![]() ![]() ![]() A letter by Mary offers a charming account of the brother and sister team at work, seated at the same table: ‘like Hermia & Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream … I taking snuff & he groaning all the while & saying he can make nothing out of it, which he always says till he has finished’.Ĭharles became close to Samuel Taylor Coleridge at school, and the friendship was one of the most important in his life: Lamb’s early poetry was published alongside his older friend’s in the second edition of Coleridge’s Poems, and it was via Coleridge that he became intimate with other leading lights of the English romantic literary movement. Cleverly distilling the story of each play into a short, readable narrative that could be understood by children – particularly girls, who were less likely to be given access to books during this period – they nevertheless aimed to preserve as much of Shakespeare’s own language as possible, while also filtering out material they considered unsuitable for young readers (by modern standards, the Tales are somewhat moralising and didactic). Mary agreed, and encouraged Charles to get involved too she tackled the comedies, while he worked on the tragedies, each editing the other’s work. In 1805, the publisher Mary Jane Godwin, second wife of the radical philosopher William Godwin, approached Mary Lamb with the idea of adapting Shakespeare’s plays into prose narratives for children. ![]()
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