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Melville's Marginalia in Marlowe's Dramatic Works and in Selections from Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets

While arguing in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850) that American critics were neglecting native geniuses in their midst, Herman Melville similarly decried the literary establishment’s veneration of Shakespeare at the expense of other Elizabethan dramatists. Less the result of outright bardolatry than of insufficient resources, scholarship has displayed a similar imbalance in its attention to Elizabethan influences on the phase of Melville’s career that produced Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852). Melville’s marginalia in The Dramatic Works of Christopher Marlowe and Charles Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets do not appear in Wilson Walker Cowen’s multi-volume Melville’s Marginalia (1965; rpt. 1987), nor have these markings and notes been cited in criticism of Melville’s works. Presented to Harvard’s Houghton Library by Gertrude A. Schlachter in 1971, Melville’s copy of Marlowe was not available to Cowen, and Melville’s copy of Lamb’s Specimens was acquired at auction only in 1993 by Clifford Ross, whose extended loan to Houghton reunited the volume with Melville’s copies of Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shakespeare.1 Thanks to the generosity of Ms. Schlachter and Mr. Ross, and to the continuing stewardship of Houghton Library, this special issue of Leviathan reproduces Melville’s complete marginalia in Marlowe’s Dramatic Works and selections of his markings and notes in Lamb’s Specimens.2 (A complete edition of the Lamb marginalia is forthcoming at Melville’s Marginalia Online.) The Lamb and Marlowe marginalia, together with