Dirty Shakespeare

Shakespeare was notorious enough for being indecent in places that he indirectly gave rise to the, now possibly slightly archaic, term “to bowdlerize”. Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) having edited out the rude bits, or rather “whatever is unfit to be read aloud by a gentleman to a company of ladies”, to produce The Family Shakespeare in 1818. It’s sufficiently famous as a case of 19th century prudishness that I’d hope that textbook editors these days would be wary of following his example.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature in English’s entry on him notes that he did the same with Gibbon. He’d at least put the very rude bits in Latin in the first place.