Tales from Shakespeare

Tales from Shakespeare retells twenty of the plays as prose stories for children — Hamlet's uncle-murder and feigned madness, Lear turned out into the storm by the daughters he trusted, the shipwreck and mistaken identities of Twelfth Night — following each plot closely while working in as much of Shakespeare's own language as the story form allows, so that a child could meet the plays' events and something of their voice before ever reading a line of verse.

Charles Lamb and his sister Mary Lamb published the book in 1807 — Mary wrote the comedies, Charles the tragedies, an arrangement forced partly by her recurring mental illness, which had already led, in 1796, to the death of their mother at Mary's hand in an episode from which Charles cared for her devotedly for the rest of both their lives. The book has stayed continuously in print as the standard child's introduction to Shakespeare ever since.

Bibliomancer publishes the 1807 text exactly as Charles and Mary Lamb wrote it.