STRAIGHTENING THE HUNCHBACK :

Theatre company straightens out Quasimodo (Sydney Morning Herald, June 28 2002)

A British theatre company has reportedly dropped the word hunchback from its stage adaptation of the classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame to avoid offending disabled people.

Oddsocks Productions has renamed its touring production The Bellringer of Notre Dame.

The original title of the novel by Victor Hugo was Notre Dame de Paris - the name of the ancient Catholic cathederal where the story takes place.

Ed Driscoll notes this latest bit of PC nonsense. Two questions : (1) Why not just use the original name : Notre Dame de Paris?; (2) Have the producers actually read the book?

The story ends with Esmerelda's execution and entombment, but in the concluding chapter, The Marriage of Quisimodo, Hugo revals that:

About a year and a half or two years after the concluding events of this story, when search was being made in the pit of Montfaucon for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days before, and to whom Charles VIII granted the favour of being interred at Saint-Laurent in better company, there were found among these hideous carcases two skeletons, the one clasped in the arms of the other. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, had still about it some tattered remnants of a garment that had once been white, and about its neck was a string of beads together with a small silken bag ornamented with green glass, but open and empty. These objects had been of so little value that the executioner, doubtless, had scorned to take them. The other skeleton, which held this one in so close a clasp, was that of a man. It was observed that the spine was crooked, the skull compressed between the shoulder-blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. There was no rupture of the vertebræ at the nape of the neck, from which it was evident that the man had not been hanged. He must, therefore, have come of himself and died there.

When they attempted to detach this skeleton from the one it was embracing, it fell to dust.

You'd think they'd worry more about his necrophilia than about his disabilities.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 29, 2002 6:45 AM