Saturday, September 06, 2008
Is this a dagger I see before me?
It is a little known fact that buried in All Saints Church in Mumbles, Swansea is one Thomas Bowdler, the man who in 1807 published the first edition of the Family Shakespeare containing 24 of the great man's plays edited for family consumption.
In 1818 he published The Family Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family. Each play is preceded by an introduction where Bowdler summarises and justifies his changes to the text.
Bowdler died on 24 February 1825 but is remembered for his work as the man who bowdlerised Shakespeare. I first encountered him when studying Hamlet for A-Level, when the teacher discovered we had a family edition of the great play. We subsequently spent half of one lesson putting the expurgated text back by hand under the teacher's direction.
I recalled this little anecdote when I read in this morning's Guardian of how the poet Carol Ann Duffy had reacted to the censorship of her work by the AQA exam board. Responding to a complaint from an external examiner called Mrs Schofield, they removed the poem 'Education for Leisure' from the syllabus on the grounds that it might encourage knife crime.
Rather bizarrely there was no attempt to similarly ban Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Juliet Caesar, The Merchant of Venice or even Hamlet itself all of which involve action with a knife that nobody would want a child to attempt to imitate. And this is the point that Carol Ann Duffy makes in her poetic riposte published by the Guardian here.
The external examiner herself reacted with disbelief: 'Contacted by the Guardian last night, Schofield said she felt "a bit gobsmacked" to have a verse named after her. She described the poem as "a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that's me".'
I wonder how many marks a GCSE pupil would get for that rather robust analysis of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry.
In 1818 he published The Family Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family. Each play is preceded by an introduction where Bowdler summarises and justifies his changes to the text.
Bowdler died on 24 February 1825 but is remembered for his work as the man who bowdlerised Shakespeare. I first encountered him when studying Hamlet for A-Level, when the teacher discovered we had a family edition of the great play. We subsequently spent half of one lesson putting the expurgated text back by hand under the teacher's direction.
I recalled this little anecdote when I read in this morning's Guardian of how the poet Carol Ann Duffy had reacted to the censorship of her work by the AQA exam board. Responding to a complaint from an external examiner called Mrs Schofield, they removed the poem 'Education for Leisure' from the syllabus on the grounds that it might encourage knife crime.
Rather bizarrely there was no attempt to similarly ban Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Juliet Caesar, The Merchant of Venice or even Hamlet itself all of which involve action with a knife that nobody would want a child to attempt to imitate. And this is the point that Carol Ann Duffy makes in her poetic riposte published by the Guardian here.
The external examiner herself reacted with disbelief: 'Contacted by the Guardian last night, Schofield said she felt "a bit gobsmacked" to have a verse named after her. She described the poem as "a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that's me".'
I wonder how many marks a GCSE pupil would get for that rather robust analysis of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry.
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Why does the WJEC ban the Irish play "Translations" by Friehl in Wales, when English school examination Boards allow it freely to be a subject of education and examination? It contains no expletives - it only recounts a Gaelic language issue!
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