Word: bowdlerism
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...describes the nightmares of such varied and notable personalities as the Queen of Sheba, the Shakespearean expurgator Bowdler, Stalin, Dean Acheson, a modern psychoanalyst, a metaphysician, and an existentialist. Bowdler, or example, dreams that his wife reads a copy of the original Shakespeare, goes mad out of remorse for her dread deed, and is carried off to the asylum, shouting Shakespearean obscenities to the neighbors as the departs...
...Bowdler's Nightmare might have plagued the real Mr. Bowdler, a pious Georgian gentleman who spent a number of years trying to out the damned spots from Shakespeare's works by expurgating the dirty words. Mr. Bowdler dreams that his wife, as a result of never having been allowed to see any dirty words, tries to imagine them instead, and starts giving the most obscene interpretations to the most innocent remarks. Author Russell's novel moral: Never brush the dirt under the carpet; the little woman is sure to stumble...
Equally shocking to later expurgators. e.g., Thomas Bowdler, were Gibbon's racy reflections on imperial sex life. Of the Empress Theodora he wrote: "After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of Nature," adding in a footnote, "She wished for a fourth altar on which she might pour libations to the god of love." No bowdlerizer, Editor Saunders lets Gibbon have...