"Publish an abridged version. Make it clear that it is abridged, and sell it as a separate product."

I recall when I was at school decades ago at a time when the use of certain words in public was much less acceptable than now that our Shakespeare texts had certain words expunged from them as they had been deemed unacceptable for our 'delicate' ears.

We highschool students were completely oblivious of the fact until to save costs I found a copy of my father's Shakespeare text which he had kept from his schooldays and used it as my textbook. When following its text in class I found my copy contained a paragraph that had been omitted from the authorized school edition.

Suffice to say, my edition became a sensation amongst the kids, everyone wanted to read the 'naughty' bit. It's so long ago that I can't remember chapter and verse but the word we delicate little flowers weren't supposed to see was bastard. Big deal!

What was immediately obvious to me even at that young age was that bannings, prohibition and censorship is counterproductive and it's much more likely to have the opposite effect of what's intended.

Around that time there was much controversy over the publication of D. H. Lawrence's† Lady Chatterley's Lover which was deemed by the Wowser Brigade as obscene. This only had the effect of multiple 'clandestine' copies turning up in the school playground with us boys huddled in small groups reading the 'naughty' parts.

Several years later a similar controversy erupted over Philip Roth' Portnoy's Complaint, and even later I came across that strange and most peculiar of works W.S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch at a secondhand book sale which shocked even my somewhat blunt sensibilities (its controversy was somewhat before my time but its notoriety still lingers even now).

It is almost certain that I would never have come across any of these works let alone bothered to have read them UNLESS public attention had made them notorious—the fact is I just don't read this sort of stuff unless controversy has first thrust it into the public limelight. There's a lesson here to be learned with respect to this Dahl affair.

Methinks there may be somewhat more to this controversy than just protecting young minds. There's nothing like a controversal beat-up to improve sales.

I'm almost certain that our censored Shakespeare texts had no impact on our morals whatsoever, if anything it made us kids more worldly and less naïve after we'd found out that we'd been censored.

We adults underestimate both the intelligence and resilience of kids, they know and don't forget when we've been hoodwinking them. No doubt, kids definitely need protection but overprotection can ill-equip them for the realities of a harsh world.

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† Incidentally, in hindsight, it's interesting to note the double standard that applied when I was at school. On the one hand, our Shakespeare was censored over a nonsensically trivial matter, at the same time we had to study and be examined upon controversial novelist D.H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers.

Whilst Sons and Lovers was a slightly saucy novel for that time it was somewhat of a joke that we kids had to study it around the time that the publication of Lawrence's more notorious novel was the subject of court action—that is, it was in the news for all the 'wrong' reasons. The dichotomy was damned obvious, even to us kids.