The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 4 / Poems and Plays

A collected volume presents the poets' and dramatists' shorter works, compiling early lyrics, sonnets, translations, album verses, epigrams, and fragmentary plays alongside editorial commentary. The editors group plays and epigrams separately, explain choices about textual variants and reprinting, and trace a movement from youthful lyric pieces toward later, more prose-inflected verse and occasional satirical or memorial poems. The book includes contributions from both writers, occasional translations and acrostics, and notes that record variant readings, lost items, and the provenance of album verses, offering readers texts together with contextual and editorial apparatus.