The _Tales from Shakespeare_.--Letters to Sarah Stoddart.
1806.--Æt. 42.
Once begun, the _Tales from Shakespeare_ were worked at with spirit
and rapidity. By May 10th Charles writes to Manning:--
"[Mary] says you saw her writings about the other day, and she wishes
you should know what they are. She is doing for Godwin's bookseller
twenty of Shakespeare's plays, to be made into children's tales. Six
are already done by her; to wit, _The Tempest_, _A Winter's Tale_,
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, _Much Ado about Nothing_, _The Two
Gentlemen of Verona_, and _Cymbeline_. The _Merchant of Venice_ is in
forwardness. I have done _Othello_ and _Macbeth_, and mean to do all
the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people,
besides money. It is to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them
capitally I think you'd think."
"Godwin's bookseller" was really Godwin himself, who at his wife's
urgent entreaty had just started a "Magazine" of children's books in
Hanway Street, hoping thus to add to his precarious earnings as an
author. His own name was in such ill odour with the orthodox that he
used his foreman's--Thomas Hodgkins--over the shop door and on the
title pages, whilst the juvenile books which he himself wrote were
published under the name of Baldwin. When the business was removed to
Skinner Street it was carried on in his wife's name.
"My tales are to be published in separate storybooks," Mary tells
Sarah Stoddart. "I mean in single stories, like the children's little
shilling books. I cannot send you them in manuscript, because they are
all in the Godwins' hands; but one will be published very soon, and
then you shall have it _all in print_. I go on very well, and have no
doubt but I shall always be able to hit upon some such kind of job to
keep going on. I think I shall get fifty pounds a year at the lowest
calculation; but as I have not yet seen any money of my own earning,
for we do not expect to be paid till Christmas, I do not feel the good
fortune that has so unexpectedly befallen me half so much as I ought
to do. But another year no doubt I shall perceive it.... Charles has
written _Macbeth_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, and has begun _Hamlet_; you
would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on
one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the _Midsummer Night's
Dream_; or rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff
and he groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it,
which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out he
has made something of it.
"If I tell you that you Widow Blackacre-ise you must tell me I
_Tale_-ise, for my Tales seem to be all the subject matter I write
about; and when you see them you will think them poor little
baby-stories to make such a talk about."
And a month later she says:--"The reason I have not written so long is
that I worked and worked in hopes to get through my task before the
holidays began; but at last I was not able, for Charles was forced to
get them now, or he could not have had any at all; and having picked
out the best stories first these latter ones take more time, being
more perplext and unmanageable. I have finished one to-day, which
teazed me more than all the rest put together. They sometimes plague
me as bad as your _lovers_ do you. How do you go on, and how many new
ones have you had lately?"
"Mary is just stuck fast in _All's Well that Ends Well_," writes
Charles. "She complains of having to set forth so many female
characters in boys' clothes. She begins to think Shakespeare must have
wanted imagination! I, to encourage her (for she often faints in the
prosecution of her great work), flatter her with telling how well such
and such a play is done. But she is stuck fast, and I have been
obliged to promise to assist her."
At last Mary, in a postscript to her letter to Sarah, adds: "I am in
good spirits just at this present time, for Charles has been reading
over the _Tale_ I told you plagued me so much, and he thinks it one of
the very best. You must not mind the many wretchedly dull letters I
have sent you; for, indeed, I cannot help it; my mind is always so
wretchedly _dry_ after poring over my work all day. But it will soon
be over. I am cooking a shoulder of lamb (Hazlitt dines with us), it
will be ready at 2 o'clock if you can pop in and eat a bit with us."
Mary took a very modest estimate of her own achievement; but time has
tested it, and passed it on to generation after generation of
children, and the last makes it as welcome as the first. Hardly a year
passes but a new edition is absorbed; and not by children only, but by
the young generally, for no better introduction to the study of
Shakspeare can be desired. Of the twenty plays included in the two
small volumes which were issued in January 1807, fourteen, _The
Tempest_, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, _A Winter's Tale_, _Much Ado
about Nothing_, _As You Like It_, _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _The
Merchant of Venice_, _Cymbeline_, _All's Well that Ends Well_, _The
Taming of the Shrew_, _The Comedy of Errors_, _Measure for Measure_,
_Twelfth Night_, and _Pericles, Prince of Tyre_, were by Mary; and the
remaining six, the great tragedies, by Charles. Her share was the more
difficult and the less grateful, not only on account of the more
"perplext and unmanageable" plots of the comedies, but also of the
sacrifices entailed in converting witty dialogue into brief narrative.
But she "constantly evinces a rare shrewdness and tact in her
incidental criticisms, which show her to have been, in her way, as
keen an observer of human nature as her brother," says Mr. Ainger in
his preface to the _Golden Treasury_ edition of the _Tales_.
"She" had "not lived so much among the wits and humorists of her day
without learning some truths which helped her to interpret the two
chief characters of _Much Ado about Nothing_; for instance: 'The hint
Beatrice gave Benedict that he was a coward, by saying she would eat
all he had killed, he did not regard, knowing himself to be a brave
man; but there is nothing that great wits so much dread as the
imputation of buffoonery, because the charge comes sometimes a little
too near the truth; therefore Benedict perfectly hated Beatrice when
she called him the prince's jester.' Very profound, too, is the casual
remark upon the conduct of Claudio and his friends when the character
of Hero is suddenly blasted--conduct which has often perplexed older
readers for its heartlessness and insane credulity: 'The Prince and
Claudio left the church without staying to see if Hero would recover,
or at all regarding the distress into which they had thrown Leonato,
so _hard-hearted had their anger made them_."
If one must hunt for a flaw to show critical discernment, it is a pity
that in _Pericles_, otherwise so successfully handled, with judicious
ignoring of what is manifestly not Shakespeare's, a beautiful passage
is marred by the omission of a word that is the very heart of the
simile:--
See how she 'gins to blow into life's flower again,
says Cerimon, as the seemingly dead Thaisa revives. "See, she begins
to blow into life again," Mary has it.
The _Tales_ appeared first in eight sixpenny numbers; but were soon
collected in two small volumes "embellished," or, as it turned out,
disfigured by twenty copper-plate illustrations, of which as of other
attendant vexations Lamb complains in a letter to Wordsworth, dated
Jan. 29, 1807:--
"We have booked off from the 'Swan and Two Necks,' Lad Lane, this day
(per coach), the _Tales from Shakespeare_. You will forgive the
plates, when I tell you they were left to the direction of Godwin, who
left the choice of subjects to the bad baby [Mrs. Godwin], who from
mischief (I suppose) has chosen one from d----d beastly vulgarity
(vide _Merch. Venice_), when no atom of authority was in the tale to
justify it; to another has given a name which exists not in the tale,
Nic Bottom, and which she thought would be funny, though in this I
suspect _his_ hand, for I guess her reading does not reach far enough
to know Bottom's christian name; and one of Hamlet and grave-digging,
a scene which is not hinted at in the story, and you might as well
have put King Canute the Great reproving his courtiers. The rest are
giants and giantesses. Suffice it to save our taste and damn our
folly, that we left all to a friend, W. G. who, in the first place,
cheated me by putting a name to them which I did not mean, but do not
repent, and then wrote a puff about their _simplicity_, &c. to go with
the advertisement as in my name! Enough of this egregious dupery. I
will try to abstract the load of teazing circumstances from the
stories, and tell you that I am answerable for _Lear_, _Macbeth_,
_Timon_, _Romeo_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, for occasionally a tail-piece
or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts and all of the
spelling. The rest is my sister's. We think _Pericles_ of hers the
best, and _Othello_ of mine; but I hope all have some good. _As You
Like It_, we like least. So much, only begging you to tear out the
cuts and give them to Johnny as 'Mrs. Godwin's fancy'!!"
"I had almost forgot, my part of the Preface begins in the middle of a
sentence, in last but one page, after a colon, thus--
:--which if they be happily so done, &c.
The former part hath a more feminine turn, and does hold me up
something as an instructor to young ladies; but upon my modesty's
honour I wrote it not.
"Godwin told my sister that the 'Baby' chose the subjects: a fact in
taste."
Mary's preface sets forth her aim and her difficulties with characteristic
good sense and simplicity. I have marked with a bracket the point at
which, quite tired and out of breath, as it were, at the end of her
labours, she put the pen into her brother's hand that he might finish
with a few decisive touches what remained to be said of their joint
undertaking:--
PREFACE.
The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as
an introduction to the study of Shakspeare, for which purpose 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.
In those Tales which have been taken from the Tragedies, as my young
readers will perceive when they come to see the source from which
these stories are derived, Shakespeare's own words, with little
alteration, recur very frequently in the narrative as well as in the
dialogue; but in those made from the Comedies I found myself scarcely
ever able to turn his words into the narrative form; therefore I fear
in them I have made use of dialogue too frequently for young people
not used to the dramatic form of writing. But this fault--if it be, as
I fear, a fault--has been caused by my earnest wish to give as much of
Shakespeare's own words as possible; and if the "_He said_" and "_She
said_," the question and the reply, should sometimes seem tedious to
their young ears, they must pardon it, because it was the only way I
knew of in which I could give them a few hints and little foretastes
of the great pleasure which awaits them in their elder years, when
they come to the rich treasures from which these small and valueless
coins are extracted, pretending to no other merit than as faint and
imperfect stamps of Shakespeare's matchless image. Faint and imperfect
images they must be called, because the beauty of his language is too
frequently destroyed by the necessity of changing many of his
excellent words into words far less expressive of his true sense, to
make it read something like prose; and even in some few places where
his blank-verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple
plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are
reading prose, yet still, his language being transplanted from its own
natural soil and wild poetic garden, it must want much of its native
beauty.
I have wished to make these tales easy reading for very young
children. To the utmost of my ability I have constantly kept this in
my mind; but the subjects of most of them made this a very difficult
task. It was no easy matter to give the histories of men and women in
terms familiar to the apprehension of a very young mind. For young
ladies, too, it has been my intention chiefly to write, because boys
are generally permitted the use of their fathers' libraries at a much
earlier age than girls are, they frequently having the best scenes of
Shakespeare by heart before their sisters are permitted to look into
this manly book; and therefore, instead of recommending these Tales to
the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the
originals, I must rather beg their kind assistance in explaining to
their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand; and
when they have helped them to get over the difficulties, then perhaps
they will read to them--carefully selecting what is proper for a young
sister's ear--some passage which has pleased them in one of these
stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is taken. And I
trust they will find that the beautiful extracts, the select passages,
they may choose to give their sisters in this way will be much better
relished and understood from their having some notion of the general
story from one of these imperfect abridgments, which, if they be
fortunately so done as to prove delightful to any of you, my young
readers, I hope will have no worse effect upon you than to make you
wish yourselves a little older, that you may be allowed to read the
Plays at full length: such a wish will be neither peevish nor
irrational. When time and leave of judicious friends shall put them
into your hands, you will discover in such of them as are here
abridged--not to mention almost as many more which are left
untouched--many surprising events and turns of fortune, which for
their infinite variety could not be contained in this little book,
besides a world of sprightly and cheerful characters, both men and
women, the humour of which I was fearful of losing if I attempted to
reduce the length of them.
What these Tales have been to you in childhood, that and much more it
is my wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to you in
older years--enrichers of the fancy, strengthened of virtue, a
withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all
sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach you courtesy,
benignity, generosity, humanity; for of examples teaching these
virtues, his pages are full.
* * * * *
If the "bad baby" chose the subjects, a stripling who was afterwards
to make his mark in art executed them; a young Irishman, son of a
leather-breeches maker, Mulready by name, whom Godwin and also Harris,
Newberry's successor, were at this time endeavouring to help in his
twofold struggle to earn a livelihood and obtain some training in art
(which he did chiefly in the studio of Banks the sculptor). Some of
his early illustrations to the rhymed satirical fables just then in
vogue, such as _The Butterfly's Ball_ and the _Peacock at Home_, show
humour as well as decisive artistic promise. But the young designer
seems to have collapsed altogether under the weight of Shakespeare's
creations; and whoever looks at the goggle-eyed ogre of the pantomime
species called Othello, as well as at the plates Lamb specifies, will
not wonder at his disgust. Curiously enough they have been attributed
to Blake; those in the edition of 1822, that is, which are identical
with those of 1807 and 1816; and as such figure in booksellers'
catalogues, with a correspondingly high price attached to the volumes,
notwithstanding the testimony to the contrary of Mr. Sheepshanks,
given in Stephen's _Masterpieces of Mulready_. Engraved by Blake they
may have been, and hence may have here and there traces of Blake-like
feeling and character; for though he was fifty at the time these were
executed, he still and always had to win his bread more often by
rendering with his graver the immature or brainless conceptions of
others, than by realising those of his own teeming and powerful
imagination.
The success of the _Tales_ was decisive and immediate. New editions
were called for in 1810, 1816, and 1822; but in concession, no doubt,
to Lamb's earnest remonstrances, only a certain portion of each
contained the obnoxious plates; the rest were issued with "merely a
beautiful head of our immortal dramatist from a much-admired painting
by Zoust," as Godwin's advertisement put it. Subsequently an edition,
with designs by Harvey, remained long in favour, and was reprinted
many times. In 1837, Robert, brother of the more famous George
Cruickshank, illustrated the book, and there was prefixed a memoir of
Lamb by J. W. Dalby, a friend of Leigh Hunt and contributor to the
_London Journal_. The _Golden Treasury_ edition, already spoken of,
has a dainty little frontispiece by Du Maurier, with which Lamb would
certainly have found no fault.
No sooner were the _Tales_ out of hand than Mary began a fresh task,
as Charles tells Manning in a letter written at the end of the year
(1806), wherein also is a glimpse of our friend Mr. Dawe not to be
here omitted: "Mr. Dawe is turned author; he has been in such a way
lately--Dawe the painter, I mean--he sits and stands about at
Holcroft's and says nothing; then sighs and leans his head on his
hand. I took him to be in love; but it seems he was only meditating a
work, _The Life of Morland_. The young man is not used to
composition."