The Family Shakespeare
<<< Back to Shakespeare as Children's Literature
Bowdler, Thomas [and Harriet Bowdler], The Family Shakspeare. 5th Edition. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Greene, 1827.
Image source: Lara Bovilsky
Thomas and Harriet Bowdler’s revision of Shakespeare eliminated “indecent” content so that children and women could benefit from its beauty and moral lessons. The Family Shakspeare perfectly captures the 19th-century tension according to which Shakespeare might appear simultaneously essential and threatening to the culture.
As Thomas Bowdler noted in his preface, Shakespeare was “the first [i.e. very best] of dramatic writers,” yet his work contained “defects” preventing “a father” from reading him “to his family circle.” These “defects” ranged from the “frequent recurrence” of graphic language not as acceptable in the 19th century as in the 16th (Bowdler was not unhistorical in his analysis of Shakespeare) to “allusions to Scripture…expressed with so much levity, as to call imperiously for their erasement.”
Deprecated: strpos(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($haystack) of type string is deprecated in /home/timespen/public_html/application/views/helpers/Shortcodes.php on line 51
In their edition, the Bowdlers attempted a clean sweep of explicit references to sex, sexual vocabulary, and parts of the body, sins such as suicide, crimes such as rape, examples of blasphemy (as construed in the 19th century), and what they deemed frivolous or joking references to religion or sin. Thomas Bowdler longed that these might be “obliterated” so that “the transcendent genius of the poet would undoubtedly shine with more unclouded lustre.” Like the 18th-century editors who altered Shakespeare’s text to “restore” it to a posited textually uncontaminated original (see “Shakespeare’s new texts”), the Bowdlers assumed that Shakespeare’s “real” text required the elimination of much of its surviving content. For them, the trimmings to be “obliterated” were not imagined as part of the real Shakespeare, but as sops the author included, they felt, “to gratify the bad taste of the age in which he lived” or, more confusingly, evidence of “his unbridled fancy.” The true Shakespeare was bridled.
As this suggests, the Bowdlers had absorbed their age’s respect for an ideal of Shakespearean authenticity that was compatible with large-scale alteration. While scrutinizing Shakespeare’s text ceaselessly for possibly “indecent” content, the Bowdlers took care to minimize their alterations to Shakespeare, though these were many: as much as one-tenth of the text in the first edition, compiled by Harriet Bowdler, though some was restored in subsequent editions. They expressed a particular reluctance to add content – “not a single line, nor even the half of a line” to the Shakespeare original (the Bowdlers followed the text of George Steevens’s edition of 1793) – though they did confess to adding, “in very few instances, one or two words (at the most three)” in order to make the text make sense around their cuts.
Our era’s greater comfort with sexual content and with freely expressed religious doctrine have made the inclusion of such content commonplace, even in schools. (Not always, however. “Bowdlerized” copies of Shakespeare's plays were prevalent in high schools throughout the 20th century and remain in use in many schools. Like the Bowdlers', such editions remove reference to sexual content or dialogue about acts or beliefs seen as impious.)
It may be easy to smile at the Bowdlers’ prudery – which even compelled them to minimize acknowledgment of Harriet Bowdler’s originating, central role in preparing these editions, lest she reveal her comprehension of early modern “indecency.” Yet as Thomas Bowdler noted in his preface, their editions merely offered versions of the plays much like those on the 19th-century stage, which similarly carefully removed potentially offensive material. As in the Restoration and 18th century, theater audiences were often unaware of how much the Shakespeare they loved onstage had been edited (see “Shakespeare’s new plays”). The signs of that editing were more frankly provided in the Bowdlers’ editions.
The Bowdlers’ edited Shakespeare was extremely popular, going into multiple editions. Many families evidently agreed that expurgated Shakespeare was desirable for the domestic circle. More importantly, they started a movement of such editing. By the turn of the 20th century, there were fifty separate expurgated editions of Shakespeare on the market.
These images show some of Thomas Bowdler’s Preface to the first edition (reprinted in all subsequent editions), explaining the work’s inspiring principles and methods and revealing its fantasy of Shakespeare edited into a pristine state. Also shown are examples from the edited plays. This includes the debate between Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest 1.2, with Caliban’s speech fantasizing a successful rape of Miranda cut (like most editions into the 20th century, the Bowdlers’ assumes that lines here that the First Folio assigns to Miranda were intended for Prospero). You may also see the Bowdlers’ rewriting of the conspiracy against Malvolio in Twelfth Night 2.5, with the letters Malvolio reads transposed to remove their implied obscenity.