Lisa Birger on "Shakespeare's Amazing Plots" by Edith Nesbit

Victorian England loved retellings. Starting with Charles Dickens himself, who retold the New Testament in family evenings. And ending with the writer Edith Nesbit, who published her book of Shakespeare retellings in 1907. Twenty of Shakespeare's plays were preceded by a biographical article and ended with a dictionary of particularly difficult words.

Edith Nesbit, considered in the UK to be one of the main children's authors, equal to James Barrie and Lewis Carroll, who inspired Clive Lewis and J. K. Rowling, the founder of children's fantasy and children's detective stories, remained virtually unknown not only in Russia, but generally outside the UK. Five of her several dozen books have been translated into Russian, and it is difficult to call them popular. So a book about Shakespeare is a great chance to get to know the author, to whom for a long time we remained criminally indifferent.

She was born in 1858, at 22 she married a bank clerk, and together with him she joined the Fabians, moderate socialists, who later included Herbert Wells and Bernard Shaw. In the 1880s she was keen on political pamphlets and speeches. But at the same time, she gradually began to write books. Her most famous novels, including "Children of the Road", "The Enchanted Castle", "Five Children and Magic", were written at the very beginning of the twentieth century. In total, Nesbit has more than 40 books, and co-authored as many more. In her books, plots are often repeated: there are always several children who for some reason were left without parents, moral choice and magic. Magic is of great importance to Nesbit, no matter what she tells - a story about poor orphans or about wonderful dragons - she never forgets that she is telling a fairy tale.

Nesbit’s craving for the fairytale was reflected in the very chronology of Shakespeare’s retellings. Nesbit clearly enjoys retelling comedies more. The book opens with "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and continues with "The Tempest." Followed by As You Like It and A Winter's Tale. And behind them is "King Lear", but of all the plays it is given the fewest pages. She must preface the story about Macbeth with the words that Shakespeare’s hero has nothing to do with the real villain. And of course, she cannot resist assessing the heroes, explaining, for example, that Othello paid for the fact that he did not know how to love unselfishly. It all ends with a quotation book in which Shakespeare’s stanzas are divided into articles like “Values” or “Appearance and Essence,” unexpected, like in a pre-revolutionary dream book.

The question remains to what extent Shakespeare is retellable at all, that is, to what extent it is about the plot. It is obvious that in Nesbit's stories tragedy is deprived of passion, and comedy is deprived of laughter: what kind of Twelfth Night is there that does not make you laugh at Malvolio? In Shakespeare she sees, first of all, a storyteller, but children will also see this in him. So for a child, this collection is not much different from some anthology of English fairy tales: the same fairies, the same strange names, the same British.

M.: Octopus, 2010

Shakespeare for Beginners