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
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