Collier, Jeremy 1650-1726
Anglican Church historian and clergyman

Born in Stow, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Ipswich and Cambridge, he became rector of Ampton, and a lecturer at Gray's Inn, London. He opposed William III and Mary, refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance in 1689. Fierce in his polemics, he spent some time in prison and in temporary exile abroad as a political outlaw. He is best known, however, for A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), a vehement attack on Restoration dramatists. Replies by John Dryden, William Congreve, Sir John Vanbrugh and others were generally considered to be ineffective. Collier's strictures did much ostensibly to reform, but actually to tame, comic drama in the 18th century. He also wrote the Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical, and Poetical Dictionary (4 vols, folio, 1701-21) and the scholarly An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (2 vols, folio, 1708-14). He was consecrated a nonjuring bishop in 1713.

Bibliography: Sister Rose Anthony, The Jeremy Collier Controversy (1937)