First edition, Chandos Leigh's copy, of "the first ever economically priced critical survey of all Shakespeare's works" (ODNB), and "the first of Hazlitt's books to achieve immediate success" (Keynes). With the bookplate of poet and literary patron Chandos Leigh, first Baron Leigh (1791-1850), to the front pastedown. Leigh, created Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh in 1839, built a considerable library at his family seat at Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire, the house which reputedly provided his distant cousin Jane Austen with a model for Sotherton Court in her novel Mansfield Park. He notably provided financial support to Leigh Hunt, a friend and collaborator of Hazlitt's; his Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (1808), which encouraged actors to evoke inward "mental character" rather than being confined to "surfaces and externals", was an important influence on Hazlitt's Shakespeare criticism. "Although like most Shakespearian critics of the age Hazlitt devoted considerable space to analysing the psychological motivation of the central figures in each drama, the word 'characters' in the title did not refer to this. It was the 'character'—the defining characteristics—of the play itself that Hazlitt set out to capture. He did so by means of stylistic sympathy: as if in imitation of the plays in question, the essay on Hamlet was speculative, that on Macbeth precipitate, on Coriolanus politically confrontational ('The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power'), and so on. Characters, dedicated to Charles Lamb, earned Hazlitt £100. The first edition sold out in six weeks; the second edition did badly, in Hazlitt's view because of the negative review in Gifford's Quarterly" (ODNB).
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