James Orchard Halliwell, later Halliwell-Phillipps, was an accomplished stealer, buyer, seller, and defacer of manuscripts and old books; a prominent literary controversialist famous for producing an almost inconceivable number of tiny, scarce publications; and the great Shakespearean biographer, or biographical researcher, of the nineteenth century. He is also a figure linking the great tradition of Renaissance antiquarianism with modernist or postmodernist revivals of antiquarian sentiment and method.

Halliwell was born on 21 June 1820 in Chelsea, London. His father was Thomas Halliwell, who had emigrated from Lancashire sometime in the late eighteenth century and who became a prosperous businessman-a glover like Shakespeare's father, as James Halliwell was wont to joke. The youngest of three sons, James was precocious. He matriculated as a pensioner at Trinity College, Cambridge, on 13 November 1837, but after a series of suspicious developments he continued his education at Jesus College half a year later.

Halliwell had been...