Mary Lamb was asked to write the Tales from Shakespear, with help from her brother, in the spring of 1806 or the winter of 1805. I have seen the statement that this was at the instigation of Hazlitt, but Lamb does not say so. The first mention of the work is in Lamb's letter to Manning, May 10, 1806:—
"She [Mary] says you saw her writings about the other day, and she wishes you should know what they are. She is doing for Godwin's bookseller twenty of Shakspeare's plays, to be made into children's tales. Six are already done by her, to wit, 'The Tempest,' 'Winter's Tale,' 'Midsummer Night,' 'Much Ado,' 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' and 'Cymbeline'; and the 'Merchant of Venice' is in forwardness. I have done 'Othello' and 'Macbeth,' and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people, besides money. It's to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally, I think, you'd think. These are the humble amusements we propose, while you are gone to plant the cross of Christ among barbarous pagan anthropophagi. Quam homo homini præstat! but then, perhaps, you'll get murdered, and we shall die in our beds with a fair literary reputation."
Mary Lamb's letters to Sarah Stoddart (afterwards Sarah Hazlitt), continue the story. This is on June 2, 1806:—
My Tales are to be published in separate story-books; I mean, in single stories, like the children's little shilling books. I cannot send you them in Manuscript, because they are all in the Godwins' hands; but one will be published very soon, and then you shall have it all in print. I go on very well, and have no doubt but I shall always be able to hit upon some such kind of job to keep going on. I think I shall get fifty pounds a year at the lowest calculation; but as I have not yet seen any money of my own earning, for we do not expect to be paid till Christmas, I do not feel the good fortune, that has so unexpectedly befallen me, half so much as I ought to do. But another year, no doubt, I shall perceive it.
When I write again, you will hear tidings of the farce, for Charles is to go in a few days to the Managers to inquire about it. But that must now be a next-year's business too, even if it does succeed; so it's all looking forward, and no prospect of present gain. But that's better than no hopes at all, either for present or future times.
Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet; you would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night's Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan: I taking snuff; and he groaning all the while, and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it….
Martin [Burney] has just been here. My Tales (again) and Charles's Farce has made the boy mad to turn Author; and he has written a Farce, and he has made the Winter's Tale into a story; but what Charles says of himself is really true of Martin, for he can make nothing at all of it; and I have been talking very eloquently this morning, to convince him that nobody can write farces, &c., under thirty years of age. And so I suppose he will go home and new model his farce.
A little later, June 26, Lamb writes to Wordsworth:—
"Mary is just stuck fast in All's Well that Ends Well. She complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boy's clothes. She begins to think Shakspear must have wanted Imagination. I to encourage her, for she often faints in the prosecution of her great work, flatter her with telling how well such and such a play is done. But she is stuck fast and I have been obliged to promise to assist her."
Then we have Mary Lamb to Sarah Stoddart again (early in July, 1806): "I am in good spirits just at this present time, for Charles has been reading over the Tale I told you plagued me so much, and he thinks it one of the very best: it is 'All's Well that Ends Well.'"