Illustration, Text, and Performance in Early Shakespeare for Children

Authors

  • 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.

Author Biography

Kathryn Prince, Birkbeck College, University of London

Kathryn Prince is a postdoctoral research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her work on Shakespeare's reception before the twentieth century has already yielded a Ph.D. thesis and several forthcoming articles, and is the focus of her current research for a book entitled "England, France, and the Shakespeare Controversy from the French Revolution to the First World War." She is also writing the Much Ado About Nothing volume for Manchester University Press's Shakespeare in Performance series.

Issue Cover text: B&L, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2006. Image: 18th century actress in a shepherdess costume tips her hat.

Downloads

Published

2006-09-01

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2006): Fall/Winter

Section

Articles