Manufactured Humbug
Frank Kermode: A great forger of the nineteenth century, 16 December 2004
John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the 19th Century
by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman.
Yale, 1483 pp., £100, August 2004,0 300 09661 5 Show More
by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman.
Yale, 1483 pp., £100, August 2004,
“... Shakespeare scholarship in the mid 19th century, one gathers, was not only very competitive but also morally dangerous. It could threaten the virtue, even on occasion the sanity, of its practitioners, a diverse group united only by their lust for Shakespeareana and their unflaggingly competitive spirit. Enthusiastic, self-taught amateurs, they developed professional skills at a time when university professionals took little interest in vernacular scholarship ... ”