The Eunuch castrated: Bowdlerization in the text of the Westminster Latin Play

Abstract

The tradition of annual performances of Latin comedies was particularly strong at Westminster School, London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the plays most commonly performed were Terence's Andria, Adelphi, Phormio, and Eu nuchus. It became traditional to omit the most shocking scene in Eunuchus, and after 1854 this play was abandoned altogether, reappearing in 1907 in a cleaned-up version based on one written by Cardinal Newman. From the early 1860s it became standard to doctor the text of all the plays put on, eliminating references to such things as pros titution, rape, and off-stage birth-pangs. This reflected debates over the morality of Terence's plays that had raged all over Europe for several centuries.