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 paper will give some background to Lamb’s Specimens in general and its impact on the reception of early English drama in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with reference to Marlowe.

Gillian Russell is Professor Emerita at the University of York, UK.  She formerly taught at the ANU and the University of Melbourne. This paper derives from her current project, an edition of Lamb’s Specimens for The Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Gregory Dart (Oxford University Press). She has published recently on the Claude A. Prance collection of Lamb-related books in the National Library of Australia -- 'A Bookman's Charles Lamb: Claude A. Prance's Elian Twentieth Century',Studies in Romanticism 65:1 (2026).

Paul Salzman is an Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University. He has published widely in the fields of early modern women’s writing, the history and practice of scholarly editing, and literary and cultural history. Recent publications include Facsimiles and the History of Shakespeare Editing (2023) and Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon 1825 to 1915 (2018).

This seminar will be held in-person only

[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.