About 50 years after Shakespeare’s death, John Dryden’s brother-in-law James Howard rewrote Romeo and Juliet as a tragicomedy in which the lovers are happily married. His production was so unpopular that the play was performed as a tragedy on alternate evenings, but it was enough to inspire a series of dramatists to try their hands at revising the Bard.

British poet laureate William Davenant added dancing and singing to Macbeth, all reportedly “excellently performed, being in the nature of an opera.” In Irish poet Nahum Tate’s 1681 revision of King Lear, the fool is absent, the king survives, Cordelia marries Edgar, and the three sisters are reconciled. In the 1740s, David Garrick raised Juliet’s age to 18, dropped the bedroom scene, removed Rosaline, and added a brief reunion between the lovers in the tomb. (He considered these changes “few and trifling.”)

The one really interesting such idea lay with Lewis Carroll, who dreamed of “Bowldlerising Bowldler,” “i.e. of editing a Shakespeare which shall be absolutely fit for girls.” He planned to “erase ruthlessly every word in the play that is in any degree profane, or coarse, or in any sense unsuited for a girl of from 10 to 15; and then to make the best I can of what is left.” Alas, he never completed the project.

At a London dinner, Sydney Smith overheard the woman next to him decline gravy. He turned to her and said, “Madam, I have been looking all my life for a person who disliked gravy–let us swear eternal friendship.”

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

— Edmund Clerihew Bentley

John Irving’s 1978 novel The World According to Garp contains the complete text of a novella, “The Pension Grillparzer.” Garp, an aspiring writer, submits it to a magazine and receives a summary rejection: “The story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for showing it to us, though.”

When Irving’s editor asked whether this might seem too abrupt, Irving showed him a rejection slip from the Paris Review — he had submitted “The Pension Grillparzer” to them just to see what would happen and, receiving this response, inserted it verbatim into the novel. “I tried the story with American Review, too, they turned it down. And even two non-literary magazines didn’t want it: The New Yorker and Esquire.”

“It was a good feeling when ‘The Pension Grillparzer’ was repeatedly singled out as one of the strongest parts of the novel, and it won the Pushcart Prize for short fiction that year. One literary magazine, Antaeus, did publish it. Naturally, I’ve liked them ever since.”