Over at the New York Times, there is a very interesting OP/ED about how Florida's new educational censorship law will result in students not being able to read the Bard's plays in their entirety.
While the opinion condemns the law, as all right-thinking people do, his makes an interesting, and equally as true, point, that Shakespeare's plays are absolutely loaded with sex and violence, and that if you remove these elements, you remove Shakespeare:
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.
Indeed.
Bowdlerized Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare.
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