The greater number of the Tales from Shakespear[128] are Mary’s; but she and Charles lived and wrote in such accord, that there is no marked difference in the style. His, of course, are freer and more graceful.
“I have done Othello and Macbeth,” he writes to Manning (May 10th, 1806), “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.”
Now it is one thing to turn a child loose in an old library,—he will forage for himself and will seldom choose any but wholesome fare. It is quite another to provide him with such stories as “Measure for Measure”, “Othello” and “Cymbeline”; to simplify the philosophy of Hamlet and weaken the grim magnificence of Lear.
The raw material of the plays would not attract many children, and those who were ready for Lamb’s Tales might have gone to Shakespeare himself.
It is clear, then, that the Lambs were Lilliputian in their attitude to children. Yet they were wise in their generation; for in 1805 (when they began to write the Tales) a boy of twelve was playing Romeo, Hamlet and Macbeth to crowded houses at Covent Garden and Drury Lane.[129]
The “little people” of the day were incredibly mature. To know them, in the delicate studies of Charles and Mary Lamb, is to find the limits of Rousseau’s influence. For in spite of the pioneer work of Mr. Day, and the activities of the whole “Barbauld crew”, these were Lilliputians, the children of Lilliputians. Lamb’s Tales must have been infinitely more diverting than most of the books they read; and if some, more childlike than the rest, flinched at the tragedies, they could turn to the magician Prospero, the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the trial between the Merchant and the Jew.
After all, the Lambs understood the vital qualities of the stuff they used. Who would not choose these tales rather than “The Price of a Victory”? They are not lessons, but literature, and that is why children are still reading them.
Lamb’s next venture was surer.