SOURCE: Heller, Janet Ruth. “Lamb and Reader-Response Criticism.” In Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama, pp. 115-27. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, Heller assesses Lamb's “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” and other critical essays that concentrate on the act of reading as a creative process.]

Scholars have recently devoted many books, articles, and conferences to the responses of readers to texts and investigated different authors' concepts of “the implied reader.”¹ Writers like Stanley Fish, Walter Slatoff, and Wolfgang Iser have explored the demands that poets and novelists make on the reading public. However, few twentieth-century critics have taken any interest in the reader's reaction to a published play, perhaps because they define drama as solely a performing art.

Since reader-response scholars have neglected plays, one must turn to film criticism to find comparisons of the responses of readers to dramas, novels, and short stories and the responses of audiences to motion pictures based on works of fiction. Adaptations of Shakespeare's plays have generated debates among film critics. While commentators such as Jack J. Jorgens view movies as “truest to the effect of Shakespeare's dramatic verse,” other scholars complain that films are overly concerned with setting and other external details and thus neglect poetic language and important themes. According to Siegfried Kracauer, “Film and tragedy are incompatible with each other” because tragedy is “an exclusively mental experience.” In contrast, “films cling to the surface of things. They seem to be the more cinematic, the less they focus directly on inward life, ideology, and spiritual concerns.” When a drama is made into a motion picture, there is “a shift of emphasis from the dimension of intellectual messages to that of photographable objects.” Kracauer believes that the photographic images of Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet are so obtrusive that they distract the spectator from Shakespeare's use of language. Seymour Chatman and Wolfgang Iser have also observed that films of literary works affect viewers very differently from the way the original novel or short story affects readers. Chatman argues in “What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa)” that films have an overabundance of images.

Film narrative possesses a plenitude of visual details, an excessive particularity compared to the verbal version. … But … unlike painting or sculpture, narrative films do not usually allow us time to dwell on plenteous details. Pressure from the narrative component is too great. Events move too fast.

In Story and Discourse, Chatman points out that the reader reacts to “only what is named,” while movies present both central and peripheral characters and objects. Because films are so visual, directors have trouble with “nonscenic” narratives, which emphasize “a realm of ideas” rather than a specific location. In contrast, literature can easily convey this “nowhere” realm. Wolfgang Iser goes even further in his discussion of Fielding's novel and the movie version of Tom Jones. Iser contends that the numerous details of the motion picture limit viewers' imaginative responses.

While reading Tom Jones, they may never have had a clear conception of what the hero actually looks like, but on seeing the film, some may say, “That's not how I imagined him.” The point here is that the reader of Tom Jones is able to visualize the hero virtually for himself, and so his imagination senses the vast number of possibilities; the moment these possibilities are narrowed down to one complete and immutable picture, the imagination is put out of action and we feel we have somehow been cheated.

The complex, “round” characters of many novels are flattened when they are portrayed on screen by an actor or actress. According to Chatman, “The all too visible player … seems unduly to circumscribe the character despite the brilliance of the performance.”²

Although Charles Lamb made many of these same arguments—in regard to staged dramas—150 years ago, none of the above critics mentions Lamb's essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation” (1811). Here, Lamb insists that all of Shakespeare's tragedies suffer when performed, and he examines Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, and Othello to determine why they have a greater impact when read. This essay has been considered eccentric by most twentieth-century commentators. For example, Wimsatt and Brooks speak condescendingly of “Lamb's baroque whimsicalities concerning Shakespeare's tragedies.”³ In this [essay], I hope to show that “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” is not an aberration. The arguments in Lamb's essay are consistent with his overall approach to reading literature. Furthermore, many of his conclusions anticipate those of Chatman, Kracauer, and Iser and are remarkably close in spirit to the film criticism of these men.

It seems strange that Lamb, who often celebrates the theater in his poems, letters, and essays, could write “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare.” He frequently attended Drury Lane and Covent Garden, wrote reviews of various plays for London periodicals, composed prologues and epilogues for his friends' dramas, had his comedy Mr H produced, and even fell in love with the actress Fanny Kelly. In a note to Robert Lloyd, Lamb insists, “A crowd of happy faces justling into the playhouse at the hour of six is a more beautiful spectacle to man than the shepherd driving his ‘silly’ sheep to fold————” (Letters, 1:271). Also, in “My First Play,” Elia calls the theater “the most delightful of recreations” (Works, 2:100). However, Lamb carefully distinguishes between dramatic genres that he feels succeed on stage and those that do not. In general, he finds comedy well suited to performance, especially “artificial comedy” (comedy of manners). But Lamb consistently expresses reservations about the staging of tragedy. His main criterion is the effect of the genre on an audience: comedy allows the spectators to escape the “shackles” of their ordinary lives to experience the freedom of a fictional dream world (see “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century,” in Works, 2:141-43), but tragedy is more metaphysical and requires deeper audience involvement and imaginative effort, which reading alone can provide.⁴

John I. Ades has observed, “In all of Lamb's Shakespearean criticism, he commends only one tragic performance as completely successful: a production of Othello in which Robert Bensley played Iago.”⁵ Lamb believed that the best tragedies should be read, not performed. This conviction grew out of his belief, shared by other romantic writers, that reading good literature provides abstraction and actively involves a person, while the stage renders one passive by appealing to the senses. Lamb spent most of his free time with his books, according to his own testimony in The Last Essays of Elia (1833): “When I am not walking, I am reading” (Works, 2:172). He compares reading to having a private “chapel” or “oratory” (2:458). Furthermore, Lamb castigates those who do not take reading seriously enough. This is his complaint in “Readers Against the Grain” (1825): more Englishmen are literate, and publications are more affordable, but the average reader's experience has degenerated into a fashionable hobby.

We read to say that we have read. … These are your readers against the grain, who yet must read or be thought nothing of—who, crawling through a book with tortoise-pace, go creeping to the next Review to learn what they shall say of it.

(Works, 1:272-73)⁶

This passive, unimaginative response to books disgusts the essayist. If people cannot become actively involved in what they read, they should avoid great literature.

Like Coleridge, Lamb views the ideal relationship between a writer and a reader as that of two intelligent and creative friends. Over and over, Lamb insists that both authors and readers must cooperate with and challenge one another. The writer must avoid patronizing the reader or beating him over the head with an argument. In turn, the reader must allow the writer imaginative freedom, even if the author's statements conflict with the reader's viewpoint. No one who is close-minded can appreciate good literature. For example, Lamb warns the readers of Hazlitt's prose that they must be receptive to new ideas. “Table-Talk is not calculated for cold or squeamish readers. The average thinker will find his common notions a little too roughly disturbed. He must brace up his ears to the reception of some novelties.”⁷ Readers should also be introspective. Lamb classifies the kind of reader who will appreciate the poems of Charles Lloyd as “one that has descended into his own bosom; that has probed his own nature even to shivering” (Works, 1:195). Introspection is valued by Lamb and the other romantics because they believe that great literature must be psychologically profound. A person who never examines his or her emotions and behavior will be blind to many dimensions of literary works.

Lamb was also concerned about the public's tendency to interpret writing too literally. In a proposed “Dedication” to the readers of Elia, he urges his audience to avoid interpreting the essays “perversely in [the] absolute and literal sense” (Works, 2:299). Lamb elaborates on this overly literal frame of mind when discussing Scotchmen in “Imperfect Sympathies” (2:59-61). Like Coleridge, Lamb wants readers to be open-minded and flexible, instead of biased and rigid.

Lamb often speaks of the writer/reader relationship as if there were a contract between the two parties, and he criticizes any violations of the necessary mutual respect. He complains to Wordsworth that “The Cumberland Beggar” contains passages which

are too direct and like a lecture: they dont slide into the mind of the reader, while he is imagining no such matter.—An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think upon this subject. This fault, if I am right, is in a ten thousandth worse degree to be found in Sterne and many many novelists & modern poets, who continually put a sign post up to shew where you are to feel. They set out with assuming their readers to be stupid. Very different from Robinson Crusoe, the Vicar of Wakefie[l]d, Roderick Random, and other beautiful bare narratives.—There is implied an unwritten compact between Author and reader; I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it.

(Letters, 1:265-66)⁸

Twentieth-century critics like Fish, Slatoff, and Iser share this perspective. They view reading as an active and creative process and attempt to make literary criticism more sensitive to the role of the reading public. Stanley Fish writes in Surprised by Sin (1967), “Meaning is an event, something that happens, not on the page, where we are accustomed to look for it, but in the interaction between the flow of print (or sound) and the actively mediating consciousness of a reader-hearer.” Furthermore, writers such as Milton may try to change the reader's conventional values and opinions. In With Respect to Readers, Slatoff frequently cites with approval Coleridge's dictum that literature “brings the whole soul of man into activity.” Slatoff argues, “Because literature counts on it, the reader must bring his own consciousness and experiences to bear.” This emphasis on the reader's introspection resembles Lamb's contract. In The Implied Reader, Iser argues that good authors design texts which “entangle” readers in the process of interpretation to give readers more insight into themselves and their world. He explores how authors like Fielding use various strategies “to open [the reader] up to the workings of the text.”⁹ This process of preparing the reader to appreciate literature intrigued the romantics as well, as is clear from Coleridge's comments on the opening scenes of Shakespeare's plays, Hazlitt's emphasis on sympathy, and Lamb's analysis of author-reader interaction.

When readers break the unwritten contract described by Lamb, the results are disastrous: literary geniuses suffer from neglect. Reviewing The Excursion in 1814, Lamb denounces the public's response to Wordsworth's poetry.

The causes which have prevented the poetry of Mr. Wordsworth from attaining its full share of popularity are to be found in the boldness and originality of his genius. The times are past when a poet could securely follow the direction of his own mind into whatever tracts it might lead. A writer, who would be popular, must timidly coast the shore of prescribed sentiment and sympathy. He must have just as much more of the imaginative faculty than his readers, as will serve to keep their apprehensions from stagnating, but not so much as to alarm their jealousy. He must not think or feel too deeply.

(Works, 1:170)¹⁰

Repeatedly in his criticism, Lamb urges the public to overcome its fear of taking imaginative risks, and he champions the work of difficult, risk-taking writers and artists. Like Coleridge and Hazlitt, he tries to educate reluctant readers to help them benefit more from books and pictures.

The contract between writers/artists and readers/viewers is the subject of much of Lamb's essay “On the Genius and Character of Hogarth” (1811). Toward the beginning of the article, Lamb emphasizes, “In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the impression which we receive depends upon the habit of mind which we bring with us to such perusal.” While “superficial” viewers will merely laugh (or sneer) at Hogarth's low-life subjects, more thoughtful people will sympathize with his harlots, drunks, and rakes. Lamb frequently describes the works of Hogarth as “objects of meditation.” The ideal viewer considers more than color and style when in an art gallery: he or she can penetrate these external elements to reach an understanding of “the poetical and almost prophetical conception in the artist.” Lamb celebrates works of art and literature “where the spectator must meet the artist in his conceptions half way; and it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists shew everything distinct and full” (Works, 1:72, 74, 78).

The best writers and artists use understatement and carefully chosen symbols to convey ideas, not obvious phrases or icons. Lamb praises Shakespeare's ability to sustain dramatic understatement. Using the subtle concluding dialogue of King Lear as an example, Lamb demonstrates that Shakespeare purposely avoids forcing Lear's recognition of Kent into a tear-jerking reconciliation that ostentatiously displays the dramatist's powers. Instead, Shakespeare “trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence” (Works, 1:345-46). Note that in this passage, as in the essay about Hogarth, Lamb emphasizes the mutual “trust” involved in the writer's or artist's contract with the public.

In “Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art” (1833), Lamb distinguishes between “poetic” and “pictorial” subjects: “In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing.” The unimaginative pictorial artist violates the artist/spectator contract because he stresses obvious external details, while the poetic painter probes what is hidden by physical appearance. To illustrate “poetic” handling of characters, Lamb cites Shakespeare's development of Othello and Falstaff. Instead of emphasizing each man's body, the playwright concentrates on “the respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character.” Their thoughts and emotions outweigh their forms when the plays are read. However, in most pictures of the two characters, Othello's blackness and Sir John's corpulence predominate, blotting out their “moral or intellectual attributes” (Works, 2:233). Similarly, Lamb is outraged by pictures of Shakespeare's heroines. In a letter to Samuel Rogers in 1833, the essayist complains that he feels “tied down” by the portraits of Juliet and Imogen at Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. Such illustrations of imaginative literature will always fail because they attempt to “confine the illimitable.”¹¹

In many of his essays, Lamb tries to teach his readers how to go beyond external details and first impressions to reach a more profound understanding of art and literature.¹² The essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” is a good example of Lamb's attempts to broaden his public's imaginative horizons. It was published in 1811, shortly after his article on Hogarth. Just as Lamb emphasized the “meditative” quality of Hogarth's prints, here he stresses Shakespeare's interest in the minds of his dramatis personae. Staged versions of Shakespeare's tragedies distort the protagonists and violate the literary contract because the theater accentuates the bodies and gestures of characters like Hamlet, Lear, and Richard III, while the dramatist is more interested in their intellects and their psychology.

Lamb begins “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” with a protest against what he considers undue attention to actors at the expense of dramatic geniuses. Specifically, he objects to a plaque in Westminster Abbey equating the talents of Shakespeare and David Garrick, the famous eighteenth-century actor. Lamb argues that there is no ground of comparison between the poet, who understands “the internal workings and movements of a great mind,” and an actor, who merely imitates the external “signs” of passion (Works, 1:98).¹³

Like Seymour Chatman, Lamb contrasts the “slow apprehension” allowed in reading drama to “the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse.” Because of this rapid parade of visual images and the prominence of the players, performances tend to elevate the actor over the playwright and may even cause the audience “to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with the character which he represents.” Note Lamb's insistence here on first-person plural pronouns, which implicate both himself and his reading public in this misapprehension. The temptation to identify an actor with a tragic protagonist is strongest when good actors like John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons are on the stage. Lamb praises these “two great performers,” but he laments the excessive “distinctness” of the theater:

When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

(1:98)¹⁴

Like Iser, Lamb finds that the overly specific images of a performance limit the imaginative freedom of the audience: “How cruelly this operates on the mind, to have its free conceptions thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality.” Moreover, fancy props and elaborate gestures distance the spectators from the play. Lamb complains that an abundance of “non-essentials” forces the audience to watch like “a reviewer” or a “judge,” instead of viewing the action sympathetically through the eyes of the protagonists (1:99, 111).¹⁵

Lamb further denigrates acted drama by linking it to the common practice of excerpting significant passages from Shakespeare's plays for schoolboys and elocutionists to spout. This short digression is very effective rhetorically. Even twentieth-century readers groan when Lamb reminds us how often one hears “To be or not to be” declaimed out of context and “pawed about” until it has lost all meaning (1:99).¹⁶

Lamb observes that the subtleties of good drama are usually obscured by the actors' practice of overemphasizing scenes of conflict and anger. These episodes of “coarse” passion appeal to “the eyes and ears of the spectators,” just as bad art is merely “pictorial.” Lamb acknowledges the popularity of such scenes, but he argues that “the best dramas,” especially those of Shakespeare, use dialogue and soliloquy to convey to readers and spectators “knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a character.” Here again, the theater distorts drama and violates the contract by emphasizing externals and thus “reduces every thing to a controversy of elocution.” The actors' emphasis on declamation wreaks havoc on the more delicate passages of Shakespeare's plays. Lamb uses assonance and consonance to stress the contrast between characters who should declaim loudly and those whose oratory is not appropriate: “Every character, from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator” (1:99-100).

“On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” is pervaded with antitheses that emphasize the distinction between reading drama and seeing a performance. Oppositions of the imaginative and the material, the free and the restricted, abound in the essay. I have listed these antitheses below.

• POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES ASSOCIATED WITH READING SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS

• the imagination
• the mind
• the intellectual
• the internal
• depths of the sea
• meditation
• visions and dreams
• motives, impulses
• ideas, conceptions, understanding
• abstraction
• thought
• illusion
• freedom, free conceptions

NEGATIVE ATTRIBUTES ASSOCIATED WITH PERFORMANCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS

• the senses
• the body
• the physical, the corporal
• the external
• the surface
• action
• the material, flesh and blood, substance
• gestures, tricks, voice
• ordinary perception, eyes and ears
• distinct shape, distinctness
• appearance, costume reality
• restriction, confinement, strait-lacing, laws, courts, cramping, pressing down

Of all Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet, Richard III, and Lear suffer the most on stage. According to Lamb, Hamlet is a meditative, retiring man. Because of the prince's temperament, it is awkward for him to appear before hundreds of spectators to utter his innermost thoughts in soliloquies. Lamb stresses Hamlet's reticence and contemplative nature by using many synonyms for the concepts. The prince indulges in “solitary musings,” “silent meditations,” “light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations.” Lamb refers to the character as “shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet” (1:100-101).¹⁷

Lamb admits condescendingly that some members of the audience need the theater because they cannot read Shakespeare and therefore cannot be touched by his thought and passion. Perhaps the critic is thinking of “readers against the grain,” as well as illiterate people. Lamb insists, “I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted” (1:101).¹⁸

Actors tend to take certain scenes out of context when Hamlet is performed. Lamb notes that players always exaggerate the prince's harshness to Polonius and Ophelia, thus vulgarizing the passion and drawing undue attention to the offensive side of the hero's character. These tragedians neglect Hamlet's “soreness of mind,” which is his motive for such conduct. The prince's madness should not be overdone but should fit into the overall pattern, “the whole of his character.” Lamb doubts that even Garrick could have performed the role of Hamlet adequately. No matter how commanding Garrick's voice and eyes were, these amounted to mere “physical properties” which could never capture the prince's “intellect” (1:101, 103).¹⁹

Just as Hamlet's mind is neglected in performance, so the “rich intellect” of Richard III is buried under the “butcher-like representation of him that passes for him on the stage.” The audience loses sight of “the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard.” Lamb compares G. F. Cooke's King Richard to “the giants and ogres in children's books.” The essayist implies that only a childlike audience can applaud such stereotyped acting. In contrast, readers can “qualify” their “horror” at Richard's crimes with an appreciation of his intellect (1:105-6).²⁰ Lamb uses rhetorical questions and first-person pronouns to implicate his readers in the argument, again reaffirming the author/reader contract.

Macbeth presents similar difficulties for the stage. Reading the tragedy offers a “vantage-ground of abstraction” which prevents “the painful anxiety” of a theater audience. While a reader can concentrate on “the sublime images, the poetry alone,” the stage version of Macbeth is too close to the reality of murder (1:106).

Likewise, watching old Lear “tottering about the stage with a walking stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting.” The theater emphasizes the king's body too much. Lamb concludes, “The Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. … The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual.” Lear is even harder to act than Richard III or Macbeth because the audience needs to identify intensely with the former in order for the tragedy to have its full impact. “On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear. … The play is beyond all art” (1:107).²¹ While the spectator at a comedy of manners must distance himself or herself from the characters, the reader of King Lear must feel close to the suffering protagonist. Lamb's emphasis on this sympathetic identification clearly influenced Hazlitt's analyses in Characters of Shakespear's Plays, where Hazlitt cites the above passage (Works, 4:270-71).

In the opening paragraphs of the essay, Lamb had criticized facile comparisons between Shakespeare and Garrick. In the middle of the essay, Lamb attacks another false comparison, the common remark that Othello's “natural” quality resembles that of George Barnwell. He views Lillo's play as a “nauseous sermon” which cannot be likened to Shakespeare's tragedy because George Barnwell lacks the psychological insight of Othello. The presentation of Othello in a theater tends to flatten the characters until the play seems similar to inferior dramas. Thus, the “common auditor” cannot perceive “the texture of Othello's mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open.” Although Othello seems more feasible for the stage than Lear, it fails almost as miserably. The theater overwhelms our imagination's view of the Moor, and we “sink Othello's mind in his colour” (1:102, 108, n. 1). Clearly, Lamb's argument here resembles his complaints about pictures of Othello in “Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art.”

Lamb finds the caresses of black Othello and white Desdemona “extremely revolting” on stage (1:108). Some literary critics have accused Lamb of “a benighted racism” in his remarks. However, the issue seems more complicated. Joan Coldwell points out that “only recently some who saw the ‘coal-black’ Olivier in the film version confessed to a similar sense of outrage.”²² In the context of “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” Lamb's objections should not be read as an indictment of intermarriage but rather as a protest against the theater's disfigurement of a powerful tragedy when spectacle impedes the audience's emotional involvement. He clarifies his position in a footnote which compares the portrayal of Adam and Eve in Milton's Paradise Lost to the uncomfortably naked figures in most paintings. Milton can bestow “Paradisaical senses” on the reader that prevent anyone from viewing the poem as pornography. Othello also causes the reader to perceive the characters in special ways. Lamb concludes, “So in the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own” (1:108 and n. 1).

Lamb argues that Shakespeare's supernatural characters must fail on stage because they also violate the contract and make “gross attempts upon the senses.” While a reader is “spell-bound” by the witches in Macbeth, an audience finds them laughable: “the sight actually destroys the faith.” Just as ghost stories cannot be effective in a well-lit room full of friends, dramatic ghosts cannot be believed under glaring lights in a crowded theater. Similarly, Lamb questions whether The Tempest can be performed on stage effectively. He argues, “Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted,—they can only be believed” (1:109-10).²³ Like Hazlitt, Lamb finds that the theater does not allow enough abstraction to enable the audience to respond imaginatively to the supernatural.

Although scenery is useful in comedy of manners and domestic genres, it ruins the more abstract imitation that is necessary to sustain the illusion of Shakespearean drama, which appeals “to the higher faculties.” Similarly, Lamb finds the frequent costume changes of contemporary productions disconcerting. They give far too much importance to dress, which is superfluous in Shakespeare's plays. Like acting and scenery, costumes overemphasize the most external aspects of dramatic literature. In contrast, when we read a scene, the “better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character” (1:110-11).

In the final paragraph of “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” Lamb insists that he could extend his argument to prove that the playwright's comic characters “are equally incompatible with stage representation” (1:111). He never wrote such an essay, and he does praise various actors for their portrayal of roles in Twelfth Night (see “On Some of the Old Actors,” Works, 2:132-38). However, his attack on paintings of Falstaff in “Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty” and his criticism of productions of The Tempest in “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” indicate how he might have proceeded.

CONCLUSION

Like Iser, Fish, Slatoff, and other twentieth-century writers, Lamb considered the act of reading a creative process. He envisioned a contract of mutual respect between authors and their public. Over and over, he insisted upon the need for both writers and readers to have imaginative freedom. Lamb felt shackled by theatrical productions of Shakespeare's plays because they limited his imagination and distracted him with costumes, scenery, and elocution instead of exploring the protagonists' psyches.

Twentieth-century film critics such as Kracauer and Chatman agree with Lamb that a realization of a work of literature in the theater or on film appeals more to the senses than reading the same work, a process which is primarily intellectual and psychological. An overabundance of visual images in a representation of a drama may obscure the poetic language and underlying ideas of the piece.

Lamb argues that Shakespeare is unique because he arouses the imaginative “powers” of his readers so forcefully (1:103), a belief that Lamb shares with Coleridge and Hazlitt. In “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” and other essays, Lamb tries to make his reading public more receptive to the literary power of great drama by teaching his contemporaries to penetrate external details to reach the text's profound themes. Like Coleridge and Hazlitt, he urges readers to open their minds and to participate actively in the experience of literature.

Notes

1. Wolfgang Iser has coined the term “the implied reader” to parallel Wayne Booth's concept of “the implied author” in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth discusses the author's attempts to shape a reader but calls the projected audience the “image of his reader,” the “mock reader” (Walker Gibson's term), or “the postulated reader.” See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 138, 177; Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett.

2. Jack J. Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 12; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, x-xi, 105-6, 229; Seymour Chatman, “What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa),” Critical Inquiry 7, 1 (Autumn 1980): 126; Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, 106, 118-19; Iser, The Implied Reader, 283. This perspective on contemporary films is not limited to critics in academia. Movie reviewer David Denby laments in The Atlantic Monthly that “the word … has been banished from the cinema.” Similarly, Jim Fergus, writing for Newsweek, argues that films are typical of our “Lite Age” of superficiality. While movies with profound ideas fail at the box office, crowds rush to see the “nonstop action” of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. According to Fergus, the popularity of this kind of film results from “our seriously foreshortened attention span, our modern preference for action, adventure and special effects instead of the old heavy stuff of theme, plot and character development.” Such frivolous works “anesthetize” the viewers, making them passive. See Denby, “Stranger in a Strange Land: A Moviegoer at the Theater,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1985, p. 50; Fergus, “When Litening Strikes,” Newsweek, 24 December 1984, p. 10.

3. William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History, 494.

4. Lamb adapted the contrast of the city and the country that he used in the letter to Lloyd in a later essay, “The Londoner,” which was originally published in The Reflector in 1802 and revised in 1818. In both passages, he expresses a preference for the theater crowds over pastoral scenes. See The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1:39 (hereafter cited as Works of Lamb in the text). According to Roy Park, two-thirds of Lamb's literary criticism concerns drama (Lamb as Critic, 17). For a discussion of Lamb's views on comedy of manners, see Janet Ruth Heller, “The Breeze and Sunshine: A Study of Lamb's Essay ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century,’” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 16 (October 1976): 149-56.

5. John I. Ades, “Charles Lamb, Shakespeare, and Early Nineteenth-Century Theater,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 85, 3 (May 1970): 519. The passage referred to by Ades occurs in Lamb's essay “On Some of the Old Actors,” in Works of Lamb, 2:133-34.

6. Lamb may have been influenced by Dryden's view of “mob readers” in “Dedication of the Aeneis” (1697). Here, Dryden defines “mob readers” as “such things as are our upper-gallery audience in a playhouse, who like nothing but the husk and rind of wit” (Essays of John Dryden, 2:223). See also Chapter 1 of this book for other deprecating remarks about the new readers and playgoers. Despite the condemnation of “readers against the grain,” Lamb does not oppose literacy per se. Like Hazlitt, he believes that readers can better themselves by extending their sympathy to real and imaginary people. In an 1801 essay, Lamb defends Sunday newspapers, which were designed for poor people, because the papers familiarize readers with events of national importance and, “what is more valuable” (italics are Lamb's), chronicle the affairs of ordinary people. The Sunday periodicals ennoble the public by expanding the readers' “sympathy with strangers and persons unknown.” See Lamb, “What Is Jacobinism?,” The Albion, 30 June 1801, p. 3; rpt. in Young Charles Lamb, 1775-1802, by Winifred F. Courtney, The Gotham Library (New York: New York University Press, 1982), 345. Similarly, Lamb argues that the circulating libraries' copies of Tom Jones and The Vicar of Wakefield soothe careworn poor people after a hard day. However, he dislikes hearing newspapers and action-packed novels read out loud (see Works of Lamb, 2:173, 175).

7. Lamb, unpublished review of Table Talk, first printed in Lamb as Critic, 302.

8. Despite Lamb's harsh words for Sterne here, there is evidence that the eighteenth-century novelist shared Lamb's commitment to leaving much to the reader's imagination. Sterne writes, “The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own.” See Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), ed. Ian Watt, Riverside Editions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), book 2, ch. 11, p. 83.

9. Stanley Eugene Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, x, 31, 344; Walter J. Slatoff, With Respect to Readers: Dimensions of Literary Response, 7, 37, 66, 143; the quotation cited by Slatoff is from Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2:12; Iser, The Implied Reader, 43, 56. See also Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature, 386, 389.

10. An examination of contemporary reviews reveals some specimens of the narrow-mindedness that Lamb berates. While some reviewers appreciate the originality of writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge, others, like William Roberts of The British Review, object to Romantic poetry because it departs from “common sense.” Roberts probably speaks for a segment of the reading public when he argues that a good poet must shape his “chaotic originalities” until they “look like natives of our own minds, and easily … mix with the train of our own conceptions.” See The British Review, August 1816, cited in J. R. de J. Jackson, ed., Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, 221-22. Clearly, such logic violates the author/reader contract by imposing too much control over the writer's imagination.

11. Lamb's own dramas emphasize the characters' minds, not external action. Wayne McKenna concludes, “Lamb sacrificed too much stage effect in favour of the exploration of the thoughts of his characters. He allowed them scant opportunity for action.” See Wayne McKenna, Charles Lamb and the Theatre (Gerrards Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 1978), 60. The letter cited is Lamb's “Letter to Samuel Rogers,” December 1833, The Letters of Charles Lamb to which are added those of his sister Mary Lamb, 3:394. Coleridge uses a similar vocabulary in a comparison of pictorial art and literature in his lectures. He argues that Shakespeare's characters are not “the mere portrait of an individual” but rather represent a general class of people. Furthermore, Coleridge views painting as a more circumscribed form of imitation. Pictorial art is “narrow” and “limited,” while poetry has “boundless power.” Although painting is restricted as an imitation because its images have a “distinct form,” poetry stirs the mind because literature “rejects all control, all confinement.” Coleridge contrasts Milton's imaginative depiction of Death in Paradise Lost with the typical painter's rendition of a skeleton. Milton's poetry keeps the reader's mind active, while the painter's skeleton lowers the brain “to the merest passivity” (Shakespearean Criticism, 2:130, 138-39).

    An examination of The Boydell Shakespeare Prints (1802-1803) and other paintings of the era confirms Lamb's objections. Except for pictures of Lady Macbeth, the heroines look too much alike: they are sweet, young, and pretty with long hair in ringlets and innocent facial expressions. Many of the paintings stress the women's beautiful long gowns and fancy hats more than their faces. In general, the illustrations fail to capture the individuality and psychological depth of Shakespeare's female characters. See The Boydell Shakespeare Prints, introd. A. E. Santaniello (1802-1803; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968); see also A Brush with Shakespeare: The Bard in Painting, 1780-1910 (Montgomery, Ala.: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1985).

    John Boydell was an important publisher of engraved prints. He hoped to both make money and further British historical painting by establishing the Shakespeare Gallery on Pall Mall and by printing a newly illustrated edition of Shakespeare's works. However, Boydell did not turn a profit because the fighting with France (1793-1815) disrupted his European trade and imitators stole some of his business.

    Lamb was not the only one to find the gallery disappointing. In the print Shakespeare Sacrificed; or The Offering to Avarice, James Gillray satirized the project. Despite the criticism, Richard D. Altick argues, Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery strongly influenced people's taste: “It determined their visual conception of Shakespeare's characters and scenes as fatefully as Bowdler's edition, published in 1818, formed their notion of what he wrote.” See Altick, The Shows of London, 106-8.

    Like Lamb and Gillray, Hazlitt disliked the paintings in the Shakespeare Gallery. In an 1815 essay, Hazlitt argues that these pictures “disturb and distort all the previous notions we had imbibed from reading Shakespear.” He mentions this in conjunction with his attack on what he considered a “farcical” and distorted production of The Tempest at Covent Garden. (The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 5:234-35).

12. John R. Nabholtz comments, “All of Lamb's Essays of the Imagination are ‘dramatic’ in their structure and procedure. … They are the working out before our eyes, in the rhetoric, syntax and structure of the Essays, of the experience of imaginative liberation itself, the dissolving and dissipating of one perspective on experience, and the creation of a new perspective.” See Nabholtz, “Drama and Rhetoric in Lamb's Essays of the Imagination,” Studies in English Literature 12, 4 (Autumn 1972): 685; see also Nabholtz, “My Reader My Fellow-Labourer”: A Study of English Romantic Prose, 10-34.

13. Later in “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” Lamb returns to Garrick, castigating him for his “miserable cravings after applause.” The essayist's animosity seems excessive in these passages, and I think he loses some of the reader's sympathy. Lamb has a better point in the following paragraphs, where he scolds Garrick for interpolating inferior scenes written by Nahum Tate and Colley Cibber in the “matchless” tragedies of Shakespeare (Works of Lamb, 1:104-5, 107).

    Like Lamb, Thomas Babington Macaulay believes that the actor cannot convey the essence of a dramatic text. “The painter, the sculptor, and the actor can exhibit no more of human passion and character than that small portion which overflows into the gesture and the face, always an imperfect, often a deceitful, sign of that which is within. The deeper and more complex parts of human nature can be exhibited by means of words alone.” See Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, ed. A. J. Grieve, 2 vols. (1907; rpt. London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961), 2:628. The passage quoted is from Macaulay's review “Moore's Life of Lord Byron,” which originally appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1831. Clearly, Macaulay shares the romantics' interest in a character's psychology.

    In addition to objecting to actors because they are superficial by definition, Lamb and Hazlitt contend that actors often obscure the playwright's words by inappropriate or inconsistent presentations that fail to elucidate a character's personality and motivation. Even the best actors have this flaw. For example, Lamb argues that Kemble's stiff and cold acting in William Godwin's Antonio obscured the tragic hero's “words” for the inattentive audience (Works of Lamb, 2:293-94). Similarly, Hazlitt faults Kean for not “concentrating all the lines of the character, as drawn by Shakespear.” Hazlitt would prefer a more sustained and “impassioned” Richard III, “with fewer glancing lights, pointed transitions, and pantomimic evolutions” (Works of Hazlitt, 5:181). As usual, Hazlitt views pantomimic acting as the opposite of true drama.

14. Coleridge made a similar remark: “Mrs Siddons as Lady, and Kemble as Macbeth … might be the Macbeths of the Kembles, but they were not the Macbeths of Shakespeare” (Shakespearean Criticism, 2:278). Martin Meisel quotes Lamb's contrast of vision and substance and comments that Lamb identifies “the pleasures of realization with our original fall.” See Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, 30.

15. Lamb once sat next to a blind man at a performance of Richard III. The man was profoundly moved by various scenes, while the rest of the audience was distracted by the bad acting. Lamb uses this experience as evidence that the staging of Shakespearean tragedy is not desirable (see “Play-House Memoranda” [1813], in Works of Lamb, 1:158).

16. Despite Lamb's harsh words for taking passages out of context, he himself committed this literary sin in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808). See Works of Lamb, 4.

17. Lamb's view of Hamlet is an outgrowth of late eighteenth-century descriptions of the prince as sensitive, melancholy, and intellectual. Earlier critics like Rowe, Dennis, and Addison viewed Hamlet as manly, active, and heroic. See Paul S. Conklin, A History of Hamlet Criticism, 1601-1821, 9, 26, 34-52. In an article attributed to Lamb by William Macdonald, the essayist portrays Hamlet as a man of “sensibility” who “lives in a world of imagination; his projects have little of the solid and consecutive architecture of the earth.” See “Mr Kean as Hamlet” (1820), in The Works of Charles Lamb, ed. William Macdonald, 12 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), 3:61 and nn. on pp. 307-8. E. V. Lucas does not include this essay in his edition of Lamb's Works.

18. In fact, Lamb opposed the suppression of the theater in Sydney, Australia. See “Barron Field's Poems” (1820), in Works of Lamb, 1:198.

19. Lamb's reference to “the whole” of Hamlet's character recalls Maurice Morgann's contention that one must consider the “whole” character of Falstaff rather than isolated incidents. Lamb may also have been influenced by William Richardson, who referred to “the whole character of Hamlet” to determine the prince's motivation. See Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777), in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Daniel A. Fineman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 162; William Richardson, Essays on Shakespeare's Dramatic Characters, 159.

    Lamb's discussion of the totality of Hamlet also resembles that of Schlegel. According to Schlegel, most actors “consider their parts as a sort of mosaic work of brilliant passages, and they rather endeavour to make the most of each separate passage, independently of the rest, than to go back to the invisible central point of the character, and to consider every expression of it as an emanation from that point. They are always afraid of underdoing their parts; and hence they are worse qualified for reserved action, for eloquent silence, where, under an appearance of outward tranquillity, the most hidden emotions of the mind are betrayed” (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, lecture 21, p. 337). In general, Schlegel, Lamb, Coleridge, and Hazlitt insist that an actor should unify a performance around a major aspect of the character.

20. While Hazlitt agreed with Lamb that Shakespeare's tragedies could not benefit from staging, the younger critic exempted Richard III from this ban, probably because Hazlitt admired Edmund Kean's portrayal of the king (Works of Hazlitt, 4:298).

21. Lamb also identifies with the characters in Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy. Lamb remarks in Specimens, “The reality and life of this Dialogue passes any scenical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush spread my cheeks, as if I were presently about to ‘proclaim’ some such ‘malefactions’ of myself, as the Brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent” (Works of Lamb, 4:160, n. 1).

22. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 330; Joan Coldwell, “The Playgoer as Critic: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare's Characters,” 194; see also Ades, “Charles Lamb, Shakespeare, and Early Nineteenth-Century Theater,” 520, n. 19.

23. Lamb's concern about the portrayal of the supernatural was shared by some contemporary writers and stage managers. Henry James Pye points out that Shakespeare's supernatural characters lose their eeriness when portrayed in a theater: “What representation can give us such ideas of the ghost of Hamlet as we received from the terrible and pathetic dialogue between that aweful phantom and his son. Perhaps the effect is stronger in the closet than on the stage. This is certainly the case with Macbeth.” Pye concludes that the witches in Macbeth become “objects of ridicule” when they appear in a performance. See Pye, A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle, n. 1 on ch. 14 of the Poetics, 274-75. In 1794, John Philip Kemble broke with tradition by eliminating Banquo's Ghost from the cast of Macbeth. Kemble also restored dignity to the witches, who had been presented as comic characters in other eighteenth-century productions. Kemble wanted to emphasize the witches' supernatural powers. See Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 133, 135.