Abstract
The Lambs’ Tales from Shakespear1 (1807) may be read on multiple levels: not purely as an influential adaptation of Shakespeare, but also as a politically and ideologically informed intervention in the children's book market through its publication by the Godwins’ “Juvenile Library”, and, furthermore, as a very personal negotiation with concepts of childhood and family, imagination and control, inflected by the Lambs’ own experiences. Taking its cue from Charles Lamb's comment to Coleridge about the need to rouse the child-reader's “beautiful Interest in wild tales”, this essay discusses the Lambs’ attempts to open up what they term the “wild poetic garden” of Shakespeare's language for the early nineteenth-century child-reader, and shows how the “wildness” of the Tales is a contested, divided concept. Ultimately it is the uncertainties and ambiguities of these “wild tales” that continue to have an impact on the shaping of Shakespeare for the child-reader.
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