ABSTRACT
John Payne Collier (1789–1883) was a research scholar of great industry and unusual gifts, contributor to the publications of the Camden Society, the Percy Society, and the Shakespeare Society, editor of an annotated Shakespeare in eight volumes (1842–4). Unhappily, his addiction to forgery makes anything that passed through his hands (and he had access to an immense number of documents) subject to suspicion. The brief extracts below, from early contributions to the ‘Edinburgh Review’, are conventional and free of ‘discoveries’.
