Banning the Bard for being bawdy? What a shocking way to teach Shakespeare

British sixth-form students reading “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” by medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer in 1960s and 70s classrooms didn’t just have the frustration of dealing with a text in a seemingly foreign language. They were also dealing with one that was broken in places by strings of asterisks – signalling the omitted sex scenes between a cockerel and a hen.

While I would not trace my subsequent academic career to the class scramble to discover those censored passages, the effort certainly taught some rudimentary scholarly skills. The passages, incidentally, were not worth concealing. The plan to teach expurgated Shakespeare in state high schools in Hillsborough County, Florida, the US’s seventh-largest school district – a move apparently in line with state governor Ron DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education Act – would appear at first sight to be just as pointless.

Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth are to be divested, for Florida teaching purposes, of so-called “raunchy” sex scenes (the violence is presumably less disturbing). I imagine that those making this decision have not read beyond the so-called raunchy stuff from each play; if they had, they’d know that no one behaving in an even remotely raunchy fashion comes off well by the end (spoiler alert: they all die!).

One particularly opaque defence of the Florida project is that by offering excerpted texts, the scope of what is taught will be broadened. This in turn, the reasoning goes, will encourage excellence in student thinking – censorship and narrowed perspectives being proven routes, it would seem, to rigorous reasoning and sound judgement.

But, of course, the plan is far from pointless. It falls in line with a paradoxical agenda that blights thinking and action in certain quarters on both the left and the right of the political divide. By it, respect for and celebration of plurality and diversity transform into hard dogmatism, and a plea for more translates into legislation in favour of less, and the hardening of limited views and prejudices.

In Britain, with classic and contemporary literature embroiled in wider culture wars, there are requests for censorship of books in public library collections and on university reading lists. Literature’s relevance, always difficult to defend, has now taken on surprising nuances of meaning.

Jane Austen’s House, a museum dedicated to the author’s life, was charged in April 2021 with “woke madness” when its attempts to engage with the Austen family’s complicated links to slavery were wilfully misinterpreted in the right-wing press as the “historical interrogation” of “tea drinking”.

More even-handedly, you might think, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, to whom censoring public knowledge is abhorrent, has reported requests made for the removal of material dealing with Britain’s colonial heritage and with LBGT+ characters and storylines.

Trigger warnings of upsetting content have been added to student reading lists. One account cites warnings from an Aberdeen University list: alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, for references to social and gender inequalities and disabilities, Virgil’s Aeneid, for dealing in war, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, for “references to sex, death and psychological manipulation”, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for “classism”, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped apparently includes (gasp) “kidnapping”!

In 2022, Aberdeen was by no means alone. There have been reports of “challenging” material (depictions of suicide and slavery are mentioned) being dropped or made optional for fear of causing student offence. The universities of Essex and Sussex were cited.

Another eight universities (including Russell Group members) admitted to making texts optional on similar grounds. Cancel culture can appear silly; it can also be deeply pernicious. Animosity or even suspicion towards books can be directed at readers and librarians, too.

In the 18th century, women and the young were considered to be in especial danger from novels – their imaginations and morals, it was thought, could be all too easily infected by the insidious influence of romance and examples of emotional excess. Something of this appears to have resurfaced in the Florida programme.

In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist, examined what it has meant to human beings to learn to read. Not being hardwired to read, in doing so the brain goes beyond its original design – a capacity Wolf sees mirrored in the reader’s interaction with text, whereby the brain’s ability to build new thoughts makes texts richer by what we bring to them. Romeo and Juliet takes meaning from, as well as giving meaning to, the early stirrings of romantic love. This just might make Shakespeare a better bet for training the adolescent brain than whatever they might stumble across on the internet.

Some of the recent trigger alerts, health warnings against both reading and being young, have been in response to the isolating effects of the Covid years. But they accelerate a creeping trend to avoid the difficult, the controversial, the distressing, the other person’s point of view – the very things that, not so long ago, we turned to literature to help us understand – and, where needful, to help us accept or exorcise.

Curiously, this withdrawal of inward enrichment goes along with a rush to public displays of empathetic credentials – the kind of experience-by-proxy that used to be sought in literature. Now, it seems, certain kinds of empathy might expand us in the wrong direction, into the wrong person’s shoes. They might expose uncomfortable differences, anxieties, or similarities; they might anger and unsettle us.

Against that, and on the side of uncensored books and unexpurgated texts, we need to remember the words, variously ascribed: “Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open.”

Kathryn Sutherland is emeritus professor at St Anne’s College, Oxford University