Illustration, Text, and Performance in Early Shakespeare for Children
Kathryn Prince, Birkbeck College, University of London
Abstract
Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespear, first published in 1807, is a familiar starting point for the history of children's Shakespeare reception. Situating this work within its forgotten context of eighteenth-century precursors by Francis Gentleman and Jean-Baptiste Perrin, and alongside the more theatrically-oriented productions of the juvenile drama that were its contemporaries, calls into question current assumptions about the development of Shakespeare for children. Re-reading the Lambs and their successors with this more complete history in mind, this article suggests that the theater, suppressed in Tales from Shakespear, emerges as a significant element of children's Shakespeare.
In 1807, Charles and Mary Lamb published their Tales from Shakespear, initiating an enduring category of Shakespeare reception that imagined children as the ideal readers of prose adaptations written expressly for them.
| Bottom, Illustration by W. H. Robinson |
The Lambs' emphasis on the reader in the library, as opposed to the spectator in the theater, was neither accidental nor inevitable. Charles Lamb's views on Shakespearean performance remain quite well known, articulated most clearly in his 1810 essay On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, which argues that "the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever" (Lucas 1903-1905, 3:88). Tales from Shakespear reflects that attitude by presenting itself as a book to be read rather than, for instance, as a recollection of contemporary performances or as a guide to theatergoing. The Preface to the first edition, included in most subsequent editions, describes the child reader encountering Shakespeare for the first time through the Lambs' adaptations. In addressing a young audience of new initiates to the cult of Shakespeare, the Preface positions Tales from Shakespear as an antidote to what Charles Lamb would describe, elsewhere in his work, as the negative effect of early theatergoing experiences. Once one had seen a Shakespearean play performed, he complained, one would have great difficulty reading the text without recollecting that performance: One would find oneself inevitably imagining the characters as interpreted by the period's great actors, a Kemble or a Siddons, rather than trying to understand the characters as Shakespeare had created them.3 Even worse, Lamb complained that after hearing too many students of Shakespeare recite "Once more unto the breach, dear friends," Henry V was absolutely ruined for him: "It has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member" (Lucas 1903-1905, 1:99). William Dodd's 1752 anthology The Beauties of Shakespear had contributed to the habit of reading choice extracts rather than the plays themselves, leading to the context-less declamations that Lamb despised.
Tales from Shakespear responds to these formative experiences of the theatrical and declamatory varieties by offering children an alternative in the well-developed narratives and psychologically comprehensible characters depicted in the Tales. The kind of reading experience available in Tales from Shakespear is quite separate from performance, designed to replace rather than to recall or to provoke it. Indeed, the theater is so absent from their tales that the Lambs generally omit even Shakespeare's scenes of theatrical performances within the plays, such as the epithalamial pageant in The Tempest or the mechanicals' amateur Pyramus and Thisbe. The Mousetrap, unavoidable as a major plot point in Hamlet, stands as the sole example of a positive depiction of plays and players in Tales from Shakespear. Here, however, the tale's endorsement of the theatrical experience is carefully qualified so that it acknowledges only the emotional impact that can be achieved when the best plays are performed by the best actors. In the Lambs' version, Hamlet responds to the player's impromptu command performance of Priam's tragic speech by reflecting on "the powerful effects which a good play, represented to the life, has upon the spectator" (Lamb 2003, 231). When these good actors perform The Mousetrap, this effect is shown to be explicitly emotional, capable of forcing Claudius to reveal his guilt through his instinctive response to the enacted murder, not educational, as it would be if Claudius were taught to repent as a result of his identification with The Mousetrap's murderer. The sole claim that Tales from Shakespear allows for the theater, then, and this in a situation where Shakespeare's plot would have made it difficult to avoid admitting some kind of relevance, is that the realistic display of emotion can result in an involuntary affective (and in this case incriminating) response from the audience. This is a far cry from the larger claims the Lambs make for reading Shakespeare's plays:
While Tales from Shakespear separates Shakespeare from the theater even to the extent of excising virtually all theatrical performances from its text, its eighteenth-century precursors are more closely associated with performance. The theater is a palpable and explicit presence in the adaptations written by Francis Gentleman, editor of John Bell's edition of Shakespeare, first published in 1773-74, and Jean-Baptiste Perrin, whose volume of morality tales inspired by Shakespeare was published in 1783.
Francis Gentleman and the Bell Shakespeare
The Gentleman/Bell edition of Shakespeare's works offers an excellent example of the way in which the eighteenth-century stage found its way onto the page. The edition is dedicated to the eighteenth-century actor-manager David Garrick and consists of acting editions of Shakespeare's plays based on theater promptbooks. In its advertisement, or Preface, Gentleman emphasizes that his edition is designed to be a "companion to the theatre," in distinction to the increasingly scholarly editions of the period meant for library reading. Gentleman promises to abandon those annotations, unhelpful to the theatergoer, that had proliferated in the successive labors of Shakespeare's great eighteenth-century editors. Instead, the introduction offers "to render what we call the essence of Shakespeare, more instructive and intelligible; especially to the ladies and to youth; glaring indecencies being removed, and intricate passages being explained" (Shakespeare 1773-74, 9-10). The elision between ladies and youth, which would later prove vexing to the publishers of Tales from Shakespear, was resolved in the Gentleman/Bell edition simply by borrowing the conventions of the eighteenth-century theater. Rather than laboring to trim Shakespeare's plays of indecencies and complexities in order to convey a sense of their moral beauties in a language appropriate for children, as the Lambs would do, Gentleman allowed contemporary theatrical tastes to do all the trimming for him. His edition retained virtually all that the eighteenth-century theater saw fit to stage, advising readers to bring these texts along as companions to the theater. This edition's notion of what it was producing for ladies and youth — Shakespeare's "essence" made intelligible — is consequently very different from what the Lambs would offer children in 1807. Where Gentleman was content simply to follow the theater in omitting "glaring indecencies" and adding explanatory notes to untangle "intricate passages," the Lambs would intervene much more decisively to construct a strenuously moral, edifying kind of adaptation for children.4 First, however, there was Jean-Baptiste Perrin.
Jean-Baptiste Perrin's Contes Moraux
While Gentleman's is the first edition to consider in any explicit way the needs of a readership that included children, Perrin goes much farther by using his title to identify children as his intended readership. In Contes Moraux Amusans et Instructifs, à l'usage de la Jeunesse, tirés des Tragédies de Shakespeare [Amusing and Instructive Morality Tales for Youth, Drawn from Shakespeare's Tragedies] Perrin, a Frenchman who made his living as a tutor to the English and Irish gentry, promoted Shakespeare as a vehicle for instructing his youthful pupils in both morality and the French language. The morality aspect of the volume, given pride of place in the first two words of the title, Contes Moraux, is less prominent in the actual text than the title would suggest. Perrin was capitalizing on the popularity of Marmontel's Contes Moraux, a long-running series in the French periodical Le Mercure which, as Katherine Astbury (1991) and others have suggested, was influential in Britain and particularly in the development of British prose fiction, children's literature, and drama. In the two decades before Perrin's Contes Moraux was published, Marmontel's tales had been translated for numerous British periodicals and had been published in several collected editions.5 By allying himself with Marmontel, Perrin was invoking an existing association between French short stories, morality, children, and the theater.6
By drawing the content for his Contes Moraux from Shakespeare's plays, Perrin was also capitalizing on another recent connection familiar to eighteenth-century readers, present in works such as Elizabeth Griffith's The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated, published in 1775. Despite some eighteenth-century critics' objections to particular "low" characters and ribald incidents, Shakespeare's status as a moral author had been firmly established by the time Perrin wrote his adaptations. While Perrin's title promises to combine two familiar types of instructive writing for the further edification of youth, his struggle to reconcile the competing demands of linguistic and moral pedagogy is evident throughout the volume.
The issue of Perrin's divided task is magnified when one turns to his Preface, directed not as one might expect, at prospective Anglophone customers for Perrin's French lessons, but at potential French readers of Shakespeare. Perrin's edition teeters precariously between his two imagined audiences, English children learning French by reading a familiar author in a foreign language and French readers seeking an introduction to Shakespeare in their own tongue. His Preface is directed entirely at the second group, French readers, and consists of an apology for Shakespeare reminiscent of Elizabeth Montagu's 1769 book, An Essay on the writings and Genius of Shakespear. Paraphrasing English Shakespeare criticism of the earlier eighteenth century, Perrin makes quick work of Shakespeare's violation of the unities by suggesting that this great poet of nature had no need to follow slavishly such rules because he was a true original, above such considerations. All of Shakespeare's faults, Perrin suggests, are outweighed by his ability to depict his characters and their passions with vigor and truth. So far, so unoriginal.
Perrin's Preface is no great contribution to Shakespeare criticism, simply reiterating points previously made — and better made — by Elizabeth Montagu. Montagu is clearly an important influence on Perrin's attitude towards Shakespeare and was a subscriber to the volume, as was Elizabeth Griffith. Like many authors who published by subscription, Perrin appears to have exploited his professional connections among the intelligentsia and the gentry to generate an impressive list of purchasers. As was customary in this period, the subscribers' list is included in the published volume and contains names that reinforce all of Perrin's claims for his work: Besides the Shakespearean cachet lent by Montagu, Griffith, and Mrs. Garrick, wife of the celebrated Shakespearean actor, Perrin's list demonstrates the social desirability of subscribing, as is reflected in the names of titled ladies, including more than one duchess, a countess, and a viscountess. Its unimpeachable fitness for children is implicitly endorsed by several reverends on the list, and especially by the volume's dedication to Lady Charlotte Finch, governess to the children of King George.
As both Perrin's title and the "who's who" of his subscribers' list suggest, Perrin's objectives in his Contes Moraux were diffuse. In contrast to the Bowdlers and the Lambs in the nineteenth century, for Perrin the chief impetus for adapting Shakespeare was not necessarily to eliminate the unsavory or risqué elements of the originals in order to render them appropriate for children, although this is a byproduct of his enterprise. He does mention in his Preface that because the volume is destined for youth of both genders, he has taken particular care to omit anything that might violate modesty. Perrin was a French tutor, however, not a moralist. By loosely translating performances (and possibly basing his adaptations on Gentleman's edition), Perrin created a potentially marketable text appropriate both for teaching the French language to the English and for introducing English literature to the French. The fact that Perrin chose Shakespeare as a means to this end tells us something about the status of Shakespeare in 1783. Thanks to the pioneering work of Gentleman and Griffith, among others, Shakespeare was available to Perrin for use as a marketing device.
This marketing does not appear to have been entirely successful, though the fault is neither Shakespeare's nor Perrin's. The adaptations in Perrin's Contes Moraux are almost without exception lively and entertaining, but their fate was sealed by the French Revolution. After 1789, the idea of a Frenchman teaching morality to the British was as absurd as the notion that a tutor to foreign lords and ladies could introduce anything wholesome to the French citoyens. Perrin's own political affiliations after the French revolution made him an even less likely moral influence west of the Channel: According to S. J. Skedd's entry in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Perrin supported the Irish nationalist movement and may have advocated a plan to encourage the invasion of Ireland by republican France.
Perrin's lasting legacy on either side of the Channel remains dubious at best. Literary influence is a notoriously treacherous area of investigation, often depending on speculation and coincidence. In the case of Perrin and the Lambs, it does not seem possible to prove even the most tenuous of connections, though Mary Jane Godwin seems to be a likely link. In his edition of Charles and Mary Lamb's letters, E. V. Lucas suggests that Mrs. Godwin got the idea for Tales from Shakespear from Perrin's book, and her work as both a French translator and a children's bookseller makes this an appealing, if unsubstantiated, hypothesis (Lucas 1935, 2:n.9).7 If Contes Moraux did provide the kernel of an idea for Tales from Shakespear, the fact that the Lambs were not able to read French at that time (see Riehl 1980, 61) probably limited Perrin's influence in any unmediated way.
Perrin's Contes Moraux was probably not a direct influence on the Lambs, then, nor is there any evidence that it achieved its self-professed goal of introducing Shakespeare to many French readers.
| Lear on the Heath, Illustrated by Arthur Rackham |
Perrin's admiration for Shakespeare's adapters is even more marked in his discussion of Romeo and Juliet. In his Preface, Perrin uses Garrick as an example of adapters who have brought their taste and learning to bear on Shakespeare. Garrick, by modifying the ending so that Romeo and Juliet have a final explanatory conversation in the tomb as they lie dying, heightens the tragedy in Perrin's estimation. Again, the morality that Perrin's title claims to be inculcating is definitely not Shakespeare's, but is congruent with the morality present on the eighteenth-century stage and in the Gentleman/Bell edition.
The theater, then, is a discernible presence in the children's Shakespeare adaptations of the eighteenth century by Gentleman and Perrin. This presence continued into the nineteenth century. While the influence of the stage appears to have disappeared from Shakespeare books for children after the Lambs, it retained and even increased its importance in illustrations. The most compelling example of this influence is in the juvenile drama sets that, beginning around 1810, were published first as mementos of productions and then as substitutes for them. Equipped with a model theater and a penny, nineteenth-century children could purchase the latest offering from Skelt, Pollock, or one of their competitors and perform the season's Shakespearean hits using characters they could color, cut out, and paste to backings that would allow the figures to move across miniature sets, accomplished with the aid of a curtailed playbook designed to propel the figures from one tableau-like pose to another. These widely popular amusements, open to reinterpretation as children transformed the plays through their own creative play, perpetuated children's connection to Shakespearean performance well into the twentieth century.8
Traces of the Stage in Illustrations to Tales from Shakespear
Even within the pages of Tales from Shakespear, despite its anti-theatrical orientation, the stage crept in through illustrations featuring tableaux of famous scenes, reminiscent of the juvenile drama and of in-character portraits that were increasingly used to advertise both actors and productions in the nineteenth century. Although the Lambs had initially left the selection of illustrations entirely at William Godwin's disposal, Charles's letters reveal that he took a belatedly keen interest in them. Writing to Wordsworth, he complains that:
| Desdemona on her Knees |
The significance of these illustrations to children's Shakespeare reception is neatly expressed by a later nineteenth-century editor of Tales from Shakespear. In his introduction to a new edition with illustrations by Robert Anning Bell, Andrew Lang describes his own first exposure to Shakespeare:
Tales from Shakespear suggests that they, too, recognized the important role these illustrations played for young readers. Moreover, both Lang's experience and recent work by Peter Holland (2004) and Jonathan Bate (2000) on illustrated Shakespeare editions make it clear that illustrations were present and valued even in works for adult readers. Increasingly in the nineteenth century, these illustrations drew on the techniques and the popularity of theatrical portraits. If Lang had feared that Kenny Meadows's woodcuts were merely a relic of an outmoded age, this was because he was unaware of a more recent edition of Shakespeare's works "containing the celebrated illustrations of Kenny Meadows, Frith, Nicholson, Corbould, Hayter, etc, etc, and Portraits, from Photographs, of Celebrated Actors" (Shakespeare 1875-80). This magnificent three-volume edition, published in 1875, brings together illustration, text, and performance in what would become a characteristic feature of popular Shakespeare reception.The theater, then, remained a significant presence in early Shakespeare adaptations for children into the nineteenth century through illustrations, including those in Tales from Shakespear. Taking the Lambs as a point of departure for children's Shakespeare reception creates a misleading impression that isolates these adaptations from the theater, but bringing that history back to its eighteenth-century origins is a useful corrective. By considering the heirs of Francis Gentleman and Jean-Baptiste Perrin alongside the Lambs' prose adaptations, what emerges is a richer and more complex genre in which Charles Lamb's antipathy to performance is by no means representative. In the theater-inspired work of Gentleman and Perrin during the eighteenth century, and in the toy theater sets and the successive editions of Tales from Shakespear in the nineteenth, performance remains the hidden heart of children's Shakespeare.
Notes
| 1. | The bibliography included in Naomi J. Miller's essay collection Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults (2003), though not comprehensive, is a useful starting point for quantitative analysis. It lists thirty-two young adult novels and thirty illustrated adaptations, but only three volumes of poetry. |
| 2. | For instance, in its entry on Shakespeare, the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature states: "Shakespeare's plays were first recast into stories for children by Charles and Mary Lamb" (Carpenter and Prichard 1984, 481). The list of adaptations provided in Miller's collection also takes the Lambs as its point of origin. |
| 4. | As Riehl explains, the Lambs introduce "morality" into their adaptations in three connected ways: 1) They explain the motives of characters, so that the reader knows who is acting from good intentions and who from bad; 2) They use morally weighted adjectives like "gentle" Desdemona and "honest" Kent to interpret the characters as good or bad; and 3) They adopt some characters' self-descriptions as narrative descriptions, for instance describing Hamlet as having lost his mirth and customary pleasures rather than having him speak the lines in a way that could be interpreted as self-pitying (1980, 80). |
| 5. | "Annette and Lubin, a true story," the first of Marmontel's tales to be published in English, appeared in Gentleman's Magazine in September 1761. St James's Magazine published a series of four tales from June to September of 1763, and Beauties of All the Magazines, Edinburgh Museum, Dublin Magazine, Universal Museum, Weekly Amusement and Caledonian Weekly soon followed suit (Astbury 1991, 72). In 1763, Miss Roberts produced the first book-length collection, Select Moral Tales, followed by the two-volume Moral Tales, the first edited by Denis and the second by Lloyd (74). Translation continued sporadically throughout the century, until the publication of Marmontel's Nouveaux Contes Moraux in revolutionary France renewed interest and led to an increase English-language versions. For more on Marmontel's influence on the development of literature in English, see Astbury 1991 and Grieder 1975, passim. |
| 6. | While the association between "contes moraux" and morality was initially a false one, based on the mistranslation of moraux as moral rather than manners or mores, by 1783 the English periodical press had largely compensated for this error by translating only the most morally edifying of Marmontel's tales, or by translating them in ways that heightened their morality. See Astbury 1991, especially 74. |
| 7. | The suggestion is also made in Riehl (1980, 61) and Thwaite (1963, 88), though both are simply repeating Lucas's conjecture without adding any new evidence. |
| 8. | As George Speaight explains in his history of the juvenile drama genre, between roughly 1810 and 1880, "some 324 plays were adapted for, and published as sheets of characters and scenery for, the Juvenile Drama. These sheets were sold originally for a penny plain or twopence coloured by hand, and their intended destiny was to be stuck on cards and cut up, and for the characters to be moved across the boards of toy theatres" (Speaight 1999, 2). Among the extant toy theater sheets housed in the collections canvassed in Speaight's Union Catalogue are forty sets based on fourteen of Shakespeare's plays: Antony and Cleopatra (published by Jameson, no date); Coriolanus (West 1824); Hamlet (Hodgson 1824, Jameson 1818, Park n.d., West 1819); Henry IV (W. Clarke 1821, West 1824); Henry VIII (Myers, n.d.); Julius Caesar (Hebberd n.d., Love n.d., West n.d.); King John (Hodgson n.d.); Macbeth (Hodgson 1823, Smart 1822, West 1811); The Merry Wives of Windsor (Smart 1822, West 1815); A Midsummer Night's Dream (Jameson 1813, West 1817); Othello (Hodgson 1823, M. — B. Skelt n.d.); Richard III (Andrews n.d., Globe n.d., Green 1851, a second version by Green n.d., Hodgson 1822, Jameson 1815, Lloyd 1830, Park n.d., Park and Golding n.d., Pollock n.d., G. Skelt n.d., M. — B. Skelt, n.d., West 1814); Romeo and Juliet (Hodgson 1823, West 1825); The Tempest (Hebberd n.d., Hodgson 1823, Smart 1822). |
| 9. | Lamb's subsequent remarks would suggest that his objection to the illustrations in the first edition was more strenuous and generalized than his earlier reaction had intimated. In a letter to Samuel Rogers, he complained: "What injury (short of the theatres) did not Boydell's 'Shakespeare Gallery' do to me with Shakespeare? — to have Opie's Shakespeare, Northcote's Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli's Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney's Shakespeare, wooden-headed West's Shakespeare (though he did the best in 'Lear'), deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody's Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait! To confine the illimitable!" (December 1833, in Lucas 1935, 3:394). |
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