years. His adult life was quiet and unadventurous, but under its calm surface lay great tragedy. When he was twenty-two his beloved sister, Mary, ten years his senior, exhausted by her labors as a dressmaker and the work of caring for her invalid parents, began to show signs of a breakdown. One day she turned in a manic rage on the little girl who was her apprentice. When Mrs. Lamb tried to intercede, her daughter stabbed her in the heart. The jury's verdict was lunacy, but the intercession of her father's former employer spared Mary permanent confinement in an asylum. Instead, she was remanded to the custody of Charles, who devoted the rest of his life to her and their common household. Mary's attacks of insanity recurred, and when the terribly familiar symptoms began to show themselves, Charles and Mary would walk arm in arm and weeping to the asylum, carrying a straitjacket with them.
Most of the time, however, Mary was her normally serene and gracious self, and shared her brother's love of company and genius for friendship. The evening gatherings at the Lambs' attracted a varied company that included many of the leading writers and artists of England. Charles drew furiously on a pipe of strong tobacco and drank copiously; as the alcohol eased his habitual stammer, his puns and practical jokes grew ever more outrageous. He had, in fact, a complex temperament, in which the playfulness overlay a somber melancholy and the eccentricity sometimes manifested a touch of malice.
To supplement his salary at the East India House, Lamb had early turned to writing in a variety of literary forms: sonnets; blank verse; a sentimental novel; a tragedy; and a farce, Mr. H , which was hissed by the audience, including its honest author, when it was produced at Drury Lane (the uneasiness with the theater that informs his essay 'On the Tragedies of Shakespeare' probably reflects this experience). He also collaborated with his sister, Mary, on a series of children's books, including the excellent Tales from Shakespeare, and wrote some brilliant critical commentaries in his anthology, important for the Elizabethan revival of that period, titled Specimensof English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare. Not until 1820, however, at the age of forty-five, did Lamb discover the form that would make his name, when he began to write essays for John Scott's new London Magazine.
Lamb's achievement in those contributions to the London was to accommodate the intimacies of the familiar essay, a genre dating back to Montaigne in the sixteenth century, to a modern world of magazine writing that aimed to reach a general public. The Essays ofElia make the magazine?an impersonal medium that contributed conspicuously to the information overload of the age?appear to be a forum in which a reader might really know an author. A sense of the paradoxes of that project?a sense that the illusions of personality in the personal essay might be easily debunked?is never far away in Lamb's writings, lending a fascinating edge to their charm and complicating the autobiographical impulse that seems to link them to the works of his contemporaries. Under the pseudonym Elia, which, Lamb said, was the name of an Italian clerk he had known briefly while employed in the South Sea House, Lamb projects in his essays the character of a man who is whimsical but strong-willed, self- deprecating yet self-absorbed, with strong likes and dislikes, a specialist in nostalgia and in that humor which balances delicately on the verge of pathos. But Elia is also, as Lamb noted, an anagram for 'a lie': the essays' seemingly unguarded self-revelation is intertwined with the cunning of a deliberate and dedicated artist in prose. And to write about himself Lamb developed a prose style that was colored throughout by archaic words and expressions that continually alluded to literary precursors, including the works of other eccentrics such as Robert Burton and Laurence Sterne?as if he were suggesting that he was most distinctively himself when most immersed in his beloved old books.
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ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE / 49 3
From On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation1
* * * [S]uch is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in
at the eye and ear at a play-house, compared with the slow apprehension
oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink
the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to
identify in our minds, in a perverse manner, the actor with the character which
he represents. It is difficult for a frequent play-goer to disembarrass the idea
of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth,
while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S.2 * * *
Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of satisfaction
which I received some years back from seeing for the first time a tragedy of
Shakespeare performed, in which these two great performers sustained the
principal parts. It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hith
erto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life after for this
juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. 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. How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus
cramped and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be
judged from that delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped being performed. 44
4
It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of
Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of
almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a rea
