bowdlerise
baod-luh-rise
verb
To censor a work before publication on moral grounds
Thomas Bowdler was born in Bath in 1754. His parents were wealthy and, on his mother’s side, patrician and aristocratic. He studied medicine at elite universities in Scotland and, while I have no doubt that he saved many lives in his burgeoning medical career, his name has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons.
As a child, Thomas Bowdler’s father, Thomas Bowdler (Thomas Bowdler’s son was also, incidentally, called Thomas Bowdler) read Shakespeare to his children, but neglected to read parts which he deemed inappropriate for young ears. The junior Bowdlers internalised this attitude and made it their mission to publish what came to be known as The Family Shakespeare in 1818, a version of the bard’s works designed to be enjoyed by all the family, with all the sex and murder taken out.
The Bowdlers were not the first people to attempt to sanitise the works of Shakespeare, but they were remarkable at the time for their restraint. Earlier censorious attempts had been so heavy handed that the remaining text made little narrative sense, and several authors who thought they could do a better job than Shakespeare simply rewrote bits of the plays they didn’t like, giving King Lear and Romeo and Juliet happy endings.
The Family Shakespeare was initially met with general indifference, until two opposing editorials were published in Blackwood’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review, two of the leading literary journals at the time. Blackwood’s was summarily unimpressed, calling the work ‘prudery’, but Edinburgh was more positive, saying that the Bowdler’s work would protect people from ‘awkwardness’ and ‘distress’. Either way, the controversy generated by these editorials spurred a huge uptick in sales, and by 1900 there were almost fifty competing versions of sanitised Shakespeare on the market.
In 1916, however, author Richard Whiteing took great issue with The Family Shakespeare, likening it to ‘a baby playing with a pair of shears’, and something of the shine began to rub off of the Bowdler name. He argued that moral censorship was essentially a slippery slope; that you start by removing passages that prevent ‘awkwardness’ and end with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Catholic Church’s list of banned books (which existed until 1968!). It was after this that the word ‘bowdlerise’ lost its family-friendly connotations and took on the thoroughly derisive definition that it retains to this day.