Two hundred years later ( in 1800), Charles Lamb and his elder sister Mary Lamb , wrote 'Tales from Shakespeare' for the then England's school children.
Mary Lamb had very serious bouts of insanity and in one of such bouts, had killed her own mother. She was about 26 then. Charles Lamb was devoted to his elder sister and spent his entire life in taking care of her, for, his sister had repeated incidence of mental illness and was in and out of asylums.
The remarkable thing is that Mary Lamb wrote all those delightful tales from the Bard with HAPPY ending . Of the sixteen 'comedies', she wrote about 12 of them.
Charles Lamb wrote the tragedies !
The Trinity were living in those decades and the condition in England then was as bad as in India.
( East India Company decades..1757- 1857)
Here is a link to Tales from Shakespeare in The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ ... tion-books
This may be of interest to @Nick H and @RanganayakiIn the autumn of 1796, at the age of 21, Charles Lamb, a city clerk with a lifelong stutter, came home from his desk at the East India Company to find that his sister, Mary, had stabbed their mother to death in a mad seizure. He described the events of 22 September in a letter to a friend:
“I will only give you the outlines. My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand with only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to a hospital. God has preserved to me my senses – I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.”
Young Charles Lamb had to persuade the parish to let him take responsibility for his sister for the rest of her days. Mary’s madness would recur briefly almost every year until her death in 1847. However, there remained enough good reason in her for brother and sister to collaborate on literary projects, possibly as a sort of therapy. Besides, from all accounts, Charles Lamb was exceptionally kind, extraordinarily free from affectation and blessed with an innate good humour. It seems that he accepted his fraternal duty without complaint, and channelled his own and his sister’s imaginative energies into literature, in particular the highly popular Tales from Shakespeare, a bestselling book throughout the 19th century.