SOURCE: Clark, Sandra. “Charles Lamb and Jacobean Drama.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, no. 90 (April 1995): 58-67.

In the following essay, Clark comments on Lamb's highly personal and eccentric, but perceptive, style in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare.

In the tongue-in-cheek autobiography-cum-obituary he wrote dated 18 April 1827, Charles Lamb drew attention to his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare in terms characteristic of the wry, self-denigrating character he had created for himself;¹ except that he is misleading about its date (it was published 19 rather than, as he says here, 15 years earlier) his account of it is accurate: he was ‘the first to draw the public attention to the old English dramatists’. He was also the inspiration for others. Coleridge's Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and some of the Old English Dramatists and Hazlitt's course of lectures on...