ABSTRACT
Salman Rushdie's comment that "the bits" composing Julian Barnes's A History of the World "fail to acquire, by cumulation, the necessary weight" is a telling example of the common critical view that the fragmentariness and self-reflexivity of postmodernist rewritings of history respond to a bent for pla(y)giarism devoid of any ethical and political concerns. The ethical and political dimensions of The Lambs of London are conveyed by the two counter-narratives underlying the ludic and parodic narratives of bardolatry and plagiarism in the William Ireland and the Charles and Mary Lamb plots. As in Chatterton, the question of originality and plagiarism thematises the textual vulnerability of The Lambs of London, an extremely self-conscious historical romance built on the imagined encounter, in the mid-1770s, of Charles and Mary Lamb with William Henry Ireland, three historical characters remembered by posterity for their rewritings of Shakespeare.
