“To be or not to be, That is the question” this iconic quote from Hamlet places itself in the annals of history all thanks to the work of one man. William Shakespere is without question one of the greatest playwrights of all time. While today his work is taught in schools; back in the 1800s his work was considered less than family friendly in some regards. In 1812 English physician and philanthropist Thomas Bowdler edited twenty of Shakespere’s plays creating a sanitized edition called The Family Shakespeare. Bowdler’s censorship of the plays took out any aspect that could be considered “raunchy” or “inappropriate.” Censoring Shakespeare by Cecila Jane says ”so how did Bowdler decide what to take out? According to him, ‘if any word or expression is of such a nature that the first impression it excites is an impression of obscenity, that word ought not to be spoken nor written or printed; and if printed, it ought to be erased.’” This lead Bowdler to cut out most jokes, inuendos, and for the sake of our timeline any homoerotic/queer coded topics. Mario DiGanji goes into some specific examples of homosexuality in shakespere talking directly in their journal Queering the Shakespere Family “I hope to have demonstrated that the contradictions within early modern gender/sexual ideologies open the space for a critique of the "naturalness" of the marital (hetero)sexuality that appears to coalesce at the end of Shakespeare's romantic comedy.” Digani goes on to discuss Shakespere’s As You Like It and how breaking down the discussion of what is “normal” in the world and turning the concept on its head. The idea of being normal or following what is right is completely cut out from Bowdler’s version as it breaks the societal structure at the time. Since saying being abnormal was bad this goes along more with the anti-LGBTQ+ and language censorship. Some other notable examples varied “This ranged from minor text alterations to larger plot and character changes. Thus Ophelia’s death in Hamlet was depicted as an accidental drowning, to avoid any suggestion that she may have committed suicide, and the prostitute Doll Tearsheet was entirely left out of Henry IV, Part 1. Lady Macbeth’s famous ‘out, damned spot!’ became ‘out, crimson spot!; any exclamation of ‘God!’ was replaced by ‘heavens!’; Juliet’s cry ‘spread thy close curtain, love performing night’ was replaced with ‘spread thy close curtain, and come civil night’; and Mercutio’s ‘the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon’ was changed to ‘the hand of the dial is now upon the point of noon’” (Jane). The breaking down of language is an issue even relevant today and definitely set a precedent for the censorship of expression as the years went on. This reprint/edit of Shakespere’s plays, while may not have caused massive ripples in itself, it was a moment of cultural significance to show that even if Shakespere one of the greatest authors ever, couldn't say what they felt then; who could?

Work Cited

DiGangi, Mario. “Queering the Shakespearean Family.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3, 1996, pp. 269–90, https://doi.org/10.2307/2871378. Accessed 30 Apr. 2022.

Jane, Caecilia. “Censoring Shakespeare.” A Historical Miscellany Censoring Shakespere, 31 Oct. 2019, http://www.danceshistoricalmiscellany.com/censoring-shakespeare/.

Shakespeare, William, and Thomas Bowdler. The Family Shakespeare ... 1812.