John Payne Collier

John Payne Collier 1789-1883, English critic, editor, and forger. The marginal notes and signatures supposedly discovered by him on original documents, especially those concerned with Shakespeare, were later exposed as having been forged by him while in the service of the duke of Devonshire. His authentic work included A Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (1865) and the reprinting of early English tracts.

Collier, John Payne (1789–1883), antiquarian, whose The History of English dramatic poetry to the time of Shakespeare: and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration (1831) contained valuable new documentary information but was contaminated with his own fabrications, the first of his insidious literary frauds. In 1840 he founded the Shakespeare Society for which he published many rare works including The Memoirs of Edward Alleyn (1841). It was the falsification of the marginal corrections of the so-called Perkins Folio (a Second folio of Shakespeare's plays dated 1632, with a possibly forged signature of Tho. Perkins on its cover) that finally brought him discredit.

Doubt was cast on the nature and extent of Collier's frauds by D. Ganzel in a biography, Fortune and Men's Eyes (1982).