Project Gutenberg's Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

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Title: Tales from Shakespeare

Author: Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

Illustrator: Arthur Rackham

Release Date: February 24, 2007 [EBook #20657]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE

By CHARLES & MARY LAMB

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR RACKHAM

_WEATHERVANE BOOKS NEW YORK_

Copyright (C) MCMLXXV by Crown Publishers, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-18860

All rights reserved.

This edition is published by Weathervane Books, a division of Barre
Publishing Company, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

PREFACE

The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an
introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for which purpose his words
are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever
has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story,
diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least
interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he wrote:
therefore, words introduced into our language since his time have been
as far as possible avoided.

In those tales which have been taken from the Tragedies, the young
readers will perceive, when they come to see the source from which these
stories are derived, that Shakespeare's own words, with little
alteration, recur very frequently in the narrative as well as in the
dialogue; but in those made from the Comedies the writers found
themselves scarcely ever able to turn his words into the narrative form:
therefore it is feared that, in them, dialogue has been made use of too
frequently for young people not accustomed to the dramatic form of
writing. But this fault, if it be a fault, has been caused by an earnest
wish to give as much of Shakespeare's own words as possible: and if the
"_He said_," and "_She said_," the question and the reply, should
sometimes seem tedious to their