The ultimate sacrilege -- censoring Shakespeare

Wolf Hall star Mark Rylance claims he has to edit Shakespeare plays to remove 'antisemitic' lines.

The British actor and former artistic director at the Globe Theatre in London said he feels compelled to cut certain parts which have taken on more 'resonance' since the Holocaust.

Rylance, who plays Thomas Cromwell in the hit BBC drama, was speaking at the Globe where he unveiled a copy of Shakespeare's first folio - recently found in France.

'From what I know of talking to scholars, our own practices are not different from what they did at the time.

'If you went out and played in a puritan town in the north of England, you took out some of the things that were going to offend those people.'

Professor John Jowett of The Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham said: 'Anti-Semitism is a fact of the early modern culture in which Shakespeare lived, worked, and thought, and he was not exempt from it.

'Critics have often remarked on his sensitive and to some extent sympathetic presentation of Shylock, but there is always an element of special pleading.

Shylock is a Jewish moneylender

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This is ridiculous.  There is a famous scene in "The Merchant of Venice" (Act 3 scene 1) which is widely held to be a plea by Shakespeare for Jews to be treated equally:

"Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the  rest, we will resemble you in that".