Five-minute digest
Tales from Shakespeare
Summary
Tales from Shakespeare retells twenty of Shakespeare's plays as prose stories for children. A short preface explains the method: the authors keep Shakespeare's own words wherever they can, avoid words that came into English after his time, and hope the tales will send young readers on to the plays themselves when they are older. Fourteen tales come from the comedies and romances. In The Tempest, Prospero, the exiled duke of Milan, lives on an enchanted island with his daughter Miranda, the spirit Ariel and the monster Caliban; he raises a storm, brings his enemies ashore, matches Miranda with Ferdinand, forgives his brother and gives up his magic. A Midsummer Night's Dream follows Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius into a wood where Puck's love-juice tangles their affections and Titania dotes on a clown with an ass's head. In The Winter's Tale, the jealous Leontes accuses his queen Hermione, loses his son and casts out his baby daughter Perdita, who grows up among shepherds; years later Paulina's statue of the queen comes to life. The other comedies are Much Ado About Nothing (Beatrice and Benedick, and Hero falsely shamed), As You Like It (Rosalind disguised as Ganymede in the Forest of Arden), The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice (Portia's plea for mercy and Shylock's bond defeated), Cymbeline (Imogen's constancy and a sleeping drug mistaken for poison), All's Well That Ends Well (the physician's daughter Helena cures the king of France), The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors (two pairs of twins), Measure for Measure (Isabel pleads for her brother Claudio) and Twelfth Night (Viola as Cesario). The book closes with Pericles, Prince of Tyre, in which the physician Cerimon revives Pericles' queen Thaisa from apparent death and the family is reunited at Diana's temple. Six tales come from the tragedies. King Lear divides his kingdom between his flattering daughters Goneril and Regan, disowns the honest Cordelia, goes mad on the heath, and is restored by her physicians before both die. Macbeth murders King Duncan at his wife's urging, hears a voice crying that he has murdered sleep, and falls to Macduff. Timon of Athens gives away his fortune and turns against mankind. Romeo and Juliet ends with the two families burying their feud in their children's graves. Hamlet avenges his father and dies asking Horatio to tell his story. Othello is deceived by Iago into killing the faithful Desdemona. Mary Lamb wrote the comedies and Charles the tragedies. The book was published for William Godwin's Juvenile Library in two volumes dated 1807, with only Charles's name on the title page, and it has stayed in print ever since as the most widely used introduction to Shakespeare for children.
Top Lessons
Flattery and true love
Goneril and Regan win their father's kingdom with fine words, while Cordelia, who loves him most, will only say she loves him as a daughter should. The tale shows that loud promises can hide empty hearts, and that plain honesty may cost a great deal before it is proved true.
Mercy is greater than the letter of the law
Portia tells Shylock that mercy blesses the one who gives it and the one who receives it, and that earthly power is most like God's when mercy softens justice. When Shylock will not show mercy, the same strict law he relied on turns against him.
Forgiveness after long sorrow
Several tales end with forgiveness after years of grief: Prospero pardons his brother, Hermione forgives Leontes, and Pericles finds the wife and daughter he thought were lost. Mary Lamb's comedies show that wrongs can be repaired, though often only after patience and repentance.
Guilt that will not let a person rest
After he kills Duncan, Macbeth hears a voice crying that he has murdered sleep, and his crime only leads to more crimes. Charles Lamb keeps Shakespeare's picture of a conscience that a king's crown cannot quiet.
Verified Quotes
“There was a certain island in the sea, the only inhabitants of which were an old man, whose name was Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, a very beautiful young lady.”
“they have only to think that they have been asleep and dreaming, and that all these adventures were visions which they saw in their sleep”
“No wonder; for the statue was indeed Hermione herself, the real, the living queen.”
“mercy was a double blessing, it blessed him that gave, and him that received it”
“she loved his majesty according to her duty, neither more nor less.”
“by the help of sleep and medicine, she and her physicians at length succeeded in winding up the untuned and jarring senses which the cruelty of his other daughters had so violently shaken.”
“In the worthy Cerimon, who restored Thaisa to life, we are instructed how goodness directed by knowledge, in bestowing benefits upon mankind, approaches to the nature of the gods.”
“enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts”
Medical Lens
The book matters to the history of psychiatry chiefly through its co-author. Mary Lamb suffered recurrent episodes of mental illness, killed her mother during one of them in 1796, and was spared a public asylum because Charles undertook to be her guardian; she spent periods in private madhouses for the rest of her life, and the Tales were written in an interval of health. The tales themselves carry Shakespeare's medicine into children's prose: Lear's madness is treated by Cordelia's physicians with sleep and herbs, a picture of the rest-and-soothing approach to mania that predates modern pharmacology; Helena cures the king of France with her dead father's prescription after his own physicians have pronounced him incurable; Cerimon revives Thaisa from apparent death; and both Cymbeline and Romeo and Juliet turn on drugs that counterfeit death. Retrospective labels for Mary Lamb's illness, often given as manic-depressive illness, are readings from letters and should be treated as interpretive.
- King Lear, after the storm
Cordelia's physicians put off her meeting with her father until sleep and herbal medicine restore some composure to his mind.
- King Lear, Kent's banishment
The narrator likens Lear to a frantic patient who kills his physician and loves his mortal disease.
- Macbeth, after Duncan's murder
Macbeth hears a voice crying that he has murdered sleep and shall sleep no more.
- All's Well That Ends Well, opening
Helena, the physician Gerard de Narbon's daughter, offers his prescription to the king whose doctors have called his malady incurable.
- Cymbeline, middle
The queen's physician, distrusting her, gives her a sleeping drug instead of the poison she asked for, and Imogen takes it.
- Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cerimon, a skilful physician of Ephesus, revives Thaisa, who had been buried at sea in a chest.