[In the following essay, Andreas discusses the school censorship of the bawdy elements in Romeo and Juliet, and contends that students, in order to fully appreciate Shakespeare, need to be taught the whole text.]

It is a curious phenomenon that we introduce Shakespeare to eighth- and ninth-grade students across the United States with a play like Romeo and Juliet, arguably one of Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedies and certainly his bawdiest. The violence of the play—the vendetta of the parents, the dueling of the young men, the clan-condoned murder, the suicides of the young lovers—particularly insofar as it is directed at and perpetrated by youths, has not much offended contemporary audiences. But the bawdry has. I am writing, of course, about the sexually charged exchange between Gregory and Samson in the opening scene; the Nurse's reminiscences about the weaning of Juliet; Mercutio's Queen Mab speech; and virtually every scene in which Mercutio, the Nurse, and servants appear—all scenes that are touchy to teach at whatever level. There was a time when A Midsummer Night's Dream was the introductory play for junior high and high school students around the country, but that was before the unilateral decision to eliminate comedy from the national Shakespeare curriculum.¹ Dangerous sexual sentiments and innuendos permeate comedy, as they should, but merely punctuate tragedy, as Michael Bristol, Susan Snyder (Comic Matrix), and others have shown. And tragic bawdry, the kind indulged in by Hamlet, for instance, is more easily explained away in introductions to the text as comic relief or qualified by being glossed as something else or strategically excised from the text altogether as extraneous and even dangerous to public morals.² The decision to introduce students to Shakespeare with Romeo and Juliet was followed by systematic expurgation of the texts of the play and selective approaches to sexuality in filmed and live productions that would be viewed by students.³

My classes afford a synoptic view of how Romeo and Juliet is taught in middle school and high school as well as in college and graduate courses. I teach a Shakespeare telecourse that includes twenty-five undergraduate students in the television studio on campus and twenty-five middle and high school teachers across the state of South Carolina, who receive the class by satellite at their home schools, usually in groups of two or three teachers. The course is live and fully interactive; teachers call in their responses to questions, discussion, and film clips and even recite or perform over the phone. The course is tied in directly with the Clemson Shakespeare Festival, which features five or six live productions of plays we study in class. Romeo and Juliet is the perennial favorite during the festival having been featured recently in productions by Shenandoah Shakespeare Express and the Warehouse Theater of Greenville, South Carolina. The play was also performed by the Acting Company of New York along with a production of West Side Story presented by the Booking Group, also of New York.

Discussion of Romeo and Juliet in the telecourse invariably tiptoes around sensitive curricular issues. Teachers want to know how their colleagues approach the play, and the college students are interested in discussing how the play was presented in middle or high school. The touchiest subject in these discussions is Shakespeare's bawdry. Teachers worry about introducing sexually sensitive material to fourteen-year-olds, students precisely the same age as the play's young protagonists. The telecourse format provides us with the means to study the play and the play's pervasive sensuality in three forms: as a printed text (an easily censored medium), including the early quarto editions, the Folio, and modern editions of the play; in film versions that recontextualize the play in terms of historical preoccupations with sexuality; and in live stage productions that approximate conditions of Elizabethan staging while reflecting contemporary issues, including bawdry, in the play. The representation of the play's vibrant sexuality is conditioned by the medium of expression, a fact that would not have been lost on Shakespeare, who deals in the play with themes of literacy and orality and their impact on sexual freedom and choice.⁴

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare seems preoccupied with orality and suspicious of literacy, which is, in a sense, deconstructed in the play by the persistent deprecation of letters, books, and reading. The servants in Romeo and Juliet, agents of both orality and vulgarity, are illiterate. Romeo and Juliet meet because the servant-clown of Lord Capulet cannot read the list of invitations he is sent to deliver to assemble the Capulets at the home of Juliet's father for a ball. Students find the following exchange interesting, because they themselves are often accused of a sort of lazy illiteracy in their persistent and understandable preferences for visual media:

SERVANT.
God gi' god-den. I pray, sir, can you read?
ROMEO.
Ay, mine own fortune in my misery.
SERVANT.
Perhaps you have learn'd it without book.
But I pray, can you read any thing you see?
ROMEO.
Ay, if I know the letters and the language.
SERVANT.
Ye say honestly, rest you merry!
ROMEO.
Stay, fellow, I can read.

(1.2.57-63)

Romeo proceeds to read the list aloud, and after some banter with the servant, Romeo and Benvolio make plans to crash the party. The improvisational nature of speech is apparent here: because the servant cannot read, the Montagues and Capulets are allowed to mix in social and ritual ways that throw Romeo and Juliet together into a coupling that eventually will reconcile the two families. The servant, even before he meets Romeo in the street, demonstrates the happy accidents that result from oral exchange in his consternation over the list his master has handed him.

Find them out whose names are written here! It is written that the shoemaker should meddle with his yard and the tailor with his last, the fisher with his pencil and the painter with his nets; but I am sent to find those persons whose names are here writ, and can never find what names the writing person hath here writ. I must to the learned. In good time!

(1.2.38-44)

The servant already has the words out of sequence here in his prose rendition of his master's poetic instructions: in reality, the tailor has his yard, the shoemaker his pencil, and the fisherman his nets. Lists are often a problem in European culture, which since the sixteenth century has mapped and demarcated the world in order to partition, administer, and dominate it. The Montagues and Capulets have each other on their lists of enemies. Moreover, in the quotation above, Romeo suggests that his melancholy, no doubt conditioned by a bookish, Petrarchan attitude toward his affection for Rosaline, has been “read” as his “fortune” of “misery.” Literary texts, like lists, are fixed and—once written or printed—do not evolve into solutions to the difficulties the texts project. The plot of the play, of course, hinges on the fate of the young lovers being fixed or “star-crossed” (prologue 6) by Friar Lawrence's letter, which arrives too late to inform Romeo of the confessor's harebrained plan to reunite the lovers. As if to remind us of this antibookish theme, Benvolio, the normative character in the play, announces that the Montague entrance to the Capulet ball will not be anticipated by any bookish prologue, “Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke / After the prompter, for our entrance” (1.4.7-8). The entrance of the Montagues will be unprompted, spontaneous, and unrehearsed. They will crash the party.

Other passages in the play reveal a suspicion of literacy and reading like that advanced by Shakespeare's contemporary Miguel de Cervantes in the narrative of a knight beguiled by his readings in chivalric romance. Paris, Juliet's unwanted suitor, is praised by Lady Capulet as a weighty tome and “golden story” (1.3.92), a book just waiting to be opened and read by Juliet. As if recommending a good book, Lady Capulet urges Juliet to accept Paris on her parents' recommendation, sight unseen:

Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face,
And find delight writ there with beauty's pen;
Examine every married lineament,
And see how one another lends content;
And what obscured in this fair volume lies
Find written in the margent of his eyes.
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him, only lacks a cover.
The fish lives in the sea, and 'tis much pride
For fair without the fair within to hide.
That book in many's eyes doth share the glory,
That in gold clasps locks in the golden story.

(1.3.81-92)

What an anatomy of reading we have here at the end of the century that produced the first printed book: reading, volume, pens, lineaments, content, margent, books, unbound papers, covers, clasps, golden stories—all enumerated by the mother who is a sworn enemy to the Montagues and to her own daughter's love interests and choices. The book is the text that eliminates free choices and fixes outcomes according to the dictates of propriety and the canons of authority. The Latin word for “read,” lego, is the root of the word lex, or “law.” In this play, the spirit of the lovers is literally defeated by the letter—the letter that doesn't arrive in time to allow Romeo and Juliet's safe reunion.

I am always quick to point out to students that early in the play the servants, Mercutio, and the Nurse are free to undercut the authority and predictable, legalistic morality of their superiors. When Lady Capulet praises Paris, the Nurse, who has already delivered her paean to nursing—and oral activity—and sexual pratfalls, is there to undercut her lady's literary conceit:

LADY Capulet.
So shall you [Juliet] share all that he doth possess,
By having him, making yourself no less.
NURSE.
No less! nay, bigger; women grow by men.

(1.3.93-95)

In the Nurse's back talk, Juliet is represented as a natural woman who will not be made “less,” or reduced, to a cover beautifying the book of Paris. She will “grow” beyond the limits of the book in pregnancy. She will be inspirited, “blown up,” as Shakespeare says of pregnancy in other contexts (see All's Well 1.1.118-19).

Romeo's affections for Rosaline early in the play—archaically bookish and Petrarchan—are undercut initially by Mercutio in the Queen Mab speech and then again in the first, chance encounter of Romeo and Juliet at the masked ball. I like to show filmed versions of that meeting beginning with the line “If I profane with my unworthiest hand” (1.5.93), where the lovers construct one of the most ingenious sonnets in all English literature, a collaborative, recitative poetic improvisation that is so spontaneous, students rarely recognize the sonnet form. Yet, with the kiss that concludes the sonnet, Juliet reminds Romeo that he, under the influence of his amatory reading, still “kisses by the book” (1.5.110). By the second act, Romeo himself is suspicious of names that fix character and reputation, names that are inscribed permanently on lists of enemies. Speaking of his name, he confesses, “Because it is an enemy to thee; / Had I it written, I would tear the word” (2.2.56-57). Romeo looks for something (like a book) to “swear by” as testimony to his love for Juliet, but his mate is smarter than that. She replies:

                                                                                Do not swear at all;
Or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I'll believe thee.

(2.2.112-15)

By this time Romeo has apparently unlearned his bookish approach to lovemaking. Love teaches its own lessons and has no need of books or schoolrooms: “Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books, / But love from love, toward school with heavy looks” (2.2.156-57).

Mercutio, perhaps the bawdiest and most mercurial of Shakespeare's characters and therefore a favorite of young students, also undercuts the rhetoric of Petrarchan sentiment, particularly when it comes to Romeo's manufactured feelings for Rosaline. Undoubtedly all teachers linger over the improvised stand-up of Mercutio, whose Queen Mab speech mocks the bookish pretensions of lovers, lawyers, parsons, and soldiers alike. Mercutio has his own pet peeves against literacy and bookishness, particularly when it comes to Tybalt, the robot soldier who fences by the worst of all kinds of manuals, the mathematical textbook:

No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve. Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am pepper'd, I warrant, for this world. A plague a' both your houses! 'Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! a braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic!

(3.1.96-102)

Even as Mercutio is dying, he challenges the ability of scripted language to render puns humorously. Mercutio the trickster will become a “grave man” tomorrow, for like Tybalt he is grave bound. He is also engraved, his body marked like a text by the predictable fencing passes of Tybalt, who “fights by the book of arithmetic.” As Susan Snyder has argued (Matrix), the yuck stops here, with the death of Mercutio at the play's heart. The grace of the “comic matrix” has given way to the gravity of a tragic “patrix,” if I may coin a term. The open-endedness of the plot represented by fun and games; the flaunting of love's conventions; and the shameless, bawdy punning of the first half of the action have been short-circuited. Mercutio is dead, the Nurse is silenced, and the servants are in retreat for most of the rest of the play. Destiny is fixed; the lovers are at this point “star-crossed.”

It is no wonder Shakespeare so frequently celebrates orality and excoriates literacy in his plays. The language of his stage is ear candy. Audiences, not spectators, attend Shakespeare's plays. With the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre in London, we have rediscovered what theater architects in Shakespeare's era knew implicitly: the Elizabethan stage is a huge sounding board like the case of a grand piano or the rounded body of a cello. With airplanes booming overhead and buses accelerating all around the theater, the lines of the actors resound and reverberate in the arena, surpassing all acoustic expectations. To be sure, scholars contemporary with Shakespeare must have complained about the threat to reading as a principal pedagogical mode represented by an upstart playwright and his fellow actors and writers in this new, unruly, folk or vulgar theater. Schoolmasters probably said something like, “My students aren't reading Homer or Sophocles anymore, not to mention Plutarch and Ovid. They congregate down in Southwark near the brothels and bearbaiting pits to watch Troilus and Cressida, which desecrates Homer, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, which turns Ovid on his head. What a pity! What a waste! They need to be reading Cicero, not watching Sejanus.” We, of course, advance the same sorts of arguments to defend literature against film, television, and most recently the computer with its multimedia and Internet capacities. But Shakespeare made a conscious career choice to turn away from the sonnet and from poetic narratives like Hero and Leander to devote himself to a more direct and unmediated form of literary expression—live popular theater. I like to tell my students that theater was reinvented by Shakespeare and his dramatic colleagues as a technology with a new shape, space, and form, a technology developed to deliver the riches of a rapidly evolving language apparently at the peak of its powers. And Shakespeare, I point out, obviously preferred to deliver that language in its purest form—orally—rather than in print. Otherwise he certainly would have shown signs that he would one day authorize the publication of his plays, as did his contemporary Ben Jonson in composing his Works.

Oral language is, of course, the medium of bawdy exchange because it is open and relatively immune to the censorship, excision, expurgation, abridgment, and prosecution to which written or literate texts are subject. Print may well have been encouraged and developed as the major medium of exchange in European culture because it was so easily controlled through licensing, selective expurgation, and listing on various indexes. Shakespeare certainly exercised his bawdy sense of humor on the stage to secure and sustain interest and to extend dramatic language into new and popular registers with jargon, slang, and billingsgate derived from the scurrilous profanity of fishmongers and pickpockets. How else do we explain the sheer abundance of vulgar slang in the tirades of Petruchio, Pompey, Thersites, Autolycus, and even Hamlet, not to mention the insults on stage that teachers the world over use to inspire interest in the oral Shakespeare. The comments of the servants, the Nurse, and Mercutio all sustain dramatic interest on the stage, if not the page, through the sexual innuendo that is an important theme in the play—at least according to Friar Lawrence, who announces, “The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb; / What is her burying grave, that is her womb” (2.3.9-10). Tomb and womb are locked in a cycle in which each is linked to and generated out of the other. The sexuality of the womb is a crucial motif in the opening scene and throughout the first three acts of the play.

The editors of the standard school texts—sometimes professionals with no educational experience hired by the publishing conglomerates but often Shakespearean scholars—have, for all practical purposes, neutered these texts of Romeo and Juliet by undermining the play's comic core, sexual allure, satiric thrust, and ironic ambiguity. Some four hundred lines of the play are customarily eliminated, including virtually all the comic and satiric as well as the bawdy lines of the Nurse, Mercutio, and the servants. The following passages are typically excised: the sexual braggadocio of the servants in 1.1, the discussion of the weaning and the sexual “fall” of infant Juliet in 1.3, the scatological elements of the Queen Mab speech and of the comic exchanges in the death scene of Mercutio in 1.4 and 3.1, and the raucous entrance of the musicians after the apparent death of Juliet in 4.5.

Cuts in the first scene of Romeo and Juliet, a scene that I always encourage students to act out in both expurgated and full-text versions, illustrate how the censorship process works. As Northrop Frye suggests about this scene, “The macho jokes, ‘draw thy tool’ and the like, are the right way to introduce the theme that dominates this play: the theme of love bound up with, and part of, violent death. Weapons and fighting suggest sex as well as death, and are still doing so later in the play, when the imagery shifts to gunpowder” (“Romeo” 16).

The Montague and Capulet servants exchange off-color jokes about maidenheads and dried-up codpieces that delay the violence which erupts when the servants' social betters rush in to start fighting for real, with swords instead of words (see Andreas, “Wordplay”). Gone in the student texts I examined is the boast of Samson, who says, “Me [the maids] shall feel while I am able to stand, and 'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh” (1.1.28-29). Gone as well are all the Aristophanic jokes about naked tools and naked weapons. References to thrusting women against the wall, to taking maidenheads instead of real heads, and to Samson's “pretty piece of flesh,” which hangs dry and dead like a cod (a sword at rest) rather than standing and drawn—all this bawdy fun is deleted. In the student texts, when Gregory commands Samson to draw his “tool” against the Montagues (31), there is no bawdy innuendo, no sexual ambiguity. The weapon is “naked” (34)—unsheathed—but it is not the “prick” (2.4.113) or the “fiddlestick” (3.1.48) Mercutio will later allude to but the “naked weapon” itself, the sword (1.1.34). The high school texts pick up after Gregory's line with Samson's cry: “My naked weapon is out. Quarrel, I will back thee” (1.1.33-34). The oral resonance here is deadened: the phallic references to “tool” and “piece” all give way to one inescapable, literalized meaning: weapon. The naked weapon is an unsheathed sword. The humor of the passage is expurgated here to be sure, along with the bawdry, but so are the stated and associative meanings. The comic option that the reader of an unabridged edition enjoys until the muzzling of the Nurse and the murder of Mercutio is here canceled out immediately. The characters are cornered into a mean little street brawl with none of the capacities for comic chaos that are Shakespeare's design in the opening scene. For all the students know from their textbooks, real lethal weapons are drawn the moment the servants first appear onstage. And students, of course, are left uninformed about the reasons for the excisions. They think they are reading Shakespeare, and their suspicions about this stuffy dead white man whom they never expected to enjoy are confirmed. What students still (I bet) call “the good parts” are generally cut from student texts: references to tools, codpieces, nipples, maidenheads, and pricks all fall under the censor's knife. Whatever these texts of Romeo and Juliet are, they simply are not Shakespeare, not in form or spirit. Somebody has slipped a bra on the Venus de Milo and slapped a fig leaf on Michelangelo's David to protect our students from art as it was conceived and executed, and we are expected not to notice, or, worse yet, we are expected to approve. The artistic work has supposedly been improved. The considerable violence in the play—the stabbings and the poisoning—has not been touched, but the jokes are cut most unkindly, and the comedy is simply murdered.

Missing also from student texts are the spontaneous, meandering lines about the Nurse's weaning of baby Juliet, including these:

When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it teachy and fall out wi' th' dug!

(1.3.30-32)

Gone are the lines about the “fall” of the baby Juliet anticipating her fall back on the marriage bed. More ominous, gone are all the typically teenage and often obnoxious jokes of Mercutio, the class wiseacre. To characterize these deletions generally, in language Shakespeare ascribed to Friar Lawrence, the imagery of the “tomb” is privileged, while allusions to the “womb” are excised. The version of the play the students read is one-dimensional, a neat illustration of Freud's concept of the death wish. Much of the human and humorous interest has been removed in order to sanitize the text and to displace some of the play's principal themes—the renewal of life through the pleasures of eros and the playfully illicit humor that verbalizes such pleasures. Derogatory comments about the church and the law in the Queen Mab speech are also removed. In the expurgated version Romeo and Juliet is reduced to a brutal, mechanistic tragedy with little humor, erotic appeal, grace, or depth. As in the eighteenth century, notorious for its comic amendments of tragic plays, the resulting text is offered by its editors as an improvement, the perfection of Shakespeare's abortive early attempt to re-create tragedy in the Renaissance mode.

To sum up the dramatic argument against what Elspeth Stuckey calls the “violence of literacy,” I emphasize that literary texts, as Shakespeare seems to know, are easily manipulated and even transformed by authority. During the five hundred years since the invention of the printing press, states and communities have devised strategic ways to contain dangerous literary texts, particularly those that are faithful to their vulgar (from vulgus, meaning folk) oral roots: revocation of the license to publish, excision, abridgment, bowdlerization, selective translation, indexing, book banning, book burning, and, of course, systematic, strategic censorship.⁵ With the advent of moving pictures a hundred years ago, censorship had to be reinvented: questionable films could be clipped and snipped—and often were, by local theater owners—but they could also be licensed, banned, burned, and, in a recent turn of events, theatrically rated, a process that, curiously, has never been applied to books.

What, then, of the filmed versions that we all use in teaching Romeo and Juliet, and what of the live productions that the lucky few among us are able to encourage our students to attend? How is the bawdry handled in these resources for teaching? To illustrate the importance of the Nurse in the first half of the play, I show students five versions of the “weaning scene,” where she ruminates on and reminisces about the deaths, fourteen years ago, of her husband and her child, Susan. These tragic events—remembered in connection with an earthquake!—the Nurse conceives as evidence of a huge cosmic “jest” epitomized in the pratfall little Juliet takes the day she learns to walk. The Nurse remembers:

And then my husband—God be with his soul!
'A was a merry man—took up the child.
“Yea,” quoth he, “dost thou fall upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit,
Wilt thou not, Jule?” and by my holidam,
The pretty wretch left crying and said, “Ay.”
To see how a jest shall come about!

(1.3.39-45)

As I have pointed out, this passage and others like it are clipped from the textbooks, but what about the films? In the film productions I show students—by George Cukor (1936), Renato Castellani (1954), Franco Zeffirelli (1968), and Baz Luhrmann (1996)—this speech and the reference to wormwood on the nipple are cut, and no visual analogy is offered. In the Zeffirelli production Juliet's breast is exposed on the wedding night, but I know teachers who feel compelled to block out this scene lest students (or parents) be offended. Only the BBC production (1978) leaves the entire weaning scene intact, but the Nurse in that production is so cold and humorless, and Juliet so stiff, that the speech does not resonate the way it should as thematically central to the play.

In live productions, I am happy to report, the comic heart of the play—Mercutio—is alive and well. In the Mercutio of the BBC production or even in Baz Luhrmann's black Mercutio, students see a hothead, a carbon copy of the warlike Tybalt, who fuels the disastrous feud in Verona. On stage, however, Mercutio is usually portrayed as a wise guy, a smart-ass, who revels in displaying a vulgar wit he seems to lift right off the street. Even John Barrymore, in his only speaking role as a Shakespearean character (Cukor version), plays up this element of Mercutio's character. The Mercutios in recent productions of Romeo and Juliet at the Clemson Shakespeare Festival were real hams, reveling in intimate and bawdy contact with the young members of the audience and providing masturbatory and coital gestures to drive home the innuendos. One Mercutio was so scandalous that the festival got letters protesting the suitability of such lines and gestures in a play for young audiences of students. The students, in fact, were approximately the same age as the teen actors (playing teen characters) who delivered the jokes onstage in Shakespeare's day.

In conclusion, Romeo and Juliet is a play fully suspicious of the expectations about literacy and of the propriety literacy was to instill in young people of the new Europe that was about to take control of the world. To strip the play of its life-affirming erotic language of the womb is to eliminate the real source of the play's attraction to young people and to reconstitute the play as a mechanistic moral exemplum about disobedient children predestined for the tomb. Romeo and Juliet alternately moves in the direction of the womb or the tomb, or, as Freud put it, toward affirmation of Eros or the defeat of Thanatos. Some teachers and students do find the references to genitalia, intercourse, and nursing offensive or, at best, write them off as incidental comic relief. Worse yet, exposed to expurgated versions of the play, students think they are reading or watching Shakespeare and are later surprised to see deleted passages restored in unabridged versions on the page or stage or screen. To ensure that students appreciate Shakespeare fully, we need to teach the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text—at least in spirit, if not to the letter.

Notes

1. On the turbulent and well-documented history of Shakespearean pedagogy, see Frey, “Teaching”; Stephen Brown; and Levin, “Core.”

2. “As the situation now stands, students who wish to investigate the bawdry at the opening of Julius Caesar or at various points in Twelfth Night must resort to the less-than-impeccable scholarship of Partridge, Rubinstein, and others, which may serve only to reinforce the entirely reasonable suspicion that the Shakespeare of their collected editions has been ‘set up’ in objectionable ways” (Frey, “Teaching” 555).

3. See Andreas (“Neutering” and “Silencing”) for an extensive consideration of the topic. The high school teacher Maureen Logan outlines the frustrations of trying to teach a truncated text of Romeo and Juliet.

4. For a study of Shakespeare's “kinesthetic” imagery—including the bawdry—and how to teach it, see Frey, “Making Sense.”

5. See Jansen for an invaluable study of these various methods of censorship.

Andreas, James R. “The Neutering of Romeo and Juliet.” Ideological Approaches to Shakespeare: The Practice of Theory. Ed. Robert Merrix and Nicholas Ranson. Lewiston: Mellen, 1992. 229-42.

———. “Silencing the Vulgar and Voicing the Other Shakespeare.” Nebraska English Journal 35.3-4 (1990): 74-88.

Brown, Stephen J. “The Uses of Shakespeare in America: A Study in Class Domination.” Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature. Ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1978. 230-38.

Frey, Charles. “Making Sense of Shakespeare's Language: A Reader-Based Response.” Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century. Athens: Ohio UP, 1997. 96-104.

———. “Teaching Shakespeare in America.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 541-60.

Jansen, Sue. Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Levin, Harry. “Core, Canon, and Curriculum.” College English 43 (1981): 351-62.

Logan, Maureen F. “Star-Crossed Platonic Lovers; or, Bowdler Redux.” English Journal 74.1 (1985): 53-55.