The Family Shakespeare

The Bowdlers were not the first to undertake such a project, but their commitment to not augmenting or adding to Shakespeare's text, instead only removing sensitive material while striving to make as little of an impact as possible on the overall narrative of the play, differentiated The Family Shakespeare from the works of earlier editors. A Folger collection second folio (1632) went under the pen of a censor for the Holy Office in Spain, Guillermo Sanchez, who, similar to the Bowdlers, focused on redacting sensitive material; however, unlike the Bowdlers, he blacked out and redacted large swaths of Shakespeare's verses with little care for maintaining the integrity of the works, even going so far as to cut Measure for Measure out entirely.[5] Others took more creative liberty in sanitising the Bard's works: In 1681, Nahum Tate as Poet Laureate rewrote the tragedy of King Lear with a happy ending.[6] In 1807, Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb published a children's edition of the bard's work, Tales from Shakespeare, that had synopses of 20 plays but seldom quoted the original text.[7]

As stated in the preface to the first edition, when the Bowdlers were children their father often entertained the family with readings from Shakespeare.[8] They later realised that their father had been omitting or altering passages he felt unsuitable for the ears of his wife and children:

In the perfection of reading few men were equal to my father; and such was his good taste, his delicacy, and his prompt discretion, that his family listened with delight to Lear, Hamlet, and Othello, without knowing that those matchless tragedies contained words and expressions improper to be pronounced; and without reason to suspect that any parts of the plays had been omitted by the circumspect and judicious reader.[9]

The Bowdlers took inspiration from their father's editing, feeling that it would be worthwhile to publish an edition which might be used in a family whose father was not a sufficiently "circumspect and judicious reader" to accomplish this expurgation himself, while still remaining as true to the original text as possible.[9]

Despite the fact that Thomas' name was ultimately the sole listed author on all later editions, the 1807 first edition (which appeared anonymously) was in fact largely the work of his sister, Harriet.[10][11] This omission of authorship was likely because a woman could not then publicly admit that she was capable of such editing and compilation, much less that she understood Shakespeare's racy verses.[2] It took nearly two centuries for Harriet to receive due credit for her work.[1]

Harriet's first edition, containing 20 edited plays, was published at Bath in four small duodecimo volumes.[12] In the preface, Harriet describes her editorial goal as to endeavor "to remove every thing that could give just offence to the religious and virtuous mind", and to omit "many speeches in which Shakespeare has been tempted to 'purchase laughter at the price of decency.'"[8] In this manner, she says, she will produce a publication that can "be placed in the hands of young persons of both sexes".[8] However, in Harriet's edition she occasionally went beyond this "religious and virtuous" mission: in addition to the primary excisions of sexual material or Roman Catholic references that might prove unfavorable for good Protestants, Harriet also edited out scenes that she felt were trivial or uninteresting.[12] These excisions amounted to approximately 10% of the original text.[2] The edition was not particularly successful.[13]

After the first edition, Thomas Bowdler managed to negotiate for the publication of a new version of The Family Shakespeare.[13] He took over from his sister and expanded the expurgations to the 16 remaining plays not covered by the first, on top of re-editing the 20 plays of the previous edition.[13] Excluded from this completed edition was Pericles, Prince of Tyre, perhaps due to the contention over its authorship or its virtual disappearance until 1854.[14] Thomas defended his expurgations on the title page, re-titling the work The Family Shakspeare: In which nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read in a family.[11] With this mission, Thomas Bowdler aimed to produce an edition of the works of "our immoral Bard", as Bowdler calls Shakespeare in the preface to the second edition, that would be appropriate for all ages, not to mention genders.[15] In addition to the reworkings and a new preface, Thomas also included introductory notes for a few of the plays—Henry IV, Othello, and Measure for Measure—to describe the advanced difficulty associated with editing them.[10]

The spelling "Shakspeare", used by Thomas Bowdler in the second edition but not by Harriet in the first, was changed in later editions (from 1847 on) to "Shakespeare", reflecting changes in the standard spelling of Shakespeare's name.[4]

Some examples of alterations made by Thomas Bowdler within his 1818 complete edition of The Family Shakespeare are listed below, along with Bowdler's reasoning where a preface to the play is available.

The release of Harriet's first edition of The Family Shakespeare passed rather innocuously, not attracting much attention.[13][12][23] There were three reviews: one in favor, complementing the tastefulness of such a "castrated" version; one against, decrying the edits as wholly unnecessary; and a third, in which the reviewer suggested that the only satisfactory edition of Shakespeare would be a folio of blank pages.[23]

At first, Thomas Bowdler's new and complete second edition seemed to be on the same track.[13][12] However, between 1821 and 1822 The Family Shakespeare found itself in the middle of a dispute between Blackwood's Magazine and the Edinburgh Review, the leading literary journals at the time.[13][23] While Blackwood's scorned Bowdler's work as "prudery in pasteboard", the Edinburgh commended his expurgations as saving readers from "awkwardness" and "distress".[24][13] It appears that the public sided with the Edinburgh. With this free publicity via controversy interest in the book spiked and sales of The Family Shakespeare soared, with new editions consistently published every few years through the 1880s.[24][13]

In 1894 the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne declared that "More nauseous and more foolish cant was never chattered than that which would deride the memory or depreciate the merits of Bowdler. No man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children."[25] Indeed, this favorable opinion of Bowdler's expurgations was the conventional view at the time, as reflected by the increasing popularity and immense success of expurgated or Bowdlerized works: in 1850 there were 7 rival expurgated Shakespeares, and by 1900 there were almost 50.[23]

The Bowdler name took on a life of its own soon after the publication of the 1818 second edition: by the mid 1820s, around the time of Thomas Bowdler's death, it had already become a verb, "to bowdlerize", meaning to remove sensitive or inappropriate material from a text.[2] However, at this time it was not yet a byword for literary censorship; rather, it was more of a genre of books edited to be appropriate for young readers or for families, and a very popular and successful genre at that.[23]

The tides began to change for the Bowdler name in 1916, when the writer Richard Whiteing decried the sanitized edition in an article for The English Review entitled "Bowdler Bowdlerised".[23][26] In the scathing and oft-sarcastic piece, Whiteing utterly denounces Bowdler and his expurgations, calling the changes "inconsistent" and scorning the prefaces to the more difficult-to-edit plays as "mealy-mouthed attempts to right himself".[26] The inconsistencies in what Bowdler changed versus what remained deeply perturbed Whiteing, who declares that "There is no end to it, except the in the limits of human patience."[26] He continues to liken Bowdler's perceived editorial tactlessness to "a baby playing with a pair of shears".[26] Whiteing argues that children should not be protected from the scandal of Shakespeare; no, they must be taught how to meet these facts of life.[26] He concludes his heated review with a warning, that Bowdlerization could easily become overzealous and create an even larger Index of banned literature than that of the Catholic Church at its prime, and a question: "Should there be any age of innocence?"[11][26]

It appears that the public was wont to agree with this strongly worded viewpoint. Public favor turned against Bowdlerized editions of books and expurgation for the sake of "appropriateness", and The Family Shakespeare began to be cited as an example of negative literary censorship.[23] The word "bowdlerize" lost its family-friendly connotations and instead became a term of derision.[27] This phenomenon is outlined in a piece in The Nation, written shortly after and in reaction to Whiteing's harsh commentary.[27] Taking a much more moderate stance than Whiteing, the opinion of whom The National describes as "flagrant exaggeration", they instead suggest that The Family Shakespeare is a relic of a bygone, pre-Victorian time, and that "As public taste moved on towards broader standards of literary propriety, the verb 'to bowdlerize' suffered corresponding degradation."[27] Nonetheless, they acknowledge that public opinion of Bowdler and bowdlerization as a practice is perhaps best represented Whiteing's strong views.[27] By 1925 The Family Shakespeare was all but obsolete.[23]

In 1969 Noel Perrin published Dr. Bowdler's Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America. Perrin attributes the fall of bowdlerization and literary expurgation to the rise of Freudian psychology, feminism, and the influence of mass media.[28][23] Perrin also cites Whiteing's statements as a harbinger of doom for Bowdler's popular status.

On Bowdler's birthday each year (July 11), some literature fans and librarians "celebrate" Bowdler's "meddlings" on "Bowdler's Day".[2] The "celebration" is ironic, scorning Bowdler as a literary censor and perpetuating the views that Whiteing served to popularize.[2][29]

Editions of The Family Shakespeare continue to be published, printed, and read today, largely to observe what exactly Bowdler removed and why.[23]