Lamb's Shakespearean criticism unfortunately survives as an injunction not to perform the plays. This is an oversimplification of a carefully reasoned critical opinion. An assessment of all of his Shakespearean criticism demonstrates that it is derived from an awareness of the limitations of the London theater of Lamb's time and of its audience, and by extension, of the limitations inherent in transforming any script into performance. Relying on clumsy scenery in enormous theaters, having to please an audience that did not easily distinguish between art and life, allowing star-system actors to employ melodramatic techniques (e.g., exploiting a certain comic self-dramatization inherent in some Shakespearean heroes and villains), working from freely cut or “improved” texts of Shakespeare's plays–all helped convince Lamb (1) that “the plays are made another thing by being [thus] acted,” and (2) that no foreseeable production could extract all the imaginative richness available to a reader of an uncut text.