That had been a night of unmixed joy and rapture but the pleasures of this night, and the delight which these lovers took in each other’s society, were sadly allayed with the prospect of parting, and the fatal adventures of the past day. That night Romeo passed with his dear wife, gaining secret admission to her chamber, from the orchard in which he had heard her confession of love the night before. Harvey’s image, though, might be thought closer to how Charles Lamb describes this scene: Harvey’s illustration for Romeo and Juliet In the joint preface they explained their aim of introducing Shakespeare’s language to children: “his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in and in whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he wrote: therefore, words introduced into our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided.”
The aim was to reduced the complications of the stories and to make them easier to understand. Charles wrote the tragedies: King Lear, Hamlet, Timon of Athens, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth. Mary took on the comedies and romances: The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Comedy of Errors, Pericles. It consisted of stories based on just twenty plays. Even if it hadn’t, I doubt if Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare would have made it onto the list, but this book must have introduced hundreds of thousands of children to Shakespeare’s plays in the 200 or so years since it first appeared.īrother and sister Charles and Mary Lamb first published their book in 1807. The survey also limited it self to the last 150 years. It was published with the serious purpose of helping to promote childrens’ reading and adults reading to children, a project with the backing of Barnardos and John Lewis. Given that most of these surveys tend to favour recent books or films, I was surprised to find no Harry Potter on the list, but then noticed the survey only asked adults! In fact no book published since 2000 came anywhere in the top 10. Second, perhaps more surprisingly, came the even older and quirkier Alice in Wonderland, published in 1865.
In a recent survey of childrens’ favourite books A A Milne’s much-loved Winnie the Pooh, written in 1926 came top. Mary and Charles Lamb by Francis Stephen Cary
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