This past Saturday marks the start of one of my personal favorite weeks, Banned Book Week by the ALA.  The Wifey and I are adamant readers and writers, so the act of bringing attention to the ongoing battle between books and ideas is close to our hearts.  Our personal library is no stranger to banned books of all shapes and sizes, from the familiar to the obscure, but I feel it is still missing some components of this heated debate.

It is easy to look at the fight for and against books through the limited view of book burning and banning, but that assumes those opposed to certain books have avoided writing on their own.   In fact, those who challenge books are quite vocal, and putting pen to paper has always been a part of their efforts to limit a book’s reach.  When we think of Wal-Mart buckling to pressure to issue censored CDs, or Walt Disney being flexible with a fairy tale’s original form to make them palatable to modern audiences, we don’t always realize that great literature has experienced the same sort of alteration.    John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has been a contested book since its inception, but the edition most libraries and schools have is actually a censored version edited by his publisher to remove the most objectionable portions.  Penguin has come around on the book, though, returning to Steinbeck’s original manuscipt for their Viking Critical Library edition of Wrath.  Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, too, experienced a similar pre-screening by his publisher, resulting in the 2003 “Original Uncensored” edition of The Jungle. These editions are more like the Director’s Cut release of a classic movie, edited more for marketability than genuine moral outrage, but editors have stepped in that direction as well.

The practice of re-editing content to remove objectionable parts owes its name to the first prominent practicer of the process.  Thomas Bowdler, a young lad of the 18th century, discovered during his schooling that the Shakespeare he was being taught was unfamiliar, despite having been read Shakespeare as a child by his father.  Bowdler’s parents had adjusted the bawdier and violent parts of Shakespeare’s works for a younger audience, and the younger Bowdler realized that there may be a market for a version more appropriate for families.   The Family Shakespeare first appeared in 1807, but was reprinted for well over a hundred years in numerous editions.  I’ve got numerous various printings of Shakespeare’s plays dating back to the 19th century, but they’re all the same – I really do wish I had a copy of The Family Shakespeare to sit on the shelf as a counterpart to the bard’s original works (although we could get into whether these ‘official’ editions suffered at their publisher’s editing as well).   The Family Shakespeare was a very prominent act of revisionism in literature, advertising it as a selling point, which earned Thomas and his family the honor of a literary term:  bowdlerization is the word for expurgation of offensive content, such as the re-dubbing of the words “darn”, “shucks”, and “fudge” for network television proadcasts of R-rated movies.

Religion is no stranger to this process, either.   Expurgated versions of the Bible have been nearly as common as the splintering of sects, and quite often writted by well-known reformers and progressives.    From the growing women’s right movement in the 19th century came The Woman’s Bible, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a ‘revision committee’ of her equals, who trimmed down the Bible to the barest, adding their own commentary to present a pro-feminist version of the Bible to support women towards their freedom.  New modern translations of the Bible spawned whenever a progressive leader decided their moral direction was limited by the Bible’s contents, from Unitarians to Utopianists to those believing a more approachable edition was needed.  Today we have narrowed down the Bible translations to a small handful, but in the 19th century more than a few new versions appeared.   Noah Webster, concerned about young students’ ability to read and understand the Bible, released his own expurgated version of the Bible.  Webster’s edition was only slightly altered, much containing very little alteration at all, but his edition contained no indication of what was changed, leading to objections from Biblical purists.   Our founding father, Thomas Jefferson, produced his own version of the New Testament, now known as the Jefferson Bible, which eliminated all “magical” aspects of Jesus’ life and limited it to the moral teachings, to present a more Deist view of Biblical teachings in line with Jefferson’s own beliefs.  The enormous variety of Bible contents — despite their divine origin — has made such a wide genre of book collectors that their fans have assembled into the International Society of Bible Collectors.

This adjustment of literature doesn’t attempt to remove any particular work, but hopes to supplant the original offensive work by offering it as an alternative.  Whether a modern Intelligent-Design-promoting textbook, a tame children’s edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or an Adventures of Huckleberry Finn revised to remove the n-word, these books are evidence of our society’s need to present right and wrong as they see it.   Regardless of how distasteful or warranted, these books need to be included for any book collection to be truly complete.  The Family Shakespeare is a part of Shakespeare History — maybe not as relevant or valuable as a First Folio, but just as necessary to observe how society has included and reacted to Shakespeare during its history.

---

================

Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect - Join our Collectors’ Community!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 12:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.