Art. 3.-THE CENSORSHIP OF PLAYS.

Report from the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship); together with the proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence, and appendices. His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1909.

ONE day in October 1907 there appeared in the 'Times' a very remarkable document. Seventy-one authors, male and female, had joined in a letter of protest. Suppose that a stranger to the facts were shown the list of signatures without the letter and told that the protesters included, without a single important exception, all the greatest living writers of English fiction, poetry, and drama, from Meredith, Swinburne, and Hardy, to striplings who had not yet passed beyond the stage of being called brilliant; he would certainly declare that only some flagrant act of gross injustice, newly committed or threatened, could explain the wonderful unanimity of men (and authors) so different in age, ideals and achievement. Suppose, on the other hand, that passages of the letter were read to him and the signatories' names concealed. He would find that the protest was aimed not at a single action but at the existence of an office: An office autocratic in procedure, opposed to the spirit of the Constitution, contrary to common justice and to common sense. . . . The power lodged in the hands of a single official-who judges without a public hearing, and against whose dictum there is no appeal to cast a slur on the good name and destroy the means of livelihood of any member of an honourable calling. . . . The menace hanging over every one who follows that calling of having his work, and the proceeds of his work, destroyed at a pen's stroke by the arbitrary action of a single official neither responsible to Parliament nor amenable to law. . . an office which denies to the members of that calling the position enjoyed under the law by every other citizen.' These men must be the vilest of criminals; so far from being 'honourable,' their calling must be so dishonourable, so dangerous to the public welfare, that they do not deserve the rights of citizens. But why, our stranger would ask,

does not the State stamp out their calling altogether? Have we no prisons, no means of capital punishment? Were we to reveal to him that these dangerous persons are only writers of plays, he would imagine the government to have fallen into the hands of school-boys, who had created this absurd office after reading scraps of Plato's Republic' in a crib.

So far we have withheld from our stranger the clue to the puzzle. The reason why so strange a state of things exists, and why it arouses so little opposition or surprise in the general public, is one which is common in an old country. What has existed for a long time is apt to appear part of the order of Nature. The office of Licenser of Plays is nearly two hundred years old in its present form; its conception dates back to Henry VII. The time will come, perhaps, when some Mr Chainmail of the future will be heard lamenting its abolition. It was not a picturesque office, nor in itself a venerable office; there was no state or pageantry connected with it; its duties were unsavoury, the inspection of nuisances; it was, without doubt, in principle grossly unjust, and in practice mainly futile, often ridiculous and sometimes offensive. But it survived by many years every other specimen of the class of secret and final tribunals to which it belonged; it carried a flavour of medievalism into the twentieth century; it was almost worth preservation as the solitary example of pure tyranny that England had to show. And it will be necessary for our stranger to catch something of Mr Chainmail's point of view, and to understand the English way of achieving liberty, before he can realise that, though the office is all that objectors declare it to be, there is no immediate likelihood of its being abolished.

The historical point of view is essential to any consideration of the facts. It is commonly known that Henry Fielding's attacks on Walpole and his ministry, produced at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, led to the passing of the Licensing Act of 1737. Part of this Act prohibited, under a penalty of 50l. for each performance, recoverable from every person engaged in it, the acting for gain of any play or theatrical performance not sanctioned by letters-patent from the Crown or licensed by the Lord Chamberlain; and ordered that

copies of all plays to be acted were to be placed in the hands of the Lord Chamberlain at least fourteen days before production, together with an account of the place and time of the proposed performance; the Lord Chamberlain to have the power, when and so often as he should think fit, to prohibit the performing of any play or part of a play or prologue or epilogue. In his famous speech on the Bill, Lord Chesterfield declared that the power which it proposed to entrust to the Lord Chamberlain was more absolute than that which we would extend to the Monarch himself,' and pointed out that there was already a remedy at law for the abuses at which it was aimed; but his arguments had no effect in the Parliament of Walpole's day, and the Bill became law. A few months after the passing of the Act a 'Licenser of the Stage' or 'Examiner of the Stage,' as he was more properly called (the only Licenser being the Lord Chamberlain himself), was sworn in as a servant of the Crown in the Lord Chamberlain's department, at a salary of 400l. a year. There is no mention of such an office or officer in the Act.

Walpole's Act of 1737 remained law for more than a hundred years. So far as concerns the licensing of plays for performance (the only point to be considered in the present article) it gave absolute power to the Lord Chamberlain. The work and the fortunes of dramatists, and through them of theatrical managers and players, were entirely at his mercy. He could refuse a public hearing to any new play; he could at any moment stop the performance of a play already licensed. He had to assign no reason; there was no appeal against his decision; and that decision was, in practice, made for him by a subordinate unrecognised by the law. It seems impossible either that such power should not have been misused, or that a calling which involved such large pecuniary interests as the drama should have endured such servitude. But so it was. There is no recorded instance of a Lord Chamberlain or his subordinate taking advantage of uncontrolled opportunities for levying blackmail, even in so corrupt an age as Walpole's. There were other reasons, too, why the drama should find little cause of complaint. In the first place, the object of the Act was to keep the stage free from political satire and

personality; that could be done and was done, without hampering theatrical enterprise to any noticeable extent. Secondly, the century that followed the passing of the Licensing Act was the century during which the drama had another and a more important battle to fight-the battle against the exclusive rights and the frequent shortcomings of the two 'patent' houses, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. And thirdly, until that battle for freedom in theatrical enterprise was fought and won, there was clearly little room for any developments in drama which might bring it into conflict with the accepted canons of morality. Indecency and immorality that century had in full measure. Most of it fell outside the purview of the Lord Chamberlain and his subordinate; about such of it as slipped past them the age was not squeamish.

The quarrel between the 'patent' theatres and the 'minors' came to a head in the reign of William IV. In the year 1832 a Royal Commission sat upon the whole question of the theatres, and in its enquiry the office of the Licenser of plays received some attention. Bulwer, the chairman of the Commission, was strongly opposed to the existence of any such office. Of the fifteen witnesses examined, ten were in favour of the Censorship, five only were against it. Of the four dramatists examined, three were in favour of the Censorship, one only was against it. Of seven managers, four were in favour, and three against. The evidence shows a good deal of dissatisfaction with the constitution and the working of the office, but shows also that the thought uppermost in the minds of Examiners, of Commission, and of witnesses alike was not morality but still politics. The report of the Commission recommended that the office of Censor (the title is here for the first time used more or less officially to designate the Examiner) be held at the discretion of the Lord Chamberlain; and in the following year Bulwer's Dramatic Performances Bill contained a provision for a graduated system of payment. But the Bill was thrown out; and ten years passed before any change was made.

Under the Theatres Act of 1843 the powers of the Lord Chamberlain were maintained, but defined. The Act of 1737 had given him absolute power; by the new

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Act his power of prohibition was limited to cases in which he shall be of opinion that it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace so to do.' The limitation is more apparent than real; it is as easy for a Lord Chamberlain to say that he prohibits a play because he is of opinion that it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum and of the public peace so to do, as to say that he prohibits a play because he chooses. And it was not long before the power of the Lord Chamberlain had to face a severer attack than that of 1832. The Act of 1843 gave an assured position to those minor' theatres, which had previously carried on a precarious and half-surreptitious existence in defiance of the law. The result was an increase in the number of plays and playwrights. Working for rewards which would seem contemptible to modern dramatists, and producing plays that may seem contemptible to modern tastes, these playwrights still had their ambitions, pecuniary and artistic, and they believed that the Censorship stood in the way of their realisation. In 1865, twenty-one dramatic authors, including Charles Reade, Dion Boucicault, John Oxenford, Palgrave Simpson, F. C. Burnand, Edmund Yates and John Hollingshead, presented a petition praying for the abolition of the office; and the question was once more considered by the Select Committee of both Houses on Theatrical Licenses and Regulations that sat in 1866. Of five playwrights examined, three were in favour of the Censorship, two against it; of seven managers, six were in favour and one against. The evidence reveals one important fact that politics have almost disappeared from the dispute, to be succeeded by morality and decency. The report of the Commission recommended the retention of the Censorship in its existing state.

Nevertheless the opposition continued to grow. Between 1866 and 1890 a pregnant change came over the English Drama-a change which is easily discernible in the plays written towards the close of that period, but which had its origin not so much in the plays as in the audience. The Bancroft management at the old Prince of Wales's and the Haymarket, the Irving management at the Lyceum, had brought back to the theatre the cultivated people who had long deserted it. It was only