“Who, then, is the Censor?” asks Dorothy Knowles, British historian of the censorship of drama and cinema. Her answer, which she gives directly after asking the question, involves people and organizations that might seem to exclude the subject of her inquiry: “The Censor is Society, the church, Educational Authorities, the local Fire Brigade, the Police, the Board of Trade, the Admiralty, the War Office, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Lords, and the Commons.”1 Like Hamlet, she knows not seems. Everything she names underlies theatrical and cinematic censorship in Great Britain, and in the United States the names of the departments are the same or similar. Those in charge of maintaining a nation as it is and as they want it to become censor whatever might impede their duties, desires, and prejudices. Perhaps most obviously, departments in charge of matters related to war and peace do not want actual or potential adversaries to obtain information about defense or military matters. The Home Office of the United Kingdom is responsible for security, law and order, and immigration, and it administers the police and the Security Service (MI5)—which includes domestic intelligence and counterintelligence agencies—as well as fire and rescue forces, visas, and immigration. The United States has similar agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Probably the most important of her list of what a censor is, is Society, since most people explicitly or implicitly approve of or condone some or all the censorship of government and nongovernment outfits, and are thus responsible for it. Despite the temptation to differentiate between them (others, who work for or are members of religious, secular, political and other temporal, national, and local censorship bodies charged with permitting or proscribing reading, hearing, and viewing what may influence men and women, adults and children, citizens and other residents of a nation, state, province, or smaller municipality) and us (mostly as parents, whose jurisdiction is limited), we influence or attempt to influence the religious and secular morals, values, ideas, and conduct of our charges and (in relationship to them) explicitly or implicitly condone or do not oppose the actions of the others.
When Shaw wrote plays, one duty of the Lord Chamberlain, a Great Officer of the Royal Household, was to license plays to be performed in theatres. Their publication was outside his jurisdiction. He employed Examiners of Plays to read plays that a theatre proprietor, who held a patent from the King, or the manager of that theatre wished to have performed and to recommend whether the Lord Chamberlain should grant a license to do so. More accurately, albeit confusingly, he might license the play, but the theatre manager or owner, not the dramatist, would officially submit it for a license. The Examiner of Plays did not officially acknowledge the playwright. Furthermore, local licensing authorities might also object to a play or receive objections from the public and try to stop its performances—although a license from an office of the Crown made it unlikely that this would happen. Therefore, theatre managers, particularly those who arranged touring companies, favored the censorship.
In the historical survey that follows, and in the subjects of later chapters, it behooves us, like it or not—or like it and not—to remember the offices and departments listed in the penultimate paragraph as underlying elements or components of official theatrical censorship—ties that connect them and us, as well as to recognize what separates both. After a historical review of censorship in this chapter, including changes in society, the remaining chapters will treat dramatic and theatrical censorship in Shaw’s time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the censorship of the cinema. The book’s concluding chapter is chiefly on the late twentieth century and partly on the early twenty-first.
Brief Survey of Censorship
Censorship existed in Great Britain and elsewhere long before any government, legal, nongovernment, and extra-legal censorship organization—such as churches, the Public Morality Council in Great Britain (mentioned in Chap. 2), and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in the United States (discussed in Chap. 4)—did.
As the Norwegian historian Mette Newth writes, “Censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history.” Ancient societies in China, Greece, and Rome considered censorship to be a legitimate method for regulating the moral and political life of their people. The same is true of censorship in the United Kingdom, before and after Victorian and Edwardian times. The name censor derives from the Roman office of that title, established in the fifth century BCE, whose duties included oversight of public morals. As in ancient Greece, says Newth, “censorship was regarded as an honorable task.” Although Socrates was not the first person to be punished for violation of the moral and political code of his day, she adds, his was probably “the most famous case of censorship in ancient times,” and his sentence for having corrupted the youth of Athens was extreme: drinking poison.2 As I.F. Stone maintains, “The trial of Socrates was a persecution of ideas.” He was probably unlikely to have been, as Stone says he was, “the first martyr of free speech and free thought,” but he was such a martyr. In Stone’s view,
If he had conducted his defense as a free speech case, and invoked the basic traditions of his city, he might easily, I believe, have shifted the troubled jury in his favor. Unfortunately Socrates never invoked the principle of free speech. Perhaps one reason he held back from that line of defense is because his victory would have been a victory of the democratic principles he scorned. An acquittal would have vindicated Athens.3
“The struggle for freedom of expression is as ancient as the history of censorship,” Newth declares. “Free speech, which implies the free expression of thoughts, was a challenge for pre-Christian rulers. It was no less troublesome to the guardians of Christianity, even more so as orthodoxy became established.” To repel subversive and heretical threats to Christian doctrine, “censorship became more rigid, and punishment more severe.” Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1439 “increased the need for censorship. Although printing greatly aided the Catholic Church and its mission, it also aided the Protestant Reformation and ‘heretics,’ such as Martin Luther. Thus the printed book also became a religious battleground.” With Pope Paul IV’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books) published in 1559, which different popes reissued twenty times, the last in 1948 (it was abolished in 1966), censorship acquired a new dimension. “Zealous guardians carried out the Sacred Inquisition, banning and burning books, and sometimes also their authors.” The Church controlled all universities and all publications. No book could be printed or sold without its permission. In 1563, French King Charles IX decreed that no writing could be printed without the king’s permission. With other secular European monarchs following suit, European rulers used government publishing licenses to control scientific and artistic expression they thought might threaten the social order.4
In 1543, during the reign of King Henry VIII of Britain, Parliament—before Pope Paul IV’s Index—passed the Act for the Advancement of True Religion, “which restricted the reading of the Bible to clerics, noblemen, the gentry and richer merchants. Women of the gentry and nobility were only allowed to read the Bible in private.” This Act forbade “‘women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen, serving-men of the rank of yeoman and under, husbandmen and laborers’” from reading the Bible in English. It permitted the performance of moral plays “if they promoted virtue and condemned vice but such plays were forbidden to contradict the interpretation of Scripture as set forth by the King.” Claiming that malicious subjects, “‘intending to subvert the true exposition of Scripture,’” have by means of printed books, ballads, rhymes, and songs subtly and craftily tried to instruct British people, especially the young, with lies, the King, in order to reform this practice, deemed it necessary to purge his realm of all such publications, exempting only books printed before 1540.5
The theatre was a profane not sacred institution, whose antecedents in antiquity were, after all, pagans. As John Palmer writes, “Theatres and plays were strictly regulated under the Tudors,” which was “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.” However, “The ‘masterless man’ was suspect.” Although players were regarded as vagabonds, “practically every Tudor person was [considered] a vagabond if he did not happen to be a landowner.”6 In Tudor and Elizabethan times, plays were supervised and censored by the Revels Office, which was attached to the Royal Household under the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain, whose office continued to hold such authority as censor during and after Shaw’s time. In 1544, its chief officer was appointed Master of the Revels.
From the outset, David Thomas, David Carlton, and Anne Etienne observe, the theatre in England “was inextricably bound up with the activities of the Monarchy and the aristocracy.” Monarchs and aristocrats required players and writers to provide courtly entertainment for them. In return, these patrons gave generous rewards and, at least as importantly, legal protection from persecution and punishment to their favorite actors who between command performances acted—for payment, of course—in public playhouses. Whereas these actors were servants of their patrons, “common players were mistrusted by Puritan civic and court authorities and were generally viewed as troublemakers.” As attested by the 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds in England and Wales, which provided for relief for the poor and aged, as well as “implemented punishment for ‘masterless men’” above the age of fourteen, these “rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars” included jugglers, “common players in interludes, and minstrels, not belonging to any baron of this realm, or towards any other honorable person of greater degree,” whose punishment was prescribed as being “grievously whipped and burnt through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron of the compass of an inch about.” This greatly affected, among others, traveling theatre troupes and actors. As Thomas, Carlton, and Etienne state, “Even those players who enjoyed aristocratic or royal protection were not above suspicion. Because of their quick and ready wit there was always a danger that they might give offence or cause embarrassment. This meant that they needed to be kept under some sort of control.”7
Notably, as John Palmer says, regulation was not exceptional.
An author who was not openly seditious, grossly obscene, blasphemous, or libelous was relatively immune from interference. Frequently, authorities closed a theatre for reasons of public health. Also frequently, players were compelled “not to act again without license for offering ‘lewd’ plays; or they might be reprimanded for staging a play which contained thinly disguised representations of living men of note.” Licenses for players were occasion...Commissioners of the Privy Council, 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 should wear, the food he should eat, the games he should play. His public speaking was as strictly regulated as the length of his sword blade.