#bowdlerize

Excerpt from the preface to the first edition (as given in vol. 1, of the fifth edition) of The Family Shakespeare, with Henrietta’s comments upon the language used by William Shakespeare. s PR2753.B6.

Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler started out with relatively noble intentions

By Kat Eschner

They just wanted to bring Shakespeare to the masses!

Thomas Bowdler is best-remembered for being the credited author of The Family Shakespeare, a book first published in 1807 “in which nothing is added to the original Text: but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read allowed in a Family.” In other words, The Family Shakespeare was Shakespeare without the "indelicacy of expression" the Bard often favored. Bowdler's revisions to Shakespeare and infamous enough that his meddling is "celebrated" by librarians and literature fans on this day each year–the anniversary of his birth in 1754.

This project actually began with his sister, Henrietta Bowdler, writes literature scholar Adam Kitzes. In that way, as Oxford Dictionaries notes, “it was truly a family Shakespeare.” Eventually, the Bowdler name got turned into a verb denoting censorship.

It’s hard to know how much of the book–in its original printing or any of its subsequent versions–was actually written by specifically Thomas or Henrietta: the dictionary notes that Thomas Bowdler might have claimed authorship of later editions “to avoid [Henrietta] having to admit publicly to having understood the passages requiring removal.” What is true is that Henrietta Bowdler was already a published author in 1807 and had more experience in the literary world than her brother, who was a doctor by profession. 

Shakespeare is justifiably still well-known for capturing human experience from a number of vantages and in real tones. Although his language isn’t always accessible to modern audiences, he talks about universal themes, and uses characters from different walks of life. This realism was too much for the author of The Family Shakespeare, whichever Bowdlers were involved.

Clbuttic: “A type of error in which some bowdlerizing software garbles words by replacing objectionable words that occur within a word with tamer alternatives, such as the erroneous correction of "classic" to "clbuttic".“