Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare

Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare is a collection of retellings of twenty of William Shakespeare’s plays by noted children’s author E. Nesbit. Each play is condensed to its core story and told using simple language that children can understand. While some quotations from Shakespeare are retained, the emphasis is on the stories rather than the language. The collection contains thirteen comedies and seven tragedies, but none of the histories.

By 1907 Nesbit was well known for children’s novels such as Five Children and It and The Railway Children. This collection expands on 1897’s The Children’s Shakespeare, which retells twelve of these plays. It follows in the tradition of prose retellings for children established by Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1807 Tales from Shakespeare.

This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.