...Item six. There are thirty-one pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but only twenty-four stories. Mrs. Cavendish, weren’t you keeping an eye on this?’
‘We’ve been watching Canterbury Tales all week,’ said a woman dressed in the most fabulously outrageous clothes, ‘and every time we look away another story gets boojummed. Someone’s getting in there and erasing the story from within.’
‘Deane? Any idea who’s behind all this?’
Daphne Farquitt’s romantic lead stood up and consulted a list.
‘I think I can see a pattern beginning to emerge,’ he said. ‘ “The Merchant’s Wife” was the first to go, followed by “The Milliner’s Tale”, “The Pedlar’s Cock”, “The Cuckold’s Revenge”, “The Maiden’s Wonderful Arse” and, most recently, “The Contest of Farts”. “The Cook’s Tale” is already half gone—it looks as though whoever is doing this has a problem with the healthy vulgarity of Chaucerian texts.’
‘In that case,’ said the Bellman with a grave expression, ‘it looks like we have an active cell of Bowdlerisers at work again. “The Miller’s Tale” will be the next to go—I want twenty-four-hour surveillance and we should get someone on the inside....
Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book
Censorship takes many forms. Biblioclasts, for example, have burned books for centuries:
Oft times, when critics of particular titles have had sufficient clout with publishers, they have been able to prevent offending titles from being published at all. Failing that, attempts have been made to dissuade readers by threatening imprisonment, excommunication, or worse:
Even when they have been unable to prevent specific titles from being published, critics often have been able to get offending passages rewritten, or excised altogether. Sometimes, this expurgation has occurred after a title already has been published. For example: the copy of the famed Nuremberg Chronicle, below, from the University of Kansas Library, shows clear signs of post-publication tampering:
The exhibition description gives the reason for the excision:
One of the false stories that dies hard is the story about Pope Joan, the female pope who is alleged to have succeeded Leo IV in 855. Although we now know the story to be without foundation (it first appeared some 500 years after the supposed event) it was often printed in medieval times. Copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle, a striking illustrated history of the world printed in 1493, are often found with the relevant passages blacked out. In this copy, presented to the University of Kansas some years ago by Otto Vollbehr, the famous collector of incunabula, the passage is lined through, as is the portrait of Joan. In the margin a late sixteenth century hand identifies the story as apocryphal, adding the disbelief of the glossator.
The great Northern Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus, revered by bibliophiles as perhaps the greatest book collector of his age, frequently saw his works subjected to post-publication expurgation:
The above title, also from the University of Kansas Library exhibit, includes the following observation:
Most of {Erasmus'] works suffered expurgation throughout the sixteenth century. This copy of the Parabolae, Strassburg, 1525, has been expurgated in accordance with [an] order and the expurgator has so written on the title page. The Sotomayor Index of 1667 ... devotes 56 double-column folio pages to methods of expurgating Erasmus. [Antonio de Sotomayor, Royal Confessor and Archbishop of Damascus, was commissioned Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition in 1632.]
More frequently, though, expurgation occurs before publication. Titles so affected are sometimes identified in bookseller and auction catalogs as fig-leaf editions. More frequently, though, especially since "Thomas Bowdler's" publication of The Family Shakespeare in 1818, such titles are said to have been bowdlerized.
In fact, the 1807 First Edition of The Family Shakespeare was the work of Thomas's sister, Harriet. It was largely to protect Harriet's anonymity that Thomas's name appears on the more famous 1818 Second Edition of this work. As Kathyrn Kane points out,
As an unmarried and supposedly inexperienced woman, she could never admit that she knew enough about matters sexual to have edited them out of The Family Shakespeare. It would have done irreparable damage to her reputation. But her brother, a man of letters and a diligent reformer, was an ideal candidate for the position. Perhaps Harriet also thought putting him into the literary limelight might help lift the depression he was suffering. It is also possible that Harriet had an eye to a second edition, which she wanted published in London to reach a wider market. A man could more easily manage such negotiations. Regardless of the reasons, by the beginning of the Regency, in 1811, Dr. Thomas Bowdler was considered by nearly everyone to be the editor of The Family Shakespeare.
Thomas, however, would not let his name appear without doing some of the editing himself:
He was actually a more careful and conscientious editor than his sister had been, doing his best to retain as much of the bard’s original text as possible. Thomas restored all the bits Harriet had cut because she considered them boring, he was less severe in his cuts of both the sexually suggestive passages and those which she had perceived to be sacrilegious. Yet he also cut passages she had left alone. However, he also added back all of the plays she had left out.
The Bowdlers were not the first to attempt to "sanitize" Shakespeare (previous such editions were labeled castrated editions). Many authors before and after Shakespeare were subject to expurgation of offensive matter prior to publication.
In more modern times, for example, books like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, even when banned outright in many jurisdictions, often have been published in pirated fig-leaf editions. The 1931 William Faro publication, left, is via Greenfield Books, which notes:
This edition is an expurgated form of the third manuscript of the famous novel. Controversial scenes have been excised and their absence is marked in the text by a row of asterisks. Because it was still considered obscene, it did not obtain a copyright and was banned in the USA. As a result, many pirated versions were produced. This particular edition pre-dates any authorized expurgated or American edition....
Lest one think expurgation is a thing of the distant past, it is not, as fans of the great science fiction author Robert Heinlein, for example, would be among the first to point out. A simple search on the keyword "expurgated" at sites like ABEbooks and ViaLibri will reveal many more such examples. Folks interested in collecting such books as a specialty may find the title below particularly useful (1969 First Edition, below left; 1992 reprint, below right)l:
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