Word: bowdlerism
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...BOWDLER'S LEGACY: A HISTORY OF EXPURGATED BOOKS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA by Noel Perrin. 296 pages. Atheneum...
What could prompt an educated man to change Lady Macbeth's most famous line to "Out, crimson spot"? Or to excise mention of Queequeg's underwear from Moby Dick? In framing answers, Noel Perrin, professor of English at Dartmouth, takes as his point of departure Dr. Thomas Bowdler, who had a passion for chess and prison reform and an aversion to London smog, sick people, and all writing that, as he put it, "can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty." Certainly the Family Shakespeare (first edition 1807, second edition 1818) became the most popular expurgation...
...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...