The 1818 edition, which Thomas led, included all 37. The 1807 edition, which Henrietta pioneered, only dealt with 20 of the 37 extant Shakespeare plays, Kitzes writes. The result: a book that’s sort of shaped like Shakespeare, plot-wise, but which is missing key phrases and plot events. This realism was too much for the author of The Family Shakespeare, whichever Bowdlers were involved. Although his language isn’t always accessible to modern audiences, he talks about universal themes, and uses characters from different walks of life. Shakespeare is justifiably still well-known for capturing human experience from a number of vantages and in real tones. It’s hard to know how much of the book–in its original printing or any of its subsequent versions–was actually written by specifically Thomas or Henrietta: the dictionary notes that Thomas Bowdler might have claimed authorship of later editions “to avoid having to admit publicly to having understood the passages requiring removal.” What is true is that Henrietta Bowdler was already a published author in 1807 and had more experience in the literary world than her brother, who was a doctor by profession. In that way, as Oxford Dictionaries notes, “it was truly a family Shakespeare.” Eventually, the Bowdler name got turned into a verb denoting censorship. This project actually began with his sister, Henrietta Bowdler, writes literature scholar Adam Kitzes. Bowdler's revisions to Shakespeare and infamous enough that his meddling is " celebrated" by librarians and literature fans on this day each year–the anniversary of his birth in 1754. Thomas Bowdler is best-remembered for being the credited author of The Family Shakespeare, a book first published in 1807 “in which nothing is added to the original Text: but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read allowed in a Family.” In other words, The Family Shakespeare was Shakespeare without the "indelicacy of expression" the Bard often favored. They just wanted to bring Shakespeare to the masses!
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