I read this book because of how often it’s mentioned in 19th century Victorian novels (as well as novels about Victorian England) as being just one of those novels on the shelves in houses for children. There’s something fascinating about this book in a kind historical sense, and relatively boring in a literary sense.
So the book was published in 1807 and is a prose version of a handful of Shakespeare plays: King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest. I think there are further additions and more tales, but that’s the basics, and in a lot of ways I would say it’s a perfect little primer into much of Shakespeare. It would of course, not be super useful for students today to use in order to understand Shakespeare, but it is interesting for students to learn about the legacy of Shakespeare through the ages, and of course, to better understand the cultural importance of Shakespeare in England. Especially if it were paired with Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare which thoroughly lauds the writers and makes the case for Shakespeare in the canon.
The book itself is not particularly good or interesting on its own, and there’s often a kind of maligned portrayal of it in the books I’ve read. But what I did like about it was looking at it from an educational philosophy sense of how did people see literature, children’s capacities to understand, and what role did that play in those children’s futures?
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42036.Tales_from_Shakespeare)