Favourite Tales from Shakespeare [antikvár]

IntroductionThis is a family book. Parents can read it to children, children can read it to parents, parents and children can read it to each other or to themselves and perhaps, most important of all, tiny children can enjoy the pictures. Mothers can give them drawing paper and paints and let them pin down their own infant visions of ships tossed to and fro by storms, of girls dressed up as boys, of ghosts walking on castle walls, of witches weaving their spells, of elves and goblins living out their lives deep in magic woodlands.Shakespeare's plays are mostly made of poetry and they were written nearly four hundred years ago, so they aren't always easy to understand. Alsó the plays only give you what people saj to each other. They don't teli you what they look üke or how they dress or what kind of house they live in. We don't know how they get from place to place or what has been happening to them between the time you saw them last and the next time they appear - only pages and pages of talk in beautiful but rather difficult and old-fashioned language.And yet, locked away inside the plays are somé of the most exciting stories ever told; somé romantic, somé tragic, somé comic, but all full of interesting people doing very much the sort of things people do today - getting into difficulties and trying to get out of them, turning up late for appointments, mistaking one person for another and so on.One of the best ways to learn about these wonderful plays is to get someone to teli you the stories hidden away inside them, the frameworks or skeletons that the poetry and the people who speak it are fastened to. Shakespeare himself always took somebody else's stories for his plays, somé from a very old English book called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, somé from a famous history book written by a man named Tom Holinshed, somé from a book about the Romans by a writer named Plutarch, and somé from Spanish or Italian books which had only recently been translated into English.So in this book I have taken five of his most exciting plays and tried to turn them back into the kind of stories he started out with. I haven't always followed the plays exactly and here and there I have even added a little from my imagination, but only the sort of things I believe Shakespeare would have allowed me to say if he had been sitting beside me! He often altered the stories to suit the play and he put in fresh scenes and extra people, so I don't think he would object to the little bits I have added here and there!Shakespeare was an actor as well as a play-writer, and although in his time London was not much bigger than a small markét town and had only three or four proper theatres, people