The Family Shakespeare

The Family Shakespeare (at times titled The Family Shakspeare) is a collection of expurgated Shakespeare plays, edited by Thomas Bowdler and his sister Henrietta ("Harriet"), intended to remove any material deemed too racy, blasphemous, or otherwise sensitive for young or female audiences, with the ultimate goal of creating a family-friendly rendition of Shakespeare's plays. The Family Shakespeare is one of the most often cited examples of literary censorship, despite (or perhaps because of) its original family-friendly intentions. The Bowdler name is also the origin of the term "bowdlerise", meaning to omit parts of a work on moral grounds. The first edition of The Family Shakespeare was published in 1807 in four duodecimo volumes, covering 20 plays. In 1818 a second edition was published, containing all 36 available plays in 10 volumes. Precedents The Bowdlers were not the first to undertake such a project, but their commitment to not augmenting or adding to Shakespeare's text, instead only removing sensitive material while striving to make as little of an impact as possible on the overall narrative of the play, differentiated The Family Shakespeare from the works of earlier editors. A Folger collection second folio (1632) went under the pen of a censor for the Holy Office in Spain, Guillermo Sanchez, who, similar to the Bowdlers, focused on redacting sensitive material; however, unlike the Bowdlers, he blacked out and redacted large swaths of Shakespeare's verses with little care for maintaining the integrity of the works, even going so far as to cut Measure for Measure out entirely. Others took more creative liberty in sanitising the Bard's works: In 1681, Nahum Tate as Poet Laureate rewrote the tragedy of King Lear with a happy ending. In 1807, Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb published a children's edition of the bard's work, Tales from Shakespeare, that had synopses of 20 plays but seldom quoted the original text. Motivation