Publisher's Synopsis
Tales from Shakespeare - All the Tales from Shakespeare - Charles & Mary Lamb - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Tales from Shakespeare also known as All the Tales from Shakespeare is an English children's book written by Charles Lamb with his sister Mary Lamb in 1807. It was illustrated by Sir John Gilbert in 1866, Arthur Rackham in 1899 and 1909, by Louis Monzies in 1908, by Walter Paget in 1910, and by D. C. Eyles in 1934. In 1894, a two-volume set with color plate illustrations and a preface by H.S. Morris, was published jointly by the J.B. Lippincott Company in Philadelphia, and in London by William Heinemann. The book reduced the archaic English and complicated storyline of Shakespeare to a simple level that children could read and comprehend. However, as noted in the author's Preface, "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." Mary Lamb was responsible for the comedies, while Charles wrote the tragedies; they wrote the preface between them. Next to his essays, this book is his best-known work; yet its success is attributable more to Mary, whose name did not appear on the title page of the first few editions, than to Charles
