than we had fancied possible in the United States’—a remark scoffed at a week later by the Critic, with the unworthy suggestion that the gi his large collection of books from Charles Lamb’s library was Collier’s presentation Poetical Decameron. 255. Collier annotated at least one, once in A. W. Ashby’s collection, with a presentation letter from Frederickson dated 22 May (Ashby’s note in Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.1456/2, fol. 101). It is now unlocated. 256. Balmanno (1780–1861) was a Brooklyn customs-house employee from Aberdeen, via London, a friend from the 1820s of Thomas Moore, Thomas Hood, and the Lambs, as well as Sir Thomas Lawrence, C. A. Stothard, and Henry Fuseli. In 1849, aged sixty-nine, he contracted a literary passion for Mary Cowden Clarke, whom he showered with correspondence and gis— culminating in a satin brocade easy chair adorned with an ivory portrait of Shakespeare, towards which fellow Shakespearians subscribed $297 of the $400 it cost him—all inspired (Balmanno said) by regard for ‘your unrivalled Concordance’. His extravagant admiration (‘I have considered you . . . one of the most estimable and extraordinary women that ever existed, certainly as exhibiting the most wonderful instincts of female perseverance ever heard of. . . . I may say with truth that, next to Shakespeare I worship you’) was reciprocated by Mrs. Clarke from long-distance, with the ‘beaming acquiescence’ (Altick) of her husband, even when his fantasies bordered on the indelicate: Balmanno describing, for instance, a dream in which Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway appeared to him. ‘She had the most superb bust I ever beheld’, he reported, ‘white as a lily, but exquisitely round and full, as that of Venus herself. There was rather a display of it, and I could seldom keep my eyes off’ (Clarke 1902, p. 24, from Balmanno’s letter of 2 April 1850; see also Altick 1948, pp. 169–75). 257. As described in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 26 January 1861. The cost was mentioned by Balmanno to Collier (4 March 1861, Folger MS Y.d.6 [2]) and contrasted with that of Mrs. Clarke’s chair—‘exactly four times as much’: Collier too was an admirer of Balmanno’s ‘Daughter in Love’, so the comparison may not have seemed invidious.


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from ‘our Transatlantic cousins’ was a hoax, and that ‘some testimonials, like Madeira, are considerably improved in value by a voyage out and home again’. By 23 February the Critic conceded that the presentation was genuine, but ‘with the exception of Messrs. Appleton and Co., the highly respectable publishers of New York, none of these names [of the subscribers] will be recognized in this country’, all being ‘gentlemen . . . whose position and acquirements, however respectable, give their opinion upon a literary question no weight whatever’. Collier, however, was understandably moved by the gesture. He thanked each one of the contributors individually, sending the letters to Balmanno to distribute, and treasured the inkstand to the end of his life. It is one of the few itemized bequests in his will, to Henrietta, whose gala marriage at Riverside in July was perhaps the only other bright spot in John’s annus terribilis.

The Complete View Clement Mansfield Ingleby’s A Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy has been widely described as the last word on Perkins and Collier. G. F. Warner in DNB wrote that it ‘practically closed the controversy’; Samuel Schoenbaum called it ‘the final blow’, which ‘misses nothing’, and which ‘remains the definitive treatment of this cause célèbre’.258 It is perhaps not quite so powerful or conclusive a book as its champions maintain, but it does cover practically all of the evolving case against text and perpetrator that we have traced through 1859–60. Ingleby’s task was complicated by his chronic ill health, and by some problems of access to the Perkins Folio in late 1860, as well as by the Duke of Devonshire’s stipulation that the facsimiles Ingleby commissioned were ‘not to be published unless they appear to me to convey a correct representation of the originals’.259 But with Ingleby still recovering from an attack suffered in Paris, and a ‘hydrotherapeutic’ cure at Great Malvern, the 350-page treatise (dated 1861) issued from the house of Nattali and Bond, Covent Garden, before the end of December 1860. Its 7-page table of contents, subdividing fourteen chapters, an introduction, and an appendix into 255 topical entries, suggests the fearsomely methodical organization of the indictment, which Schoenbaum thought

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258. Schoenbaum 1991, pp. 263–64. Dewey Ganzel’s adverse evaluation (‘shabby’ and ‘grossly dishonest’ in parts, altogether ‘the product of a conspiracy, perhaps the most successful in the history of English letters’) is predictable (Ganzel, pp. 324–37). 259. Devonshire to Ingleby, 19 June 1860, Folger MS C.a.14 (22). In the event the duke delegated that decision to Ellesmere’s librarian, G. H. Kingsley, and the vetting turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Ingleby, since (as the Literary Gazette for 29 December 1860 pointed out) the ‘authenticated facsimiles’—i.e., plates ‘sanctioned as faithful representations by an independent authority appointed for that purpose by the Duke of Devonshire’—resisted the kind of doubt cast on the Hamilton-Nethercli lithographs.



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‘marshals the evidence against the old scoundrel with overpowering destructive force’. The exhaustive recapitulation of philological, palaeographical, and provenential objections to Perkins, as well as the sequence of arguments pro and con in the press, take up nearly two-thirds of the volume, in which little is new,260 but nearly every claim and counter-claim of importance is coolly assessed.261 Schoenbaum remarked that ‘the arraignment is all the more devastating by reason of the author’s unimpassioned tone, his reluctance to press a doubtful point, [and] his willingness to make concessions’—‘as when he allows that even a truthful man might, like Collier, vary the details of an event in the retelling’, and felt that ‘only extraordinary self-control could purchase such restraint, for Ingleby truly detests Collier’ (1991, p. 264). Indeed, while preserving good courtroom decorum through most of A Complete View—a great improvement in that respect upon Shakspeare Fabrications—Ingleby, like Brae, made no secret of his animus. ‘In the attempt to be strictly impartial’, he began by admitting, ‘it is very likely that I have failed’, because of his ‘hearty conviction’ that all the impugned annotation and documents were spurious, and that ‘at present Mr. Collier’s character has not been vindicated from the presumption of complicity in so numerous and important a series of frauds’. By the end of his book, however, such qualifications vanished from Ingleby’s full-blooded censure. ‘Shame to the perpetrator of [this] foul libel on the pure genius of Shakspere!’, he exclaimed (p. 324), with an outcry to suggest appropriate redress, if Collier ‘for reasons best known to himself . . . evades inquiry’: ‘The man who lies under these appalling suspicions is the recipient of a Government pension.’ A er dealing with Perkins at unprecedented length, Ingleby devoted seventyfour pages to the Bridgewater and Dulwich manuscripts, ‘the forged State Paper’, and a few other ‘supposititious and suspected documents’—although in his summary he downplayed these impostures, which ‘merely vitiate our Elizabethan history’, as a ‘less grave’ offence than that of tampering with Shake-

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260. One argumentative novelty, perhaps dubious, was Ingleby’s insistence (pp. 114–16) that the Merivale-White-Madden-Hardy debate about the age of the pencillings, some of which demonstrably lie under the ink, was gratuitous, for ‘the primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink-writing, and in that alone’: i.e., having established (as not every reader of 1860 would agree) that ‘the ink-writing is a modern simulation’ we need not worry about the pencil marks in vacuo, but must simply infer that they too are modern, and (by ‘the conclusion of our senses’, if not quite by logical extension) that ‘all the pencil marks and corrections are in one handwriting [and] that that handwriting is one of our own day’. 261. One curious, and perhaps disingenuous, omission is any mention whatever of the Will Warner episode. Ganzel thought this ‘grossly dishonest’—a deliberate ‘suppression’ of evidence which Ingleby ‘himself had uncovered and believed in’ (pp. 327, 324), and which contradicted his own reconstruction of provenance. But as we have seen, Ingleby had elsewhere made public all the details of his interviews with Warner, and perhaps by now he, like Madden, had decided that Warner’s story was simply fictitious.


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speare. Here the six Bridgewater House papers, the six Dulwich examples so far identified, and the vexed players’ petition were discussed and condemned, each illustrated in facsimile by the lithographers Ashbee and Dangerfield.262 His own palaeographical skills being modest, Ingleby was punctilious in crediting the judgements of others, and his roll-call of experts—Hunter, Halliwell, Madden, Hamilton, Gairdner, Turnbull, Brewer, Hardy, and W. H. Black 263—would strike contemporaries as an imposing one. In the delicate matter of Robert Lemon’s testimony, Ingleby chose to phrase it that Collier’s friend, ‘who was not in the State Paper Office at that time [as attested by Hardy, subsequently quoted at length], has committed an oversight in speaking positively to a circumstance of which he could not have had any personal knowledge’ (p. 297). The first periodical to notice A Complete View was the Athenaeum, still unswervingly loyal to Collier, which dismissed the book and its thesis in one fly-swatting paragraph: ‘We cannot imagine any reader patient enough to toil through 350 pages of extracts and repetition’, especially as these contained nothing more than the ‘old, old story of insinuation and accusation which the public mind has so peremptorily rejected’ (22 December). Reader fatigue may indeed have doomed Ingleby to a muted response, but the Critic (5 January 1861), while agreeing that little was ‘new’ here, thought the book ‘not the less valuable; for it forms, as it were, a record of the whole business’, and quoted approvingly Ingleby’s indignant summing-up. The Literary Gazette (29 December) regarded A Complete View as ‘the turning-point of the whole discussion’, and Ingleby’s case as effectively proven—especially in view of the ‘authenticated facsimiles’— although it lamented the author’s ‘lust for vengeance’, which appeared to reflect the ‘vice of intemperance’. No such scruples inhibited Ingleby’s partisan friends: ‘It is the clearest and most incontrovertible detection of an exposure and an impostor which has ever appeared’, wrote Sir Francis Palgrave, recently an outspoken anti-Collierite; the perpetrator ‘is pinned to the wall. And let him writhe and wriggle as much as he may, there he must remain until he has rotted away.’ Madden hailed it, with gratified hyperbole, as ‘a complete Exposure of the most atrocious and most successful literary fraud that has ever been attempted’; and F. C. Parry thought it ‘completely convincing and convicting’.264 One outsider’s

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262. Ingleby treated the Bridgewater House First Folio separately, as a forepiece to the Perkins discussion, pp. 13–26. The nineteen facsimile illustrations in Complete View include one by Nethercli (the passage from the Perkins Folio Hamlet prepared for Ingleby in 1859) and twentysix other Perkins annotations (on two sheets with the imprint of Ashbee and Dangerfield), as well as the three-page letter of 26 April 1853 from Collier to Parry—a curious touch. 263. The former Assistant Keeper at the Public Record Office who had assisted Halliwell in his examination of the Bridgewater documents: see Halliwell’s Shakespeare (1853), i:185. 264. Palgrave to Ingleby, 14 January 1861; Madden to Ingleby, 8 January 1861; and Parry to Ingleby, 21 December 1860, Folger MS C.a.14 (30), (17), and (29).



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reaction to the case as it now stood may represent that of many, hitherto unexposed to or uninvolved in the grueling controversy: Dr. James Paget of Hanover Square, in receipt of a gi copy of Hamilton’s Inquiry, wrote on 20 December that ‘in addition to its importance as maintaining truth in Literature, it may be studied as the record of a medical case—a case of monomania for forgery, parallel with those that are more common, for thieving & killing’.265 Mercifully for John, such observations as Paget’s did not o en achieve mid-Victorian print. Collier never replied to A Complete View, nor is his opinion of it on record; to the best of our knowledge he never discussed it in print or in correspondence, nor marked up a copy with his own adversaria. But indeed the year-end of 1860 seemed to mark a cease-fire in the Perkins debate, widely thought to be one of triumph for the discreditors. Ingleby had defended himself from the possible charge of ‘striking a man who is down’ by retorting that ‘Mr. Collier is not down. He . . . is bolstered up by the officious aid of his numerous partisans and friends’, and promising that when these adherents withdraw their support, ‘we will not strike another blow’ (p. 326). If such a nolo contendere from Collier was not quite the surrender that Ingleby and Madden might have desired, some manner of concession was implicit in the silence from Collier’s camp: regarding, that is, at least those accusations now levied. Ingleby and his predecessors had by the new year of 1861 impugned some eighteen texts and documents, all of which remain condemned in the year 2003,266 and are believed to be John Payne Collier’s own perpetrations. But Ingleby also placed on record his apprehension of others, listing (p. 303) seven ‘suppositions and suspected documents’ that he had been unable to locate ‘in the depositories indicated by [Collier]’, and closed (p. 314n.) with a prescient warning: ‘I have no doubt that a great number of these fabrications yet remain unsuspected’. And although none of Ingleby’s extra suspects of 1860 has been fully discredited,267 dozens of other then-unquestioned spuria

Tseng 2004.2.20 08:57

265. Paget to Hamilton, 20 December 1860, Mostyn Papers. 266. These were the Perkins and Ellesmere Folios; six Bridgewater House documents (the letters from H. S. and Samuel Daniel; the so-called Daborne warrant; the accounts mentioning the performance of Othello in 1602; and two documents concerned with the Blackfriars Theatre); seven Dulwich documents (the ‘Sweete Nedde’ verses, the letters to Henslowe from John Marston and Richard Veale, the interpolated lines in Joan Alleyn’s letter to her husband, the 1596 list of Southwark inhabitants, the 1604 list of the King’s Men, and the 1609 Clink assessment list); the State Paper Office players’ petition; and two ballads from Collier’s own ‘Protectorate Manuscript’. 267. For Ingleby’s candidates see: (1) the 1633 certificate concerning the value of Blackfriars Theatre, QD A22.9; (2) a letter of Samuel Daniel now in the collection of the Duke of Sutherland, QD A22.15; (3) a contemporary docketing described by Collier as Sir Walter Ralegh’s signature, QD A27a.7; (4) the Inigo Jones drawing with legend ‘like a Sir Jon fallstaff’, QD A22.12; (5) and (6) the 1596 petition by local inhabitants protesting the opening of the Blackfriars Theatre, QD A16.18 (the non-existent ‘1576’ petition results from a mistake by Collier or a typographical error in HEDP); and (7) the letter of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, containing a reference to Middleton’s Game at Chess, QD A24.7.


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now swell the indictment. Among them are some fi een entries in the diary of Philip Henslowe at Dulwich; insertions in the diaries of Henry Machyn and Humphrey Mildmay at the British Museum, and in the early copyright registers at Stationers’ Hall; the ballads added to the Hall Commonplace Book; ownership inscriptions or other annotations in a number of printed books; and such wholecloth fabrications as ‘The Burning of the Globe’ and Thomas Brande’s account of the ‘pippin-pelted’ French actresses. To say nothing of what might materialize in the next two decades of a very long life, despite whatever regret or remorse, or even ‘distress’ at the indignity of the ongoing exposure that the unrepentant, unapologizing, unregenerate scholar-forger might already have suffered.

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