An earlier version of this article was published in 2018.
We are told over and over that today’s youth are too sensitive and that care must be taken so that certain things do not offend them or that certain literary texts can traumatize them, including the Shakespearean texts that previous generations accepted without question. current generation of “snowflakes”?
In his 1765 edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the great eighteenth-century critic Samuel Johnson admitted that reading some scenes from The Lear King Shakespeare’s books were extremely disturbing to him. The death of Lear’s daughter Cordelia in the last act of the tragedy so disturbed him that he avoided rereading the scene until he was forced to do so by his job as an editor.
He further said that the blinding of old Gloucester in the middle of the play was so terrible that a theatergoer I could not stand it, describing it as an act “too horrifying to be endured in a dramatic display”. Was Johnson a snowflake too? If so, so would many others in his day. There is a long history of censoring and rewriting Shakespeare’s plays to make them less traumatic to readers and viewers.
Censoring Shakespeare’s Violence
In 1681 the dramatist Nahum Tate rewrote The Lear King with a new happy ending in which both Cordelia and her father survived and the remake proved so popular with audiences that the Tate adaptation was the only version of the play to be staged for the next 150 years.
Not only that, but Titus Andronicus, another rather violent Shakespeare play, was similarly rewritten. In this work one of the female characters is raped and as a consequence they cut off his tongue and hands to prevent him from betraying his attackers. When the play was staged in England in 1850, all of these factors were omitted.
As one critic of the era wrote: “The deflowering of Lavinia and the amputation of her tongue and her hands … They have been omitted in their entirety.” The critic also commented that the work came to appear “not only presentable, but even attractive as a result.”
Violence was not the only thing that perplexed Shakespeare’s readers and viewers. Race and sexuality they also caused problems and the American President John Quincy Adams wrote in 1786 that, although he thought that Othello was a great work in many respects, the central interracial relationship of the work seemed to him “reckless, disagreeable and inconceivable.”
Other important figures also expressed reservations about various aspects of Shakespeare. Queen Victoria, for example, criticized the sexual humor of the plays when she wrote to her eldest daughter in 1859 that she had never “had the courage” to see The Merry Wives of Windsor on stage “having always heard how ordinary it was, since your beloved Shakespeare is terrible in that respect and many things have to be omitted in many plays. “
Censoring printed works
To counter these and similar objections, a market for printed editions censored works. In 1815 Thomas and Harriet Bowdler published The Shakespeare Family to “present to the public an edition of the works in which the father, the guardian and the instructor of the youth can place without fear in the hands of the pupil.”
The Bowdlers edited 20 of Shakespeare’s plays for publication, removing profanity and many of the sexual and violent references. They also changed plots to be less bleak (Ophelia’s death in Hamlet, for example, was turned into an accidental drowning to avoid disturbing readers with the image of an apparent suicide).
The Bowdlers were criticized by some of their contemporaries for having gone too far in manipulating these classics, but their edition was still very popular, and hundreds of other censored versions of Shakespeare’s works had already appeared in print by the end of the 19th century. .
Race, violence, sexuality, suicide – many of the things that are said to be too disturbing to today’s students were exactly what bothered them to readers and viewers of other times. Shakespeare has never been an innocuous or comforting playwright, and his plays have always been capable of disturbing his audience.
Of course, the disturbing details can change over time: most contemporary critics of Othello are more concerned with whether or not the portrayal of the protagonist is racist than whether the play advocates interracial marriage. Be that as it may, we should rethink the idea that there is something unique or unusually fragile about today’s youth in their reaction to Shakespeare when that claim is contradicted by the evidence of the past.
Author: Rebecca Yearling, Keele University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. You can read the original article here.
Translated by Silvestre Urbón.