Children can be cruel, especially to thin, bespectacled boys who purport to read Shakespeare. When word got out among my peers, the ridicule and taunting were unceasing. Those magical stories provided great pleasure and set me happily upon hours of daydreaming-shouldn’t every children’s book do just that? There was, however, one drawback to my enthusiasms. These days, it is to the colossal tragedies- Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra-that I return time and again, but back then, A Midsummer Night’s Dream seemed more beguiling. The prose was a bit beyond me at the time, though I did find the illustrations enchanting: Who was this Nick Bottom, with an ass’s head firmly affixed to his own? Soon, I grew into its prose, and the book became a favorite (replacing D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which had had no less an influence on my imagination). When I was a boy of seven or eight, my father brought home a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare-retellings of several of the Bard’s plays for children.
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