BeautifulSoup is a scraping library, so it’s probably not the best choice for doing HTML rendering. If it’s not essential to use BeautifulSoup, you should take a look at html2text. For example:
import html2text
html = open("foobar.html").read()
print html2text.html2text(html)
This outputs:
Some text more text even more text * list item * yet another list item Some other text * list item * yet another list item