However, Lamb seems not to have needed to experience dissipation to understand it. As a boy he had immersed himself in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and in his early twenties he attempted to imitate them. John Woodvil was composed in 1799, and published in 1802. It is set in the years following the Restoration of Charles II. The hero, John Woodvil, has inherited the family estate, where he carouses with his cavalier cronies, and neglects Margaret, the orphan ward of his father, to whom he used to be attached. Meanwhile his father, Sir Walter, who had fought on the parliamentarian side in the Civil War, and who was excluded from the general pardon after the Restoration, lives in hiding in Sherwood Forest with his other son, Simon. At the pitch of intoxication, Woodvil reveals the secret of his father's hiding-place to one of his drinking friends, Lovel, who then goes to Nottingham and attempts to arrest Sir Walter. Simon drives Lovel off, but Sir Walter expires, mortified by the knowledge that his other son has betrayed him. Woodvil himself is chastened and reformed by the catastrophe. The play ends with the hint that he will be reconciled to Margaret, and will find consolation in religion after an epiphany in church:

It seem'd, the guilt of blood was passing from me 

Even in the act and agony of tears, 

And all my sins forgiven.

Even Lamb's friends thought that John Woodvil left much to be desired. Southey wrote to Charles Danvers that "Lamb . . . is printing his play, which will please you by the exquisite beauty of its poetry, and provoke you by the exquisite silliness of its story." Southey is surely right that the merits of Lamb's play are to be found in certain passages, rather than in its dramatic integrity. For instance, Woodvil's soliloquy just before he betrays his father both expresses the elation imparted by wine, and supplies a hint of the hubristic disaster to come: