Collier, John Payne (1789-1883)

English Shakespearean critic. He fraudulently claimed that his amendments to Shakespeare's work in the margins of a copy of the 1632 folio (the ‘Perkins folio’) were genuine; they were later proved to be forgeries.

Collier was born in London. He worked as a parliamentary reporter for The Times before he became a barrister 1829. The Poetical Decameron appeared 1820; in 1825-27 he prepared a new edition of Old Plays by the writer and publisher Robert Dodsley (1703-1764), to which he added six more hitherto not in print. From then onwards he devoted his life to the study of Elizabethan literature, especially to the plays of Shakespeare.

His Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare's Plays (1852) caused a sensation among English and German scholars. Other works include The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration (1831), which also contained some fake information.