'I could a tale unfold...': Adaptations of Shakespeare's Supernatural for Children, from the Lambs to Marcia Williams.

Among the various instances of the supernatural that can be found in Shakespeare’s plays, 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. 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 (1850-52) and to more recent prose adaptations by Bernard Miles, Leon Garfield, Andrew Matthews and Marcia Williams, this essay discusses the changing cultural implications and difficulties of handling the narration of the Shakespearean uncanny for children in prose versions of Hamlet for children.