The AI Journal

Henrietta Maria Bowdler edited twenty of Shakespeare’s plays for family reading, cutting away roughly a tenth of the text, and published the result anonymously in four volumes in 1807. When her brother Thomas expanded the collection to all thirty-six plays in ten volumes in 1818, it went out under his name alone, and it was his name, not hers, that entered the language as a verb for censorious mutilation. Molly Yarn’s 2022 history of Shakespeare’s women editors treats this substitution as characteristic rather than incidental: crediting the milder, more socially permissible brother for work a woman could not publicly own without herself appearing to understand precisely which passages needed removing, and why. A woman who demonstrably knew what “offensive” meant in Shakespeare risked a worse verdict than the plays themselves. That original erasure matters, but it is not the interesting problem. The interesting problem is what the word “bowdlerize” has done to the memory of the book itself, by treating the entire project, sister’s authorship and brother’s publication alike, as an act of subtraction performed on a Shakespeare the public otherwise had in full.

The subtraction framing needs a baseline, and Noel Perrin’s history of English-language expurgation supplies the one usually left implicit: an established, decades-old practice, well underway before Bowdler ever touched a folio, of vetting canonical texts against a rule of what could be read aloud in front of women and children. Perrin’s survey runs from Alexander Pope’s silent tidying of Shakespeare’s bawdry in the 1720s through Noah Webster’s expurgated 1833 American Bible, and its central finding undercuts the vandalism charge more than it supports it: expurgation was not an eccentric act performed against a healthy general readership, but the standard method by which an entire literary culture managed which texts a family could own at all. The relevant question about the Family Shakespeare was never whether the Bowdlers cut lines an unconstrained reader would have preferred left in. It is whether the households buying the book would, absent it, have read Shakespeare in some fuller form, or would not have read him there at all.

The answer that scholarship gives is closer to the second. Gail Marshall’s edited history of nineteenth-century Shakespeare describes the specific domestic ritual the Bowdler edition was designed to serve: a father reading Shakespeare aloud to an assembled household, exercising in real time the same discretionary judgement about which lines to skip that the printed text now performed for him in advance. That ritual sat inside a wider and well-documented anxiety about what women in particular should be permitted to read; Jacqueline Pearson’s study of women’s reading in this period describes reading itself as treated as a “dangerous recreation,” requiring supervision, editing, or outright prohibition depending on the material and the reader’s age and sex. Shakespeare’s frank treatment of adultery, illegitimate desire and blasphemy fell squarely inside the material conduct writers worried about. Where the discretionary adult reader was unavailable, unwilling, or simply reading silently to children too young to judge tone for themselves, an unexpurgated text did not sit on the shelf as a fuller alternative. It sat there as a book that could not be handed to the intended reader, which in practice meant it was not handed to anyone.

Measured against that constraint, the Family Shakespeare’s commercial life reads less like the triumph of squeamishness over literature and more like a market finding an audience literature’s usual channels had not reached. The 1807 edition sold slowly, but the 1818 expansion went through five editions by 1827 and continued in steady reprint for decades afterward, becoming for a large stretch of the century one of the most common ways a British or American child first encountered Shakespeare’s actual language rather than a plot summary. The clearest sign that this was demand meeting an underserved market rather than mere resignation to prudery came in 1821, when Blackwood’s Magazine mocked the recently completed ten-volume edition as an absurdity fit only for maiden aunts. The ridicule did not kill the book. The Edinburgh Review answered with a favourable notice, sales rose rather than fell, and the Family Shakespeare went on to outlast the quarrel between the two magazines that had fought over it, still in print, still being bought by parents and schoolmasters, deep into the second half of the century. A genuinely superfluous product does not survive being laughed at in the country’s two leading reviews; it survives because enough of its buyers had already decided, correctly, that it gave them something the alternative gave them nothing of at all.

That entrenchment is also where the case against Bowdler is strongest, and it is a different case from the one the word “bowdlerize” preserves. Cutting a tenth of the text was not a neutral trim for length or decorum; Alexa Alice Joubin’s account of the book’s reception argues that the excisions fell disproportionately on expressions of female desire, sexual jealousy and religious blasphemy, meaning what several generations of readers absorbed as “Shakespeare” was a text quietly reshaped around a particular idea of what women, in particular, should not be shown wanting. Worse, the substitution outlived its original justification. Expurgated editions remained the standard schoolroom Shakespeare well into a period, the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the mixed-company reading prohibition that had justified the 1807 edition was already loosening, and the Family Shakespeare’s institutional dominance no longer answered to a live constraint but simply persisted, on inertia, as the version schools already owned and already knew how to teach. An edition built to open a locked door kept functioning as though the door were still locked for decades after households were, in fact, willing to open it themselves.

That is the real charge, and it belongs to the book’s institutional afterlife rather than its origin: not that the Bowdlers wrote a worse Shakespeare, but that publishers and schools kept reaching for their solution to a problem after the problem had changed shape, and that the solution itself quietly narrowed what “Shakespeare” was taken to mean for the readers who never encountered anything else. Neither point restores the version of events in which the 1807 and 1818 editions themselves subtracted from an available whole. For the households the volumes were addressed to, on Marshall’s account of the domestic reading ritual and Perrin’s account of the wider expurgating culture that made such a ritual unremarkable, the whole was never on the table to begin with; the choice was an edited Shakespeare a father could read aloud or effectively none. A word that means to censor by removing objectionable content asks a reader to picture a fuller text being cut down to something smaller. What it actually commemorates, at least in 1807, is a text being permitted for the first time into rooms it had not been permitted into before.