Tales from Shakespeare [antikvár]

EDITOR'S NOTECharles Lamb was still a young man, not yet known as 'Elia'of the essays, when he and his sister and life-long companion,Mary, wrote together in 1806 the Tales from Shakespeare;they were living at the time in Mitre Court Buildings,Temple. In a letter to a friend in that year, Mary Lambsays that plays, novels, poems, and 'all manner of such-likevapouring and vaporous schemes are floating in my head,' theresult being that Charles, writing on May the 10th, speaksof Mary as having already completed six of the tales: TheTempest, Winters Tale, Midsummer Night's Dream, MuchAdo, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Cymbeline. TheMerchant of Venice was in preparation; Charles himself haddone Othello and Macbeth, and said it was his intention todo all the tragedies.We get other interesting glimpses of the tales from Mary.'You would like to see us,' she says, 'as we often sit writingon one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermiaand Helena in the Midsummer Night's Dream; or, rather,like an old literary Darby and Joan; I taking snufF, and hegroaning all the while, and saying he can make nothing of it,which he always says till he has finished, and then he findsthat he had made something of it.' And in one of Charles'sletters he writes: 'Mary is stuck fast in All's Well that EndsWell. She complains of having to set forth so many femalecharacters in boys' clothes. She begins to think Shakespearemust have wantedimagination! I, to encourage her (forshe often faints in the prosecution of her great work), flatterher by telling her how well such a play and such a play isdone. But she is stuck fast, and I have been obliged topromise to assist her. To do this it will be necessary toleave off tobacco.' Later on, Mary writes that 'Charles hasbeen reading over the tale I told you plagued me so much,and he thinks it's one of the very best: it is All's Well thatvii