Teaching with Tales from Shakespeare Elizabeth Haven Hawley

Home , Arthur Rackham, Elizabeth Shippen Green

We transform lives through our work in heritage preservation. Global heritage collections are central ways of creating cohesiveness within and across cultures. They do this by challenging us to explore and articulate our commonalities and differences through the layered and competing narratives they expose.

We express the complexity of our own times and lives through the richness of the documents and materials we create and sustain. And by looking critically at what is missing from those collections, we move beyond narrow identities to affirm a more vibrant social palette. We must be trained and train others to see human experience both through presence and absence in collections. We also need to find ways for the broader public to experience our holdings, directly as objects, indirectly through surrogates, and through shared transformation of the arrayed aspects that can Source: Charles and Mary Lamb, be found in even a single item. Tales from Shakespeare (Philadelphia: David McKay The world of Shakespeare was a period of Company, 1922). Images from transformation, restructuring the relationship of people book in author’s collection. to the land, the law, and to one another. I specialize in studying transitions -- the eras in which great changes occurred, but which at the time did not reveal clear paths forward. The history of technology is an essential aspect of studying Shakespeare’s world, as well as each era in which his works became key cultural resources. The 1922 edition of Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb, can show us the ways in which social and technological trajectories intersect and shape the forms in which we come into contact with Shakespeare. The 1922 edition is an emblem and evidence of how social practices intertwine with those of the material world and how we structure our work in it.

What can be discerned with a little guidance,

magnification, and the book itself? What is experienced differently in another form or through interaction with that form, whether it be the actual book or a dramatic performance? And to the point: when must this specific object be used rather than any other form or substitution?

A research library encompasses a remarkable range of conversations between the many pasts and our complex present. We need to be up to our promise of providing

1 opportunities for engagement with books in the future, both documenting our engagement, now, and preserving opportunities beyond our use, for the future. I say this as someone who loves books but who also is wary of the tendency to make an altar to or out of them. Having worked in the printing industry, I have been maker and destroyers of their bodies. As reader, scholar, teacher, librarian, I have learned that each interaction leaves a mark. Let us make those marks mean something with our careful work together.

Brief Publishing History

Frontispiece The English essayist Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, his sister, wrote shortened and selected prose versions of twenty plays as a means of introducing children to dramatic works through prose. First published in London in 1807, Tales from Shakespeare rode a wave of interest in Shakespeare adaptations that brought aspects of the Bard’s writing in line with each era’s preferences.

Tales has been frequently republished, with particular intensity in London and major American cities. A comprehensive listing of the entirety of its publication history would be daunting to attempt. In addition to the English-language versions more commonly known, Tales also introduced adults and non-English speakers to his works. We find Yiddish versions in the United States about a century after the work’s first publication. Translation into Korean in the early 20th century paved the way for appreciation of full-text materials in that country. Though facilitated by Japanese interest in Shakespeare, Korean readings of Shakespeare have long expressed nuances of political protest, both during Japanese occupation and more recent political suppression. The publishing diversity reflects the spread of Shakespeare’s works into and across cultures as a means of validating or expressing opposition to political power.

The Lambs’ work is a prime example of Anglo-American publications for introducing children to Shakespeare in the 19th century. Mary wrote fourteen adaptations of plays into prose, taking charge of the comedies. Her brother Charles prepared six of the tales, including plays such as King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet. They both contributed to the preface, although Charles attributed the majority of it to Mary. Charles, becoming known through his work as an essayist, was the only author noted on the title page until the late 1830s, a few years after his death.

To their joint effort, Charles brought a belief that prose better conveyed nuance than performance of drama. The stage favored force, rather than intimacy. The subtler aspects of

conveying love could be better appreciated in prose Title page and, perhaps, by individual rather than community experience. Mary offered a somewhat more mechanical point of view. She emphasized the value of love, but more so as it intersected with propriety and expressions of gendered norms of the day. Their adaptations followed expectations that children’s reading in the 19th century would inculcate morality, reward of diligence, loyalty, and virtue.

Shakespeare, then, would seem a choice somewhat at odds with their aims for children’s literature. Yet they followed a long tradition of reinterpreting scripts into other types of text and the revising, rewriting, and cutting of unpopular aspects in order to make their work resonate with their society. In a similar vein, though Mary was the main writer and proponent of its commission, the book remained under her brother’s name until after his death. Mary’s unfortunate history of mental illness and her murder of their mother made Charles a mentor and protector – as well as necessary public face for their work.

The Lambs exercised editorial license to make works suitable for children, expressing belief that the “great pleasures” of the works would be experienced as an adult readily after a taste had been acquired during childhood. Compaction and simplification, along with the guidance of more knowledgeable brothers who could select appropriate reading from full copies of plays, would help little girls to take part in a world shaped by Shakespeare. It seems the Lambs modeled their expectations upon their own close relationship, producing a work that replicated their personal experiences.

While using as much of Shakespeare’s vocabulary as possible for material they crafted, Mary and Charles trimmed and omitted sections that did not fit into a child’s upright education. Mary’s goal of promoting contemporary middle-class Christian morality and social relations was clear, for instance, in Merchant of Venice. She suppressed the important “hath not a Jew eyes” soliloquy and minimized the marriage of Shylock’s daughter to a Christian. Her work perpetuated the least generous interpretations of Shylock’s character. She removed the suitor competition, directing readers into conceptualizing a love-match rather than a test of a daughter’s loyalty to her father. Her editing created an implicit critique of capitalism, just as the United States was establishing market capitalism, turning tillers of the land toward workshop and then factory labor. In Mary’s adaptation, Portia served both as obedient wife, accepting a husband’s complete control over her wealth and person, and as chief advocate in a legal proceeding on behalf of her husband’s best friend. Her role was to submit to

Headpiece to preface

nature’s hierarchy, only acting outside of that role when called to defend the interests of one who ruled her.

Tales from Shakespeare can be considered a best seller. In the United States, high literacy rates and an emphasis on education essential to participating in civic life provided a perfect environment for the book’s popularity. Reading supported learning God’s word in colonial times, shaping perceptions of Elizabeth Shippen Green, self portrait Shakespeare as literature. Increasing study of Shakespeare and public performance of works in the 19th century stimulated more interest. From crude popular culture to finding a classical past in time for the centennial of the country, Shakespeare infiltrated American public life and growing individualized spaces for middle and upper classes.

For these among other reasons, we find numerous US imprints. While invariably reprinting the original preface, these new editions reset type, offered decorative bindings, or added plays or exchanged older illustrations for new, to peak the interest of customers.

Mary Lamb considered the illustrations that Mary Godwin selected for the 1807 edition not as tasteful and educational as the text deserved. Over the next century, both unnamed and well known artists such as Arthur Rackham illustrated editions of the work. Highly successful during her own time, Elizabeth Shippen Green Elliot illustrated the 1922 edition.

Elizabeth Shippen Green, also later taking Elliott as her married name, created art evoking idealized domesticity at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. During this Golden Age of Illustration, her lush, colorful art took full advantage of advances in color printing. She formed an enduring social and professional partnership with Violet Oakley and Jessie Willcox Smith. Their output carved out a successful occupational space by focusing on topics considered a women’s domain, such as children and home life. Green succeeded in making a career of producing artwork for advertising, popular magazines, and children’s books.

Smith’s photographic work sometimes provided models from which Green sketched her images of children and women, which printers turned into halftone images to make printable. Separates plates for each color could be arranged carefully and printed in sequence to achieve prints strikingly Illustration for “Merchant of Venice” similar to her original art. Color illustrations for Tales from Shakespeare became a key marketing device from the 1890s onward, with the availability of leisure time shaping educational reading matter.

Yet even the most colorful and enticing print in 1922 competed with new ways of capturing, transmitting, and multiplying the human voice and other audio through recorded music, radio, and film. And with a number of other publishers bringing out this work in editions that sometimes also had just a colorful illustrations, why did it make sense for a Philadelphia publisher to throw his hat into the ring with another?

The transformation of print and audio media from novelty messaging into

5 narrative-bearing technologies was dramatic during this period. Yet competition brought out the highest levels of skill by workers in existing trades and an eagerness for applying new techniques. Just as importantly, demand for print rose strongly in an elastic market.

After World War I, color became even more pervasive in American society. Colorful fabrics, paints, and inks were more possible than before the war because of the abrogation of patent treaties with Germany, a leading source of dye technologies. Color was more than a marketing mechanism – it induced people to buy when goods were available. Gravure printing methods allowed consumer magazines to print exceptionally long print runs, flooding the market – yet with strong demand meeting that supply.

War generates a desire for information, and print demand rocketed upward. For our purposes, a key aspect was the pent up demand for school books that could not be purchased during the war. Tales from Shakespeare especially benefited from the professionalization of libraries. The American Library Association teamed up with booksellers and publisher organizations to recommend a “must buy” list of works essential to a country schoolhouse library. Tales from Shakespeare easily made the top 25 of titles selected from a list of 100 pre-selected by the library association.

Immediately before this edition was printed, the price of book paper fluctuated wildly. Demand for book production was so great that prices for book paper skyrocketed from 3- 1/2 cents per pound before World War I to 14 cents per pound in 1920. The price floor fell to 6 cents per pound in spring of 1922 but began edging up as the year went on. These severe changes urged publishers to quickly move materials into production. Clearly, David McKay grabbed a window of profitability.

The result is that this book’s paper seems to be a combination of soda and sulphite chemical wood. I would speculate that it has more of the latter, due to how the paper of this edition tears. The paper also is a much more fragile substrate than its outward appearance suggests, as can be seen by tears from handling at inconvenient angles (so please turn pages carefully). Ready tearing in older books is characteristics of overprocessed paper that temporarily makes a substrate more beautiful or similar to more expensive papers in smoothness. Chemical and pressing processes taken too far result in less permanent papers.

The ink has held its color well, and this is not fast-fading aniline ink. Leaves facing full-page color illustrations tend to have a halo of browning around their edges, corresponding to the uninked paper of the illustration. We should ask a conservator about these things.

The publisher turned to a quality printer in Philadelphia, the Beck Engraving Company near Independence Square. The advent of photographic processes dramatically expanded the possibilities for artistic and lifelike effects in printing. Skilled craftspeople took Elizabeth Shippen Green Elliott’s artwork and separated the colors so they could be layered in a way

6 that produced the richest depth. They used just four colors to produce this illustration: Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. And they broke the image down into varied sizes of dots to create tones through the interplay of these dots, how the eye sees adjacent colors, and how light reflects from the paper, through the ink, to the observer’s eye.

Source: 80X details of “This Bond Doth Give Thee The printer carefully angled the dotted Here No Jot of Blood,” Merchant of Venice, in screens to minimize obscuring overlap, Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare called a moiré. The colors were likely to (Philadelphia: David McKay Company, 1922); have been printed YCMK, which stands for graphics by speaker. yellow, cyan (bright blue), magenta (pink- red), and black.

The amount of yellow underneath the other colors of the image provides evidence that it likely was laid down first. Customarily, the least conspicuous color is placed at 0˚, and we find yellow to take this angle.

Certain deep blue areas in other parts of the illustration required printing cyan immediately before cyan. (The reverse would have made produced a deeper cyan, rather than blue.) The angle 75˚.

In the coloring of the overall image, magenta poses little threat of a moiré, allowing it to be placed nearest the angle of yellow. The magenta line shown is 16˚, one notch off a typical 15˚ angle.

Black appears as the most conspicuous

color. Typically, the dominant color is positioned at 45˚. Here we find it at 46˚.

Are these technical details meaningful? I think that they are, when viewed together as a cluster of technical practices reflecting and reproducing the social context. Specifically, they provide evidence of highly specific directions to the printer for reproducing the art as faithfully as possible, using printing techniques that stretched mightily to accommodate nuanced painting-style illustrations. The larger social context in which the work was envisioned as a cultural product cannot be extracted from the means of production and each hand that shaped its appearance in the market.

I would like to go back to the Merchant of Venice for a moment and to a particular aspect of Shakespeare’s story. The dilemma of a contract impossible to fulfill without inherent damage to a body strikes me as a metaphor for what we in heritage preservation do: We strive to keep materials permanently and yet to make them accessible to the greatest extent possible. We know that each hand touching a work and each additional lumen assisting human sight shaves off a bit of life from the objects we have promised to preserve. At the same time, we keep alive texts and their physical containers, and meanings that can be constructed of these together, through access in our own time.

Did Portia obey as a wife by taking on a role beyond the bounds of what was proper for a married woman? Likewise, do we preserve by increasing relevance, interest, and cultural support, even as these worthwhile outcomes more often than not hasten deterioration? We do. This balancing is the most difficult aspect of our work as heritage professionals.

Books are sturdy things, except when they are not. We become so accustomed to persistence that we forget the many factors that make it possible for an item to come to be, to survive in that form or another, and to maintain authenticity as a whole. These things require that form and content resonate at critical junctures with the cultures in which they are created and experienced.

This specific item has survived for more than a century and can be a route for studying the societies in which it was published, as well as the larger history of the work and the original works of Shakespeare. Its creation as a compilation compressing, self-censoring, and rewriting the past for the present evokes a host of ways of presenting it, beyond scholars, as individuals or in groups, reading the text in the reading room or in images to be placed online.

We might first think of childhood studies, education, and critical editing, and then find more. The book also opens avenues for teaching about the study of gender, American economy, World War I, the relationship of institutions and individuals, health and disability, and the history of technology. So, too, might we study how we develop concepts of individual identity and the practices through which we form ideas about our roles in society.

Shakespeare penetrated American culture through the alignment of technical and social contexts, and the execution of specific editions, performances, ephemera, and other cultural goods. These each required Shakespeare to be become part of ordinary practices in society, rather than reserved for elite consumption. Those who purchased and recommended books for readers contributed. So, too, did those who published, printed, engraved, illustrated, and wrote books that intersected with social and technological practices. Their hands, unseen but imprinted on the 1922 edition, can be recognized and taught.

The continued popularity of Tales of Shakespeare in this form or generally was not foreordained. Many trends intersected to create the "fit" between the Lambs' adaptation and Am culture. Creation of the specific 1922 version arose from a further set of circumstances, situated within the larger picture. So we have a result which could not be here today had Mary's family had committed her to an asylum for life; if a profusion of color were not desirable and technologically possible; or if adults had not purchased books for libraries in cities, schools, and homes. The 1922 edition may not have come to be without demand for the domestic life illustrations that provided an occupational sphere for women artists, a fortunate break in paper prices that supported print production, and the voice of the increasingly strong library profession extending its influence over reading practices and education.

Even beyond these contingencies, this item could not have survived without institutional and individual collectors who acquired this work, balanced its use with its integrity, and managed to release it for other purposes. That integrity exists in what you see as a physical object, whether text, binding, or the marks made by readers, as well as in the ways that we link this copy to the actors in its creation and endurance. Authors, illustrators, printers, owners, and readers are part of that work. So, too, are those who create metadata, digital projects, or talks about this copy.

Considering these many aspects of the work at hand can help us to form answers to our questions about the limits of examination, the ways that we experience a cultural work in various forms, and whether we should, or can, draw distinctions between original materials and surrogates.