andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> and the Bard of Avon (you know, Sir Francis Bacon,
> Baron Verulam, or was it Sir Edward Vere, the Earl of
> Oxford?) is so improper that he was the main target of
> Bowlderization in the 19th century.
Some years ago someone did a complete survey of high school texts of Shakespeare. Not a single text was unexpurgated.
But another oddity. This censoring of high-school texts creates an odd blind spot in students. Some decades ago when I was teaching Romeo & Juliet to an Intro to Lit course, I had to spend half the class time simply explicating the dirty jokes. It wasn't that my students were naive; it just never occurred to them to look for 'obscenity" in a school book.
Carrol