 | |  |
A communication in The Athenaeum for 31 January 1852, signed "J. Payne Collier," announced his purchase of a copy of the Second Folio of Shakespeare inscribed "Tho. Perkins, his Booke" and containing thousands of alterations of the text written in a hand "probably not of later date than the Protectorate." This "Perkins Folio," now in the Huntington Library, does indeed contain thousands of alterations — perhaps 25,000 — ranging in size from marks of punctuation to whole lines and pairs of lines.
In 1859 Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, observed that the writing in the book was "not a genuine writing, either of the 17th or 18th century." Later evidence found at the Museum indicated that Collier himself had been the fabricator, and Clement Mansfield Ingleby, in A Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy, 1861, set forth all the evidence of Collier's wrongdoing. But, persuasive though the evidence is in its sheer bulk, most of it is at best circumstantial, and the rest is open to suspicion.
Madden, though a first-class paleographer, did not record in any detail his reasons for concluding that the Perkins annotations were written in the nineteenth century. Nor, until now, has anyone else made a thorough paleographical examination of them. A good many years ago I was struck by the close similarity between the writing of the corrections in the Perkins folio and that of eighty-three ballads written in a manuscript in the Folger Library. But though I then saw good reason for believing that Collier had written the ballads, it was not until I tackled the problem recently that I came upon the proof that at first eluded me. That proof, together with a demonstration that the ballads and the Perkins annotations are the products of one hand, is the matter of this paper.
By way of introduction I might reasonably be expected to provide an account of Collier's career, emphasizing the facts concerning his acquisition of the Second Folio, Collier's several descriptions of the
| | |