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When the London theaters reopened in 1660, after having been shuttered by the Puritans for 18 years, the Restoration decided that Shakespeare needed rewriting. Taking its cue from Ben Jonson ("Shakespeare wanted art"), the Restoration and the Age of Reason argued that the Bard was a barbaric child of Nature whose war bled woodnotes wild violated the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. His plots were a confusing mishmash of the tragic and comic. He was vulgar. Samuel Pepys confided to his diary that Hamlet "disgusts this refined age." Dryden called him "divine Shakespeare," but added smugly: "I have refined his language, which before was obsolete." Voltaire may have summed up his era's widespread judgment on the Bard: "A few pearls on a dunghill."
For a century and a half, Shakespeare was vivisected and prettified. The biting vigor of the language was made toothless. In the original, a half-demented Macbeth rounds on a servant with
The devil damn thee black, thou creamed-faced loon! Where got'st thou that goose look?
Rewriter Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare's godson, refined this into: "Now friend, what means thy change of countenance?" Romeo and Juliet stayed alive; "false Cressid" remained true to Troilus; and in the most bizarre happy ending of the lot, King Lear's daughter Cordelia married Edgar, and Lear was offered back his kingdom. Adapter Nahum Tate, who also edited out Lear's Fool (this cut lasted for 157 years), solemnly declared that his only purpose was "making the tale conclude in a success for the innocent distressed persons."
The Blushing Bowdler. "Declamation roar'd, while passion slept," said Dr. Johnson of the ranting style of early 18th century acting. Then David Garrick, who had an indifferent voice and a remarkably expressive face (a deaf-mute was one of his most ardent fans), pioneered a conversational, non-declamatory style. Although he restored some of the verse and affected to play "as written by Shakespeare," Garrick did his own tampering with the text. The gravediggers were missing in his Hamlet, as was Ophelia's funeral, and Laertes had no pact with the King to kill Hamlet. As far as the public was concerned, it was a case of mime over matter; audiences thrilled to volcanic Edmund Kean playing Tate's sugar-coated Lear, and demanded that mesmeric Sarah Siddons ring down Macbeth on the sleepwalking scene in her farewell appearance.
Victorian prudery nice-Nellified 19th century Shakespeare. In 1818 Thomas Bowdler, a retired physician, blue-penciled what he regarded as the Bard's blue lines and produced a Shakespeare without blushes for the family reading hour—doubtless pleasing that Victorian matron who emerged from a performance of Antony and Cleopatra saying, "How strangely different from the home life of our dear Queen." In the U.S. Shakespeare was so passionately popular that a dispute between the fans of rival actors—William Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest led to New York