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)

9781108062909, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 October 2013

392 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.2 cm, 0.5 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 2 focuses on plays produced in the seventeenth century. Including extracts from Massinger, Fletcher and Shirley, among others, it remains a rich resource for literature students.

Table of reference to the extracts
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
John Fletcher
Philip Massinger
Philip Massinger and Thomas Decker
Philip Massinger and Nathaniel Field
Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley
George Chapman and James Shirley
James Shirley
Extracts from the Garrick plays.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]