Tales From Shakespeare

Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, published by T. C. & E. C. Jack in 1905, is one of those books created to solve a problem that has troubled generations of readers: Shakespeare is important, magnificent and culturally unavoidable, but occasionally one would quite like somebody to explain what on earth is going on.

Charles and Mary Lamb first produced these prose retellings of Shakespeare’s plays for younger readers, turning the plots into straightforward narrative while preserving much of the drama, character and atmosphere. The result is essentially Shakespeare with the stage directions, Elizabethan wordplay and prolonged uncertainty over who is pretending to be whom temporarily removed.

Here you encounter kings, lovers, villains, fools, ghosts, mistaken identities, murders, shipwrecks and people making spectacularly poor decisions for reasons that would have been solved in five minutes if anybody had simply had an honest conversation.

The Lambs’ great achievement was to make Shakespeare approachable without reducing him to a collection of summaries. These are proper literary retellings, written with elegance and respect for the originals, but designed for readers who may not yet feel ready to charge directly into five acts of blank verse armed only with a school dictionary and optimism.

There is also something wonderfully Victorian and Edwardian about the whole enterprise. Children were apparently expected to become acquainted with Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello and assorted other disasters before bedtime, presumably so that later life would come as less of a surprise.

Published in 1905, this edition belongs to an age when handsome literary books were still produced for ordinary reading rather than merely for occupying shelves in television period dramas. It has now survived well over a century, which makes it considerably older than most of the people who have been forced to study Shakespeare and quite possibly more cheerful about the experience.

For modern readers, Tales from Shakespeare remains genuinely useful. It provides a clear route into the plots and characters, whether you are returning to Shakespeare after years away, encountering him for the first time, or simply trying to remember whether it was Viola, Rosalind or somebody else who spent most of the story disguised as a man.

It is also an appealing piece of literary history in its own right. Charles and Mary Lamb were major figures in the literary world of their day, and their Shakespeare stories became enormously influential, remaining in print in countless editions for more than two centuries.

Condition: Good. This is a genuine 1905 copy and shows the normal signs of age, handling and continued existence expected of a book that has made it through two world wars, several monarchs and generations of schoolchildren. It remains a sound and attractive old copy, which is more than can be said for many things published last year.

No ISBN, naturally. In 1905 books were allowed to exist without machine-readable identification and somehow civilisation continued.

A charming early twentieth-century edition for collectors of Shakespeare, classic children’s literature, literary adaptations, antique books or anyone who likes their tragedy concentrated into manageable prose.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — helping old books survive long enough to become more historically interesting than the people who first bought them.

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