Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare

Abstract

Shakespeare for Girls:Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare Jean I. Marsden (bio) On September 21, 1796, in a fit of madness, Mary Lamb picked up a knife and fatally stabbed her mother. Mary recovered and spent the remainder of her long life looking after her brother Charles and writing children's books, including the popular Tales from Shakespeare (1807). Mary's family and friends, it seems, were kinder to her than literary history has been; today she is remembered almost exclusively as the perpetrator of a lurid matricide. As a result, her role in the composition of Tales from Shakespeare has been almost completely overlooked. Mary began the project and wrote fourteen of the twenty tales (the comedies and romances), while Charles contributed versions of six tragedies. Although the book was Mary's idea and she was its primary writer, the Tales were published under Charles's name well into the twentieth century.1 By ignoring Mary we overlook not only her contribution to Tales from Shakespeare, but, even more important, the ways in which she deliberately directed this project toward a female audience. The "feminization" of Shakespeare took a variety of forms, for unadulterated Shakespeare was seen as improper for a delicate female mind (hence the publication of the Reverend Bowdler's popular Family Shakespeare within a decade of Tales from Shakespeare).2 Where boys might expect to learn courage from Shakespeare's "manly book," girls had to be presented with a version of the plays which would encourage development of feminine graces—modesty, patience, and gentleness. Elements of gender were thus purposely written into the text of the Lambs' Tales, elements which previous critics have seemingly refused to see.3 Previous studies of Tales from Shakespeare have focused on Charles's dislike of heavily didactic children's literature and the ways in which the Tales oppose this didactic tradition.4 While reintroducing imaginative fiction to children may have been Charles's aim, it was not Mary's main goal. In the first two-thirds of the "Preface"—according [End Page 47] to Charles written solely by her5—she stresses that the tales were designed for a specific audience: "for young ladies, too, it has been the intention chiefly to write" (vi). They are directed at girls, she continues, "because boys being generally permitted the use of their fathers' libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book" (vi). The Tales would thus fill a gap in the education of young ladies whose access to challenging imaginative fiction was limited. Boys would have little need for the Tales, not only because they were given an education their sisters lacked, but also because they were allowed access to their father's libraries. Mary suggests that these well-read brothers should assist their sisters and, after their sisters had digested Tales from Shakespeare, even read them passages of Shakespeare, "carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister's ear" (vi). The Tales reveal in their emphases and omissions which aspects of Shakespeare the Lambs, their publisher, and their reviewers felt would benefit young ladies, and which they deemed inappropriate for them. The public agreed with Mary's description of the deficiencies in the education of girls, and when the second edition was published in 1809, it included a new "Advertisement" acknowledging its predominantly adolescent female audience: "It has been the general sentiment, that the style in which these Tales are written, is not so precisely adapted for the amusement of mere children, as for an acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood" (iii). The Tales were "acceptable" because of their propriety and "improving" both in their tone and in their status as a young lady's introduction to Shakespeare; the advertisement also stresses that in the Tales from Shakespeare there was nothing to make a young lady blush. Mary Lamb knew firsthand of the limitations girls faced. Although her brothers John and Charles spent several years in private schools, she herself was less fortunate. After six months of afternoon classes in...