This guest essay was in the NY Times.

OK, so this isn't about the movie versions. But still...

https://dnyuz.com/2023/08/13/cancel-shakespeare/

By Drew Lichtenberg

"Dr. Lichtenberg is a lecturer at Yale University and the resident dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C."

First quarter:

It seemed, for a moment, that Shakespeare was being canceled. Last week, school district officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., said that they were preparing high school lessons for the new academic year with some of William Shakespeare’s works taught only with excerpts, partly in keeping with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s legislation about what students can or can’t be exposed to.

I’m here to say: Good. Cancel Shakespeare. It’s about time.

Anyone who spends a lot of time reading Shakespeare (or working on his plays, as I have for most of my professional career) understands that he couldn’t have been less interested in puritanical notions of respectability. Given how he’s become an exalted landmark on the high road of culture, it’s easy to forget that there’s always been a secret smugglers’ path to a more salacious and subversive Shakespeare, one well known and beloved by artists and theater people. The Bard has long been a patron saint to rebel poets and social outcasts, queer nonconformists and punk provocateurs.

Yes, Shakespeare is ribald, salacious, even shocking. But to understand his genius — and his indelible legacy on literature — students need to be exposed to the whole of his work, even, perhaps especially, the naughty bits...

(snip)

These are the letters (four of them):

https://sadaelganob.com/opinion-shakespeare-in-full-including-the-bawdy-parts-except-in-florida/?expand_article=1

Check out the one by Bradford Farwell.

The women he mentions were likely born before WWII, so there's a pretty good chance they were given bowdlerized Shakespeare textbooks in high school - and had never realized, then or later, that they had been lied to.

Unfortunately, I know from experience that even in somewhat-liberal schools in the 1970s, that was still happening. (OK, so I'm talking about 7th grade, but honestly!)

The textbook was "Outlooks Through Literature" (1976), eds. Edmund James, James L. Pierce, Mabel H. Pittman, Jesse Stuart, and Hilton Farrell.

This "edition," if you can call it that, was censored left and right. (There is no indication of this anywhere in the textbook - you'd have to have read the play before, elsewhere.) That is, not only is practically every bawdy or erotic line slashed - including Juliet's lines

"Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties, or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night."

- but also Romeo's line

"I sell thee poison. Thou hast sold me none."

I just don't get it.

The illustrations are by John Asquith.

Read more about that textbook and another one, here:

https://community.abebooks.co.uk/s/question/0D58V00007dtbKkSAI/scott-foresman-textb-wromeo-juliet-?topicId=0TO8V0000015HqUWAU&count=undefined

On Tuesday, August 22, 2023 at 12:00:35 PM UTC-4, Lenona wrote:
> This guest essay was in the NY Times.
>
> OK, so this isn't about the movie versions. But still...
>
> https://dnyuz.com/2023/08/13/cancel-shakespeare/
>
> By Drew Lichtenberg
>
> "Dr. Lichtenberg is a lecturer at Yale University and the resident dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C."
>
> First quarter:
>
> It seemed, for a moment, that Shakespeare was being canceled. Last week, school district officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., said that they were preparing high school lessons for the new academic year with some of William Shakespeare’s works taught only with excerpts, partly in keeping with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s legislation about what students can or can’t be exposed to.
>
> I’m here to say: Good. Cancel Shakespeare. It’s about time.
>
> Anyone who spends a lot of time reading Shakespeare (or working on his plays, as I have for most of my professional career) understands that he couldn’t have been less interested in puritanical notions of respectability. Given how he’s become an exalted landmark on the high road of culture, it’s easy to forget that there’s always been a secret smugglers’ path to a more salacious and subversive Shakespeare, one well known and beloved by artists and theater people. The Bard has long been a patron saint to rebel poets and social outcasts, queer nonconformists and punk provocateurs.
>
> Yes, Shakespeare is ribald, salacious, even shocking. But to understand his genius — and his indelible legacy on literature — students need to be exposed to the whole of his work, even, perhaps especially, the naughty bits...
>
> (snip)
>
>
>
>
> These are the letters (four of them):
>
> https://sadaelganob.com/opinion-shakespeare-in-full-including-the-bawdy-parts-except-in-florida/?expand_article=1
>
> Check out the one by Bradford Farwell.
>
> The women he mentions were likely born before WWII, so there's a pretty good chance they were given bowdlerized Shakespeare textbooks in high school - and had never realized, then or later, that they had been lied to.
>
> Unfortunately, I know from experience that even in somewhat-liberal schools in the 1970s, that was still happening. (OK, so I'm talking about 7th grade, but honestly!)
>
> The textbook was "Outlooks Through Literature" (1976), eds. Edmund James, James L. Pierce, Mabel H. Pittman, Jesse Stuart, and Hilton Farrell.
>
> This "edition," if you can call it that, was censored left and right. (There is no indication of this anywhere in the textbook - you'd have to have read the play before, elsewhere.) That is, not only is practically every bawdy or erotic line slashed - including Juliet's lines
>
> "Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
> By their own beauties, or, if love be blind,
> It best agrees with night."
>
> - but also Romeo's line
>
> "I sell thee poison. Thou hast sold me none."
>
> I just don't get it.
>
> The illustrations are by John Asquith.
>
> Read more about that textbook and another one, here:
>
> https://community.abebooks.co.uk/s/question/0D58V00007dtbKkSAI/scott-foresman-textb-wromeo-juliet-?topicId=0TO8V0000015HqUWAU&count=undefined

On Tuesday, August 22, 2023 at 12:00:35 PM UTC-4, Lenona wrote:
> This guest essay was in the NY Times.
>
> OK, so this isn't about the movie versions. But still...
Actually, this WAS included:

....Where the avant-garde led, pop culture followed. Shakespeare’s plays have always lent themselves to all manner of interpretations and they found new life in the postwar era, with landmark works like Basil Dearden’s “All Night Long,” a neo-noir film from 1962, which set “Othello” in a British jazz soiree. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” in 1968 plugged into a different cultural zeitgeist, capturing onscreen the summer of love, while Roman Polanski’s film version of “Macbeth” in 1971 feels like an encomium for the dying utopian dreams of the ’60s.

In the transgressive ’90s, Shakespeare was everywhere: taboo, art house, alternative and cool. Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” reimagined Prince Hal and Hotspur as gay grunge gods and Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” featured Leonardo DiCaprio at the peak of his androgyne allure. Even “Shakespeare in Love,” a relatively middlebrow Oscar winner, presented a vision of the brooding, bearded, sexy Shakespeare, as embodied by Joseph Fiennes...