Counterpublic Shakespeares in the American Education Marketplace

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.