Intro by Raeto West:
Collier (or whatever his real name was) shows all the signs of being a crypto-Jew. His upbringing is obscure. He spent a lot of time in his youth reading out-of-the-way books. (Think of Disraeli's father's literary works). He tried for the Bar, apparently half-heartedly and thought he had not much chance at success. He turned down lower legal positions. He sniffed around eminent writers; and was successful in finding a patron who willingly supported him. And so on.
The noise made about The Merchant of Venice suggest to me that accurate but extremely disagreeable references to Jewish beliefs, laws, secrets, plans might well have been targeted by Jews and removed where possible.
I rediscovered Collier in Mark Jones's edited book, which I quote just below here. I follow it with the complete Dictionary of National Biography entry for Collier, taken from archive.org, possibly with some scanning errors, though I think nothing important. I'm inviting the curious reader to dive in. - RW 18 Auguest 2024
“The career of the greatest and most pernicious of all nineteenth century forgers, John Payne Collier (1789-1883), was built on this obsession. [Mark Jones says the obsession with signatures, marks, authentication was a humanist thing.
Jones hasn't considered intentional corruption: it is possible that forgers wanted to change the text of anything critical of Jews. - RW] His vast output has corrupted, perhaps permanently, the record of the texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His insertions in Philip Henslowe's Diary, his invention of the Old Corrector' whose 'contemporary' improvements were written in the margins of a Second Folio (1632) of Shakespeare, the similar emendations to the 1611 Spenser which bore Michael Drayton's 'signature' - all these were products of Collier's agile hand, but still greater command of his authors' sense. The Collier controversy rumbled on throughout his long life, and is not dead. There is no exhibit here, for the watchful skill and enmity of 'the Keeper of Manuscripts', Sir Frederic Madden (1801-73), kept Collier's artefacts out of the British Museum.”
From
Fake?: The Art of Deception (1990, British Museum), edited by Mark Jones. — Archive.org has a full colour scan of the book (University of California Press)
G. F. W.