Godwin attended the first, second and final and lectures in Hazlitt’s series ‘On the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth’, delivered at the Surrey Institution. He heard Hazlitt introduce the series by describing the effects of ‘the translation of the Bible’, ‘the discovery of the New World’ and ‘the natural genius of the Country’ on Elizabethan lecture. The second lecture concentrated on Lyly, Marlow, Heywood, Middleton and Rowley and the series concluded with a comparison of Elizabethan drama with modern German theatre. The series was Hazlitt’s last and was published by Robert Stodart in February 1820.

See Morning Chronicle, 8 November 1819; Examiner, 21 November 1819; Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life: from Winterslow to Frith Street (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) and Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. by Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), vol. 5.