John Payne Collier
(11th January 1789 – 17th September 1883)
John Payne Collier was an English writer and Shakespearean critic. He was also a forger who would pass off his own annotations and amendments as old ones. Scholars today still debate if Collier was rotten to the bone and everything he produced was a forgery or if this was to a large degree a conspiracy of dilettant upper-class folks against a hard-working enthusiast from the lower class. The truth often lies somewhere in the middle. While some of the annotations have been shown by scientific methods as forgeries, Collier also did a lot of valuable work in his compilations and republications of rare volumes.
