Tales from Shakespeare

Shakespeare without the stage

In 1807 Charles Lamb and his sister Mary published twenty of Shakespeare’s plays retold as short prose stories for young readers. Mary wrote the fourteen comedies, among them The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night. Charles wrote the six tragedies: King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Othello. In their preface they explain that they used Shakespeare’s own words wherever they could, and avoided words that came into English after his time.

Why it works for learners

Each tale is a complete play in a few pages, short enough for one or two sittings, with the plot laid out clearly: who loves whom, who is in disguise, who is lying. That makes the collection one of the easiest ways into stories that are referred to everywhere, in books, in films and in everyday speech. The vocabulary is love, jealousy, kings, ghosts, storms, shipwrecks, twins and disguise, and the themes repeat from tale to tale in useful ways. If you later want to see or read the plays, in your own language or in English, you’ll already know the stories, and Shakespeare becomes much less daunting.

Which level to start at

A2 works for most of the tales, because the plots are clear and the situations simple. B1 is ideal if you want more of the dialogue the Lambs kept. In English at C1 and C2, you’ll meet real lines of Shakespeare woven into the prose, and a tap explains any word that has changed its meaning since.

Read next

• The Arabian Nights, another book of complete stories
• Grimms’ Fairy Tales, short tales to read one at a time
• The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, more legendary Britain