In the autumn of 1796, at the age of 21, Charles Lamb, a city clerk with a lifelong stutter, came home from his desk at the East India Company to find that his sister, Mary, had stabbed their mother to death in a mad seizure. He described the events of 22 September in a letter to a friend:

“I will only give you the outlines. My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand with only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to a hospital. God has preserved to me my senses – I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.”

Young Charles Lamb had to persuade the parish to let him take responsibility for his sister for the rest of her days. Mary’s madness would recur briefly almost every year until her death in 1847. However, there remained enough good reason in her for brother and sister to collaborate on literary projects, possibly as a sort of therapy. Besides, from all accounts, Charles Lamb was exceptionally kind, extraordinarily free from affectation and blessed with an innate good humour. It seems that he accepted his fraternal duty without complaint, and channelled his own and his sister’s imaginative energies into literature, in particular the highly popular Tales from Shakespeare, a bestselling book throughout the 19th century.

Lamb had already launched a precocious career when, in 1794, he and close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a number of poems in the Morning Post. In 1796, he had four sonnets in Coleridge’s volume, Poems on Various Subjects, and still more verse in the second edition, published the following year. Lamb also became friends with Hazlitt and Wordsworth, whose fame rubbed off on him. Combined with the delights of his prose, more than his poetry, and the glamour of this gifted circle, Lamb slowly acquired what one critic has called “the status of cultural teddy bear in the Victorian establishment”.

Tales from Shakespeare epitomises the best of Lamb: his qualities of clarity, readability and charm, literary gifts that would reach their highest expression in Essays of Elia, published in the influential London Magazine during 1820. A forerunner of Lamb’s mature later work, his Tales have a personal and sometimes conversational tone that won generations of readers. It was from this point that Lamb’s reputation as “the most delightful of English essayists” began to be formed.

Lamb and his Mary took the often-dark complexity of Shakespeare’s stage plots and simplified them for younger readers, paraphrasing and bowdlerising where necessary. You will, for instance, look in vain here for a prose rendering of the relentless horrors in Titus Andronicus or the bloody and violent revenges in Timon of Athens. The Lambs do not want to go near the popular political message of Coriolanus and they make no attempt to produce a schoolroom version of Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth or Richard the Third.

Ever since the actor David Garrick had (belatedly) celebrated Shakespeare’s bicentenary with an extravagant Stratford pageant in 1769, there had been a steady deification of “the bard” that would reach a climax during the 19th century. Charles and Mary Lamb anticipated this and their work is part of the zeitgeist. As they write in their preface: “What these tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers’ wish that the true plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years – enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages are full.”

The book contains artful prose summaries of some of Shakespeare’s most popular works, from Hamlet and King Lear to The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. According to Lamb, he worked primarily on Shakespeare’s tragedies, while his sister focused mainly on the comedies. Their approach was reverential, even pious: “Diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he wrote”.

Lamb was already a champion of the – to us – perverse idea that Shakespeare plays better on the page than the stage. His essay, On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation, is a classic Romantic dismissal of the theatre. In that essay, Lamb argues that Shakespeare should be read, rather than staged, in order to protect his genius from vulgar commercial performances, a critique derived from the excesses of contemporary theatre practice. At the same time, Lamb also explores a deeper consideration of the dramatic representation of Shakespeare’s plays. For Lamb, these do not require “performance” or “staging”, but, rather, the complex and allusive suggestiveness of Shakespeare’s language. As one critic has written: “In the altered state of consciousness that the dreamlike experience of reading stands for, Lamb can see Shakespeare’s own conceptions mentally materialised.”

Besides contributing to the burgeoning myth of the bard, Tales from Shakespeare shaped a century of literary responses to England’s national poet. Some of these Tales read oddly today. Here, for instance, is the Lambs’ introduction to Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare’s darkest plays: “In the city of Vienna, there once reigned a duke of such a mild and gentle temper that he suffered his subjects to neglect the laws with impunity; and there was in particular one law, the existence of which was almost forgotten… a law dooming any man to the punishment of death who should live with a woman that was not his wife... ”

Nevertheless, Tales from Shakespeare was a key text in the 19th-century English library. Its influence lingers, too, in latterday “retellings” of Shakespeare by writers such as Margaret Atwood and Anne Tyler.

A signature sentence

“This plainness of speech, which Lear called pride, so enraged the old monarch – who in his best of times always showed much of spleen and rashness, and in whom the dotage incident to old age had so clouded over his reason, that he could not discern truth from flattery, nor a gay painted speech from words that came from the heart – that in a fury of resentment he retracted the third part of his kingdom which yet remained, and which he had reserved for Cordelia, and gave it away from her, sharing it equally between her two sisters and their husbands, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall; whom he now called to him, and in presence of all his courtiers bestowing a coronet between them, invested them jointly with all the power, revenue, and execution of government, only retaining to himself the name of king...”

Three to compare

Charles Lamb: Essays of Elia (1823)
Charles Lamb, Adam Phillips (ed): Selected Prose (1985)
Jane Smiley: A Thousand Acres (1991)

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