The Eternal Survivors: the Didactic Tales

or Some Thoughts on Tales from Shakespeare by the Lambs

Abstract

Although Shakespeare’s dramas originally were not written for children, several re-written versions have been published for this target audience. Their connecting thread is their content, their language and the fact that plays which were originally written for perfor-mance should be transformed into a narrative form. During the time the Lambs decided to re-write the tales, girls’ access to certain works of art was limited, while the boys could enter the study rooms at home and read the books there. The Tales from Shakespeare were written with the aim to formulate moral principles, behaviour patterns decisively for the girls, ac-cording to which a future wife had to live. As a result of this, almost all the tales focus on love. Godwin, the customer of the tales, points out in one of his essays that any reading su-itable for children stimulates their imagination and curiosity. He would have liked to order some easily legible Shakespeare for the little ones. The Lambs’ conception though, with the help of which they wanted to conform to the spirit of the age, shifted the scale towards the representation of female characters and female ideal in general. But it resulted in the omis-sion of several details of the plays, the focus of the stories changed, and as a consequence of this, a lot of criticism was voiced in connection with them. Thus not only the illustrations, the toys developing the children’s fantasy changed and developed a lot over the years, but the editions addressed another target audience from time to time. As a consequence of this, the Lambs’ works got a new place in world literature. They were meant to be gift books, which means that they drew the parents’ attention to buy them and give them to their daughters. According to Harvey, this hint to adult customers could be observed even in the 1995 Penguin edition as well. Obviously though, it seems as if the Lambs, without concealing didactic aims, forgot all about the criteria of tales. The tales were published in Hungarian at the end of the 19th century. From the last decades of the18th century an intensified interest in the social position of women and the questions of their education could be observed in Hungary as well.
More and more writings were published by Hungarian authors on the topic, and advisory books on the education of women by foreign authors published in Hungarian were fashio-nable as well. But the instructions of the early 19th century have already lost their relevance, but the volumes of the re-written tales with their beautiful illustrations regain power again and — similarly to fast food — become quickly consumable. It seems that the tales originally targeted for children still reach mainly the adults today.