SOURCE: Andreas, James R., Sr. “Teaching Shakespeare's Bawdry: Orality, Literacy, and Censorship in Romeo and Juliet.” In Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, edited by Maurice Hunt, pp. 115-24. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2000.

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...