The Censorship of British Theatre, 1737-1843

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Teaching

These are some suggested exercises that might be assigned to advanced undergraduates for individual or group assignments related to the manuscripts available on this website. Students who have access to e-resources such as the 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Database, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online may be best placed to tackle some of them.

  1. Discuss whether James Miller’s The Camp Visitants (1740) offers an accurate portrayal of anxieties regarding militia camps in Britain. What might we glean from a comparison of this play with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice about the persistence of such anxieties in eighteenth-century Britain?
  2. One of the most consistent facets of the Examiner of Plays’ censorship was the expunging of references to real people. Using appropriate resources, offer a view as to which real-life person might be represented by the following characters:
    1. The ‘superseeded general’ of The Universal Register Office (LA 189, f.3r)
    2. Lord Flimsey of The Election of the Managers (LA 659, f.23r)
    3. Henrietta of Jonathan in England (Add MS 42868, f.39r)
  3. Compare the published version of Elizabeth Griffith’s The Platonic Wife to the manuscript. Identify the substantive changes made which were not requested by the Examiner. What conclusions might you draw about the power of audience censorship and/or the particular demands placed on female dramatists?
  4. Criticism of electoral shenanigans and corruption were often censored by the Examiner of Plays but not always consistently. Frederick Pilon’s The Humours of an Election (1780; available on ECCO) is an example a play which cast a gleefully acerbic eye on electoral culture but suffered very little interference from the Examiner, much to the outrage of some newspaper reviewers.
    1. Compare the published version of Pilon’s play to the first manuscript of The Election of the Managers and speculate as to the different treatments of these two plays by the Examiner. 
    2. Using the appropriate resources, identify the real-life individuals represented by Pilon’s George, O’Shannon, and Belfield.
    3. Compare the manuscript of The Election of the Managers (1784) to The Hustings (1818) and Joseph Stirling Coyne’s The Humours of an Election (1837). What conclusions can you draw about how British political culture and the Examiner’s attitude towards the critique of this culture has changed (or not) over the half century?
  5. Representations of London and London life feature heavily in the city’s theatre. Compare the manuscripts of Joseph Reed’s The Universal Register Office (1761), Thomas Moncrieff’s Life in London (1821), and Samuel Atkyns’s The Thieves House! (1844). How does censorial intervention enlighten our sense of:
    1. the contrast between the city and country life?
    2. prevailing notions of social class?
    3. the importance of redemption to ideas of character?
  6. Consider the Examiner’s treatment of threats to female virtue in The Universal Register Office (1761) and Richelieu (1826).
  7. The Examiner’s office was heavily invested in preserving ideals of British military potency and honour over our period. Looking at James Miller’s The Camp Visitants (1740), John St John’s The Island of St Marguerite (1789), and Matthew Lewis’s Monody on the Death of Sir John Moore (1809), how successful do you think it was?
  8. Choosing any play in this resource with two manuscripts, consider the effectiveness of the Examiner’s censorship and the degree of compliance of the part of the theatre.