The censor and the theatres

Front matter

Cornell University Library

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Contents

CBiF. PACE

I. THE ORIGIN AND LAW OF CENSORSHIP 17

II. THE IMPERTURBABLE DEPARTMENT . 58

Introduction

One of the cheapest volumes ever offered the The Report public by a British Government is the Report select Comf rom the Joint Select Committee of the House 1909. of Lords and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship), together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices, ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 2nd November 1909. This is far from being so barbarous a document as the title suggests. It weighs 2^ lb. ; there are 375 pages, running into something like halfa-million words ; among its contributors are Mr Bernard Shaw, Mr Granville Barker, Mr J. M, Barrie, Mr Forbes Robertson, Mr John Galsworthy, Mr Laurence Hausman, Sir Herbert Tree, Sir William Gilbert, Mr A. B. Walkley, Miss Lena Ashwell, Sir George Alexander, Mr George Edwardes, Mr Comyns Carr, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Southwark, Mr Hall Caine, Mr Israel Zangwill, Sir Squire Bancroft, Sir Arthur Pinero, and Mr G. K. Chesterton, with

II many other famous people of whom the public has never heard. This wonderful volume may be bought for three shillings and threepence. The question naturally arises: How can any book on the Censorship of Stage Plays compete with it ?

Entertaining, FirSt, fcW pCOplc haVC time to read half-abut quite

unreadable, million words on any subject. Second, no one not professionally interested in the theatre would care to read the Report from the Joint Select Committee, etc., even if he had the time. For the book is mostly dull, in spite of its authors ; also it is extremely exhausting, even where it fails to be dull. It is a mine of entertainment, but it is really a mine, and the entertainment has to be dug out. The method of Joint Committees scarcely favours literary brilliance in the witnesses. A witness prepares a statement of his views ; but instead of being allowed to read it preliminary to cross-examination, so that it may go down in bulk upon the Minutes, he is coaxed and bullied into a confession of his opinions by questions put seriatim by members of the Committee. From the official point of view the method is admirable. It is obviously most correct that witnesses should be ridden on the curb, and that the Committee should have power to suppress anything which may be pertinent, though inconvenient to be heard.

But the method rather takes off from the literary value of the proceedings. If any one wishes to verify this, he should compare Mr Bernard Shaw's rejected written statement of evidence with his evidence orally presented to the Committee under cross-examination. Mr Shaw had had a long experience of public life and public speaking, but it is not humanly possible to make the most of an argument under a critical fire of interrogation. Moreover, the Report from the Joint Select Committee, etc., is full of the vainest repetition. One after another witnesses are taken over the same ground by the patient Committee ; and though it is frequently amusing to note small variations in the manner of their going, the general reader will find little that is fresh or interesting after he has been through the evidence of one or two champions on either side. In fact, much of the amusement and instruction to be derived from the Report consists in grouping and collating the evidence of witnesses, and in picking from the dull mass of argument that is common to this group or that small individual points of difference. Few of the distinguished men who appeared before the Committee omitted to contribute some interesting argument, admission, or point of view ; but it is rarely worth the while of a general reader to go through the whole of a witness's evidence to come at the one or two things which particularly distinguish him from his predecessors. The Report from the Joint Select Committee is a book that every one interested in the theatre should have (Index, threepence extra), but few would care to undertake it as light, continuous reading.

Competition It is not, therefore, so insane an enterprise possible."* as it sccms to compete with a Government publication supported by so distinguished a body of contributors. The Report is in parts excellent ; but, after all, a point of view is rather necessary to a book, though it is a custom increasingly common among authors to begin writing about a subject in order to discover what they think. The Report from the Joint Select Committee has ten editors. Each member of the Committee has his own set of problems for each witness, and no member of the Committee has the slightest regard for the effect of his behaviour upon the literary or philosophic value to the Report of the evidence he draws. The Report, therefore, though one of the cheapest, is also one of the most chaotic and puzzling volumes that has ever been offered to the public. Witnesses agree neither as to their arguments nor as to the facts upon which their arguments are based. Arguments in absolute contradiction are put forward by witnesses on the same side, supported by facts which are flatly opposed. The Committee is asked by one witness to abolish the Censor for the very reason which another witness has already put forward for his retention. It is characteristic of the Censorship question that it hopelessly corrupts the logic of all but the strongest heads. Hopeless confusion of fact and argument, together with a complete absence of any sort of arrangement of the evidence, makes the Report from the Joint Select Committee, etc., despite its extreme value to the specialist in Censorship (whose mind is already made up), a book very doubtfully precious to the general reader, who has not yet seriously considered whether he wants a Censorship or not. The effect of the evidence upon half-open minds of the inexpert is well illustrated by the decision of the Committee itself. As time went on, and witness succeeded witness, the Committee was continually more bewildered, till at last it issued a Report which remains to this day an obstacle to any clear thinking on the subject.

The larger half of the present essay is based object and upon the evidence given before the Joint Select Committee of 1909, Everything was said before this Committee that can be said on either side ; and any remedy that may be found in legislation for the anomalies of the present position will have to be based on a careful reading of the witnesses. After discussing the origin of Censorship, and stating as briefly and clearly as possible the law as it stands to-day, I propose to group the evidence for and against the Censor, to outline briefly the various remedies which at present hold the field, and to sum up — conclusively, as I hope — in favour of the honest, practicable remedy of abolition and the single licence for theatre and music-hall. I shall not in this essay assume on the part of my readers any special knowledge, legal or professional, of the theatre and its laws. Any one who has this knowledge would naturally go to the Blue-book and dig for himself. But in grouping the evidence I shall leave it open to the reader to judge for himself the force and value of the main arguments used on either side, and I shall as far as possible allow the witnesses to speak for themselves. I do this partly from magnanimity, but more from a conviction that the more the pillars of Censorship are heard in their own defence, the better for their opponents. Personally, I was never thoroughly persuaded that the Censor ought to be abolished till I began to read the evidence of its more enlightened champions, Mr Fladgate and Sir George Alexander.

Chapter I The Origin And Law Of Censoeship

What does the public know or care about the Public ignorance as to Censor ? Sir George Alexander was probably the Censor.

not very wrong when he told the Committee in one of the numerous bright passages of his evidence : "I doubt very much whether the large majority of playgoers were aware until this enquiry took place that there was a Censor." The large majority of playgoers probably has never realised that authors who write for the theatre are liable to be robbed of their property without appeal by a person (the Lord Chamberlain) who administers neither law nor tradition, and that a virtual insurance against prosecution under the common law is every day granted to authors and managers by an official (the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner) who legally does not exist. As to the Lord Chamberlain, the pit and gallery of a west -end theatre are mostly aware of him as being responsible for a minimum number of exits to the theatre, the freedom of gangways from obstruction, and the lowering of a fire-proof curtain at least once in the course of every performance — arrangements with which in practice he has nothing whatever to do. For stalls and circle, the Lord Chamberlain was till recently remarkable as the author of a celebrated under-statement to Mr Speaker that he was not an agricultural labourer. What is the We must be quite clear as to the law of Cen-

law of the i . i «

Censor? sorship before touchmg upon arguments and remedies. The facts are capable of quite simple arrangement. Nevertheless many who talk and write about them are hopelessly confused as to the legislative position. The amazing uncertainties as to the conduct and responsibility of the Lord Chamberlain and his Examiner of Plays may be postponed to a later chapter. We shall then discover that neither the Lord Chamberlain nor his Examiner has a very clear idea of his powers, or even of the intention of his office. We shall find that in the Examiner's mind there is considerable uncertainty as to whether he is a censor of table-manners, a moral expert, a dramatic critic, a politician, or a Sociologist. But for the present we had best confine ourselves to a plain statement of the law.

The law of Censorship, as we shall see, I'heeidates from the Theatres Act of 1843 . But before ^itfon of explaining the Provisions of the Theatres Act authors." we may notice one rather important point as to the position of dramatic authors and managers to-day, and see whether it is not possible to discover its precise historic origin. What is most startling about the position of dramatic authors to-day is that, so far as their property is concerned, they are virtually outside the law. A play may be worth many thousands of pounds on performance ; but it is possible for the Lord Chamberlain to destroy it utterly as a commodity by refusing it a licence. He may destroy it on no ascertainable ground, and according to no fixed body of law or tradition ; and there is no appeal from his decision. Authors, other than dramatic authors, are not in this position. They are subject to the common law of their country, which is held sufficient to protect the public from their power to outrage or wound its susceptibilities. Why is the property of a dramatic author especially excepted from the laws which apply to property of every other person and of every other kind ? When was it first considered necessary to discriminate against the theatre.

and what is the historic reason for this discrimination ?

The origin of It docs not at flrst sight seem necessary in a ensoia ip. ^^.^^jy ^j Censorship to-day to go back in history beyond the Theatres Act of 1843. But it so happens that many of the Censor's friends have impudently claimed the historical argument for themselves. To this claim they have not a shadow of right. At no period before 1737, when Walpole outlawed the whole play-writing profession in circumstances as honourable to dramatic authors as it was disgraceful to himself, was the theatre in a position of inferiority to the pulpit or the press. Moreover, had it not been for Waplole and the theatres legislation of 1737 and 1843, pulpit, press, and play would to-day be on a footing of equality. The Theatres Act pulled up the general movement towards free thought as far as that movement was affecting plays and players. Pulpit and press went the appointed way of historical development. The theatre was arrested in the early eighteenth century, and is in a position to-day which is clearly exceptional.

I. The Origin of Censorship.

Shakespeare Towards the closc of the Middle Ages the Tudor" theatre was becoming a profane institution. precedent. ^^^ j^. ^^^ j^^^ immediately the Gate of Hell.

It is a mistake to suppose that as soon as the theatre escaped from the Church the Church rounded upon her protege, or that the State regarded it as a disreputable institution. Theatres and plays were strictly regulated under the Tudors ; but this regulation did not rest upon any idea that play-houses should especially be stigmatised. It is important to realise that in the Tudor period — on the whole a period of order and common sense — the theatre was exactly on a level with every other institution which was able to disseminate ideas. It was neither more nor less controlled than the press or the pulpit. The idea that the plays of Shakespeare were the product of an age in which the theatre was held in contempt, and specially provided for in statutes about vagabonds, is at the bottom of a good deal of the optimism common among managers to-day as to the harmlessness of\/ Censorship. The point about Tudor Censorship is that it dealt impartially with the theatre, the pulpit, and the press. The only distinction made in the case of theatres was a distinction which every opponent of Censorship is ready to make to-day — namely, that the theatre being a place where people assembled, it was necessary to impose certain regulations for the public health and safety. Far from denouncing and wishing to get away from the Tudor view of plays and players, all we require to-day is to bring the Tudor view level with the time. If Elizabeth and her Council had taken a view of the theatre similar to that which was taken of it in England thirty years ago, Shakespeare would not have written plays.

The Tudors did not differentiate against the play-house either in law or practice. Plays and players were under the same sort of supervision as regulated the ordinary citizen. It is true that companies of players in the time of Elizabeth would attach themselves to the Court or to a nobleman's household. This has been taken to prove that the Tudor player was a vagabond, who was compelled to write himself down the Earl of Leicester's servant if he wished to be regarded as a reputable citizen. This view could only be held in complete ignorance of Elizabethan administration and of the attitude of the Elizabethan State towards the individual. In Tudor times everybody was responsible for everybody else, and the player had somehow to fit himself into the scheme. There was only one kind of citizen which Elizabeth's Privy Council would not endure — the " masterless man." Masterless men might incontinently be shipped to the wars or deported beyond sea in batches. The Privy Council liked to know where people lived, what property they had, what books they read, where they went for their hoHdays, and what opinions they held. The " masterless man " was suspect. They got rid of him. If Tudor players are to be regarded as vagabonds because they were expected to find what feudal lawyers called a warranty, then we must regard practically every Tudor person as a vagabond if he did not happen to be a landowner.

The Censorship of plays and the control of The

, • Xt t t t • 1 f Sovereign in

theatres was m Shakespeare s day m the direct Council. jurisdiction of the Sovereign in Council. There was nothing exceptional in this. In the latter half of the sixteenth century an attempt was being made to govern England on bureaucratic lines. The story of this attempt is not yet adequately written in any text-books of the period, but it may be gathered from one of the most fascinating records of political activity extant — the Acts of the Privy Council, edited by Sir William Dasent. The Privy Council, acting through Commissioners, Justices of the Peace, and local gentlemen, regulated the life of its farthest and humblest citizen as wholly as it ruled the convictions of its bishops. It determined the plays he should see in the same spirit that it determined the sermons he should hear, the books he should read, the clothes he shoidd wear, the food he should eat, the games he should play. His public speaking was as strictly regulated as the length of his swordblade. In comparison with pulpits, or alehouses, or bookshops, the theatre was a free place. An author who avoided the commonplaces of sedition, and was not grossly obscene, or blasphemous, or libellous, was comparatively immune from interference. The Council was frequently compelled to close a theatre for reasons of public health. Players were frequently bound over not to act again without licence for offering " lewd " plays ; or they might be reprimanded for staging a play which contained thinlydisguised representations of living men of note, " a thing very unfit, offensive, and contrary to such direction as has been heretofore taken," But if a licence for players was considered to be on occasion necessary, so were licences for travellers beyond sea, gipsies, tavernkeepers, merchants, butchers, beggars, publishers, preachers, and couriers.

In 1582 the Council set up a form of Censorship not very different in scope from the Censorship of Messrs Brookfield and Bendall. This Censorship was to be in the hands of "fit persons who may consider and allow of such plays as be fit to yield honest recreation without evil example," Such delegations of authority were part of the Tudor plan of Government in Council, They never, of course, superseded the authority of the Council itself— or, rather, of the Sovereign in Council. The Council delegated its powers indifferently to individuals or committees. Thus a patent granted to Leicester in 1574 gives him a general licence to act plays in anj' part of England ; but all " comedies, tragedies, interludes, and stage-plays " are first to be examined and allowed by the Master of the Revels. This was an official under the Lord Chamberlain, first appointed by Hemy VIII. in 1544. But neither his nor the Lord Chamberlain's authority over the theatre was arbitrary or exceptional. It was exercised under the Council with a strictly limited discretion. It was revocable, and exercised within the terms of delegation. Occasionally the Council would direct that the Master of the Revels should be advised by distinguished men of the day, as when they gave Edmund Tilney a statesman and divine to assist him in " reforming " comedies and tragedies. Coxe, in his life of Walpole, quaintly comments upon this : " Had not these wise regulations taken place, Shakespeare might have confined to burlesque farces and low buffoonery those vast powers of invention and description which his own language can alone adequately delineate."

Tudor Censorship of the theatre, then, was Tudor part of the law and custom under which every thc'Swanci other form of contemporary activity flourished. tS^rulid!

Shakespeare's theatre in 1582 occupied in relation to art and letters of the day exactly the position it would occupy in 1912 if Censorship, whether of the Lord Chamberlain or the local authority, were abolished, and if theatres were put under the common law. In this event theatres would be neither more nor less free than political platforms, which was precisely the position in the time of Shakespeare. It was regarded as subject to the prerogative of the Sovereign in Council, as was every other province of the citizens' activity.

History of Thence to the time of Oliver Cromwell nothing

ship of moment happened to the British theatre.

ma to 164™. But in the interval the Tudor system of Government by Administrative Order in Council was falling to pieces, and the so-called abolition of Star Chamber in 1640 was the final defeat of a system of centralised bureaucracy which for a generation had made England the bestgoverned country in Europe. The control of theatres was part of this system up to the moment when Cromwell so rudely disturbed the course of our history. It was still exercised — as under Elizabeth — by the King, either in Council or through his officers of the Court. But it was inevitable that, as the conciliar system began everywhere to break down, the Lord Chamberlain's functions in this respect grew in importance. The records of his office show that as early as 1628 the Lord Chamberlain, either personally or through the Master of the Revels, licensed theatres, closed them, and exercised a general supervision over the work of the dramatists. It so happened that King Charles I. took rather an interest in plays, and there is on record an amusing memorandum of Sir Henry Herboit (Master of Revels under Pembroke as Chamberlain), which illustrates the extreme decorum of a Court whose Sovereign was rich in all the amiable virtues. Sir Henry had read a play in which he discovered the oaths faith, death, slight. " Swear not at all " was at that time the order of the theatre, so Sir Henry thought the play should be taken to the King. Accordingly we read: "The King is pleased to take faith, death, slight, for asservations and no oaths, to which I doe humbly submit as my master's judgment ; but under favour conceive them to be oaths." * This story would seem to show that the theatre of King Charles was free only within the straitest limits, but it was as free as the press, and as free as the pulpit, and as free as the hustings. There was as yet no discrimination. Prjnine and Bastwick and Burton would certainly have told you that it

' Mr William Archer tells this story in an essay on the Censorship, published in 1886 by Mr Fisher Unwin.

■was safer to be a playwright or a player, and in that character to say and write what you had to say, than to be a preacher or a printer. The theatre Oliver CromwcU is important. He had as

as the Gate . i i *

of Hell. little permanent mnuence upon the law ot Censorship as upon the law of the Constitution ; but indirectly he was responsible for a great deal. He abolished the House of Lords; and the House of Lords returned. He abolish. d the theatre ; and the theatre was restored. But the political or moral result of these proceedings was not measured by the thoroughness with which his work was afterwards undone. The Puritan Nonconformist view of the theatre as the Gate of Hell was at one time almost universally held, and is held to this day by large sections of the British middle class. Indirectly this view has helped the Censor in modem times to assume a position of moral expert and pillar of the social fabric, though by origin he has no business with moral questions at all. The Puritan view has to be taken carefully into account when we consider the risk involved to the theatre in allowing any form of Censorship by local authorities. But in spite of its indirect importance, the Puritan or moral view of the theatre is not historically the origin of its being to-day outside the law which protects every other form of intellectual activity.

The theatre at the Restoration was immedi- The free ately restored. Nominally it was supposed to go thaitres. on as before under the old sanctions. Actually the position was different. From the Restoration to the Revolution was a free period for the theatres. From 1660 to 1685 plays and players, nominally under the Lord Chamberlain's Master of the Revels, were so far as Censorship was concerned considerably more free than any other form of literary activity. Differences between the managers and Sir Henry Herbert, who reasserted his authority and tried valiantly to stem the current of the age, were usually settled, as under Charles I., personally by the King or his brother. Sir Henry Herbert as Censor morum of the Court of Charles II. is a pathetic historic figure, whose life is worthy of closer examination than it has yet received. After his death Charles II., whose conduct was often as witty as his speech, appointed as his successor Charles Killigrew, manager of the King's Company. The freedom of the stage may now be faintly imagined. The theatre, in fact, was never so near to absolute freedom as under Charles II. It shared the general benefit of the change towards freedom of word and thought ; and the chief point to notice is that still it was not in any exceptional position. We cannot too clearly realise that at no time in our history, until Censorship was established in its present form by statute, was the theatre regarded as needing special treatment. From the Restoration to the Revolution it was in the normal run of progress, and it faithfully reflected the period. It was becoming free as the press was becoming free — by an inevitable loosening of administration and a gradual disuse of prerogative.

Restoration Somc will objcct here that it is dangerous for licentious, an Opponent of Censorship to claim the Restoration period as a period of comparative freedom for the theatre. If Restoration drama is a sample of the kind of theatrical literature that flourishes upon a free stage, should we not cling desperately to Censorship as the one practical means of keeping our theatres clean ? Something will have to be said about Censorship and clean drama at a later stage. But a word here is necessary as to the drama of Congreve and his contemporaries. Restoration drama, as a body of literature, was upon a higher level than drama has been in this country from the beginning of the present system of Censorship down to, at any rate, some twenty years ago. A good deal of nonsense has been talked and written about Restoration drama. It has been reprobated as unclean by critics who have never read the plays, and have taken their views, presumably, from professors of history and literature who confuse brilliant conventional cynicism with pornography. The licentiousness of Restoration drama was a concession to a harmless convention of the time — a convention common to periods brilliant for social culture and wit — ^that every one should pretend to be more wicked than he either was or cared to be. A play of Congreve would affect many a well-bred person of to-day much as the vision of his sweetheart in evening dress affected Mr Kipps. Mr Kipps' ideas of what was conventionally irreproachable did not include a young woman dining in public very nearly naked to the waist. You might point out to him that, once the convention was accepted, no one need realise that it existed ; that it was possible for men and women to sit comfortably side by side in the circumstances that startled him so tremendously without once feeling that there was anjrthing particularly disquieting or extraordinary in the situation. But Mr Kipps would never be able comfortably to endure the convention of ladies in evening dress until he failed to notice it, and would remain defiantly incredulous of those who could. Critics who object to Restoration drama for its licentiousness are exactly in the position of Mr Kipps. It is possible — in fact, for a cultivated person anything else would be impossible — ^to read through a play of Congreve without once realising that it is not entirely respectable. Certainly no one who entered a Restoration theatre would ever have felt conscious that he was taking an aphrodisiac. He would admire the wit, dexterity, and polish with which his author moved among the recognised conventions of the period. The pointless vulgarity of bowdlerised importations from France were reserved for audiences of the late nineteenth century, proudly conscious of being in a clean theatre, and under express statutory protection of the Lord Chamberlain.

From the ^^^ j;]jg Revolution there was a temporary

toWaipoie. set-back. Early in the days of William people began to discover how wicked their fathers were, and Jeremy Collier published a little book which is one of the curiosities of literature. It purported to be a " short view of the stage " ; it was actually a collection from Congreve, Wycherly, and Dryden of all the passages considered by Collier to be the most profane and obscene. Collier, in fact, adopted the method of all respectable pamphleteers and newspapers, which contrive to make the best of both worlds, offering the public wares he held to be unfit for sale, and disguising the exact nature of the undertaking with righteousness in the margin. King William was tremendously shocked, and sent the following order to all play-houses : " His Majesty being informed that, notwithstanding an order made in June 1697 by the Earl of Sunderland, then Lord Chamberlain of the King's Household, to prevent the profaneness and immorality of the stage, several plays have lately been acted containing several expressions contrary to religion and good manners ; and whereas the Master of the Revels hath represented that in contempt of the said order the actors did neglect to leave out such profane and indecent expressions as he had thought proper to be omitted ; therefore it is his Majesty's pleasure that they shall not hereafter presume to act anything in any play contrary to religion and good manners, as they shall answer at their utmost peril." This order was a nine-days' scare among the theatres ; after nine days it was absolutely disregarded. The order is itself evidence that the theatres were passing in the order of nature out of the Lord Chamberlain's control. Moreover, a patent granted to Steel, Cibber, and Booth shortly after the accession of George I. actually allowed them to present plays without subjecting them to licence or revision of any kind. In fact, whenever the Chamberlain's decaying powers were exercised, as in the celebrated case of " Polly," sequel to " The Beggar's Opera," there was considerable