Word: bowdlerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Blushing Bowdler. "Declamation roar'd, while passion slept," said Dr. Johnson of the ranting style of early 18th century acting. Then David Garrick, who had an indifferent voice and a remarkably expressive face (a deaf-mute was one of his most ardent fans), pioneered a conversational, non-declamatory style. Although he restored some of the verse and affected to play "as written by Shakespeare," Garrick did his own tampering with the text. The gravediggers were missing in his Hamlet, as was Ophelia's funeral, and Laertes had no pact with the King to kill Hamlet...
Victorian prudery nice-Nellified 19th century Shakespeare. In 1818 Thomas Bowdler, a retired physician, blue-penciled what he regarded as the Bard's blue lines and produced a Shakespeare without blushes for the family reading hour-doubtless pleasing that Victorian matron who emerged from a performance of Antony and Cleopatra saying, "How strangely different from the home life of our dear Queen." In the U.S. Shakespeare was so passionately popular that a dispute between the fans of rival actors-William Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest led to New York
...news of Derek Monsey's novel reaches the right ears, he will surely be barred for life from the Book-of-the-Month and P.E.N. clubs. His book is didactic, and his thesis-previously embraced by Savonarola, Bowdler and certain 17th century New England pastors, but expounded by no fiction writer within memory-is simple: among the higher primates, sex is nasty...