ABSTRACT
By the nineteenth century a familiarity with Shakespeare was expected of every educated person; the sooner aspirant middle-class children could acquire such knowledge, the better. Shakespeare was thus forcibly transformed into a children’s author. (G. Taylor 207)
Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in the little walks of Children than with Men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography & Natural History.? Damn them. I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights & Blasts of all that is Human in man & child. (Charles Lamb writing to S. T. Coleridge, 1802. Letters 81-82)
As these epigraphs demonstrate, nineteenth-century Shakespeare for children no less than contemporary cases was imbricated with concepts of education and entertainment. The responses to these competing functions within dominant literary cultures of the nineteenth century, often marked temporally as well as ideologically-the (early) Romantic, the (mid-century) high-realist Victorian, and the (late) pre-Modern-can be mapped through major examples of Shakespeare for children produced under their auspices. A consideration of the cultural and critical contexts and content of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare (1807), Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850-51), and Edith Nesbit’s The Children’s Shakespeare (1897) offers the opportunity to establish the foundations of today’s appropriations of Shakespeare for children, and reveals attitudes both to children as reading subjects and ‘Literature’ in the form of Shakespeare. They establish the broad paradigms of appropriating Shakespeare (as Author) for Children (as Readers) that have continued throughout the twentieth century,
and thus diachronically contextualise contemporary Shakespearean children’s literature and the cultural forces refl ected and reproduced by it. These forces include distinctions between Shakespearean plot and language; anxiety about Shakespeare’s authority instructive or poetic; and most signifi cantly for my purposes, the emphatic gendering of the genre and its implied readers.1
