Shakespeare as Children’s Literature: Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures (review)

Velma Bourgeois Richmond’s Shakespeare as Children’s Literature is a companion to her Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (2004), providing a comprehensive guide to “Shakespeare” for English-speaking children in the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, principally in Great Britain and America. Richmond begins by defining the tradition of children’s literature that developed through the course of the eighteenth century from Lockean principles, chiefly through chapbooks that offered imaginative pleasure and later through moral tales. Tales from Shakespear (1807) by Charles and Mary Lamb, part of a genre of retellings of literature for adults, inhabited both those traditions—explicitly seeking to provide a “‘beautiful interest in wild tales’” (11) but, to some extent, moralizing those tales to make them suitable for girls. The Lambs’ Tales became the most significant nineteenth-century mode of delivering Shakespeare to children: these texts were reproduced, illustrated, selected from, and added to; and they inspired competitive versions. Richmond’s first chapter also sets versions of Shakespeare for children in the context of changes in print technology that led to the Golden Age of children’s book illustration and of changes in education. These changes included the Education Act of 1870, which mandated education for children in England and Wales, the definition of English literature as a subject of study, and the Newbolt Report, The Teaching of English in England. The latter, completed in 1921 by a committee that included Caroline Spurgeon, Frederick S. Boas, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and John Dover Wilson, articulated principles and standards according to which Shakespeare was included in the elementary and secondary curricula.

Further chapters explore the illustration of Lambs’ Tales, ventures defined as completions of or selections from Lambs’ Tales, Victorian alternatives to the Lambs’ work, the flowering of Edwardian retellings, the appearance of Shakespeare in children’s schoolbooks, and the role of retellings of Shakespeare in home libraries. In each chapter, Richmond typically moves through the principal editions in the category, defining premises, analyzing adaptations, and describing representative or particularly interesting illustrations. Illustrations are a significant aspect of this study. Unfortunately, especially given the richness and beauty of Edwardian color schemes, this book uses color only on its cover (which features J. R. Skelton’s charming image of Shakespeare walking among children at play in Stratford). Fortunately, though, Richmond’s descriptive analyses pay close attention to the color values and their effects. The cataloging of editions is also enlivened by Richmond’s identification of specific copies that yield a more individualized sense of history—books that have served as gifts from parents or aunts, school prizes, or rewards. Finally, a quartet of tables ends the study, displaying the distribution of plays in editions of the Lambs’ Tales, versions of E. Nesbit’s Children’s Shakespeare, and other collections of Shakespeare stories, as well as the number and kind of illustrations by artist or publisher.

With this book, Richmond seeks to counter today’s “general loss of quiet, thoughtful reading and a valuing of the humanities, especially a strong sense of the moral tradition of English literature” (5), with a reminder of what the Victorians and Edwardians had to offer. In 1911, Alice Spencer Hoffman defined the project of understanding Shakespeare’s plays as something that would make children “‘better and nobler men and women’” (222). In her discussion of Miranda’s education by Prospero, she elaborated: “‘Perhaps you do not know what is meant by a beautiful mind. It is the mind which makes us think and do, and if the mind is beautiful and good, we shall think and do beautiful and good things, while if it is bad, we shall think and do bad things’” (222). Richmond agrees that “minds grow beautiful from reading and understanding Shakespeare” (323). Shakespeare as Children’s Literature, then, is political in its belief that Shakespeare offers...