The Bard, our most esteemed literary hero, is not immune to the clear-cutting, myopic nature of censorship. From the time of the plays’ releases to modern day, Shakespeare has been banned or altered to suit the tastes of uptight individuals. Thomas Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, are the editors behind The Family Shakespeare,” volumes of William’s famous plays that are edited for modesty’s sake. More recently, plays like Merchant of Venice have been banned around America.
In the Elizabethan Era, during Shakespeare’s existence, the state reveled in censorship at an unacceptable level. The Crown tried many times to stifle Shakespeare’s plays. Most of the attempts were unsuccessful because of the Bard’s popularity. However, while penning “Henry VIII,” someone highlighted the sections of the play that portrayed Thomas Moore, a Catholic, and wrote, “Leave this in at your peril!”
You know how Shakespeare is really clever with his puns and double entendres? You know how that’s one of the ways he’s still relevant as a playwright? Yeah, some people don’t appreciate the subtlety of the Bard’s wit. And they especially hate his not so subtle brand of humor. That being said, it shouldn’t surprise many people that his stories have been “modified” for the delicate ears of women and children. The first edition of The Family Shakespeare was released in 1807, about two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death. It contained twenty-four of Shakespeare’s plays. In 1818, though, Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler really took censorship to a new level with The Family Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family. As indicated by the incredibly long winded title, the Bowdlers knew what they were doing; by 1850, eleven editions of this compilation had been printed. Bowdler, in his own defense for butchering the works of an English literature god, said he “endeavored to removed every thing that could give just offense to the religious and virtuous mind.”
“Othello” is another Shakespeare play that fell victim of censorship. While the play was quite popular in Shakespearian times, many people in the seventeenth century heavily criticized the mixed race relationship. John Quincy Adams even called the relationship between Othello and Desdemona “disgusting.” This play was even completely censored from production in pre-Civil War America. All the way up to the 1950s, when this play was shown, the audience was shocked during the interracial kiss.
Those uptight Victorians! They continued the censorship of Shakespeare in a bizarre way. In Victorian times, people were delusional and repressed enough to claim that Shakespeare’s famous sonnets were written by someone else because of the homosexual undertones of some of the stories.
Even today, Shakespeare is still banned. Since World War II, “The Merchant of Venice” has become the most banned Shakespearian work in the American classroom. It is banned for the anti-Semetic portrayal of Shylock, the Jewish money lender. The anti-Semetism in this play can be debated for all time, but no one will ever know for sure whether Shakespeare was himself anti-Semetic or just portraying the stereotypes of the time so his audience could connect to the character. Some famous actors have played Shylock, like Lawrence Olivier in a 1973 movie and Al Pacino in a 2004 film. However, recent portrayals of Shylock are more sympathetic, displaying him as a tragic character rather than a grotesque stereotype.
Even one of the greatest writers of all English literature, a man who English majors must take a class on, can be censored. In his time, the censorship is understandable because of the overarching power of the monarchy. However, it is not excusable. The most egregious offense, the one that actually angers me is that as recently as 1980, and probably later, “The Merchant of Venice” has been banned in schools across the country. To ban the main English literary figure is mind-boggling. It can be used in the curriculum as a “teachable moment,” not banished for some revisionist history ideals. Irony of ironies, “The Merchant of Venice” isn’t banned in Israel, and furthermore, is one of the country’s most popular plays. Maybe we could learn a thing or two about tolerance from them.
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