When Matthew Gregory Lewis, then nineteen, wrote proudly to his mother from The Hague that he had just finished a romance called "The Monk" and that if the booksellers would not buy it he would publish it himself, he could have had little idea of the storm of controversy that within three years would make him one of the best-known (and most notorious) literary figures of late eighteenth-century England. The fame of The Monk (1796), indeed, has been kept alive through the novel's almost continual circulation in reprints and translations since Lewis's time, while his many other works--highly successful in his own day--have sunk into relative obscurity. Lewis concentrated most of his literary energy on plays--in the seventeen years following the publication of The Monk, he produced eighteen dramatic works--and he bears the dubious honor of being the most popular play-wright in a period in which theater was distinctly...