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“I could a tale unfold…”: Adaptations of Shakespeare's Supernatural for Children, from The lambs to Marcia Williams

The greatest horrors are always unspeakable and can only be imagined. As Hamlet's ghost cannot reveal the horrors of the underworld, he describes the effect that such a description (“a tale”) would have on the listener. Among the various instances of the supernatural that can be found in Shakespeare's plays, from more “substantial” ghosts, fairies, and goblins to more subjective apparitions and hallucinations, Hamlet's meeting with his dead father in Act I, sc. 3 is perhaps one of the scenes that has most captivated and inspired the Western collective imagination. Whether the ghost's place of origin is Hell or Purgatory (critics are more inclined towards the latter, from Dover Wilson to Stephen Greenblatt), the child reader is confronted with a pedagogically challenging situation to say the least, in which a barbaric request issued by an enraged and vindictive spirit has to be considered by the protagonist. How has this unseemly solicitation to commit murder, contrary to Christian ethics and common morality, been transposed and made sense of, in texts specifically geared to children? Starting with the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare (1807) and moving to Mary Cowden Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1850–1851) and to more recent prose adaptations by Bernard Miles, Leon Garfield, Andrew Matthews, and Marcia Williams, this paper will discuss the changing cultural implications and difficulties of handling the narration of the Shakespearean uncanny for children in prose versions of Hamlet for children. I hope to prove that these adaptations are revealing about the way authors from different ages have tried to make sense of the uncanny presence of destructive supernatural forces in Hamlet in order to turn this tragedy into an educationally valuable reading experiences for the child. This discussion, which will proceed along chronological lines (starting with the Lambs) will be preceded by a short section in which I will consider briefly the technical as well as ideological issues involved in adapting Shakespeare for children.