SOURCE: Heller, Janet Ruth. “Lamb and Reader-Response Criticism.” In Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama, pp. 115-27. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Heller assesses Lamb's “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” and other critical essays that concentrate on the act of reading as a creative process.

Scholars have recently devoted many books, articles, and conferences to the responses of readers to texts and investigated different authors' concepts of “the implied reader.”¹ Writers like Stanley Fish, Walter Slatoff, and Wolfgang Iser have explored the demands that poets and novelists make on the reading public. However, few twentieth-century critics have taken any interest in the reader's reaction to a published play, perhaps because they define drama as solely a performing art.

Since reader-response scholars have neglected plays, one must turn to film criticism to find comparisons of the responses of readers to dramas, novels, and...