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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Tales from Shakespeare presents an enchanting selection of stories that masterfully capture the essence of William Shakespeare's timeless plays. This collection diversifies the narrative styles by translating the Bard's original dramas into prose, revealing the rich narratives hidden within these classic works. The anthology brings together comedy, tragedy, and history under one cover, providing readers with a delightful traversal through Shakespeare's most celebrated tales. In this literary mosaic, each piece stands out, offering a unique blend of Shakespeare's themes of love, power, betrayal, and morality, making the anthology as varied as it is profound. Authors Charles and Mary Lamb serve as the guiding voices in Tales from Shakespeare, expertly bridging the gap between the Elizabethan stage and contemporary readers. As pioneering figures in literary adaptation, the Lambs make significant contributions to the educational discourse on Shakespeare, reflecting the Romantic era's emphasis on emotion and imagination. By distilling Shakespeare's complex plots and characters into accessible stories, they create a dialogue with historical and cultural movements of their time'—such as expanding literacy and democratizing literary education'—thereby opening up Shakespearean narratives to a much wider audience. Tales from Shakespeare is a must-read for anyone interested in exploring Shakespeare's works through a refreshing lens. This anthology is not merely a retelling but a thoughtful reimagining that offers both educational value and artistic enjoyment. Readers will relish the breadth of insights provided by this synthesis of Shakespearean legacy and the Lambs' interpretative skill. This volume is an invitation to experience the melding of rich historical storytelling with insightful commentary, fostering a renewed appreciation for Shakespeare's brilliance through a medley of voices engaged in a timeless dialogue. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Tales from Shakespeare
Table of Contents
Introduction
Tales from Shakespeare, first published in 1807, gathers Charles and Mary Lamb’s prose retellings of selected plays by William Shakespeare. Conceived as an accessible pathway for young readers while remaining engaging to adults, the collection relates the plots and principal characters of comedies, tragedies, and romances without reproducing dramatic form. This edition presents the full complement of tales traditionally included—preface and narratives ranging from The Tempest to Pericles—offering a coherent survey rather than Shakespeare’s complete dramatic corpus. The scope is introductory yet substantial, guiding readers through emblematic stories that have shaped English literature and the broader conversation about character and fate.
The volume comprises a preface and a sequence of narrative adaptations written in clear, continuous prose. It is not a compilation of plays, verse, or critical essays; nor is it a miscellany of letters or diaries. Each tale condenses a stage work into a short story–like account, foregrounding character, motive, and incident while tracing the essential arc of the original plot. The result bridges storytelling and mediation: a book of narratives that can be read independently, yet that points beyond itself to the theatrical sources from which it draws, inviting readers toward further exploration.
Across the collection, the Lambs preserve the moral and emotional contours that animate Shakespeare’s drama: courage and conscience, friendship and betrayal, mistaken identity and recognition, ambition and remorse, love tested by time and trial. Their style is decorous and lucid, shaping complex plots into steady, well‑paced narratives. Scenes likely to perplex or unsettle young readers are tempered, but the central conflicts remain intact. The tone balances sympathy with sober judgment, encouraging reflection on consequence and character while sustaining the wonder, wit, and pathos that have made these stories endure.
As a whole, Tales from Shakespeare has long functioned as a doorway to Shakespeare for readers encountering his world for the first time. By reframing plays as narratives, the book lowers barriers of archaic diction and stage convention without severing ties to the source. It invites gradual acquaintance—story first, drama later—while still rewarding seasoned readers who relish narrative craft. Its endurance rests on tact: fidelity to essential plot and spirit, clear prose shaped by humane intelligence, and an educational purpose achieved through storytelling rather than instruction, making it both an introduction and a lasting companion.
The collection’s range is deliberate. It gathers festive comedies of disguise and wit, grave tragedies of inward conflict and public catastrophe, and late romances marked by trial, separation, and wonder. The selection includes, among others, As You Like It and Twelfth Night; Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth; The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Pericles, alongside The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear. In the original arrangement, Mary Lamb principally adapted the comedies, while Charles Lamb chiefly handled the tragedies, a division that lends complementary emphases within a single, consistent narrative manner.
Narration proceeds in measured third‑person prose, attentive to motive, sequence, and moral implication. While the tales describe decisive speeches and memorable images, they avoid the full rhetoric of the stage, favoring clarity over flourish. The Lambs at times echo Shakespearean diction to preserve atmosphere, yet they write continuously in their own idiom, shaping paragraphs that move from cause to consequence with calm assurance. This approach allows readers to follow intricate plots without confusion, leaving space for imagination to supply setting, gesture, and those unspoken currents that bind characters in affection, rivalry, duty, and desire.
Read together, these retellings form a compact atlas of Shakespearean storytelling mapped by two early‑nineteenth‑century stylists of notable tact. They neither replace nor compete with the plays; rather, they kindle curiosity by imparting lines of action, ethical tensions, and tonal variety. Whether approached as an elegant suite of stories or as preparation for reading and performance, the collection affirms the continuing vitality of these narratives and the Lambs’ achievement in making them hospitable to new audiences. In doing so, it preserves continuity between ages: from stage to page, from adult tradition to the attention of the young.
Historical Context
Tales from Shakespeare appeared in London in 1807, at the hinge of late Georgian and early Romantic culture. Its authors, Charles Lamb (1775–1834) and Mary Lamb (1764–1847), were lifelong Londoners whose work was shaped by urban print culture and the sociability of literary circles. Charles, educated at Christ’s Hospital, was a clerk at East India House on Leadenhall Street from the 1790s to 1825; Mary, after a devastating breakdown in 1796, collaborated closely with him thereafter. Their friendships with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt grounded the book in the era’s reformist, imaginative, and conversational literary values.
The volume was issued by M. J. Godwin & Co.’s Juvenile Library at 41 Skinner Street, a radical experiment in children’s publishing managed by William Godwin and Mary Jane Godwin. The engraved plates were after designs by the young William Mulready, signaling a convergence of pedagogy and fine illustration. The preface, signed “C. L.,” declares the book “designed for the use of young persons,” promising to keep “the purest expressions” of Shakespeare while omitting what was “improper.” That balance—fidelity tempered by discretion—frames every tale, from comedies like Twelfth Night and As You Like It to tragedies such as Macbeth and Othello.
The book answered a swelling market created by expanding schooling and family reading. Sunday schools from the 1780s, Joseph Lancaster’s British and Foreign School Society (1808), and Andrew Bell’s National Society (1811) widened elementary literacy. Moral watchdogs, including Sarah Trimmer (The Guardian of Education, 1802–1806) and Hannah More’s Cheap Repository (1795–1798), policed children’s literature. In the same year, 1807, Thomas Bowdler began the Family Shakespeare enterprise, inaugurating a broader movement to domesticate the Bard. The Lambs’ retellings inhabit this milieu: accessible prose, selected quotation, and careful pruning make Shakespeare’s range—from The Comedy of Errors to King Lear—legible and respectable for a new juvenile public.
The Lambs wrote as Shakespeare’s texts and performances were being vigorously re-edited and contested. Samuel Johnson’s edition (1765), Edmund Malone’s variorum (1790), and George Steevens’s work shaped the canonical text, while the stage was dominated by the Kemble–Siddons generation at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. The 1809 “Old Price” riots at Covent Garden exposed a public wrestling with theatre’s cost, prestige, and purpose. Adaptations still held sway—Nahum Tate’s happy-ending Lear remained current until restoration in 1838—so the Tales both participate in and resist stage fashion: Charles Lamb restores the tragic gravity of Lear and Macbeth while presenting them in the decorous medium of prose.
Division of labor reflects both literary judgment and social expectation. Mary Lamb composed most comedies and late romances—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and others—streamlining plots and amplifying motifs of friendship, chastity, and reconciliation. Charles Lamb wrote six, generally the weightier tragedies and The Tempest: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Together they convert dramatic structure into narrative arcs, prune bawdy and coarse business, and retain emblematic speeches, thereby offering readers a through-line across the whole repertory, from early experiments like The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Pericles.
Stylistically, the Tales merge Enlightenment clarity with Romantic inwardness. The prose is lucid and measured, yet alive to “imagination” and character, ideals Charles later theorized in his Elia essays (1820–1823). Mary’s concurrent books—Poetry for Children (1809) and Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809)—share the same address to youthful sympathy and moral discernment. The preface commits to preserving “select expressions,” a principle visible in Hamlet’s reflections or Prospero’s farewells, but always cushioned by explanatory narrative. Across works as various as Measure for Measure and Timon of Athens, the Lambs emphasize conscience, temperance, filial duty, and friendship—virtues prized by middle-class households who made Shakespearean culture part of domestic education.
Wartime and commerce shaped reception. Amid the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) and the 1807 abolition of the British slave trade, domestic reading became a patriotic and pious habit. Circulating libraries and cheaper reprints carried the Tales beyond Skinner Street into provincial Britain and, by the 1810s–1820s, into transatlantic markets. Subsequent London editions by other houses kept the book continually in print. Charles’s career at East India House symbolizes the period’s imperial networks that also circulated British books; but the Tales remain resolutely local in idiom, presenting the national poet as household property. Their reach yoked Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies to modern ideas of tasteful, improving leisure.
In the nineteenth century the Tales became a classroom and nursery staple, sustaining Shakespeare’s status as “national poet.” By giving first access to stories ranging from The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew to Twelfth Night, Cymbeline, and Othello, the Lambs naturalized an extraordinarily heterogeneous canon within a single moralized frame. Victorian schoolmasters, family anthologies, and later illustrators repeatedly renewed the volume, even as textual scholarship advanced. The book’s historical work was to reconcile theatre and parlor, philology and feeling, scandal and propriety, so that young readers could move with confidence from prose abridgment to the plays themselves across the whole list named in the collection.
Synopsis (Selection)
PREFACE
Outlines the aim to retell Shakespeare’s plays in clear prose for young readers, preserving essential plots and spirit while omitting material deemed unsuitable.
THE TEMPEST
Shipwrecked nobles reach an enchanted island ruled by the exiled Prospero, who uses magic to confront past wrongs and steer events toward reconciliation.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
Lovers, craftsmen, and fairies cross paths in a moonlit forest, where misapplied enchantments cause comic confusions before harmony is reestablished.
THE WINTER'S TALE
A king’s sudden jealousy shatters his family and court; years later, pastoral scenes and chance recognitions open the way to renewal.
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Verbal sparring between Beatrice and Benedick unfolds alongside a plot that slanders Hero, prompting schemes to test fidelity and restore reputations.
AS YOU LIKE IT
Exiles find refuge in the Forest of Arden, where disguises and pastoral life reshape identities and affections.
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
Two friends become rivals in love, with flight, disguise, and outlaw entanglements testing loyalty and constancy.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
A merchant risks a perilous bond to aid his friend’s courtship, while a casket test and courtroom trial weigh mercy, risk, and worth.
CYMBELINE
A princess’s secret marriage sparks court intrigue and a wager on her fidelity, leading to disguises, abductions, and conflict with Rome before truths surface.
KING LEAR
An aging king divides his realm by flattery, unleashing familial betrayal, exile, and a descent into storm and madness.
MACBETH
Prophecies and ambition drive a Scottish nobleman to seize power, and the resulting tyranny and guilt unravel bonds of trust and state.
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
A physician’s daughter cures a king to claim a reluctant husband, then undertakes exacting tasks and stratagems to gain his recognition.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
A strong-willed heiress and a determined suitor engage in a combative courtship, while impostures and parallel matches complicate the proceedings.
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Two sets of twins separated at birth cause escalating mistaken identities in a bustling port, ensnaring merchants, spouses, and officials in a single day’s confusion.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE.
A strict deputy enforces harsh morality laws in Vienna, forcing a novice to plead for her brother and exposing tensions between justice, mercy, and authority.
TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL
After a shipwreck, a disguised newcomer serves a duke, setting off crossed affections, mistaken identities, and comic pranks in Illyria.
TIMON OF ATHENS
A lavish benefactor is ruined by prodigality and false friends, turning misanthrope and condemning social ingratitude and corruption.
ROMEO AND JULIET
Young lovers from feuding families pursue a secret bond amid mounting hostilities and dangerous miscommunications.
HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK
A prince confronted by his father’s suspicious death and a spectral accusation wrestles with doubt, surveillance, and the burden of revenge in a treacherous court.
OTHELLO
A respected general is manipulated by a resentful subordinate, as insinuations kindle jealousy that imperils his marriage and command.
PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE
A wandering prince faces riddles, shipwrecks, and long separations across the sea, with chance encounters guiding him toward recognition and reunion.
