Tales from Shakespeare is a collection of 20 stories. It was adapted for young readers from the original plays by William Shakespeare. The book was written with an intention to modernise the archaic English and complicated story line of Shakespeare to a simple level that children could read and comprehend. However, as noted in the author's Preface, his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in, whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he wrote, therefore words introduced into our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided.