Welcome to Daily TWiP, your daily dose of all the holidays and history we couldn’t cram into The Week in Preview.

Ever wonder where the word “bowdlerize” comes from? Its much-maligned namesake, Thomas Bowdler, the famous (or perhaps infamous) expurgator of Shakespeare’s plays, was born today (July 11th) in 1754 near Bath, England.

When Bowdler was a child, his father would read Shakespeare out loud to the family. Upon reaching adulthood and reading Shakespeare for himself, he realized his father had altered or even omitted passages he deemed unsuitable for his wife and children.

Bowdler decided to produce a similarly edited edition of Shakespeare’s works that could be read aloud in a family setting, sparing others the stress of editing on the fly and making Shakespeare more accessible to children. Each edited play was prefaced by a detailed explanation of what changes Bowdler had made and why he had made them.

“The Family Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family” was published in 1818, with the first edition published in 1807. Bowdler later attempted similar edits of Edward Gibson’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” but with much less success.

Over the years, Bowdler’s name has become synonymous with prudish censorship. If you consider the alterations he made to Shakespeare, however, they seem more like changes a loving father would make to protect his impressionable young children and less like moral prissiness. For example, the death of Ophelia in “Hamlet” is no longer an implied suicide but an accidental drowning, and Lady Macbeth says “Out, crimson spot!” instead of “Out, damned spot!”

Most parents wouldn’t introduce the original Grimm version of “Cinderella” (where the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to try to fit into the golden slipper) until a child is of an appropriate age, so we see nothing wrong with glossing over some aspects of Shakespeare until the child is capable of handling them – just as long as they read the originals before the SATs. Poor Bowdler got a bum rap.

Daily TWiP appears Monday through Saturday courtesy of The Week in Preview. Read more of both at www.nashuatelegraph.com/columnists/weekinpreview.

– Teresa Santoski

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