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Revisit the stories of King Lear, Romeo, Juliet, and Othello and many mother in Charles and Mary Lamb¿s
Tales From Shakespeare. Originally intended for the use of ¿young persons,¿ this collection offers twenty tales of comedy and tragedy from the world¿s most famous playwright faithfully and respectfully retold for budding readers.
About the author
Charles and Mary Lamb were a brother and sister writing team best known for their children's book
Tales From Shakespeare. Despite being born eleven years apart, Charles (1775-1834) and Mary (1764-1847) were incredibly close as children with Mary teaching her younger brother how to read and appreciate literature. The two would experience vastly different upbringings as Charles would obtain his formal education at Christ's Hospital, while Mary had been informally introduced to the written word through her father's stories. Unfortunately both would suffer from some form of mental illness with Mary's mental health being far worse than that of her brother Charles'; the Lamb family would suffer a massive tragedy in 1796 when Mary suffered a mental breakdown and stabbed her mother to death in the family home. While devastated, Charles would fight to keep his sister from being committed to an insane asylum and took personal responsibility for her care. Shortly after this, Charles would begin his literary career with the publication of four poems in his dear friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
Poems on Various Subjects. He would add two more poems to the second edition and publish a book of poetry in collaboration with Charles Lloyd entitled
Blank Verse. Mary's literary career would begin at the behest of William and Mary Jane Godwin who asked for her contributions to their
Juvenile Library. Her most notable works would include two collaborations with their brother
Tales From Shakespeare (1807),
Poems for Children (1810) and an independently written collection of stories entitled
Mrs. Leicester's School (1808). The two siblings would leave the world as they entered-more than a decade apart; with Charles dying of a baterial infection in 1834 and Mary dying of natural causes in 1847.
Summary
“The following tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for which purpose his 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.”Tales From Shakespeare (1807) is a collection of Shakespeare’s most-known comedies and tragedies retold by Charles and Mary Lamb. The book is one of three books written in collaboration between the siblings for William Godwin’s Juvenile Library and was conceived as a way to introduce the work of Shakespeare to younger readers. Having never been out of print, Tales From Shakespeare is a widely adored and influential work of children’s fiction that balances the line of being accessible to children while remaining faithful to the original source material.This edition of Tales From the Shakespeare is a classic work of children’s fiction reimagined for modern readers.
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