By the twentieth century, the post of Examiner of Plays had been the subject of some disrepute; a fine example of it’s not what you know it’s who you know. George Redford (Examiner of Plays 1895 – 1911), for example, was only awarded the job because he was a personal friend of his predecessor E F Smythe-Pigott (Examiner of Plays 1874 – 1895), and it was Charles Brookfield, previously a writer of scurrilous plays (poacher turned gamekeeper indeed) and a friend of Redford, who took over when the latter retired. Brookfield died shortly after taking up his appointment in 1913, and after this date the Lord Chamberlain himself became more personally involved in the licensing of plays. The last official Examiner was George Street, and on his retirement in 1936, the work which the Lord Chamberlain chose not to do was passed on to more junior officers known as the Comptrollers, although the Lord Chamberlain himself usually attended to the more controversial material.

To submit a new play for licensing – that is, a play first presented after 22nd August 1843 – the producer had to follow a procedure which was to remain virtually unchanged from 1843 to 1968. A copy of the text, accompanied by a fee of two guineas, had to be sent to St James’ Palace to be read by the Lord Chamberlain, or, more likely, one of his officers, before rehearsals were due to commence. It should be noted that the fee was considered as a payment for reading the play only. If a licence was refused, the two guineas were not returned. However, with any luck, the licence would be sent back quickly. It would have read:

“I, the Lord Chamberlain of the (King’s /Queen’s) Household for the time being, do by virtue of my Office and in pursuance of powers given to me by the Act of Parliament for regulating Theatres, 6 & 7 Victoria, Cap 68, Section 12, Allow the Performance of a new Stage Play of which a copy has been submitted to me by you, being a …….. in ……Acts, entitled…….. with the exception of all Words and Passages which are specified in the endorsement of the Licence and without any further variation whatsoever.

“Given under my hand this…..day of …..19…..

Lord Chamberlain”.

As well as the ‘specified Words and Passages’, the licence also bore a list of five regulations, which largely followed the guidelines set down in 1909, “the strict observance” of which, it read, “is to be considered as the condition upon which the Licence is signed.” By the way, if you can’t remember the 1909 guidelines, don’t worry, that’s because I haven’t told you about them yet! Patience, gentle reader. The regulations forbade the appearance of use on stage of “profanity or impropriety of language”, “indecency of dress, dance or gesture”, “objectionable personalities”, “anything calculated to produce a riot or breach of the peace” and “offensive representation of living persons”. It also instructed that “any change of title must be submitted for the Lord Chamberlain’s approval”.

If there was a delay getting a response from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, this normally meant that, instead of the licence, a letter would eventually arrive headed “The Lord Chamberlain disallows the following parts of the stage-play:…” This would mean that the director and a representative of the management would have to go to St James’ Palace and argue their case. In later years the author would get involved as well, although the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was never keen to recognise authors – the censor once wrote to the playwright Sydney Grundy who had dared to question why his play May and December had not received a licence, only to be informed that “he could take no official notice of (his) existence”.

Sometimes managements had to chase up the Lord Chamberlain’s Office because they took so long to come to a decision. Frank Marcus’ The Killing of Sister George (1965) was granted a licence only after the producer Michael Codron sent a note in panic to the censor reminding him that there were only ten days before the play was due to open. The onus was always on the management to secure the obtaining of the licence.

If a play was considered to be so offensive that even drastic changes would not alter its tone, the text would be sent back and no licence issued. The decision would be unequivocal and final. For example, on 8th November 1967 the copy of Edward Bond’s Early Morning, a play which featured Queen Victoria as a lesbian and with her two sons as conjoined twins, was returned to the Royal Court marked “His Lordship would not allow it”, with no other comment. This was the last play to be banned, but no one knows exactly how many potentially marvellous manuscripts had previously been returned with similar disgust, and which have never seen the light of day since.

However novel the shift of drama in the mid-1950s and 60s might appear in retrospect – bearing in mind the critic John Russell Taylor’s great quote “some of the new dramatists were naturally novel, some caught novelty, and some had novelty thrust upon them”, a similar situation had already arisen at the time of the Restoration period. Before the Cromwellian era playwrights had been keen to satirise puritans; Ben Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Bartholomew Fair (1614) is a typical example. Angelo, the “precise” character who creates all the misery in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603), is a typical puritan, invoking an ancient law that makes all forms of fornication a crime punishable by death. Under Cromwell, plays were banned, most theatres destroyed and no other entertainments such as Morris Dancing permitted. But on the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, theatre again returned to London, and, not surprisingly, audiences wanted as much satire and bawdy in a play as could reasonably be crammed into two hours’ performance time. Courtall, in George Etherege’s She Would If She Could (1668) appreciates how the theatre reflects Restoration life: “a single intrigue in love is as dull as a single plot in a play, and will tire a lover worse than t’other does an audience.” Fortunately for the Restoration patrons, Walpole’s Theatre Act was not to arrive for 70 years or so.

Whilst we’re in the Restoration era, a word or two about Sodom (or the Quintessence of Debauchery), allegedly written by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester and privately performed at the Court of King Charles II in or around 1678. It’s a satire, dealing with the corruption and vice of the monarch, and, unsurprisingly, Charles II didn’t appreciate it. Published copies (it was published in Antwerp, no one in England dared touch it) were seized, book dealers who sold it were prosecuted, and when it finally made its way to the Examiner of Plays in 1737, it was summarily dismissed. I’ve only read a synopsis, and it seems there’s little doubt that Rochester allowed his fantasies to run riot. Any play that promotes anal sex between gentlemen, and features characters by the names Bolloxinion, Buggeranthos, Clytoris, Cunticula, Fuckadilla and Prince Pricket, would probably only ever appeal to a niche audience! It’s only once been performed in public in the UK – in 2011 at the Edinburgh Fringe, perhaps unsurprisingly.

It is possible to draw a parallel between the puritan era of Cromwell and the mid-20th century when, as a reaction to the stress of the Second World War, early post-war drama avoided any great emotional content and most plays dealt with ‘safe’ subjects and situations. Naturally, this also avoided playwrights conflicting with the Lord Chamberlain. The Restoration period, with its determination to express itself at all costs, may be equated with the 1950s and 1960s, particularly since sex and personal satire figure so acutely in the works of both periods, and playwrights such as Etherege, Wycherley and Vanbrugh were able to deal with matters that would have been censored in the 1950s.

Thanks for reading this far. In my next post I’m going to be looking at the reactions to the abolition of censorship and will be looking in some detail at Peter Handke’s play Offending the Audience. No real need to do any research – and I don’t suppose anyone will actually have seen it (I certainly haven’t!) See you soon!

It wasn’t until 1737 that Robert Walpole, the first statesman to be regarded as Prime Minister of Great Britain, introduced the Licensing Act to make the censoring of plays one of the Lord Chamberlain’s official and compulsory duties. Up till then it had simply been a matter of practice, and obeying the whims of the monarch of the time, but Walpole firmed it up in law. I rather like the wording of the Licensing Act 1737:

“From and after the twenty fourth day of June, one thousand seven hundred and thirty seven, every person who shall, for hire, gain, or reward, act, represent, or perform, or cause to be acted, represented, or performed, any interlude, tragedy, comedy, opera, play, farce, or other entertainment of the stage, or any part or parts therein, in case such person shall not have any legal settlement in the place where the same shall be acted, represented, or performed, without authority by virtue of letters patent from his Majesty, his heirs, successors or predecessors, or without licence from the Lord Chamberlain of his Majesty’s household for the time being, shall be deemed to be a rogue and a vagabond within the intent and meaning of the said recited act, and shall be liable and subject to all such penalties and punishments, and by such methods of conviction, as are inflicted on or appointed by the said act for the punishment of rogues and vagabonds who shall be found wandering, begging, and misordering themselves, within the intent and meaning of the said recited act.” If you were found to be a rogue and a vagabond because you didn’t get a licence for your play you would be fined the sum of £50 – which in 1737 was a very big sum indeed.

Walpole and his government had been the subjects of a series of satirical jibes in the plays of both John Gay and, more particularly, Henry Fielding, whose “Historical Register for the year 1736” was considered by Walpole to be the ultimate insult. Among the satirical observations and the devious characters, it included a corrupt fiddler called Quidam (translated in my old Cassell’s compact Latin dictionary as a certain person or thing (known, but not necessarily named), who was clearly a caricature of Walpole himself. The main intention behind the new Act was to secure a basis from which the country could be governed without fear of ridicule generated by rogues and vagabonds on stage. The Act required the Lord Chamberlain to appoint an examiner who would read all new plays at least fourteen days before the first performance, any which he did not see fit to license being subsequently prohibited from the stage. Fielding, knowing the game was up, turned to novels.

The only voice of dissent in Parliament, whose protest has survived today, came from Lord Chesterfield who denounced Walpole’s Act, not only because it offended against freedom of expression and would involve more bureaucracy, but chiefly because the laws of the country, when applied to dramatists, were adequate protection against possible offence. “Our laws are sufficient”, he maintained, “for punishing any man that shall dare to represent upon the stage what may appear, either by words or the representation, to be blasphemous, seditious or immoral…If the stage becomes at any time licentious, if a play appears to be a libel upon the Government or upon any particular man, the King’s courts are open.” This last argument was frequently cited in the meetings of the 1967 Committee. He was also concerned at giving so much power to one, unelected, man: “A power lodged in the hands of one single man, to judge and determine, without any limitation, without any control or appeal, is a sort of power unknown to our laws, inconsistent with our constitution. It is a higher, a more absolute power than we trust even to the King himself.”

Holding the honour of being the first play to be banned under the Licensing Act is Gustavus Vasa, by Henry Brooke. Ostensibly it’s a story of Swedish patriots defending themselves against invasion by Danish and Norwegian troops; but in reality it’s a thinly disguised satire criticising Walpole for his tyrannical control over Parliament. The Lord Chamberlain at the time, the Duke of Grafton, awarded the play an outright ban from being performed anywhere in England, giving no reason other than “there was a good deal of liberty in it.” In the short term, Brooke did well from the debacle, as he arranged for a private publication of the play which created a lot of attention and he earned about £1000 from the sales – Lord Chesterfield bought ten copies. However, with his reputation at court in tatters, he found it difficult to get new plays performed. He wrote a couple of novels, but lived most of his life in penury.

The 1737 Act brought to an end the usefulness of the Revels’ Office; the Master’s judgements had usually been ignored in any case. There remained, nevertheless, a Master of the Revels until 1755; the last man to hold this post was Solomon Dayrolle, but there was no work for him to carry out. That’s because all the licensing had been delegated to the new Examiner of Plays, a role created by the 1737 Act – even though the ultimate responsibility still remained with the Lord Chamberlain. Whilst it was useful for an Examiner of Plays to be interested in the theatre – high on the “person specification” for the job interview, one would imagine – the Lord Chamberlain, with all his other Royal Household duties to perform, needn’t have been a theatre buff. As a result, the Examiner of Plays held real power over the censorship procedure, and usually the Lord Chamberlain would simply rubber-stamp the Examiner’s judgment. Not always though; in 1777, Edward Capell, the Deputy Examiner of Plays and puritanical Shakespeare fan, disapproved of Richard Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and wanted it banned. But the Lord Chamberlain at the time, Lord Hertford, overruled him – just as well; how much poorer our lives would have been without the escapades of Sir Peter Teazle and the gossip of Lady Sneerwell.

Despite a review of the Act in 1832, a new Theatres Act in 1843, and Select Committees in 1853, 1866, and 1892, the position remained largely unchanged throughout the 19th century. It was not until the Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship), 1909, that any new criticism against the censorship procedure was officially voiced. For the first time, a set of guidelines was suggested for the Examiner of Plays to follow; some of them were unofficially accepted, although none was legally enforced. The other main contention of the 1909 Committee was that the submission of new plays to the Lord Chamberlain should be optional, and therefore that the production of an unlicensed play should not be illegal.

However, the consequences of producing an unlicensed play that was found to offend public decency, would have been considerable. From the 1909 Committee Report: “If the Director of Public Prosecutions is of opinion that any unlicensed play which has been performed is open to objection on the ground of indecency, he should prefer an indictment against the manager of the theatre where the play has been produced, and against the author of the play. When notice has been given to the manager of the theatre by the Director of Public Prosecutions of his intention to take proceedings, it should be illegal for any further performances of the play to take place until the case has been heard and decided. The Court before which an indictment is preferred should be empowered to make one or more of the following orders according to the merits of the case:

(a) Prohibiting the performance of the play for such period as they may think fit, but for not more than ten years.
(b) Imposing penalties on the manager of the theatre.
(c) Imposing penalties on the author of the play.
(d) Endorsing a conviction on the licence of the theatre.”

But the findings of the 1909 Committee were largely ignored (apart from the suggested guidelines for the Examiner of Plays) and the Theatres Act 1843 remained unmodified.

In my next post, I’ll be looking at the Examiners of Plays and also a quick look back at the Restoration Era. See you soon!

It was fifty years ago – or at least it will be on September 26th – that stage censorship was abolished in the UK. Many avid theatregoers of today might ask, “what’s stage censorship?” Indeed, generations have now enjoyed the liberty and expression that a, generally, free theatre offers. But prior to 1968, each new play had to go through a process of being read and evaluated, and potentially censored, before it reached the stage. And unlike films, which also have a censorship procedure, there was no classification of U, A, AA, and X (as it was in 1968 – U, PG, 12, 15, and 18 today). There’s no age restriction on a play unless the theatre where it’s playing chooses to adopt an age limit on any one particular production.

Occasionally films are subject to blanket censorship – the British Board of Film Classification can refuse to licence a film, or to insist on cuts before licensing. But that’s comparatively rare; the main element of film censorship in the UK is simply a matter of protecting people under 18 from seeing material deemed unsuitable for them. Not so in the theatre pre-1968. A play was either licensed “as is”, in other words as presented by the theatre management with no changes to the text; or the censor would require certain passages to be removed or rewritten; or it would be banned outright.

Back in 1981 a hopeful, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed young Mr Chrisparkle, with an unspectacular degree from a spectacular university in English Literature under his belt, applied to a number of universities to spend two years researching The Effects of the Withdrawal of Stage Censorship. Many failed to respond at all; several politely declined; some rudely declined (yes, University of Wales at Lampeter, I’m looking at you); some made constructive suggestions whilst still declining; and one – Queen Mary College at the University of London, bless them – said yes. I was really pleased at that, because one of the lecturers at Queen Mary was the playwright Simon Gray, whose works I greatly admired (and still do). What surprised me was that it wasn’t the late Mr Gray who ended up being my supervisor, but an American lecturer by the name of Dr Paul Kirschner. I found out after many years that Dr Kirschner was a devotee of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, as was my tutor at Oxford, Dr Francis Warner. I have no idea if this was a coincidence or not; knowing academia, possibly not.

Sadly, Dr Kirschner and I had different views on what my thesis would contain. He was, of course, right, and did his best to point me in the right direction towards achieving that elusive Master of Philosophy degree. But I couldn’t write what he wanted me to write, even though I tried really hard. After about 18 months of fascinating research, extensive writing and a whole lot of brick wall head banging, I decided to call it a day. One of the main problems was, having called it “The Effects of the Withdrawal of Stage Censorship”, I largely concluded that there weren’t any. That was probably the wrong conclusion to draw, but once I’d got that idea into my head, there wasn’t any progress to be made!

Since then, I’ve often wondered what, if anything, I should do with all the research and writing I had done. I’ve looked at it, laughed at the pomposity of my writing style, cringed at how politically slanted my approach was, gasped at my occasional use of awfully non-PC terminology (well it was 35 years ago), and accepted that no way was this stuff ever going to get me a postgraduate degree! Additionally, over the years, some much brighter brains than mine have published excellent books about the history of stage censorship, and I’m in no position to compete with them.

But the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of stage censorship seems too good an opportunity to miss, and I feel I must mark it in some way. Now that I am 9 years into my blog and I have a devoted readership to whom I am extremely grateful for their attention and kindness, I thought it was time to take another look at what I’d written. Jazz it up a little for the 21st century and bring in a few ideas and events that hadn’t even happened at the time – after all, drama didn’t end in 1983. There’ll be some history, some background, some personal observations, even some literary criticism – I know, get me. Above all, I’m hoping to remove much of that faux-academic style that I could never master anyway.

The plan is largely to keep to the same structure as my original thesis, which means some chapters are quite short and others are quite long – especially when I get into the nitty-gritty of (what I think are) two significant pre-withdrawal plays, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Edward Bond’s Saved. I’ll mention in advance any plays that I’m going to consider in any great detail, so you can have a re-read or a quick Google to refresh your memory. But I’m going to try to break down the longer chapters into bite-sized chunks so that you don’t have to put aside a whole evening just to wade through some interminable stuff about old plays. Even tragedy is meant to be fun sometimes!

To prepare you for what’s ahead: in the first couple of posts I’ll be doing some introductory stuff and looking at some Shakespeare, Restoration comedy and the 18th century ridiculing of politicians, which was really what got the censorial ball rolling in the first place. No need for you to do any research, and don’t worry, I’ll keep it light!

So, gentle reader, we embark on a new project for summer 2018. I give you, not “The Effects of the Withdrawal of Stage Censorship”, but “Stage Censorship? Leave it Out!” Welcome!