In those tales which have been taken from the Tragedies, the young readers will perceive, when they come to see the source from which these stories are derived, that 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 the writers found themselves scarcely ever able to turn his words into the narrative form: therefore it is feared that, in them, dialogue has been made use of too frequently for young people not accustomed to the dramatic form of writing. In a canny act of marketing, while they presume that boys will be “permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls are,” they request boys’ “kind assistance…in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest.” They urge them then to select the Shakespearean originals their sisters like most and, “carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear,” read it aloud.The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare, 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 are 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 their Preface, the Lambs also indicate that their adaptation might be especially useful for girls, whom they assume must wait until they are older to read Shakespeare in the original. The Lambs write that they hope their Tales will stimulate an appetite for Shakespeare in children, which children may gratify more fully as they mature: the Tales offer “little foretastes of the great pleasure which awaits them in their elder years.” The prose versions are also far shorter than the Shakespearean originals, and the plots and dialogue are therefore stripped down. Their retellings make substantial alterations, however, in framing Shakespeare’s plots with narrative explanation and moral interpretation.

The Lambs’ adaptations include many direct quotations from Shakespeare, incorporated into dialogue in the tales or into narrative description.

Lamb shakespeare