The Narrator as Mediator and Explicator in Victorian and Edwardian Retellings of Shakespeare for Children

Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807) was the first English attempt to mediate and remediate Shakespeare in fictional form for children, a form which relied on a narrator who often appropriates the characters’ words as their own and intrudes with comments and interpretations, so that out of the multitude of (often contradictory) viewpoints offered by the plays, a unified version of character and plot is presented to the child reader. As well as reprints of the Lambs’ Tales, collections of tales taken from Shakespeare were at the peak of their popularity in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. In these narrative retellings, motivation is constantly offered to a child in need of acculturation in the national poet’s work (in other, more contemporary words, in need of cultural capital). My essay focuses on the special, multifaceted and often ambiguous relationship that the narrator establishes with the child reader in these collections, by making Shakespeare’s plays available to a child audience in a way they may find congenial and relevant, and yet at the same time controlling the child’s interpretation of the plays. I argue that there is an unresolved paradox at the core of this retelling enterprise: the child reader is gently coerced by narrators for his/her own good, although this control/coercion might deprive children of the possibility to develop their abilities to understand characters’ motivations or actions. It appears that Shakespeare occupied too crucial a position in Victorian childhood pedagogy to give young readers the freedom to try and resolve (or simply make sense of) textual and moral ambiguities in an uncontrolled way.