February 10, 1775

Charles Lamb (February 10, 1775 to December 27, 1834) was a beloved writer among his 19th century comrades. That he is now forgotten may be both unjust and ironic. The latter because among Lamb's accomplishments was restoring to public awareness the accomplishments of certain of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

Charles Lamb published Specimens of English Dramatic poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare, (1808). His selections were designed to remind his contemporaries of the accomplishments of their forebears.

Of the multiple selections Lamb made, from the work of the dramatist Thomas Middleton (1580 - 1627), we have one cut from the tragicomedy The Witch (c 1616).

'Whole earth's foundation bellow[s] and the spirits
Of the entomb'd ... burst out from their marbles[,]
Nay draw yon' moon to my involv'd designs [--]
Fire I know as well as can be, when my mother's mad
and our great cat angry, for one spits French
then and th' other spits Latin ...'

One edition of Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets: Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (1903) points out the particular importance of Lamb's selections is:

'... the biographical interest bearings and relations of Lamb's various Books and of the multifarious casual and fugitive writings in verse and prose that constitute the main body of his Works. Regarding the Specimens from the historical standpoint then, I need only remind the reader very summarily of what has been often said before, that the book was in a high degree both original and originative .

'It was original not only in the character of the selections made from a whole literature and in the intellectual quality and formula of the incidental criticisms. "Notes" as Lamb modestly called them, but it was most of all original by the direction in which it looked. And here its originality becomes originative.

'For we may consider that this piece of casual book making formed the beginning of that modern English Scholarship or Scholarship in English which, since Lamb's day, has gathered its own glory of great names not unworthy to be inscribed on the same scroll with [those]... of the more ancient Learning. Hardly an Elizabethan of any note but has now ... his dues of commentary and recension of his text but when Lamb produced his Specimens
..the names of ...Thomas Dekker...and many another were almost as completely forgotten as their works were virtually lost.... Ben Jonson [was] almost solitary in this [and] stood out above the flood of oblivion which had submerged his contemporaries and predecessors in the dramatic art all save Shakespeare...

'...Finally to have done with this historical aspect of the matter, it may be noted that, though Lamb was connected in so intimate and friendly a way with Hazlitt and Coleridge, those two great exponents of Shakespeare, and of things in general it is more likely that they received knowledge and stimulation from ...[Charles Lamb] both from his written word and from his more copious stammered rhapsody upon many a darling passage, than that he was by them directed into the long unvisited and almost forgotten Elysian Fields of England's greatest literature. Hazlitt indeed knew nothing at all of these things till many years later and Lamb has told us how his friend then carried down to the country a load of books with the business like purpose of getting up the whole subject once for all in order to lecture upon it in the following winter season... Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare again belong to 1811-12 and in undertaking them he was turning to account a new interest in our Dramatic Literature which the Specimens had done much to awaken...'

Just so.