Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson [Hardcover]

This volume fills a significant gap in theatre scholarship tracing the history of how the great Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson freed the imaginations of British playwrights, performers, practitioners and, by implication, theatre scholarship with the Theatres Act of 1968. (I was then just five years old and unable to see how this Act enabled me to successfully lecture and teach Theatre to students aged from 7 to senior citizens in primary and high schools as well as Universities.) The censorship of free play production and playwriting had been forced upon this imaginative profession by our first Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who we today would call "a control freak". The book shows how Walpole's paranoid fear of political play production led him to deliberately mislead the House of Commons (sound familiar?) into passing the Stage Licensing Act in 1737 which made free playwriting and free play production absolutely illegal in Britain for fifty one years. Most importantly, even though the 1843 Theatres Act partly repealed the Act, play censorship remained illegal incrdibly giving the Lord Chamberlain and his sidekick, the Reader of Plays, a free and private rein to censor what they liked when they liked for a total of 231 years. They never had to give any reasons for censoring anything. Walpole was motivated by two things: a) his paranoid fear of popular political play production and b) the proliferation of theatre building which started in the first three decades of the eigtheenth century on the heels as part of what Dr. Kathleen Wilson calls the "extra-parliamentary debate Liberty" (1989) by successful radical playwrights including Aprha Behn, Susannah Centlivre and George Farquhar, and radical performers including Elizabeth Barry, John Hippisley, Jane Green and artists, especially William Hogarth (David Garrick's best friend).

Apart from the reporting of much excellent new primary source documents in the National Archives (for the most part reported in Carlton's and Etienne's refreshing chapters) I was pleased to read a central issue newly raised here: different governments successively prevented repeal of Britain's censorship laws with the excuse (or misinterpretation) that censorship was a "Royal Prerogative". In fact, this book shows how censorship became a legal civil issue from the 1843 Theatres Act. Any government thereafter could have repealed it with the support of activists. (Activists first attempted this in 1907 (thanks to playwright Bernard Shaw), again in 1949 (under Attlee's Labour government)and after the world war years 1914-1945, took less than 20 years to finally abolish it in 1968 (Thanks for this go to Roy Jonkins, later Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, socialistst playwright Edward Bond and producer George Devine at the still surviving Royal Court Theatre amongst others.)

This book traces the history of stage censorship at the cost of imaginative theatre historiography and imaginative theatre as a practical performance-art subject. Both lie broken and buried under the a linear social and political history which cites many new primary source documents but few scripts. Why are there no illustrations of productions of plays from this book? Why no pictures of theatres like the surviving eigtheenth century theatres at Richmond and the Theatre Royal Bristol? Why no image of performers standing stage front at the newly restored nineteenth-century Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds or Frank Mathcam's wonderfully intimate Wakefield Opera House? Why no photos of the 20th century theatre clubs creatd to evade censorship? Does the primary source of play production not matter as much to these scholars as the primary source documents they can read? In his unimaginative chapters tracing the linear history of play censorship in the period 1576 to 1843 David Thomas unaccountably excludes the extra-parliamentary nationwide debate of Liberty (I use a capital deliberately) established by the British people with Cromwell at Putney Church in 1649 and reiterated in the British Bill of Rights during our Parliamentary Revolution of 1688. (See Tomas Morton and Nigel Smith, Radicalism in British Literary Culture from 1650 to 1830, 2002.) This is very familiar to social and literary historians, but unaccountably excluded here.

The words of eminent Professor Robert D. Hume apply to the unimaginative, positivist theatre historiography of this book: "Theatre history is a discipline much practised but severely under-theorized... We now work in a post-positivist world... Scholars have been unadventurous and unimaginative - one could say timid." ("Theatre History, 1660-1800: Aims, Materials, Methodology." 2007) The biggest weakness lies in the authors failure to identify a joint interpretative perspective. This leaves readers to trace a linear description of when and how censorship took place within sometimes overly-detailed irrelevant historical descriptions of other national issues including the Labour cabinet's creation of the NHS and the Liberal cabinet's unsuccessful attempt to close the House of Lords in the early 20th century. Readers need reminding: this is a history of play producion, not just a social history.

Not surprisingly, performers rarely make an appearance, pushed aside by the authors. The same can be said of their ignorance of performance spaces within which plays were acted illegally from 1737 (and earlier). This leads to more serious factual errors. The eighteenth-century theatre building "explosion" started after 1728, not in "the 1760s" which Thomas erroneously claims.(52) Celebrity performers including the great John Hippisley, employed master carpenters and masons to build classical theatres with profits they earned from John Rich's first production of The Beggar's Opera, the embodiment of English Liberty (first staged by radical John Rich at Lincoln's Inn Fields after being refused by conservative Colley Cibber of Drury Lane). (A glance at Sybil Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1939 shows Bath's theatre opened in 1705 and was supressed in 1737.) This error reveals deeper problems rooted in the absence of any joint historiography by three authors. Thomas especially seeks to associate play production with Royalty for no accountable reasons. Parliament approved Theatres ROYAL, not theatres, outside Westminster from the 1760s. He dismisses out of hand that contemporaries might have regarded the Licensing Act as a deliberate challenge to what he casually calls "ancient English liberties" (27). New national laws passed throughout the eighteenth century including the "poor law, public health, apprenticeship regulations, hours and conditions of work" and the Marriage Act all "gradually elbowed aside" the freeborn Englishman...and his place was taken by the professional administrator." (Derek Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth, 30) It is hard to see why David Thomas fails to see the Stage Licensing Act was part of this national debate of Liberty because he brushes it aside, like Walpole himself.

These historiographic problems stem from the fact that none of its authors are leading theatre historians and performance practitioners. Neither Carlton "sometime Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies" at Warwick University nor Etienne, Lecturer in Modern English Drama, University College Cork," (3) have any experience in play production. Thomas, Professor of Theatre Studies at Warwick University before retiring, was, not surprisingly a strong literary analyst of Ibsen's plays written centuries after the period covered by his chapters here. He never explored Action Research (see Professors Jack McNiff and John Whitehead in the Humanities) or Performance-Practice (see writings by Elaine Aston and Jane Milling) and his few writings and programmes on theatre history use little or no imaginative historiography with regard to play production. Most importantly, he overlooks Dr. Gilli Bush-Bailey's and Professor Emeritus Jacky Bratton's excellent identification of "revivals" as a valid and viable theatre historiography, citing no revivals of plays from the long-eighteenth century in his chapters here. (Katherine Newey "Embodied History: Reflections on the Jane Scott Project" in Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film Volume 29 Issue 2, December 2002, pp 66-70.)

The best chapters are 3 to 6, with extensive new research written by David Carlton, and 7 and 8 based on the new extensive historical researches through the Lord Chamberlain's files in the National Archives by Dr. Anne Etienne written by her and later edited by David Thomas.

Other serious errors include a) failing to publish and describe the meaning of Hogarth's very well-known engraving showing the 1737 Stage Licensing Act lying at the feet of the "Actresses Dressing in A Barn" and the government spy - Walpole himself? - leering through their dressing room roof is another error in the first two chapters (Paulson, ); and b) none of the authors appear to read Professor Worrall's excellent Theatric Revolution (2006)which identifies the Stage Licensing Act as the single most important influence on 18th century play production in theatres across the U.K. till 1830 (and, by implication of this book, 1968). Worrall cites numerous detailed primary source materials which he has newly researched himself, many of which could have helpfully informed the work of Thomas here. Worrall sees successful 18th century play production correctly, I think, through the middle class merchants who attended, financed and supported theatre and who were activists for Liberty internationally.

The later chapters are much better because they provide so much new, refreshingly enlightening primary source material researched by Carlton and Etienne. Read more ›