The Hazards of Expurgation: Adapting Measure for Measure to the Bowdler Family Shakespeare

Abstract

As a publication that evolved in its basic design over the course of several years, the early editions of the Family Shakespeare-more familiarly known as the Bowdler Shakespeare-bear witness to many substantial changes in content. To begin with, it grew in size and scope over the course of its first printings. When Henrietta Bowdler first undertook the task of editing Shakespeare's plays, publishing them in 1807 with the removal of passages deemed unfit for reciting in the company of women, children, and her audience of sermon readers (Murphy 170), she limited herself to twenty cases, leaving untouched a full seventeen, for reasons about which one can only surmise.1 The project became more ambitious after her brother Thomas took over. In a gesture that reflected a change in its overall design and objective as it changed custody, he expanded the text to include a complete set of plays for its 1818 publication. Thomas Bowdler also supplied the textual apparatus, beginning with a general preface, along with introductory notes to a small handful of plays: the two parts of Henry IV, Othello, and Measure for Measure. He rewrote these prefaces and notes-by the fourth edition, published in 1825, he had replaced the general preface with an entirely new essay-as he made additional modifications to the volume.The most substantial change involved his revisions of Measure for Measure. In its first complete publication of 1818, that entry consisted of a reprint of John Philip Kemble's script, which had been highly altered for performance at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, and which had been available in print by as early as 1803. As Bowdler noted, he had substituted the Kemble text in lieu of his own version, the play having proved too challenging to amend.2 In fact, Bowdler did eventually rise to the challenge, and by the second edition of 1820, he had replaced the Kemble text with his own fully revised version, a play that he re-examined afresh from Escalus to What's yet behind that's meet you all should know (5.1.536). Thanks to these efforts, Measure for Measure stands out as the only play in the Family Shakespeare that appears in two fundamentally distinct versions, and anybody who looks at the publication over the course of its early editions might recognize these two versions as textual witnesses of an internal conflict that the famous expurgator went some length to resolve.A fuller description of Bowdler's conflict with that play, along with its resolution, will repay the effort. Not only does it reflect major revisions that took place among the early editions to the Family Shakespeare itself, but also it draws our attention to deeper problems that became intrinsic to the project, essentially from the moment he took the project over from his sister. While he may have been initially drawn in by authoritarian motives-to appropriate Henrietta's work under his own name and to enlarge it, from the initial twenty plays to a complete set-from the moment he began to edit he found himself beset by questions over how to carry that project to completion.3 And while he was able to address them over the course of subsequent editions, in doing so he ended up having to re-articulate both his own role as an editor and the status of his text as an edition for readers.A fuller examination of Bowdler's attempts to resolve this struggle also demonstrates that his own role in the history of printed editions of Shakespeare may have been more complicated, and thus more significant, than has been credited. In the context of textual criticism of Shakespeare's plays, the Family Shakespeare has often been perceived as an anomaly, something that went against the grain of a demand for authenticity in Shakespeare's writings. As Margreta de Grazia has argued throughout her book, Shakespeare Verbatim, this demand had not emerged until 1790, when Edmund Malone published his volume, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. As de Grazia further points out, a need for authenticity is by no means self-evident, and in many respects it has the unfortunate effect of blurring out rich traditions of adaptation and revision. …