The schools in Florida planning to teach Shakespeare’s works “only with excerpts”, to shield students from anything too salacious, are part of a long tradition, says Drew Lichtenberg in The New York Times. The playwright Nahum Tate was so horrified by the “bloody climax” of King Lear that he rewrote its ending. This “sanitised” version, premiered in 1681, held sway for more than 150 years. Voltaire described Hamlet as the work of a “drunken savage” who wrote without “the slightest spark of good taste” (though this didn’t stop him “openly borrowing” from the Bard for one of his own plays). Nietzsche thought Shakespeare’s works were “the ne plus ultra of grisly truths”, with Hamlet in particular a treatise on the “horror or absurdity” of existence. “Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he considered this a good thing.”
In other cultures, the “bawdy lowbrow” and the “poetic highbrow” have separate champions: in France, there’s François Rabelais and Jean Racine; in Spain, Miguel de Cervantes and Pedro Calderón. But Shakespeare managed to combine high with low “into something rich, special and strange”. His work is “almost purposefully designed to confound those who want to segregate the smutty from the sublime” – proof that “profundity can live next to, and even be found in, the pornographic, the viscerally violent and the existentially horrifying”. That’s why efforts to sanitise his work always fail in the end. “One can no more take out the dirty parts of Shakespeare than one can take out the poetry.” And that is his genius.