Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare (1901)
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Charles and Mary Lamb, and Walter Paget. Tales from Shakespeare. London: New York: E. Nister; E.P. Dutton, 1901.
Image Source: University of Oregon Rare Books Collection
In 1807, Charles and Mary Lamb adapted 20 of Shakespeare’s plays into prose intended to be “easy reading” for children, as their Preface explains. The Lambs saw their stories as a way to introduce children to language and plots they thought too difficult for children to understand without assistance. Prose, they assumed, would likewise be easier for children to understand than dramatic dialogue. The Lambs’ adaptations clearly met cultural needs, as their book has seen hundreds of editions and translations, remaining continuously in print to the present.
Unlike the Bowdlers, the Lambs were primarily motivated by their sense that children needed Shakespeare to be simplified rather than censored, though they also euphemized the plays’ sexual and darker content, as you may see here in the selection that starts off their version of Measure for Measure. As they put it in the Preface, their particular task was a kind of cognitive translation of Shakespeare into “terms familiar to the apprehension of a very young mind.” Such explanation helps us understand how both Shakespeare and children were perceived at the start of the 19th century.
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The Lambs’ adaptations include many direct quotations from Shakespeare, incorporated into dialogue in the tales or into narrative description. Their retellings make substantial alterations, however, in framing Shakespeare’s plots with narrative explanation and moral interpretation. The prose versions are also far shorter than the Shakespearean originals, and the plots and dialogue are therefore stripped down. The Lambs write that they hope their Tales will stimulate an appetite for Shakespeare in children, which children may gratify more fully as they mature: the Tales offer “little foretastes of the great pleasure which awaits them in their elder years.”
In their Preface, the Lambs also indicate that their adaptation might be especially useful for girls, whom they assume must wait until they are older to read Shakespeare in the original. In a canny act of marketing, while they presume that boys will be “permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls are,” they request boys’ “kind assistance…in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest.” They urge them then to select the Shakespearean originals their sisters like most and, “carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear,” read it aloud.
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When thus mediated and taught in stages, the Lambs emphasize, Shakespeare’s value for the moral development of children is extreme: the plays are “enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions…” During this period of Shakespeare’s greatest popularity, Shakespeare was usually seen and valued in this way as reinforcing moral norms.
Images here show Walter Paget’s beautiful cover and half-tone illustrations, the Lambs’ Preface, and how they approach adult content in retelling Measure for Measure. For another edition of the Lambs, see the 1923 Macmillan edition, illustrated by Maud and Miska Petersham.