No, The Times Journalists at the Hay Literary Festival, Burglarising is Not What It's All About, says Griselda Heppel

 Imagine you’re a young journalist from The Times, reporting on the Hay literary festival. Nice job if you love books and writing – which journalists do, or they’d be doing something else – and you should enjoy it while you can, as literary festivals are sadly in their Götterdämmerung period, what with no corporate sponsor being pure enough to be allowed to fund them, and grants from such lofty organisations as the Arts Council being extremely unlikely, owing to books being lamentably highbrow and middle class (not!).

Anthony Horowitz
By Edwardx - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126308848

So there you are, listening to Anthony Horowitz speak on a panel on the subject of rewriting classics by dead authors in order to remove ‘offensive’ language (as Puffin did last year with a new edition of Roald Dahl’s works), and you hear him say he doesn’t approve of burglarising books. 

Yup, that’s what he said. Well, he must have said that, there’s no other word that would fit that many syllables, he just doesn’t know the correct word is ‘burgle’. And burgling books is obviously what it’s all about. 

Reading this Times article ((Horowitz: My greatest fear is book without end, Saturday May 25th, 2024), my first reaction was astonishment that a fine, intelligent writer like Horowitz would make such a monstrous verbal mistake, both in word and meaning. It didn’t fit his style at all. 

Thomas Bowdler: The Family Shakspeare,
1818 edition

Then it dawned on me: the mistake wasn’t his. He’d used the correct term, one that has been in the English language ever since a certain Thomas Bowdler published his Family Shakspere in 1807, in which great chunks of lines and some whole characters (the prostitute Doll Tearsheet, for instance, in Henry IV Part 2) were omitted, so as to render the plays suitable for women and children. A later generation, torn between mockery and outrage that the bard’s works should be so mangled, coined the word ‘bowdlerise’ to mean the act of censoring writing to remove so-called offensive language. (My own mother took great pride in the fact that her father was expelled from school in the 1890s for wishing to read Shakespeare unexpurgated.)

Bowdlerise, that’s what Horowitz said. Not, heaven help us, burglarise. And The Times journalists had never heard of the term. 

I suppose that might be a good sign. That in all their education, they were never made to read a bowdlerised text, only the original, racy, sweary words of whichever authors they studied. If so, they were lucky, perhaps the last generation to be so. 

Because if Dahl’s books are now censored in order to remove upsetting words like ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’, how can conscientious publishers keep churning out the works of Dickens, D H Lawrence, T S Eliot, William Golding and yes, Shakespeare without liberally going through them all with a red pencil beforehand? Even the Royal Shakespeare Company, that custodian of our greatest playwright’s legacy, has issued a trigger warning on its current production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, alerting sensitive theatregoers to the unfortunate bodyshaming of its main character.

Sir John Falstaff
By Adolf Schrödter - http://www.hampel-auctions.com/,
Public Domain,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=635450

That’s right. Arguably Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation, the puffed-up, lecherous, sack-loving, ruthless, corrupt, cuddly, endearing Jack Falstaff, whose heartless attempts to seduce (as if!) several of the Wives bring on him the comeuppance he so deliciously deserves. Falstaff’s body IS the comedy: it provides a ludicrous combination of arrogance with a total lack of self-awareness of how he presents himself. If his intended quarry isn’t allowed to make fun of his vanity, where’s the comedy? 

In peril, is the answer. Perhaps the RSC won’t dare to put the play on again. Nor Henry 1V Parts 1 and 2 for that matter. Dickens’s Pickwick Papers will be allowed to go out of print, as will William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. Cinderella will no longer be bullied but empowered by her Lovely Sisters to Live Her Best Life. 

And no one, young or old, will ever want to pick up a book or go to the theatre again.

OUT NOW 

The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel

BRONZE WINNER in the Wishing Shelf Awards 2021 

By the author of Ante's Inferno  

WINNER of the People's Book Prize

www.griseldaheppel.com 

https://griseldaheppel.wordpress.com.