Specimens of English Dramatic Poets
Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare

This expanded two-volume 1835 anthology brings together some of most striking passages of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

Charles Lamb (Edited by)

9781108062893, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 October 2013

384 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.2 cm, 0.49 kg

Since its first appearance in 1808, this collection of extracts from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama has been highly acclaimed; the twentieth-century critic Edmund Blunden considered it 'the most striking anthology perhaps ever made from English literature'. In compiling the work, the critic and essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) aimed to achieve two goals: to illustrate the greatness of Shakespeare's often forgotten contemporaries, and to explore the way in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishmen experienced emotion. He includes only those scenes which he judges to show the best poetry and the deepest passion, adding only brief notes to let the texts speak for themselves. This reissue is of the expanded two-volume edition of 1835. Volume 1 focuses on the plays produced at the height of the Elizabethan theatre's popularity. Including extracts from Kyd, Marlowe and Jonson, among others, it remains a rich resource for literature students.

Preface
Table of reference to the extracts
Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton
Thomas Kyd
George Peele
Christopher Marlowe
Robert Tailor
Anthony Brewer
Authors uncertain
Joseph Cooke
Thomas Decker
Thomas Decker and John Webster
John Marston
George Chapman
Thomas Heywood
Thomas Heywood and Richard Broome
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley
William Rowley
Thomas Middleton
William Rowley, Thomas Decker, John Ford &c.
Cyril Tourneur
John Webster
John Ford
Samuel Daniel
Fulke Greville
Ben Jonson
Francis Beaumont.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]