Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ttngx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-03T03:54:29.827Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Counterpublic Shakespeares in the American Education Marketplace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2021

Emma Smith
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

Imagine this scene: an American high school student picks up an edition of Macbeth. The edition, however, differs from those read by her peers. It omits, for example, the moment Lady Macbeth describes dashing out an infant’s brains while nursing. It excludes the Porter’s drunken soliloquy as he pretends to stand watch at the gates of hell. It forgoes Malcolm’s fraudulent disclosure of his insatiable lust to Macduff. And when the student reaches the moment when the somnambulating Lady Macbeth scrubs Duncan’s blood from her hands, the line reads, ‘Out, foul spot!’ Other readers, of course, know it as ‘Out, damned spot’, but the text contains no indication of the change. One might wonder whether this student had unwittingly acquired Thomas Bowdler’s nineteenth-century Family Shakespeare, but no. This student is reading an edition of Shakespeare published in 2004 by A Beka Book out of Pensacola, Florida. A Beka, along with a cottage industry of other publishers, create editions of Macbeth for private and home-schooled students across America. This specific edition of Macbeth is marketed towards fundamentalist Protestants, who, editors believe, may find such material objectionable. Such editions do more than bowdlerize lines and scenes, they insert these plays – and Shakespeare himself – into a larger polemic against American mainstream education.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shakespeare Survey 74
Shakespeare and Education
, pp. 195 - 207
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×