One recollection by the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon concerns a boisterous and drunken dinner in December 1817 at which Lamb, Wordsworth and Keats were all present – an indication, apart from anything else, how tightly knit the London literary community was during this time. He became close friends with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, as well as with the William Godwin family (the connection, of course, to Tales from Shakespeare).įrom 1806, Charles and Mary began hosting weekly soirees at their home in London, and became the centre of a vibrant and remarkable social circle that included many of the most exciting writers in London – the poets John Keats, the essayists William Hazlitt and Thomas de Quincey, and the critic and journalist Leigh Hunt (another schoolfriend of Lamb’s), many of whom remembered both Charles and Mary fondly. A letter by Mary offers a charming account of the brother and sister team at work, seated at the same table: ‘like Hermia & Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream … I taking snuff & he groaning all the while & saying he can make nothing out of it, which he always says till he has finished’.Ĭharles became close to Samuel Taylor Coleridge at school, and the friendship was one of the most important in his life: Lamb’s early poetry was published alongside his older friend’s in the second edition of Coleridge’s Poems, and it was via Coleridge that he became intimate with other leading lights of the English romantic literary movement.

Cleverly distilling the story of each play into a short, readable narrative that could be understood by children – particularly girls, who were less likely to be given access to books during this period – they nevertheless aimed to preserve as much of Shakespeare’s own language as possible, while also filtering out material they considered unsuitable for young readers (by modern standards, the Tales are somewhat moralising and didactic). Mary agreed, and encouraged Charles to get involved too she tackled the comedies, while he worked on the tragedies, each editing the other’s work. In 1805, the publisher Mary Jane Godwin, second wife of the radical philosopher William Godwin, approached Mary Lamb with the idea of adapting Shakespeare’s plays into prose narratives for children.

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