Content area
Full Text
Shakespeare as Children's Literature: Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures. By Velma Bourgeois Richmond. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2008. Illus. Pp. viii + 363. $35.00 paper.
Reviewed by Susan Allen Ford
Velma Bourgeois Richmond's Shakespeare as Children's Literature is a companion to her Chaucer as Children's Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (2004), providing a comprehensive guide to "Shakespeare" for Englishspeaking children in the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, principally in Great Britain and America. Richmond begins by defining the tradition of children's literature that developed through the course of the eighteenth century from Lockean principles, chiefly through chapbooks that offered imaginative pleasure and later through moral tales. Tales from Shakespear (1807) by Charles and Mary Lamb, part of a genre of retellings of literature for adults, inhabited both those traditions-explicitly seeking to provide a "'beautiful interest in wild tales'" (11) but, to some extent, moralizing those tales to make them suitable for girls. The Lambs' Tales became the most significant nineteenthcentury mode of delivering Shakespeare to children: these texts were reproduced, illustrated, selected from, and added to; and they inspired competitive versions. Richmond's first chapter also sets versions of Shakespeare for children in the context of changes in print technology that led to the Golden Age of children's book illustration and of changes in education. These changes included the Education Act of 1870, which mandated education for children in England and Wales, the definition of English literature as a subject of study, and the Newbolt Report, The Teaching of English in England. The latter, completed in 1921 by a committee that included Caroline Spurgeon, Frederick S. Boas, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and John Dover Wilson, articulated principles and standards according to which Shakespeare was included in the elementary and secondary curricula.