Question: "I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare."
Thus did Thomas Bowdler, a self-appointed editor trained as a physician, explain his creation of a children's edition of Shakespeare that omitted some characters completely, toned down language he considered objectionable, and euphemized such shocking situations as Ophelia's suicide-an accident in Bowdler's version.
Bowdler was hardly the first to tone down the Bard. Poet laureate Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear, banishing the Fool entirely and giving the play a happy ending. His version was staged regularly from the 1680 s through the 18 th century.
Thomas Bowdler was, from all the evidence, a less likely editor. He was born in 1754 near Bath, England, to a wealthy family. He studied medicine but never really practiced, preferring to exercise philanthropy and to play chess, at which he was a master. In his retirement, he decided to try his hand at editorial work. Shakespeare's dramas were his first project. He added nothing to the texts, but by cutting and paraphrasing strove to remove anything that "could give just offense to the religious and virtuous mind."
The result was a 10-volume expurgated version that was criticized widely, although hardly universally. The famed British poet Algernon Swinburne remarked that "no man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children."
There is some indication that Bowdler's sister Harriet did the actual editing of Shakespeare's text. She was a poet and editor in her own right, and clearly more qualified than her brother to lay hands on the Bard of Avon. She may have published the expurgated edition anonymously before allowing her brother to take over the rights. If this is so, it is unsurprising that Harriet would not have wanted her name on the book. If the original Shakespeare were truly objectionable, then it would have been doubly so for a well-bred, unmarried Englishwoman of the day.
Bowdler went on to create children's versions of the Old Testament and of Edward Gibbons's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, although neither achieved either the success or ridicule of his Shakespeare. Today, of course, we know Bowdler not for his good works, but instead for the eponym derived from his good name. To bowdlerize is to censor or amend a written work, often with a connotation of prudishness. The process for which Bowdler is known is one that continues to the present day, as texts deemed too difficult for today's high schoolers are "dumbed-down," library editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have the "n-word" blacked out, and middle-school productions of popular Broadway plays have all expletives deleted. We would be hard-pressed to say that we live in a prudish era, but some of the same impulses that drove Thomas and Harriet Bowdler still exist today.
The author's claim that Bowdler's Shakespeare was not unanimously criticized is supported by:

Options:
A. a quotation from Algernon Swinburne
B. reference to later children's works by Bowdler
C. the definition of the eponym formed from his name
D. the example of Ophelia's revised "suicide"
Answer: Although choices B, C, and D appear in the passage, none of them supports the claim that Bowdler's revised Shakespeare was not universally despised. The quote from Swinburne (choice A), however, does-Swinburne praises Bowdler for creating a Shakespeare that can be put in the hands of children. The correct answer is A.