SOURCE: Nicholes, Joseph. “Politics by Indirection: Charles Lamb's Seventeenth-Century Renegade, John Woodvil.” The Wordsworth Circle 19, no. 1 (winter 1988): 49-55.

In the following essay, Nicholes describes Lamb's historical drama, John Woodvil, as an analogical commentary on the political situation contemporary to Lamb.

The idea that Charles Lamb was one of the least politically minded of Romantic writers has been, since Lamb's own day, a prominent feature of his literary reputation. Burton Pollin and Winifred Courtney have shown, however, that Lamb was more concerned with politics than either he or his friends and biographers have been prepared to admit. “That Lamb was not apolitical can no longer be in doubt,” writes Mrs. Courtney in her recent critical biography Young Charles Lamb: 1775-1802 (1982), “nor did he just stop being political after a certain age” (p. 186).¹ Lamb began his historical drama, John Woodvil: A Tragedy, within a month of being lampooned as...