Charles Lamb - The tragedies of Shakespeare

Underlying Lamb’s essay is his desire to reevaluate Shakespeare’s tragedies with renewed support for Shakespeare and the category of the author. This desire, certainly shaped in part both by his romantic contemporaries and his consideration of contemporary theatre, exemplifies well the detailed arguments of M.H. Abrams for the romantic shift from audience-centered to author-centered poetics. It is with this idea that Lamb obviates the judgments which have identified actors such as Garrick with the authorial power of Shakespeare, and with the “great or heroic nature” (117) of Shakespeare’s characters.

In the first instance, Lamb argues that the human actor can never be seen to have a “mind congenial with the poet’s”, for in the “power of originating”, the author exercises an “absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man” (112). Even “the very idea of what an author is cannot be made comprehensible” to “unlettered persons”, such as stage-players an...