Not many people in history have given their names to an English verb. Captain Charles Boycott, Lord Erne's land agent around Lough Mask in Co Mayo at the time of the "Land War" in the late 1870s, was one. Another was Thomas Bowdler, who was born, 250 years ago yesterday, on July 11th, 1754.
Bowdler did a lot of good during his life, so it is unfortunate for him that the unflattering word "bowdlerise" should follow him through the centuries. He was born at Ashley, near Bath, to a gentleman of independent means, and studied medicine at the universities of St Andrew's and Edinburgh, graduating as a medical doctor in 1776. After four years spent travelling abroad, he settled in London. In 1800, he left there to live in the Isle of Wight, and later he moved to South Wales.
Bowdler was an energetic philanthropist, working hard in prisons and penitentiaries. In fact he devoted more of his life to penal reform than to the practice of medicine. He is famous - some would say infamous - for his collaboration with his sister Harriet on what they called The Family Shakespeare. This wasn't a book about the Bard of Avon and his family, but rather a 10-volume edition of the works of Shakespeare, made "suitable" for all the family to read. Brother and sister began working on the project in 1807 and the final version appeared 11 years later.
"I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughters, and therefore I have prepared The Family Shakespeare," Bowdler said.
He may have had a point.Think of the raving King Lear on the heath in the play that bears his name: "The wren goes to it, and the small gilded fly/ Does lecher in my sight./ Let copulation thrive." Definitely not for delicate minds.
The Bowdler Shakespeare omitted "those expressions which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family". The fruit of the Bowdlers' labour was that in the completed edition of The Family Shakespeare (1818), more than 10 per cent of what Shakespeare had written was deleted. They had made over 100 cuts in both Hamlet (at least they could make up their minds about what they wanted to do, unlike the Prince) and Romeo and Juliet. The writer Natalie Rosinsky calculated that some of the meetings between the star-crossed lovers from Verona were cut down to half their original length.
In the course of their self-appointed task, the Bowdlers sometimes found themselves faced with texts that could not be rendered sufficiently "safe". After editing Othello (it wasn't enough for that rotter Iago to behave so badly; he had to speak like a cad as well), the Bowdlers realised that the play no longer made sense. They had to suggest instead that copies of Shakespeare's story be moved "from the parlour to the cabinet": there was nothing else for it but to keep it locked away from the children.
Whether Dr Bowdler collaborated with his sister or if she actually did all the editing herself is a question that is still being debated. Some have suggested that Harriet did all the work, but that she was unable to claim the credit because by doing so she would have been admitting to understanding the lewdness in Shakespeare and effectively made herself appear an indecent woman. ( But no matter who actually edited The Family Shakespeare (and to Thomas has gone the fame, or the infamy, down the years), it has been extremely influential. Until 1940, both the Oxford University Press and the Cambridge University Press published only the Bowdler version of Shakespeare. Generations of students grew up without reading unexpurgated texts of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar, among others. No doubt our own Malone Shakespeare was bowdlerised, and its editions were around much later than 1940.
There are two contrasting schools of thought on the influence of Dr Bowdler. He found a doughty late 19th-century champion in the poet and dramatist, Algernon Charles Swinburne, definitely no prude although he did become a reactionary in later life. Swinburne said that no man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children. He castigated criticism of Bowdler's excisions as nauseous and foolish cant. Other supporters stress that his versions brought Shakespeare into the classroom and introduced the great works to children who would otherwise not have read them.
Opponents cry out that such censorship is ridiculous and that Bowdler had no right to arrogate to himself the right to choose which parts of Shakespeare were and were not appropriate.
Whether the verb that originated in his name is justified or not, Bowdler's Shakespeare is illuminating in another way. One commentator rightly remarked that just as the history of Shakespeare's time is often reflected in his works, many of the preoccupations of the early 19th century are evident in the way Thomas Bowdler edited those works.