The Censorship of British Theatre, 1737-1843

Introduction

The Stage Licensing Act became law in 1737 and a version of it remained in force until 1968. The remarkable longevity of this act has prompted a number of important studies; this resource focuses on its first century or so, a time when the theatre was an extraordinarily potent cultural and political force within Georgian society. What could or could not be uttered on stage at this time had a particularly forceful resonance for British society.

This resource offers a very modest introduction to the censorship culture of the Georgian theatre. It contains high resolution scans of 40 manuscripts from the period 1737-1843—from the Stage Licensing Act to its successor the Theatres Act—in order that scholars can get a sense of the line-by-line attention given to plays by the Examiner’s office. Each scan is accompanied by a brief note (2000-5000 words) that gives an author bio, a plot summary, a succinct note on the play’s reception history, a commentary on the censorship imposed on the manuscript, and some suggestions as to further introductory reading related to that play. The website eschews offering an introduction to the legislation itself and its ramifications: this has been done by a number of scholars listed below.

There are no claims to comprehensiveness made here: the selection of appropriate examples was a very difficult task and an entirely different set of equally fascinating plays could have been offered (and many will feel the absence of some plays puzzling – where is Samuel Foote’s The Minor? What of James Sheridan’s Knowles’s Virginius?). Equally, the commentary for each play is necessarily brief and speculative; it is intended to open up discussion rather than close it down. Anyone who has spent any time with the Larpent Collection or the Lord Chamberlain’s plays will be aware that it is very difficult and in many cases, simply impossible, to be certain as to who is making the corrections and excisions to the manuscripts. Many of the emendations are made by the Examiner of Plays or his deputy, of course, but it is clear that other hands are often involved, in most cases, it is probably the theatre manager but it may also be the author (but given that most of the manuscripts are in the hand of the theatre’s copyists, it seems more likely to be the manager or his proxy). Given the uncertainty, the speculative commentaries offered by this resource are written in such a way to invite debate and critique as scholars will develop their own views as to the authorship of these corrections. Hence the inclusion of high resolution scans so that users can make up their own minds. 

Users of the site will also be interested in reading the reception history of the plays as, in some cases, it is apparent from some newspaper reports that the London audiences did not feel that the Examiner’s office had done its job adequately and made vocal their disapprobation of elements of a performance. This second layer of censorship often led to the author/manager revising the piece for future stagings. In brief, censorship is a complex phenomenon and it is clear from extended time with the manuscripts that standards are applied unevenly to different writers and plays for reasons that are not always clear. It is hoped that this resource will prove a useful introduction and a stimulus to scholars for further work in this area.

The manuscripts

The Larpent Collection is held at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. It comprises over 2500 theatrical manuscripts—plays, operas, prologues, epilogues, songs, etc—which were submitted to Lord Chamberlain for approval in advance of performance at the patent theatres for the period 1737-1824. 

The Lord Chamberlain’s Plays is the single largest collection of manuscripts in the British Library. It comprises the vast majority of the many thousands of plays submitted for performance at the patent theatres for the period 1824-1968. Further information can be seen here: [Available here].  

Selection methodology

Based on the MacMillan catalogue of the Larpent Catalogue, which identifies those manuscripts which have had major changes or corrections, a long-list of a little over 150 manuscripts was drawn up for close examination. From this initial long-list a short-list of about 50 plays was selected and input from the advisory board was sought before the finalised list of 30 was selected.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Plays proved too voluminous for this approach to be taken with only a 2 month period at the British Library facilitated by the funding and I was heavily reliant on John Russell Stephens’s The Censorship of English Drama, 1824-1901 (1980) for the selection of 10 manuscripts from this collection. 

The criteria driving selection were varied. Preference was for those manuscripts which revealed a significant level of emendation from the Examiner/manager. While the logic of wanting to show the most richly detailed manuscripts still seems sounds, a corollary effect is that some plays which might be expected to be seen here are absent. Plays such as James Thomson’s Edward and Eleonora (1738) and William Paterson’s Arminius (1739) are not, for example, included as the manuscripts are simply not that interesting – they were prohibited outright with little or no actual annotation by the Examiner. An effort has also been made to offer a selection of manuscripts which reveal a wide variety of reasons for censorship intervention. The level of scholarly interest in an author/play was also taken into account but, at the same time, an effort was made to include plays which are not widely known. The legibility of the manuscript was also a factor – some interesting plays were very difficult to read so it seemed more optimal, all other things being equal, to go with a play that might be more easily read by users. Plays which contained illuminating correspondence between the Examiner of Plays’ office and the author/theatre manager were also of high interest. In brief, the overriding principle was to offer a selection of plays showing varying reasons for censorship in plays in which scholars would be interested. 

There are seven ‘double’ examples where both the initial submission (refused a license or extensive changes requested) and the re-submission are shown. This was felt to be important so that users of the resources could get a sense of how writers/managers responded to the Examiner’s demands. That said, a decision was made not to include all versions of Macklin’s The Man of the World which may strike users as odd, given its unique status as the only play twice refused a licence in the eighteenth century, but as there are two subsequent versions and I was keen to include Covent Garden Theatre, a rollicking but little known piece, it seemed that this would be sufficient Macklin.

Users of the resource will rightly remark that  only three of the forty manuscripts selected here are authored by women writers. This is a problem that became apparent very early on in the project and, despite a concerted effort to supplement this figure by checking the manuscripts of a considerable number of female dramatists, I was unable to discover any additional appropriate examples suitable for a resource on censorship.  I would be delighted if this shortcoming galvanizes scholars to develop work in this area and prove me wrong.

There is one selection bordering on the self-indulgent which is the anonymous Killigrew! Or King Charles at Tunbridge Wells (1825). However, after working on this topic for the past few years, I proved unable to resist the inclusion of a play which offered a fictional and humorous account of the award of the theatre licence to Thomas Killigrew.

Selected further reading

Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature with the Minutes of Evidence (London: House of Commons, 1832).
[available here]

L.W. Connolly, The Censorship of English Drama 1737-1843 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1976).

Robert D. Hume (ed), The London Theatre World 1660-1800 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).
[see esp. chapters by Stone, Loftis, and Winton]

Matthew J. Kinservik, Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002).

Vincent J. Liesenfeld, The Licensing Act of 1737 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).

Dougald MacMillan, Catalogue of the John Larpent Plays (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1939).
[available here]

See also Pierre Danchin’s supplement to this work: ‘Unidentified Items in the Larpent Collection: Addresses, Prologues, and Epilogues’, Huntington Library Quarterly 64:3/4 (2001), 445-67]

Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

John Russell Stephens, The Censorship of English Drama, 1824-1901(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Julia Swindells and David Taylor (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737-1843 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
[see esp. chapters by Thomas, Swindells, Kinservik, Newey, and Davis]

David Thomas, David Carlton, and Anne Etienne, Theatre Censorship from Walpole to Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures, 1773-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).