The Dean of Gloucester banned Gerontius from his cathedral in 1901, and at Worcester the following year, the Dean insisted on expurgations before allowing a performance.
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After the first edition, Thomas Bowdler managed to negotiate for the publication of a new version of The Family Shakespeare. He took over from his sister and expanded the expurgations to the 16 remaining plays not covered by the first, on top of re-editing the 20 plays of the previous edition. Excluded from this completed edition was Pericles, Prince of Tyre, perhaps due to the contention over its authorship or its virtual disappearance until 1854. Thomas defended his expurgations on the title page, re-titling the work The Family Shakspeare: In which nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read in a family.
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629–32 The Dean of Gloucester banned Gerontius from his cathedral in 1901, and at Worcester the following year, the Dean insisted on expurgations before allowing a performance.Lewis, Geraint, "A Cathedral in Sound", Gramophone, September 2008, p. 50. Retrieved 1 June 2010. Clara Butt, first singer of Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory" Elgar is probably best known for the first of the five Pomp and Circumstance Marches, which were composed between 1901 and 1930.
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Bowdler does not include a preface to Romeo and Juliet, but in general the targets of the expurgations are innuendos: Original: "the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon." – (Mercutio, II.4.61) Bowdlerised: "the hand of the dial is now upon the point of noon." Original: "Tis true, and therefore women being the weaker vessel are ever thrust to the wall . . ." – (Sampson, I.1.13) Bowdlerised: OMITTED Original: "not ope her legs to saint- seducing gold" – (Romeo, I.1.206) Bowdlerised: OMITTED Original: "Spread thy close curtain, love performing night" – (Juliet, III.
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It was also criticized for expurgations, as some scenes, particularly sexually explicit ones, had been omitted or edited. The quality and difficulty of the translation therefore impeded the adoption of Kristin Lavransdatter into standard literature of the English-speaking world. A new and complete translation by Tiina Nunnally was released by Penguin Classics in 2005, and is considered by many critics to be the superior of the two, particularly for its clarity, reflective of Undset's "straightforward, almost plain style." For her translation of the third book, Korset (The Cross), Nunnally was awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 2001.
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The Bowdler name took on a life of its own soon after the publication of the 1818 second edition: by the mid 1820s, around the time of Thomas Bowdler's death, it had already become a verb, "to bowdlerize", meaning to remove sensitive or inappropriate material from a text. However, at this time it was not yet a byword for literary censorship; rather, it was more of a genre of books edited to be appropriate for young readers or for families, and a very popular and successful genre at that. The tides began to change for the Bowdler name in 1916, when the writer Richard Whiteing decried the sanitized edition in an article for The English Review entitled "Bowdler Bowdlerised". In the scathing and oft-sarcastic piece, Whiteing utterly denounces Bowdler and his expurgations, calling the changes "inconsistent" and scorning the prefaces to the more difficult-to-edit plays as "mealy-mouthed attempts to right himself".
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The British publisher hired one or more revisers who were, in the evaluation of scholar Steven Olsen-Smith, responsible for "unauthorized changes ranging from typographical errors and omissions to acts of outright censorship".Olsen-Smith (2008), 97 According to biographer Robertson-Lorant, the result was that the British edition was "badly mutilated".Robertson-Lorant (1996), 277 The expurgations fall into four categories, ranked according to the apparent priorities of the censor: # Sacrilegious passages, more than 1200 words: Attributing human failures to God was grounds for excision or revision, as was comparing human shortcomings to divine ones. For example, in chapter 28, "Ahab", Ahab stands with "a crucifixion in his face" was revised to "an apparently eternal anguish";Cited in Tanselle (1988), 681 (citation), 784 # Sexual matters, including the sex life of whales and even Ishmael's worried anticipation of the nature of Queequeg's underwear, as well as allusions to fornication or harlots, and "our hearts' honeymoon" (in relation to Ishmael and Queequeg)Tanselle (1988), 682, 784–85 Chapter 95, however, "The Cassock", referring to the whale's genital organ, was untouched, perhaps because of Melville's indirect language.
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