The Social Life of Books by Abigail Williams

Author:Abigail Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300228106
Publisher: Yale University Press

Bowdlerizing Shakespeare

Bell’s edition of Shakespeare had a wider reach and influence than any other contemporary edition of the dramatist. In offering an accessible, sanitised version of the plays, authorised by contemporary performance practice, it paved the way for the most famous trimming of Shakespeare of the era—Thomas Bowdler’s Family Shakspeare, which appeared in various versions in 1807 and 1818. Bowdler, the man whose editorial stance was memorialized in a whole new verb, to bowdlerize, made his aims clear in the subtitle to his work: “in Which Nothing is Added to the Original Text but those Words and Expressions are Omitted Which Cannot with Propriety be Read Aloud in a Family.”39

Thomas Bowdler had originally trained as a doctor, but had ceased practising and was a member of the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu’s circle. He involved himself in a series of philanthropic projects and was actively engaged in the “Proclamation Society,” a group formed in 1787 to enforce a royal proclamation against impiety and vice. Despite the title of the work for which he has become famous, Bowdler was not himself a family man; after a brief and unhappy marriage to a widow at the age of fifty-two, he did not have any children, and lived as a bachelor. Nor was he, in fact, the original author of the family Shakespeare. His sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler had originated the project at Bath in 1807, with the publication of the first edition of The Family Shakespeare (the title was spelt differently in his sister’s edition). His sister’s edition had contained only twenty plays, avoiding such perilous works as Hamlet, and throughout had excised sexually explicit passages and religious references that might offend the Anglican reader. Thomas Bowdler had assumed the authorship of this edition by 1809, probably in order to protect the reputations of his sister and the family. His own edition, not published until 1818, included more plays, and restored some of the cuts his sister had made merely because she thought them trivial or uninteresting. One modern critic of the edition claims that Thomas Bowdler made his excisions “rather as an unusually scrupulous television producer might now.” His sister, who took out in addition anything she thought was absurd or uninteresting, “treated Shakespeare rather as a normal television producer would.”40 Yet despite this salutary modern parallel, Thomas Bowdler has become infamous for his moralistic intervention in Shakespeare’s reception history.

Bowdler’s Family Shakspeare squarely located morality within the home. “Family” in this title was used to invoke a domestic propriety. The 1807 edition stated that “the present publication … is intended to be read in private societies, and to be placed in the hands of young persons of both sexes.”41 And interestingly, Bowdler was to identify the origins of his edition in his own experiences of reading at home: “My first idea of the FAMILY SHAKSPEARE arose from the recollection of my father’s custom of reading in this manner to his family. Shakspeare (with whom no person was better acquainted) was a frequent subject of the evening’s entertainment.

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