CEMS Seminar with Professor Emerita Gillian Russell
“Marlow’s plays & poems are totally vanished”: Charles Lamb’s recuperation of Christopher Marlowe in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakspeare (1808)
CEMS and ANU English are pleased to host Professor Emerita Gillian Russell for this in-person seminar.
When: Thursday 24 September, 1-2 pm
Where: ANU Campus (location TBC)
Registrations: Opening closer to the date
In 1804 Charles Lamb wrote to William Wordsworth that old editions of the plays and poems of Christopher Marlowe were now unobtainable: they had ‘totally vanished’.[1] In his anthology of extracts from the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808), Lamb included five extracts from plays by Christopher Marlowe – Lust’s Dominion, Tamburlaine Part One, Edward II, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus. While one of these plays, Edward II, had been reprinted in Robert Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays (1744), the others had not, meaning that general readers of the Specimens, who could not afford old quartos, were being exposed to plays such as Doctor Faustus for the first time. This was also the first time that plays by Marlowe had been grouped together (– Lust’s Dominion was later judged not to be by him). Lamb’s selection and his commentary on the plays paved the way for a Marlowe revival in the Regency, including Edmund Kean’s The Jew of Malta at Drury Lane Theatre in April 1818 and editions of Marlowe’s plays in 1818 (Broughton and Oxberry) and 1826 (Robinson’s 3 volume Works). Focusing on Lamb’s treatment of Edward II, this paper considers how the Specimens were of crucial importance to nineteenth-century interest in Marlowe and his eventual canonical status today.
[1] Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, October 13, 1804, The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, vol. 2 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976), p. 147.
Gillian Russell is Professor Emerita of Eighteenth-Century Literature in the University of York. Her research has focused on the relationship between theatre and war, sociability, and the history of printed ephemera, and her books include The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793-1815 (Oxford, 1995), Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge, 2007) and The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Politics and the Cultures of Collecting (Cambridge 2020). The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Award by the British Academy in 2021. Gillian is currently working on an edition for OUP of Charles Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who Lived around the Time of Shakspeare (1808), part of a general edition of Lamb’s works, edited by Gregory Dart. Lamb’s Specimens, based on the Garrick collection of early modern plays in the British Museum, as well as collections such as Robert Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays, was influential in the rediscovery of the work of many important dramatists, including Marlowe, Middleton, and Massinger.