A good retelling of Shakespeare’s plays in short story form. If one wants to know the story lines and is not intent qon reading the plays in their original form or language, this is a good place to start.

Written in a time when littls girls were not taught Shakespear until a later age, if at all the authors made a number of Shakespeare's plays into a more narrative and condensed form for older brothers to read to their younger sisters
I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative format or the plays and the memories some of them brought back from when I studied them with my friends in high-school.

Notă: 4⭐/5
Gen: Classic
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finished this while getting bored in engineering lectures

rest in peace shakespeare you would've loved hannah montana

Well this is one way to end a relatively fruitful Shakespeare catch-up month… It started off strong with Hamnet, kept going decently with Titus Andronicus (even though it’s ridiculous, it is source material, so it can stay), and even though there were a few DNFs to cross off the reading list I was still in a hopeful mood when I cracked the spine on this book. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, specifically the Arthur Rackham illustrated edition, was high on my thrift hunting list so I was pretty excited when I finally scooped a copy a little bit ago and was waiting for the perfect time to delve into their “classic” adapted tales for children. Unfortunately almost from the get go I was disgusted with their interpretation of Shakespeare’s stories… Sure, some of the premise and characters were there, but gone was the Shakespearean subtlety, wit, and drama and instead we’re left with infantilized moral tales unsuitable for any but the most vapid child. Starting off were two potentially strong tales, that even with the ribaldry taken out had plenty of room for highjinx and entertainment - the Tempest and a Midsummer Night’s Dream - but the stories were told in such a drab manner that all of the sparkle of magic was completely taken away. After that point I focused entirely on enjoying Rackham’s illustrations, so as not to ruin any beloved stories or spoil the ones I haven’t gotten to yet. This specific edition didn’t have the best versions of his colour work, being a Book of the Month club publication, and their placement was a bit arbitrary, but the simple line work for story headers and enders was well-reproduced and the paper quality was surprisingly lush. With a smidge more effort on the part of the colour reproductions (and a replacement of the atrocious travesty of text) this book actually would have been a solid example of an illustrated classic, as its size and weight was just about perfect for reading and it’s a great size to sit displayed on a shelf!

I'm not very fond of theater, not even Shakespeare's, but these tales are wonderful! Written in an accessible language, they are a very enjoyable reading for children as well as for adults. I reread them many times :) Recommended!

This book seems like a good one to include in a unit study of Shakespeare. The summaries here would be a good way to introduce the plays to a young child, and then have them read the actual play. I believe they will understand them better with some foreknowledge.

However, just by reading these stories, I have come to believe that Shakespeare wasn't the great literary genius people claim he was. (Don't hurt me for saying that, please!) When I read Othello in my literature class this year, I thought it was a weak story, mainly because things worked out so conveniently for Iago. Then, especially in his comedies, he uses very similar elements over and over again. The main one being beautiful women disguising themselves as young boys for various reasons. Couldn't Shakespeare think of something different for a change? Another thing that was really annoying was how easily the men fell in and out and back in love. Romeo wasn't even the worst one in my opinion. However, some of these tales were actually good, and I want to read the actual plays, or even better, watch them performed. A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre being the main ones.

The Bard for Children
15 April 2016

tI reckon the first time I encountered this collection was back in high school when our teacher wanted to teach us the Scottish Play, but didn't feel that we were ready to actually start reading the proper text, namely because she felt that maybe we wouldn't fully understand Shakespeare's language (despite the fact that this was year 11 English). Mind you, as we all know, Shakespeare isn't the easiest of authors to read (though I must admit that he is a lot easier to read than some of the modern authors – James Joyce for instance). In fact, as I was reading the piece on Macbeth my mind went back to that day in class, when we all had a photocopy of the story sitting in front of us and were reading it aloud (which I must admit seems really odd these days because I find reading a book aloud amongst a group of people rather odd – and I still wonder how we managed to get through the entire year when half the class involved us sitting there reading the book aloud – not that these were particularly long books mind you, with the exception of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but then again I don't remembering actually reading that one aloud in class).

tAnyway, this is a great little book, especially for those of us who happen to have young children (not that I'm one of those people), simply because it has been written in a style that is really accessible to those of us who might not be able to understand the language, or even be able to follow what is in effect a script. Okay, the Lambs do try retain as much of the original dialogue as possible, but only where they use the dialogue. For the most part the story is told using prose, which has a great effect on being able to help us understand the action of the play. I must admit that this is the first time that I have read this particular book in years (and even then I have only read it once before, not counting that time in highschool), and I generally don't grab it off the shelf to get an idea of what a particular play is about – that's what Wikipedia is for.

tMind you, the Lambs haven't included all of the plays in this work – notable absences include the Roman plays (which is a shame because Julius Caesar happens to be one of my favourites) and the History plays. The suggestion is, at least in the introduction to the edition that I read, is that the Lambs were more interested in the plays that operated within the domestic sphere as opposed to those that operated in the political sphere. While that may seem a little odd when we note that plays such as the Scottish Play and King Lear are included (as these two plays very much operate within the political sphere) I can sort of see where the Lambs are coming from – the book is primarily targeted at children, and at the age at which they would have been reading this their experience of the world outside of the home would have been quite limited.

tIt is interesting to consider the target audience of this book though – written in 1809 it would have mainly been for the children of the middle and upper classes, who no doubt would have been able to read. However it is suggested in Charles Lamb's introduction that it was more for the girls than the boys, as the boys would have had access to the father's library (another indication that it would have been for the upper classes) at a much younger age than the girls. It is also an indication that at the time children's literature would have been literally non-existent, namely because it was expected that when a child learnt to read, they would have been thrown straight into the deep end (though I suspect that the Bible would have been a major part of a child's introduction to literature).

tOkay, I'm not really an expert on early children's literature, but it seems as if the Lambs were paving the way for what was to become a multi-million dollar industry. Okay, tales for children had existed for centuries, but many of the stories that we traditionally consider to be children's stories (such as Grimm's Fairytales) were originally written for an adult audience. It wasn't until the 19th century that stories, and books, were written specifically with children in mind. In a way we can trace the modern children's story back to the work of Charles and Mary Lamb, who saw a need to make some of the classic Shakespearian plays more accessible to the younger audience.

This is a very strange book. I read a lot of reviews that said what is the point of reading a book that is just a series of synopses of Shakespeare's plays? But for me the value was first of all when you strip the plays of the beautiful language and just look at the skeleton plots, you realize that most of his plays don't make a lot of sense. Why is it easier to enter a nunnery as in Pericles, Prince of Tyre than to search for your husband, who is a king, and see whether he is alive or not? (spoiler, he is) Secondly, you see the same elements repeated over and over again. Wives who enter nunneries the second they think their husbands are drowned. Women who on a freak decide to dress as men and become pages to this or that person. My husband and I used to look at each other when deciding whether to go to an NJ Shake production and say ok well have we seen that one before? Because the plots are so confusing and the actions of the characters so often random, we really couldn't remember.

And then there's Cymbeline, a problem play. It has so many nutty elements like the old head in a sack gambit; princes stolen from their cribs for no discernible reason; women who are supposed to be murdered but aren't; many dead ghosts appearing to explain things and then the Gods have to sort it all out in the end. When Jupiter showed up in the production we saw to fix everything a woman in the audience moaned out "Oh my god" and she spoke for all of us.

So the play synopses help you understand why you can't remember many of the individual plays -- because they simply don't make sense or because there are too many plays about twins or too many plays where women dress as men and then are revealed hilariously at the end to be women.

But the other service Charles and Mary Lamb is credulity. They justify all the insidious questionable elements that otherwise kind of slide by. Yes we all know Taming of the Shrew is seriously misogynistic, but so are many other plays. The anti semitism is everywhere. The Merchant of Venice is one thing but why do the witches in Macbeth use the liver of Jew? Where did they get it -- from a corpse or someone living? How many Jew livers do they have in their magical stores? So many creepy upsetting questions. And this was a book written for children, so the idea that a Jew is so bad that his liver is required along with other creepy bad things to make an evil potion and that children should be okay with that is interesting. Or the idea that these ideal perfect women who are beautiful and very very good are something girls should strive for is interesting. The morals that the Lambs pull out of these plays are horrifying, but they also sound like the morals that Shakespeare was really going for.

I am personally a huge fan of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and many of the other Shakespeare reimaginings I've read so that aspect of it doesn't bother me at all. Overall, I was glad I read it if only because it might help me keep All's Well That Ends Well and As You Like It straight. And I'm going to have my ears open for the inappropriate and unnecessary use of Jew's livers and other unlikely things in his plays from here on out.

Prose versions of two dozen or so of Shakespeare’s plays—a nice introduction or refresher of most of his work apart from the history plays.

Perhaps this is better suited for pre-teens or teens? Several of the stories have mature topics and would not be appropriate for younger children in my personal opinion. I’m not well versed in Shakespeare, but it may be beneficial to introduce the original prose first rather than start here. I think it may be helpful as a supplement to the original plays, but I wouldn’t substitute with this.