Shakespearean Retellings and the Question of the Common Reader

Abstract

Chapter 2 moves from the high register of the literary manifesto, with its claims to inaugurate and emancipate, to the middling register of the tale collection, whose aim is to enchant and entertain. The tale collection has long held popular appeal across cultures, serving as vehicle for the recounting of adventures in faraway places or supernatural events in everyday life. This chapter approaches Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1806 Tales from Shakespeare, a redaction of twenty plays by Shakespeare for children, as a variation on such a form. It studies translator Lin Shu’s 1904 translation of the Lambs’ Tales as Yinbian Yanyu, the first Shakespearean text of any sort to appear in China. It examines how each set of Shakespearean retellers manipulates the form of the tale collection to address and fashion an imagined “common reader”—that quintessentially nineteenth-century character of global literary and cultural history whose ascendancy in various locales is predicated on the spread of literacy and the increasing accessibility of printed matter.