Like a Lamb to the Slaughter: Unjust Censorship in Tales from Shakespeare

Abstract

On September 22, 1796, Mary Ann Lamb, the sister of famed essayist Charles Lamb, stabbed and killed her mother in a fit of insanity. Surprisingly, she was not sentenced to death for this vicious attack and, instead, spent mere months in a mental asylum before being released into her brother’s care. She would live with Charles off-and-on for the rest of her life. Plagued by mental instability, Mary’s life was marked by both literal—and figurative—violence. Haunted by the fact that she had killed her mother, Mary suffered from frequent nervous breakdowns. However, this violent death opened many opportunities for the young author. Freed from the duty of caring for her mother—who had been an invalid for years—the diagnosis of mental illness gave Mary the opportunity to live with her brother as a dependent, allowing her ample time to read and write. Just eleven years after Mary’s mental breakdown, she and Charles published Tales from Shakespeare (1807), a book that retells William Shakespeare’s plays in prose for children. Of the twenty tales recounted in the book, fourteen were written by Mary. Yet, Mary’s name remained conspicuously absent from the title page until the publication of the seventh edition, an act of symbolic violence against the author that echoes across the ages. In a gross miscarriage of justice, Charles Lamb—rather than his sister Mary—was credited as the author of all twenty Tales, receiving universal acclaim as author, and boosting his prestige as an essayist and noteworthy literary critic. Like other sibling pairings (William and Dorothy Wordsworth spring to mind), the extent to which women influenced and contributed to their brothers’ oeuvre has been the subject of scholarly discourse since the rise of feminist criticism in the late twentieth century. The reason behind the erasure of Mary’s name from the title page of the siblings’ collaborative work remains a mystery, and, notably, the failure to acknowledge Mary’s authorship is not the only form of gendered erasure evident in the Tales. The remainder of this paper examines the Tales through the lens of another form of erasure: the erasure of women’s agency and sexuality from the pages of the Tales.