About the Author
No one would have seemed better qualified to confer dignified status upon such unlikely matter as jest books as William Carew Hazlitt (1834–1913), descended from a man commonly regarded as second only to Samuel Johnson as England’s greatest literary critic, especially for his writings on Shakespeare. Hazlitt’s works as author and editor include not only Shakespeare’s Jest Books but also AHandbook to the Popular, Poetical, and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain (1867), Four Generations of a Literary Family: The Hazlitts (1897), The Letters of Charles Lamb (1886), The Lambs (1897), and Shakespeare, the Man and His Works (1902).
