Observe Bowdler’s Day Every July 11

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On July 11 we celebrate Bowdler’s Day, the anniversary of the birth of Thomas Bowdler on July 11, 1754.

Who the heck is Thomas Bowdler? And why do we want to celebrate his birthday?

Well, depending on your perspective, you might consider him either a genius or a prude who should never have been allowed near the written word.

Or you might consider him just an amusing footnote to history.

But what exactly did he do?

 

Who is Thomas Bowdler?

Doctor Thomas Bowdler edited the works of Shakespeare, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and parts of the Old Testament of the Bible to remove language he found offensive. Or as he put it “…those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”

So he turned Ophelia’s suicide into a swimming accident. And he removed a prostitute completely from Henry IV Part II. And so much more.

If you’re interested, The Family Shakespeare is available on Archive.org. You can read it for yourself. Although I’m not sure why you’d want to.

To be fair, he came by his questionable editing honestly. It all started with his father, who used to read the Bible and even Shakespeare to the family. Little Thomas and his sister didn’t realize it at the time, but their father was leaving out anything he didn’t consider suitable for children or women to hear.

Although Thomas gets the credit for The Family Shakespeare, some believe his sister actually edited the first edition of the book. Thomas joined her efforts only later.

So really it was a family effort. But on the bright side (there’s a bright side to butchering Shakespeare?!) they did end up bringing Shakespeare’s works to a larger audience. Before their edited version, books of Shakespeare’s plays were expensive and only for the rich.

The “Bowdler editions” were affordable for the middle class.

And they also gave us the term bowdlerize, which means to remove or modify parts of a written work that may be vulgar or offensive.

Scroll down for some ideas on celebrating this unofficial “editing” holiday.

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How to Celebrate Bowdler’s Day

Why on earth would we celebrate such a thing?

Well, celebrate is probably the wrong word.

Remember may be better. Remember the importance of free speech … Your constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech.

And remember also there’s no constitutionally guaranteed freedom from being offended by others’ speech (or written words).

But if those written words are in the public domain, you have every right to edit them as you see fit. Alan Gribben did just that in 2011 with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. His revised version replaced the offensive “n-word” with slave.

It caused some controversy at the time. Many people argued that the word is not only historically accurate, but essential to truly understanding life at the time it was in common usage as well as the enormity of Huck’s rejection of the racism of that time.

What do you think of bowdlerization?

 

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