ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an extract that forms part of Charles Lamb’s reminiscences of John Kemble, who played the lead in Antonio, and describes the play’s performance as Lamb remembered it twenty-two years later. Godwin, his friend James Marshall, and Lamb had attended the play together, but Lamb was no impartial spectator. In 1800 he was a good deal more sympathetic to Godwin’s project than his later account suggests. Lamb’s gentle mockery of Godwin’s first experiment in writing for the stage glosses over a significant aspect of his reformist programme of the mid-1790s, in which he exploited different literary genres to try and convey his political and philosophical beliefs to a wider audience. Moreover, Lamb’s presentation of the writing of Antonio as a brief episode in an otherwise speculative career contributes to the misleading image of Godwin as a contemplative philosopher.
