Tales from Shakespeare


Tales from Shakespeare is an English children's book written by brother and sister Charles and Mary Lamb in 1807.
The book is designed to make the stories of Shakespeare's plays familiar to the young. Mary Lamb was responsible for the comedies, while Charles wrote the tragedies; they wrote the preface between them. Marina Warner, in her introduction to the Penguin 2007 edition, says that Mary did not get her name on the title page till the seventh edition in 1838.

Publication history

Tales from Shakespeare has been republished many times. It was first published by the Juvenile Library of William Godwin and his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, who chose the illustrations, probably by William Mulready. Later illustrators included Sir John Gilbert in 1866, Arthur Rackham in 1899 and 1909, Louis Monziès in 1908, Walter Paget in 1910, and D. C. Eyles in 1934.
In 1893-4, the book was supplemented with some additional tales by Harrison S. Morris, and was re-published in the USA as a multi-volume set with colour plate illustrations.
As noted in the authors' preface, " words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he wrote: therefore, words introduced into our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided."

Contents

The book contains the following tales:
  1. The Tempest
  2. A Midsummer Night's Dream
  3. The Winter's Tale
  4. Much Ado About Nothing
  5. As You Like It
  6. Two Gentlemen of Verona
  7. The Merchant of Venice
  8. Cymbeline
  9. King Lear
  10. Macbeth
  11. All's Well That Ends Well
  12. The Taming of the Shrew
  13. The Comedy of Errors
  14. Measure for Measure
  15. Twelfth Night
  16. Timon of Athens
  17. Romeo and Juliet
  18. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
  19. Othello
  20. Pericles, Prince of Tyre

    In fiction

The book is given as a gift in Morley's "Parnassus on Wheels".
Graham Greene uses Tales from Shakespeare for a book code in Our Man In Havana.
Tales From Shakespeare is referenced in the 2018 film The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society.