Bernard Shaw and the Censors: Fights and Failures, Stage and Screen [1st ed.] 9783030521851, 9783030521868

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BERNARD SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Bernard Shaw and the Censors Fights and Failures, Stage and Screen

Bernard F. Dukore

Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries Series Editors Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel Massachusetts Maritime Academy Pocasset, MA, USA Peter Gahan Independent Scholar Los Angeles, CA, USA

The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and American following. Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No one engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism that arose in the wake of World War 1. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14785

Bernard F. Dukore

Bernard Shaw and the Censors Fights and Failures, Stage and Screen

Bernard F. Dukore Blacksburg, VA, USA

About the cover: The cartoon on the front cover shows the Bishop of London, who presented an extravaganza, The English Church Pageant, at the Fulham Palace, where in June 1909 it received ten performances with 4,200 men, women, children and horses; they played to 178,000 people, including those who attended dress rehearsals. Beside him, Shaw holds his manuscript of The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, which had been refused a license the previous month. The punch line, below the drawing, is Shaw’s complaint, “Some people have all the luck. I can’t get my religious play past the censor.” The artist, Bernard Partridge, had played Sergius in the first production of Arms and the Man in 1894, under his stage name, Bernard Gould. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries ISBN 978-3-030-52185-1    ISBN 978-3-030-52186-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52186-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Getty Images: Universal History Archive / Contributor This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger. —William Shakespeare, King Henry V, III.i

To MAURICE EVANS, who revived Man and Superman, in which he played John Tanner, on Broadway from 8 October 1947 to 19 June 1948. A friend and I, both impecunious high school students in Brooklyn, cut classes to see a matinée performance of it on a Wednesday, when tickets in the second balcony cost 55¢ each, including a 10% luxury tax left over from World War II. That production turned me on to theatre and to Shaw. Both have been part of my life ever since. Belatedly but gratefully, I thank Maurice Evans.

Preface

One tends to assume that a book on Shaw will celebrate him and, if not his victories, his battles to achieve victory. And why not? Even when he lost, the reports of his combats and defeats, especially his own accounts of his failures, are so buoyant and entertaining, they seem to describe triumphs. For example, one of his descriptions of the censor’s refusal to license Mrs Warren’s Profession conveys elation that because the censor did exactly what Shaw expected him to do, which was to refuse to license the play for public performances, he saved Shaw the trouble of rewriting his preface about the play’s not having received a license. Another example is his explanation of his losing the election to the Vestry of St. Pancras in 1894: that he was humiliatingly defeated because the laborers of St. Pancras considered his sympathy with Labour to be disreputable. Three years after this failure, Progressives on the vestry struck a deal with their opponents to allow some of their nominees to win uncontested seats, which is how he became a member of the St. Pancras Vestry. When the vestry system was changed in 1900, St. Pancras was turned into a borough and the vestry became, with other boroughs, a subdivision of the London County Council. Once more Shaw stood for the seat. For the first and only time he won a contested election. When he stood again four years later, he came in third in a field of four candidates. To understate: electioneering was not one of his strong points. He abandoned politically neutered language in favor of irony and bluntness, which too many voters did not appreciate. Although he was a teetotaler, he announced, with a Dickensian reference (to Our Mutual Friend) that few of his constituents would have ix

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recognized, that he would force all adults in the borough to drink a quartern of rum (a gill, which is a quarter of a pint) to cure them of any inclination to get drunk. He annoyed nonconformists by advocating publicly financed improvements of church schools, because for too many children the choice was a church school or no school, and he revealed that members of the Church of England were already paying taxes to support the Roman Catholic Church in Malta and to prosecute booksellers who displayed the Christian Bible in India and North Africa. To put it mildly, his campaign methods were not tailored to win the votes of the electorate a century ago—or today. But what remains with most of us are his quips and his delightful descriptions of his battles. More often than not, we remember Shaw’s victories and his celebrity, not his defeats and his status as an outsider. Usually too, we remember him as a classic, not as a member of the avant-garde, which he was and which Victorians and Edwardians generally did not view tolerantly. We remember his leadership, along with William Archer’s, in the victorious campaign to have Ibsen’s Ghosts produced, not his classification as one of the “muck-ferreting dogs” that a reviewer of the play called Ibsenites, including him. We remember Mrs Warren’s Profession as a play ahead of its time, not as what it was described in its time—“disgusting,” “filthy,” “the limit of stage indecency,” and “wholly immoral and degenerate”—or that it took over three decades and one world war before British censors permitted it to be performed publicly in Britain. We remember him as a Nobel Prize winner, not as one whose plays were sometimes considered unfit for the stage. We remember him as an Academy Award winner for his screenplay of Pygmalion, not as the writer of the film’s dialogue that the Hollywood censors considered so indecent or immoral, they insisted it be hacked to pieces before they would permit its distribution in the United States. In short, we remember his victories, not his defeats, and his fights, not his failures. We usually do not remember, or do not know, that his most thorough victory over the English stage censorship was evading it by having a play successfully produced in Ireland, a country that, though part of the British Empire, was outside the censor’s jurisdiction—probably because the play, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, which is not one of his major or popular works, is less well known than those that are. This book is not only about Shaw the Failure, although this subject is an important part of it, but also and primarily about Shaw the Fighter, and a splendid fighter he was, one who in his struggles against censorship—of

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his plays and those of others, of his works for the screen and those of others—sometimes won but usually did not. For the most part, we do not remember usually, perhaps because ultimately, even when it was a long time later, he prevailed. But Shaw himself remembered usually. The fact that he had to wait so long for a public run of Mrs Warren’s Profession at a West End theatre distressed him until the end of his life, about a quarter of a century after those performances. Nor did he forget the failure of his enormous and time-consuming efforts to persuade a 1909 joint parliamentary committee to recommend the abolition of the censorship, or his personal humiliation by that committee, which disturbed him until his end came. The epigraph of this book, from Shakespeare’s King Henry V, celebrates Shaw the fighter, who when he battled gave his all, imitating the action of the tiger, although unlike the tiger he did so eloquently, wittily, and gloriously. The book does not overlook his defeats. Rather, it insists on them. Since, as its subtitle indicates, his fights and failures were with the censors of stage and screen, the first chapter asks, “Who Is the Censor?” Its reply is a short historical survey of censorship, primarily in Great Britain, and in Great Britain principally the customs and laws that affected Shaw and the theatre as it existed when he began to write for it, which was the last decade of the Victorian era and the Edwardian decade. This means that a consideration of the society of those times, including class struggles and the formation of the London police force, is vital. Of the laws, the Licensing Act of 1737 is the most prominent, as is Shaw’s reaction to it in the press and in his prefaces to works intended for the stage. Climaxing this chapter is an account of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, on stage censorship, which met in 1892, before which Shaw, then a nobody, was not invited to testify. Not until after this committee met did he complete his first play, Widowers’ Houses, which was performed in December of that year. Whereas Shaw is a minor actor in the first chapter, he is the star of the next three. Chapter 2, “The Critic and Emerging Playwright Versus British and American Censors,” chronicles, in the phrase of that chapter’s epigraph, the losses and victories of his battles, which he waged primarily as a dramatic critic in the press against his antagonists, the censors, particularly two Examiners of Plays (the second obtained his position after the death of the first) in the office of the Lord Chamberlain. Before Shaw became a dramatist, indeed, before he obtained a regular post as dramatic critic in

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the Saturday Review, the most notable works he championed were a play by Shelley which the Lord Chamberlain refused to license for performance and a banned novel by Zola. In his Saturday Review columns, as this chapter examines, he fought on behalf of and sometimes at the expense of other English playwrights. His first major campaign was for Ibsen’s unlicensed play Ghosts, and it is an important subject of the chapter. Following this section is his campaign, the most significant in this chapter, for his own play, Mrs Warren’s Profession, first in England, then in the United States. In Chap. 3, “Shaw’s Campaign Against the Censors: Press, Public Opinion, and Parliament,” Shaw once more goes into battle against the censors, and twice more for his own plays: Press Cuttings and The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet. This time he was better known and more experienced than he had been when he campaigned for Mrs Warren’s Profession. Through evasions, he was able in the first instance to get the play licensed and in the second to secure a performance that gave him copyright protection in Great Britain despite the play being unlicensed. Whereas in 1892 he was not present at the Select Committee of the House of Commons on stage censorship, in 1909 he was a star witness of the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, on stage censorship. In fact, he led the campaign, and unlike the previous hearings, this one consisted of a large number of dramatists who were against the censors. The hearings and their outcome form the bulk of this chapter, which does not conclude with them but continues to chronicle Shaw’s activities against censorship until his death. Although the subject of the penultimate major section of this book, Chap. 4, “Shaw and Movie Censorship in Britain and the United States,” is still fights by Shaw against censors, this chapter differs from the others in a crucial respect: the concern of the antagonists is not the stage but the motion picture screen. As in Chap. 1, here writ small, since movies were invented at the end of the nineteenth century, this chapter begins with a survey of film censorship—first in Great Britain, then in the United States. What may initially come as a surprise is how similar their censorships were. They even began in the same year, 1909. What the chapter does not treat are Shaw’s first two motion pictures, How He Lied to Her Husband (1931) and Arms and the Man (1932). The reason is that censorship was not an issue with them. Although movies interested Shaw from their inception, when he agreed to license his plays for adaptation to the screen, which he did not do until talkies arrived, he began in a small way—first a short

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one-­act play, then a full-length play—and he licensed them to a British firm, to be directed by an English director. Although Shaw and various Hollywood individuals and firms conducted negotiations about movie versions of his plays, he disapproved of one adaptation (of The Devil’s Disciple, 1934, by RKO) and he himself did not write any for an American company. He wrote adaptations of Pygmalion, which were filmed in Germany (1935) and Holland (1937), and which the directors or studios chose to ignore in favor of what they considered to be improvements by other hands. During this period, he adapted Saint Joan to be filmed in English (1934–1935), and it was clear that American distribution was mandatory. Disapproval by the Catholic Church—or, more accurately, of a Catholic organization that spoke for the Church—of the screenplay he had written made Twentieth Century Fox, which was to be the film’s American distributor, drop the project (1935–1936). To date, it has not been filmed. Even though his screenplay of an English-language Pygmalion was filmed and distributed in both Britain and America, the ending was changed and Hollywood censors severely cut and changed a great deal of the picture for American distribution. The latter was also the case with his screenplay for Major Barbara. His screen version of Cæsar and Cleopatra was also filmed, less injuriously by Hollywood but also less successfully. This was the last film version of one of his plays during his lifetime. In the two decades after his death on 2 November 1950, censorship on stage and screen, in Britain and the United States, diminished to points past Shaw’s and most people’s expectations. This book’s final chapter is on the attrition of censorship, which first treats its reduction and, in 1968, its official elimination on both the British stage and the American screen. Official end, not actual end. The title is “The Erosion of Stage and Screen Censorship,” not “The End of Censorship.” With a system of recommendations rather than licenses or refusals to license, censorship did not disappear from the film industry. Blacksburg, VA

Bernard F. Dukore

Acknowledgments

Primarily, I am indebted to two colleagues for having read early drafts of this book. They raised detailed, discerning questions and made suggestions to improve it—all more constructive than I can convey. Tom Markus, a professional stage and screen actor and director, also a writer, is well known for his Shakespearean productions. Less well known is his love of Shaw. He regrets not having directed and acted in more plays by him. Ongoing advice and comments by the meticulous and astute Michel Pharand, author and editor of many books and journals on Shaw, have been invaluable. Although I have profited enormously from both, I absolve them for any blunders and infelicities that may remain. For their indispensable help on specific questions, I am delighted to thank Lord Fowler, Speaker of the House of Lords; Frances Thompson, his Assistant Private Secretary; and Nicholas de Jongh and Irving Wardle. Many thanks, too, to L.W.  Conolly for providing me with a copy of Marjorie Deans’s unpublished book “Nero’s Fiddle.” I would be remiss in not conveying, again, my sincere gratitude to the editors of this series, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel and Peter Gahan. Their profitable suggestions revealed expertise and perceptiveness. Working with them was a pleasure. For permission to quote from the works of Bernard Shaw, I happily acknowledge The Society of Authors, on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate. Last but surely not least, I thank Ann La Berge, whose consistently genial encouragement ensured that I was leagues away from the slough of despond. xv

Note on Shaw

Bernard Shaw’s idiosyncratic typographic style—such as omitting apostrophes from words like you’d and doesn’t, whose meaning is clear without them—but distinguishing between its and it’s, cant and can’t, lest the former be considered misspellings, and using spaces within words or phrases, rather than italics—are retained in quotations.

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Praise for Bernard Shaw and the Censors “This book shows us a new side of Shaw and his complicated relationships to the powerful mechanisms of stage and screen censorship in the long twentieth century.” —Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University, Ireland “Dukore’s style is fluid and his wit delightful. I learned a tremendous amount, as will most readers, and Shaw and the Censors will doubtless be the last word on the topic.” —Michel Pharand, former editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, author of Bernard Shaw and the French, and editor of Bernard Shaw and His Publishers and Bernard Shaw on Religion “The content is always excellent, and is written in a clear and muscular style. The third chapter is the true meat of the book, and I think it’s terrific. I like this book very much and have been learning a lot and thinking a lot.” —Tom Markus, Artistic Director, LORT companies (retired) and author, Another Opening, Another Show

Contents

Preface  ix 1 Who Is the Censor?  1 Brief Survey of Censorship  3 The Licensing Act of 1737  15 After 1737  19 The Police and Censorship 25 1832 to 1892  28 2 The Critic and Emerging Playwright Versus British and American Censors 39 One Critic, Two Censors 42 A Doll’s House and the Campaign for Ghosts  50 The Campaign for Mrs Warren’s Profession in England 58 The Campaign for Mrs Warren’s Profession in America 69 After New York 80 3 Shaw’s Campaign Against the Censors: Press, Public Opinion, and Parliament 89 1907   91 Evasions: The Minstrel Show and Ireland101 The 1909 Joint Select Committee of Parliament 110 Major Witnesses in Favor of the Censorship 113 Major Witnesses Opposed to the Censorship 120 xxi

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Other Witnesses in Favor of the Censorship 130 Other Witnesses Opposed to the Censorship 137 The Outcome144 From the Eve of World War I to Shaw’s Death in 1950 148 4 Shaw and Movie Censorship in Britain and the United States167 The Loophole in the Cinematograph Act170 The British Board of Film Censors179 Sex180 Propaganda183 The United States189 The Aborted Film of  Saint Joan 193 The English Film of  Pygmalion 200 The English Film of Major Barbara 206 The English Film of  Cæsar and Cleopatra 214 Censorship of Shaw’s Films, Cleric and Laic219 5 The Erosion of Stage and Screen Censorship227 Stage Censorship227 Screen Censorship234 Brave New Millennium241 Index247

Abbreviations

Rather than unnecessarily bloat the footnotes, for works frequently cited I have used the following abbreviations parenthetically in the text, followed by volume numbers (if there are more than one) and page numbers: 1892 Report Report from The Select Committee on Theatres and Places of Entertainment, The House of Commons, 1892, http://hdl.handle. net/2027/umn.319510023137811 [https://vt.hosts.atlas-sys. com/illiad/illiad.dll?Action=10&Form=75&Value=1425748] (accessed 22 March 2018). 1909 Report Report from the Joint Select Committee of The House of Lords and The House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship). London: The House of Commons, 1909, https://babel.hathitrust.org/ cgi/pt?id=uc1.31158007048126;view=1up;seq=426 (accessed 9 March 2018). BSGP Dukore. Bernard F. Ed. Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw and Gabriel Pascal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. CL Shaw, Bernard. Collected Letters, 4 vols. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt, 1965–1988. CPP Shaw, Bernard. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, 7 vols. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt, 1970–1974. CS Dukore, Bernard F. Ed. The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw. London: George Prior, 1980. DTC Dukore, Bernard F. Ed. Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. SC Shaw, Bernard. Bernard Shaw on Cinema. Ed. Bernard F. Dukore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. xxiii

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ABBREVIATIONS

Shaw, Lady Gregory and The Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record. Ed. Dan H. Laurence and Nicholas Grene. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993. Shaw, Bernard. The Drama Observed, 4 vols. Ed. Bernard F. Dukore. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

The source of Shaw’s authorship of unsigned works is Dan H. Laurence, Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography.

CHAPTER 1

Who Is the Censor?

But man, proud man, Dress’d in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d. —William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, II.ii

“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 Author(s) 2020 B. F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw and the Censors, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52186-8_1

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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.

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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

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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

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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. 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.

An author who was not openly seditious, grossly obscene, blasphemous, or libelous was relatively immune from interference. Frequently,

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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 occasionally considered necessary, but so were licenses for overseas travelers, tavern keepers, merchants, butchers, publishers, and preachers.8 Nevertheless, plays and players were particularly susceptible. Puritans and non-Puritan preachers and ministers targeted them as immoral. In 1577, in A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, John Northbrooke, who was not a Puritan, called players neither good nor godly and maintained that they should be neither “tolerable nor sufferable in any commonweal, especially where the gospel is preached.” He quoted Saint Augustine, that “whosoever give their goods to interlude and stage players is a great vice and sin, and not a virtue,” and Saint Chrysostom, who railed against theatres as places where you hear “‘filthy speeches’” that are “‘the beginning of whoredom.’” Because such playhouses as The Theatre and the Curtain provided Satan with the quickest way “to bring men and women into his snare of concupiscence and filthy lusts of wicked whoredom,” these places should be forbidden and closed by authority, “as the brothel houses and stews are.” Northbrooke linked players of interludes and comedy with “heretics, Jews, and pagans,” and, following the Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, called actors rogues who must be punished by having their ears burned with a hot iron, “and for the second fault to be hanged as felon, etc.” Nevertheless, if “players of interludes and comedies” convert, repent, and return to the Lord, then “grace and reconciliation [are] not to be denied.” For centuries to come, theatres and players were tarred with sexual depravity, which is to say sex, and actresses considered depraved (DTC 159–62). Two years later, Stephen Gosson wrote The School of Abuse, in which, taking his cue from Ovid, he denounced theatre as “a whores’ fair for whores,” where in London as in Rome men heaved and shoved to sit “shouldering” beside women, with whom they are toying, smiling, winking, and “manning them home when the sports are ended.” To celebrate the Sabbath, they “flock to theatres and there keep a general market of bawdry. Not that any filthiness in deed is committed within the compass of that ground, as was once done in Rome, but that every John and his Joan, every knave and his queen are there first acquainted and cheapen the merchandise in that place, which they pay for elsewhere, as they can

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agree.” True, some players are neither evil nor improper, and the same is true of some plays, but these are so few that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. “Now, if any man ask me why myself [who] have penned comedies in times past inveigh so eagerly against them here,” Gosson confessed, “let him know that Semel insanavimus omnes [We have all been mad at some time]. I have sinned and am sorry for my fault. He runs far that never turns. Better late than never” (DTC 162–65).9 To illustrate the anti-theatrical attitude of Puritans in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, let us turn to the plays themselves. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night—first performed in 1602, the year before Queen Elizabeth I died—Maria tells Sir Toby Belch that Malvolio is not really a Puritan, but “sometimes he is a kind of puritan,” that is, he affects the attitudes of one. In reality, he is a pretentious, pompous, conceited idiot who memorizes highfalutin words and tries to speak as the nobility does; he thinks so highly of himself, he is convinced that everyone who looks at him loves him. His name may be Italian for ill will, which he exhibits, and he abhors fun and games so much that Maria and Sir Toby mock him, as does the inept Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Puritans and those of similar views considered theatrical entertainment to be sinful, which audiences of this play did not. Since Puritans tried to close theatres, which they did in time, Elizabethan and Jacobean plays parodied this point of view. Malvolio is one such parody, and although according to Maria he is not a bona fide Puritan, he is at least puritanical when it suits him to be. Sir Toby reproaches him for his presumptuousness, which does not befit a person of his low rank, as well as for his puritanical affectations: “Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” That is, he is a moralist who would ban Sunday recreational activities (the Sabbath was a day for spiritual activities, such people maintained, not for frivolities like “church ales,” where ale was sold to raise money for a parish’s church and its poor members—and drinking ale easily became an unrestrained spree). Malvolio’s last line in the play, spoken immediately before his exit—“I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you”—is perhaps prophetic in view of what would happen some thirty years later. A dozen years after the first performance of Twelfth Night, now Jacobean times, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair was first performed. In the final scene, the hypocritical Puritan zealot, named Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, declaims against the theatre and actors when he interrupts Lantern Leatherhead’s performance of a puppet play, a parody of the story of Hero

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and Leander, together with that of Damon and Pythias. “Yes,” Busy affirmatively and emphatically begins his harangue, “and my main argument against you is, that you are an abomination: for the male among you putteth on the apparel of the female, and the female of the male.” His rant, a familiar anti-theatrical justification, derives from Deuteronomy 22:5: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” One of the glove or hand puppets refutes him: “It is your old stale argument against the players, but it will not hold against the puppets; for we have neither male nor female amongst us. And that thou may’st see, if thou wilt, like a malicious purblind zeal as thou art!” At this point, the puppet “takes up his garment”—a type of petticoat breeches—to demonstrate that since he has no genitals he is neither a male nor a female cross-dresser and therefore commits no offense against God. Roughly thirty years later came civil war. From the start of King Charles I’s reign, Puritans suspected him of having Catholic sympathies. After all, his wife, Henrietta Maria of France, was Catholic and he supported the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom Puritanism was a greater threat to the Church of England than Roman Catholicism was. Most members of the so-called Long Parliament who remained in Westminster after the civil war began in 1642 were Puritans. During the war, Puritans, whose zeal was formidable, became more radical. In the 1640s, they raised an army of 50,000 men who did not hesitate to use their weapons. On 1 January 1649, when Charles I tried to raise an army from overseas, they charged him with treason against the English people and sent him to the Tower of London. Tried and found guilty, he was beheaded on the 30th of the month. The monarchy was abolished. Among the Puritans, economic and religious issues were interlinked. Along with class, warfare, and extreme economic disparity between rich and poor was the primary puritan goal of creating what they considered God’s agenda. They were not a unified organization. Their spectrum included some who aimed to eliminate class stratification. Enemies of the populist Levelers gave them that name to suggest they wanted to level men’s properties and fortunes. Their goals included extension of the suffrage, equality of everyone under the law, and religious tolerance. The Diggers were agrarian socialists who sought common ownership of the land. They wanted to replace the social structure with small egalitarian communities. Oliver Cromwell restrained fringe elements, which meant the more radical sects. In 1653, he became Lord Protector of the

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Commonwealth and tried to establish a broadly based national Church that tolerated different Protestant sects. By 1660, however, the English rejected a government of Puritans. With the Restoration of the Monarchy that year—Charles II was crowned on May 29th, his thirtieth birthday— came the restoration of Anglicanism and the expulsion of Puritan clergy from the Church of England. The England to which Charles II returned was essentially agrarian. The landed aristocracy dominated the local and national governments, and the average country gentleman usually stayed in the country. Most Englishmen—yeomen, tenant farmers, and agricultural laborers—earned their living from the soil. The citizens of the rising middle class lived in the towns and in increasingly crowded London, where they engaged in commerce and industry. About a third of England’s five million inhabitants made just enough to subsist on, and about another third were on poor relief. Some of the latter lived in London slums, but most lived in the country. The sybaritic group that surrounded Charles II was not typical of the English nobility and much less typical of the average Englishman. Probably the wealthiest group in the country, it contained many of the highest titles in the peerage. Led by the King, they indulged in apparently endless rounds of pleasure-seeking and pleasure-making. In a nation newly emerged from repressive puritanism, reaction followed swiftly. In the court of the “Merry Monarch,” as Charles II was called, the courtiers tried to outdo each other in wit, swordsmanship, and licentiousness. A well-­ turned phrase could hold the key to success at court, as could a well-­ turned ankle. Charles II was both merry and a monarch. His Parliament had more power than that of Charles I, and he had fewer royal prerogatives than his father did. When it became politically expedient, he modified his policies and blamed his ministers, to whom he delegated many of the responsibilities his father had taken on himself. He was shrewd enough to avoid being executed, as his father had been, or exiled, as his brother was to be. Restoration England was a period of stark contrasts. The King was restored, but so was Parliament. There was extreme opulence, and there was extreme poverty. It was a time when the ideals of courtly love were in vogue and a time when libertinage was in vogue. It was a time when the actress Nell Gwyn rose in rank via the royal bedchamber and a time when the Puritan preacher John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress. Londoners in 1660 in search of entertainment could watch cockfights, which were still popular, as were bullbaiting and bearbaiting. They could

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go to coffee houses or taverns. They could go to brothels or to Bedlam, where they would enjoy watching naked lunatics. Love-making was one of the court’s chief diversions, and libertinage was worn as a badge of honor. Audiences agreed with the hero of Sir George Etherege’s She Would if She Could that “a single intrigue in love is as dull as a single plot in a play” and with his companion’s comment that in London one would not have to wait long before finding subplots. Although the Puritan government had passed laws banning performances of plays, there had been illegal performances during the Commonwealth. When Charles II returned from France, he legitimized theatrical activity by granting two patents—one to Thomas Killigrew, who had followed him into exile, and the other to Sir William Davenant, who had boldly presented thinly disguised theatrical entertainments in London during the Commonwealth’s later days. Thus, they held a monopoly on “legitimate” theatre productions in London (the term “legitimate theatre” remains in use, albeit rarely in the twenty-first century, to describe professional stage productions of plays). In the Restoration theatre, actresses first appeared on the English public stage. Although only two playhouses monopolized legitimate theatre in London, they were more than adequate to meet the demand. In fact, their managers frequently had difficulty filling the houses. The theatre was public, but it was not the popular entertainment it had been in the days of Shakespeare. Rather, it was a plaything of London’s upper classes, a toy of the court. Respectable Londoners usually stayed away, not only because of the rowdy and dangerous behavior of the aristocrats and the shocking sentiments uttered by their stage counterparts, but also because they considered female players to be immoral. The dominance of king and courtiers in the audience guaranteed not decorum, but usually the reverse. There were frequent riots, sometimes fatal. Peace officers could do little to restrain their “betters.” During performances, fops, wits, and pseudo-wits chattered incessantly. Prostitutes solicited trade. Gallants, inebriated or not, felt free to wander into the wings and the dressing rooms and would accost the actresses as soon as they came off stage. The Prologue to William Wycherley’s The Country Wife— We set no guards upon our tiring-room, But when with flying colors there you come, We patiently, you see, give up to you Our poets, virgins, nay, our matrons too.

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—was accurate. Comedies of manners were played for audiences of no manners. Even though the Puritans lost the war, they did not disappear from the nation. Like the so-called silent majority of the last half of the twentieth century and not so silent evangelists in the twenty-first, they remained while hippies, so-called hippies and generally those considered to be politically to the left of center seemed to hold sway. The built-up resentments of the former moved and eventually burst to the surface, becoming highly vocal, legible, and forceful. In the seventeenth century, a major target that the religious and even ordinary subjects of the king attacked was immorality. Its locus included playhouses. As soon after the Restoration as 1677, Parliament passed the Sunday Observance Act, which legally forbade commercial occupations on the Sabbath except for food service. “Any recreation of a public nature must be confined to the parish in which one resided and must not prevent the performance of one’s religious duties.” This Act remained in force throughout the eighteenth century, when in 1780 Parliament passed another Sunday Observance Act that prohibited the use of any building or room for public entertainment or debate on Sundays. As close to our day as 1930, Parliament debated whether to repeal the Sunday Observance Act and permit London theatres, music halls, and movie houses to open on the Sabbath—a bill vigorously opposed by such organizations as the Lord’s Day Observance Society as “a fight to the finish against Sunday entertainments of all kinds.” The measure failed. The law was not repealed until 1969.10 Much of the criticism of Restoration comedy is a variation of Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), which applied these epithets to it and denounced this type of comedy as “a large collection of debauchery” interlaced with “smuttiness.” His argument—that these comedies are immoral and should be banned—is grounded on the fact that they offend traditional morals (DTC 352, 358). They ask us to sympathize with sexually voracious heroes and heroines because of their insatiability. The hero is not charming despite his debauchery but because of it. There is no eleventh-hour repentance, nor are we asked to expect one. Unlike Prince Hal in King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, the appealing young man does not expect to virtuously abandon youthful indiscretions for “the good life.” He is already living the good life. It should come as no surprise that Puritans and other religious Britons considered him immoral and had misgivings about the theatre, which bred him, and actors and actresses, who embodied him and the women he loved.

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Why, although the behavior of characters in Restoration plays is immoral, do some members of later periods admire or find fun in them? One reason is esthetic. Their assumptions about human desires exist in a framework of social behavioral patterns. Their witty heroes and heroines strive to satisfy their desires in accordance with rules of social conduct. How they do so is as important as if not more important than their fulfillment. The young men do not simply try to seduce a woman, but to do so with style, dexterity, and wit. In addition, the morality these plays allegedly violate is often only the professed, conventional morality of their admirers. Restoration rakes seldom rape their stage victims; rather, they sweet-talk them, and when a liaison is arranged, both parties are willing and eager. As just indicated, perhaps the most influential work that advocates censoring or banning from the stage comedies of and like those of the Restoration is also its most prominent summation, Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, which speaks for Puritans and non-Puritan believers in traditional morality. Notice that he published it at the end of or a bit later than the period when this type of comedy flourished. While Restoration comedy may not have been quite dead, it was in its death throes. Collier had virtually won the argument and was largely preaching to the converted. His title summarizes the work: English stage comedy had become immoral and profane, which it should not be. For over two centuries, his influence prevailed. It took two world wars before his notions seemed quaint and old-fashioned. Britain had shifted from pre-Commonwealth to Commonwealth and then to Restoration, after which the nation swung to less permissive views of sex, which prevailed in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and part of the twentieth centuries. To Collier, the main purposes of plays include the recommendation of virtue and discommendation of vice, “to make folly and falsehood contemptible,” and everything that is wicked infamous and avoided. Alas, writers for the stage had gone in the opposite direction, which he found intolerable, and he gave examples: smutty speech, cursing, profanity, taking God’s name in vain, maltreatment of the clergy, and making the main characters libertines whose debauchery is successful. His chapter titles catalogue these deficiencies. First is “The Immodesty of the Stage.” After citing examples of characters and plays, he calls them a collection of debauchery “sometimes in disguise and sometimes without it.” Their only possible intentions are “to weaken the defenses of virtue,” “to extinguish shame, and make lewdness a diversion.” He is careful to cite respectable

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classical authority to buttress his argument: “It was upon the account of these disorders that Plato banished poets [from] his Commonwealth [The Republic, Book III].” All these matters are worsened by—of course—sexuality. “The gentle sex” is an old-fashioned, condescending term which, to his credit, Collier does not use; but, to his discredit, his discussion of women amounts to it. For instance: “Obscenity in any company is a rustic, uncreditable talent, but among women ’tis particularly rude.” Since women of good reputation would find such talk offensive in conversation, why should it be entertaining on the stage? “Do the women leave all the regards to decency and conscience behind them when they come to the playhouse? Or does the place transform their inclinations and turn their former aversions into pleasure?” Obviously, these questions are rhetorical. Collier chastises dramatists for making most female characters whores, for having them “speak smuttily” without even “the poor refuge of a double meaning to fly to,” and when a sentence has two meanings “the worst is generally turned to the audience.” The chapter “The Profaneness of the Stage” focuses on “cursing and swearing” and “abuse of religion and Holy Scripture,” with examples aplenty. “The Clergy Abused by the Stage” and “The Stage Poets Make Their Principal Persons Vicious and Reward Them at the End of the Play” are also amply illustrated. In Etherege’s The Man of Mode, he charges, a gentleman is a “whoring, swearing, smutty atheistical man,” qualifications that “complete the idea of honor” (DTC 351–58). By the time Collier published his arguments, the outcome of the issue had essentially been decided. Restoration comedy was not so much censored as it was superseded. Because what theatre audiences wanted to see had changed, so had the plays on offer. The libertine and rake left, and in the final act, the lovers were on their way to the altar instead of the bedchamber. As licentiousness fell from favor, comic dialogue became notably less erotic. In 1822, fifteen years before Victoria’s coronation, Charles Lamb, in “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century” (soon after that century’s demise), admits that the comedy of manners—a term not synonymous with Restoration comedy, which is one form of it—“is quite extinct on our stage.” His reasons? “The times cannot bear them” and “their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test.” However, he is sophisticated enough to have a few wistful regrets. He does not say he thoroughly enjoys them but is “glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience,” because “I come back to my cage”— an arresting image, so to speak—“fresher and more healthily after it.” Their characters exist in almost a world of fairyland. They “do not offend

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my moral sense; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all.” Their world “has no reference whatever to the world that is” (DTC 609–11). By 1856, when Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote “Comic Dramatists of the Restoration,” Victoria had been enthroned for almost two decades. Although he does not thoroughly condemn a newly published volume of these plays, he comes close, citing “the opinion of many very respectable people”—a phrase common in Victorian and Edwardian justifications for theatre censorship—which is that they “ought not to be reprinted.” He does not condemn the volume outright but cannot recommend it “as an appropriate Christmas present for young ladies.” Clever and entertaining as these plays may be, they are “a disgrace to our language and our national character.” What is immoral should not be shown to “the young and susceptible in constant connection with what is attractive” (DTC 613–15). Before continuing with the censorship of the theatre, let us return a few years to the censorship of other writings in order to demonstrate that censorship was part of the fabric of the times (and for long periods before and after these times). As Mette Newth observes, the rapid growth of printed newsletters and newspapers in Europe in the early seventeenth century “represented a huge improvement of information sources for the literate peoples of Europe. But it also increased the authorities’ worry that unlimited access to information would be harmful to society and public morals, particularly in times of war or internal crisis.”11 On 14 June 1643, Parliament issued an Act to regulate publishing: no “Book, Pamphlet, paper, nor part of any such Book, Pamphlet, or paper shall from henceforth be printed, bound, stitched or put to sale” except under specified conditions. Plays were excluded because “the great late abuses and frequent disorders” were in printing “false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed Papers, Pamphlets, and Books” against religion and government. John Milton objected that this Act would discourage learning and stop truth by obliterating what we know and preventing new knowledge. In protest, he published Areopagitica in 1644. Its words still resonate: It is “as good almost [to] kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.” Although the Areopagitica became one of the most quoted arguments against censorship, it had no effect on this law, which was renewed several times until 1695, when despite resistance by the House of Lords it was terminated.12

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The Licensing Act of 1737 As Knowles makes clear, King Henry VIII inaugurated The Act for the Advancement of True Religion in 1543 partly because of the anxieties that resulted from his policies, notably the Reformation, for speeches and writings had begun to deal with current controversies. According to a writer signed G.M.G., which may be the initials of his name, active censorship of plays may have begun in 1552, “when a poet was thrown into the Tower for the offence of ‘making plays.’” Although Henry VIII’s Act aimed to do what its title proclaimed, it also, perhaps primarily, intended to suppress—in sermons, books, and every medium of expression, including plays—the dissemination of unorthodox views or opinions that might stir up heresy and sedition. In view of what was to come—plays by Ibsen and Shaw, for example—we should recognize that “There was no attempt to censor morals.” As we know, the great period of dramatic and theatrical activity in Elizabethan and Jacobean times preceded the suppression of such activity during the Commonwealth. When playwrights emerged and reemerged after the Restoration, they were still controlled by the Lord Chamberlain and Master of the Revels, but they enjoyed greater freedom than before. Afterwards, upon encountering another puritanical revival, dramatic authors turned for inspiration and subject matter to the contemporary political arena, one result being Parliament’s passage of The Licensing Act of 1737, which established theatrical censorship in Britain for over two centuries. In Knowles’s words, “Perhaps the most radical change affected by this law was the uncomplimentary inference that the drama, unlike the other branches of literature, the press or the platform, needed special supervision, hence special legislation.”13 In the early eighteenth century, Richard Findlater reports, when political party warfare promoted “vigorous journalism in the expanding press, a certain amount of political satire also reached the stage.” In plays, the government “was justifiably regarded as fair game.” In addition to the songs in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), another reason for its huge popularity “was its attack upon the ‘great men’ of the time. Although Gay wrote in broad and generalized terms about ‘statesmen’ and ‘courtiers,’ contemporary audiences gleefully recognized the targets in George II’s Court and [Prime Minister Robert] Walpole’s Cabinet.” So profitable was The Beggar’s Opera (sixty-two performances, a record at the time) that it was commonly said to have made Gay rich and Rich gay (John Rich was manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, where it played, and “gay” meant

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free of all cares, since he was wealthy; Gay received about £700—which would be about £144,000 today—and Rich £4000: more than £149 million today). Banning so successful a play would have been politically awkward, but the end of the year brought something more awkward: Gay’s sequel to it, Polly. A few days after the submission of Polly to the Lord Chamberlain, he refused to license it, “‘without any reasons assigned,’ said the indignant author, ‘or any charge against me for having given any particular offence.’” The reasons were obvious. Walpole did not want to be ridiculed on stage again and used the Lord Chamberlain to ensure he was not, at least for the time being. However, the Lord Chamberlain’s authority did not include books and newspapers, and “Walpole no doubt believed with theatre censors throughout the ages, that what might be dangerous to stage was safe to read.” Polly was not performed until 1777. But Gay stopped bothering Walpole earlier: he died in 1732. Before his death, a more potent dramatist emerged to enrage the Prime Minister, Henry Fielding, whose successful satires, beginning in 1730 with Rape Upon Rape, attacked him and his cabinet (the title refers to the corruption of politicians and the judiciary). When Tom Thumb (also 1730) proved more popular, he expanded it to three acts in 1733, retitled it The Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb, and more pointedly attacked Walpole. Ridiculing Walpole’s public and private morals, not to mention the King and Queen, Fielding had staged The Welsh Opera as a companion piece to Tom Thumb in 1731. By 1736, he became manager of the Haymarket Theatre and although he knew his theatre might be closed because it infringed on the monopoly of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, his other lampoons also mocked Walpole’s government.14 As Findlater succinctly concludes, “By this time Robert Walpole had had enough.” Furthermore, “he knew that his power was slipping. Opposition to his ascendancy was growing and widening.” Since by 1737 he could no longer ignore Fielding’s barbs, “he armed himself with an invulnerable moral excuse.” He cast himself not as an enemy of political liberty, but as a defender of decency. He received, he announced, an anonymous manuscript of a farce, The Vision of the Golden Rump, whose author, he and his representatives implied, was Fielding. Not only was this attack against him treasonable, he maintained, it was indecent. We still do not know who wrote it, how Walpole obtained it, or whether it actually existed (if it did, it has not survived). According to The Times many years later, “it was written at Walpole’s instigation to frighten Parliament into passing a censorship Act.” According to Thomas, Carlton, and Etienne,

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The attack on Fielding implied that he might be guilty of seditious libel. The seditious libel laws made it an offence to bring the Government into hatred or contempt, or to foment public resentment against the Government in print, or to publish writings which subverted the authority of the King. For the press, which enjoyed considerable liberty, and for authors and publishers, this was a serious charge, which (if proved) could lead to heavy fines, punishment at the pillory, and a banning order.

Allegedly, Walpole circulated copies of it to some members of Parliament, but no one is sure of this. “Walpole rapidly drafted a Bill and pushed it through the House.” Superficially, the Bill seemed innocuous. It was not a new Act but supposedly an amendment of a 1714 Act “for reducing the laws relating to rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars, and vagrants into one Act of Parliament,” and—citing actors—more effectively punishing them by “sending them whither they ought to be sent, as relates to the common players of interludes,” whom the Act deems to be rogues and vagabonds. If anyone acts, represents, or performs, or causes to be acted, represented, or performed for payment or reward, “any interlude, tragedy, comedy, opera, play-farce, or other entertainment of the stage, or any part or parts therein,” without authority or license, “every such person shall for every such offence suffer any of the pains or penalties inflicted by the said recited act.” The Act emphasizes, “No new interlude, tragedy, comedy, opera, play, farce or other entertainment of the stage, or any part or parts therein, or any new prologue, or epilogue” could be performed without the approval of the Lord Chamberlain, to whom the manager or owner of a theatre (of which only Covent Garden and Drury Lane were legal), not the author, must submit it at least two weeks before the first performance. The Act would give the Lord Chamberlain absolute, arbitrary power “when and as often as he shall think fit” to prohibit performances of all stage productions in England and Wales (but not, for reasons that are unknown, Ireland). It contained no provision for appeal against his decision. If he deemed it necessary, he could close a theatre that gave a performance of an unlicensed play. For every performance of an unlicensed play, he could demand the forfeiture of fifty pounds from every person connected with the presentation. As Steve Nicholson emphasizes, “There was nothing in that Act, or in the subsequent Theatres Act of 1843, to define precisely the grounds on which a license could be refused; nor was there any requirement that a decision should be explained or defended.”

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In what Findlater calls a speech that “has become the locus classicus for the enemies of censorship,” Lord Chesterfield summarized “with masterly eloquence the basic case against the Lord Chamberlain.” Although the Bill may seem to be aimed only against the stage, he argued, it is directed elsewhere as well. “It is an arrow that does but glance upon the stage. The mortal wound seems designed against the liberty of the press. By this Bill you prevent a play’s being acted, but you do not prevent its being printed,” and if the Lord Chamberlain refuses to license a performance, it will surely be printed. Once this occurs, Parliament will be blamed for having failed to prohibit it from being published and will soon pass a Bill preventing an unlicensed play from being printed. Then writers will compose satires disguised as novels, secret histories, dialogues, and what not. From a theatrical precedent, Parliament would find reasons to eliminate free speech. He maintained that if poets and actors are restrained, “let them be restrained as other subjects are, by the known laws of their country: if they offend, let them be tried, as every Englishman ought to be, by God and their country.” Do not subject them to the arbitrary will of one person. A single man’s power “to judge and determine, without any limitation, without any control or appeal” is a power not in our laws and “inconsistent with our constitution.” Since this power is more absolute power than the king’s, it should not be vested in the Lord Chamberlain. Lord Chesterfield’s eloquence notwithstanding, his arguments were as unpersuasive then as the same arguments would be in 1909, when Parliament conducted hearings on the censorship. The Licensing Act passed in 1737, giving control of the stage to an official of the Royal Household, who appointed two Examiners of Plays to read plays and operas and propose whether the Lord Chamberlain should license them. This official became “an absolute arbiter with a supremacy established by law.” Lord Chesterfield’s prediction that publishers would not find themselves immune from censorship came to pass, but not as extensively as he anticipated. Publishers of works by such authors as Zola were prosecuted for and convicted of obscenity (they would deprave or corrupt readers). The subject of male homosexuality was taboo, and not only on the stage: the very word was unmentionable in the press. Contemporary readers of Oscar Wilde’s trials did not find it in newspapers, which employed code words, such as “acts of gross indecency.” While lesbianism was never a crime in England, the subject was taboo; code words were used. In 1928, more than three decades after Wilde’s trials, the home secretary banned Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which advocated tolerance for lesbians, and its publisher

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withdrew it. Thus, Lagretta Tallent Lenker concludes, the book was really censored by the government and its publisher.15

After 1737 As Shaw states in his 1898 Preface to Plays Pleasant, one result of the 1737 Licensing Act is that Henry Fielding, whom he calls “the greatest practicing dramatist, with the single exception of Shakespear, produced in England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century,” having been expelled from the profession of Aristophanes and Molière, took up “that of Cervantes; and since then the English novel has been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English drama has been its disgrace.” Placing himself in their company, Shaw describes himself as a victim of the Lord Chamberlain and his Examiner of Plays, “who robs, insults, and suppresses me as irresistibly as if he were the Tsar of Russia and I the meanest of his subjects.” The robbery consists of making Shaw pay him two guineas (two pounds and two shillings—more than £250 today) for reading each of his plays longer than one act, in order to obtain “an insolent and insufferable document” stating that it “‘does not in its general tendency contain anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage,’ and that the Lord Chamberlain therefore ‘allows’ its performance (confound his impudence!).” Despite this certificate, the Lord Chamberlain retains the right, as a citizen, to prosecute him or instigate another citizen to do so, for an outrage on public morals if he changes his mind. “Besides,” Shaw asks, “if he really protects the public against my immorality, why does not the public pay him for the service? The policeman does not look to the thief for his wages, but to the honest man whom he protects against the thief.” If Shaw refuses to pay, “this tyrant can practically ruin any manager who produces my play in defiance of him” by imposing a fine of £50 (over £6200 today) on everyone who participates in its representation, “from the callboy to the principal tragedian. Since he lives, not at the expense of the taxpayer, but by blackmailing the author, no political party would gain ten votes by abolishing him” (CPP 1: 19–21). Cleverly, Shaw makes robbery (a charge readers can understand) prominent in his case against stage censorship. He must pay the Lord Chamberlain and the Examiner of Plays for the privilege of deciding whether to ban his plays. One year after the Licensing Act was passed, said G.M.G., “the Lord Chamberlain’s new powers seem fairly to have gone to his head, for we find him attempting to enforce a ‘licensed’ play, by placing on the stage

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two files of grenadiers with fixed bayonets.” A later Examiner of Plays, John Larpent, objected to an allusion in The Whim (1795), by Lady Eglantine Wallace, to “the notorious success, at Court, of elderly ladies, described in the dialogue as the ‘fat ladies of fashion,’” which he considered too pointed a reference to allow. Instead of demanding the line be cut, he decided, on the day of performance, to ban the play. Like other Examiners of Plays, he lacked a sense of humor. When George Colman the Younger was appointed Examiner of Plays in 1824, The Times reported years later, he “became a dragon of propriety in office. No one on the stage might call a woman an angel; even a man might not be said to play the fiddle like an angel (were not angels scriptural beings?), and the mildest oaths were severely expunged.” He considered a play about revolutionary sentiments in Poland too dangerous to be licensed in Britain. “Scriptural personages might not be even mentioned, nor oaths or obscene expressions (including the word ‘thighs’) employed.” As James Woodfield observes, these moral constraints satisfied what Matthew Arnold called “‘the prison of Puritanism’” in Victorian Britain, which demanded respectability. Woodfield quotes St. John Ervine’s description of his theatre-­ loving aunt, who “occasionally fell into a panic ‘when she thought of what would be the state of her immortal soul if God should call her home while she was in the theatre.’” Evelyn Millard, an actress who, soon after she had married in about 1900, “refused to say ‘I say to you by my unborn child,’ because she felt the public would consider the line indelicate.” The demand for respectability so falsified life as dramatized on the stage that the theatre “offered only an escape from life, not an examination of it.” One of the essential objections to the 1737 censorship law, including G.M.G.’s, is not simply to his and The Times’s specific examples, but to “the unique secrecy of the Censor’s jurisdiction, a secrecy perfectly fitting an authority which … can claim direct descent from the Star Chamber.”16 In 1837, Victoria ascended the throne. The era named for her lasted until her death on 22 January 1901. Although today we find pre-Victorian and Victorian instances of offensiveness and their repression amusing, the censors, like the Queen, were not amused. Akin to those who came before them, middle-class Victorians were accustomed to efforts by their social betters to restrain, dominate, and control their lives—which is not to say they liked all such actions. Yet some of them became persuaded that such measures were for the public good or moral decency; others that they were for the religious or educational benefit of the young, innocent, ignorant, and susceptible, who were in classes below theirs; others that they

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bolstered their own authority and kept those below in order; and still others that many of these strictures did not touch their lives or were easy to ignore or evade. The industrial revolution, in full swing, grew rapidly through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. On both sides of the Atlantic, social conditions in large cities were changing as an increasingly sizable number of single men and women moved there from the country and from Ireland and other countries for jobs. Along with the growing population came growing anonymity. Workers were under the thumbs and scrutiny of their employers, some of whom required female employees to live in company dormitories, but it was difficult to be one’s brother’s or sister’s keeper when there were so many of them. “At the end of workdays and on weekends,” John Houchin writes, “men and women went to amusement parks, dance halls, vaudeville or music hall theatres.” Not coincidentally, the number of whorehouses grew. Novels, written and translated into English, reflected “a more realistic view of society, challenging middle-class ideas of propriety that operated to the benefit of the wealthier classes.” Many called such books “‘indecent, depraved’” and “‘a menace to society.’” They “feared that commercialized erotica was too alluring and too widespread to be resisted by society in general.” Although the middle and wealthier classes tolerated no control of their own sexual practices, “they simultaneously demanded laws to proscribe similar behavior among workers and the poor.”17 At the start of the nineteenth century, London—the center of government of a vast empire—was the largest city in Europe, and it grew phenomenally in size, population, and prosperity. Its first census, in 1801, gave the number of inhabitants as one million (almost twice that of Paris), a figure that more than doubled half a century later (when Paris had a million); by 1911, it had over seven million (when Paris had under three million). For all its wealth, mansions, and palaces, districts of extreme poverty and squalor rose. In addition to job-seekers from English-speaking parts of Britain, the populace of London—a great port city and capital of the largest empire in Europe—included, especially near the docks, Chinese, blacks, and Indian sailors. It also contained people from European countries including, by mid-century, hundreds of political refugees seeking the safety of Britain’s laws, which were more liberal than those of the nations from which they fled. Toward the end of the century, that number grew considerably as Eastern European asylum-seekers escaped pogroms and other forms of oppression. In the first half of the nineteenth century, urban sprawl, which had grown in the eighteenth century, vastly enlarged

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the suburbs. Property developers built houses along main roads between suburbia and London; they then filled in the spaces between the new houses, frequently for the respectable working class. For the wealthier, they created detached villas in suburbs. In the second half of the century, the metropolitan population’s growth was chiefly in the outer suburbs. As international commerce grew in eastern London, the dockside lands by the Thames created new communities for the tens of thousands of longshoremen, chandlers, and sailors who worked there. Early in the century, open spaces in fashionable Regent’s Park and Trafalgar, in the West End, were created. Nearby were unspeakably wretched slums. Much of London was plagued by poverty, and workers augmented low wages by crime and prostitution. In addition to a growing number of male workers—including shop workers, furniture makers, upholsterers, glaziers, painters, and decorators—many thousands of women arrived to become domestic servants (according to the 1891 census, 238,000 of them) for the escalating middle class. In working-class neighborhoods, pawn shops flourished, reflecting intermittent and seasonal employment. Street lighting reached many slums, but getting rid of garbage became harder.18 These rapid changes in the nineteenth century further solidified social and geographical boundaries among classes. As poverty increased, so did demonstrations to protest it. While the industrial revolution made numerous people rich, it made life worse than ever for a far larger number of families in rural and urban areas. With many people moving into cities, trying to find jobs—which were fewer and which paid less than they anticipated—robberies increased. The middle classes became alarmed by public disturbances and airing of grievances, which occurred more and more often. To them and to the wealthy, the poor seemed virtually a different race, if not species, connected by a few miles or even yards, but separated by an abyss. Wealthier classes saw them as indistinguishable from criminals—particularly when they protested in crowds in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square, where the police, mandated to maintain public order and safety, were confrontational, whether or not the likelihood of riots was realistic. Economic difficulties increasingly politicized the working class. Reformers, particularly the Chartists—the first national working-class movement, which thrived from the 1830s through the 1850s—agitated by petitions to the House of Commons, buttressed by mass meetings, to pressure politicians to enfranchise the male working classes. They influenced public disturbance. The name comes from the People’s Charter of 1838, which demanded six reforms to democratize the political system: a

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vote for all men at least twenty-one years old and not imprisoned, a secret ballot, no property qualification to become a Member of Parliament, payment for MPs (which would enable those non-wealthy to stand for a seat), equal representation of voters (instead of less populous districts having more representatives than more populated ones), and annual elections. The Chartists opposed unemployment and wage cuts. To the peerage, land owners, and property owners, these demands were anathema. For mobs to make such dictates to them smacked of insurrection and rebellion, recalling the excesses of the French Revolution. One of its leaders, Bronterre O’Brien, wrote articles that convinced English workers they were a class between slaves and citizens, without political rights (in Major Barbara, Shaw mischievously refers to them when Snobby Price—who talks socialism but is a hypocrite, slacker, coward, and thief—says he was christened Bronterre O’Brien). Their demonstrations and riots included looting, destruction of mansions, raiding police stations and arson, plus preventing fire engines from extinguishing fires. Testifying to their organizational skills, they created disturbances that occurred almost simultaneously in different locales. Because of widespread economic hardships, authorities regarded manufacturing districts as powder kegs that a small spark could easily ignite. Indeed, an outbreak in one district quickly spread to its neighbors.19 In 1855, disorderly outbursts erupted in Hyde Park over the Sunday Trading Bill, which outlawed buying and selling on the Sabbath—the only day working people had off. Among the eyewitness reporters was Karl Marx, who wrote (in German), “The working class receives its wages late on Saturdays; Sunday trading, therefore, exists solely for them. They are the only section of the population forced to make their small purchases on Sundays, and the new bill is directed against them alone.” In Hyde Park, James Bligh, a Chartist leader, addressed 50,000 protesters. A police inspector, leading forty constables swinging truncheons, told him Hyde Park was the Crown’s property and they had no right to hold a meeting there. The park was public property, Bligh insisted. The inspector threatened to arrest him if he continued to address the crowd, which swelled to more than 200,000, mostly workers, many with their families. When the police tried to move the leaders to a ground-level area and shoved groups of people, a Chartist protested, “Six days a week we are treated like slaves and now Parliament wants to rob us of the bit of freedom we still have on the seventh.” They shouted, “Let’s go to the road, to the carriages!” The crowd attacked horse riders and persons in carriages. Elegantly attired

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people in coaches ran a gauntlet among pedestrians, whom constables forced off the road. One journalist wrote of “a cacophony of grunting, hissing, whistling, squeaking, snarling, growling, croaking, shrieking, groaning, rattling, howling, gnashing sounds.” More police arrived in Hyde Park and for hours violently scattered the crowd. In 1886—the coldest winter in thirty years—a riot called “Black Monday” took place. A character in Major Barbara recollects it: the unemployed, after demonstrating in Trafalgar Square, threw stones, breaking windows of rich men’s clubs when the club members jeered at them on their way to Hyde Park to a meeting the police had approved. Headlines in the New York Times proclaimed “London Under Mob Rule,” “Rioting in Trafalgar Square,” and “The Police Powerless.” Later in 1886, the Tory Home Secretary declared that a Hyde Park rally established by the Reform League to advocate the extension of voting rights to men who did not own property would be illegal. The League marched there anyhow, to be confronted by 3000 foot and mounted policemen. About 200,000 sympathetic bystanders joined its members to overwhelm the police, who called for military support. The mob threw stones at them and held the meeting. The next year, “Bloody Sunday” (13 November) culminated mounting tensions over the right to demonstrate in Trafalgar Square. Soldiers arrived to help the police disperse, at times violently, protests by the unemployed, many of whom slept in the square and washed in its fountains. Whereas the British economy had grown and unemployment was low in the mid-­ nineteenth century, unemployment and underemployment rose in the late nineteenth century. Worried about dangers that radical oratory might create, the Police Commissioner banned all meetings in Trafalgar Square. On Bloody Sunday over 4000 policemen, augmented by hundreds of constables and armed soldiers, tried to stop tens of thousands of respectable people, along with putatively unrespectable anarchists and socialists, from protesting against unemployment. Three were killed, seventy-five hospitalized, and fifty arrested. Maintaining “law and order” policies, the government repressed freedom of speech and assembly. Bloody Sunday also focused public attention on the Metropolitan Police as London’s public order arbiters. Among those present was a terrified Shaw.20

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The Police and Censorship Recent paragraphs have used the term police about as often as the word censorship. The two are related. To adapt Karl von Clausewitz’s aphorism (On War, 1833), the use of the police is a continuation of politics by other means. By stopping rallies and preventing speeches from being made, the police censor what working-class audiences might learn from them. As Alex Vitale says, “the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements.” When it is viable, the police preemptively and aggressively try to prevent the formation of organizations, movements, and public expressions of anger, “but when necessary they will fall back on brute force.”21 After having modernized the police system in Ireland in 1814, which he called not the police but the Peace Preservation Force, Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary (Secretary of State for the Home Department) and later founder of the Conservative Party, secured passage of the Metropolitan Police Act in 1829, creating the London Metropolitan Police Service. Whereas in Ireland members of the new police force were nicknamed “peelers” after his surname, in England they were nicknamed “bobbies” after his given name. In the early nineteenth century, the term police was new in Britain. The word is French. The English governing classes were fearful of the French Revolution, which lasted from 1789 to 1799—thus a recent memory. In spite of England’s 1815 victory over France in the Napoleonic wars, governing and governed classes were not keen on using a French word for this organization. Ridiculing the new force, Londoners called its members “Jenny Darbies” (from the French gendarmes) and other derogatory words. An early print showed “a husky peeler with two large pistols in his belt, brandishing a cutlass in one hand and his other arm thrust forward with fist clenched in what looks like a pugilistic pose.” General opposition to the new police did not last. Within a few years, Wilbur Miller relates, the middle and upper classes supported them, recognizing their usefulness “in holding the line against radical protests.” The middle classes depended on them “for protection and order” and for fostering social stability to help discipline an unruly industrialized population. The police “contained disorder with minimal violence,” which increased their sense of security and economic stability. Although aristocrats created them and continued to dominate society, “to a great extent

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the police were a middle-class institution,” since this class “probably benefited most directly from the new force.” Both middle- and upper-class Londoners “felt that their persons and property were increasingly secure” because of the police.22 Before Peel created the police force, authorities had called upon armed soldiers to silence protesters and neutralize the effect of crowds listening to their messages or demonstrating their grievances. Peel charged the police with preserving the public peace, preventing crime and detaining or arresting offenders. As Norman Gash says, he wanted what the old system was not: “a disciplined working body. Salaries, choice of personnel, and rules for promotion aimed to ensure that the Metropolitan Police would not be ‘a sanctuary for the incompetent and the genteel.’” Of the first 2800 new policemen, 600 kept their jobs. The first policeman was sacked for drunkenness after four hours on the job. The turnover was also attributable to such factors as unsuitability for the job and disciplinary problems. In the force’s early years, personnel losses were the Metropolitan Police’s major problem. By the 1830s, however, the force surpassed Peel’s expectations and Parliament congratulated itself on having established it. London’s Metropolitan Police became the model for police throughout the country and abroad.23 The goals of this police force were not as entirely benign as the previous paragraph may suggest. Vitale reminds us, “The signal event that showed the need for a professional police force was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819”—so named because it conflated the occurrence at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester and the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, where the English conclusively defeated Napoleon Bonaparte. With widespread poverty and skilled workers displaced by industrialization, there were nationwide calls for political reforms. In 1819, 60 to 80,000 people gathered in Manchester to demand representation in Parliament, “only to have the rally declared illegal. A cavalry charge with sabers killed a dozen protestors and injured several hundred more.” Foot soldiers ruthlessly used the stocks of their rifles and their bayonets to bludgeon and stab the unarmed civilians. Parliament passed vagrancy laws that aimed to force people to take jobs at the low wages that were offered. “What was needed was a force that could both maintain political control and help produce a new economic order of industrial capitalism.” Peel’s London Metropolitan Police did both. Notwithstanding its claims of political neutrality, the main purposes of the new police were to protect property, suppress riots, put down strikes, and “produce a disciplined industrial work force. This system was expanded

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throughout England, which was awash in movements against industrialization.” As F.C.  Mather recognizes, “The weight of Queen Victoria’s influence was thrown on the side of energetic repression.” Stanley Palmer writes, “virtually all authorities agree that the early police emphasis was on preventive maintenance of order, whether by patrolling or baton charging.” The vast majority of those arrested were drunks, vagrants, and disorderly characters, not major criminals. “Emphasis on the detection of crime did not emerge until the second half of the century, after the period of collective disorders, and even after 1870 detective departments were kept small and constables’ training in police science lagged behind that available on the Continent.” Disinterest in detection in Victorian times is evinced by the fact that Scotland Yard did not create a detective branch until 1842, and it numbered 8 out of a force of 4400. Later, more were added to this branch, but “official bumbling continued,” as may be seen in popular detective fiction. As Palmer puts it, “Sherlock Holmes was forever outwitting Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.”24 Views of the police often followed class lines. In music halls, a popular working-class entertainment, songs and patter depicted policemen unflatteringly. In “The Modern Peeler,” Wilbur Miller writes, the policeman is rough and corrupt. “Brandishing his truncheon, the Modern Peeler declares that it would be bad for the health of any citizen who took his number” (his badge number, which identified him). When he first became a policeman, he looked after other people’s welfare, not his own; he did not do so for long. He justifies rummaging through a drunk’s pockets: “‘I consider I remove temptation from the path of some poor wretch who might be induced through poverty to plunder the person of a fellow creature.’” He allows rowdy medical students to bribe him to go their way, but he mercilessly clubs drunken workers. The next day, at court, “‘I told his Worship of the brutal and cowardly attack the wretches had made on me, and wound up by saying that I feared I was internally injured from the kicks I had received; of course the prisoners had the impudence to say I was a liar, but his Worship (as usual) paid no attention to their statement, and fined ’em £5 each, or three months on the stepper [treadmill].’” Since £5—the maximum legal fine for assaulting a policeman—was too high for most workers, they were imprisoned. The poor resented fines as epitomizing one law for the rich, another for the poor. From music halls to cheap “penny gaff” theatres in the poorer areas, where admission was one or two pence, performances in which “policemen were getting very much the worst of a free fight” met “the unbounded delight of pit and gallery.” An

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editorial in the Daily News in 1868 said that in almost all the “penny dreadful” pulp novels read by the poor, “the hero is the criminal. To befool the police, to escape from justice, or to foil the law are the most favorite adventures of these jaunty and charming villains.” In working-­ class entertainments, the policeman is an unpleasant character, not the servant of an impartial legal system. By and large, the image of the police was a lackey of the propertied classes. Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “was not being particularly radical when he pointed out that legal officials saw the interests of their own class as the ‘true cornerstone of law and order.’” Although the police oppressed the working classes, within the framework of this class-stratified society they were sensitive to proletarian values that differed from those of the middle class.25

1832 to 1892 During the century after the Licensing Act of 1737, as Leon Hugo says, “social values underwent some reshuffling.” In 1831 Edward Bulwer-­ Lytton—a popular novelist, playwright, and poet who opposed stage censorship—became a member of Parliament and would become a baron in 1866. In 1833 he presented his Select Committee’s report on dramatic literature, which—largely because a bevy of witnesses favored censorship—resulted in maintaining the Lord Chamberlain’s stranglehold on theatre; but (a playwright, he) it emphasized the disparity between the copyright protection of dramatists and that of other writers. The committee recommended that the author of a play should enjoy the same legal rights and protections as the author of other literary genres and that performances of his writings should not be legal without his consent. If protection for printing and reprinting a nondramatic work was contingent on its first publication, the committee recommended, a similar form of protection—the date of its first public performance—should protect the author of a dramatic work. Yet the Dramatic Copyright Act of 1833 brought together performance and publication copyrights in the imprecise term “copyright performance.” It was generally believed, without “clear legal support,” that a writer could obtain performance copyright only by the production of his written work on stage and that he would lose the “performing right” if his play were published before it was performed. This led to the practice of having friends, not necessarily actors, give a recital “of a manuscript play in a hall, or other ‘place of public

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entertainment,’ usually without costumes or scenery.” After a “copyright performance,” the author could publish his play without fear that it would be pirated. However, he could only obtain such a performance through a theatre manager, who would submit the play to the Lord Chamberlain for a license, and a single customer (only one was necessary) would pay a guinea for admission. As the spectator was usually a friend, the author might reimburse him. The box office return was proof of performance. According to Richard Findlater’s accurate diagnosis, the affair was “a strange pact of mutual humbug,” with the author submitting a mutilated version of his play and the Lord Chamberlain licensing it, both knowing that the approved text would never have a second performance.26 As the next chapter demonstrates, this was precisely the case with Mrs Warren’s Profession. By the 1830s, as we have seen, political concerns were no longer an issue in the theatre, their prominence having been superseded by moral and religious matters. Efforts by Bulwer-Lytton and others to loosen the censorship of the 1737 Act were fruitless. Worse than fruitless were the parliamentary hearings in 1842, which resulted in the Theatres Act (also known as the Theatre Regulation Act) of 1843. This Act expanded the Lord Chamberlain’s control beyond the two “legitimate theatres” in London to every theatre in Great Britain (but not in Ireland) and authorized the Examiner of Plays to ban (officially, to recommend that the Lord Chamberlain ban) performances of a play which might contain anything immoral or improper; indecent in costume, dance, or gesture; offensive to living persons; or capable of producing riots or breaches of the peace. Such terms, as Hugo writes, “the lawmakers in their wisdom did not define, thus opening the way for a succession of Examiners to read and interpret the Act as waywardly as they wished.” Subsequently, select committees in 1853 and 1866 confirmed the Examiner’s grip on the theatre. “Technically, the granting of a license for a play did not preclude a prosecution being instituted against those involved in its production,” Nicholson observes. “Yet to take legal action against a play which had been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain would be to challenge the authority of a member of the royal household,” which meant, in practice, that “once a script had received its license it was extremely unlikely that it would be challenged in a court of law.”27 As the Assistant Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department was later to tell the Joint Select Committee of The House of Lords and The House of Commons on Stage Plays (Censorship) in 1909, the criteria for prohibiting a play from being performed are

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“absolutely vague” in both the 1737 and 1843 Acts (1909 Report 1–3, 30–31). Censorship of the drama became an issue for, as The Times put it, “a body, earnest if small, of lovers of the drama,” which was “created to some extent perhaps by the very different influences of Tom Robertson and Dumas fils,” wanted to the theatre to contain “some kind of ‘criticism of life.’” Also, the noted scholar Dr. F.J. Furnivall founded the Shelley Society in order to stage the poet’s play The Cenci (1819) in 1886, but the Examiner of Plays refused to license it because of its theme of incest. The Society evaded the ban by arranging a supposedly private performance for members who paid not for tickets but for membership, the benefits of which included free tickets (about these matters, more below).28 Before The Cenci and before the 1909 Parliamentary Report of its censorship committee hearings was a report from the 1892 Select Committee of the House of Commons, also on the censorship of theatre. Viewpoints about the theatre were slowly becoming different. What precipitated this was chiefly the public performance of William Archer’s translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in London in 1889 (to be dealt more fully in the next chapter). Before the last dozen years of the nineteenth century, English drama had been unoriginal. In the last decade of the century, English writers, who were inspired by Ibsen’s plays and productions of other unorthodox dramas in such liberated continental theatres as André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris and Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne in Berlin, wanted similarly serious English plays. But there were roadblocks, among them critics and other journalists who believed they wanted such a theatre in England, but what they really wanted was not exactly such a theatre. An unsigned editorial in the Weekly Comedy of 30 November 1889 asked if it were possible for a Théâtre Libre to be established in Britain—“a theatre free from the shackles of the censor, free from the fetters of convention, unhampered by financial considerations.” Although the writer did not doubt this possibility, he added that a British Théâtre Libre “would aim neither at fostering playwriting of a merely didactic kind, nor at introducing subjects of an immoral or even unwholesomely realistic nature.” Unlike the French Théâtre Libre, “the British Free Stage should banish all that is vulgar, low and cynically immoral.” In other words, the answer was really No. Another roadblock was the Lord Chamberlain. According to several scholars, his Examiner of Plays “relied on censorship, pre-­censorship (where managers checked scripts before sending them for licensing), and

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even pre-pre-censorship, where playwrights checked the suitability of their play’s subjects before embarking on writing.”29 In 1892, to return to the Select Committee of the House of Commons, witnesses were questioned on issues including the censorship (the only one I treat). Expectedly, the theatre managers, including Henry Irving, who three years later became the first actor to be knighted and was one of the star attractions of the hearings, and the solicitor of the West End Theatre [Managers] Association, William F. Fladgate, who, speaking for his clients, urged that the Lord Chamberlain retain his power to license performances of plays. Fladgate was happy to call him autocratic, since his clients approved what he did. However, Irving, who also approved, declared, “we have never found anything autocratic [about him] in any way.” Other actor-managers followed this script: “I am most strongly in favor of retaining the present functions” and “I am strongly in favor of maintaining the jurisdiction of” the Lord Chamberlain. Lionel Brough, a seasoned provincial actor and manager, stumbled by calling the managers the “real censors” because they would not produce a play the public would not like and, conflictingly, “the public are our best censors,” thereby begging the question—that if the managers or the public were the real or best censors, why was an official censor necessary?—which no one asked. Michael Gunn, for over twenty years owner and manager of Dublin’s principal theatre, the Gaiety, said straightforwardly, “The fact of there being no obligation to have plays licensed in Ireland, has never, in my experience, given rise to any difficulty, no plays having ever been produced which have in any [way] offended public taste.” If an MP found that statement ironic, he did not say so publicly (1892 Report 44–45, 68, 217, 223, 229, 233). Another star witness, Clement Scott, the doyen of British theatre reviewers, stated his position succinctly: “I wholly disagree with those who maintain that the censorship should be abolished.” Disputing Lionel Brough’s assertion that the public is the best censor, Scott asked, “to whom is the public to appeal in case their feelings are outraged? To the nearest policeman or to the rough-and-ready power of pulling up the benches? The laws of decency and order must be administered by someone, and it is better [by] far to check before than to correct after.” He argued, “The preliminary stroke of the kindly blue pencil in a tentative play or sketch is better than the spreading of objectionable matter. Hundreds of ears may be poisoned before the remedy is found, and without a censor of first instance it would only be found after unnecessary and

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fruitless discussion in the public papers.” In practice, the censorship has “Not in the slightest” hampered dramatic art in England (1892 Report 326). The third star witness, Edward F. Smyth Pigott, who was Examiner of Stage Plays from 1874 to 1895, protested the use of the term censor because it may be used invidiously, for “to many minds it represents the Star Chamber and the Inquisition,” whereas he is simply an Examiner who performs a public service, since “for the sake of public order and decency, to say nothing of public morality and public manners, it is expedient that some preventive control over representations on the stage should be exercised by the State”—a position that is alien to our twenty-first-century view but that is one with which few MPs and few members of the Victorian public disagreed. Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Department, smugly told the Chairman, who mentioned censorship of plays, “We do not like it to be called ‘censorship.’” “What do you call it?” “The examination of plays.” No one pressed him on the issue. Although Pigott’s jurisdiction excluded Ireland, few plays were performed there that were not first licensed for performance in England, and the few that were, were usually performed in England later. As Examiner of Plays, he said modestly, he merely advised the Lord Chamberlain, which is technically accurate. Less modestly, he added, his position required “a wide knowledge of the world and [a] cultivated sympathy with literature and art which is equally regardful of public morality and public decency,” but he disingenuously claimed he was neither an arbiter of taste nor a censor of morals. He quoted from his 1883 memorandum, a guide he composed for future examiners if they were questioned on their official role, that which was sometimes “invidiously called a ‘censorship’ is nothing in effect but the friendly and perfectly disinterested action of an adviser who has the permanent interests of the stage at heart.” He reminded the MPs, “Two besetting sins of the stage in all times and all countries, licentiousness and scurrility, have not been absent from our own, and have continued to excite those religious and social prejudices against the art and profession of acting which are now so happily diminished.” Without his office’s prior prevention, dramatists would have written obscene works and “unscrupulous” theatre managers would have produced “obscene and blasphemous doggerel, vile and ribald parodies, and insulting caricatures, liable in any other form of publication to prosecution and punishment”, and “Surely what is actionable in a newspaper, or liable to prosecution under Lord Campbell’s Act”—The Obscene Publications Act (1857),

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which made selling them a statutory offence—should not exempt the theatre, for “such outrages would meet with applauding audiences, who would pay and laugh first, and be content to condemn at leisure.” He linked advocates of freedom for theatres with those who wanted “free trade in disorderly houses and houses of ill-fame.” Abolition of censorship would result in licentiousness, “which would shut the theatres against all decent and respectable playgoers.” The essence of his office is preventiveness and secrecy, which are advantages. “To talk of the public protecting themselves, and being their own censors” would be ridiculous, since “everybody’s business is nobody’s business, and … they do not even protect themselves, their health, their safety, their comfort and convenience, their lives and property against street nuisances” or “against roughs and burglars, and quacks.” Pigott concluded his testimony with a dig at William Archer, whom he called “The only assailant of my office that I have seen,” but “I know nothing of him at all,” which was untrue. For every reader of Archer’s columns, he said that Clement Scott, who was on his side, had a thousand. As for the Independent Theatre, which “was founded not only to supersede the censorship but to dispense with all questions of profit and loss,” one of their own advocates “told me they cannot get a play written for them for love or money.” This was true, Shaw admitted in his 1898 Preface to Plays Unpleasant (CPP 1: 17). Although Pigott had passed some of Ibsen’s plays, including A Doll’s House, they have not “put a penny into anybody’s pocket. I make allowance for Mr. Archer”—of whom he just said he knew nothing—“because he has some interest in the plays; he is a translator of Ibsen’s plays, and therefore I suppose has a certain interest in their being produced” (1892 Report 313, 328–34). William Archer was the only witness to oppose censorship. In May 1892, when Archer spoke before the committee, we should remember that to British theatregoers “the new drama” meant Ibsen and no one else. Not until 9 December, more than half a year later, was the first modern English drama, Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses, performed (for two nights in a small theatre). Archer’s was one of the few voices of the opposition, and because he translated Ibsen’s plays, Pigott and others discredited his statements as biased. Archer opposed censorship, he explained, since “it represses serious dramatic work.” This position was difficult to defend, partly because, he admitted, “there were no stirrings of serious drama.” When he pointed to Alexandre Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camélias and Le Demi-monde as having been repressed by the censor, he was on shaky

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ground, partly because it is hard to credit them as literary masterpieces, which he called them, and partly because after they were altered to conform to Pigott’s objections, they were performed. Of the English stage adaptation of Le Demi-monde, he admitted it did no harm. The demi-­ mondaine was changed to a divorcée, but he acknowledged that “you can read between the lines” and most audience members knew the heroine was “a woman of loose character.” Since, he claimed, there were “stirrings of serious drama,” the censor’s influence was “necessarily repressive and terrorizing to native authors.” Three years later, Shaw accurately admitted that if anyone wants proof that the Censorship has prevented worthy plays from being written, “he has me at a disadvantage, for I naturally cannot produce the plays that the Censorship has prevented from existing” (TDO 1: 276). Archer was on firmer ground when he attacked the censor’s powers: he “has absolute and uncontrolled authority to suppress a play” and “there is absolutely no appeal. He is not even bound to give a reason for his decisions,” which is “an injustice to dramatic authors.” Asked if he knew a recent instance in which the censor has repressed “serious drama,” he retrieved authority by citing The Cenci, which the censor had vetoed for public performance. Yet he erred by admitting he did not think the stage lost much by this and that the worst effect it could have on an audience was tedium. He regained ground by pointing out that the situation recurred, since the Society wanted to give another performance in 1892 on the same basis as the previous one, to celebrate the centenary of Shelley’s birth, but the censor barred the same theatre from allowing the Society to do so because its new lease had a clause prohibiting its use for any performance not licensed by the Lord Chamberlain. The Shelley Society could not get another theatre, since managers feared that if they let the Society use their theatre it would prejudice the Lord Chamberlain’s office against them and endanger their licenses. Unaware that the censorship did not extend to Ireland, Archer pointed to America, which had no censor, as a nation “where our own language is spoken and dramatic literature is practically the same.” American dramatic critics, actors, and authors “all say that they feel no evil in having no censorship.” For this audience, Archer’s argument was unimpressive (1892 Report 256–59, 262). Among the committee’s recommendations was that the law excluding Ireland from the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction should be unchanged (1892 Report xiii). In 1895, Pigott died and was succeeded by George Alexander Redford, whom Woodfield calls a “former bank manager whose

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single qualification appears to have been the friendship of his predecessor, for whom he had deputized on occasion during periods of illness.” As Hugo says, “change but no change continued as though by perpetual non-motion.”30 Like his predecessors as Examiner of Plays and like those who came after him, Redford was what Shakespeare had called a “proud man” adorned with “a little brief authority,” but Redford did not feel ignorant of what he had been “most assured.”

Notes 1. Dorothy Knowles, The Censor, The Drama and The Film 1930–1934 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), p. 276. 2. Mette Newth, “The Long History of Censorship,” Beacon for Freedom of Expression, 2010, http://www.beaconforfreedom.org/liste. html?tid=415&art_id=475 (accessed 11 June 2018). 3. I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 197–98. 4. Mette Newth, “The Long History of Censorship.” 5. Jeremy Norman, “Henry VIII Restricts the Reading of the Bible (May 12, 1543),” History of Information, http://www.historyofinformation.com/ expanded.php?id=2813 (accessed 30 August 2018). 6. John Palmer, The Censor and the Theatres (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971; first published London 1912), pp. 23–24. 7. David Thomas, David Carlton and Anne Etienne. Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), https:// www-oxfordscholarship-com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/view/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199260287.001.0001/acprof-9780199260287 (accessed 11 July 2018), p. 6; “An Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, and for Relief of the Poor and Impotent, 1572,” Politics without Borders, http://ringmar.net/politicaltheoryfornomads/index.php/an-act-for-the-punishment-of-vagabonds-and-for-relief-of-the-poor-and-impotent-1572/ (accessed 22 April 2019). 8. John Palmer. The Censor and the Theatres, pp. 23–24. 9. The Latin quotation is from Battista the Mantuan, Eclogues, I, 118. 10. The Sunday Observance Act of 1677, http://legacy.owensboro.kctcs.edu/ crunyon/Eng262/Austen/sunday%20law.htm (accessed 23 October 2018); “Will Ask Parliament for Sunday Show Law: London Theatre World Organizes to Fight Ruling Banning Sunday Performances,” New York Times, 6 December 1930, p.  12, https://timesmachine.nytimes. com/timesmachine/1930/12/06/102196416.html?action=click&conte ntCollection=Archives&module=ArticleEndCTA®ion=ArchiveBody& pgtype=article&pageNumber=12 (accessed 23 October 2018).

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11. Mette Newth, “The Long History of Censorship.” 12. “June 1643: An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing,” BHO: British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp184-186 (accessed 22 April 2019); John Milton. Areopagitica (1644), Jebb edition. Online Library of Liberty (Cambridge: University Press, 1918), http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/milton-areopagitica-1644-jebb-ed (accessed 21 October 2018). 13. Dorothy Knowles, The Censor, The Drama and The Film 1930–1934, pp.  13–15; G.M.G., The Stage Censor: An Historical Sketch: 1544–1907 (London: Samson Low, Marston & Co, 1908), pp. 5–6, https://archive. org/stream/stagecensorhisto00ggmgrich/stagecensorhisto00ggmgrich_ djvu.txt (accessed 25 March 2018). 14. “The Beggar’s Opera,” Theatre Database, http://www.theatredatabase. com/18th_century/beggars_opera.html (accessed 22 April 2019); Richard Findlater, Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), pp. 35–37. 15. Richard Findlater, Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain, pp. 36–43; “The Office of Examiner of Plays. I,” The Times, 27 December 1907, p.  15; Frank Fowell and Frank Palmer, Censorship in England (London: Frank Palmer, 1913), pp. 368–71; David Thomas et al., pp. 34, 41–42; “The 1737 Licensing Act,” reprinted in J. Raithby, ed., Statutes at large, vol. 5 (London: Eyre & Strahan, 1811), pp.  266–68; Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Vol. I: 1900–1932 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003), p.  4; “Lord Chesterfield’s Speech, on the Bill Introduced into the House of Lords, May 24th, 1737, for Licensing and Regulating the Theatres,” Select Speeches, Forensick and Parliamentary, Vol. 1, ed. N. Chapman (Philadelphia: Hopkins and Earle, 1808), pp. 186–87, https://books.google.com/books?id=oB4RAAAAYA AJ&pg=PA177&lpg=PA177&dq=Lord+Chesterfield+speech+1737&sou rce=bl&ots=vZSgBFtwBz&sig=L21YlA-qehBY-VlYESmL4DU-Biw&hl= en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiL2r79lObfAhUjmuAKHS45A2YQ6AEwBHo ECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=Lord%20Chester field%20speech%20 1737&f=false (accessed 11 January 2019); Lagretta Tallent Lenker, “Shaw’s Interior Authors: Censored and Modern,” SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 38.2 (2018), 161. 16. G.M.G. The Stage Censor, pp. 90–91, 101–02, 105–06, 122; “The Office of Examiner of Plays. I,” The Times, 27 December 1907, p.  15; James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 1–3, 108. 17. John H.  Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 41–42, 47.

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18. “London, 1800–1913,” The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, https://www. oldbaileyonline.org/static/London-life19th.jsp (accessed 11 July 2018); “Ville de Paris,” Demographia, http://demographia.com/dm-par90.htm (accessed 30 October 2019). 19. “Crime, Poverty and Reforms,” Victorian Crime and Punishment, http:// vcp.e2bn.org/justice/section11334-crime-poverty-and-reforms.html (accessed 11 July 2018); “A Time of Great Change,” Victorian Crime and Punishment, http://vcp.e2bn.org/justice/page11764-a-time-of-greatchange.html (accessed 11 July 2018); F.C. Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (New York: Augustus M.  Kelley, 1967), pp.  7, 9, 13, 14, 21–22. 20. Bernard F. Dukore, Crimes and Punishments and Bernard Shaw (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 122–25; Tim Lambert, A Brief History of Unemployment, http://www.localhistories.org/unemployment.html (accessed 21 June 2018). 21. Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (London: Verso, 2017), p. 34. 22. Stanley H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. xvi; Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in London and New  York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 105–09. 23. Norman Gash. Mr. Secretary Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel to 1830 (London: Longman, 1985), pp.  177–79, 185–86, 498, 502–06; “The Development of a Police Force,” Victorian Crime & Punishment, http:// vcp.e2bn.org/justice/page11377-the-development-of-a-police-force. html (accessed 1 July 2019). 24. Alex S.  Vitale, The End of Policing, pp.  35–36; F.C.  Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), p.  33; Stanley H.  Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, pp. 9, 533. 25. Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies, pp. 126–28. 26. “Office of Examiner of Plays. I,” p.  15; “Commentary on: Dramatic Literary Property Act (1833),” Primary Sources on Copyright (1453–1900), h t t p : / / w w w. c o p y r i g h t h i s t o r y. o r g / c a m / t o o l s / r e q u e s t / showRecord?id=commentary_uk_1833 (accessed 5 December 2018); Richard Findlater, Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain, p. 80; Phyllis Hartnoll, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 179. 27. Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp.  198–99; Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, p. 23.

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28. “The Office of Examiner of Plays. II,” The Times, 2 January 1908, p. 5; James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914, p. 117. 29. James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914, p.  176; Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson, with Miriam Handley, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets … History of British State Censorship (London: The British Library, 2004), pp. 4–6. 30. James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914, p. 114; Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw, p. 199.

CHAPTER 2

The Critic and Emerging Playwright Versus British and American Censors

When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won. —William Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.i

As Chap. 1 indicates, the Shelley Society was founded to produce The Cenci, but because of its theme of incest, Edward F.  Smyth Pigott, the Examiner of Plays, refused to license its performance. To dodge the ban, the Society persuaded the manager of the Grand Theatre in Islington (a borough of London) to let it give a technically private performance for which seats were not sold at the box office; instead, members paid the Society dues, for which they received tickets. More than 2400 people attended. Shaw was the production’s press officer, which as Brad Kent notes, “gave him the opportunity to develop a network of media connections and garner some recognition as a spokesperson for the avant-garde.” The play provoked fury among many theatre reviewers. Kent reports that the Daily Chronicle called it “hideous” and “a blot upon the genius of its author, if not upon English dramatic literature.” To The Scotsman it was “revolting” and “utterly obscene.” Representative of most reviews, says Kent, these opinions “justified the censorship’s existence.” Shaw reviewed the production. Since he was one of the founding members of this Society, he wrote, people who wanted to see the play offered to buy his tickets, which he refused to sell, but not for reasons of loyalty to the Lord

© The Author(s) 2020 B. F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw and the Censors, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52186-8_2

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Chamberlain, who had withheld its license “on the ground that the performance of such a play would deprave the public.” In the audience were luminaries that included Robert Browning, James Russell Lowell, and George Meredith—“and as many people as the theatre could hold have been not only admitted for nothing but invited and personally welcomed. So far, the anticipated depravation of the public seems not to have come off; for the conduct of the nation has not perceptibly altered for the worse since the afternoon of Friday, the 7th of May, 1886” (TDO 1: 59). Pigott got his revenge. When the Grand Theatre’s annual license came up for renewal, Michael Holroyd reports, the lessee had to accept a new clause that forbade performances of unlicensed plays. Other managers recognized this as a warning. In 1892, the Society wanted to give another performance on the centenary of Shelley’s birth, but no theatre manager was willing to let it use his theatre. Although Herbert Beerbohm Tree was on the verge of lending the Society the Haymarket, he changed his mind after an interview with Pigott. Until a more liberal licenser succeeds Pigott or unless the censorship is abolished, said Shaw, “I see no chance of getting the Cenci out of the Index” (CL 1: 361), a reference to the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of books mentioned in Chap. 1, which Catholics were forbidden to read without permission. Charles Charrington, whose lease of the Avenue Theatre was about to expire, offered the Society his theatre to produce the play, but the Society could not raise enough money for production costs. Florence Farr circumvented the censor by playing Beatrice Cenci in the prison scenes of Act 5 at the Bedford Park Club before a small audience (TDO 1: 201–03). The Cenci was not licensed until 1922 when, despite protests by the Public Morality Council (founded in 1899 to oppose vice and indecency, meaning mainly sexual immorality), the play had a matinée performance. As Knowles says, open opposition to the censor dates from 1886, and the reason, says Nicholson, was The Cenci’s “acknowledged status as a classic, which meant that its appeal was limited to special audiences.”1 Shaw’s next public pronouncement on censorship, signed “A Novelist” (he was not yet a dramatist), was a letter to The Star in 1888, about Émile Zola’s La Terre (1876), called The Soil in its English translation. Its publisher was prosecuted for “publishing an obscene libel,” which meant describing sexual subjects. The jury refused to listen to the solicitor general read twenty-one allegedly offensive passages to establish his case. On advice of counsel, the publisher pleaded guilty and paid a £100 fine. Shaw granted the absurdity of defending Zola’s purported obscenity “on the

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ground that Rabelais was obscene. A dramatist charged with drunkenness might just as reasonably plead in excuse the occasional inebriety of Shakspere.” The issue was “whether a writer may or may not expose to society its own wickedness.” Since no one pretends that what Zola describes is not true, there are two views of what he might do about it. To the British Pharisee, his duty is “to hide the evil and pretend that there is no such thing.” Zola’s view is that his duty is “to drag it into the light and have it seen to.” Shaw agreed with Zola.2 A year later he used his column as music critic for The Star to attack Pigott. “He will, I hope, excuse me if, in the exercise of my duty as a critic, I describe him as an unmitigated nuisance.” Censorship “prevents serious plays from being acted, and consequently prevents them from being written.” If Pigott banned bad plays along with good ones and cut inane dialogue, conventional people might be excused for approving his censorship “on the ground that in depriving the thoughtful of their theatre he also deprived the vicious of theirs.” But he did not object to immoral plays. As Shaw indicated, you can perform farcical comedies that revolve around adultery and prostitution, but you cannot perform The Cenci; and if you were to spend sizable capital to mount “one of Ibsen’s great works, you would do so at the risk of being forbidden to proceed at the last moment by the licensor.” The fault was not attributable to the individual Examiner of Plays; “it is inherent in the institution of censorship.” He asked readers to consider that although a newspaper or book with lewd matter can do more harm than an indecent song or dance, neither is censored. A sense of public responsibility and accountability to a jury prevent the owners of The Star from making it “a broadsheet of obscene anecdotes. Yet the editor would never dream of allowing such pleasantries into his columns as the official licenser of plays hallmarks for public use” in theatres. On 8 March 1892, in a letter to Evacustes Phipson Jr., a watercolor painter and a socialist, he declared, “‘If people abuse free institutions, prosecute them; but don’t deny them freedom on the assumption that they will abuse it.’” This view, Holroyd states, “remained his opinion through many battles for the rest of his life. He was to write more than fifty articles against the censorship, reinforced with many speeches and letters to newspapers.” Brad Kent makes a vital point about his writings on this subject: “By attacking censors, Shaw sought to deflect criticism from the banned artists onto those who banned them, thereby making the competence and motives of the censors, not authors, the focus of debate.”3

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One Critic, Two Censors In 1893, Shaw completed Mrs Warren’s Profession, which he did not submit to the Examiner of Plays because he was sure it would be refused a license. He was right. On 4 December 1894, he accepted an offer by editor Frank Harris to become the theatre critic of the Saturday Review.4 Because the censorship problems concerning Ghosts and Mrs Warren’s Profession are extensive, I will first discuss Shaw’s criticism of theatre censorship, mainly in the late nineteenth century, except for Ghosts and Mrs Warren’s Profession, before examining these controversial plays. Shaw’s first Saturday Review column appeared on 5 January 1895. Only three weeks later he seized the opportunity to have a go at the censor by reviewing the publication of a play. The production of William Heinemann’s The First Step, he said, was “frustrated by that insane institution for the taxation of authors, the Censorship of the Lord Chamberlain.” The previous year, Sydney Olivier’s play, A Freedom in Fetters, embodied “his observations of human nature as developed in the British colonist by a tropical climate. The censor [Pigott], after one horrified glimpse into this strange region,” refused to license its performance. Olivier pursued the usual remedy, publication, only to find that the first publisher he approached, William Heinemann, agreed with the censor that it was immoral. Heinemann then wrote A Freedom in Fetters, which Pigott also suppressed. Declining to publish his own play, he sent it to the Bodley Head, which published it to clear him of the insinuation that he had written a grossly indecent work. Shaw opined that it was no more indecent than Olivier’s play, “only the hero and heroine are living together without being legally married, which is against Mr Pigott’s rule of thumb for determining whether a play is ‘moral’ or not” (TDO 1: 251). Shaw’s next opportunity came a month later with A Leader of Men by Charles E.D.  Ward, whose real subject was the love affair between the Irish MP Charles Stewart Parnell, an influential advocate of home rule for Ireland who died in 1891, and Mrs. Katharine O’Shea. When their affair became public, it ruined his political cause. The issue of censorship, said Shaw, arises not on the play under review but on the better play the author did not write because he was sure it would be “strangled at its birth by Mr Pigott. Mr Ward, like all dramatic authors, has had to choose between infanticide and abortion; and he has chosen abortion.” Among the censor’s official taboos was reference to prominent people. In real life, the political conflict interwove with a personal struggle between two rival

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leaders, the younger of which was trapped between his affections and the British law that “makes a mistaken marriage indissoluble except at the cost of social disgrace to the woman and political ruin to the man,” and his political cause along with him, “beneath a well-timed blow from his opponent, driven home with the colossal weight of our public hypocrisy and the Noncomformist Conscience.” There may not be a dramatist in the nation “who has not thought of giving artistic life and form to that drama, only to relinquish the project at the thought of Mr Pigott, and to pass on, possibly to some farcical comedy theme sufficiently salacious, to be sure of a license.” Ward “did not wholly submit to the despot. But neither did he defy him, being still sufficiently modest to content himself with an expurgated version of the tragedy” (TDO 1: 263–64). In February 1895 Pigott died. Ignoring the convention de mortuis nil nisi bonum (of the dead, say nothing but good), Shaw used his March 2nd column to make Pigott’s death the subject of Pigott’s job: “It is a great pity that the Censorship cannot be abolished before the appointment of a successor to Mr Pigott creates a fresh vested interest in one of the most mischievous of our institutions.” He repeatedly insisted that if the censorship were eliminated, the result would be performances of “licentious plays; actresses would leave off clothing themselves decently, and the public would sit nightly wallowing in the obscenity which the Censor now sternly withholds from them.” This notion encompasses another, that the Examiner of Plays, unlike other people, is “untainted by their assumed love of filth,” which is silly. He is not selected by examinations in literature or morals. His salary “will fetch nothing more in the market than well connected mediocrity. Therefore it is necessary to give him absolute power, so that there may be no appeal from his blunders.” Shaw called him “the Tsar of the theatres” (a phrase he repeated four years later about Pigott’s refusal to license Ghosts) and stated that “in ninetyeight out of every hundred plays submitted to him (this is an official estimate), no question of morals is raised.” Shaw’s figure is based on Pigott’s testimony to the 1892 committee that he had examined an average of 300 plays per year, of which he rejected no more than half a dozen. Only 2% of the plays submitted to him questioned received opinions and petrified prejudices, Shaw wrote, but these are the plays on which the growth and vitality of the theatre depend and which give him a chance to show his superiority to the public by telling it to heed them despite the possibility they will be shocked. Since the Examiner of Plays is never better than the ordinary public, he does the reverse. Sharing its ignorant intolerance, he uses his

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official authority to forbid the exceptional plays from being performed. Shaw called Pigott “a walking compendium of vulgar insular prejudice, who, after wallowing all his life in the cheapest theatrical sentiment (he was a confirmed playgoer), had at last brought himself to a pitch of incompetence.” He was obsessed by French immorality, American indecency, the womanly woman, divorce, and “not before a mixed audience.” He conceived of the English people as “rushing towards an abyss of national degeneration in morals and manners and only held back on the edge of the precipice by the grasp of his stern hand” (TDO 1: 272–74, 3: 1070; 1892 Report 334). What type of person should succeed him? A month later, in the Pall Mall Gazette, Shaw answered: “a Nobody.” The appointment of a Somebody, he reasoned, would arouse “a storm of indignation. If a man’s a Somebody, his qualities are public property, and that means it is known that he is unfit to be the despot of the British drama.” Shaw wanted stage censorship “abolished root and branch: exterminated, annihilated.” He claimed for the playwright the same freedom any other author has. “If I produce a pernicious play, let me be prosecuted for it, but dont let me be gagged by a Nobody,” that is, an official who uses the power of the State to curtail his liberty on the assumption that he would use it badly (TDO 1: 288–89). As Leon Hugo states, “The truth of this paradox was soon borne out. Shaw and other playwrights got their nobody in George Alexander Redford, a former bank manager and friend of Smyth Pigott’s— qualifications enough in the Lord Chamberlain’s view. He and Shaw were bound to cross swords sooner or later.”5 Rather than deal with Redford now, let me return to Pigott. Having indicated what the Examiner of Plays would not license, Shaw condemned Pigott for plays he did license, such as Gentleman Joe, a mildly ribald comedy. Its title character visits his girlfriend and asks the butler where she is. She “is getting ready to see you, and is taking off her things” is the reply, which the actor playing Joe construes as completely undressing herself, and the audience, “pleased at its own cleverness in finding this out, laughs at the schoolboy indecency for fully half a minute.” Shaw admitted that such jokes are silly stuff that no censor could object to or are so obvious (Joe mistakes her comment on her underwear, “frilling,” for “thrilling”) that “even the most angelically innocent Censor” could not miss if he had any brains. What is worse is that these entertainments would be more enjoyable if they were not depressingly moral. If they were written from the viewpoint of the devil’s advocate, they might have

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conviction, interest, and wit. Shaw did not object to Yvette Guilbert (a French singer immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings) singing “Les Vierges” (“The Virgins”), a song in which virtue “is attacked with bitter irony by a poet who does not believe in it and: I must not say by an artist who does not believe in it either, but at all events by one who has the power of throwing herself with mordant intensity into the poet’s attitude for the moment.” He calls for whole plays written like Les Vierges, in which the votaries of pleasure can religiously put forward their creed against the idealists and the Puritans. There would be life in that: purpose, honesty, reality, and the decency which arises spontaneously beside them. But a timidly conventional play like Gentleman Joe, with its abject little naughtinesses furtively slipped in under cover of the tamest propriety is another matter. (TDO 1: 280–82)

The Living Pictures, licensed in 1895, so offended Alexander Coote, secretary of the National Vigilance Association, founded to root out vice, that he called it immoral. It did not offend Shaw, who called Coote “useful, convinced, thoroughly respectable,” but in matters of art an “intensely stupid man, and on sexual questions something of a monomaniac.” Six of the sixteen living pictures were mythical or imaginary females. One was Lady Godiva. The women who impersonated them “were not actually braving our climate without any protection.” Their apparently naked flesh was spun silk, but the illusion of the usual music hall attendee was undraped, clean, graceful human figures and, unlike many of the fully dressed women in the audience, modest. He imagined that many younger, poorer girls among them received “a greater regard for the virtues of the bath” and a “repulsiveness of that personal slovenliness and gluttony which are the real indecencies of popular life,” plus a brief escape “into the enchanted land to which naiads and peris belong.” Whereas Shaw considered The Living Pictures artistic, Coote did not: “‘Nothing … can justify the exhibition of nude and semi-nude women as a means of amusement for a mixed audience.’” Why not, Shaw pretended to wonder, if audiences thought them prettier and no less decent than if they were dressed, or if nudity or semi-nudity better fit the characters, or if they were performing athletic feats that skirts would encumber? He called many people “morbidly sensitive to sexual impressions, and quite insensible to artistic ones.” When they forbid children to go to the theatre or amuse themselves with stories or “‘profane’” pictures, the children’s affections are repressed and

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“their susceptibility to emotional excitement nursed on sin, wrath, terror, and vengeance,” with the result that when they grow up “life becomes to them a prolonged temptation of St Anthony.” To people like Coote, whose views are out-of-date in western societies, “Sex is a scourge. Woman is a walking temptation which should be covered up as much as possible.” Shaw’s solution for them is not to attend theatres that present such performances, but even this will not completely protect them. “Every lownecked dress, every gust of wind that catches a skirt and reveals an ankle, perhaps a child in whom ‘human nature is in evidence’ to the extent of a pair of sturdy little legs, may be a torment to the victims of this most pitiable of all obsessions.” Their error lies in their attempt to make female nudity or semi-nudity the sole criterion of indecency. Since they do not complain of either in male athletes, says Shaw, “if there were anything in the Vigilance Association’s view of such exhibitions as demoralizing, our women ought by this time to be much more demoralized than our men” (TDO 1: 301–07). Let me, for a moment, jump to 1905, when the Review of Reviews published Shaw’s letter to the editor, William T. Stead, which is apposite to his views ten years earlier. A play at the Gaiety Theatre offended Stead because it treated sex in a way Stead abhorred. Shaw reminded him that the Gaiety’s patrons abhorred certain plays by Ibsen, Eugène Brieux—whose Three Daughters of M.  Dupont deals with marriage and prostitution as options available to young women and whose Damaged Goods (Les Avariés) treats venereal disease—and himself, “and their opinion is as good as yours or mine.” Shaw did not object to the Gaiety as long as he was free to stay away from it. He objected that its attendees did not reciprocate his tolerance. They are not content with “freedom to stay away from the plays which disgust them: they support, by their public opinion, the total suppression of such plays.” George Alexander Redford, the new Examiner of Plays who licensed the one that shocked Stead, said he would never license Ibsen’s Ghosts, which shocked the Gaiety’s patrons. Illicit sexual intercourse is a huge trade in London. Whereas some works of art stimulate it, others do the reverse. People supported censorship because, while it pretended to suppress the former and encourage the latter, it did the opposite. The treatment of sex in Damaged Goods, Ghosts, and his own Mrs Warren’s Profession made it inconceivable that anyone, after seeing one of them, would become a customer of this market. Yet censorship forbade theatre managers from performing them for fear of having their theatres closed and they, plus everyone connected with the performance,

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fined £50, whereas if they produced a play like the one to which Stead objected, or one in which the heroine was an attractive prostitute living in romance and luxury, they would obtain a certificate that “the performance ‘does not, in its general tendency, contain anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage.’” What gets a license for plays that Stead calls “worthy of Gomorrah” is that they make sexual escapades amusing and pleasant and suppress “disgusting or horrifying association or contingency of such adventures.” This, Shaw added in his familiar refrain, “is what English public opinion calls upholding morality. If you really want to lead the London stage out of Gomorrah, you must abolish the Lord Chamberlain” (TDO 3: 1112–13). His 1896 review pointed to the controversy about the church scene in Henry Arthur Jones’s Michael and His Lost Angel. Some critics contended that “Church ritual, and indeed anything of a sacred character is out of place on the stage,” where it is “a breach of good taste and an offence against public decency.” They declared that “‘some things’ are too sacred to be represented on the stage.” Objecting to this vague phrase, he insisted they replace “‘some things’ by the mysteries of religion, which is what the objectors would mean if, on this subject, they were earnest enough to mean anything at all.” Just what are the mysteries of religion, he asked. Are they faith, hope, love, heroism, life, creation, or are they pews and pulpits, prayer books and Sunday bonnets, copes and stoles and dalmatics? Even that large section of the population of these islands whose religion is the merest idolatry of material symbols will not deny that the former are the realities of religion.

He asked those who think pews and prayer books are too sacred for theatrical representation why they have not protested that “all our dramas deal with faith, hope, love, and the rest of the essentials?” The actual objection to this play, he declared, is to the title character, a minister who deals with religion as coextensive with the same subjects in real life. “To the man who regards it as only a watertight Sunday compartment of social observances, such a view is not only inconvenient but positively terrifying.” If they argue that a stage representation is merely a pretense, a mockery, and something that simulates what it is not by such theatrical trickery as light, paint, and mimicry, he grants their line of reasoning but asks what they would say of pictures in the National Gallery, in which canvas and colors “simulate, not only churches and priests, but the very persons of the

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Trinity themselves? Is the crucifix an offence against the sacredness of what it represents?” Would they excommunicate all art or only the theatre? Shaw used such arguments extensively, as he did his claim, You cannot attack the freedom of the plays you do not like without equally endangering the freedom of those you like, and it is better to tolerate the catholicly religious people who are claiming for the theatre its share in the common spiritual heritage than to put a weapon into the hands of the sectarianly religious people who would make an end of the theatre altogether if they could. (TDO 2: 502–05, 507–08)

In two columns in April 1898, he seized an opportunity Redford gave him to compare what he considered impermissible and permissible to license. On April 2nd he reported that in the preface to William Heinemann’s play Summer Mothers, Heinemann “tells us that the Queen’s reader of plays, ‘requiring, with ladylike niceness, a good character for the frail heroine not only deprived the play of its purpose, but rendered it, if not positively i m moral, u n moral, to say the least.’” Why should Heinemann revile Redford for “doing exactly what he is appointed to do?” When Fielding threatened to attack parliamentary corruption, the English governing classes discovered that the drama is a formidable weapon for a modern reformer and “resolved that the weapons should be so blunted by a court official as to make it useless for the purposes of the reformer. Mr Redford is not appointed to make the theatre moral, but solely to prevent its having any effect on public opinion: in other words, to make it, as Mr Heinemann rightly says, u n moral.” The Examiner of Plays could not advise the Lord Chamberlain to license a serious play without accepting some responsibility for the author’s opinions. On the 23rd, Shaw proposed that Act 2 of The Conquerors by Paul M. Potter was the censor’s reply to Heinemann. In it, the hero prepares to rape the heroine. After she prays and screams, she faints, which makes him realize he behaved like a scoundrel, and he leaves. Upon reviving, she thinks he carried out his goal and for two acts raves “in a frenzy of passion which is half murderous and half incipiently affectionate. The mere imagination of the rape has produced what I may politely call a physiological attachment on the part of the victim.” She stabs him with a knife, then remorsefully carries him to her bedroom to nurse him back to life. When her brother must escape either through her bedroom or through a garden, where sharpshooters prepare to kill him, she sends him to the garden so that he will not kill her

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aspiring rapist. After she learns he did not rape her, they fall into each other’s arms for a happy ending. Shaw calls this an “edifying situation” whose outcome is just what the Censor is supposed to forbid. Whatever the intention of censorship, it “operates as an official passport for licentiousness” (TDO 3: 1029, 1044). In December 1897, the theatre critic Clement Scott replied “No” in an interview titled “Does the Theatre Make for Good?” and “It is nearly impossible for a woman to remain pure who adopts the stage as a profession.” Shaw reported him saying “he was the worse for his thirtyseven years of playgoing; that actresses are not, as a rule, ladies, nor ‘pure,’ and that their prospects frequently depend on the nature and extent of their compliances” (TDO 3: 968). The controversy about the morality of the stage continued, and on 22 January 1898, Shaw reported that it “has been stabbed stone cold dead by an epigram” by Robert Buchanan, a poet, novelist, dramatist, and anti-Ibsen critic. Buchanan’s quip, “‘Thousands of virtuous women on the stage, but only six actresses!’ is so irresistible that it is exceedingly difficult to say anything more without anticlimax” (TDO 3: 985–86). When an occasion, such as the whiff of bribery, presented itself in 1897, Shaw publicized it. Theatre managers favor the censorship because the Lord Chamberlain’s license protects them in London and on tour, which (as Chap. 3 documents) their testimonies before the 1909 Select Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament confirm. In his column, Shaw reported that the London managers gave the Vice Chamberlain (deputy to the Lord Chamberlain) five hundred ounces of silver. He found the frankness of this gift refreshing, he said. “When the builders in my parish proffer ounces of silver to the sanitary inspector, they do so by stealth, and blush to find it fame”—ironically referencing Pope’s “Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame” (Epilogue to the Satires). The Vice Chamberlain felt free to accept presents from those whom he judges. Continuing ironically, he called this an injustice to Redford. “Why is he to have nothing? A well known Irish landlord once replied to a threatening letter by saying ‘If you expect to intimidate me by shooting my agent, you will be disappointed’”—a paraphrase of the Earl of Clanricarde, after murders of several of his bailiffs followed his eviction of almost two hundred of his tenants in Galway. Shaw imagined Redford telling theatre managers, similarly, “‘If you expect to bribe me by presenting 500 ounces of silver to my vice principal, you will be disappointed.’” Very likely, the Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office never thought seriously of this “ludicrously

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improper proceeding; for the Censorial function of his department will not bear serious thought” (TDO 3: 947–48). In “The Censorship of the Stage in England,” in the North American Review, 1899, Shaw wrote more fully than his Saturday Review column had space for and coined a phrase that has often been quoted. He called the Lord Chamberlain “the Malvolio of St James’s Palace.” But since the Lord Chamberlain has no time to check on his subordinate, “the Examiner of Plays, humble, untitled, ‘middleclass’ though he may be, is yet the most powerful man in England or America.” For this position, you need not be qualified, which a professor of literature or drama should be. You must pass an examination to sell stamps in an English post office, “but you may become Examiner of Plays without necessarily knowing how to read or write.” The only rule is that a play must not be “the vehicle of new opinions on important subjects, because new opinions are always questionable opinions,” and he dare not make Her or His Majesty “responsible for questionable opinions by licensing them.” Other rules are simple. A dramatist must not make fun of ambassadors, cabinet ministers, or any living person who is influential in fashionable society, although the Examiner will not officially notice a gag at the expense of people such as General William Booth, who organized the Salvation Army, a Socialist or Labour Party member, or other such types. If a male libertine is in a serious play, he must be redeemed at the end by marrying an innocent young female. If the libertine is female, she should die at the end and burst into tears upon touching a respectable girl’s hand. These rules “are traditional and probably unwritten. They are not the invention of any individual censor; they simply codify the present and most of the past prejudices of the class he represents. To write a play which complies with them in form whilst grossly violating their purpose is”—Shaw quotes Hamlet—“as easy as lying,” and it is the business of adapters of French farces. The simple thing to do with censorship is: “Abolish it, root and branch.” Years ago, the London Playgoers’ Club had asked Shaw’s opinion on how to get rid of the Censor. As far as he could see, he replied, “nothing short of abolishing the monarchy could touch him” (TDO 3: 1065–66, 1073–74, 1076).

A Doll’s House and the Campaign for Ghosts Astonishingly—and as Joan Templeton records, to the surprise of William Archer—Pigott licensed Archer’s translation of A Doll’s House (1879), which was first produced in London on 7 June 1889.6 Shaw too was

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surprised. As he said in his prepared statement to the 1909 Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament, the only play by Ibsen prohibited on the English stage, Ghosts, is less subversive than A Doll’s House (CPP 3: 719). As early as The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), he observed, A Doll’s House views duty as “the primal curse from which we must redeem ourselves before we can advance another step,” and one of society’s pernicious abominations is “forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under pretence that she likes it; and, if she ventures to contradict the pretence, declaring her no true woman.” Because men dominate our society, society regards women solely as a means of ministering to men’s appetites. “The ideal wife is one who does everything that the ideal husband likes, and nothing else.” However, to treat anyone “as a means instead of an end is to deny that person’s right to live.” To treat a person as a means to an end like sexual intercourse “is insufferable to any human being.” Women who are so dealt with should rebel, which Ibsen advocates in A Doll’s House. “The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men,” Shaw proclaimed, adding, It is of course quite true that the majority of women are kind to children and prefer their own to other people’s. But exactly the same thing is true of the majority of men, who nevertheless do not consider their proper sphere is the nursery. … If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.

Unless Woman repudiates what society considers womanliness, meaning duty to her husband, children, society, and the law, and everyone and everything except herself, she will be unable to emancipate herself. Only in repudiating duty altogether can she be free. Woman is not directly the slave of Man, but is the “slave of duty,” and as man’s road to freedom “is strewn with the wreckage of the duties and ideals he has trampled on, so must hers be” (TDO 1: 125, 132, 135, 137–38). When Nora, in A Doll’s House, recognizes that her entire family life has been a fraud and she, like Frederick in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, whose world première was ten days after that of A Doll’s House, has been a “slave of duty” (the subtitle of The Pirates of Penzance), she— unlike Frederick—rebels. She tells her husband that when she lived with her father, he told her his opinions, which she then held, and if she had

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others she did not mention them because he would not have liked it. “He used to call me his doll-child, and played with me as I played with my dolls.” When she lived in her husband’s house, he arranged everything to suit his tastes, which she had or pretended to have. “I don’t know which— both ways, perhaps; sometimes one and sometimes the other.” Both men wronged her, she charges. She is not competent to educate her children, and her husband is unqualified to help her do so. She leaves him and her home to learn for herself what reality is, Shaw says, “refusing to see her children again until she is fit to be in charge of them, or to live with him until she and he become capable of a more honorable relation to oneanother than which they have hitherto stood” (TDO 1: 157). We should recognize that the Helmers have two servants, a maid and the children’s nurse, Anna, who was Nora’s nurse when Nora was a child, which means that neither Helmer nor the children will have as difficult a time after Nora leaves as playgoers and readers may imagine. Easily overlooked among the characters of A Doll’s House, Anna has an importance that is disproportionate to her brief appearances. Social acceptance of an unmarried parent was not usual twenty-plus years before Ibsen wrote this play, when Anna bore an illegitimate daughter. Just as nineteenth-century society considered Krogstad a fallen man, so it considered Anna a fallen woman. Shielded from life’s realities, the bourgeoise Nora wondered how Anna could have had the heart to give her baby to strangers. The lower-class Anna, who has always known what the real world was, is surprised. “I had to when I came to nurse my little miss Nora.” She could not afford to refuse the offer of so good a job. “A poor girl who’s been in trouble must take what comes.”7 In view of Nora’s rebellion, why, as I asked earlier, did Pigott license a play he considered injurious to public morals? When he appeared before the 1892 Select Committee he called Ibsen’s plays “too absurd.” After studying them, he concluded that all their characters were “morally deranged. All the heroines are dissatisfied spinsters who look on marriage as a monopoly, or dissatisfied married women in a chronic state of rebellion against not only the conditions which nature has imposed on their sex, but against all the duties and obligations of mothers and wives; and as for the men they are rascals or imbeciles” (1892 Report 334). In other words, he regarded the plays as so ridiculous and their characters so unrealistic, he did not think that they could possibly harm theatre audiences. Although Pigott licensed A Doll’s House, he refused to license Ghosts in 1891. “It is a waste of time to ask for a licence,” he told J.T. Grein. Pigott’s successor, Redford, Shaw told the 1909 Joint Committee, said it would

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never be licensed in Britain. As Granville Barker told this committee, Ghosts was the only play by Ibsen censored in England; when other plays of his, such as An Enemy of the People, were produced, critics said that such awful things may happen in Norway but could not happen in England, and if plays like An Enemy of the People were about abuses supposedly existing in England, the censor would likely have banned them (1909 Report 71–72). Nor were the English the only authorities shocked by Ghosts. The leading theatres of the three Scandinavian capital cities initially refused to produce it. In 1883, Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre produced it, but not until 1889 did Stockholm’s new National Theatre do so. Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre did not produce it until 1898. A lesser theatre in Christiana (later Oslo), capital of Norway, performed it that year, but its leading theatre, the Christiana, waited until 1900. In 1886 and 1887, it received private performances in Germany. In 1889, Brahm’s Freie Bühne, modeled on Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, opened with Ghosts, and the next year the Théâtre Libre produced it. Only after German censors withdrew their veto did Berlin’s two foremost literary theatres, the Deutsches Theater and the Lessing Theater, perform it—simultaneously— in 1894. Its first professional production in New York was the same year. Its first production in London, a single private performance by J.T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society, was in 1891.8 The Lord Chamberlain did not lift his ban until 1915—the same year Hollywood released a silent movie adaptation of Ghosts that ran less than an hour and was produced but not directed by D.W.  Griffith, who did to Ghosts what he did to Reconstruction in The Birth of a Nation, which he produced and directed the same year (he distorted the original—in the latter, the historical facts of slavery and the Reconstruction). As Shaw said, the battle against stage censorship began in earnest with a private performance of Ghosts on 13 March 1891, which he told Archer the next day was “a tremendous success; and I fully expect that today the gloves will be off & the fighting agog in earnest.” They were, and it was. “After the first act the applause was immense,” he said. “After the second, a third of the applauders were startled into silence. After the third four fifths of them were awe-struck.” The next day “there was the devil to pay in the papers. [Clement] Scott, with my God Almighty rankling in him, went stark raving mad” and demanded “that the Independent Theatre should be prosecuted, suppressed, fined, and deuce knows what not” (CL 1: 285, 289). Unlike Shaw, most reviewers and audiences of the first production of Ghosts, Joan Templeton reminds us, considered it about syphilis

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and heredity, and she draws our attention to the fact that it “inspired a reaction so virulent that the English performance of Ghosts has taken its place among the most notorious premières in theatrical history,” but unlike those of Victor Hugo’s Hernani and J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, “it was not the audience that exploded in wrath—many were Ibsen’s admirers—but the press.” Between those who attacked the play and those who defended it, it inspired over five hundred articles in the British press.9 Shaw did not regard Scott as he did Pigott and Redford. He respected Scott as a critic whose strong, heartfelt views differed from his own. In an 1896 review of a collection of Scott’s reviews of Henry Irving’s productions, he called Scott the first great dramatic reporter, whose “susceptibility to the direct expression of human feeling is so strong that he can write with positive passion about an exhibition of which it elicits from his colleagues only some stale, weary compliment in the last sentence of a conventional report, or, at best, some clever circumlocutionary discussion of the philosophy of the piece.” The excellence of his criticisms “lie in their integrity as expressions of the warmest personal feeling and nothing else. They are alive: their admiration is sincere and moving: their resentment is angry and genuine.” When Ghosts challenged the old ideas with the new, he “was the only critic whose attack on Ibsen was really memorable.” Among others, “there was plenty of elderly peevishness and envious disparagement, virtuous indignation and vicious scurrility, with the usual quantity of timeserving caution among the more considerate,” but Scott was the only one who “gave utterance to his horror like a man wounded to the quick in his religion, his affections, his enthusiasms: in the deepest part of him.” He laid on “with conviction: he had not only the excitement of the combat and the satisfaction of making his quarterstaff ring on the heads of his adversaries, but he sowed no harvest or malice, rather establishing on us the claim of an old opponent, always a strong claim in a free country.” However, he “is not a thinker: whatever question you raise with him you must raise as a question of conduct, which is a matter of feeling, and not of creed, which is a matter of intellectual order.” He will never tolerate “the drama which asserts and argues,” which “is polemical rather than instinctive in its poignancy” (TDO 2: 605–06, 608–09). With this in mind, let us turn to Ghosts and its reception following its London première. Like A Doll’s House, Shaw accurately writes in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Ghosts is not primarily about syphilis but—worse—is an uncompromising attack on marriage as a sacrifice of human beings to an ideal,

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and whereas the earlier play revolves around a woman who rejects self-­ sacrifice and social ideals, the later one focuses on a woman who has “acted as a model wife and mother, sacrificing herself at every point with selfless thoroughness.” Society, says Shaw, prescribes ideal duties but no enjoyment for her husband, who has “a huge capacity and appetite for sensuous enjoyment,” which he seeks underhandedly and illicitly. Because his wife’s devotion to duty has made life unbearable for him, he gratifies his desires by drinking and having an affair with their housemaid, leaving his wife to comply with duty by overseeing his business affairs. Even those who are indignant with Nora for leaving the doll’s house must admit that Mrs. Alving is justified in leaving her house. Must admit? In Victorian times, this was a slap in the face, for conventional English people did not consider themselves obliged to admit any such thing. Justifiably, Shaw calls Ghosts a sequel to A Doll’s House in which Ibsen demonstrates the results of what you may have been angry with Nora for not doing. The ideal of wifeliness and duty that Mrs. Alving fulfills means she must silently suffer and, for her son’s sake, conceal the truth about his father and the impurity of home life from him and everyone else. As Shaw insists, Ibsen takes pains to expose her marriage as a union that was not a love match but a financial transaction. The man she loved was a respectable clergyman, Pastor Manders—another blow to Victorian audiences. When she discovered her husband’s ways, she tried to take refuge with Manders, who sternly led her back to her duty, with its pretenses and lies. She obeyed him so well that everyone thought her marriage was a model of respectability. At night she listened to her husband’s lewd jokes and drank with him in order to stop him from going elsewhere to indulge his desires. She provided for their servant, with whom her husband had an affair, married her off and gave her a dowry—which was different from what she had received for marrying Alving only in the amount: a pittance versus a fortune—and raised his illegitimate daughter as her maid. Recognizing that if her son, Oswald, were to remain at home he would learn the truth about his father, she sent him to Paris to be educated. She was so successful that her old love, the clergyman, holds her up as a model of the ideal of marriage. When her husband dies, she recalls her son from Paris to enjoy his company and love (TDO: 1: 157–58). Oswald has inherited his father’s love of enjoyment. When he returns “to the solemn, strictly ordered house where virtue and duty have had their temple for so many years,” his mother observes his boredom and his drinking after dinner, both “miserably familiar” to her, and his flirting

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with the maid, Regina, who he does not know is his half-sister. But whereas she did not love her husband, she loves her son with the intensity of a love-­ starved woman. She recognizes that Oswald has a right to happiness and that she has no right to make him dutiful and wretched, as she was. “She sees, too, her injustice to the unfortunate fabric of lies and false appearances which she has wasted her life in manufacturing.” In driving the father to fulfill his pleasures secretly, the result was “the diseases bred by such conditions”; Oswald tells her he has syphilis and also poison for the time when, a Parisian surgeon told him, his brain will be worm-eaten by it. Desperately, she hopes to make him happy. She will give him champagne and not stand in the way of his marrying his half-sister. But when Regina learns of his illness, she leaves, for she is her father’s daughter and will not sacrifice her life by devoting it to an invalid. Alone with her son, the mother promises that if he becomes sick before he can poison himself, she will poison him. When the weather clears up and he asks her to give him the sun to play with, she sees that “ideals have claimed their victim and that the time has come for her to save him from a real horror by sending him from her out of the world, just as she saved him from an imaginary one years before by sending him out of Norway” (TDO 1: 158–59). The play ends with her painfully trying to decide whether or not to actually do so. As Shaw recognized, Ibsen means everything that revolts his critics. The protagonist of Ghosts “proposes to abandon her husband and live with the clergyman” she loves. Years later, she tells him that his making her return and do her duty as a wife “was a crime on his part. Ibsen agrees with her, and has written the play to bring you round to his opinion” (TDO, 1: 119). Those whom the play shocked recognized that Pastor Manders is its villain. They vilified Ibsen as immoral. Manders condemns the unnamed advanced books in Mrs. Alving’s library while admitting he has not read them. In other words, she responds, he knows nothing of what he condemns. He knows enough about them to disapprove of them, he retorts. When he contends that because Oswald has lived exclusively among artists he has never known what a good family life is, Oswald refutes him: although artists cannot afford to marry, they live with their children and their children’s mothers. He asks if Manders, who is scandalized, prefers that they turn their children’s mothers out of doors. To Manders, nonmarital living arrangements are immoral. The only immorality Oswald encountered in artistic circles, he says, was when model husbands and fathers visited Parisian artists. “These gentlemen could tell us all

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about places and things we had never dreamt of.” When these respectable men returned home and spoke of immorality running rampant abroad, “They knew what they were talking about!” Manders is shocked (and most respectable men in the audience were likely in a state of denial), but Mrs. Alving agrees with her son. “Shaw, unlike the great majority of his contemporaries,” Templeton perceives, saw Ghosts not as “a play about syphilis or heredity, but a tragedy of idealism.”10 The effect of Ghosts on English reviewers, Shaw says in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, was to send them to “bedlamite lengths.” Archer quoted the more excessive denunciations in an article in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1891. Shaw records them in The Quintessence. The censurers called Ghosts “abominable,” “disgusting,” “An open drain,” “a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open”; “putrid,” “Revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous,” “A piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonor with every right-thinking man and woman,” and “malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel.” They denounced Ibsen as “A crazy fanatic,” “consistently dirty,” “A gloomy sort of ghoul,” and “A teacher of the estheticism of the Lock Hospital [which specialized in treating venereal diseases].” They labeled his admirers “Lovers of prurience and dabblers in impropriety who are eager to gratify their illicit tastes under the pretence of art,” “nasty-minded people who find the discussion of nasty subjects to their taste in exact proportion to their nastiness,” “The sexless,” “the unsexed females, the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats,” “Effeminate men and male women,” and “Educated and muck-ferreting dogs” (TDO 1: 160–62). Such denunciations were not confined to Britain. William Winter, a critic who was perhaps the American Clement Scott, decried Ibsen as immoral. He abhorred the conversion of the stage “into a forum for debate relative to all manner of taints and diseases, alike in the individual and the social system.” To him, such plays are “odious and revolting in subject”; their admirers derive satisfaction from observing depravities and agree with Ibsen “that human nature is utterly corrupt, human society rotten, mankind a failure, and the world a gigantic mistake.” The subject of the “radically immoral” Ghosts is “Moral obliquity and mental failure, sequent on inherited physical disease, resulting from sexual vice.” He quotes Ibsen—“‘I go down into the sewers’” and “‘my business is to ask questions, not to answer them’”—and asks, “why should the product of an exploration of ‘sewers’ be exploited through the medium of the Theatre?” Let him rent a lecture hall to air his views. In The Quintessence in 1891, Shaw insists what he would insist to the Joint Select

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Committee of both Houses of Parliament in 1909: “The statement that Ibsen’s plays have an immoral tendency, is, in the sense in which it is used, quite true. Immorality does not necessarily imply mischievous conduct: it implies conduct mischievous or not, which does not conform to current ideals” (TDO 1: 180). As a tactic in his fight against censorship, Shaw’s admission that Ibsen’s plays were immoral was and would continue to be unfortunate, therefore bound to fail, since what registered more on many of his readers (and in the 1909 hearings, listeners) was the adjective rather than his definition of immorality. As Celia Marshik reminds us, even though Sidney and Beatrice Webb had warned him the “effect on public opinion [would be] disastrous,” since this terminology “implied that he endorsed sexual liberty,” he disregarded their advice.11

The Campaign for Mrs Warren’s Profession in England Upon finishing Act 1 of Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shaw thought it would be “just the thing for the I.T.” (the Independent Theatre); and he wrote to Grein on 12 December 1893, prophesying “I do not think there is the least chance of the play being licensed.” He was right about that but wrong about the I.T. Grein thought the play too offensive even for private performances. By 10 June 1896, Shaw was discouraged about an immediate or eventual production. He did not remain dejected. On 10 May 1897, he proposed a plan to his school chum, Matthew Edward McNulty. He wanted to publish the play in 1898, but because of the copyright performance custom established by the Dramatic Copyright Act of 1833, he feared that unless he had a performance before publication, he would forfeit his copyright. He could circumvent the censor’s probable refusal of a license by having McNulty or another person in Dublin arrange a copyright performance there, since Ireland was outside the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction. Nothing came of this plan. Plan B was asking Redford to license the play and, after his refusal, ask him to blue pencil his objections “or make Mrs W. a washerwoman or a pickpocket or whatever will enable him to license enough of the text to protect me” (CL 1: 402–03, 632, 757–58, 796–97).12 On 11 March 1898, as anticipated, Redford told the manager of the theatre where a copyright performance would be given that he would not recommend the play be licensed. The next day Shaw wrote to Redford,

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pointing out he had called his attention to the play’s nature by a note on the copy he had submitted and asking if a blue pencil might satisfy both of them. If Act 1 were licensed except for the dialogue between Praed and Crofts, Act 3 until the start of the scene between Crofts and Vivie, and the final act from Praed’s entrance until the end, omitting Act 2 and leaving Mrs. Warren’s profession unspecified, the public would be protected against a performance of the complete play while he would be protected against forfeiting performance rights in America. Redford would thus relieve him from a loss of property, a result of a veto, by recommending a license of parts of the play that are insignificant but without which no pirate could perform the unlicensed parts. Shaw did not have the play submitted for a usual production, but because it would be published the following month in a collection of his plays, performance before publication was necessary to secure copyright. He had not counted on what may have been Redford’s response to his repeated criticisms of him in his Saturday Review columns. On 14 March, Redford replied that as he had issued “‘an uncompromising Veto’ to the representation of Mrs Warren’s Profession,” it was not his position “to attempt any ‘dramatic expurgation’ with the blue pencil, as you appear to suggest. It is for you to submit, or cause to be submitted, a licensable play, and if you do this I will endeavor to forget that I ever read the original’” (CL 2: 13–14). As Hugo says, Shaw’s letter “was courteous, sensible and not remotely confrontational,” which is true, but from Redford’s view it was, after Shaw’s denigrations, impertinent: Shaw was telling him how to do his job, which understandably offended him. “Redford’s reply was neither courteous nor sensible, and it was confrontational.”13 Shaw’s column of 2 April 1898 responded in kind. As quoted earlier, William Heinemann had criticized Redford for insisting he change Summer Mothers in a way that would make it unmoral and Shaw had asked why one should revile an official for doing what he was appointed to do. Drawing on his experience with Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shaw divulged the censor’s new departure. When he previously objected to a play, he specified passages he demurred. He expurgated the play and licensed it except for these words and passages. Thus, the author or manager “knew that when he had paid his two guineas he had no further extortion to fear.” No longer! Recently, Shaw disclosed, he submitted a play for license to protect himself from a possibly heavy loss by forfeiture of stage rights by publication without prior performance. In fact, his book was in press with a preface announcing the censor’s refusal to license it.

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Consequently when I sent in my play and my two guineas to Mr Redford, I could not help feeling rather anxious lest in a careless moment he should license my play, and so put me to the heavy expense of canceling, rewriting and reprinting my preface. I had even marked his copy conspicuously as a play with a serious purpose, in order to rouse his worst suspicions. But he behaved nobly, and did exactly what I had said he would do.

When Shaw asked for the usual indication of what passages were objectionable, so that he could obtain his copyright by having a performance of parts of the play with no meaning, objectionable or not, without them, Redford replied, as indicated, that his job was not to expurgate a play and that if Shaw submitted a licensable play he would license it despite what Shaw previously submitted. This forced Shaw “not only to debauch my own play with my own hands … but to disgorge another two guineas.” He did both until the play “was as gratuitous an offence against good manners as any dramatist was ever guilty of, in which condition Mr Redford was as much bound to license it as he had been not to license it when it meant something and might have done some good.” The Lord Chamberlain sanctioned the corrupt version, which received a copyright performance on 30 March. Shaw advertised to readers who might be curious, “the original version will be published without the omission of a single comma” (TDO 3: 1029–31). As he discovered, Celia Marshik reminds us, even though the press was free, “the public was free to ignore it as well.” Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant “reached a small audience. Only 1240 two-­ volume sets were printed, and while Shaw expected his work to sell well in the United States, a mere 734 sets sold there between April and December 1898.” The censor had not silenced the play but “had reduced its impact to a whisper.”14 Shaw had fought the Examiner of Plays by publicly confessing his refusal to certify his play as moral, and the result was that his book sold only 506 copies in Great Britain, less than in America, where he had counted on larger sales. In effect, he failed. The censor had beaten him. In his Preface, Shaw explains that the Examiner of Plays refused to recommend that the Lord Chamberlain license it because it exposed prostitution “as a big international commerce for the profit of capitalists like any other commerce, and very lucrative to great city estates, including Church estates, through the rents of the houses in which it is practiced.” Branding it as immoral and improper for the theatre, the Lord Chamberlain prohibited its production, which implied that the author, to his financial detriment, was an unscrupulous blackguard. Shaw’s injury was “real and

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considerable, and the injury to society much greater.” When Parliament, after the Great War (later called World War I), passed laws on the White Slave Traffic, as Mrs. Warren’s profession was called, all it did was “to enact that prostitutes’ male bullies and parasites should be flogged, leaving Mrs Warren in complete command of the situation, and its true nature more effectually masked than ever.” He blamed the censorship for not better educating legislators and journalists. As long as poverty makes virtue worse than unattractive and the money of rich men makes vice alluring, the “fight against prostitution with prayer and persuasion, shelters and scanty alms, will be a losing one.” The Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, backed by the Press, has an unwritten but well understood rule that prostitutes are tolerated on the stage only when they are beautiful, exquisitely dressed, and sumptuously lodged and fed; also that they shall, at the end of the play, die of consumption to the sympathetic tears of the whole audience, or step into the next room to commit suicide, or at least be turned out by their protectors and passed on to be “redeemed” by old and faithful lovers who have adored them in spite of their levities.

It is only natural that the poorer females in the audience will be taken in by the beauty, the dresses, and the luxurious lifestyle of the female characters, and will deduce that consumption, suicide, or ejectment are no more than pious formulas to save the censor’s face. Even if the dramatic catastrophes were convincing, most English girls are so poor, dependent, and aware that the drudgeries of any honest work available to them are so likely to lead them, sooner or later, “to lung disease, premature death, and domestic desertion or brutality that they would still see reason to prefer the primrose path to the stony way of virtue, since both, vice at worst and virtue at best, lead to the same end in poverty and overwork” (CPP 1: 231–32, 234, 236–37). The play dramatizes these views. Mrs. Warren tells her daughter Vivie that her mother “called herself a widow” (my italics), which suggests she had not been married. For that matter, nothing suggests Mrs. Warren had been married (like mother, like daughter); she may have chosen the title to prevent people from thinking Vivie was illegitimate. While one of her and her sister Liz’s half-sisters worked twelve hours a day for meager wages in a whitelead factory, from which lead poisoning killed her, the other married a laborer, paying rent and keeping him and their children on

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eighteen shillings a week until he became a drunkard. She and Liz went to a church school whose clergyman warned that Liz would end by jumping off Waterloo Bridge. Liz ran away and became a prostitute. Mrs. Warren became a scullery maid, later a barmaid, working fourteen hours a day for a pittance plus board. One night Liz appeared, elegantly dressed with lots of money, reprimanded her for wearing out her health and good looks for other people’s profit, and lent her money to join her as a prostitute, so that together they could save more money and open a brothel in Brussels, which they did. If she had not done so, she would have become an exhausted old drudge before she turned forty. In no other profession could they have saved enough to go into business. All they had was attractiveness and an ability to please men. “Do you think we were such fools as to let other people trade in our good looks by employing us as shopgirls, or barmaids, or waitresses, when we could trade in them ourselves and get all the profits instead of starvation wages?” she asks Vivie, and “What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man’s fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?—as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!” Prostitution is better than any other job open to a poor woman, she emphasizes. If Vivie became a prostitute, she would be a fool, but she herself would have been a fool if she had not become one. “The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her. If she’s in his own station of life, let her make him marry her; but if she’s far beneath him she cant expect it.” Vivie calls her “a wonderful woman” who is “stronger than all England” (CPP 1: 310–15). No wonder the censor objected to the play being performed before an audience that included girls. Of this passage, Shaw remarked in 1913, the English censorship, “like Hamlet, though it most potently and powerfully believed the statement, yet held it not honesty to have it so set down”—which Hamlet says to Polonius—“and would not allow me to light up my lighthouse, for which step the White Slave Traffic was deeply indebted to it” (TDO 4: 1310–11). Shaw’s title has two meanings. Profession means not only a job or occupation, but also a declaration of beliefs or opinions. Mrs. Warren’s speech professes her views, which her onstage audience of one approves. In Mrs. Warren and in Shaw’s defense of the play, hostile critics refer to her profession that her choice of profession was, for a woman in her class and circumstances, correct, as it was a better option than any other available to her, and to the idea that blame attaches not to her personally but to the society that makes these her only

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alternatives and that make money from her profession. Redford could not fathom, let alone believe this. As the play shows, the profits of prostitution are shared by the title character and her partner, a baronet whose cousin is a peer of the realm, also by the landlords of brothels, by the trades of which they are customers, and by public officials who through complicity or corruption are silenced. Add employers who profit by underpaying female workers; judges, church, and state officials who administer properties that brothel-­ keepers rent; and stockholders who get dividends from real estate and other investments connected to prostitution. They form a large group “with a strong pecuniary incentive to protect Mrs Warren’s profession, and a correspondingly strong incentive to conceal, from their own consciences no less than from the world, the real sources of their gain.” They insist that female vice, not poverty, drives women to prostitution. In the play, Vivie rejects Sir George Crofts’s proposal of marriage, reprimanding him for having become her mother’s business partner: “My mother was a very poor woman who had no reasonable choice but to do as she did. You were a rich gentleman; and you did the same for the sake of 35 per cent.” When she calls him “a pretty common sort of scoundrel,” his reaction surprises her: “Why the devil shouldnt I invest my money that way?” The Archbishop of Canterbury is one of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners who determine the Church’s earning and distribution of revenues, and their tenants include publicans and sinners. The Crofts Scholarship she had at the University of Cambridge’s Newnham College was founded by his brother, an MP. He gets his 22 per cent out of a factory with 600 girls in it, and not one of them getting wages enough to live on. How d’ye suppose they manage when they have no family to fall back on? Ask your mother. And do you expect me to turn my back on 35 per cent when all the rest are pocketing what they can, like sensible men? No such fool! If youre going to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles, youd better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of all decent society.

Vivie, “conscience stricken,” recognizes his justification is accurate. “You might go on to point out that I myself never asked where the money I spent came from. I believe I am just as bad as you” (CPP 1: 262–64, 330–32).

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In addition to the play’s depiction of prostitution, those who objected to it were troubled by the issue of incest. Shaw’s first draft is more daring about Crofts’s attraction to Vivie than his revisions are. When he asks why he might not “take an interest” in Vivie, “a fatherly interest,” Mrs. Warren rejects him. “Why shouldnt she marry me?” he asks. “You!” she exclaims and “(lowering her voice) How do you know that the girl maynt be your daughter, eh?” He answers, “(lowering his) How do you know that that maynt be one of the fascinations of the thing? What harm if she is?”15 Although the last two speeches did not survive in Shaw’s revisions, Crofts’s fatherly interest in marrying Vivie is shocking enough (CPP 1: 302). For several reasons, Shaw was wise in not retaining these lines. For one, he does not return to the subject. For another, Crofts is as close to a villain as he ever dramatized, and this aspect is so extreme, it might make his character verge on caricature. Emphasizing Crofts as a business investor no matter what the business is and as a dissolute fifty-year-old man who wants to buy a twenty-two-year-old wife with an offer of prosperous widowhood—Mrs. Warren says he is “like all the other worn-out old creatures!”—suffice (CPP 1: 273, 281, 303). Also, confining the possibility of incest to Frank and Vivie is dramatically more pointed and potent. Frank’s father, a cleric, had been a client of Mrs. Warren, who kept his love letters to her. Thinking he may be Vivie’s father, Reverend Gardner calls Frank’s marrying her “out of the question. Mrs Warren will tell you that it’s not to be thought of.” She responds, “Well, Sam, I dont know. If the girl wants to get married no good can come of keeping her unmarried,” but “nettled” that he considers her daughter not good enough for his son, tells him, “(defiantly) I know no reasons. If you know any, you can tell them to the lad, or to the girl, or to your congregation, if you like.” She swears no one Vivie ever met is her father. “I’m certain of that, at least.” Whether this is true is unclear. Crofts, who is vindictive because Vivie rejected him, tells her and Frank they are half-siblings (CPP 1: 291, 297, 307–08, 333). This may still shock twenty-first-century audiences. In 1900, Shaw chastised Archer for being “just like all the managers,” who want the subjects of his plays “with the ungentlemanly consequences left out.” Like them, he would accept the play “on condition that I leave in the prostitution, hot and strong, but leave out the inevitable complication that the prostitute’s child never knows its brothers and sisters, and is dramatically certain to find them turning up unexpectedly in the third act” (CL 2: 138). In Heartbreak House, Shaw recycles some of this—to no one’s objection, as far as I know, probably because he omits incest. Captain

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Shotover, who repeatedly confuses Mazzini Dunn, Ellie’s father, with the burglar Billy Dunn, asks Billy if Ellie is his daughter. “Well, how do I know, Captain?” he replies. “You know the sort of life you and me has led. Any young lady of that age might be my daughter anywhere in the wide world, as you might say” (CPP 5: 136–37). Would sexual intercourse between Vivie and Frank, if they were half-­ siblings, be a crime? Biblically, yes, according to Leviticus 18: 9. Yet what are we to make of Genesis 19: 30–36, that after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s two daughters got him drunk and seduced him, resulting in the birth of a son to each of them? One theologian explains this away by saying that in Genesis God gives no approval of the sin. Another says the passage records “the sordid act as a matter of history, but there is no sanction of sin in the sacred text.” As for Adam’s and Eve’s sons and daughters, God did not decree they not mate with siblings, for there was no one else in Eden to marry, and Leviticus was written thousands of years later. On 10 May 1650, during the Interregnum, Parliament passed legislation to suppress “the detestable sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication,” making carnal knowledge of brother and sister, including half-siblings, punishable by death and burial without benefit of clergy. In 1662, two years after the Restoration, The Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer forbade marriage between, among other relatives, brother and sister, including half-siblings. The Marriage Act of 1835 decreed that all marriages “between Persons within the prohibited Degrees of Consanguinity or Affinity [a list of marital relationships established by the Church of England and legally prohibited by church and state] shall be absolutely null and void to all Intents and Purposes whatsoever,” but the statute contained no other penalties. As in the 1650 Act on incest, first on the list of prohibitions was having carnal knowledge of one’s grandfather or grandmother, which might lead to conviction as a felony (this may seem bizarre, but since a grandparent would likely predecease his or her granddaughter or grandson, the younger spouse, instead of a sibling or half-­ sibling, might claim the right to inherit the deceased’s money and property). Not until 1908, a decade after the publication of Mrs Warren’s Profession, would the marriage of Vivie and Frank—if they were half-­ siblings—become illegal, according to An Act to Provide for the Punishment of Incest, which made the marriage between brother and sister, and half-brother and half-sister, a misdemeanor that upon conviction would imprison the guilty parties from three to seven years, with or without hard labor for no more than two years.16

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Shaw’s insistence that one failure of the censorship is that while it prohibits some subjects in serious plays, censors look the other way when comedies treat them jokingly. In Cæsar and Cleopatra, written five years after Mrs Warren’s Profession, the possibility of incest is not only comic, it is a non-issue as regards sexuality. King Ptolemy is only ten years old and the relationship between him and his teenage sister Cleopatra is sibling rivalry. Upon seeing him, her first actions are to drag him off his throne and take her place on it. He complains to Caesar that she always treats him this way, she calls him a crybaby, and when Caesar takes his hand and replaces him on the throne, his jealous sister is enraged. When Ptolemy’s tutor explains to the Romans that because Egyptian kings and queens may marry only those who have their royal blood, Ptolemy and Cleopatra are not only brother and sister, but are also king and consort, the only person who is shocked is Britannus, who proclaims he is scandalized by this improper convention. Condescendingly, Caesar asks the tutor to excuse Britannus, who is a barbarian and thinks his island’s customs are laws of nature—which may be Shaw satirizing Britannus’s descendants who are shocked at Vivie and Frank. Here, Shaw uses incest as a technicality to solve a political problem. Caesar proclaims that the rival siblings will reign jointly. Happily for Britannus and Shaw’s audience, he fails, since the political faction behind Ptolemy rejects the idea. Whereas incest is a comic non-issue in Cæsar and Cleopatra, it is a comic subterfuge in Major Barbara, written a dozen years after Mrs Warren’s Profession. The marriage of Cusins’s parents is legal in Australia but not in England, because his mother is his father’s deceased wife’s sister, which makes him a bastard. Unlike Hamlet, whose mother married his deceased father’s brother, Cusins does not berate either of his parents, as Hamlet does his uncle-­ stepfather, as an “incestuous … beast” who luxuriates “in the incestuous pleasure of [his spouse’s] bed.” Cusins’s fiancée comments, “Silly!” and his prospective mother-in-law dismisses the matter as “Stuff!”—quipping, “A man cant make cannons any the better for being his own cousin instead of his proper self” (CPP 3: 164–65). Two years after Major Barbara’s first performance and the year of its first publication, Parliament passed The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act (1907), which legalized a man’s marrying his dead wife’s sister. Surprisingly, Shaw did not subsequently change the line or add an explanation, although he changed the line in his 1941 motion picture adaptation (see Chap. 4).

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The taboo against incest also had an economic basis. Before the late nineteenth century, the number of bankers, entrepreneurs, and businessmen increased and formed an influential elite. To keep fortunes in the family, marriages between in-laws and between first and second cousins became increasingly common by the second half of the century, when outsiders were unlikely to marry daughters of wealthy families. Novels, whose characters readers considered people like themselves, Adam Kuper observes, “routinely featured romances and marriages between cousins.” Oscar Wilde parodies this in The Importance of Being Earnest, which “ends with the discovery that Ernest and Gwendolen are cousins.” Jack’s mother, Kuper reminds us, was neither a handbag nor Miss Prism. “He is the long-­ lost son of Lady Bracknell’s sister. Since Ernest and Gwendolen are the children of two sisters, even Lady Bracknell can have no objection to their marriage.” After World War I, when there was a shortage of eligible males in extended families, more out-of-family men married the wealthy daughters, but before then, despite objections by religious people, the tide had begun to change.17 Ironically, Granville Barker’s testimony to the 1909 Joint Parliamentary Committee on censorship refers to his discussion with Redford on the advisability of passing Major Barbara—not because incest was a problem but because the Salvation Army might be outraged if it were put on stage. Fortunately, Barker was able to tell him that the Court Theatre and the Salvation Army had been in communication, “and that so far from their feelings being outraged, they regarded it, I may say, as an excellent advertisement …. Had I not been able to assure Mr. Redford of that, he might, I think, easily have been unwilling to license the play” (1909 Report, p. 72). According to Shaw, what is wrong with censorship is not the failing of any individual censor. Every set of rules excludes original, epoch-making work while it passes conventional, old-fashioned work. The expurgatory index of the Catholic Church is august, learned, and authoritative, but it is not more enlightened, liberal, and tolerant than the Lord Chamberlain’s relatively unqualified officials. “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.” Accordingly, the first condition of progress is to remove censorships. To prohibit Mrs Warren’s Profession, he maintained, “is to protect the evil which the play exposes” (CPP 1: 246–47, 264).

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Although Shaw secured his copyright in the play, he found it difficult to find a theatre to produce it. On 2 November 1901, he lamented to Mrs. Patrick Campbell that he was “in hideous straits” about the Stage Society’s inability to find one for fear that “the Reader of Plays should revenge himself by suspending its license.” In a headnote to this letter, Laurence reports that the Society “was turned down by more than a dozen theatres, two music halls, and a picture gallery,” partly because of licensing difficulties, but also because the performance was to be on a Sunday. In desperation, the Society “settled for the small stage of the New Lyric Club,” where it was produced as private performances, on 5 and 6 January 1902—over a year after its scheduled première (CL 2: 240–41, 250). Reviews were hostile. The play, said the St James’s Gazette, “deals with an unmentionable subject in a manner that even the least squeamish might find revoltingly offensive.” The drama’s theme is “disgusting,” its tendency “wholly evil.” J.T. Grein found it so repellent he called it unfit for women’s ears, and “To some male minds too much knowledge of the seamy side is poisonous, for it leads to pessimism, that pioneer of insanity and suicide.” Certain that most women and many men did not know but guessed what Mrs. Warren’s trade was, Grein called the production “painful” (like the play’s dialogue, his review does not contain the words “prostitute” or “prostitution”). He insisted, “The main point is whether the problem is worth discussing and whether it has been dealt with in an adequate, convincing manner. I say no on both counts.” A dozen years later, on 16 November 1914, three months after the outbreak of the Great War, with the play still banned in Britain, the Dublin Repertory Theatre, an amateur company, audaciously produced it (authorized by Shaw) in its unpatented theatre, advertising it “for the First Time in Public.” Although the English authorities in Dublin Castle threatened to penalize it with a fine of £300 per performance in its unpatented theatre, they “wisely backed off from any such confrontation,” as Conolly properly puts it.18 Given that Mrs Warren’s Profession, after its initial private performances by the Stage Society in 1902, did not receive its first public performances in England, by a traveling repertory company, until 1925 in Birmingham and in King’s Cross, London, for one night each, more than three decades after Shaw wrote it, and not until 1926 in London’s West End, it would be impossible to make a case that Shaw won the battle with the English censors of this play. He fought but failed.

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The Campaign for Mrs Warren’s Profession in America In the United States, Shaw and those associated with the play’s production battled more censors. Its first public performance in what Hugo ironically calls “censor-free America” was on 29 October 1905  in New Haven—ironic because while America never had a national censor of plays, it has had state, county, in this case city, and in the case of cinema, as Chaps. 4 and 5 demonstrate, nongovernment censors who suppressed or tried to suppress dramatic works on stage and screen. What happened in America, Hugo observes, prompted Shaw to abolish “the principle of total abolition on which he had staked his all for over a decade.”19 In 1907 he concluded, “A wise control of the stage by the community is very much to be desired,” but it should not be exercised by the Examiner of Plays, whose rules are inconsistent and contradictory, or by “police raids.” Since freedom exists only in dreams, the municipality is the best available option. “It will not read plays and forbid or sanction them. It will give the manager both liberty and responsibility.” If he produces depraved plays, no one will defend him when his license comes up for renewal. “We want, not anarchy and the police, but reasonable liberties in return for reasonable guarantees” (TDO 3: 1140, 1145–46, 1148). The story of Mrs Warren’s Profession’s difficulties in America begins not in New Haven in 1905 but in New York in 1900. Commissioned by Olga Nethersole, the American dramatist Clyde Fitch wrote Sapho, based on Alphonse Daudet’s French novel (1884) about a prostitute’s affair with a student. Produced and directed by Nethersole, its star, it opened on 5 February 1900 with enormous publicity. Under the title “Mob, Frantic to See Sapho, Storms Doors of the Theatre,” The World described opening-­ night theatregoers and “curiosity seekers,” over half of them “women in fashionable millinery and martialed by men in evening dress and white gloves.” Tickets for seats and standing room were “snapped up eagerly.” When the box office announced “No More Money Taken Tonight,” mobs hurried to the street to pay ticket speculators up to four times the ticket prices. In the lobby, policemen controlled lines of purchasers. Outside, hawkers held up “dirty yellow-backed novels and yelled ‘Sapho, the most sensational book of the century!’”—which had begun only a month before. The audience numbered 1800, 200 of them in standing room. The same day, The World published another article with samples from the novel’s reviewers, who judged the impossibility that from Daudet’s

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“repulsive novel … a clean, wholesome drama could be made,” that brothel plays have never done good to anyone, and that their only effect, aside from gratifying prurient taste, was “to defile the minds of the young.” John Houchin relates, “Priests, ministers, and rabbis urged young women to avoid seeing the play.” One cleric called the title character “‘a libel on God.’” Hostility followed class lines. The play threatened the idealization of middle-class marriage, the superiority of which was based partly on self-­ control. To the middle class, “commercialized erotica was too alluring and too widespread” to ignore. “While claiming control of their own private sexual practices, they simultaneously demanded laws to proscribe similar behavior among workers and the poor.” Sapho dramatized “the type of woman that middle-class moralists feared.” The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose founder and first president was Anthony Comstock, charged Nethersole with indecency and immorality. On 21 February, the District Attorney arrested her and others connected with the production. Police closed the theatre on 5 March. On 5 April, after a two-­ day trial, the jury deliberated for fifteen minutes and acquitted them. Two days later, it reopened and ran for eighty-three performances. From 1901 through 1913, Nethersole toured it in America, London, and Australia. At that time, said her obituary more than half a century later, public kissing on the mouth was considered indecent.20 The year after her tour ended, an American silent movie version of Sapho was denounced by moralists, who found one scene especially indecent—not because of what it showed but because of what it left to the imagination. A young man carries “a woman ‘who had drunk deep of the dregs of life in the underworld of vice’” to his room and she embraces him. The lights fade out. When they go up, she is in bed, wearing a nightgown, implying that during the blackout the unwed lovers engaged in a sexual act. Licensors in some British cities banned the film. The owner of a cinema that showed it was prosecuted before six magistrates who saw it privately. Despite witnesses who testified “to its gross immorality and its demoralizing impact on the ‘innocent and pure minds’ of children, they dismissed the case after deliberating only a few minutes.”21 After Sapho’s run in New York in 1900, the stage was set for another play about sex which audiences might think sensational. Five years after Sapho, enter Mrs Warren’s Profession. In September 1905, Arthur Elmore Bostwick, head of the Circulation Department of the New York Public Libraries in Manhattan, banned Man and Superman from the open shelves. The New York Times reported that

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he disapproved of all Shaw’s plays. It is permissible for mature people to read Shaw, but not children, he said, and revealed class bias. “‘His attacks on existing social conditions are very radical and are almost certain to be misinterpreted by children.’” Suppose Man and Superman “‘fell into the hands of a little east sider. Do you think it would do him any good to read that the criminal before the bar of justice is no more of a criminal than the Magistrate trying him? Do you think that would tend to lower the statistics of juvenile crime?” Despite his ban in Manhattan, the book remained on the open shelves in Brooklyn public libraries. Asked by the paper’s London correspondent for comment, Shaw—who mistakenly thought Comstock was responsible—responded, “Nobody outside of America is likely to be in the least surprised. Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate town civilization after all.” Glad to receive credit, Comstock was silent on this. Shaw coined the word “Comstockery” in September. In October, the New York Times used it as a title, “Chicago ‘Comstockery,’” thereby passing it into the language, where it remains. To Shaw, this public, official insult was a symptom of moral horror not only in America. Indifferent to “the good intentions of the … Comstockers” but not to “the bigoted connubiality which provides them with the huge following that emboldens them to meddle with matters the greatest men touch with extreme diffidence,” he quoted from Man and Superman: “All men mean well” and “Hell is paved with good intentions, not bad ones.” On the 28th, the books returned to the shelves. Bostwick the librarian descends from Arthur Bostwick, a Puritan who fled to New England to escape religious persecution and make money. As historians record, Colonial America did not embrace tolerance; rather, “the dissenters became persecutors. Virginia imprisoned Quakers. Massachusetts whipped Baptists. Government-established churches were common, and nonbelievers were denied basic civil and political rights.” Like other Europeans in the New World, the Puritan religion was “used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the ‘heretic’ and the ‘unbeliever’—including the ‘heathen’ natives already here.” Those who settled Plymouth belonged to an uncompromising Puritan faction. “Their ‘city upon a hill’ was a theocracy that brooked no dissent, religious or political.” Like Bostwick’s forebears, the New York Times reports, Puritans in 1905 “still impose their austere standards of morality” on other Americans.22

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With Richard Mansfield, Arnold Daly was one of the first actor-­ managers to produce Shaw’s plays in America—Candida in 1903, The Man of Destiny and How He Lied to Her Husband in 1904, and You Never Can Tell and John Bull’s Other Island in 1905. The last, Shaw’s first failure in the United States, lasted less than two weeks in New York.23 In 1904, he cautioned Daly not to produce Mrs Warren’s Profession before warning the public so that it would not “attract the wrong people and keep away the right people.” Any suggestion that it was “unfit for young people to witness, will attract those who like licentious entertainments.” The play will disappoint them because it turns a subject they want to be romantic and attractive into one that is sordid, and it arouses their conscience, “which they expect the theatre to keep fast asleep for them at all times.” Worse, the same suggestion would revolt the thoughtful, whose support is necessary for success. The play shows that prostitution is not the fault of the prostitute but of a society that “pays for a poor & pretty woman’s prostitution in solid gold and pays for her honesty in starvation, drudgery & pious twaddle.” Whereas her patrons have no interest in this view, women who are occupied with rescuing prostitutes have. “Get the rescuers into the theatre and keep the patrons out of it; and you need have no fear about the reception of the play” (CL 2: 464). Stunned by the unanticipated failure of John Bull’s Other Island, Daly wanted to preserve his reputation as an exponent of Shaw’s drama of ideas. Quickly and rashly, he put Mrs Warren’s Profession into rehearsal. Its first public performance, only six days after the last one of John Bull’s Other Island, was in New Haven, an out-of-town tryout prior to its New York opening. Mary Shaw (not related to the author), who played the title role, records that over a thousand undergraduates of Yale University were in the galleries, with others and faculty in the orchestra. Most of them knew of the play only what they read in the newspapers. “They were looking for something offensive and coarse in the play, and, to our amazement in the very first act speeches that had no significance beyond their literal meaning were greeted with laughter and exclamations.” In the second act, when Mrs. Warren tells her daughter of her past, “pandemonium broke loose in the upper galleries.” When she said she cannot tell her who her father was, pandemonium returned. “It was impossible to proceed.” People in the orchestra called for quiet. The actresses waited for the audience to calm down, by which time Mary Shaw decided she could not act Mrs. Warren “with the vulgar cockney dialect to which she reverted in strong feeling.” Knowing how to control audiences,

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she played her as if she were Lady Macbeth, “in loud, sonorous tones with menace in every one of them. An appalling silence descended. There was no more trouble of any kind from the undergraduates” and when the second act curtain fell, the cast had ten curtain calls. During the intermission, one spectator said, “‘Gee, there’s no fun in this; this is a sermon.’” She agreed: “I really didn’t play Mrs. Warren at all; I preached a sermon.” The play continued “without further incident.” The public response, the New York Times reported, was “an uproar” from the newspapers, the police, and the public as to whether future performances should be permitted. Mayor John P. Studley directed the Chief of Police to revoke the theatre’s license and tell Daly he could no longer produce the play because it was “‘grossly indecent and not fit for pubic presentation.’” The mayor, who had neither seen nor read it, decreed, “I shall not allow it to be presented again.’” Believing the New Haven kerfuffle was a response from, to borrow terminology from a famous 1935 Variety headline (“Sticks nix hick pix”), hicks in the sticks nixed Shaw and sophisticated New York reviewers would reprove them, Daly decided to open the play at Manhattan’s Garrick Theatre on 30 October, three nights after its New Haven première.24 At this point, Comstock entered the picture. Who was Anthony Comstock? Let us turn to his biography by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech. In the twenties—with such wits as Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Harpo Marx (who was silent only as a comic actor)—Broun and Leech were members of the Algonquin Round Table in the New York hotel’s restaurant. Leech wrote two history books, both recipients of the Pulitzer Prize (she was the first woman to receive it for history), and one of them the Bancroft Prize as well. A socialist and a journalist, Broun wrote theatre criticism. In one review, he called Geoffrey Steyne the worst actor on the American stage. The actor sued him. The next time Broun reviewed a play with him in it, Broun mentioned him in the last sentence: “Mr. Steyne’s performance was not up to his usual standard.” When the case came to court, the judge dismissed it. Broun considered Shaw the greatest living playwright. To him and Leech, “the Comstock persona was hateful,” but they wanted to find the man behind the image. Leech persuaded Comstock’s successor as president of his Society to give them access to Comstock’s diary and other papers, which “were self-revealing documents indeed, showing Comstock’s unholy lust for publicity and his lack of compassion and charity.” Yet they found him to be a human being “who dedicated himself to the welfare of

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a mentally defective adopted daughter and whose pockets bulged with small toys to give away to slum children.”25 Although Comstock would not appear in a New York court as a complainant against Shaw’s indecent play, his voice was one of the first in America against it. In 1869, says Houchin, he became America’s “first federally appointed censor.” More than any other American of his time, he “expanded government control over sexual representation and contraception.” His main concerns were books, magazines, and pictures of nude women, and he was adept at involving the government to police depictions of the female body. He “began a crusade against obscene literature” in 1872 and collected evidence to have booksellers arrested for marketing it. He was convinced that obscene material was “the most virulent foe that Christian Americans would ever battle. It caused crime, debased the institution of marriage, and threatened to corrupt children, particularly young males, the future of the nation and the race.” Backed by the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), he founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice in New York in 1873. He did not care if a book was obscene or had suggestive passages, smutty photographs, or merely a racy title. He and his YMCA allies “also considered that women who wanted control of their bodies and the size of their families were obscene”—issues still alive in the twenty-first century. He focused on cheap editions of tawdry novels and reproductions of sexually stimulating European art, which sold for a few cents. The Ulysses S. Grant Administration appointed him Special Agent of the US Post Office. In 1873, he lobbied for the passage of An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, soon called “the Comstock Law,” which outlawed transportation of allegedly obscene matter—including contraceptives, sex toys, letters, or documents with sexual content, including only information—in the US mail. Roughly half the states later enacted “Comstock laws.” His Society attacked pornography and serious writing, modern and classical, on moral principles. He did nothing except call the police’s attention to Mrs Warren’s Profession, which he neither read nor saw, but he was responsible for the sensation it created in New York. He learned Shaw’s name when Bostwick removed Man and Superman from the open shelves of Manhattan’s Public Libraries and put it on reserve. A reporter from the New York Times interviewed Shaw, who erroneously assumed Comstock, a name familiar to him, was responsible. The Times sent a reporter to interview Comstock, who like Shaw knew how to use the press advantageously. “George Bernard Shaw?” he asked, “who is he?”

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and “I never heard of him in my life. Never saw one of his books, so he can’t be much.” (The following year Shaw used his jibe in The Doctor’s Dilemma. “I dont believe in morality,” says Dubedat. “I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw.” “Bernard Shaw? I never heard of him,” Sir Patrick responds. “He’s a Methodist preacher, I suppose.” [CPP 3: 393–94]). When the reporter showed Comstock Shaw’s letter in the paper, he read it, called Shaw an Irish smut dealer, and ranted that his statement meant he knew his works “can, and probably do, do harm to weak and dishonest people.” This laid him, his publishers, those who present his plays and have anything to do with their production or dissemination legally liable. He called it evident that Shaw—whom he confused with the Ibsen of Ghosts—“believes the proper method of curing contagious and vile diseases is to parade them in front of the public. He evidently thinks that’s the way to treat obscene literature.” The question was not whether his works might corrupt the reporter’s mind or his own, but whether they might corrupt anyone’s mind. That morning, he boasted, he confiscated 23,000 pictures for destruction and had the man convicted in court. “Last week I confiscated 100,000 such pictures from a German in Brooklyn.” It was unimportant if the literary style of a work were great if the subject was bad. The sole question was whether a book, picture, or play can hurt anyone morally. If Shaw’s description of himself in the Times was accurate, “we will bring his works and the people that disseminate them to the test of the law.” He will investigate Shaw’s plays that were presented and the actors who presented them, and if they were like what Shaw indicated, his Society will have them dealt with. The reporter concluded there should be trouble ahead for Shaw and his plays.26 He was right. With “Comstockery” in mind, say his biographers, retaliation, together with public policy, may have been a factor when he tried to frighten Arnold Daly from producing Mrs Warren’s Profession. On 24 October, he wrote to Daly, reminding him that Shaw’s “filthy” production was suppressed in England. So that Daly could not plead ignorance of the law, he quoted a relevant decision of a New  York Appellate Court. As Broun and Leech indicate, “Daly was no poor hand at publicity himself and he realized the value of a Comstock condemnation.” He gave reporters copies of the letter and his reply: “‘You call Mrs. Warren’s Profession a “filthy play.” I cannot believe that you have read it,’” since it is “‘a strong sermon and a great moral lesson,” and he invited Comstock to attend a rehearsal. “This invitation was not accepted,” say Broun and Leech, but Daly was probably “aiming over Anthony’s head in the general direction of the public.”

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Asked why he would not see it, Comstock asked, “Why should I?” He aimed not to advertise Daly or Shaw but to impress upon them that there were laws about plays that contravene the community’s morals and offend public decency. If they produce one, their punishment will be severe. He had not read it but received letters from people who had, and Shaw’s own words convict him. The play’s praise by “men of letters” was irrelevant; what was germane was the judgment of “men of morality and decency.” The Society fulfilled its duty when he sent Daly a warning. If the play is performed, it is up to the police to do their duty. The stage’s tendency is toward indecency, and “if a manager would advertise that on a certain day there would be a beautiful girl on exhibition in his theatre in the nude, the theatre would be packed.” Daly asked a New York Times reporter why Comstock had not taken exception to plays like Camille and stressed the difference between it and Shaw’s play: “‘If a girl sees Camille she says of the courtesan: ‘How grand, how noble. I want to be like Camille.’” If she sees Mrs Warren’s Profession she finds Mrs. Warren and her like repellant. Since Shaw, Daly, and Comstock were all masters “of puffery it may be a little unfair to single out one of the three and give him the credit,” Comstock’s biographers admit, but all the evidence points to Comstock as chiefly responsible for the tumult. Having set the ball in motion, he sat back, watching Shaw and Daly keep it moving. Shaw said that whereas he had spent his life trying to awaken the public conscience, Comstock had spent his examining and destroying a hundred tons of indecent postcards. Daly announced, “children would not be admitted to Mrs Warren’s Profession.” To many, “Comstock was a joke, but he was still a figure of great power. His attitude toward Mrs. Warren’s Profession was that of his times.” In that period, he did not seem easier to shock than others were. New  York editorial writers made fun of him, but they generally agreed with his estimate of the play he had not read. “The liberal New York World spoke of Mrs. Warren’s Profession as ‘tainted drama.’”27 Before it opened on 30 October, Daly let Police Commissioner William McAdoo read the prompt script and, contrary to Shaw’s demands and the terms of his license to produce the play, Daly deleted passages McAdoo thought offensive. Thus, Shaw lost his fight with the New  York censors before opening night. Crowds gathered outside the theatre. Scalpers asked outrageously high prices: a rear balcony seat was sixty dollars (which today would be about $1800). Mary Shaw required a policeman to get her through the crowd. After reaching her dressing room, she claims, credibly, that it took her ten minutes to regain her composure. To emphasize

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expensively dressed vulgarity, she planned to wear, as in New Haven, a blonde wig and a striking dress. Daly, alarmed, asked her to remove the wig and tone down her appearance. McAdoo, script in hand, waited for her to speak a blue-penciled line. By the end of the scene between Mrs. Warren and Vivie, which had become innocuous, he was asleep. The audience did not misbehave. The next morning, said the New York Times, McAdoo told Mayor George Brinton McClellan, Jr. “the production was ‘revolting, indecent, and nauseating, where it was not boring.’” His report stated, “‘The play is in four acts. I saw three of them.’” The main characters led and lead “‘immoral lives, and defend their position with all the cleverness and ability of the author; they are and they continue prosperously immoral to the end of the play.’” The play tells working girls it is better to have a “‘life of vice rather than of honest work.’” He wrote to Daly, the theatre owner and the manager, forbidding a second performance and threatening to arrest anyone participating in it. He issued warrants “charging a violation of the Penal Code which relates to ‘offending public decency.’” Ticket sales stopped.28 Interviewed by the London correspondent of The Sun on 31 October, Shaw asked, “Are the facts exposed in Mrs Warren’s Profession denied? If not, in whose interests are they suppressed?” The police, “doubtless with the best intentions, are protecting not public morality but the interests of … the employers who pay women less than subsistence wages and overwork them mercilessly to grind profits for themselves.” They raise an outcry “of immorality and disgusting dialogue, but in the end,” he prophesied, “the public conscience of America, at present a hasty, unintelligent and easily duped force, will get educated and go over them like a steam roller, with an effective factory code” (CPP 1: 358). After the final act, Daly reminded the audience that “if their ‘public opinion’ was responsible for closing the production, they would be making a ‘sad commentary indeed upon twentieth century so called civilization and our enlightened new country.’” To condemn this play, he implied, would be to deny the theatre’s progress toward civilization—“code words,” says Randy Kapelke, that would stamp an American audience’s rejection of the play with the mark of philistinism, “cultural ignorance and backwardness.” Alas, reviews in the purportedly sophisticated New York papers echoed those of the hicks in the sticks. “As a defense of immorality this takes the palm,” said The Sun. Under the headline “Performance About as Elevating as a Post-Mortem,” the reviewer of the New York Times said the play “has absolutely no place in a theatre before a mixed assemblage” and its dialogue comprised “long, dry, tedious shallows of

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nugatory talk.” The headline of the review in the New York Herald announced, “Shaw Play the Limit of Stage Indecency.” It called the plot, atmosphere, incidents, and characters “degenerate.” The only way to expurgate it “is to cut the whole play out. You cannot have a clean pig sty.” It insults decency because “It defends immorality,” “It besmirches the sacredness of a clergyman’s calling,” and “worst of all,” it flippantly discusses “the marriage of brother and sister, father and daughter, and makes the one supposedly moral character of the play, a young girl, declare that choice of shame, instead of poverty, is eminently right.”29 The New York World, polled the audience “whether it considered the play fit to be produced in America.” It distributed cards to indicate Fit or Unfit. The responses were 304 Fit and 272 Unfit (CL 2: 573–74). Shaw had initially scored by coining the word “Comstockery.” The New York Public Library, pressured, returned Man and Superman to the open shelves. Comstock fought back and—until decades later, when the times changed—won. Recalling that period, his biographers state, “it is astounding to find that not Comstock, but almost the entire New York community regarded Shaw as a clever and ribald charlatan.” Ironically, the same year the community was “outraged and shocked” because Shaw dramatized prostitution the way he did, “prostitutes ranged openly up and down Broadway only a few steps from the theatre.” Although it may be almost inconceivable to imagine what standard Comstock used to list his fight against Shaw among his triumphs, he did so in his annual report to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, in which he pinned Comstockery on himself as a badge of honor and defined the term: Comstockery—The applying of the noblest principles of law, as defined by the Higher Courts of Great Britain and the United States of America, in the interest of Public Morals, especially those of the young. We are pleased to avail ourselves of this opening, made by a foreign writer of filth, to concisely define before the world the grand principles which govern our actions. If, like a boomerang, it hits back, our foreign foe has no one to blame but himself.

Many of Comstock’s crusades, Broun and Leech conclude, involved books, plays, and pictures that “were pornographic only by the widest stretch of the imagination. Comstock wanted judges and juries to make that stretch and often they obeyed him.”30 Perhaps it is not so astounding after all. At the end of 1905, before the New York Court of Special Sessions

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judged the case, Daly closed the play in New York. Comstock was the winner—at least for the moment. I have quoted Broun and Leech saying that judges often obeyed Comstock. With this play, two of the three appellate judges did not. The Court found in favor of Mrs Warren’s Profession. On 6 July 1906, Justice Olmsted wrote the opinion acquitting the defendants: “The complaining police officer, who was the sole witness, testified to no indecent or suggestive act on the part of the performer.” The decision, based on the prompt book’s words spoken on stage, was that the language did not offend public decency and that “If virtue does not receive its usual reward in this play, vice at least is presented in an odious light and its votaries are punished.” The play attacks “existing social conditions, particularly those which relate to the commercial employment of women,” and “not one of the characters of the play refutes the sophisticated reasoning of the courtesan mother” as to why women become prostitutes. Moreover, instead of exciting impure imagination in the mind of the spectator, that which is really excited is disgust; that the unlovely, the repellant, the disgusting in the play, are merely accessories to the main purpose of the drama, which is an attack on certain social conditions relating to the employment of women, which the dramatist believes, as do many others with him, should be reformed.

Comstock’s biographers, one of them a theatre reviewer, assess this decision as suffering “from the dramatic critic complex, to which most of the world is subject, and [it] undertook to digress from the law long enough to tell Shaw how a play should be written.” They quote the opinion: “The theme is not a pleasant one,” “stereotyped railings against current social conditions,” “another of the dramatist’s shock producers,” “old and hackneyed materials, the common tools of scores of other playwrights,” and “there is so little that is attractive that it is safe to predict, without the preliminary sensational advertisement of this proposed production, its life on the boards would be short.” The court’s conclusion, they find, is that “Bernard Shaw was a person made important almost wholly because he had chanced to come across the path of Comstock.”31 After the hurly-burly, the battle was first lost, then won—or apparently won. With the announcement of the decision, the New York World’s editor cabled Shaw, asking his opinion of it. Shaw replied: “STRANGE COUNTRY WHERE THE PRESS IS BLIND AND THE EYES OF

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JUSTICE OPEN I AM PROFOUNDLY GRATEFUL.” The New York American requested a statement from Shaw, who contrasted his position in America and England. “In America, every conceivable insult and outrage was heaped on me by the New York press, which forced the police to arrest Arnold Daly, and his whole company; but America has also given me my remedy.” His and Daly’s personal characters have “been publicly vindicated.” In England, by contrast, he had no legal remedy, for “the King’s reader of plays takes the view of the New  York newspaper men whose minds resemble his in most respects, and he keeps my plays from the stage without any possibility of my calling him to account. I have no redress. He is above all the courts.” Shaw concluded, “America has the best of it this time. I certainly prefer the American system in this respect” (CL 2: 631–33). After considering the matter for some years, his position became more measured. Daly, he reflected, “was morally lynched side by side with me. Months elapsed before the decision of the courts vindicated him and even then … his triumph received a rather sulky and grudging publicity.” Meanwhile, he could barely approach an American city, including those that had applauded him “as the defender of hearth and home when he produced Candida, without having to face articles discussing whether mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays as You Never Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs Warren’s Profession, and acted by the monster who produced it.” Journalists erroneously assumed that Daly and Shaw, as “exploiters of vice,” must have made “colossal fortunes” from the abuse heaped on them and “in fact provoked it and welcomed it with that express object. Ignorance of real life could hardly go further.” Soon after, “a leading New York newspaper, which was among the most abusively clamorous for the suppression of Mrs Warren’s Profession, was fined heavily for deriving part of its revenue from advertisements of Mrs Warren’s business” (CPP 1: 260–62). Vindication by the New York court did not the end the matter.

After New York In March 1907, Mrs Warren’s Profession returned to the New York stage with Mary Shaw in the title role. Although there was no municipal interference, “the combined hostility of the newspapers and the clergy turned out to be a very formidable opposition.” As Houchin says, “The censors had their way in spite of the acquittal.” The play received only twenty-five performances. After losing the battle in the court, the moralists and

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censors won it in the court of public opinion, for not enough audiences turned out to make the production successful. Mary Shaw toured the play to cities in the American midwest and west coast, and to Canada. Outside northeast America, L.W. Conolly reports, it “also had a rough ride.” She dealt with opposition to the play by meeting local civic groups and prominent citizens and changing the text “(without, of course, Shaw’s knowledge, let alone permission) to accommodate their concerns”—which hardly qualifies as victory for Shaw. She agreed with him that this was a woman’s play, for its theme “appeals more powerfully to women than to men,” and she pointed out, “In all the hubbub, not a woman’s voice had been heard; it was simply one vast aggregate of men and their opinions.” What she did was to arrange, before performing in large cities, to be invited to “the principal women’s clubs, to lay the case plainly before them, and to ask for their cooperation.” Everywhere, “the best class of organized women” welcomed her. “They were most interested and eager to hear my side of the case. In every instance a vote was taken to visit the theatre and see the play, and to form an independent judgment of it.” The play did not shock any woman she spoke with, but it usually shocked men. In every city, protectors of morals called on her to request modifications in several speeches. In Lincoln, Nebraska, clergymen told her they wanted certain lines cut. The worst was Vivie’s asking her mother who her father was. Mary explained why it was natural for Vivie to ask this question and Mrs. Warren’s inability to answer it propels the confession of what her life had been like. She asked if there were other lines they complained of. “There was a most awkward pause, a kind of eye consultation between them, and then the spokesman replied: ‘No, I think not.’” The faculty of midwestern state universities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska supported her, attending the play and inviting her to address their students. In San Francisco, the Jesuits, who owned the land on which the theatre had been built, objected to its production there because a clause in their lease “prohibited plays of an immoral character ever being given in the playhouse erected on it.” Their objections were, first, Crofts’s defense that the Archbishop of Canterbury had questionable investments, that publicans and sinners rented tenements belonging to the church, and that the only conditions for his investments were that they bring in a good return. Since this theatre “‘is raised up on church property,’” they admitted with surprising candor, “‘we feel that this touches us a little too closely.’” Second, they objected that Vivie respects what her mother did. Since marriage is a sacrament, the Jesuits could not condone respect for a woman

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who had an illegitimate child. In violation of Shaw’s license, Mary agreed to cut both passages, even though the first objection was a confession of the accuracy of Crofts’s justification. The show went on, abridged. Shaw lost to the Jesuit censors. Upon concluding her tour, she again presented the play in New York, for a month, starting March 1918.32 In view of her tenacious support of the play and her campaign for it throughout North America, it is difficult to condemn her. Even so, we must recognize that she acceded to the demands of censors. As Conolly reminds us, “the international acceptance of Mrs Warren’s Profession as a powerful and important contemporary play was rapidly developing.” In addition to performances in North America, there were European productions in 1907 and 1908: Berlin, Stockholm, Budapest, Madrid, Munich, and Paris. In the first decade of the new century, “England was perhaps the only country in the world where public performances of Mrs Warren’s Profession were banned.”33 This was not for want of trying. With Shaw’s cooperation, B. Iden Payne tried to persuade Redford to reverse his decision and license Mrs Warren’s Profession for public performance in Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre, of which he was manager. In 1907, Payne sent him a copy of the play, a check for two pounds and two shillings, and a statement that he wanted to produce it. In testimony before the 1909 Joint Parliamentary Committee on censorship, Frederick Whelen—founder of the Incorporated Stage Society—quoted a letter from Payne, that three days after he submitted the play, the fee, and his statement, Redford returned them and “‘had written on my own sheet of paper, “surely you are aware that I have already refused to license this play.—G.A.R.”’” On 4 August, Shaw sent Payne a draft letter of response to Redford, which Payne followed, drawing Redford’s attention to the fact that as the Examiner of Plays was an official, I could hardly accept this footnote to my own letter as an official refusal. I also called his attention to the fact that it was some years since he had refused Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and that it was quite consonant with the custom of the censorship of plays for an adverse decision to be revoked, mentioning as particular instances The Power of Darkness, by Tolstoi, and Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias. I also reminded him that Mr. Shaw’s position had considerably grown in importance during the last few years.

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Payne urged Redford “‘to at least reconsider the play, or at any rate to give me a formal refusal. To this I received no reply, and after about ten days I wrote asking once more for an answer to my last letter. This was received with the same silence, and I dropped the matter as hopeless’” (1909 Report 136; CL 2: 707–08). In December 1911, as the next chapter discusses, Redford resigned as Examiner of Plays. He was replaced by Charles Brookfield, who made no change in the status of Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Two years later, Brookfield died and was replaced by G.S. Street. Again, no change. Edith (or Edy) Craig, Ellen Terry’s daughter, produced it on 16 and 18 June 1912, in Covent Garden—not publicly but as part of a subscription season of the Pioneer Players, founded the year before, James Fisher reports, as a theatre group “run by women and dedicated to presenting plays by and about women.” In 1916, during the Great War, the Plymouth Repertory Theatre suggested that because women, for whom this moral play was designed, were a large part of theatre audiences, it was time to give it a license. The Lord Chamberlain thought this reason insufficient, saying, “‘The more cleverly Mrs Warren defends prostitution the more objectionable does it seem to me that she should be allowed to do so on the public stage.’” Employing a different tactic, Shaw asked why the censors were worried about a play that was now outdated, and asked whether there was a provision for reconsidering a decision once public opinion changed. When the Lord Chamberlain replied that he found no need to reread the play to reach his decision, Shaw retorted that he needed to reread the Bible because though the New Testament does not change, his perception of it does. He added that, as he had just passed his sixtieth birthday, he feared only that when the play is finally licensed he would find himself “a respectable elderly gentleman over sixty, credited with a recent production of a play written with a brutality extremely unbecoming to his age and serenity.” In 1921, John Johnston reports, one reason the advocates of Mrs Warren’s Profession thought they had another chance was that the Lord Chamberlain reconsidered and licensed a translation of Brieux’s Damaged Goods, about the danger and effects of syphilis, a play his office had rejected. “After very careful consideration,” said G.S. Street, he changed his mind: “So far as I am concerned the play is, though quite without enthusiasm, recommended for license.” However, the Lord Chamberlain too had no enthusiasm and did not change the decision of his predecessors. Possibly, the difference between their views of the two plays was that in wartime Damaged Goods taught a lesson (about syphilis) the authorities

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wanted soldiers on leave to learn, whereas Shaw’s play did not. In 1924, however, says Johnston, Charles Macdona, who held touring rights of Shaw’s plays, applied to a new Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cromer, who granted the license, explaining that since times had “greatly changed since 1898,” it would “be absurd to go on refusing a license to this play.’” Not until 27 July 1925 was Mrs Warren’s Profession publicly performed in England (CL 3: 883). The next day, the reviewer of the Birmingham Gazette confessed himself at a loss to understand why it had ever been banned. “There is no suggestion that the profession of Mrs Warren is a desirable career, or that to live it whole one should necessarily be immoral. The play amounts to a scathing exposure of the society that tolerates Mrs Warren’s profession and fattens on it.”34 Shaw’s campaign for this play lasted so long that today his efforts and failures recall what his countryman Samuel Beckett wrote in 1983 (in Worstward Ho!): “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Although Shaw was ultimately victorious, it is difficult to claim victory for battles that had begun more than a quarter of a century earlier.

Notes 1. Brad Kent. “Bernard Shaw, the British Censorship of Plays, and Modern Celebrity.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 (2014), 57: 234; Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956), p. 148; Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (New York: Random House, 1988), 1: 336; “Records of the Public Morality Council,” The National Archives, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/4fa412a8-cdd3-493d-86b3-f308e68aefbc (accessed 2 November 2019); Dorothy Knowles, The Censor, The Drama and The Film 1930–1934 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), p. 21; Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, pp. 182–83. 2. Bernard Shaw, Agitations: Letters to the Press 1875–1950. Ed. Dan H.  Laurence and James Rambeau (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985), pp. 12–13. 3. Bernard Shaw, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Shaw’s Music, 3 vols., ed. Dan H.  Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1981), 1: 818–19, 823; Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 2: 224–25, 5: 268; Brad Kent, “Censorship,” George Bernard Shaw in Context, ed. Brad Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 201.

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4. Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw: The Diaries 1885–1897, ed. Stanley Weintraub (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 2: 1052. 5. Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 205. 6. Joan Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-appraisal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 11. 7. Henrik Ibsen, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, trans. William Archer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 7: 54, 143–45; Bernard F.  Dukore, “A Doll House a Century Later,” New England Theatre Journal (1991), 2.1: 9–10. 8. Richard Findlater, Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain, p.  82; William Archer, “Introduction” [to Ghosts], Henrik Ibsen, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, 7: xxi–xiv; James Walter McFarlane, “Appendix III: Ghosts: Commentary,” The Oxford Ibsen (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 5: 479. 9. Joan Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-appraisal, pp. 36, 38, 103. 10. Henrik Ibsen, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, 7: 178–79, 196–200; Joan Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-appraisal, p. 103. 11. William Winter, Vagrant Memories: Being Further Recollections of Other Days (New York: George H. Doran, 1915), pp. 496–98; William Winter, The Wallet of Time: Containing Personal, Biographical, and Critical Reminiscences of the American Theatre (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1913), 2: 567, 567, 569, 590–92; Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 64. 12. For a full account of Shaw’s problems with licensing this play, see L.W.  Conolly, “Mrs Warren’s Profession and the Lord Chamberlain,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies: Dionysian Shaw, ed. Michel Pharand (2004), 14: 46–95. 13. Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw, p. 205. 14. Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, pp. 52–53. 15. Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession: A Facsimile of the Holograph Manuscript (New York Garland, 1981), pp. 94–96. 16. Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook of Bible Difficulties (n.p.: Victor Books, n.d.), pp. 9, 19, http:// crusadefortruth.com/links/PDFS/When_Critics_Ask.pdf (accessed 19 February 2019); Wayne Jackson, “Does the Bible Conflict with Itself in the Matter of Incest?” Christian Courier, https://www.christiancourier. com/articles/950-does-the-bible-conflict-with-itself-in-the-matter-ofincest (accessed 19 February 2019); “[10] May 1650: An Act for suppressing the detestable sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication,” BHO: British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp387-389 (accessed 5 August, 2018); The Book of

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Common Prayer [1662, Church of England], http://www.ccepiscopal. org/handouts/bcp-1662.pdf (accessed 2 August 2018); Marriage Act 1835 (5 & 6 Gul. IV) Cap. LIV, https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/54694fa6e4b0eaec4530f99d/t/577cf1fa46c3c411803 8de3a/1467806202887/Marriage+Act+1835.pdf (accessed 19 February 2019); “An Act to Provide for the Punishment of Incest, 1908” (Appendix E: “Incest”), Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession, ed. L.W.  Conolly (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005), pp. 204–05. 17. Adam Kuper, Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 5–7, 11, 22–23, 33–36, 251–53; Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, 28 August 1907 (7 Edw. 7, e. 47.), pp.  135–36, http://simongatward.com/wp-content/ uploads/2013/06/marr_deceased_1907_7_Edw7_c47.pdf (accessed 20 January 2019). 18. “Contemporary Reviews” (Appendix C), Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession, ed. L.W.  Conolly, pp.  174–76; L.W.  Conolly, “Mrs Warren’s Profession and the Lord Chamberlain,” pp.  64–65; Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, “Shaw and the Dublin Repertory Theatre,” SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, ed. Michel Pharand (2015), 35.2: 179. 19. Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw, p. 207. 20. John H.  Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century, pp.  46–47; “Mob, Frantic to See Sapho, Storms Doors of the Theatre.” The World, 7 February 1900, p. 14; “Sapho Convicted in Critics’ Court. Verdict that Play Will Conserve No Good Purpose in Pointing a Moral Is Unanimous,” The World, 7 February 1900, p.  14; “Olga Nethersole Dies,” New York Times, 11 January 1951, p. 2. 21. Dean Rapp, “Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic, and the British Film Industry,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies (Autumn 2001), 34.3: 429. 22. “Free Libraries Bar Bernard Shaw’s Books; Bad for Children, Says A.E. Bostwick, Who’s in Charge. HIS ACTION IS NOT FINAL And May Be Reversed Tomorrow—Brooklyn Sees No Harm in Man and Superman,” New York Times, 21 September 1905, p.  9; “Chicago ‘Comstockery,’” New York Times, 6 October 1905, p. 8; “Bernard Shaw Resents Action of Librarian: Calls ‘American Comstockery’ World’s Standing Joke,” New York Times, 26 September 1905, pp. 1–2; “Who’s Bernard Shaw? Asks Mr. Comstock; And, Having Read the Irish Author’s Letter, He Finds Out. I’ll Look Him Up, He Says. Why, He Convicts Himself, Adds Mr. Comstock— Now He Will Investigate Shaw’s Plays and Books,” New York Times, 28 September 1905, p.  9; Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, “The Threat of Tribalism,” The Atlantic, October 2018; p.  79; Kenneth C.  Davis, “America’s True History of Religious Tolerance,” Smithsonian Magazine,

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October 2010, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americastrue-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/ (accessed 27 December 2018); James W.  Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp.  90–91; Rebecca Beatrice Brooks. “The Great Puritan Migration,” History of Massachusetts Blog, https://historyofmassachusetts. org/the-great-puritan-migration/ (accessed 27 November 2018). 23. John Bull’s Other Island, https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/ john-bulls-other-island-4825 (accessed 1 March 2019). 24. Mary Shaw, “My ‘Immoral’ Play: The Story of the First American Production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” McClure’s Magazine (April 1912), 38: 685; “Daly’s New Shaw Play Barred in New Haven,” New York Times, 29 October 1905, p. 1; “Sticks nix hick pix,” Variety, 17 July 1935, https://variety.com/1935/film/news/sticks-nix-hick-pix-1117922332/ (accessed 1 November 2019). 25. Richard O’Connor, Heywood Broun: A Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), pp. 37–38, 125, 158; “Comstock Act,” 1873, Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Comstock-Act (accessed 15 May 2018). 26. John H.  Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century, pp.  36–38; Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927), pp.  18, 145, 229–30; “Comstock Act,” 1873, Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Comstock-Act (accessed 15 May 2018); Laurie Penny, “The Criminalization of Women’s Bodies Is All About Conservative Male Power,” The New Republic, 17 May 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/153942/criminalization-womensbodies-conservative-male-power (accessed 1 November 2019); “Who’s Bernard Shaw? Asks Mr. Comstock,” New York Times, 28 September 1905, p. 9. 27. Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock, pp.  231–33; “Comstock Won’t See Bernard Shaw’s Play,” New York Times, 26 October 1905, p. 9. 28. Mary Shaw, “My ‘Immoral’ Play,” pp. 688–89; “Shaw Play Stopped; The Manager Arrested,” New York Times, 1 November 1905, pp. 1–2. 29. Randy Kapelke, “Preventing Censorship: The Audience’s Role in Sapho (1900) and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1905),” Theatre History Studies (June 1998), 18: 127; “Play Stupid and Vicious: Performance About as Elevating as a Post-Mortem,” New York Times, p.  9; “Dramatic Censor M’Adoo,” The [New York] Sun, 5 November 1905, p. 6; “Shaw Play the Limit of Stage Indecency,” New York Herald, 31 October 1905, pp. 3–4. 30. Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock, pp. 234–36, 267.

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31. “The Court Approves Bernard Shaw’s Play. Mrs. Warren’s Profession Legally Not Indecent, Justices Say,” New York Times, 7 July 1906, p. 7; Laurence, headnote to Bernard Shaw, cable to the New York World, 6 July 1906 (CL 2: 631–32); Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock, pp. 233–34. 32. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/ mrs-warrens-profession-5045 (accessed 28 February 2019); Mary Shaw. “My ‘Immoral’ Play,” p.  692–94; John H.  Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century, p.  56; L.W.  Conolly, “Mrs Warren’s Profession and the Lord Chamberlain,” p.  58; Mrs Warren’s Profession, https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/mrs-warrensprofession-8606 (accessed 1 March 2019). 33. L.W.  Conolly, “Mrs Warren’s Profession and the Lord Chamberlain,” pp. 58–59. 34. “Censor of Plays Resigns,” New York Times, 22 December 1911, p. 14, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1911/12/ 22/104845295.pdf (accessed 28 February 2019); James Fisher, “Edy Craig and the Pioneer Players’ Production of Mrs Warren’s Profession,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, ed. Fred D.  Crawford (1995), 15: 38–39; Bernard Shaw, Theatrics, ed. Dan H.  Laurence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 132–33; John Johnston, The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), pp. 78, 90; “Contemporary Reviews” (Appendix C), p. 180.

CHAPTER 3

Shaw’s Campaign Against the Censors: Press, Public Opinion, and Parliament

Our battle is more full of names than yours, Our men more perfect in the use of arms, Our armor all as strong, our cause the best. Then reason will our hearts should be as good. —William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2, IV.i

In the Edwardian decade and the following years before the Great War, English dramatists wrote or wanted to write plays that, like Ibsen’s, dealt seriously with social issues. What stood in their way was the threat of the Lord Chamberlain’s refusal of a license. Unsurprisingly, as James Woodfield states, a chief argument of those who supported the abolition of stage censorship was discrimination against serious dramatists. Like authors of music hall skits or sketches, who did not have to submit them to the Examiner of Plays for a license, novelists and poets were censorship-free, and “even dramatists could publish their plays subject only to the normal laws of libel and decency.” English critics knew of this and of the rise of non-commercial free theatres (i.e., free of the restrictions of censorship) in major European cities, which produced new and different types of plays. In London, theatres sprang up to circumvent the Lord Chamberlain’s ban on serious drama by the same means that productions of The Cenci and Ghosts had circumvented it: private performances for members of a society or club who did not purchase tickets at the box office but received them

© The Author(s) 2020 B. F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw and the Censors, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52186-8_3

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as part of their membership dues. In 1891, the Independent Theatre, inspired by the Théâtre Libre and the Freie Bühne, produced Ghosts and Zola’s Thérèse Raquin. The Stage Society, founded in 1899 also as a private club, produced plays refused licenses by the Lord Chamberlain or licensed plays unlikely to be performed on commercial stages. Its first production was Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, and in 1902, it performed Mrs Warren’s Profession and The Marrying of Anne Leete, the first play by Granville Barker (also called Harley Granville-Barker). In the first few years of the new century, the Stage Society produced works by European playwrights—including Maurice Maeterlinck, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maxim Gorky, and Eugène Brieux—and by English dramatists, including W.  Somerset Maugham and St. John Hankin. After a production of Candida in 1903, with Barker playing Marchbanks, business manager J.E. Vedrenne and Barker, who was also a director, formed a partnership to produce plays at the Court (also called the Royal Court) Theatre, which they did from October 1904 to June 1907. Shaw, who was their house playwright and who directed his own plays, silently gave them financial concessions. The Vedrenne-Barker management also produced works by contemporary Europeans (Ibsen, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, and Arthur Schnitzler), Englishmen and Irishmen (including John Galsworthy, Hankin, Maurice Hewlitt, W.B.  Yeats, and John Masefield), and an American woman (Elizabeth Robins), as well as three plays by Euripides.1 The censorship, embedded in the Lord Chamberlain’s office, was an obstacle that dramatists continually tried to overcome. In the hearings of the House of Commons in 1892 they failed. Biblically speaking, William Archer’s was virtually the only voice crying in the wilderness. In the Edwardian decade, there were more voices, whose decibels increased. With more writers, managers, and readers who were sympathetic to these developments, there seemed to be an opportunity to do better than what had been tried in the previous decade. In October 1905, the Review of Reviews published Shaw’s letter to its editor, William T.  Stead, which said, as quoted in Chap. 2, that if one wants to liberate the London theatre one must get rid of the Lord Chamberlain. In the next sentence, not quoted there, Shaw continued, “And to abolish him you must abolish the monarchy, since the King rules the theatres, not by the advice of his ministers, but by divine right.” Previously, the only widespread press protest against the censorship occurred in 1902, when G.A. Redford refused to license Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna, in which a woman, wearing a cloak with no clothing

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underneath it, entered and as Shaw expressed it, “thrilled the audience from time to time by threatening to take the cloak off.” Then “the passionate champions of the Lord Chamberlain deserted him as one man; but Mrs Warren’s Profession and [Brieux’s] Les Trois Filles de M.  Dupont rallied them to his side in a moment” (TDO 3: 1113–14).

1907 The fifteenth-century Anglo-French battles that lasted 116 years are called, for convenience’s sake, the Hundred Years’ War. Also for convenience, I have titled this part of Chap. 3 “1907,” although it begins in 1906 and advances into 1908. The events of these years led to the 1909 Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and The House of Commons on Censorship. Before, during, and after these events, Shaw composed diatribes against censorship. In June 1907, he excoriated the “Philistine assumption that every artist, especially every artist connected with the stage, is an agent of the devil” and the related belief that those not connected with it are competent to regulate them “despotically in the interests of public morality just as any tramp is considered competent to hold a horse.” One can and some have managed theatres so as to make the stage a shop window for a brothel, despite their having licenses by the Lord Chamberlain certifying they contain nothing immoral. The problem is the absurd pretense that the Lord Chamberlain’s—that is, the King’s—Reader of Plays is “wholly and divinely good and omniscient,” capable of preventing from happening what actually does happen. He refuses a license to an author who is not yet fashionable and a manager who is not yet popular, as witness Tolstoy, who was banned until The Times treated him as a great man, at which point The Power of Darkness (written in 1886) was licensed (in 1904 the Stage Society gave it three performances). Under the censorship, you may show debauchery but not mention syphilis. The censor does not object to Mrs. Warren because she is a procuress, which is “a stock figure in the melodrama of the innocent heroine from the country,” but he forbids her explanation of how society manufactures procuresses. Shaw turned the verb “shock” upside down. “The difficulty on the stage at present is not to save audiences from being shocked, but to induce managers to shock them when it is for their good and that of society that they should be shocked, as it generally is in England about three times a week on one subject or another.” To call for the stage to be as free as the press is

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insufficient. Shaw recollected the persecution of those who tried to publish Zola’s novels in England. One effect of this is that English publishers have not printed Brieux’s plays. Shaw harbored no personal animosity toward Redford; it was his office that Shaw condemned. Magnanimously, he proposed to let Redford’s fate be a large pension with leisure to write the moral plays he had been unable to obtain from everyone else (TDO 3: 1139–40, 1143–45, 1148). Shaw could not know that, as related later, Redford would retire in four years or that his pension would be less handsome than Shaw proposed, let alone that the year after his retirement he would become the first President of the British Board of Film Censors (his chief qualification was probably his experience as a censor of plays). In 1906 and 1907, proponents of the serious drama and enemies of the censorship were hit with a double whammy: two proscriptions that contributed to the growing crisis. In 1906, Redford vetoed The Breaking Point by Edward Garnett, in 1907 Waste by Granville Barker. As editor and reader, Garnett was influential in the publication of works by Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and D.H.  Lawrence. Galsworthy dedicated The Man of Property (the first novel in The Forsyte Saga) to him. Garnett’s writings were not influential and The Breaking Point, as Hugo says—concurring with Barker, who rejected it for the Court Theatre—“is not a good play”—which is not why it was refused a license. Still, Frederick Harrison had admired it and accepted it for the Haymarket (also called the Theatre Royal Haymarket). In 1907 Garnett published it, dedicated “To the Censured,” with a preface, Redford’s “private letter” to him (which did not mention what he objected to) and “A Letter to the Censor,” which William Archer may have written as part of the campaign, led by Shaw, to abolish stage censorship. Archer’s letter objects that anyone “indicted for felony has a right to be heard in [his] own defence” and the judge does not sentence him to be hanged without giving reasons, but only dramatists are denied such elementary fair play. Garnett’s Preface claims for The Breaking Point “the interest of those people who are striving to obtain an intellectual English drama—a drama that is a criticism of life.” He quotes Harrison’s letter of acceptance: although Harrison knows it will not make money, he wants to produce it for “that section of the public which is alive to what the theatre might be.” Even the stupidest member of the audience would not call the play immoral, Garnett maintains. In it, a girl has a lover whose wife left him but now wants a reconciliation, which he does not want because he loves the girl who, worried she may be pregnant, drowns herself. As Hugo says, what is modern is the

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heroine’s affair with a married man, but her suicide “follows honoured precedent, that of sinful Paula Tanqueray, the virtue of whose self-inflicted punishment had earned the dewy-eyed approval of thousands of playgoers and Shaw’s undying scorn.” Garnett claims, in italics, “It is not the Censor’s function to suppress works of art,” “to suppress intellectual plays that criticize contemporary life” or to “introduce new moral teaching.”2 In the history of censorship, why was The Breaking Point important rather than merely the subject of anecdotes about benighted times? The answer involves the ascendancy of modern literature in Edwardian times. Garnett was associated with the advanced writers mentioned in the last paragraph and with Tolstoy. His wife Constance was one of the first English translators of nineteenth-century Russian literature, including works by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov, which introduced them to a large English-speaking public. Harrison, caught up in the movement toward the new drama, wanted to be in the vanguard. The difference between the Edwardian and Victorian eras is striking. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, writers, producers, and critics who prophesy with their pens should keep their eyes open since the present loser will later win, for the times they are a-changing. With Shaw, one must emphasize both the last phrase and the word later. In addition to bans on The Breaking Point and Waste, events concerning other plays occurred in 1907. In January, in nearby Dublin, capital of a country that was part of the British Empire, the Abbey Theatre produced J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, sparking week-long riots and denunciations of the play by Irish nationalists, who considered it, in the words of the Freeman’s Journal, “a protracted libel upon Irish peasant men and, worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood.” The “barbarous” language of its “repulsive creatures” is hardly imaginable. “Everything is a b——dy this or a b——dy that, and into this picturesque dialogue names that should only be used with respect and reverence are frequently introduced.” Each day the paper headlined the previous night’s riots, which were not spontaneous. Audiences threw rotten vegetables and stink bombs at the actors, and they disrupted performances with whistles and trumpets. English censors, aware of these actions, were also, Nicholson says, “touchy about how the military was depicted,” wishing they could have cut the phrase “‘khaki cut-throats’” and “any allusions derogatory to the Army” from performance in censor-free Ireland. As Celia Marshik writes, 1907 became “a turning point for the solidification of anti-censorship forces.”3

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In April 1907, the Lord Chamberlain himself, not his Examiner of Plays, prohibited a production of a work licensed in 1885, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, a nationwide tour of which the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, run by Richard D’Oyly Carte’s widow Helen, was to open in May—an unusual but not unprecedented action (see Secrets of the Harem in Chap. 5). The circumstances of this interdiction were as topsy-turvy (a term often applied to Gilbert’s work) as anything Gilbert wrote. Initially, no one—censor or government, critic or public, even the Japanese—considered this opera would offend anyone or be anything but, in the lyrics of one of its songs, be “a source of innocent merriment.” By 1907, Japan, which the English used to consider a small Asian island whose people had quaint customs, became after its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 a world power and ally of Great Britain, which was awaiting a visit by Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, whom it did not want to offend. After the Lord Chamberlain banned The Mikado, the British government forbade military and naval bands from playing music from it. The Prince’s arrival on May 6th was announced in early March, after arrangements for The Mikado’s tour had been made. The Lord Chamberlain announced its prohibition to Mrs. D’Oyly Carte on March 26th. Not until the end of April were its details made public, perhaps because the government wanted to avoid protracted discussions by Parliament and the press. No newspaper agreed with this action, which members of Parliament also found unjustified. Ironically, notes Samuel Hynes, “Only one military band violated this ban: the band of the Japanese warship Tsukuba, lying at anchor at Chatham, cheerfully played selections from The Mikado to welcome a visiting British naval party aboard.” After Prince Fushimi left on May 31st, MPs demanded the ban be revoked, which it was the following month. On July 15th, it was first performed on tour, not reaching London until April 1908. Ironically, E.P. Lawrence observes, “The crucial fact that The Mikado was intended to be a satire on British, not Japanese culture was recognized by only one critic in 15 and by no one in 1907.” As G.K. Chesterton said, “I doubt if there is a single joke in the whole play that fits the Japanese. But all the jokes in the play fit the English.” In 1878, when H.M.S. Pinafore premièred, the Queen was not amused by the character Sir Joseph Porter— who stuck close to his desk and never went to sea, and so became “the ruler of the Queen’s navee”—based on the businessman-turned-politician W.H. Smith, owner of the world’s first chain store (of newsagents), who became an MP and despite his lack of nautical experience, she appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1883, she knighted Sullivan but not

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Gilbert, who had to wait over a quarter of a century to be knighted—28 June 1907, to be exact, which prompted an editorial in The Times to wonder whether the knighthood was compensation for the ban on The Mikado.4 The prohibition of the previously licensed Mikado became another 1907 event that made the Lord Chamberlain’s bans seem ridiculous. On October 18th, while Waste was in rehearsal, to open November 19th, the Examiner of Plays refused to license it. Like The Breaking Point, Waste dramatizes a result of adultery and, Hugo notes, the supposedly wicked are punished for their sins. Henry Trebell, an MP, has an affair with a married woman, whom he impregnates. She obtains what Douglas Kennedy calls a “back-alley abortion,” which causes her death. When Trebell’s political opponents ensure that the scandal ruins his political career, which is the whole of his life, he commits suicide. Barker asked Redford for specific objections to his play. Instead of citing passages, Redford used generalities: “‘the extremely outspoken references to sexual relations’” and “‘all references to a criminal operation.’” As Samuel Hynes elegantly puts it, “since the plot turns on the abortion, Redford’s demand is rather like asking the producer of Hamlet kindly to remove all mention of regicide.” The Stage Society gave a private performance in November 1907. The play was licensed in 1920 but not performed publicly until 1936. The 1907 reviewers shared Redford’s views. In The Times, Arthur Bingham Walkley called it “a work of extraordinary power” and admired its realism, but he approved the censor’s decision and deemed Waste unfit for performance “before a miscellaneous public of various ages, moods, and standards of intelligence.” Emblematic of the period’s patriarchal views, J.T.  Grein, in the Sunday Times, called it “too powerful and too dangerous to be unleashed on the ‘unthinking and still imperfectly educated crowd.’” As Redford’s second complaint reveals, Victorians and Edwardians used code words for what they objected to. Just as press reports of Oscar Wilde’s trials did not mention homosexual, reports of Waste did not say abortion.5 Instead, they called it “illegal operation” and “criminal operation.” So did the 1909 Report of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Censorship. I have found only one contemporary exception: in the Preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, Shaw uses abortion, which he had also used, as Chap. 2 notes, in connection with A Leader of Men (CPP 3: 687). Of Shaw’s responses to the ban on Waste, one of the most notable is a two-part article, “Dramatic Censorship,” in The Nation, 1907 and 1908.

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The first part mocks the notion of investing the drama to a censor because he is a tactful, sensible man of the world, calling it as reasonable as investing the nation to a king for the same reasons. The job of censor requires one who knows better than Tolstoy or Ibsen, George Meredith or Dickens, Thomas Carlyle or John Ruskin “what moral truths the world needs to be reminded of” and on what institutions the derision of comedy may play without destroying what is vital in them. No one who is not “a born fool would pretend for the moment to be capable of such a task; and the reason that some censors have talked as if they were capable of it is that some censors have been born fools.” It is unfair that although Redford’s salary is smaller than a judge’s, he has more responsibility. Not only must he administer the law, he must make it up as he goes along, for no statutes guide or bind him. He can only fall back on office rules and traditions. The first rule is that “dramatic art is too unclean a thing to be allowed to be religious. It may be lewd, and it may be silly; but it must not dare touch anything sacred.” If painting had been so restrained, there would be no paintings of Christ, the Virgin, or the apostles. If music had been so enchained, Handel would not have composed The Messiah. If Redford had been censor in Athens, then Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides would have been barred from writing; if in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare would have been barred. Other rules explain why Redford has licensed immoral plays and refused to license serious plays are that a dramatist must not mention illegal obstetric operations, incest, and venereal disease. Would anyone want them mentioned on the stage, he would ask? “Yes,” Shaw answers, for if honorable men do not treat these subjects in public, dishonorable men will do so in private. If it is inappropriate for the theatre to show passions that lead to these results, the dramatist must show vice without real-life consequences, unlike “those sham consequences of remorse and forgiveness, or despair and suicide, which not one of the spectators believes to be inevitable or even probable.” If a dramatist wallows in depicting a vice that dare not be named, he will receive a “certificate of its propriety” provided he does not dramatize it leading to an illegal operation, venereal disease, or a doubt as to possible kinship between the children of those who have practiced it. Because the censor’s ban caused Waste to be canceled, ordinary people would conclude that Barker wrote a “hideously filthy” play and would be surprised to learn that its subject is the disestablishment of the Church of England and its protagonist an MP whose political plan fails because of “a private indiscretion

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of the sort that has ruined two political careers and crippled another in our own time.” He impregnates a married woman who avoids giving birth by having an abortion, which kills her. The scandal ruins his political career just as the O’Shea divorce ruined Parnell’s. The “scheme for disestablishing the Church is wasted. The political services of the man who devised it are wasted. Hence the title Waste.” What Redford objected to was neither adultery nor an illegitimate child—subjects he had licensed before—but the illegal operation is taboo. If you turn the intellectual interest of Waste into “lascivious sentimentality” and “suppress the illegal operation,” Redford will license it. This is how censorship works.6 Shaw turns to Mrs Warren’s Profession, which people imagine was unlicensed because the heroine was a prostitute and is a procuress. Not so. These are among the staples of licensed plays. Unlike them, Shaw’s play does not dodge the consequences of promiscuity, such as the son of one of the title character’s former clients falling in love with her daughter. The question “Is he her half-brother?” is “unanswerable.” Shaw’s refusal to avoid dealing with this issue conflicted with the censor’s edict against suggesting incest, which is why the play was banned, while plays that present the mother as a stylishly dressed, charming woman who has a “fictitious retribution at the end in which nobody believes” because everyone knows it is unrealistic, teaches no lesson to poor girls in the gallery and sends young men “into the arms of the best imitation the streets can offer him of the guiltily splendid young lady he has been admiring inside.” Brieux’s Les Avariés (Damaged Goods), also censored, is also a deterrent to prostitution, for it deals honestly and uncomfortably with a man transmitting a venereal disease to his wife and children. If Brieux had shown the attractiveness that induced the man to get the disease without hinting at the consequences, Redford would have licensed it. In Ghosts, Ibsen deals with the taboos in both these plays: the son inherits his father’s disease and falls in love with his father’s illegitimate daughter. “‘Horrible,’ says the Lord Chamberlain. Ibsen, if alive, would probably ask whether the Lord Chamberlain wished him to make it agreeable.” The reply would be that if he could not make it agreeable, he should not dramatize it. If it is proper to show and discuss seduction, adultery, promiscuity, and prostitution on stage, Shaw argues, it is proper to show their consequences: abortions, incest, and venereal disease. “Either prohibit both, or allow both.” The sensible action is to abolish censorship of plays. License theatres annually, as you license public houses and music halls. License dramatists annually if

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you wish, as you do automobile drivers. License managers and even Redford to express his opinion of plays, if you wish. But let the play take its chance with people’s consciences as it came from the author’s conscience.7 When Redford banned Monna Vanna, Shaw reminds his readers in the second part of this article, critics denounced him because the incident of the military leader and the woman elated them; but since Barker’s discussion on the disestablishment of the Church did not interest them as much as sex did, they forgot Monna Vanna and proclaimed that the censor’s right to ban Waste because of adultery, an illegitimate child, a seduction scene, and abortion. “Now mark how plain a tale shall put these gentlemen down,” says Shaw, quoting Prince Hal in King Henry IV, Part 1. To get a license to secure his copyright outside Britain, Barker accepted the alterations Redford demanded and had a copyright performance in London. On 28 January, Waste was acted “before a select audience by perhaps the most remarkable cast—judging by the celebrity of its members in literature—that ever appeared on the stage in London.” It included Gilbert Murray, Mr. and Mrs. H.G.  Wells, Laurence Housman, and Charlotte and Bernard Shaw (called “Late of the Theatre Royal, Dublin”). Barker’s one major change was to substitute a conventional, incredible suicide by poison for death from an illegal operation. The seduction scene, which critics cited as an example “of the horrors from which the Censorship protects us,” was in it, word for word, as was the adultery, the illegitimate child in utero, and everything “that was supposed to be the forbidden fruit of the Lord Chamberlain’s garden.” The issue was not whether the characters should act immorally. Redford gave immorality the royal sanction. The difference was the retributive consequences of immorality. Whereas Barker gave a credible result of it, Redford insisted on an incredible one. But “Has any man ever been deterred from committing adultery by the possibility of his accomplice committing suicide by poison?” Redford licensed the crime and suppressed the retribution. This is what well-­ intentioned censorship always does, which is the opposite of what it is meant to do, and what Redford honestly intends it to do.8 Unlike the parliamentary hearings of 1892, the forces opposing stage censorship in the Edwardian decade were more numerous, had more impressive names than their opponents, and, led by Shaw, were well prepared. As the Earl of Westmoreland says in King Henry IV, Part 2, their weapons and armor were strong, their cause was the best. Unlike Westmoreland’s opponents, however, the opponents were led by King

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Edward VII, whose weapons were invincible. If the outcome of the 1909 hearings was not foreordained, the odds of victory were less favorable than these forces had hoped. When Redford banned Waste, Galsworthy, Murray, and J.M.  Barrie formed a committee against censorship, supported by Archer, Barker, Gilbert, and Pinero, and asked for a meeting with Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Barrie led the deputation, but its impetus was Shaw, who wisely refrained from taking the spotlight. Unlike Shaw’s plays, none of Barrie’s had been refused a license. Since the Prime Minister was ill on the scheduled date, 17 February 1908, Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone received them on the 25th. Before this, the committee wrote a letter protesting the censorship, which The Times published on 29 October 1907. Shaw told Murray, “We shall get in one blow, and one only; and it must be a smasher. The list of names will not be too long, unfortunately …. It is the length and completeness of the list that will make the impression” (CL 2: 715). Turning the heat on the government, the Times letter announces the Prime Minister’s consent to receive a deputation from dramatists to discuss the censorship. What follows is a formal protest against the censorship, which the signatories explain was instituted for political reasons, not for “the so-called moral ends to which it is perverted,” and which is “autocratic in procedure, opposed to the spirit of the Constitution, contrary to common justice and to common sense.” They protest that this power is held by one official, responsible neither to Parliament nor to the law, who arbitrarily judges “without a public hearing and against whose dictum there is no appeal.” An adverse decision casts a slur on a dramatist’s reputation and destroys his or her means of livelihood. “They ask that their art be placed on the same footing as every other art” and that they be put “in the position enjoyed under the law by every other citizen.” To accomplish this, they want licensing of plays to be abolished. Although Shaw said the list of names would not be too long, it had seventy-one eminent writers, all of whom had written plays, including Barker, Barrie, Joseph Conrad, Galsworthy, Gilbert, Thomas Hardy, Robert Vernon Harcourt (elected to Parliament the following year and would become a member of the Joint Committee on Censorship the year after), Laurence Housman, Henry James, Henry Arthur Jones, Masefield, A.E.W. Mason (who had played a bit role as the Russian Officer in the first production of Arms and the Man in 1894, was elected to Parliament in 1906, and would become a member of the Joint Committee), George Meredith, Murray, Pinero, Elizabeth Robins, Shaw, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Synge,

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Wells, Yeats, and Israel Zangwill. The same day The Times published this letter, it published a long, unsigned article that comprehensively gave the history of stage censorship and its present pros and cons, but tilted toward the cons. Although Shaw mentioned one blow, another came four months later, very likely arranged by him. On 24 February 1908, The Times published a letter by more than seventy celebrities, almost all not dramatists, who sympathized with the “demand for the abolition of the present system of the censorship of plays.” Among them were Lawrence Alma-­ Tadema, Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, Winston Churchill, Roger Fry, H.  Rider Haggard, Stewart Headlam, William Poel, Charles Ricketts, Bertrand Russell, Ethel Smyth, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Those supporting the censorship were not silent. Less full of names than their opponents, the Theatrical Managers’ Association, for reasons indicated in Chap. 1, met on November 15th, passed a resolution supporting the censorship, and proposed it be extended.9 As scheduled, the deputation of dramatists met the Home Secretary and told him what their letter told readers of The Times. With the benefit of hindsight, it is unfortunate that they did not present a united front. Although they opposed the censorship, they did not all propose its abolition. Some favored a process of appealing the Examiner’s decision. Absence of unity on this may have played a role in 1909. In any event, Gladstone reported on the meeting to the Prime Minister, who continued to be in such poor health that he resigned on April 4th and died on the 22nd. He was succeeded by Herbert Henry Asquith, who was new in his position and had more pressing priorities than censorship, such as “the People’s Budget,” which would include for the first time taxes on high incomes and lands of wealthier classes, Irish Home Rule, and women’s suffrage. This does not mean the deputation was ineffective. Because, as usual, competing issues demanded attention, nothing was immediately done. In 1908, Harcourt won a seat in Parliament as a member of Asquith’s Liberal Party (in February 1907 Barker produced his play A Question of Age for two performances at the Court Theatre). In December 1908, Harcourt introduced a bill whose objectives, a memorandum stated, included abolishing censorship of plays by the Lord Chamberlain and giving theatre performances the same control as those in music halls, which had no censorship. A week later, the King’s Assistant Private Secretary announced that the King would not agree to theatres being removed from the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction. Putting pressure on the Prime Minister, Harcourt hoped Asquith would agree to consider this issue. In

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June 1909, he acceded and appointed a Committee of both Houses of Parliament to consider it and laws relating to the licensing and regulation of theatres and to make recommendations.10

Evasions: The Minstrel Show and Ireland Earlier that year, Shaw composed two one-act plays that ran afoul of the Examiner’s rules, Press Cuttings and The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet. Press Cuttings was first presented privately at the Court Theatre on July 9th and first publicly in Manchester, September 27th. The first production of The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet was at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on August 25th, its first in England, by the Irish Players, in Liverpool on 10 April 1916.11 On 24 June 1909, Redford informed Barker, who planned to present two matinées of Press Cuttings at the Court in July for the benefit of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, that he could not license it. In a letter to The Times on 26 June, Shaw quoted the official reason: “No representation of living persons to be permitted on the stage.” The play caricatured living people: Balsquith conflated Arthur James Balfour and Asquith; Mitchener stood for Horatio Herbert Kitchener. In real life, former Prime Minister Balfour opposed women’s suffrage, says his biographer, “on the conventional grounds then common: that politics were not ‘women’s sphere,’ that the vote would give rise to regrettable controversies in the home circle, that women were influenced by sentiment rather than reason, and so forth.” Current Prime Minister Asquith opposed it, refusing to introduce a bill to enfranchise women and declining to receive their delegation. In the Second Boer War, Field Marshal Kitchener ruthlessly burned Boer farms and rounded up women and children into squalid concentration camps. Shaw’s letter in The Times assured readers he did not portray anyone who had not served inoffensively in Punch, the satirical magazine, and argued that he had been “represented on the stage” with the Lord Chamberlain’s approval, in a fantasy by J.M. Barrie, and another time his appearance was so lifelike that it deceived a relative of his (CPP 3: 884). Barrie’s play is Punch (1906), in which Shaw, called “The New Man,” is heard offstage, humming “The Wearing of the Green,” and when he enters “is made up, not like Mr Shaw, but like the man who played Superman”—that is, like Barker, who as the leading character of Man and Superman, wore a moustache and beard that despite Shaw’s claim only somewhat resembled Shaw’s. The New Man carries a shillelagh, has an

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Irish accent, and when Judy asks Punch if he is Ibsen, replies, “Queer now to think that Ibsen was once considered advanced.” Shaw had been parodied in J.B. Fagan’s 1905 skit Shakespear v. Shav, in which Shakespeare posthumously sues him for such libelous slanders as “I hate to think that Shakespear has lasted 300 years” (CPP 2: 48). Shaw is a stage Irishman who, when fined one farthing (a quarter of a predecimalized penny), says, “Ah shure, I haven’t got a farthing at-all at-all.” Shaw’s letter about Press Cuttings says he named the “wildly impossible Teutophobe general” Mitchener to prevent suspicion that he was a caricature of Lord Roberts (Commander-in-Chief of the Forces Frederick Sleigh Roberts, a successful British general in India and the Second Boer War). Shaw’s characters, he insists, should not be considered representations of living persons more seriously than topical people in Christmas pantomimes, and he speculates that Redford’s real reason was to destroy the value of several weeks of his work—in other words, revenge for what Shaw had been saying in the press about Redford’s censorship. In fact, the headline The Times gave the letter is “The Censor’s Revenge,” and in an interview for The Observer, Shaw admitted, “I have devoted myself to the destruction of the Lord Chamberlain officially. But, for the matter of that, so has Mr Barrie” (CPP 3: 884, 887). Revenge it surely was.12 I find it impossible to believe, as some do, that Shaw wrote this play calculating it would be censored, and its performances were scheduled. As Knowles says, Press Cuttings—which satirically treats such issues as women’s suffrage, German invasions, and universal military service—was “banned in an attempt to silence criticism of governmental activities and this under the ‘offensive personalities’ provision.” She quotes a review of a technically private performance of it in the Westminster Gazette, 10 July 1909: “‘The Censor’s subtlety consisted in this, that he distracted our attention during the performance by causing us to wonder vainly why he had refused to license the play.’” Brad Kent has cleverly noticed the crucial matter that “the play is set in the offices of the prime minister on April the first. Shaw was out to make fools of the authorities and they fell hook, line, and sinker.”13 To get a license without sacrificing his satire, he used an evasion: the American minstrel show. As preface to the published play, he commands, “By direction of the Lord Chamberlain the General and the Prime Minister in this play must in all public performances of it be addressed and described as General Bones and Mr Johnson, and by no means as General Mitchener and Mr Balsquith” (CPP 3: 839). In a “Special Interview” for the Pall

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Mall Gazette in 1913, he explains that in the Christy Minstrels “Bones and Mistah Johnson [utter] inconsecutive pleasantries, encouraged by roars of laughter” (CPP 4: 643). Nowadays, when hardly anyone recognizes the Edwardians to whom the original names allude, the names of these characters—one of whom is incompetent, the other indifferent to killing—are funny. Then, the substitute names elicited roars of laughter, for many people were in the know about the Christy Minstrels. In America, the appellations Bones and Johnson might have presented a problem, for the traditional names in a minstrel show are its endmen (blackface comedians at both ends of a semi-circular row of seats), usually called Tambo (who plays the tambourine) and Bones (who rattles a pair of clappers or spoons). However, Holroyd reports, in the Christy Minstrel shows in Britain, Bones and Johnson were the names of the ringmaster (who introduces the acts) and the clown.14 No matter: the Lord Chamberlain’s writ did not encompass the United States. The censor’s refusal to license The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet was more serious and complex. As with Press Cuttings, some critics said Shaw intended the play more for the censor’s office than for the theatre. To the contrary, there is no evidence that he used phrases from the list of proscriptions to do battle with or taunt the Lord Chamberlain.15 He did not write plays to be censored. Even when he submitted Mrs Warren’s Profession for a license, he ironically said, as Chap. 2 notes, that he was apprehensive Redford might license it, thereby giving him the trouble of rewriting and reprinting his preface. Frederick Whelen, director of the Afternoon Theatre, which planned to present the play at Tree’s theatre, told the 1909 Joint Parliamentary Committee that the suggestion Shaw wrote Blanco Posnet with the idea that it not be produced was untrue. It had been cast and announced for production. The Examiner of Plays returned it to Tree with a letter, probably so that an opportunity should be given Tree to withdraw the play so it would not officially come to him. Sir Herbert met Redford to ascertain his objections. Redford showed a large number of marked passages he claimed were blasphemous. He waived his objection to many speeches but insisted others be withdrawn. Whelen met Shaw, who agreed to make some changes and omissions but considered all of Redford’s demands were so drastic, they would mutilate the play. Since he did not give way, Blanco Posnet was withdrawn (1909 Report 135). The sticking points were Blanco’s accusation that Euphemia had immoral relations with every man in town—a passage Redford called obscene—and Blanco’s description of God as a sly, mean one who “lies

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low for you. He plays cat and mouse with you. He lets you run loose until you think youre shut of Him; and then, when you least expect it, He’s got you.” Blanco justifies himself by the Bible: “It says he cometh like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians) and adds, “aye, like a thief—a horse-thief” (CPP 3: 774). Years later, in a letter to the editor of The Nation and Athenaeum, 26 March 1921, Shaw mellowed, calling Redford “an honest and well-meaning man; but his mind, on the plane of Posnetic theology, did not exist. He simply said, as a commonsense Englishman, ‘It cannot be right to call God a mean one and a sly one. I cannot allow it.’ And he didnt” (CPP 3: 811). Times change. In 1917, in Heartbreak House, Shaw wrote a passage recalling the religious uproar over Blanco Posnet, but it did not disturb the censor. “What did you expect?” Captain Shotover asks Ellie Dunn. “A Savior, eh? Are you old-fashioned enough to believe in that?” (CPP 5: 145). As with Press Cuttings, Shaw evaded the censorship. This time he used another country to do so, Ireland, which was beyond the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction. Because the officials in Dublin Castle, seat of British Government there, and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, viceroy of the King, did not want to act against the Lord Chamberlain’s edict and the King’s wish, matters were not simple. With Blanco Posnet banned in England, Shaw offered it to the Abbey Theatre, which accepted it, for as Dan H. Laurence and Nicholas Grene state, the theatre still suffered from the riots that attended its recent production of The Playboy of the Western World. “Clearly Yeats and Lady Gregory hoped that in being seen to be defying the British censorship they might win a respite from the continuing violent hostility of the nationalist press” (SGA, xiv). For this purpose, the stars seemed to be in alignment. In London, the Joint Parliamentary Committee first met on 29 July 1909. The Abbey announced Blanco Posnet for 25 August, during the week of the Royal Dublin Society’s Horse Show. On 5 August, headlined “Mr Shaw’s Prohibited Play. Is there an Irish Censorship?” the Irish Times erroneously reported “a separate Irish Censorship” as a duty of the Lord Lieutenant, which alarmed Dublin Castle. His weapon was to revoke the theatre’s patent, granted less than five years before. Pressuring Lady Gregory, Under Secretary Sir James Dougherty told her that by wanting to produce a play to which the English censor objected she put Castle officials in a difficult position. Could the expressions be deleted? No. Trying again, he said the problem was not the expressions, but that the Censor banned them and Dublin society would oppose them. She

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countered: a Viscount who descended from the founder of Guinness Brewery had booked six seats and Dublin society would likely follow his lead. If she did not cancel the play, Sir James threatened, she might forfeit the patent. He also urged compliance on the basis of not provoking public opinion. But, she responded, he did not interfere when the theatre provoked nationalist public opinion two years ago. True, he agreed, but the censor had not banned that play. If she did not comply, then Lord Aberdeen, the Lord Lieutenant, would decide. Censorship by the Castle, she knew, might ruin the theatre, since announcements had been made and people from England and Ireland had booked tickets. If the Castle made good this threat, the upper and middle classes who would book tickets in the stalls would be frightened. She reminded him the Abbey was the source of employment to Irish people and visitors to Dublin spent a great deal of money. He promised to give her Lord Aberdeen’s decision shortly. She relayed this to Shaw, who thought it “almost too good to be true.” If the Lord Lieutenant forbade an Irish play without reading it, and “at the command of an official of the King’s household in London, then the green flag would indeed wave over Abbey St, and we should have questions in parliament and all manner of reverberating advertisement and nationalist sympathy for the theatre.” He warned her not to threaten “a contraband performance. Threaten that we shall be suppressed; that we shall be made martyrs of; that we shall suffer as much and as publicly as possible” (SGA, 13–19). On 13 August, she and Yeats learned the Lord Lieutenant opposed the production and would use every legal power to prevent it. They decided to perform it even if the patent were forfeited. At the Castle, the Crown Solicitor amiably implored them to reconsider and less amiably threatened to withdraw their patent before the production. Since Blanco Posnet is a one-act play, Yeats proposed to complete the evening with Oedipus the King, which was also banned in England because of incest. They agreed to ask Shaw to cut passages he had already proposed to cut for the Censor. They believed they had beaten Dublin Castle because even with those cuts the play would be what the English censor had forbidden. On the same day, she cabled Shaw, asking him to delete these passages. Shaw asked her to cite specific texts in the page proofs and promised to reply immediately (SGA, 19–21). The next day he telegrammed her about “The Incorrigible Censor,” an article in The Nation that quoted passages about Euphemia’s immoral relations and God being sly and mean, with parallels in the Book of Job.16

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He agreed to cut the line about immoral relations “if the Castle is silly enough to object to such relations being called immoral,” because it is mentioned elsewhere, but nothing else. With Shaw’s telegrams and the Nation article, she and Yeats again met with Dougherty, whom she told that as they did not submit to Irish nationalist objections to The Playboy, they could not submit to Dublin Castle. He raised possible objections by the Catholic Church; they reminded him they did not give in when the Archbishop of Armagh denounced Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen but played it under police protection. When he charged them with wanting to produce every play the Censor rejected, Lady Gregory reminded him they produced none in the past and declined to produce plays, such as Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding, which they thought might hurt Catholic religious feelings. He pleaded that it would be wrong to produce Blanco Posnet, while a parliamentary committee was considering censorship and that Dublin Castle was in contact with English officials, including the Lord Chamberlain. Adamantly, Lady Gregory and Yeats said they determined to produce it, for the censor’s decision did not apply to Ireland. Dublin Castle must decide if they would suppress the Abbey and put their actors out of work (SGA, 22–24). Several days later, she asked the Lord Lieutenant to cite a specific clause of the Patent to justify suppressing the theatre. He read irrelevant passages on indecency and blasphemy, but the only count on which he could charge them was stirring up a riot. She quoted from Sinn Fein, urging its members not to riot. He said religious people might create a disruption. She replied that they do not usually go to the theatre, and she and Yeats watched rehearsals and removed inessential passages that might give offence. Insisting the play’s argument must be untouched, she refused to accept the censor’s cuts because, quoting Shaw, they “destroyed the religious significance of the play.” Admitting he admired the play, Lord Aberdeen confessed his difficulty: his official position compelled him not to buck the Lord Chamberlain, especially since the King favored retaining the censorship. He asked for their help, which they did not give. If he were responsible for banning the play, she warned, he would be accountable for every bad play imported from England. He pleaded he had nothing to do with the censor, only with the Lord Chamberlain because of the courtesies of officials to each other, and as the King’s representative he could not oppose the King. When he objected to the “immoral relations” phrase, they said Shaw had given them permission to cut it. When he asked them to cut “dearly beloved brethren” she refused: “we must have some respect

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for our audience and not treat them as babies.” He promised to decide after writing to the King. On August 19th, she telegrammed Shaw, who responded, “THEN IT IS REALLY THE KING AFTER ALL SO MUCH THE BETTER,” and flippantly advised her to announce this and cancel the performance (SGA, 32–35). On 20 August, the Under Secretary, acting for the Lord Lieutenant, officially wrote to Lady Gregory and released the letter to the press: The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, refused a license for public performance in England by the Lord Chamberlain, has been announced for production by the Abbey Theatre. “The play does not deal with an Irish subject, and it is not an Irish play in any other sense than that its author was born in Ireland.” The Abbey was founded to encourage dramatic art in Ireland. This play does not promote this object, as described in the application for the Patent. The Lord Lieutenant has concluded that “in its original form” it does not conform to the assurances given in the Patent’s application or with the Patent’s conditions “as granted by the Crown.” The letter points to consequences if the play were produced in its original form. She asked him to tell the Lord Lieutenant that neither the printed play nor the Abbey’s stage version was “in its original form as refused by the Censor.” Interpreting the letter seriously, she and Yeats publicly stated that if the Abbey’s patent were endangered, it was because English censorship was extended to Ireland or because the Lord Lieutenant would revive “a right not exercised for 150 years,” to forbid any play produced in a Dublin. English censorship does not concern them, but they will not, “by accepting the English censor’s ruling, give away anything of the Irish theatre of the future,” for it would become a political censorship and while considering Ireland’s special circumstances, they cut some passages they thought might give offence, these passages are not what made the English censor refuse his license (SGA, 39–42). When Shaw read this, he was indignant. On 22 August, he told Yeats, “The statement that you have bowdlerized the play practically confesses that it is not fit for representation” and demanded the production include a new speech, enclosed, to replace one about God creating the croup, deleted by the Abbey. He insisted they issue another statement that since, upon reading her letter, a particular speech could be misconstrued, he rewrote it more strongly and clearly, so that the play will be performed exactly as the author wrote it, with one concession: “to oblige the Lord Lieutenant, he agreed

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to withdraw the word “immoral” as applied to the relations between a woman of bad character and her accomplices. In doing so I wish it to be stated that I still regard those relations as not only immoral but vicious; nevertheless, as the English Censorship apparently regards them as delightful and exemplary, and the Lord Lieutenant does not wish to be understood as contradicting the English Censorship, I am quite content to leave the relations to the unprompted judgment of the Irish people.

He agreed to delete “Dearly beloved brethren” since Dublin Castle worries it may shock Ireland, but he assures him that no other passages objected to by the English censor “might not have been written by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, and in point of consideration for the religious beliefs of the Irish people the play compares very favorably with the Coronation Oath” (SGA, 43–44). Irish Catholics familiar with this oath may have chuckled, since it requires the British monarch to promise, Bible in hand, to govern the peoples of the kingdom—whose religions included the established church, Lutherans, Baptists, Quakers, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus—and countries then including Ireland, India, and Ceylon, that he or she will maintain “the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel,” “the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law,” and will “preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England.”17 Directly after the first performance on 25 August, Lady Gregory and Yeats telegraphed Shaw of its success: from start to finish, it had “sustained and intense attention, and applause.” She pitied the police who waited to take rioters to jail but left “like fishermen with nets empty.” Because the censorship controversy had drawn international attention, reviews appeared all over the world. Ironically, the representative of the Gaelic American arrived too late to obtain a ticket (SGA, 46–49). Reviewing it for the Piccolo della Sera, James Joyce mentioned the law that exempted Dublin from a ban by the English Lord Chamberlain, which made it “the only place in all the British territory in which the censor has no power” and its small Abbey Theatre “so filled at the first performance that it literally sold out more than seven times over.” Although “guards maintained order,” there was “no hostile demonstration … by the select public who jammed every nook of the little avant garde theatre,” and at the end “thunderous applause summoned the actors for repeated curtain calls.” Joyce indicated that the title character “breaks out into long, disjointed

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speeches (and it is here that the pious English censor covered his ears), which are theological insofar as their subject is God, but not very churchly in diction.” Posnet uses the language of horse thieves when he says God works secretly in the hearts of men. The audience wound up wondering “why on earth the play was interdicted by the censor.” Nor was Joyce alone. As one Irish writer said, “The press’s biggest complaint was how unscandalous Shaw’s play was.” Although Joyce panned the play—“the transformation is too abrupt to be convincing as a sermon, and the art is too poor to make it convincing as drama”—the impact of his review is his derision of the censor.18 On 27 August, Shaw wrote to Lady Gregory, intending the letter for publication. By the actions of Dublin Castle, he stated, he does not mean the Lord Lieutenant, who was in Scotland when they began. He means the deputies who confronted a matter that required tact. They broke down in points of law, diplomatic etiquette, and common knowledge. First, in trying to intimidate an Irish theatre, they conspired with an English official who had no jurisdiction there. Second, they thought the Lord Lieutenant was the King’s agent, whereas his powers derive from an 1843 Act of Parliament. “Third, they assumed that he is the servant of the King. He is nothing of the sort. He is the Viceroy: that is, he is the King in the absence of Edward VII.” Fourth, they referred to the Joint Parliamentary Committee investigating censorship but did not learn that it was appointed because the censor’s actions had been so disreputable, the government could not resist demands for an inquiry. It had to bar the public and press to discuss the plot of a play licensed by the official who banned Blanco Posnet. It ruled out details of licensed plays as unfit for the public to hear. Although the case that brought things to a head was the banning of Blanco Posnet, the Castle assumed that Shaw, not the censorship, is the defendant in the trial and treated him as if he were a convicted offender. Fifth, they said the publishers refused to give the Lord Lieutenant a copy of the play, which suggested Shaw had so instructed them. In fact, they could not supply a copy because it “was not published and could not be published until the day of performance” without forfeiting the author’s American copyright. Copies of page proofs were available, but the deputies did not ask for them. Sixth, they claimed Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree condemned the play for upsetting religious feelings, but Tree told the Joint Committee, “No: it would heighten religious feeling.” He announced it for production, but the censor forced him to withdraw it (SGA, 51–53). “Claiming the moral high ground,” as Marshik says, Shaw used the

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Abbey’s production of Blanco Posnet to impugn the immorality of the English censors. He “had learned from his experience with Mrs Warren. A lone playwright accused of indecency and censored was a ‘Smut Dealer’; a group of writers that advocated the performance of particular works was a movement and could be allied with other political movements, such as Irish nationalism.”19 With Mrs Warren Shaw had lost the fight; with Blanco Posnet he won.

The 1909 Joint Select Committee of Parliament The Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and House of Commons (Censorship) had five members from each House: from the former, the Earl of Plymouth and Lords Willoughby de Broke, Newton, Ribblesdale, and Gorell; from the latter, Robert Harcourt, Hugh Law, Colonel Lockwood, Alfred E.W. Mason, and Herbert Samuel. The Committee first met on 21 July and named Samuel as Chairman. Its first hearing was 29 July, its last 24 September. It examined forty-nine witnesses, continued to meet until 2 November, and issued its report on 11 November. Its members were not stacked against anti-censorship. Harcourt was the most visible abolitionist. The others included A.E.W. Mason, a playwright and popular novelist (between 1915 and 2002, five film versions of his 1902 novel The Four Feathers were made); Lord Gorell, a Queen’s Counsel, expert in Admiralty law and High Court Justice; Hugh Law, an Irish MP; and Herbert Samuel, with whom Shaw was friendly but who favored censorship of books, pictures, and plays that stirred up sexual immorality. An atheist, he minimally practiced the Jewish religion to which he had been born. His oldest son called him “puritanical in the extreme” and his biographer said he “was prone to periodic fits of morality.”20 Yet he had a sense of fair play. In 1920, he was named High Commissioner of Palestine—the first Jew to govern Israel in 2000 years. An avenue in Tel Aviv beside the Mediterranean bears his name. The Committee had more to consider than drama. Many people supported censorship. Some wanted to control the lower classes, some to protect the young people’s morality. Like now, there was distrust of elites and intellectuals (new drama advocates were considered both), trade unions, and the nine-year-old Labour Party, extension of the franchise to male laborers and women. Opposition to them was deep-seated. Reasons for favoring censorship were complex. Even if the Lord Chamberlain’s office were abolished, municipalities would have censorship. Managers

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supported him since his approval protected touring companies from local censors, who were loath to ban what the Crown sanctioned, thereby ensuring more reliable returns on their investments. His license helped guarantee jobs for actors and workers backstage. The committee had to consider what theatre legally included and excluded. Traditionally, it differed from music halls and variety shows. It presented classical and modern dramas and comedies; music halls offered songs, contemporary skits, and short versions of plays that theatres offered. Music halls did not need the Lord Chamberlain’s license. Smoking and alcoholic beverages were not permitted in the auditoriums of theatres but were in those of music halls. Since this book’s subject is censorship of plays (and films), this chapter will not deal with music halls per se. Like a general, Shaw marshaled his troops. He drafted testimonies to guide witnesses. He did not propose they be read verbatim, but serve as humorous exemplars. To Dame Edith Lyttleton—playwright, novelist, and mother—he sent an “Imaginary Statement by a British Matron,” which proposed she testify to this effect: Almost every play licensed by the Lord Chamberlain turns more or less on the treatment of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman, or both. I wish to testify, as a woman, that the censorship is not in touch with women’s feelings or opinions—that is, with the feelings and opinions of more than half of the playgoing public—as to what is fit to be represented on the stage.

As a mother, she takes her daughter to the theatre and later regrets it. She condemns disrespect for women in plays, which almost makes theatergoing “unfit a young man from being a decent husband or a young woman from being a dignified wife.” The heroine of one play they saw was a public-spirited woman who helped improve the conditions of unfortunate female workers. In its climax, she declared “that her public work was of no real interest to her, and that the only moment a woman really valued in her life was that in which she brought her lover to her arms.” This is the usual morality of theatre under the Lord Chamberlain. At the same time, plays like Ghosts, “which at least represent women as having minds and souls, and some other mission in life than merely to please men and gratify their own crudest passions,” are unlicensed. “If this Committee in its wisdom— its exclusively male wisdom, I notice—determines to recommend a reformed censorship, I demand a place on it for my own sex. I am sure no woman would have made a mess of it as Mr Redford has; and I have no

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faith at all in any man or body of men doing it much better” (TDO 3: 1164–65, 67). She did not appear before the Committee. Shaw composed a “Model Proof for a Cultured Peer,” perhaps offered to Robert George Windsor-Clive, Viscount Windsor, who had been chairman of the Shakespeare Memorial project. “I am the Viscount, &c., &c., &c., &c., &c.: or, to put it shortly from the point of view of the Examiner of Plays, I am a most tremendous swell.” Theatre usually shows people in his class as having no occupation or interest “except the seduction of flighty but goodhearted girls of the lower middle class,” he might continue. He himself has public responsibilities that give him neither the time nor the taste for this pastime. Besides, such behavior would outrage the public and inconvenience him. He considers theatre nationally important and worries that young people usually attend musical comedies. Those who discuss censorship speak as if its main concern were plays by Ibsen and others who treat problems of marriage and middle age, not people who take a girl or lad to a play. The latter know that the theatre’s music, dancing, costumes, and fun are spoiled by coarse jokes or appeals to low impulses. Censorship has not suppressed them. Licensed plays present problems, but so do unlicensed plays by Brieux, Ibsen, and Shaw. Their subjects are often the same. The former treat them farcically or worse: harmless, amusing, or sympathetic. At times, censorship is more liberal with opera than with drama. It objects to Oedipus the King because it mentions incest, but a popular German opera is Die Walküre, in which the hero and heroine are twins (and the sister bears a child impregnated by the brother). No one thinks this opera hurts anyone (TDO 3: 1167–70). The “Cultured Peer” was not a witness. Shaw offered “Imaginary Evidence by a Spiritual Peer” to the Bishop of Southwark: If you ask me what guarantee you will have for the virtue of the theatre if the restraint of the censorship is removed, I can only tell you that there is a force among free men which is far more potent than any censor, although it is very hard to make censors believe this. That force is what the Church calls the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost. If you do not believe in the existence of that force, then I do not see how it matters to you whether the theatre is corrupt or not.

He concludes, “You have tried the censorship; and it has failed; for your stage is very filthy,” and advises, “try the Holy Ghost instead.” This

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Bishop, who was a witness, did not testify along these lines (TDO 3: 1172–73), although, as discussed below, he was dissatisfied with censorship. Major Witnesses in Favor of the Censorship The Committee’s hearings began with Sir William Patrick Byrne, Under Secretary of State for the Home Department, who testified on the history of the censorship. Its origin, the Licensing Act of 1737, was protection against “seditious plays and personal attacks, and not for the protection of public morals.” Except for libel and politics, indecency and immorality did not mark plays in 1737. The Act of 1843 lays out morality as an “absolutely vague” reason to ban a play. The major provisions of the 1843 Theatres Act repeat those of the 1737 Act. Only for riot or misbehavior can the Lord Chamberlain close a patent theatre or a theatre licensed by him. But the 1843 Act says he may, to preserve “good manners, decorum, or of the public peace,” forbid the presentation of a play. The newer Act specifies that the person who submits a play to him must be the master or manager of the theatre, not a dramatist. Furthermore, censorship “does not apply to Ireland” (1909 Report 1–3). Although the line between music halls and theatres seems clear—music halls may not produce plays—in practice, stage plays covers short plays, called sketches, which music halls commonly present. Sir William admitted that although the courts did not routinely recognize this illegal practice, every few weeks “persons are prosecuted and fined” (1909 Report 5–6). Robert Harcourt honed in on the Lord Chamberlain’s ability to grant or refuse a license. Since music halls were not controlled by him but by the police and a licensing authority after a performance, could an authority prevent a performance on a music hall stage? “No,” said Sir William. Although every parliamentary committee that considered this has recommended that “censorship should extend to music halls,” he conceded the impossibility of examining every song or sketch for music halls, which produce hundreds of them a week. Examinations would require “an army of inspectors.” Pressed by Harcourt, he admitted that such ex post facto actions as the music hall manager’s loss of his license are effective. But, asked Harcourt, why would such control be ineffective for theatres? In a theatre, he replied, “more delicate and debatable questions would arise,” like those regarding heads of state. Absent a legal definition of improper performances being misdemeanors (except for extreme obscenities “which rarely occur”) he admitted that reasonable persons would differ on what is

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improper. Reiterating that the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction excludes Ireland, Harcourt asked if there might be a controversial play on Home Rule or religious differences between Catholics and Protestants without the Lord Chamberlain’s control before production. The answer was yes. Sir William agreed that no committee recommended the extension of censorship to Ireland. Has not Ireland had a growth of scandalous drama? The reply was devastating: “the reverse,” and despite the lack of censorship, the Irish theatre compared favorably with the English. Even so, he thought a censor desirable, for a censor’s “gentle and legal way of doing things” was “superior to broken heads of policemen and others in the theatres” (1909 Report 9–14). Examining legal terms, Lord Gorell quoted the license authorizing a performance: the play “does not in its general tendency contain anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage,” and he asked where “immoral or otherwise improper” come from. The second witnesses for the Crown, Examiner of Plays George Alexander Redford, supposed they were from the 1737 Licensing Act. They were not, said Lord Gorell. It gives no basis for the Lord Chamberlain to exercise his discretion but is “absolutely open.” The 1843 Act says the work should be “‘fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum, or the public peace.’” All Redford said was that he accepted the license as he found it. When the committee later turned to Shaw, who did his homework, Shaw reminded it that “from one end of the Bible to the other the words ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ are not used.” Nor are they used in Shakespeare’s plays, and in 1843, “any person using the words ‘morality’ and ‘immorality’ as being synonymous with ‘righteousness’ and ‘sin’ was very strongly suspected of being a Rationalist, and probably an Atheist.” By calling his own plays “immoral,” Shaw explained, “I mean non-customary.” As Marshik reveals, even though Sidney and Beatrice Webb “warned him via telegram that the ‘effect on public opinion [would be] disastrous’” were he to call his plays immoral, he insisted on doing so.21 They were “conscientiously immoral,” Shaw tried to explain. Although Lord Gorell’s views of divorce and county courts would shock the Archbishop of Canterbury, Shaw—connecting Lord Gorell with himself—stated they were “conscientiously immoral; and in bringing them forward Lord Gorell is doing a very high public service, in my opinion.” On the issue that Redford’s criteria for issuing licenses were not based on parliamentary law, Laurence Housman seconded Shaw later: Redford rejected his Nativity play Bethlehem based on “unwritten traditions,” precedents that “led to maladministration” of the

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1843 Act, “a refusal of licences” that nothing in it justifies. Our views of good manners and decorum “are not the same as those which prevailed at the passing of the Act of 1843” (1909 Report 30–31, 47–48, 144). Redford’s arrogant testimony revealed an astonishing lack of knowledge and preparation. Asked what principles he used to license plays, he admitted, “no principles that can be defined.” He acts on custom and precedent, as established by previous Lord Chamberlains. He reads a play to determine if it contains passages that are indecent or offensive to religious sentiment, or to sovereigns of other nations or public figures. He admitted there was no definition of who such a person may be. His personal opinion of a play’s merits or demerits, he claimed, does not enter into the matter: “I am not a critic.” His only courses of action, he professed, were to recommend a play be prohibited or changes be made in it (Report 1909, 14–15). As for scriptural plays, “I do not even read them.” If they are scriptural, he tells this to whoever submitted it and returns the play. Asked to define a religious play, he said, anything “adapted from or taken from the Scriptures.” Actor-manager Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson later testified that Redford told him the same, and so had a member of Parliament. Asked by A.E.W. Mason if Redford would “on principle” bar a play like Everyman, Redford was evasive: like Shakespeare’s plays, it did not have to be sent to him. Mason pressed. Redford said that if it were written today and sent to him, he would be glad to see it performed and would not call it a scriptural play. When William Poel consulted him about it, he said Poel not have to submit it. What of ancient Greek plays? A license is necessary, Redford said, because while they precede the Licensing Act, they had not been performed in English translation or in this translation. As for Restoration plays, which precede the Licensing Act, Redford contradicted himself—claiming first that they should be submitted for performance, then that they come under the heading of Shakespeare’s plays. As Philip Carr, dramatic critic of the Manchester Guardian, testified later, “there seems to be a considerable amount of confusion in Mr. Redford’s mind on that point.” Harcourt called Restoration plays “the most indecent plays that have ever been written.” Redford fudged: this would be a matter not for him but for the Lord Chamberlain, since he is the authority for licensing theatres, not for licensing plays. Samuel pointed out that God is personified in Everyman. Redford said this play was not submitted to him. Samuel pressed him on his point that if plays contained scriptural characters, they would be banned. Redford hedged: if the parties concerned

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wanted adjudication, he would read them and give an opinion. As for prohibiting allusions to national and international politics, he prevaricated: “It is a matter of discretion.” If he thinks something in a play may offend a foreign power or person, he discusses this with the theatre manager. Sometimes, as with references in songs, he has them cut or changed. Asked by Samuel why he considers such allusions in pantomimes objectionable, he answered, “The stage is not a political arena.” He pointed to a paragraph on the back of every license which says that no representation of living persons and of make-up is allowed. In that case, why did he sanction J.M. Barrie’s Punch, which has a character made up to look like Bernard Shaw? On reading the play, Redford said, he could not know the character would be so represented, which, as discussed, is true. Questioned by Mason on Barrie’s Josephine, which Harcourt reminded him contains characters modeled on living persons—Lord Rosebery, Arthur Balfour, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, all previous Prime Ministers22—he first said he did not remember the play, then that he did not know this was the case (1909 Report 15–17, 20, 111, 113, 297). Lord Gorell asked him to explain “the guiding principle on which the censorship is based” and cited the Act: “‘That it shall be lawful for the time being, whenever he shall be of opinion that it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum, or of the public peace so to do, to forbid the acting.’” Redford tried to avoid being pinned down: “They have become much more elastic in recent years.” But the words remain on the license, Lord Gorell stressed. They serve “As a rough general basis,” he admitted. Lord Gorell concluded that the censorship “must be discretionary to a certain extent. There is no right or wrong exactly about it apparently. It is a question of opinion.” Redford agreed. Harcourt reminded him, “You stated definitely that it was no part of the business of the Examiner of Plays to be a critic, but that he had to deal only with questions of morality and so on?” “Yes.” Harcourt quoted Pigott in the 1892 hearings, which Chap. 2 quotes and paraphrases, that Ibsen’s characters are morally deranged, their heroines dissatisfied women who rebel against the nature of womanhood and oppose female duties and obligations, and their men rascals or idiots. He asked, “Does that constitute or does it not constitute a criticism of the plays apart from morality?” His predecessor, Redford replied, was a critic and a literary man, which he himself is not. In addition, he said, accurately, he had licensed all of Ibsen’s plays that had come to him. He admitted it was not his duty to give a reason for vetoing a play, yet he confessed he occasionally did so unofficially, assuming his

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communications to a theatre manager were confidential (1909 Report 21–24). What emerges from the testimony of Redford, who tried to avoid being cornered, is equivocation and untrustworthiness. When Hugh Law asked him the principles, rules, or precedents on which he acted when he refused to license Monna Vanna, he replied, “On the principle of the plot, the immorality of the plot.” He meant that the entire plot, “to my mind, was not proper for the stage; it does not come under the words which I think are in the licence itself, ‘proper to the stage.’” Law reminded him that in the play the woman leaves the enemy’s camp unharmed because the hero is in love with her, and its theme is that love is the enemy of lust. He asked if Redford considered this immoral. Redford blustered that it was, “from the point of view of the Examiner of Plays, at any rate.” Harcourt pointed out that the press noticed “one of the most immoral incidents in The Devil was almost identical with one of the incidents in Monna Vanna; and yet you considered that The Devil was not immoral and Monna Vanna was.” Redford denied the analogy. “The one is a literary work, and the other is a flamboyant, lurid piece of stage business.” Harcourt asked, “The literary work is censured and the flamboyant piece of stage business is passed. Is that your contention?” Redford did not reply. Law asked if this were the principle on which he acted. He denied this. Harcourt continued: “What is the principle on which you acted; that is what we want to arrive at.” Again, no reply. Apparently seeking to help him, Lord Ribblesdale suggested, “to your mind, your action was dictated by the words which you believe to be in this licence that we have not seen. It is all really governed by the ‘to my mind’?” “Yes,” he said, relieved, “and the precedents and the customs of the office,” a comment that confused Lord Ribblesdale: “But I understood you to say just now that when you took over the office, it was handed over to you without any instructions as to precedents or any instructions for your guidance of any sort except again in your own mind?” Redford tried to explain that he was guided by his mind and experience. “No instructions” (1909 Report 27–28). Not necessarily so. In an 1883 memorandum, which his predecessor Pigott had quoted in his testimony to the 1892 committee, as cited in Chap. 1, but which Redford may not have read or known about, or had forgotten, Pigott gave an “extensive official account of the censor’s role” because he had wanted a document “to prepare anyone likely to be questioned on the subject of censorship with stock answers to familiar criticisms.” Pigott “argued that historically censorship defended drama against

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its own helpless predilection for the scurrilous and licentious.” Censors “protected the theatre from playwrights who wished to enjoy ‘an unrestricted license in their importations of obscenity,’ and from ‘needy and unscrupulous managers and against those theatrical speculators and parasites who would willingly degrade the one and the other by turning theatres into disorderly houses if not into houses of ill fame.’”23 Upon further questioning by Law, Redford admitted he refused to license Garnett’s The Breaking Point, later published as a novel, and when it was performed privately, it did not provoke a riot. Law added that the press condemned the play not as improper but as dull. Asked by Harcourt about a specific scene Redford objected to, he prissily replied, “I cannot mention it here.” Law mocked, “You will spare our blushes”—a phrase common in sentimental women’s novels, such as Ellen Pickering’s Nan Darrell; or, The Gipsy Mother (1853), in which a lord tells a young woman, “I will not be so cruel as to compel an answer—I can interpret silence, and will spare your blushes.” After World War II, the phrase was used sarcastically, as in Season 1 of the BBC’s Endeavour, set in the mid-1960s, in which the Detective Sergeant, after apprehending a criminal at an event where was Princess Margaret was present, says the police were able to “spare royal blushes” (according to the press, some of her relationships were scandalous).24 Redford also said, erroneously, that he refused to license Mrs Warren’s Profession because it violated two rules: one character is a procuress and the play’s subject is prostitution. Law asked why he licensed Hall Caine’s The Christian, which also treats these subjects. “I am not saying whether it is right or wrong, but I am trying to arrive at the principle on which you act: whether you refuse a play, let us say, when the subject is treated seriously and with deliberate purpose, and you consider it proper to grant a licence when the subject is either treated in a light-comedy fashion or in a sentimental fashion.” Redford gave his stock response: he judges each play on its own merits. He refused to license Bethlehem, a Christmas story, because it violated the custom of not portraying scriptural characters on stage. Did he consider the Christmas story not proper for the stage? “It was not a question of propriety at all; it traversed the custom.” He admitted licensing Samson and Delilah, also based on scripture, but could not explain the contradiction. All he said was that it had been rejected eight years earlier and that the rules had later been modified. He admitted that both Bethlehem and Alice Mary Buckton’s Eager Heart introduced Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus on stage, but in the latter it was “perfectly

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inoffensive.” Law asked if Housman’s play was offensive. Redford denied this but cited an eight- or nine-year gap between the submission of these plays and invoked “custom and precedent; the unwritten law.” With some impatience, Harcourt reminded him, “It is a matter of common knowledge that there is acute controversy on these cases, and you have not come before the Committee prepared with any views on these controversial points, when they should be put to you, for the information of the Committee.” Law asked about Everyman, in which God appears on stage and speaks. “I think not,” said Redford. “I beg your pardon,” Law retorted; “I have seen it four or five times.” If Everyman were a new play, would he license it? “It is impossible to say,” replied Redford (1909 Report 28–30). Based on Lord Gorell’s line of inquiry, Harcourt asked if Redford considered himself guided not by Parliamentary law but by precedents of his office. Reply: “The first principle is the Act of Parliament.” Lord Gorell read the terms of the license, which are not in the 1843 Act. Redford thought they were, even though he read the Act many times. But, he added, he was not a lawyer. Harcourt asked, “I may take it then that you have no means of judging, and you have not attempted to judge whether the rules under which you act are merely precedents which might possibly be unauthorized and at any rate are not authorized by the Act of Parliament?” “No.” Lord Gorell apologized for having read only part of the license and then read more: among what is impermissible are profanity, improper language, indecent dress, offensive representations of living persons, or anything calculated to produce a riot or breach of the peace. He asked whether those are covered by the statute. “I imagine so.” Ironically, Lord Gorell said, “There is nothing about ‘Scriptural.’ You must take that to be an unwritten law” (1909 Report 31–33). We should see Redford in the context of his times. As Hynes observes, his “principles” are the attitude of the governing classes. Since his words and actions “consistently imply the assumption that knowledge of the public good resides in official minds, and is not to be foolishly questioned,” he and the other authorities had “no legalistic qualms about imposing their judgments of what was desirable for the public upon helpless artists and audiences,” and their acts of censorship are consistent “as acts in defense of an established order, and therefore as fundamentally political and social in nature.” Censorship of religious subjects meant defense of the established church. “Redford’s invented category of ‘Scriptural’ subjects protected only Christianity from stage

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representation.” Political vetoes reflected Edwardian apprehensions about social order “in a time of strikes, suffragette demonstrations, and anarchist threats.” Sex was most problematic when it involved disturbances of the social order, for example, adultery involving political personages, and abortion. We should not “laugh Redford away as simply a quaint fool, for he had a hangman’s power over the London stage at a time when English drama was beginning to show signs of life.” His stupidity was “a typical managerial mind applying itself to managing morals.” Moreover, “His sense of infallibility was so papal that he was impatient of small inconsistencies, and he never condescended to learn exactly what the law under which he rules actually said.” In Edwardian England, Woodfield reminds us, the campaign for a new drama “was not only against commercial interests, but also against the prejudices and taboos of a puritanical, middle-­ class society that was eminently satisfied with its own morality and mode of living, and suspicious of, or openly hostile to, innovations or new ideas, which it considered subversive.” Although the arbitrary Examiner of Plays exercised censorship, his actions “angered only a minority of intellectuals” but were approved by the majority of the upper and middle classes. “The confrontations of dramatist and censor, therefore, were essential skirmishes in a battle for progress that was not confined to the theatre.”25 Major Witnesses Opposed to the Censorship Following the two witnesses representing the Crown were two leading opponents of the censorship. First was William Archer, translator and dramatic critic (but not a dramatist until ten years later). From the outset, his view was unlike Shaw’s. He objected to the censor but would modify his objection if there were a possibility of an appeal. The censor was a magistrate who administered not the law but his personal prejudices and vague official traditions. These placed a class of citizens “outside the written law of the land.” Whatever the value of their property, he could destroy it by forbidding its performance. He could also keep serious plays out of existence, for many authors will not write them if one man’s veto can prevent their production. Until recently, the censorship did not weaken modern English drama because there was no English drama worth speaking of. This was no longer the case. In 1892, Archer was the only person to speak against the censorship before the House Committee, whereas in 1907, almost every eminent English dramatic author—and no manager—signed a petition against it. Archer believed the fears of managers against

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abolishing the censorship were groundless. Ireland, British colonies, and the United States had no censorship. Surprisingly, he failed to mention what happened to Mrs Warren’s Profession in America, saying instead that in none of these countries, as far as he knew, was there any interference by local authorities against the theatre, a statement he twice amended: it did not occur “in any vexatious manner,” then it occurred in “one or two— quite a few [he may have meant ‘few’]—instances” (1909 Report 34–35). The censor’s chief concerns are morals, religion, and politics, domestic and foreign. While Archer favored a check on irresponsible meddling in foreign affairs, for which he faulted ignorant or irresponsible comedians, censorship cannot prevent this. As for religion, managers can judge what would offend audiences, which none of them wants to do. If audiences strongly objected, they would take the play off, but an iron-clad rule that a play should not treat a biblical subject is repressive. Archer opposed all censorship that forces an author to tell what he will write before it is performed and “that involves the sending of a manuscript to an official.” Let the public judge a play, subject to the usual restrictions of indecency. Asked if the effects of censored plays were more harmful than those of uncensored plays, he was unequivocal: “Absolutely no.” He found no deleterious effects on audiences of censored plays at private performances, whereas many licensed frivolous plays lower moral standards. If Shakespeare were writing now, he doubted that Othello or Hamlet would be licensed (the former treats miscegenation, the latter incest and regicide). Asked to name major English authors whose works the censor rejected, he cited Shaw and Barker; among foreign authors, Brieux. He asserted that the failure of Brieux’s most serious plays to receive a license deterred English dramatists. Managers know that plays dealing seriously with high or painful topics will not draw audiences for a long run, but he contended that the progress of art lies with managers who, often at financial sacrifice, produce few performances of plays for a different public. He agreed with Mason that “the censorship acts almost automatically against serious plays, and in favour of light plays,” which unlike serious plays tend to be financially prosperous (1909 Report 36–39, 41–42). The second major witness against censorship was Shaw, who had written nineteen plays, of which three were censored. Press Cuttings had not received a license, but the censor intimated he was willing to grant it on a condition Shaw would have complied with but was not “a condition connected with the original refusal.” His view was forthright: “the censorship ought to be abolished.” Because he loathed anarchy, he wanted the drama

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and its author to be liable to the law, which he conceived to be the guarantor of liberty. If Parliament were to enact a law that he must not mention or treat a specific subject, he would either obey it or “defy it under conditions under which a man is a martyr, but I object to there being no law” and to any control of theatre that is not a control applied to all citizens, and that excludes rights afforded to everyone in the pursuit of their livelihood (1909 Report 46). Following the precedent of the committee of 1892, which allowed Henry Irving to give it a written memorandum on which he was examined, he asked this committee to let him do the same. Sir Henry read his statement, but Shaw had it printed for the committee’s convenience and asked the committee to examine him on it. The chairman cleared the room to deliberate the request in secret session. Upon returning, he told Shaw the committee had decided not to include the statement as evidence. Except for who voted for and against inclusion, what happened in camera is unknown. In the secret session, Harcourt moved that Shaw’s prepared statement be printed as an appendix to the committee’s report. The motion failed, 4 to 5. Lord Ribblesdale and Messrs. Harcourt, Law, and Mason voted in favor of it; the others against (1909 Report xx, 47). Chairman Samuel did not vote, perhaps because it was unnecessary: if he had voted in favor, the result would have been a tie and the motion would have failed anyhow. Samuel asked if Shaw contemplated greater control of the theatre than the one in existence. Denying this, Shaw called the present control tyrannical. “Almost any lawful control that you could get would be less so.” The censor has “at his personal disposal my livelihood and my good name without any law to administer behind it.” This is “past the very last pitch of despotism.” His license “conveys the impression that [the plays] contain nothing objectionable,” which gives them a virtually conclusive defense against legal proceedings that may be taken against them. Shaw agreed on the need for social control but insisted that it should be that of law. Asked if sexually suggestive plays passed by the censor should be prohibited from being performed or stopped when they are performed, Shaw said, consistently, that the question should “be decided by legal prosecution.” Plays should be suppressed “if their production is found to be a legal offence.” He is also a journalist, an author of nondramatic works, and a public speaker, but if he committed offenses against the law in any of these capacities, he would be responsible to it, not to an Examiner of

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Plays or the Lord Chamberlain. Drama should not be immune to law, “only exempt from censorship” (1909 Report 47–48). In his questions, Samuel and others guided him to give answers that were in the statement the committee had suppressed. Did he claim that a teacher of a new religion should be exempt from the law? No, but he should be exempt from prosecution on the ground of immorality. In the rejected statement, Shaw argued, “Whatever is contrary to established manners and customs is immoral.” An immoral doctrine is not necessarily sinful. To the contrary, “every advance in thought and conduct is by definition immoral until it has converted the majority.” It is important that immorality should be protected against the attacks of those whose only standard is custom and “who regard an attack on custom—that is, on morals—as an attack on society, on religion, and on virtue” (CPP 3: 698–99). Samuel asked if a dramatist might he be prosecuted on grounds other than immorality. “Yes.” “With regard for example to sexual immorality?” “To sexual vice,” Shaw put it precisely. Would this apply to performances that offend the religious feelings of certain parts of the community? “No, certainly not.” Should attacks on religion or ridicule of sacred personages be permitted on the stage? I think that the danger of crippling thought, the danger of obstructing the formation of the public mind by specially suppressing such representations is far greater than any real danger that there is from such representations. The real difficulty, of course, is not to suppress such representations, but, on the contrary, to bring them about.

It is hard to get a stage production of anything that is “contrary to the opinions of a large body of people.” Would the danger of causing a riot be a good reason to prevent a performance? “No. I put it on exactly the same footing as political meetings, which, in my experience, very often have ended in riot.” The same freedom applies to both. As to plays that touch on the sovereign or foreign countries, “The State might interfere by prosecution possibly. I object to a censor interfering.” What of incitements to sexual vice? If you prosecute for these, you make it possible to prosecute because the leading lady wears a pretty hat or is a pretty woman. You may make any law you like defining what is an incentive to sexual vice, but to lay down a general law of that kind with regard to unspecified incentives to sexual vice is going too far, when the mere fact of a woman washing

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her face and putting on decent clothes or anything of the kind, may possibly cause somebody in the street who passes to admire her and to say, “I have been incited to sexual vice.”

Bringing the theatre under the law would substitute the magistrate for the censor, whom he called anarchic. He does not administer law; a magistrate does. As Shaw explains in his rejected statement, which he published in the volume containing The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, a magistrate administers laws, but a censor relies only on opinions. “A judge leaves the question of guilt to the jury; the Censor is jury and judge as well as lawgiver” (CPP 3: 708). Shaw agreed with Samuel that “the dramatist would have an advantage … because he would know what the law was, whereas he does not know what the Censor’s mind is” and “not only is there no law for me to find out, but I cannot find out even what the usage of the censorship is.” John Bull’s Other Island, which ridicules a type of Liberal politician, was licensed. Press Cuttings, which ridicules another type of politician, usually on the other side, was censored. “I have to ascertain what the Censor’s politics are before I know whether the play will pass. If he is a Liberal, apparently I have to ridicule Conservatives if I ridicule politicians at all, and vice versa.” The courts would not give certainty, for “You cannot have full certainty in this life about anything,” but because they administer law, you can get as close to certainty as is practicable (1909 Report 48–50). As for the legal proceedings against Mrs Warren’s Profession in New York, the Lord Chamberlain’s refusal to license it in England created an impression “that it was a hideously indecent and horrible play,” and therefore “all the worst elements in the New  York population came in enormous crowds.” The police arrested the whole company, even the stage manager. The magistrate adjourned the case until he read the play, and although “he publicly expressed his extreme loathing of the unpleasant task before him,” the next time he appeared “he exhibited a certain amount of temper, which one would almost think suggested disappointment,” for the play did not contain what he had been led to expect. Shaw quoted the ruling, which I did in Chap. 2. It acquitted the defendants and stated there was nothing indecent in the words; the dramatist did not make vice attractive and his attack on social evils might result in reforms. Even so, “I have suffered severe pecuniary loss and a great deal of discredit through it,” since the affair suggested he was an indecent author, a view that “will follow me to the very end of my career.” He would rather deal

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with a responsible judge than a man with no legal qualification and at times unable to understand the law (1909 Report 50–51). Shaw spoke of another aspect of theatre. It “is a place where drink is sold” and can easily be used “as a prostitution market.” Its manager may set up an entertainment of no value, relying on the profits of drinking bars and the attraction of women of bad character. Since these bring it under control as a public house, Shaw thinks it reasonable that a theatre be licensed annually, as a public house is, by local bodies. Censorship of them is “intolerable from a commercial point of view, and, quite reasonably, managers object.” Here, Shaw is on their side. He recognizes that much theatrical business relies on speculation in the form of tours and that one town’s withdrawal from a tour may turn a speculation into a calamitous loss. But he does not suggest removal of local licenses because the entertainment is allegedly immoral (1909 Report 51). A serious drama, Ghosts has been censored and Redford has stated “it never would be licensed in this country.” On reconsidering a play to which a license was refused, although he said “a play can be reconsidered,” after Mrs Warren’s Profession’s exoneration in America, he refused to consider it when other managers submitted it. Apparently, “he has no consistent usage.” Harcourt mentioned that in 1892 Pigott was asked that if his opinions were hostile to Ibsen’s plays why he did not censor them. He quoted Pigott: “‘They are too absurd for words altogether,’ suggesting that they were merely ridiculous plays.” Did Shaw agree with this dismissal? “Certainly not. They are plays of enormous importance.” They are immoral because “they challenge the existing standard of morality.” The reason for rejecting them is that the Censor would have to face “a tremendous attack on, say, the institution of the family.” He agreed with Harcourt that A Doll’s House is such an attack. A more enlightened Censor would have perceived this and said, “‘If we license the play we to some extent endorse the attack; and, whilst we admit that the author may be a great man, who sees further than we do, we, not being able to see so far, cannot take that responsibility.’” Therefore, Harcourt concluded for Shaw, from the viewpoint of blocking new ideas that would constitute a new morality, “an enlightened Censor might be worse” than the existing one. Shaw concurred. At the end of his evidence, Chairman Samuel asked him to continue to give evidence the following Thursday (1909 Report 52–53). However, when Shaw showed up, the chairman told him that since in the committee’s judgment he had already stated his views fully, it had no more questions for him. Why did it reverse its decision? A plausible reason

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hinges on Shaw’s actions after it refused to permit his written statement to become part of its report. On July 31st, he wrote privately to Samuel of his grievances. He was more than merely upset by its “point blank refusal without reason given.” As Hugo says, he was bitter, he was “snubbed— rebuffed—by the Committee, not once but twice.” He may have unconsciously taken his cue from Lady Britomart in Major Barbara who, agitated by the “perfectly scandalous” way Undershaft defied social and moral norms, asked the Prime Minister, The Times, and the Lord Chamberlain to examine these matters—a passage that is comic partly because she cites them in what she considers an ascending order of importance and partly because while the Lord Chamberlain had everything to do with theatre he had nothing to do with her objections. For Shaw, it would be useless to seek aid from the Prime Minister or the Lord Chamberlain. He felt that by suppressing him the committee had oppressed him, a word he used in a Lady Britomart-like way in his letter to Samuel: “I shall fly to the last refuge of the oppressed: a letter to The Times.” Since that very year The Times had granted asylum to him ten times—and there were five months to go before the year ended—Samuel may have chuckled, as Shaw probably intended him to. Shaw asked, sincerely, if there were a possibility the committee might rescind its decision and, humorously, “I cannot think for the life of me why you let them spoil your bluebook by cutting me out of it” (CPP 3: 72, CL 2: 853–54). Using incredibly bad judgment, he wrote to The Times. On August 2nd, it published his letter, which aired his grievances, including the precedents the committee ignored, the hundreds of pounds worth of work it cost him, the “secret conclave” wherein the committee discussed his statement, and their decision not to explain why they rejected it. What was worse was not only that Shaw attacked the committee’s integrity, which was bad enough, but that he did so after it had only just begun to examine witnesses. Since the committee did not admit it departed from precedent, he charged, “it is clear that the precedent followed is not that of admitting statements impartially, but of receiving statements in favour of the censorship only.” The committee will permit witnesses who favored the censorship to state their case before they are questioned, but … those who are, like myself, opposed to the censorship, will not be allowed to state their case at all, except in so far as they can interpolate disconnected scraps of it into their

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answers to questions. In short, we are to be treated as we should have been if we had been indicted for high treason in the 17th century.

In short, he publicly accused the committee of bias, political oppression through arbitrary use of power, and, like Redford, offering no explanation for its action. Because a member of the press asked if his statement attacked the king, he enclosed a copy of it to convince The Times that it contained no “improprieties which Mr. Redford has taught the public to suspect even in my most innocent utterances.” Unsurprisingly, members of the committee whose views differed from Shaw’s or who were undecided voted to give him no further opportunity to air his grievances at their expense. As Hugo says, this was “a rebuff that amounted to a public rebuke.” In Holroyd’s words, “He had been publicly slapped in the face.”26 To use twenty-first-century vernacular, he lost his cool—a political disadvantage. Prominent among censorship’s foes, Granville Barker approached the subject as an actor and manager as well as a dramatist. Adamantly opposed to the censorship of plays, he said, he doubted its advocates could give an example in which it encouraged the development of English drama in the last twenty-five years. By contrast, it is easy to prove it has retarded the advance of English drama. Since the submission of a play for a license risks having the author’s property destroyed, a dramatist does not want to make the censor think about his play. He therefore tends to write one whose treatment of subjects the Examiner is so familiar with, he does not think about it. If adultery falls within routine theatrical limits, he passes it, but if he encounters an original or unusual view on any subject, “the process of his thinking very often interferes with the licensing of the play.” This prevents a dramatist from choosing new subjects. When Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People, the theatre did not usually deal with its general subject, local government. If a play had been about England, as Chap. 2 mentions, the censor would most likely have forbidden it for causing disapproval of local government authorities. Ghosts is the only play by Ibsen that was censored, but when An Enemy of the People was first produced, critics said these things may happen in Norway but were impossible in England. If it treated abuses in England, he “might have considered it his duty to stop them” (1909 Report 71–72). Did Barker anticipate the Examiner’s rejection of Waste?

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I have long ago given up trying to forecast what the judgment of the Examiner of Plays will be, because I have been unable, by studying his decisions, to arrive at any principle of his working, and, therefore, I have held that the best plan for a dramatist to pursue is merely to write the play which he wishes to write, and take his chance, and in Waste, I wrote the play which I wished to write, and I took my chance.

Legally, “I have no right to question his decision in any way.” Was the censor willing to license the play if it were altered? Yes, but he demanded general alterations: Barker should moderate “outspoken references to sexual relations.” He said that plain speaking was his “only honest course,” for “innuendo would be indecent” and while it was difficult to delegate responsibility to the censor, he agreed, if Redford cited specific phrases, to consider altering them. Redford did not reply. To revise to “a vague accusation” would be to admit he had written something indecent, which he could not do. Redford also demanded he delete all references to “a criminal operation.” A few months earlier Barker had directed, at the same theatre, a licensed play whose plot “partly turned upon a criminal operation which was quite openly referred to on the stage [Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women].” When he wrote Waste he could therefore not imagine that a reference to this subject would result in refusing it a license. “Was it much of a shock to you when Waste … was refused?” “It was a great disappointment.” “But you were not altogether surprised?” Ironically, he replied, “I am never surprised at the action of the Lord Chamberlain.” When Harcourt reminded him he did not give the title of the licensed play that referred to abortion, he said he did not want to do so because the Lord Chamberlain’s powers were so arbitrary that if he did, “he might take the licence away from it, and I should be sorry to damage anybody’s property by bringing that about.” He offered to name it if the committee thought it necessary. Perhaps because two dramatists were on the committee, it did not. It is difficult for a dramatist to expend time writing a play when he is uncertain that the censor will accept it, Barker maintained. His options are to write conventional plays he is almost sure the censor will accept or to write an uncensored type of literature, such as fiction. As a theatre manager, dramatists have told him their ideas for plays, and he felt it his duty to say that if they treated the subjects in certain ways, they ran the risk that the Lord Chamberlain might destroy their property. He has done this “at least half a dozen times” in the last several years. He stated that “responsible people who have made their reputations and who have

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their livings to earn, do not choose very often to write plays under the risk that the Censor may not pass them.” Perhaps referring to an accusation concerning Shaw’s Blanco Posnet, Harcourt asked if it were Barker’s position that some people write plays almost certain to be rejected. Barker: “I take it that nobody would deliberately sacrifice an entire year’s work” (1909 Report 72, 75, 84–86). Like Shaw, Barker did not advocate no control of the stage: “ordinary customs referred to in public speaking and writing in England, translated into law, would be amply sufficient.” Libel, concerning relations with foreign powers, gives powers of prosecution after a performance of a play, not before. He does not consider that one performance of a play that libeled a foreign ruler “would be a national calamity, or could plunge the nation into an international quarrel.” If an author or manager wanted to provoke a libel action, producing a play would be too expensive a way to do so, especially since one might do it by publication. Like Shaw, he agreed that “you have no right to represent vice upon the stage, unless you are prepared also to represent the consequences that vice entails.” Asked whether, if the present system of licensing plays were abolished, he feared police prosecutions, such as what happened in America with Mrs Warren’s Profession, he replied, “None whatever.” He agreed that censorship’s effect “has been to narrow and conventionalise the drama.” As Lady Gregory told the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Barker told the committee, “there is nothing to be gained by treating the public as children” (1909 Report 72–73, 75–77). Again like Shaw, he maintained that the licensing authority should not be empowered to withdraw a license unless it could prove its reason in court or to a Secretary of State who would interpret a specific code. Friendly committee members asked leading questions. Mason: Is his main contention that censorship has a detrimental effect on writers? “Yes.” Is it his opinion that “the best work can be got out of any author if he is doing just what he wants to do to the best of his ability, and without any limitation?” “I absolutely agree.” He summarized, “the law which now applies to the publication of printed matter might simply be transferred to the theatre.” Interference with a public representation in the theatre may be necessary “to the same extent that it is necessary in regard to printed books.” Would the play continue to run during litigation? “Yes.” A book is published, but its circulation continues. What applies to one applies to the other. As to Restoration comedies, “the indecency of the Restoration drama is very much misunderstood.” It is not indecent in the usual sense;

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“it is merely cynical, and, therefore, I do not think that the Restoration drama would do harm to anybody” (1909 Report 79, 81–83). Other Witnesses in Favor of the Censorship Before continuing with opponents of censorship, let us return to its supporters. William Fladgate reported that the Society of West End Theatres (he was its solicitor) unanimously favored the Lord Chamberlain’s authority to license theatres and ban a play before its first performance. He disputed the view that censorship injured the growth of serious English drama. A negligible number of plays were killed before their birth, he admitted sarcastically, some of which were published so that the public could read them and appreciate “their proper worth, whatever that may be.” As for extending censorship to Ireland, it had too few theatres to make a difference, and in Dublin, “the Lord Lieutenant has an absolute power of veto over any play”—which we have seen is inaccurate. His statement that the police had no authority to interfere with a performance of a licensed play, he said, came from evidence given to the 1892 committee, and he knew of no legislation that changed this. But Sir William Byrne, Harcourt stated, said that “the police have power to stop an indecent exhibition in a theatre.” Does Fladgate mean the police could not legally stop an obvious indecency? “I do not think they would,” he replied. Later, actor-author Cecil Raleigh called him “absolutely wrong” and cited examples as proof. Harcourt’s major point was that having spent money to produce a play, a manager wants a guarantee that no authority would say, the day after it opened, he should not have produced it, which would mean a £3000 to £4000 loss, for he would have to close the theatre. To produce a play without knowing what its reception might be concerning, say, immorality, you must appeal to a police magistrate or a County Council. To Shaw the law guarantees a body of principles and guidelines; to Fladgate, enormous expense in going to different courts. When Lord Ribblesdale asked whether criticism in the press sufficed to protect the public against what Shaw called plays with ideas not common thirty years ago, Fladgate agreed but superciliously added, “I do not pretend always to understand Mr. Bernard Shaw’s plays” (1909 Report 54–65, 123–24). Revealing the Lord Chamberlain’s smugness, his Comptroller, Colonel Sir Douglas Dawson, said he had formed an advisory board but found no play “doubtful enough” to convene it. If it disagreed with the Examiner, he “would probably” do what it recommended. Samuel asked if an actor

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is forbidden to play a living person. Sir Douglas: “the rule is elastic.” One rule in the license, Samuel noted, is: “No offensive personalities or representations of living persons is permitted on the stage.” Sir Douglas agreed but did not say what might make it flexible. Lord Gorell asked what regulations guide the Examiner of Plays. The answer: they are printed “on the back of the licence for plays.” But this “does not follow the terms of the statute,” said Lord Gorell, which are “that the Lord Chamberlain may forbid a play if, in his opinion, it is against good manners, decorum, or the public peace.” “Quite so,” said Sir Douglas, as if this settled the matter. Lord Gorell asked where he gets the idea he must follow the license’s terms? “By verbal [i.e., oral] instructions, I should say.” If the Examiner’s practice varies in that he sometimes says, as with Waste, that he cannot cite particular passages, but at other times, as with Blanco Posnet, he specifies lines, asked Harcourt, “What is the general practice?” It “depends upon the objectionable matter which is in the play.” Harcourt delicately said, “the first point is a little in conflict with the evidence” (1909 Report 88–89, 94–95, 97). Sir William S. Gilbert, who objected to both the Lord Chamberlain and Shaw, aired his antipathies: “I am very strongly of opinion that there should be a Censor, but I am still more strongly of opinion that the responsibility of vetoing a play should not rest exclusively on the shoulders of that Censor, but that there should be an appeal from him” to an arbitration board. He considered closing The Mikado “unwarrantable and illegal” and correctly exonerated Redford. The Lord Chamberlain embargoed his property, he charged, but censorship was desirable. Without naming Shaw, he had him in mind when he called the stage an improper pulpit “to disseminate doctrines possibly of anarchism, of socialism and of agnosticism; and it is not the proper platform upon which to discuss questions of adultery and free love, before a mixed audience composed of persons of all ages and both sexes, of all ways of thinking, of all conditions of life and various degrees of education.” Did he believe the censorship inflicted injury on English drama? “I know nothing about the plays that have been censored. I only know about those that have been passed.” He claimed there was a “wide distinction between what is read and what is seen. In a novel one may read, ‘Eliza stripped off her dressing gown and stepped into her bath,’ without any harm; but I think if that were presented on the stage it would be very shocking.” Not taking Gilbert’s slurs calmly, Shaw rebutted this argument. Stupid people, he charged, seized

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this illustration as if it were a successful attempt to prove that without a censorship we should be unable to prevent actresses from appearing naked on the stage. As a matter of fact, if an actress could be persuaded to do such a thing (and it would be about as easy to persuade a bishop’s wife to appear in church in the same condition) the police would simply arrest her on a charge of indecent exposure.

He called the extent to which this safeguard was overlooked “a measure of the thoughtlessness and frivolity of the excuses made for the censorship” (CPP 3: 740). (Indecent exposure is still a crime in the United Kingdom and most of the United States.) After pronouncing that The Cenci did not have a “proper subject for treatment on a public stage,” Gilbert declared that the public was satisfied with the censorship. Asked by Harcourt if there were not different publics, he complacently said, “No doubt.” And what may satisfy the public that goes to the Gaiety Theatre might not satisfy those that go to the Vedrenne-Barker plays? Gilbert’s reply: “It might not be satisfactory to an intellectual audience.” Perhaps the majority might be satisfied with the present censorship, Harcourt asked, but is there an intellectual minority, part of a different theatergoing public, that may be dissatisfied with the present conditions? Again, smugly: “No doubt” (1909 Report 190–93). To Gilbert, as to most of his contemporaries, “intellectual” was a term of disapprobation. Arthur Bingham Walkley, reviewer of The Times, justified censorship. If a play offends morality, religion, or public order, interference with it later would be partly effective and would advertise the offense. A single performance should be stopped. To read something obscene is less harmful than to hear it together with hundreds. It does not matter if a censor has a “narrow conventional view of literature and life,” for it is the view of many people, whom he represents. Walkley divided the public into the enlightened theatregoers, whom advanced ideas interest, and the general public, whom they do not. The former may be sufficiently educated or openminded to see plays banned by the censor. He has seen almost all of them. He doubts the claim that the veto deprives some authors of income. There is “no money in a pioneer play, the drama of ideas.” He thinks the importance of all art, especially the drama, is overrated and censorship hardly matters. He prefers “an enlightened despot.” Although he does not understand why the censor rejected Monna Vanna, “Does that amount to much?” The public “missed an evening’s pleasure,” but “Is that a very serious matter?” Asked by Harcourt if he believed the importance of art in

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England is exaggerated, he replied, “Yes.” Does he feel humiliation as a critic of an unimportant art? “No; one must live”—a retort drawn from the exchange “I must live.” “I do not see the necessity” (Voltaire, Preliminary Discourse). Tactfully, Harcourt did not give the rejoinder. Since Walkley had seen the censored plays, Harcourt asked if he or anyone else in the theatre suffered moral harm. “No,” Walkley unflappably replied, “because the crowd on those occasions was a special crowd; it was not a crowd of the general public” (1909 Report 197–200, 205–06). Following Walkley, John George Snead-Cox, editor of The Tablet, a Catholic journal, stated that almost all Catholics would favor retaining the censorship, which is a “barrier against indecency on the stage” even if the censor rarely exercises his functions, “just as a battery of guns during a long war might defend a harbor without ever firing a shot.” He even considered the censorship too lax. When the curtain rises on an English family, audiences assume the subject will be divorce. Because working men and women accept what they see “as fairly representing what actually goes on, [they] can hardly help believing that the favourite amusement, and, indeed, the principal occupation of the leisured classes is the pursuit of some sort of matrimonial intrigue.” By licensing so many of these plays, the censor propagates a lie and lends vice “the prestige of fashion, and the palliation of the example of the rich.” Too many plays are about adultery and women “with a past.” Although he did not think it too stringent a rule that no scriptural character should appear on stage, he had only the New Testament in mind, for, asked if Samson in the opera Samson and Delilah, or Adam, Cain, or Abel, should be prohibited, he replied, “I do not think it could matter two straws, really” (1909 Report 304–05). Bram Stoker, author of Dracula and Henry Irving’s manager for a quarter of a century, deemed censorship “beneficent,” for it banned such controversial subjects as “religion, politics, and decency.” He claimed no experience of plays that had been refused, but Harcourt reminded him that Irving commissioned Frank Marshall to write Robert Emmet. The Lord Chamberlain’s Comptroller asked Irving, who told the 1892 Committee there would be no objection to it, to withdraw it because of an upsurge of Fenianism. It remains unproduced.27 Asked if censorship harmed British drama, Stoker said that from what he heard of or read of unlicensed plays, “the fewer we have of them the better.” Like Gilbert, J.W.  Comyns Carr, whose King Arthur Irving produced, distinguished between a performance and a book and disagreed that censorship crippled the drama. As for banned plays, he thought the theatre was not a fit arena

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for “humanitarian gospel.” Like Walkley, he preferred suppressing a play before performance than prosecuting it later. Were many plays not written because of the censorship? Most of them, he said, were not written because the author could not write them (1909 Report 160, 255–57, 259). Theatrical owners and managers almost unanimously favored the status quo, for it offered some stability in an unstable profession. The Theatrical Managers’ Association was “absolutely in favour of the retention of censorship of some kind.” It favored pre-production control because tours were booked three to eighteen months in advance; unless the work were licensed a provincial manager would fear to produce it should a local person object, stopping the performance and possibly closing the theatre. One manager called local censorship “the death knell of touring companies.” Mrs. D’Oyly Carte favored censorship. Although she suffered from the censor more than most managers did, because of The Mikado, this action impressed on her how more serious matters could be if provincial authorities had this power. Managers preferred a censor to local authorities, before whom, as John Henry Saville said, “some crank … will invent the right of questioning” their plays. There will always be “some local Stiggins [an avaricious, unsavory evangelist in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers] objecting to a Scotch Elder being put on the stage.” A local Stiggins might oppose renewal of a theatre’s license, which he would not do for a play licensed by the Lord Chamberlain—a guarantee it is fit for production. To most managers, George Edwardes maintained, the theatre aimed “to provide harmless entertainment, brightness, gaiety, and amusement for the public,” not “higher functions.” Their plays are so innocent, owners and managers boasted, suburban girls would not blush. Asked by Harcourt about A Gaiety Girl, Edwardes admitted he changed a character from a clergyman to a doctor and claimed that the author, Owen Hall (pen name of James Davis, a pun on “owing all”) did not remonstrate. Harcourt quoted a letter from Mrs. Davis, that when her husband learned the Lord Chamberlain wanted “‘the character of the parson changed, he deliberately refused to change it.’” Edwardes claimed he did not recall this. Davis’s wife had consulted a woman of “high social position,” said Harcourt, who told her, “‘the parson must go’—and it was on her suggestion he was made a doctor.’” Unblinkingly, Edwardes said he did not doubt her veracity (1909 Report 164–66, 173–76, 240, 242, 244, 246). Frederick Mouillot, who booked attractions for large theatres in censorship-­ free Ireland, produced few plays not previously acted in England. He sent original plays to the censor, who licensed them.

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Although riots greeted the unlicensed Playboy of the Western World, he knew of no improper plays performed in Ireland. He thought the censorship should be maintained as a back-up but admitted plays have rarely been stopped after having been performed. Asked by Mason if the provincial touring system would collapse if censorship were abolished, he said probably not, but it would increase the difficulties (1909 Report pp. 171–73). Actor-managers were in a tricky position. Beerbohm Tree toed the pro-­ censorship line: “some kind of censorship is absolutely necessary” before production as a guarantee to managers and to prevent productions of “libidinous plays.” Post-production bans would expose him “to the slings and arrows of every County Council and every Local Board who might come in and object to a play.” To continue his Hamlet reference, this would be outrageous fortune and he preferred not to take arms against a sea of troubles. He thought local authorities unfit to judge suitability for production. Based on his experience, Redford did the job tactfully and considerately to managers. Asked by Samuel if there were a play Tree wanted to produce but was stopped by the censor, he cited Œdipus, which the Lord Chamberlain considered immoral. Like Walkley, he did not think drama in England suffered because a play by Brieux or Shaw was prohibited. He found the censorship helpful with Blanco Posnet, since he preferred friendly relations with authors and found it easier if the censor rather than he demanded cuts (1909 Report 151–53, 156). George Alexander also toed the line. Harcourt asked if in his opinion the censorship were abolished, there would be more indecent or partly indecent plays than there presently are. Abolition, he said, would tempt “some writers and managers to see how near to what would have been censored it might be possible to go without official interference.” More blasphemous and indecent plays would be produced, but he confessed, “very few such plays have ever been submitted to me.” He would not go so far as to say that were censorship abolished managements might arise to produce indecent plays, but there might be a limited public to keep them going for a while (1909 Report 230–31, 233, 238). Breaking with his colleagues, J.B. Mulholland testified against submitting plays to the censor. He wanted plays with new ideas to get a hearing. Commonsensically, he perceived, “I do not think that the present feeling is any love of the Censor but fear of the unknown.” When Harcourt mentioned testimony about the difficulty of touring plays unless the censorship was retained, he called this “another bogey.” He has produced many

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plays, most of them first done in London. They were “tried on the cat,” that is, had a try-out in a provincial town before being produced in London, or the reverse in his case, for he had the London verdict to go by (Henry Tozer used the term “trying it on the dog,” which means the same). Managers read criticisms in the press. “If there is any question about a piece we can avoid it, or … see it for ourselves.” But many theatres were controlled by syndicates (the same was true in the United States then), which had “mere figureheads” managing them. “Many companies are booked without being seen.” Reading reports of evidence given to this committee, what struck him was the assumption that “a stream of indecency [would be] let loose in the event of this dam of the censorship being knocked over. I do not for a moment believe it” (1909 Report 223–29). Actors were in a sticky position, for they did not want to contradict managers who might employ them. Clarence Derwent, whose will provided for acting awards in American and British theatre, testified that to transfer the veto to local powers would eliminate security of employment. Tripping over himself, he agreed that objectionable plays should be censored and that the censor had passed objectionable plays. Questioned by Harcourt, he tried to explain that “the functions of the censorship appear not to have been very definitely prescribed” and referred to the banned Monna Vanna, Maternity, and The Three Daughters of Monsieur Dupont. He found it unfitting that plays with controversial subjects, written by men who were “seriously trying to grapple with the social problems of the day, should be banned, while what I can only describe as a putrid stream is allowed to circulate through the country day after day, week after week, and year after year at the present time untouched by the Censor.” Calling this a poor effort to defend censorship, Harcourt tried to make sense of it: “You quarrel with the way in which the individual administers the censorship rather than with the powers conferred upon him?” Relieved, the actor said, “Yes.” Another actor testified, “The happy medium is really what guides the Censor; he does not wish to make mistakes.” The Actors’ Association had passed a resolution similar to that of the Actors’ Union, supporting Harcourt’s Bill, “which included the abolition of the censorship.” Older actors disagreed. Sir Squire Bancroft, then age sixty-nine (he continued to act until 1918), maintained that control after a play was performed “would be useless.” There is no point “in shutting up Lady Godiva the day after the fair” (1909 Report 193–95, 261, 333–34).

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Other Witnesses Opposed to the Censorship Like Barker and Shaw, J.M. Barrie favored the abolition of the censorship. Since, unlike them, he had never had a play censored, he could speak without a personal sense of injury. His position was more flexible than Shaw’s: if censorship were not abolished, it might be modified. The censor might warn a manager that if he did not mend a play, local authorities could revoke his license. Barrie dismissed managerial worries: evidence shows that 7000 plays are passed to 40 not passed, which means “a manager would have one risky play about once in fifty or a hundred years,” or “half of one percent.” Most dramatists, some successfully, write as they wish because their views are accepted as correct. Others, abler or as able, are less lucky. They are unconventional, disagree with many accepted views, and work out their ideas in plays. To the official mind, unaccepted views are suspect. While these views may be wrong, they write as best they can and against their commercial interests, for the likelihood of their plays being produced at large theatres is small, for managers know the general public will not see them. Censorship stifles honest criticisms of life. The new does not necessarily improve on the old, yet in nondramatic literature it “is allowed its say, often a foolish say that soon passes into oblivion, but often also a great say that may be for a time reviled, but eventually is accepted as among the nation’s literary glories.” The ideas of dramatists like himself “happen to be what the public like. We are rather conventional, and we have an easy time of it, but these others have a hard time of it really. One would like to strike a blow for them.” That morning, Mason said, a statement expressed the Lord Chamberlain’s opinion that a large number of authors favor the censorship. What is Barrie’s view? “Only the view that I do not know who they are” (1909 Report 100–06). Cecil Raleigh, a prolific commercial dramatist, seconded Shaw, indicating that not only non-commercial dramatists opposed censorship. The 1800-member Society of Authors agreed there should be “no control before production.” The press, literature, music, painting, and speech are free, and if an Englishman does anything wrong, you must prove this and then punish him. Only with drama you tell him beforehand he will do wrong. If anything on a stage seems wrong, then prosecute and prove it in court. The Society would endorse censorship with arbitration if a censor disapproves of a play. “You would hardly suggest that that arbitration should be in public?” Lord Gorell asked. The reply: “We like as much publicity as possible. We are all of us against secrecy.” As for political or

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blasphemous plays, if you cannot succeed in court, you have no right to stop a play. Unlike Gilbert, Raleigh called the effect of an immoral book worse than that of a play. A book is read in secret, considered in secret, and does harm in secret. As a whole, theatre audiences are respectable. In theatrical parlance, a “blue” play—an obscene, lewd, or lascivious play—never pays. His vantage is that of Drury Lane, which deals in large numbers. “Virtue triumphant is my income absolutely. We can hold more in the theatre in a week than they will take in the Court in a year.” All censorship does is to stop writing for fear of what the censor will do. You may not put Thackeray’s Four Georges (about British life under four kings named George) on the stage. You cannot come close to staging a modern historical drama. Managers think censoring plays before performance protects them, but they know little about playwriting. “They do not write plays because they cannot.” Raleigh scoffed at Barker. He “has written two plays which were produced and one play which was prohibited by the Censor.” But he himself is talking of business dramatists who “write dozens of plays and live by it.” They regard managers “as employed regard employers.” Censorship is an excuse for managerial weakness: they cannot decide and want the censor’s help; they distrust their authors (1909 Report 117–26). In June, the popular novelist and dramatist John Galsworthy published a broadside against censorship, calling it “a bulwark for the preservation” of ordinary thought and feelings. Books have uncustomary views of morality and themes unsuited to young people or painful to average people. Should not “a paternal authority” suppress them before they appear? “The fear of the mixed audience” hangs over the heads of theatre managers, but publishers have no such fear.28 So far the censor has licensed his plays without comment, his testimony adds, but censorship deters authors, himself included, from writing plays. He spoke and corresponded with others on this and quotes letters by some of them. Thomas Hardy said he initially wanted to produce a story published the previous December “as a tragic play” and even shaped the scenes and action, but he realized that the subject, “the fear of transgressing convention overrules natural feeling to the extent of bringing dire disaster … would prevent me even getting it on the boards, so I abandoned it.” Arnold Bennett wrote that censorship made it impossible for him “even to think of writing plays on the same plane of realism … as my novels.” It is a question of treatment, not of subject. The censor’s “timidity about sexual matters is an illusion. He is equally timid about all matters ….” Writers want to express themselves in drama and

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become part of “the ‘Court’ movement.” With censorship before performance, they will not abandon other literary genres for the drama. Plays by Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Brieux, and Shaw were not censored for creating international problems or blasphemy, but “for gross indecency,” and to so characterize their work is to inspire in writers the feeling that “would be inspired in a soldier if a brother officer had been accused by the authorities of gross indecency without being given a chance to defend himself.” Neither their subjects nor their treatment are indecent, their productions would have corrupted no one, and prurient audiences would have been bored (1909 Report 127–32). Frederick Whelen, director of the Afternoon Theatre, whom I have cited in connection with The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, indicated that Redford licensed Hermann Sudermann’s Johannisfeuer, translated as Midsummer Fires, with the stipulation that a passage in Act 3 be omitted in production: “If you follow a girl, such as I am, into the cellar, then surely she knows, or at least thinks she knows, what your intentions are.”’ He licensed Hauptmann’s Hannele only if the Stranger were not “made up to represent the conventional pictures of Christ.” He “should not have a beard—it came to that in the end really—and on that the play was allowed.” The Church Times praised it, as did the Salvation Army. Although certain plays he had seen revolted Whelen, he did not think he had the right to prevent others from seeing them (1909 Report 134, 136). Gilbert Murray, Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford and translator of classical Greek plays, called censorship “totally indefensible.” He too emphasized that no other art was subjected to restrictions and that the alleged reasons for them did not hold. He claims an indecent incident in a book produces greater harm than one in a play “because it has time to sink in.” He saw no risk that licentious drama would flourish in England and no evidence that plays produced in countries without censorship were worse. The censor does not consider if a play infringes on a law but arbitrarily decides in vague terms that it is against decorum and good manners. He should not express an opinion on decorum but on whether a play breaks a law. If he believes it does, he should warn against producing it because of possible prosecution or else say, “‘I will prosecute you.’” Murray found no risk that writers were waiting to rush indecent plays to the stage if censorship were abolished. Lord Gorell admitted he was unaware of a law giving “the right to stop anything because it may be contrary to good policy and government in dealing with foreign countries, or because it represents subjects which are not familiarly represented at the

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present time—scriptural subjects.” Murray agreed, preferring “to take the risk on the stage as I would take the risk in serious literature” and let the courts decide. Meanwhile, the harm done “has been greatly exaggerated” (1909 Report 214–18). Unlike the statement Shaw had printed for the committee, Hall Caine’s printed statement was accepted, but probably because his oral testimony differed from it, it is not in the report. Before these hearings began, he held that “dramatic censorship was a necessary evil” that one “tolerated in the interests of the business of the theatre,” especially for actors and actresses, “whose precarious livelihood might be still further imperiled by the withdrawal of a central authority.” But once the friends of the censor gave evidence, “I saw that the censorship could not be supported under any circumstances whatsoever.” Evidence by both sides show its failure. The advanced dramatists complain that the censor prohibits their plays but licenses plays of worse tendencies. The censor’s friends complain it admits plays they would not let their daughters see. Apparently the only people who do not complain are those who produce the plays to which the others classes object. The censor’s standards are current morality. Since the morality is today’s, if the censorship were logical it should forbid yesterday’s plays when they offend today’s morality. It does not, because yesterday’s plays have been grandfathered in, which evades the issue. By the moral standard the censorship imposes now, Shakespeare is “a chartered libertine.” But in truth, no Shakespearean play is produced as Shakespeare wrote it; managers and actors always censor it. The censor does not dare to do so, for the public outcry would be louder than protests on the budget. A dramatist may paint vice aiming to condemn it at the end but before that he makes it alluring. The censor cannot deal with this. He sees a play with bad people and bad scenes, so he censors it. Tomorrow’s morality will likely differ from today’s. Since the Examiner of Plays licenses plays consistent with today’s, it follows that he cannot license those ahead of his time. George Edwardes said he was not concerned with plays that were not “‘light, bright and amusing.’” George Alexander thought censorship necessary to suppress political plays, blasphemy, and obscenity. Gilbert said moral problems have no place on the stage. Comyns Carr said the stage should not be a pulpit. He himself, admittedly not an advanced author, considered Ibsen’s plays, except one, “very light, bright and amusing, and … something very much more than that.” The exception is Ghosts, which is his most moral drama. Unless a play is so bad that it can be prosecuted and convicted, it should not be censored. Prosecution

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before any magistrate would be better than the decision of a censor, who acts “on his own judgment,” whereas the magistrate bases his action on the law. Harcourt asked if Catholics objected to the portrayal of the Pope in Caine’s The Christian. “On the contrary, they made the fortune of our play by coming in great numbers to see it.” Those who objected were mostly atheists or people uninterested in religion (1909 Report 306–15). Although there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Caine’s views, which had much in common with Shaw’s, we should note that Shaw still worked behind the scenes. Hall testified on 23 September. On 12 August, his novel The White Prophet had been published and condemned by reviewers. On 6 September, well before he testified, Shaw—who had panned his play The Manxman (TDO 2: 450–52)—defended his novel in a preface to a second edition. He did not change his views to influence Caine’s testimony. Rather, he saw that their ideas on its subject converged, and he seized the moment, since the novel, like Shaw’s preface to John Bull’s Other Island, written five years earlier, treated the execution of Egyptians in Denshawai sympathetically to the Muslim victims and harshly to the Christian British officials. On 11 October, after Caine’s testimony, its publisher issued it as a pamphlet, distributed gratis to the press. It was not included in later editions of the novel, but was published as a book review. Pointedly, Shaw told Gilbert Murray on 29 August that he wanted Caine to tell the Select Committee how censorship prevented The White Prophet from being dramatized—if, he added, it was the censor rather than Beerbohm Tree who stopped it. Caine did not mention this subject (CL 2: 865–66).29 Although the popular Sir Arthur Wing Pinero had no complaint against Redford, he stood with the great majority of his colleagues in urging the committee to view the Lord Chamberlain’s autocratic power as opposed to the drama’s interests and as degrading the dramatist by placing him under a non-legal threat. Censorship does not protect the public. Those who would accept harmful productions are so small, they would ruin managers. Unlike Shaw, he suggested alternatives to abolition. One would be to retain the Examiner of Plays but eliminate his veto. If he thought a play might endanger decorum or the public peace, he should tell the manager and Public Prosecutor of this risk. Or there might be an appeal to an ad hoc arbitration board. Asked if he knew of cases in which the censorship deterred authors from writing plays, he said he knew only of himself. “I never think of the Censor while I am writing my play.” After he finished it, he added—perhaps with a twinkle in his eyes—“I do not sleep.” But

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nothing could be sillier “than the idea that if the censorship were removed we should all of us at once plunge the stage into a sea of indecency” (1909 Report 335–37, 340). Some views of the Bishop of Southwark, whom Shaw tried to influence, resemble his. The most the Bishop could say was that he was dissatisfied with what he knew of the system, much of what it admitted, and some of what it excluded, yet he would not abolish it. A board of appeal might overcome some difficulties. He distinguished between decency and morality. He would not interfere with free, bold treatment of moral questions, such as marriage, pro or con, but decency was different. One may dramatize marriage indecently, whereas—he may have had in mind Shaw’s Getting Married, first performed the previous year—one may take a marriage contract as the basis of male and female relations and present it with no trace of indecency. “If so, I do not think it ought to be stopped”—nor, I add, was Shaw’s play stopped. He would have censorship of licentious plays but not serious dramas even if they preached doctrines contrary or shocking to present morality, “because the current morality ought to be able properly to take care of itself.” If plays offend what the country considers best, they “will not prosper.” He saw no reason why religious and scriptural plays should not be performed. He would probably find irreligious plays disagreeable, “but I do not think I ought to advocate their being stopped, except by public opinion.” They would bore the public, who would not buy tickets to them. Asked if he thought discussions of some subjects would be dangerous, he replied they would, but, like Shaw, said they should not “be checked mechanically by the censorship. I think the evil of that is greater than the evil of letting it go.” He disagreed that the “theatre is not a pulpit” and should be restricted to froth. He wanted it to continue the tradition of both Æschylus and Aristophanes. Would he substitute Sophocles for Æschylus and exclude Œdipus? No. Does Shaw’s belief “that a high and serious treatment of great moral questions, even if those views did not square with your own, should not be prohibited?” Yes. He thought it undesirable to limit the stage to plays to which a man would take his young daughter. Since there are classical books he would not give her, he does not want to limit plays to those that young people can see without being shocked. “I think that the public must look after itself a good deal in those matters” (1909 Report 298–304). Perhaps the most amusing testimony was Israel Zangwill’s, a dramatist and novelist best remembered for his play about America, first performed

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there in 1908. Its title, The Melting Pot, has passed into the language.30 If he were censor, he would suppress half the plays for indecency and the other half for stupidity. “You may mean anything, so long as you say something else.” Their writers do not conceal art, for “there is none to conceal,” but they conceal “indecencies decently,” while in a “readily discoverable manner.” They wink and ogle. “Seriousness is the unpardonable sin.” Coarseness is excusable if it is “flippant and frivolous enough.” Like Barker, he reminded the committee that jingoism (mindless support of war, especially for patriotic reasons) came from a music hall song. Its chorus is: “We don’t want to fight,/But by Jingo if we do,/We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men,/And got the money, too.”31 The Daily News derisively called supporters of Britain’s militaristic policy “Jingoes” and the term became a catchphrase. Since pantomimes have political allusions, why should not theatres? Asked of Monna Vanna, he quoted a letter by its author, that when a German critic was offended that the title character was nude under her cloak, he was reminded that so was everyone else. Asked if he were “an ‘advanced author,’” he said he was so advanced, Barker would not produce a play of his, but he had advanced back again to orthodox morality. Perhaps after discussions of ethical problems by Shaw, we might end where we are. Asked if the abolition of the censorship is desired by “so-called advanced authors who write for a very limited circle,” he replied that if they write for a limited circle they will do limited harm. When he said English drama suffered from being run like a business, Lord Newton asked him to name a place where art was not run like a business. He pointed to places where art was run as a business that did not immediately pay. The Théâtre Libre first had to create its market. “There must be a preliminary period of waiting for a public by a new artist or a new form of art.” Some managers will sink money “over a sterile period with the view of benefiting later,” like Barker, who knew what the commercial market was and could write for it “instead of trying to create a new one.” One Lord asked if he “thought of writing a play with the Censor as the main character.” “Well,” Zangwill retorted, “a morality play with the devil in it has been customary.” Samuel asked, “Would you wait to write such a play until the Censor is abolished?” The response: “I think I would rely on his sense of humour to pass my play” (1909 Report 73, 325–26, 328–29, 332–33).

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The Outcome After an even-handed summary of the testimonies, the Joint Select Committee reached several conclusions. (1) The public interest requires special laws to regulate theatrical performances. (2) Because of the expense of touring companies and dependence on them by actors, actresses, and other theatre personnel, a public authority should license a play before performance. (3) Despite legitimate objections to the censor’s secrecy, emphasis on conformity to conventional standards, and injuriousness to criticism of such standards, arbitration of the Lord Chamberlain’s decision by another party is not a viable alternative since the dispute is not between individuals, to be decided by another individual, but whether the State, in the community’s behalf, should prevent a public performance of improper plays; therefore, the licensing authority should be maintained but not with an absolute veto. (4) To safeguard the community, a public authority should be empowered to suspend the performance of unlicensed plays upon confirmation that they are licentious, harmful, or improper; after confirmation, their producers are subject to penalties. (5) Because ex post facto control should not be entrusted to local authorities and because decisions by judges would often be based on “too little questions of law and fact and too much questions of discretion,” the courts are unsuitable; the recommended alternative is a tribunal “of legal and lay members of the Privy Council.” The committee recommended the enactment of legislation that “The Lord Chamberlain should remain the Licenser of Plays.” His duty would be to license them unless he reasonably holds they are indecent, contain “offensive personalities,” invidiously represent a living or recently deceased person, violate religious reverence, induce crime or vice, impair friendly relations with a foreign power, or cause a breach of the peace. While submission of a play to be licensed by him should be optional and performance of an unlicensed play be legal, if the Director of Public Prosecutions believes “an unlicensed play that was performed is open to objection on the ground of indecency, he should indict the theatre manager and the author.” Once he does so, “it should be illegal to perform the play until the case has been adjudicated and decided.” Courts should have power to prohibit the performance of a play for up to ten years and impose penalties on the manager and author. If the Attorney General considers that an unlicensed play that was performed is improper for any listed ground, he may apply to a Committee of the Privy Council to prohibit a performance of it for up to ten years and to add this as a

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condition or alteration of the theatre’s license. This committee may hear cases in camera (1909 Report viii–xi). Unsurprisingly, the Select Committee failed to square the circle. Despite references in its report, issued on November 2nd, to legitimate objections to the secrecy of the censorship, its emphasis on conventionality, and its injuriousness to social criticism, despite the testimonies of anti-censorship dramatists and others, despite the ineptitude of the Examiner of Plays and the Comptroller, despite admissions by the Under Secretary of State, despite the logical fallacies in the testimony of numerous proponents of censorship, the committee reinforced the status quo. Far from ameliorating the problems of the censorship—and from defining the legal meanings of such terms as indecency, offensive, licentious, and improper—its proposals buttressed the status quo. ““Some knowledge of the English character, and of the official mind,” said Max Beerbohm, “had sufficed to save me from hoping for anything better.” The censor should be got rid of, but when a Parliamentary committee was appointed to investigate this and his enthusiastic friends thought “there was a possible chance that the Censor would be abolished, or that his power would be much modified, and way would be made for the dawn of a new day, I smiled.” Holroyd calls the report “an illustration in the art of contriving methods of reform … that leaves matters exactly where they were.” Hugo states that the committee thought it had “produced a document that nobly enshrined the English genius for compromise,” but if it “exemplified the Dickensian formula for How Not to Do It, the government went one better and Did Nothing About It. The Report was submitted to Parliament and then shelved.” This was inevitable, for the King said he would not agree to theatres being removed from the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction and would not accept an Advisory Board’s recommendation that would remove his veto power. He must retain it “‘on the same principle as the Sovereign has the power of making use of the veto in cases of emergency of an exceptional character.’”32 Although the term was not used, the argument was the slippery slope: to make any change would be to create a precedent that would have unforeseen, disastrous consequences. Although the uncensored Blanco Posnet remained banned, the Abbey Theatre toured it, with Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan and Lady Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward, in England, where under the auspices of the Stage Society it gave two private performances in London on December 5th and 6th (SGA 57). Was Shaw right when he said, as quoted in Chap. 2, that the only way to get rid of the censor was to abolish the monarchy?

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Whereas the response of antagonists of censorship ranged from disappointment to fury, its advocates felt differently. Social purity organizations worked to strengthen the nation’s morals through censorship. On 14 and 15 July 1910, a Public Morals Conference was held in London with almost five hundred attending; its proceedings were published that year. Demanding “the Church ought to control the theatre,” Reverend Thomas Phillips proposed, “the Bishop of London would make a very sensible censor.” It did not matter if the Bishop were to revise plays: “the vital thing is that no play should be staged which violates the conscience of the Bishop or any other decent citizen.”33 The theatre exists in a political and social context. In the Edwardian decade, the Prime Minister had more immediate and important matters to contend with, including a constitutional crisis over the People’s Budget, alluded to earlier, that would introduce taxes on lands and incomes of Britain’s wealthier classes to fund new social welfare programs (in the event, it failed to pass the House of Lords), and King Edward VII’s death on 6 May 1910 (he was succeeded by his son, who became King George V). Censorship passed into the background. Woodfield reminds us, “Resistance to the abolition of the censorship can best be understood in the context of an established order fighting a last-ditch stand against the incursions of a marauding enemy.” If Parliament controlled censorship, it would have enacted changes after the 1909 committee’s report, but the Examiner of Plays worked for the Lord Chamberlain, whose royal master “made him a bulwark against the heresies of socialism, the chaos of anarchism, the specter of moral (especially sexual) disintegration, and the vacuum of atheism.” Against abolitionist logic was “the traditional conservatism of the ruling classes and a deep-rooted suspicion of all that was new, un-English and, worst of all, intellectual.” Theatrical censorship was not just a matter of the rights and freedoms of dramatists; it was symptomatic of battles for political freedom manifested in male and female suffrage movements, socialism, the trade union movement, and the Labour Party. The campaign for the new drama was against commercial interests and “the prejudices and taboos of a puritanical, middle-class society that was eminently satisfied with its own morality and mode of living, and suspicious of, or openly hostile to, innovations or new ideas, which it considered subversive.” Although a capricious individual controlled censorship, he enraged only a few intellectuals, whereas most of the ruling and middle classes approved it. Their confrontations were “skirmishes in a battle for progress that was not confined to the theatre.”34

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Paradoxically, one result of the hearings that some may have anticipated turned out to be inconsequential: the resignation of Redford, whose testimony had discredited him and the Lord Chamberlain. He became a scapegoat. Probably to avoid suggesting that his departure was due to the hearings, he did not officially leave office until 21 December 1911. When the anti-censorship faction of the theatre community learned of this, some were gleeful. On 19 December, Pinero wrote to Shaw, “Redford is going! He resigned yesterday”—followed by sixteen exclamation marks. The next day, he told Archer, “His position, he says, has been made intolerable for some time past, and his hope now is that he will receive an adequate pension in consideration of his past services.” To avoid suggesting the Lord Chamberlain’s office required a scapegoat and to slap the face of opponents of censorship in and out of Parliament, his replacement was Charles Brookfield, author of the ribald play Dear Old Charlie, whose previous appointment as Assistant Examiner of Plays had aroused protest in the press, the theatre community, and Parliament. The irony amused Archer: “That the adaptor of Dear Old Charlie—that glorification of cynical adultery—should be selected as the guardian of public morals is a stroke of exquisite humour, quite the most delicious in the history of an office always prolific of absurdities” (headnote, CL 3: 77). Alluding chiefly to A Doll’s House and Ghosts, Brookfield spoke against the intellectuals who contested his appointment: Personally, if a young person could be harmed by seeing a play, I think it would more probably be by a sombre dissertation on the right of a wife to desert a degenerate husband—or one of the many kindred topics so dear to the New Dramatist—than by the frivolous burlesque of ill-assorted marriages, such as one finds in the old French vaudevilles.

As for an older person, “it seems to me just as preposterous to suppose that a man would be impelled by witnessing a Palais Royal farce to go forth straightway and deceive his wife as that he would be inspired to beat her and throw their offspring out of the window by watching Punch and Judy.” In a debate in the House of Commons, Harcourt—who recognized that, as Hynes says, “Brookfield’s plays were the sort of worthless, indecent farces that managed to get licenses while serious plays were banned”—asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if, in view of the evidence given to the Joint Select Committee, the Lord Chamberlain was aware of the nature of Brookfield’s plays. The response:

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“The Lord Chamberlain … advises me that he is aware of the evidence given before the Select Committee of 1909 as to one of Mr. Brookfield’s own plays, but that in his judgment this evidence raises no presumption that Mr. Brookfield is disqualified for the efficient performance of his duties.” Harcourt asked if Brookfield as author were to submit one of his own plays to Brookfield as Examiner, it would be licensed, the reply was that if Mr. Brookfield were to submit a play of his, “the Lord Chamberlain himself would read that play with great profit and amusement.” Brookfield died two years later and was replaced by George S.  Street. Nothing changed—for quite some time.35

From the Eve of World War I to Shaw’s Death in 1950 Even before World War I, times were gradually changing—with the emphasis on gradually. During and after the war, they changed more rapidly. In pre-war 1911, Oedipus Rex was licensed for the Court Theatre, Liverpool, but public performances were forbidden, even though it was part of the school curriculum and students performed it—at school, of course. In 1912, it was played in London by John (later Sir John) Martin Harvey. That year Granville Baker persuaded the novelist and poet Eden Phillpotts to write a play, The Secret Woman, an adaptation of his successful novel (1905). They anticipated no objections, but while the play was in rehearsal the Lord Chamberlain refused to license it unless “improper” speeches were cut. Phillpotts and Barker declined to delete them. Findlater reports, “The odd thing was that the censor refused to make public the passages he thought unfit for consumption by an English audience, but agreed to show them privately to any interested Members of Parliament.” One passage was the husband’s attempt to explain his adultery to his wife of twenty-three years: Is it false to one woman to be fond of another? Has no man ever loved two women true and tender? ’Tis a thing in their power, I tell you—a thing that scores have done. I love you with all my heart and soul. I’d die for you, and die laughing. Can you call home an impatient word, or harsh speech, or unkind deed from me in all your life? I’ve loved you rising and sleeping— year in, year out—and you know it, Ann—you know it in your heart. And t’other be a dear thought to me also. … But, afore God, my conscience is clear of evil. … My flesh and blood’s a bit too much for you and always was. And a bit too much for me sometimes.

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Because of the censor’s decree that it was illegal to charge for tickets to see The Secret Woman, Phillpotts’s sympathizers donated money that enabled the manager of London’s Kingsway Theatre to present six private performances to which admission was gratis. In 1949, Edward Percy Smith, a dramatist who became an MP, cited this in the debate on the Censorship of Plays (Repeal) Bill, which he introduced (it is discussed below): The Secret Woman was presented “at a West End theatre to which anyone could write for tickets and witness the performance without paying. And about 100,000 people did so, myself included.”36 In 1913, The Times published a letter by the Bishop of Kensington, who objected to a show at the Palace Theatre, starring the French actress Gaby Deslys, who did the “Gaby Glide” (descending a staircase while wearing little clothing). Shaw responded, taking issue with the Bishop calling it “objectionable.” The complaint, he observed, was not objectionable but “highly attractive to large numbers of people whose taste is entitled to the same consideration as his own.” Evidently, he demands that plays he approves should be tolerated but those he does not should be banned. By “suggestive” he means “suggestive of sexual emotion. Now a Bishop who goes into a theatre and declares that the performances there must not suggest sexual emotion is in the position of a playwright going into a church and declaring that the service there must not suggest religious emotion.” One of the main purposes and beauties of the theatre, like all the fine arts, is the “suggestion, gratification, and education of sexual emotion.” In the Bishop’s diocese, sculptures in the Victoria and Albert Museum are filled with beautiful naked figures. “There is a voluptuous side to religious ecstasy and a religious side to voluptuous ecstasy; and the notion that one is less sacred than the other is the opportunity of the psychiatrist who seeks to discredit the saints by shewing that the passion which exalted them was in its abuse capable also of degrading sinners.” Some families raise children to believe that undraped statues and nude paintings are abominations that corrupt young people; that the theatre, which performs Tristan and Isolde and Romeo and Juliet, “is the gate of hell; and that the contemplation of a figure attractively dressed or revealing more of its outline than a Chinaman’s dress does is an act of the most profligate indecency.” The English and Scottish morality produced by the starvation and vilification of essential emotions is so morbid, abominable, and obsessed by what tempts it, “so merciless in its persecution of all the divine grace which grows in the soil of our sex instincts when they are not deliberately perverted and poisoned,” that if its believers could

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impose it on the community for one generation, as some would like to do, “the Bishop, even at the risk of martyrdom, would reopen the Palace Theatre with his episcopal benediction, and implore the lady to whose performances he now objects to return to the stage even at the sacrifice of the last rag of her clothing.” When the Bishop heard the Palace had what he considered an objectionable entertainment, he should not have gone there. “That is how sensible people act.” When the Bishop retorted that the power to influence people for good is inextricable from the power to influence them for evil, Shaw agreed, but in this case why does he “imagine that he can suppress and destroy the power for evil without also suppressing and destroying the power for good?” Drawing from Matthew 26: 40–41, Shaw observed, “No doubt it is easier to go to sleep than to watch and pray,” which is why people try to secure purity and virtue by paying an official to do the job for them. But the official, “who is equally indisposed to watch and pray,” simply forbids “everything that is not customary; and as nothing is customary except vulgarity, the result is that he kills the thing he was empowered to purify and leaves the nation to get what amusement they can out of its putrefaction” (TDO 4: 1303–07). After reading Androcles and the Lion in 1913, the Examiner of Plays concluded, “It is often very amusing—but it deals with religious devotion & heroic sacrifice in a spirit of raillery which would probably shock a good many of the audience.” Although it did not warrant a ban, he was loath to recommend it be licensed. But he recommended it.37 Nor did he refuse to license Pygmalion the same year, and it was first performed in London in 1914. In it, Eliza refers to her father’s unmarried partner as her sixth stepmother and her father expresses a willingness to sell her to Higgins and Pickering for £50, admitting he could not afford morals and neither could they if they were as poor as he was. In Shaw’s 1914 preface to Misalliance, first performed in London in 1910, he said that discussion of and even imparting knowledge about sex were taboo and had no age limit. Apropos censorship, he continued to warn that “the present must not attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending to know good from evil in tendency, or protect citizens against shocks to their opinions and convictions, moral, political or religious: in other words it must not persecute doctrines of any kind, or what is called bad taste.” Personal and social enlightenment hinges on a hearing for doctrines that “first appear seditious, blasphemous and immoral and which deeply shock people who never think originally, thought being with them merely a habit and an echo.” By contrast, Johnny

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says in the play, “You can draw a line and make other chaps toe it. Thats what I call morality” (CPP 4: 65, 175, 694, 710). In August 1914, a month after the first public performance of Ghosts in England (one matinée)—it had previously received one private performance by the Independent Theatre Society—the Great War began. Understandably, censorship of the stage ceased to be an issue. Although Shaw’s writings on the war misled some Englishmen to think otherwise, Shaw—a socialist Irishman who favored the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912 and whose residence since 1876 was in capitalist, imperialist England—was sensitive to the possible effects of his writings during the war. When actor-manager William Faversham proposed reviving The Devil’s Disciple in New York, Shaw wrote to him on 20 December 1915, self-censoring his play, which he called “disengaged” because they would both risk the charge of being bankrolled by Germany to produce a play representing England as the enemy of freedom. “On the whole, this is not a moment for political plays not made to order for war purposes; and we had better let The Devil’s Disciple sleep for the present.” On 4 May 1917, he told Lady Gregory he had virtually pledged not to let it be played anywhere during the war (CL 3: 338, SGA 133). During the war, censorship was routine. Four days after Britain entered it, the Defense of the Realm Act was passed, censoring and criminalizing actions or statements one might consider anti-war or anti-government policy. Courts of summary jurisdictions tried minor offences, in vague terminology. Civilians were subject to trial by courts martial. One would think Shaw’s play The Inca of Perusalem (1915), which spoofs the Kaiser, would easily sail by the censor. Not so. The Lord Chamberlain worried that the monarchs of the combatants were relatives. King George V and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II were first cousins; so were George V and Russian Tsar Nicholas II; and Wilhelm II and Nicholas II were third cousins. The Lord Chamberlain stipulated such deletions as references to the Inca’s grandmother (Queen Victoria) and uncle (Edward VII). He ruled that “royalty could not be represented on stage” (but references to them were enough). As Brad Kent says, “given that the royal family had attempted to distance themselves from their German brethren during the war, including changing their name two years later to the House of Windsor, the office had to protect them in this instance.” Furthermore, the license stipulated that the Inca’s make-up should not make him “too closely resemble the German Emperor.” Shaw consented. Again there was trouble in Ireland. In September 1915, Shaw wrote O’Flaherty, V.C. for

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the Abbey Theatre, which again was in financial difficulties (because of the war, lucrative tours to America were impossible). He waived royalties for performances in Ireland. Partly in jest, he told Lady Gregory, “The picture of the Irish character will make the Playboy seem a patriotic rhapsody by comparison.” O’Flaherty has seen war realistically and is candid about it. “He sees Ireland as it is, his mother as she is, his sweetheart as she is; and he goes back to the dreaded trenches joyfully for the sake of peace and quietness.” Inspired by Lance-Corporal Michael O’Leary’s having received the Victoria Cross for bravery, the play went to the military authorities, who thought an “educated” audience would find no harm in it, but various Irish factions might consider it an insult to O’Leary, and with others resenting this, there could be rival demonstrations by the audience. They considered it better to wait before producing it. In London, the Chief Secretary for Ireland worried that the Irish would regard the play, of which he knew only the title, as too much a recruiting play and the English as an anti-recruiting play. The Under Secretary of State for Ireland told Shaw that demonstrations would smother the play’s good lesson, while individual passages would receive a prominence he did not intend. According to St. John Ervine, manager of the Abbey Theatre, the General Officer of Dublin warned that if there were a riot in the theatre at a performance of the play, the theatre’s license would be cancelled. The Abbey was living “from hand to mouth. A wet night would send our receipts almost galloping down. Summary closure of the theatre would be ruin.” With Yeats in London and Lady Gregory in America, the only one to advise Ervine was an excitable trustee who recommended the play not be produced at that time. “So we withdrew it, a decision I now deeply regret; for there is little in this very entertaining piece that can be called inflammable, although, heaven knows, the Irish do not need much to set them off.”38 The play’s first performance was on the Western Front in February 1917 by officers of the Royal Flying Corps (which became the Royal Air Force in 1918), directed by Shavian actor Robert Loraine, a pilot, and Denis Mulholland in the title role (SGA xviii, 95, 108, 111–12, 116–17).39 Censorship in the post-war period was odd, Lisa Sigel says, not because the government criminalized allegedly obscene books and articles, opened and confiscated mail, banned theatre productions, and kept a tight rein on movies, for these were continuations of established policies of suppression. “Instead, the oddity was that the government kept arguing that it did not censor.” The Home Secretary’s position was that censorship would interfere with traditional British freedoms. According to him, no one should

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construe that anything he or the police did as “‘fettering the rights in any way whatever of a man and woman to write what the spirit moves them to write.’” In Edwardian Britain and in wartime, censorship of seditious, treasonous, libelous, and pornographic material was “a matter of course” and “during the inter-war period, the government argued for freedom of the press even as it censored.” To avoid accusations of censorship and to admit it interfered with mail between individuals, the state created euphemisms for its actions. It issued “warrants” for mail letters and “arrested” letters and packages, which let it monitor private correspondence. “The government knew that it censored; this was not a case of one department not knowing what another did. The Home Office worked closely with Customs and the Postal Office.” All three received opinions of various works from the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Home Office also worked with the Metropolitan Police, each giving the other details of cases. Seizure of works was routine, their destruction a set policy. For future reference, the Customs and Postal Offices sent copies to, among other repositories, the British Museum, University Library Cambridge, National Library Scotland, the City of London Police, and the Director of Public Prosecutions. While such confiscated materials as books were systematically burned or shredded, the government maintained this was not censorship, and while the Home Office told the Chief Constables of “a confidential list of titles whose further circulation should be prevented,” it denied this was censorship, for neither it nor the police had “‘any power to prohibit the circulation of any publication’” or “to ‘ban’ a book.”40 The war years made a difference in the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which its opponents recognized, relaxed its rigors. In terminology appropriate to war, says Findlater, “Its enemies seemed to have declared an armistice.” One “sign of the times was the capitulation of the Stage Society, whose annual report for 1916–1917 announced that ‘With the production of Ghosts, Damaged Goods and The Three Daughters of M.  Dupont our fight against the censorship appears to have attained its purpose.’” During the war, the Lord Chamberlain lifted his ban on all three, which received public performances. Back to Methuselah (1918–1920) was licensed, Kent concludes, partly because few spectators would see all of the long philosophical Pentateuch. Still, he demanded that Shaw delete the parody of the Athanasian Creed and satirical depictions of Lloyd George and Asquith. Shaw agreed. No one criticized his putting Adam, Eve, or Cain on stage (the stricture against portraying

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scriptural characters was ignored), but the condition that “‘the usual conventionalities of dress of various other characters in the Play [must be] observed’” prompted Shaw to play the role of “shocked moral authority, countering that he could not abide by the Lord Chamberlain’s request: in the Garden of Eden, conventional dress was nudity and he did not wish the police to interfere with the production.” He therefore insisted on contrivances to make them appear but not actually be naked.41 In 1923, Saint Joan was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, whatever his concerns about Catholic reaction. Its first London production was in 1924. Although he did not censor it, others did. In 1939 students at Al-Azhar University, Cairo, demanded it be removed from the English studies syllabus. The Dean agreed and prepared to burn copies of it because it had passages considered insults to Mahomet and Islam. Shaw was stunned—“the students and the faculty of that university ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves”—and explained, “What is expressed is not my view. It is the historical view of the medieval Catholic Church.” He could understand that illiterate people might be offended, but for “a learned body” or a university to misunderstand the play was beyond his comprehension. “Cant they see the comparison of St Joan to Mahomet made in my play is a compliment to Mahomet?” The English nobleman (Warwick), formerly a Crusader against the Mahometan powers, immediately challenges the Bishop. “He says that if Mahomet was only a camel driver, St Peter was only a fisherman. He praises the conduct of Islam, sometimes even at the expense of Christendom.” The author does not denigrate Mahomet but a fifteenth-century bishop of a church to which he does not belong. “No one who could read could misunderstand.” Shaw said that “every member of the faculty—the students I can forgive, almost!—ought to be incontinently sacked” (TDO 4: 1483–84). Times had changed. In 1924, Noël Coward’s The Vortex, which featured drug addiction, was licensed; the play was so successful, it transferred from a fringe theatre to the West End. That year the refusal to license Mrs Warren’s Profession changed. After thirty years, Lord Cromer, the new Lord Chamberlain, licensed it. It would be absurd, he conceded, as Chap. 2 mentions, to continue its ban, “ignoring the march of time and the change it brings about in public opinion over facing such questions openly.’” After its first public performance in Birmingham in 1925, the reviewer cited in Chap. 2 called it possibly “‘the most truly moral play ever produced on the English stage, not excepting miracle plays, morality plays,

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or religious propaganda plays. A vicarage soirée, with an uplift[ing] address from the rector, would be an orgy of licentiousness compared with this play.’”42 By 1925, Shaw was no longer a member of the avant-garde. In 1926, this perennial gadfly did not suddenly become a member of the old guard when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925, but he became respectable. The “Award Ceremony Speech” by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, is worth quoting: His ideas were those of a somewhat abstract logical radicalism; hence they were far from new, but they received from him a new definiteness and brilliance. In him these ideas combined with a ready wit, a complete absence of respect for any kind of convention, and the merriest humour—all gathered together in an extravagance which has scarcely ever before appeared in literature.

He created a new kind of dramatic art. “Its novelty does not lie so much in structure and form,” for he obtains any scenic effect he feels necessary. “But the directness with which he puts his ideas into practice is entirely his own; and so too are the bellicosity, the mobility, and the multiplicity of his ideas.” Without mentioning Mrs Warren’s Profession, first publicly performance in England two years earlier, Hallström alludes to it by what he says of Plays Unpleasant, the volume in which it first appeared, which is “so named because they brought the spectator face to face with unpleasant facts and cheated him of the thoughtless entertainment or sentimental edification that he expected from the stage. These plays dwell on serious abuses—the exploitation and prostitution of poor people, while those who perpetrate these abuses manage to retain their respectability.” Shaw’s works, including the two other plays in this book, bear the mark of his humanity, which is one of his finest qualities. His struggles against traditional views that have no solid basis and against traditional feelings that are spurious or only partly genuine bear witness “to the loftiness of his aims. Still more striking is his humanity; and the virtues to which he has paid homage in his unemotional way—spiritual freedom, honesty, courage, and clearness of thought—have had so very few stout champions in our times.” According to Archibald Henderson, Shaw quipped that the prize was awarded him as a token of gratitude for not having published anything in 1925. If he said this, it was in jest, as his bibliography reveals.43 On 18 November 1926, after notification that he had received the award, he

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wrote to the Royal Swedish Academy, distinguishing between the award and the prize. “For the award I have nothing but my best thanks,” but he refused to accept the money because “My readers and audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs; and as to my renown it is greater than is good for my spiritual health. Under these circumstances the money is a lifeboat thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.” He proposed it “be used to encourage intercourse and understanding between Sweden and the British Isles.” The Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation was created in March 1927. Among its awards was a contribution for the 1927 London production of The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg, whom Shaw considered a genius (CL 4: 33–34). Continuing to bash censorship, this Nobel laureate turned his attention to Ireland. Unlike Britain, which had censorship of theatre but not books, newspapers, or journals, Ireland passed a Censorship of Publications Act in 1929, which on the basis of indecency would legalize the latter, including plays if they were printed in them. The Act construes indecent as “including suggestive of, or inciting to sexual immorality or unnatural vice or likely in any other similar way to corrupt or deprave.” It bans “medical, surgical or physiological details the publication of which would be calculated to injure public morals.” Anyone found guilty of violating it would be subject to a fine up to five hundred pounds and/or up to six months imprisonment. A work may be banned if it advocates “unnatural prevention of conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage.” Although the Act directs the Censorship of Publications Board to consider “the literary, artistic, scientific or historic merit or importance and the general tenor of the book,” the authors whose works the Board has banned include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and D.H. Lawrence; Irish writers include Edna O’Brien and Liam O’Flaherty. James Joyce’s Ulysses was not banned because it was not published in Ireland, but a customs law stopped it from being brought into the country. While the Bill was debated, Shaw argued: “We shall never be easy until every Irish person is permanently manacled and fettered, gagged and curfewed, lest he should punch our heads or let out the truth about something.” He asked the Church, “which is not Irish but Catholic,” if it will “submit to this amateur Inquisition which is eliciting triumphant chuckles of ‘We told you so’ from Ulster.” If a priest warns children about venereal disease, he may be imprisoned for corrupting the young. “The seed of Torquemada is in the Irish soul as well as the seed of Calvin,” he warned. “Let Ireland beware!” It did not beware. Before the Act’s passage, said Julia Carlson, moral

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fervor created by an “obsession with national purity led to widespread public and private censorship,” and vigilantes seized and burned English Sunday newspapers because they covered divorce cases. Burning books considered indecent continued for years. Middle-class people destroyed them at home. In the Board’s decisions, virtually any book that referred to sexual activity was banned. The Act explicitly aimed to prevent dissemination of birth control methods and hide “penalties of prostitution until we have irrevocably incurred them.” When one proposes to let a young woman read a book on sexual abnormalities as misfortunes instead of terrors to be vilified and stoned, Shaw said, an Irishman “declares that he is prepared in the interests of family life to slay his children rather than see them free to read such a work.” In 1933, his novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God was banned.44 Shaw fought but failed to prevent the enactment of this censorship law. This law remains. “As recently as 2012,” Cathy Hayes said in 2016, “there were still a whopping 274 books and magazines banned in Ireland.” In 2018, eight books on abortion and four sex guides were banned. In 1992, a referendum made it legal to publish information about abortion, but these books stayed banned, for they had been published before the referendum. In 2018, the Republic of Ireland voted by a two-to-one majority to overturn the ban on abortion. Two years earlier, the Board unanimously banned its first book in eighteen years, The Raped Little Runaway, by Jean Martin, which describes the rape of a boy. Strangely, Liam O’Brien observes, its publisher, STAR Distributors Ltd., has an almost “nonexistent Internet presence, which in the book trade indicates that the business is likely closed. The Raped Little Runaway has no entries on Amazon.” I have found one URL for STAR, which lists a few entries in the 1980s and fewer thereafter. Because books published by STAR are difficult to locate, O’Brien asks, “who would complain about a nigh-on impossible-to-find book of smut?” He calls the ban “a resoundingly empty gesture,” and if any “instance of wasted time and money should provide justification for abolishing the Board and its many numbskulled decisions, let it be this.”45 Shaw still fought censorship in England. He urged the Special General Conference of the Chief Constables’ Association to resist being given powers to prohibit performances of plays on the basis of reading them beforehand: every argument to stop plays to prevent evil “is equivalent to the argument for handcuffing me before I get back to my hotel, on the ground that if you do not I might punch someone’s head on the way. You

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have got to allow the dog his first bite.” As he acknowledged, matters improved in the 1930s. His 1933 postscript to his preface to Blanco Posnet states, “The censorship of plays remains unaltered, though of late years it has been much more liberally and intelligently exercised. None of my plays is now on the index” (CPP 3: 760). Liberally and intelligently characterized the censor’s treatment of his plays of the thirties. The Lord Chamberlain was not offended, or not officially offended, by miscegenation, polygamy, and blasphemy in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles. Geneva, first performed in 1938, had three characters based on “living persons”—heads of state, which censorship barred from the stage: Battler (Hitler), Bombardone (Mussolini), and Flanco de Fortinbras (Franco). With Shaw Nobelled, his status was enshrined. To ban any of his plays would have been internationally humiliating. The Lord Chamberlain resolved this, Brad Kent says, by requiring that “the play’s setting be changed to Ruritania, at once a foreign nowhere and a foreign anywhere.” He also demanded that Battler not wear a Chaplin moustache so that he did not closely resemble Hitler. Terence Rattigan was less fortunate. That year, the Lord Chamberlain refused to license his Follow My Leader (written with Tony Goldschmidt), about Hitler (in the play an ignorant plumber who is a puppet of the real rulers of the country, named Moronia), who had just invaded Czechoslovakia. As Nicholas de Jongh explains, the Lord Chamberlain’s duty was “to ensure that political views in plays reflected government policy in relation to foreign countries.” He deferred to the Foreign Office’s insistence that no play should offend a foreign country with which Britain’s relations were sensitive. And part of “the right wing of the Conservative Party was sympathetic to Hitler, strongly anti-Semitic and believed a continuing policy of appeasement was in Britain’s best interests.”46 The ban lasted two years, when Britain and Nazi Germany went to war. Trying to return theatre censorship to the national agenda after World War II, the British Theatre Conference, in 1948, passed a resolution recommending its abolition. Sir Lewis Casson moved the motion, which was seconded by Edward Percy Smith, an MP who was a successful dramatist. It passed with three dissentients. Four hundred and fifty delegates, representing every branch of theatre except management, backed this appeal. To counter it, the Society of West End Theatre Managers passed a resolution favoring censorship. Predictably, the Government ruled for the status quo. In 1949 Parliament debated The Censorship of Plays (Repeal) Act, introduced by Smith, with provisions that revoked the requirement that

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the Lord Chamberlain license or refuse to license new plays and eliminated prosecution of anyone involved in their performance. Clement Attlee’s government tabled the bill because stage censorship “‘had not in recent years given rise to any volume of public criticism; and in these circumstances it would be inexpedient for the government to involve themselves in unnecessary controversy over this issue.’” As the century approached its midpoint, the theatrical profession was divided. Theatre managers welcomed censorship because, as before, it safeguarded them from prosecutions. Playwrights and directors generally opposed it because of the “constraints it imposed on what might be written and how plays might be performed.” As before, it “was pushed to the sidelines.”47 Shaw’s experiences, especially with Mrs Warren’s Profession, rankled him until the end of his ninety-four-year-old life. In his preface to Farfetched Fables, completed forty years after the 1909 hearings, he continued to fight: “As a playwright I was held up as an irreligious pornographer, and as a public enemy, not to say a thoroughpaced cad, for many years by an irresponsible censorship which could not be challenged in parliament or elsewhere” (CPP 7: 402). In April, three months before he turned ninety-three, while Parliament debated strengthening the censorship, The Times published another of his letters on the subject, which still outraged him. He called a censor of plays “an official of infinite wisdom, infallible judgment, and encyclopedic erudition, for whom time does not exist.” If the Lord Chamberlain, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chief Justice, or another mortal were to try to read and judge every play ever written, he would have to stop all other activities and read plays sixteen hours a day. Apart from making playwrights wait years for a license, he “would go stark mad.” But what would happen is what has happened. He would hire a staff of clerks at low wages to read and judge plays. They would compile a list of subjects, beginning with religion and sex, that must not be mentioned. For three decades, Britain’s censor had suppressed Mrs Warren’s Profession. “I was branded as a pornographic author and suffered heavy loss and discredit in consequence. Even now managers advertise their performances of the play as ‘banned for 30 years.’” When he first fell afoul of censorship, staples of entertainment in music halls, which were not subjected to it, offered their audiences silly songs with senseless words that winks and gestures made obscene.48 This letter appears to be his last public statement on censorship, and it was an admission of failure. On 2 November 1950, he died.

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In the United States, which had no national legal theatre censorship, moralists and reformers of vice tried to purify plays—as they did movies (the subject of the next chapter), novels, comic books, and other entertainments, especially those enjoyed by the working class. Among the most successful American theatrical censorship efforts after World War I was a ban on a type of variety show, burlesque, which featured striptease acts by women. Burlesque may not have become a major issue if Billy Minsky (of the four Minsky brothers, a surname synonymous with burlesque) had not opened his show uptown—on West 42nd Street—in 1930, the year after the Great Depression began. Reformers did not overly trouble themselves with scantily clad women in Broadway shows like the stylish Ziegfeld Follies and George White’s Scandals, and they may not have been too concerned with rowdy burlesque shows had they remained in Harlem and immigrant ghettos. But Billy Minsky’s burlesque theatre was steps away from Times Square, it drew audiences from the uptown theatres, and other burlesque theatres opened on the same street, which Rachel Shteir calls “a flood zone.” In the 1930s, New  York anti-obscenity activists, often religious, targeted them. Municipal authorities denounced “smut,” especially in burlesque, which impacted the legitimate theatre. Andrea Friedman calls their campaign “among the most successful of all attempts to control the sexual content of New York’s entertainment industry in the first half of the twentieth century.” In 1934, New York City elected as its mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who detested commercialized vice, on which he cracked down. John Sumner, who succeeded Comstock as President of the New  York Society for the Suppression of Vice, called 1935 the year burlesque ran wild. He influenced New York City’s municipal authorities, which raided burlesque shows at its demand. Convictions were few and burlesque’s contents did not change. In 1937, LaGuardia, who was thrice elected mayor, intensified his campaign against striptease, which he considered immoral. Friedman observes that his “war against burlesque and other ‘moral evils’ coincided with the increasingly prominent role taken by Catholic clerics and lay activists in the cultural politics of the 1930s.” He refused to renew theatre licenses on May 1st, the annual renewal date. Owners and managers of burlesque theatres took him to court. A grand jury ruled in his favor. He had the license commissioner hold applications until Autumn, when the term of licenses shrank from twelve months to three and the license fee increased fourfold. In its report for 1937, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice boasted it had removed striptease from the city. While it was not the major cause, New York City

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had banished burlesque shows. To see them, New Yorkers had to cross the George Washington bridge to New Jersey. As for the United States Constitution’s First Amendment, a judge stated in 1941, “Regulatory power is at odds with freedom of speech, but the alternative is social anarchy, and oppressive license.”49

Notes 1. James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 115, 181–89; Bernard F. Dukore, Shaw’s Theater (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp. 132, 148 n. 11 et passim; Desmond MacCarthy’s The Court Theatre 1904–1907, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1966), p.  107 et passim. 2. Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 200–01; Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, vol. I: 1900–1932 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003, p. 29; Edward Garnett, A Censured Play: The Breaking Point (London: Duckworth & Co., 1907), pp. ix–xi, xiv, xxi. 3. James Kilroy, The Playboy Riots (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971), pp. 7–9; Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, vol. I: 1900–1932, p.  32; Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 60–71. 4. E.P.  Lawrence, “The Banned Mikado: A Topsy-Turvey Incident,” The Centennial Review (Spring 1972), 18: 151–56, 160; Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) p. 226; Sidney Dark and Rowland Grey, W.S. Gilbert: His Life and Letters (London: Methuen, [1923]), p. 101. 5. David Thomas, David Carlton and Anne Etienne. Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), https:// www-oxfordscholarship-com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/view/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199260287.001.0001/acprof-9780199260287 (accessed 11 July 2018), p. 77; Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw, p. 201; Dennis Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.  84–87; C.B.  Purdom, Harley Granville Barker: Man of the Theatre, Dramatist, and Scholar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), pp.  73–76, 198, 245–46; Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p.  222; “Stage Society, The,” The Times, 27 November 1907, p. 8; Dennis Kennedy, “Introduction,” Harley Granville Barker, Three Plays, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1987), p. 16; Bernard F. Dukore, Crimes and Punishments and Bernard Shaw (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 28. 6. Bernard Shaw, Agitations: Letters to the Press 1875–1950, ed. Dan H.  Laurence and James Rambeau (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985), pp. 93–98. 7. Bernard Shaw, Agitations, pp. 98–101. 8. Bernard Shaw, Agitations, pp. 102–04. 9. James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914, p. 122; Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw, pp. 202–03; “The Censorship of Plays,” Letter to the Editor, The Times, 29 October 1907, p. 15; “Censorship of Plays, The.” From a Correspondent, The Times, 29 October 1907, p.  15; “Censorship of Plays, The.” Letter to the Editor, The Times, 24 February 1908, p. 8. 10. David Thomas et  al., Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson, pp. 84–85, 88–89, 91; Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw, p. 209. 11. Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, Theatrical Companion to Shaw (London: Rockliff, 1954), pp. 124, 128. 12. E.T.  Raymond, A Life of James Balfour (Boston: Little, Brown, 1920), p.  21; Bernard F.  Dukore, Crimes and Punishments and Bernard Shaw, pp.  131–32; Leon Hugo, “Punch: J.M.  Barrie’s Gentle Swipe at ‘Supershaw,’” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, ed. Stanley Weintraub and Fred D.  Crawford (1990), 10: 70–71; J.B.  Fagan, “Shakespear v. Shaw,” pp. 126, 130. 13. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (New York: Random House, 1989), 2: 232; Judith Hill, Lady Gregory: An Irish Life (Doughcloyne: Collins Press, 2011), pp.  345–46; Anne Etienne, “Naked Censorship: Stripping the Censor’s Discourse,” Review LISA E-Journal, 11 (2013) http://journals. openedition.org/lisa/5509#ftn2 (accessed 11 March 2018); Dorothy Knowles, The Censor, The Drama and The Film 1930–1934, p.  59; Brad Kent, “Bernard Shaw, the British Censorship of Plays, and Modern Celebrity,” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 (2014), 57: 239. 14. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 2: 233. 15. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 2: 117–28; Judith Hill, Lady Gregory: An Irish Life, p. 345; Joan FitzPatrick Dean, Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 90; Lucy McDiarmid, “The Abbey and the Theatrics of Controversy,” A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage, ed. Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2000), p. 59. 16. A.W. Massingham (unsigned), “The Incorrigible Censor,” The Nation (29 May 1909), 310–11.

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17. “The Queen’s Coronation Oath” (published 2 June 1953), https://www. royal.uk/coronation-oath-2-june-1953#na (accessed 2 March 2018). 18. T.F.  Evans, ed. SHAW: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 198–99; Joan FitzPatrick Dean, Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland, p. 95. 19. Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, p. 63. 20. Bernard Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 49, 114. 21. Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, p. 64. 22. “Drama: The Week” [unsigned review], The Athenæum, No. 4094, 14 April 1906; p. 459, https://books.google.com/books?id=rG_NVvvu5f8 C&pg=PA459&lpg=PA459&dq=j.m.+barrie+josephine&source=bl&ots= sKJM3VFaZA&sig=2t7zzybp1RhfqFvZcfirRBapUoo&hl= en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiL2IW5l77fAhXthOAKHeuqCicQ6AEwEHo ECA0QAQ#v=onepage&q=j.m.%20barrie%20josephine&f=false (accessed 26 December 2018). 23. Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson, with Miriam Handley, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets … History of British State Censorship (London: The British Library, 2004), p. 5. 24. Ellen Pickering, Nan Darrell; or, the Gipsy mother (London: Clarke, Beeton and Co., [1853]), https://books.google.com/books?id=J7QBAAAAQA AJ&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=spare+your+blushes+pickering&source=bl &ots=3ldLFFpCxf&sig=ACfU3U08psbKVNbmer2yTyRv3NhyPjDxsA& hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwid5ZmL-frhAhUNN8KHaPCCCAQ6AEwA3oECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=spar e%20your%20blushes%20 pickering&f=false (accessed 1 May 1, 2019); Endeavour, Series 1. DVD, PBS, 2013. 25. Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, pp.  217–18; James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition, p. 173. 26. Bernard Shaw, The Letters of Bernard Shaw to The Times 1888–1950, ed. Ronald Ford (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp.  104–06; Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw, pp.  219–20; Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 2: 234. 27. Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World, pp.  185–86, https://books.google.com/books?id=22Xp03gBd-MC&pg =PA185&lpg=PA185&dq=henry+irving+play+on+robert+emmet&sourc e=bl&ots=90jOA_g7dO&sig=ACfU3U38aydqpPvbmv2IpGGthVT_3J 2K4A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi5vfHFqbnhAhUr1lkKHfwVDOs Q6AEwBHoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=henry%20irving%20play%20 on%20robert%20emmet&f=false (accessed 5 April 2019). 28. John Galsworthy, A Justification of the Censorship of Plays (London: William Heinemann, 1909), pp. 14, 16–18, 20, 22, https://archive.org/stream/

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justificationofc00gals/justificationofc00gals_djvu.txt (accessed 25 October 2018). 29. Dan H.  Laurence, Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1: 93; Bernard Shaw’s Book Reviews, ed. Brian Tyson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 2: 230–40. 30. Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot (New York: American Jewish Book Company, 1921), Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/23893/23893-h/23893-h.htm (accessed 28 December 2018). 31. G.W.  Hunt, “Macdermott’s War Song (1878),” http://www.cyberussr. com/hcunn/q-jingo.html (accessed 30 March 2019). Hunt wrote and composed the song for music hall singer G.H. Macdermott (“the Great Macdermott”). 32. Max Beerbohm, “The Censorship Report,” Saturday Review, 20 November 1909, Max Beerbohm, Last Theatres 1904–1910 (New York: Taplinger, 1970), pp. 505–07; Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 2: 237; Leon Hugo, Edwardian Shaw, p. 229; Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, pp. 63–64. 33. The Nation’s Morals: Being the Proceedings of the Public Morals Conference Held in London on the 14th and 15th July, 1910 (New York: Cassel and Co., 1910), pp. vi, 195. 34. David Thomas et  al., Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson, pp. 99–102; James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914, pp. 129, 173. 35. J.P.  Wearing, ed., The Collected Letters of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), p. 236; “Censor of Plays Resigns,” New York Times, 22 December 1911, p.  14, https:// timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1911/12/22/104845295. pdf (accessed 28 February 2019); “The Annual Register,” A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1913, ed. Edmund Burke (London: Longmans, Green, 1914); Charles H.E. Brookfield, “On Plays and Play-­Writing,” The National Review, No. 345 (November 1911): 421; “Censorship of Plays,” HC [House of Commons] Deb[ate] 30 November 1911, vol. 32 cc580–82, Hansard 1803–2005, https://api.parliament. uk/historic-hansard/commons/1911/nov/30/censorship-of-plays (accessed 14 August 2018); Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p. 239. 36. Dorothy Knowles, The Censor, The Drama and The Film 1930–1934, p. 37; Richard Findlater, Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), pp.  119–20; Eden Phillpotts, The Secret Woman (London: Duckworth, 1912), pp. 35–36; “Torquay’s Eden Phillpotts Upsets the Censors,” Noddleit, 26 May 2012, http://www. noddleit.com/nod/i9304 (accessed 20 August 2018); Censorship of Plays

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(Repeal) Bill HC Deb 25 March 1949  vol. 463 cc713–97 Order for Second Reading read, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1949/mar/25/censorship-of-plays-repeal-bill (accessed 13 April 2019). 37. Brad Kent, “Bernard Shaw, the British Censorship of Plays, and Modern Celebrity,” p. 241. 38. Bernard F. Dukore, Crimes and Punishments and Bernard Shaw, pp. 57–58; Brad Kent, “Bernard Shaw, the British Censorship of Plays, and Modern Celebrity,” p.  247; St. John Ervine, Bernard Shaw: His Live, Work and Friends (New York: William Morrow, 1956), p. 471. 39. Laura Arrington, “The Censorship of O’Flaherty, V.C.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies: Shaw on War, ed. Lagretta Tallent Lenker, (2008) 28: 90; David Gunby, “The First Night of O’Flaherty, V.C.,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, ed. Gale K.  Larson (1999), 19: 96. 40. Lisa A. Sigel, “Censorship and Magic Tricks in Inter-War Britain.” Revue LISA e-Journal: Literature, History of Ideas, Images and Societies of the English-Speaking World (2013), 11.1: 10, 12–13, 16, 18, https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/5211#text (accessed 17 December 2018). 41. Richard Findlater, Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain, p. 126; Brad Kent, “Bernard Shaw, the British Censorship of Plays, and Modern Celebrity,” pp. 242–43. 42. Brad Kent, “Bernard Shaw, the British Censorship of Plays, and Modern Celebrity,” pp. 243–44. 43. Per Hallström, “Award Ceremony Speech,” 10 December 1926, The Nobel Prize in Literature 1925, George Bernard Shaw, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1925/press.html (accessed 19 March 2018); Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956), pp. 838–39; Dan H. Laurence, Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, 2 vols. 44. Censorship of Publications Act (Republic of Ireland), 1929, http://www. irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1929/act/21/enacted/en/print.html (accessed 10 May 2018); “Censored: The 274 Books and Magazines Still Banned in Ireland Today,” The Journal (Ireland), 21 May 2012, https://www.thejournal.ie/censored-the-274-books-and-magazines-still-banned-in-ireland-today-455034-May2012/ (accessed 31 October 2019); Bernard Shaw, Platform and Pulpit, ed. David H.  Greene and Dan H.  Laurence (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), pp. 274–76, 279; Julia Carlson, ed., Banned in Ireland (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 9–10, 133, 136–37. 45. Cathy Hayes, “Hundreds of books and magazines remain banned in Ireland,” 28 July 2016. Irish Central, https://www.irishcentral.com/ news/politics/censorship-in-ireland-hundreds-of-books-and-magazines-

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remain-banned (accessed 3 September 2018); “Eighth Amendment repealed as Irish President signs bill into law,” BBC News, 18 September 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45568094 (accessed 16 April 16, 2019); Liam O’Brien, “Why is the Irish censorship board banning its first obscene book in 18 years?” 16 March 2016, Melville House. https://www.mhpbooks.com/why-is-the-irish-censorship-board-banning-its-first-obscene-book-in-18-years/ (accessed 10 May 2018); “Star Distributors,” Open Library, https://openlibrary.org/publishers/Star_ Distributors (accessed 5 October 2019). 46. Bernard Shaw, Platform and Pulpit, p.  196; Brad Kent, “Bernard Shaw, the British Censorship of Plays, and Modern Celebrity,” pp. 245–46, 248; “Nothing is ever as it seems,” British Library, 4 April 2011, https://www. bl.uk/press-releases/2011/april/nothing-is-ever-as-it-seems (accessed 13 April 2019); Nicholas de Jongh, Politics, Prudery & Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage 1901–1968 (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 144. 47. David Thomas et  al., Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson, pp. 135–38, 145–46, 151, 257; Censorship of Plays (Repeal) Bill HC Deb 25 March 1949  vol. 463 cc713–97 Order for Second Reading read. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1949/mar/25/ censorship-of-plays-repeal-bill (accessed 13 April 2019). 48. Bernard Shaw, “The Censorship of Plays,” The Times, 7 April 1949, pp. 280–81. 49. Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 136–41, 156, 162, 171–75, https:// ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/lib/vt/reader. action?docID=272745 (accessed 10 June 2019); Andrea Friedman, “‘The Habitats of Sex-Crazed Perverts’: Campaigns against Burlesque in Depression-Era New  York City,” Journal of the History of Sexuality (October 1996), 7.2: 204, 211, 221–25.

CHAPTER 4

Shaw and Movie Censorship in Britain and the United States

Well, I must be patient; there is no fettering of authority. —William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, II.iii

In Europe and America in the 1880s and 1890s, inventors made experiments of photographing people and animals in motion—motion pictures, moving pictures, or, slangily, movies, which signaled the new medium’s difference from still photographs. The goal of these inventors was commercial: inexpensive entertainment for a mass audience. In May 1893 in Brooklyn, Thomas Edison unveiled his Kinetoscope, a peephole with a slot into which one might drop a coin to watch photographs that revolved on spools, which gave the impression of motion. In New  York City, London, Paris, and Berlin, similar machines were unveiled. Successive audiences of one person at a time were unprofitable, let alone lucrative. The next step was several machines in rows for customers, one at a time at each machine. The breakthrough innovation was machines that projected moving pictures onto a screen, so that as many paying customers as the room, hall, or other venue held could watch the phenomenon. In 1895, different inventors in different countries did the trick. In February 1895, the Lumière brothers, Louis and August, patented their first projection machine. In March in Paris, they demonstrated the Cinematograph, which projected pictures in motion on a screen. Their first film, known as Lunch Hour at the Lumière Factory and Workers © The Author(s) 2020 B. F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw and the Censors, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52186-8_4

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Leaving the Lumière Factory, lasted less than a minute. In April in New York, Woodville Latham demonstrated the Panopticon, which also did so, as did the Bioscope of Max and Emil Skladanowsky in November in Berlin. In December, the Lumières’ Cinematograph showed moving pictures to a paying public in Paris. Admission was one franc. As Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach report, the first day’s revenue was thirty-­ five francs. Although the organizers were discouraged, “Three weeks later, without a single line of advertising the profits had risen to two thousand francs a day.” In February, the Lumières showed their invention in London. To them, prospects of commercial success ranged from uncertain to dismal, but Georges Meliès, who had turned thirty-four years old soon before he attended the December exhibition, called the film show “a sort of miracle.” Before it ended, he relates, “‘I rushed up to August Lumière and offered to buy his invention. I offered ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand francs. I would gladly have given him my fortune, my house, my family, in exchange for it.” Lumière refused. “‘Young man,’ said he, ‘you should be grateful, since although my invention is not for sale, it would undoubtedly ruin you. It can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity but, apart from that, it has no commercial future whatsoever.’” Undaunted, Meliès proceeded on his own and by the end of the decade became an innovative movie director.1 By 1900, the novelty of movies became popular in amusement arcades, traveling fairs, music halls, vaudeville theatres, and similar venues, often makeshift. Once they attracted large audiences, moralists attacked them. In 1895, Thomas Edison showed Carmencita, whose eponymous dancer showed her ankles, and Princess Ali, who performed a belly-dance. Both were considered pornographic. More famous was Edison’s 1896 The Kiss (in 48 seconds a man silently sweet-talks a woman and smoothly parts his moustache before kissing her—a peck on the mouth). According to Tim Dirks, it “was denounced as shocking and pornographic,” and the Catholic Church called for censorship and moral reform. Three years later in England, a parson took a traveling film exhibitor to court for showing Robert Paul’s 1896 film The Soldier’s Courtship, a 31-second scene in which a woman enters and sits on a park bench, annoyed; a soldier enters, they argue, then embrace and kiss—more passionately than their American movie counterparts do. In November, France went one better. Le Coucher de la mariée (translated as The Bride Retires and Bedtime for the Bride) became so popular that remakes were filmed until 1905. In many, says Noël Burch, “the bride looks into the lens of the camera filming her as if

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to summon the spectators to bear witness.”2 What they have in common is mouth-to-mouth kissing—that is, sex, which is more erotic in the French film. Although Victorian audiences frowned upon such public displays of affection, they were probably less uncommon than we may suppose, but these short sequences were private moments seen by a paying public. Shaw was familiar with advances in motion pictures. An avid moviegoer, he saw lots of westerns, including those of cowboy star William S. Hart. He was a fan of Charlie Chaplin and Max Linder, and of Mary Pickford. On his travels, if he had a few free hours and a movie were playing, in he went. He made fun of his interest in cinema, calling it a toy that irresistibly brought out the boy in him. But it also brought out the businessman. On 12 December 1908, he wrote to Pinero that if the gramophone and the cinematograph could be synchronized, a fresh career might open for both of them, and he met with Gramophone makers. Earlier than most people, he foresaw, “This cinematograph game is not, like the keeping of oilshops [small shops that sold oil for lamps], a matter for a great number of small separate establishments: it is clearly a subject for organization on the biggest modern scale, by a bloated trust.” Therefore, guilds of authors should prepare contracts to protect their members. He recognized the economics of movie making in precisely the term employed by American movie makers, an industry (the British called it “the trade”); and like all industries they would be controlled by capitalists who, if they were seduced by art to the detriment of profits, would be bankrupted. He guided himself accordingly. Years later, when American movie producer Samuel Goldwyn tried to seduce him by the allure of cinematic art, he described their differences in a famous quip: “You are interested in art, and I am interested in business.” By 1912, he discussed synchronized records and movies with Léon Gaumont, who could produce eight-­minute records and hoped soon to be able to make forty-minute ones. The next year Shaw attended a movie rehearsal at Gaumont Studios to see how movies were made and examine features of cameras, including the size of the area their lenses might film. When the Film Society was organized in 1925 to show intrinsically meritorious films unavailable for viewing in commercial movie houses (discussed below), Shaw was among its original guarantors; he sometimes dropped by and the Society ran special screenings for him (CS 3–4, 19; SC xii–xiii, 1–2). Shaw was not the only one who was interested in movies and who perceived their possibilities. In the 1909 Joint Select Committee hearings,

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Granville Barker mentioned “cinematograph theatres.” Soon, if it has not already occurred, he presciently told the committee, “it will be possible to have a play performed by the action being shown on the cinematograph and the dialogue being given by gramophone.” He did not know whether it would be a performance of a stage play, “but it is quite certain that we may have over here, very soon, as they have now, I believe in Germany and the United States, various so-called theatres put up all along the street, at which those performances may take place.” At the 1909 hearings, Robert Harcourt asked a member of the London County Council (LCC), apropos a pending bill on licensing cinematographic performances, whether the LCC was concerned with regulating the decency or indecency of performances. The reply: “It was purely a question of structure and fire protection.” Movie censorship did not arise in the hearings (1909 Report 70, 317).

The Loophole in the Cinematograph Act As Harcourt revealed, legislation about movies had arisen in Parliament— unsurprisingly, since by 1906, a little more than a decade after the Lumière brothers showed movies to the public in London, halls and rooms for the purpose of showing them had opened. Herbert Samuel, Chairman of the 1909 Committee, introduced the Cinematograph Bill that year, his biographer states, to protect the public from the danger of fires at cinematograph showings. Samuel explained, “long afterwards,” the only issues were “‘fire and the safety of buildings,’” for film stock was inflammable. Passed by Parliament on 25 November 1909, receiving Royal Assent that month and taking effect on January 1st, the Act focused on inflammable film, which required safety measures for the public. However, he revealed, “‘a clause provided that local authorities might attach conditions to the presentation of films.” The courts interpreted this to cover their subject matter and extended inflammable from fire to the passions. “‘That was not in the least our intention.’” The Cinematograph Act states that “an exhibition of pictures or other optical effects by means of a cinematograph or other similar apparatus, for the purposes of which inflammable films are used, shall not be given unless the regulations made by the Secretary of State for securing safety are complied with,” and that a county council may license premises “on such terms and conditions and under such restrictions as [are] subject to regulations of the Secretary of State.” Later, movie makers employed non-flammable film (a misnomer: the safer

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films—“non-flam film,” people in the industry called it—merely burned more slowly than inflammable stock), but the regulation included them. The Act does not specify what restrictions the Secretary of State might impose, which was the loophole for censorship of content. In April 1909, before the Select Committee heard witnesses, Parliament debated the bill. Samuel said its intent was to safeguard the public from the danger of fires at cinematograph entertainments, “which are specially liable to outbreaks of fire on account of the long highly inflammable films which are used in the lanterns. There have been already many fires.” Within the last few years, the LCC had averted “several serious panics which might otherwise have taken place,” but the public safety conditions of many venues were unexamined, therefore possibly dangerous, and were unlicensed. He called attention to “several panics owing to fires” from cinematograph films in other countries, although England has been free of them. Absent regulations, “sooner or later disaster is almost certain to take place.”3 Wide newspaper coverage gave the British public details of a major fire in Paris in May 1897, when a movie was shown not for ordinary people in the type of location just described but as part of a highly publicized fashionable event for the Parisian privileged classes, aristocracy included, in a magnificent building erected for the Bazar de la Charité, organized by a baron. Its main attraction was that recent invention, moving pictures. Guests included the Duke and Duchess of Alençon, who was the sister of the Empress of Austria. The baron assured everyone they were safe because men were not permitted to smoke. In total, 1600 to 1700 visitors were present. Illumination for the cinema camera was an ether lamp. The projectionist needed more light. His assistant struck a match, which sparked an explosion. Within ten minutes, the building burned down. The dead numbered 180, of whom 130 were of the nobility, including the duchess just mentioned. Samuel’s implication that something similar might happen in England resonated. Another MP, Watson Rutherford, raised questions. First, an assertion familiar to us over a century later, regulations inflict hardships on businessmen, who have taken precautions without government intervention. Second, the bill was unnecessary: “I am informed on good authority that there has not been in this country a single case of fire arising from any of these entertainments at all.” A heated exchange followed. Samuel said there had been a large number of fires. Rutherford retorted, “I was not able to ascertain that within anything like recent times there had been any fire arising from this class of entertainment.” Third, the bill gives no indication of what regulations will be made.

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Although Rutherford did not imply creeping censorship (his concern was the expense that regulations might entail), the absence of specific regulations made censorship of subjects possible.4 Who was correct? Tony Fletcher has examined 150 ledgers of correspondence in the Greater London Council Archives (now the London Metropolitan Archives) that relate to the licensing of over 300 venues in London from 1896 to 1909, including documentation for 1898 and 1899, when the LCC began to formulate regulations concerning the new technology. Standing for election in 1895, John Benn stated, “London was full of death traps,” referring to safety conditions in some theatres and halls. Everyone did not follow the rules and unlicensed premises showed public entertainment. The May 1897 fire at the Bazar de la Charité focused the attention of the LCC and the public on this problem. The LCC received letters about fire hazards, which it referred to its Chemists’ Department, whose members visited sites to examine safety aspects of the Cinematograph which might require regulation and reported problems in some structures, especially where projection machines were, and it gave safety recommendations. This department suggested regulations for Cinematograph exhibitions, effective 25 January 1898. In February, the LCC learned that these entertainments were in shops, private houses, and halls registered for religious worship—all unlicensed for public entertainment and none that fell under the LCC’s jurisdiction unless the movies were accompanied by music or contravened the Theatres Act. In August, a fire involved a cinematograph at Penge (a suburb of London), where the operator was burnt and the audience panicked. In October, at the Tivoli Music Hall, a lamp and film were destroyed and the machine’s wooden casing damaged. More fires occurred. In one instance, a room had not been built in compliance with the Council’s fireproof regulations. The projector fell to pieces and films in a wooden box were destroyed. The cause of fire was a film accidentally falling, rolling toward an electrical resistance unit and becoming ignited by it, which set fire to open cans of films. Between 1897 and 1900, the LCC records over 300 venues checked for cinematograph performances, whose practices the LCC decided warranted further examination. To answer the question at the start of this paragraph, Samuel was correct. I do not imply that Rutherford lied. More likely, he accepted the information from management (“good authority”), which was averse to government regulation, and did not believe further investigation was necessary.5

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The step from concern for public safety to concern for public morality should not come as a surprise. What is surprising is that, as Dean Rapp records, even though the film era began in Britain in 1896, few considered its moral impact on viewers in its first decade. This was primarily because film was dispersed in a variety of venues like music halls and fairgrounds where other entertainment was provided, or in unused shops and other premises that were temporarily rented. Film thus had no permanent, separate identity as a leisure activity that took place in one particular type of public space, hence it was difficult for moralists to recognize, much less discern and evaluate its moral influence. Moreover, many of the middle class (from whom most moralists came) dismissed the early film industry as a passing, vulgar fad of the working class that need not be taken seriously.

In France, says Noël Burch, elitist journals considered movies “the best form of diversion for the mob” and, echoing Karl Marx’s famous statement about religion over half a century earlier, called it “a new opium of the people” and “also a source of profit.” In Britain and the United States, cinema was considered “the poor man’s theatre,” on which decent, respectable folk looked down. In Britain, Burch observes, “The most eloquent testimony to this is probably a silence—that of The Times.” After greeting the Cinématographe, Lumière’s first presentation in London in 1896, this “prestigious newspaper of the upper middle classes” did not once mention cinema for eight years. Between 1897 and 1906, Rapp notes, the British religious press and moral activists were silent about it. In 1906, after thousands of buildings had been built for use as cinemas, moralists recognized film’s impact, particularly on working-class and young audiences. As expected, they concluded that movies undermined their morality. Dark cinemas enabled couples to make love and to hide child abuse from view. The subject of many films, they charged, was sexual indecency, crime, and violence, which encouraged immorality and incited juvenile delinquency among boys who imitated crimes depicted on the screen. The moralists demanded censorship, police action, and at least brighter lighting to discourage sexual misdeeds. Their main sexual issues were “the alleged sexually suggestive contents of some films; sex in the cinemas among adult men and boys and girls; and overly affectionate couples in the cinemas.” Between 1906 and 1914, moral leaders were from the middle class: clergy, religious journalists, church councils, and leagues of moral

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purists. They tried to have sexually suggestive scenes removed. For most of World War I, they charged that in addition to the content of films, sexual indecency was rife among audiences, corrupting children and adolescents. The social purists who were the driving force in this crusade feared that the nation was being undermined by sexual immorality, especially “among the working class who were supposedly more sexually promiscuous than the other classes.” They campaigned for chastity among married men and total abstinence among the unmarried, against prostitution and the sexual abuse of children, and against indecent novels, plays, periodicals, advertisements, and music hall shows. The crusaders used “surveillance of the working class” to uncover immorality and control their behavior. They “appealed to the state, judiciary, and police to intervene by imposing more regulations on the working class and the entertainment industry.”6 The aim to protect children from sexual predators was humanitarian, but was the charge accurate and the practice widespread? In 1915, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police received reports from police superintendents. The number was zero. But others reported ten alleged assaults by men aged eighteen to seventy-two (the last, a clergyman) on boys and girls aged five to thirteen. They included placing a hand on a girl’s thigh, putting one under a girl’s clothing, fondling little girls in the cinema, and then taking them home. Four men were sentenced, with penalties from ten pounds to twelve months with hard labor. Based on class and respectability, middle-class abusers (like the cleric) were less likely to be charged than working-class suspects. A Salvation Army official said the Army received complaints from parents in poorer districts that although their girls had been molested in cinemas, attendants hushed children who made such charges. In 1916, a social purity activist collected information on sexual acts in cinemas from an agent whose report aimed to provoke government and police action. At one cinema, he claimed, a girl of fourteen said gentlemen gave her candy or money for a hug and a kiss, and another girl offered to “pull it” for him for sixpence. This agent said he observed same-sex male relations in cinemas, where for a shilling tip to an usher, men could have sex with each other at the back of the balcony. When the agent tipped sixpence, the usher asked if he wanted to sit with boys or girls. It is difficult to know how many of these tales to believe. “The Cinema reported in 1915 that sexually suggestive films have ‘bulked more largely than ever before.’ But somewhat contradictorily it argued that there were still not that many of them.” In 1916, 118 Chief

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Constables sent the Commissioner reports on indecent acts but they cited two or three. Two London officers remembered two more. The constables mentioned three couples courting in a way “some” might think indecent. As for massive indecency, the chairman of London’s Cinematograph Exhibitor’s Association said “his group knew of only [sic] two cases of child molestation in 1915 and none in 1916.” In 1916, Women Patrols said they found none.7 Guy Phelps reminds us, “fear of the social impact of the cinema is worldwide,” every country that shows films has regulations restricting presentation for children, and where it has no censorship for adults, obscenity laws apply. It is not difficult to see why. When mass literacy provided a wider public for books, restrictions on publication increased. Whereas newspapers were protected by freedom of the press, cinema did not pretend to be educational or instructive. From the start, it aimed only to provide entertainment to a largely working-class public “whom the better educated and those in authority felt to be most open to corruption” and toward whom they felt paternalistic. In London, the first call for censorship came before the twentieth century. By 1907, London had about 170 unlicensed buildings that gave cinema exhibitions. In 1910, the year the Cinematograph Act took effect, local councils interpreted the law in ways “far removed from simple fire prevention measures.” Local authorities employed the Act to ban the showing of motion pictures on Sundays. Some contemporaries denounced this ban. Sarcastically, Fowell and Palmer called it “obvious that there must be something terribly evil in an entertainment which at once attracted the sympathetic support of the majority of the citizens, and which, worst of all, threatened to diminish still further the dwindling Sunday congregations.” According to countrywide police testimony, they said, “the opening of Sunday picture-theatres had lessened Sunday drunkenness and made an enormous improvement in the condition of the streets.” Most of the time, the police testified in favor of Sunday showings. Failing complete control of the community on Sundays, many ministers “would evidently be willing to have the youth of the community exposed to the risks of bored idleness on the streets or the dubious but cheerful company in the public-houses, rather than that they should frequent the picture theatres on Sundays.” The authors commented, “There would seem to be no objection to a picture of the Vicar of Little Mumblesea on his lawn or to a Mothers’ Sewing Meeting in full swing—if the garments were blotted out.”8

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After a court ruled that six-day licenses exceeded powers listed in the Cinematograph Act, the LCC appealed the decision. The High Court ruled in its favor, opening the door to local authorities to make conditions unrelated to safety. Some decisions were challenged, but the local authorities usually won. As a result, the 1910s public accepted the view that licensing could deal with the content of films, including rules that they should not be immoral, indecent, or obscene, whatever the terms might mean. For this reason, film makers were cautious about making films that could be described by these words. As Annette Kuhn summarizes, “The practices of film censorship which grew out of the Cinematograph Act effected much more stringent controls over the contents of films than any legislation directed specifically at indecent or obscene publications could possibly have done.” Not only that, but “these practices operated in an a priori manner, in that regulation was exercised before films were exhibited, not afterwards.”9 When Shaw opined on this subject, his concern was primarily the effect of the content of movies, as the title of his 1914 article testifies: “The Cinema as a Moral Leveler.” He called them “a much more momentous invention than printing was.” For printing to affect people, they had to learn to read, and until 1870—the year of the Education Act, the first law committing the country to mass education—most of them had not done so, Shaw said, echoing the common, inaccurate view of the time (long before then, religious pressure groups worried about the lower classes reading unwholesome works, and governments, employers, and judges feared the effects of Thomas Paine’s radical writings).10 Shaw was correct in saying that reading was difficult for a manual laborer after a workday of eight or more hours, since a book would put him to sleep within minutes. By contrast, cinema tells stories to the illiterate and literate, and it keeps them “not only awake but fascinated as if by a serpent’s eye. And that is why the cinema is going to produce effects that all the cheap books in the world could never produce.” Furthermore, the cost of admission is cheap. For a halfpenny, children can see three films. For a penny, they can stay all day— not in first-run West End cinemas but in poorer neighborhoods, where cinemas fill their empty seats this way. People are right to consider the morality inculcated by the cinema. “The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct will be those of the film.” However, people who appear never to have entered a movie house “are alarmed at the hideous immorality of the film plays, and are calling out for a censorship and for the exclusion of children

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under sixteen.” Others, like himself, who frequent cinemas, “testify to their desolating romantic morality, and ridicule the moral scare.” Their real danger is not immorality, but morality. Necessarily, movies must be “extraordinarily and internationally moral.” For a film to be maximally profitable, it must go around the world unchallenged. The result is what a farm worker thinks is right and what an old-fashioned governess considers properly sentimental. “There is no comedy, no wit, no criticism of morals by ridicule or otherwise, no exposure of the unpleasant consequences of romantic sentimentality and reckless tomfoolery in real life, nothing that could give a disagreeable shock to the stupid or shake the self-­complacency of the smug” (SC 9–10). Ten years later Shaw asserted that their “colossal proportions make mediocrity compulsory.” Because their distribution is global and they want to please everyone, from American millionaires to Chinese coolies, from cathedral town governesses to mining village barmaids, “they cannot afford to meddle with the upper ten percent theatre of the highbrows or the lower ten percent theatre of the blackguards.” Therefore, they have supplanted old-fashioned tracts and Sunday School prizes. A film may be “reeking with morality, but dares not touch virtue. And virtue, which is defiant and contemptuous of morality, even when it has no quarrel with it, is the lifeblood of high drama” (SC 38–39). In its early days, as Ivor Montague, a cinema writer and practitioner (writer, producer, editor, and director, whose work with Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, and others includes that of associate producer of The 39 Steps), points out, a movie “was not highly regarded as an art.” What he said in 1964 remains true: “Film is not only a medium of communication between a creator or creative group and the spectator. It is also a commodity transferred from producer to consumer.” Film-making’s nature is mass manufacture and mass selling. Although it resembles theatre more than other arts, it has important differences in manufacture and exhibition. Add to its initial costs (wages for visual and verbal artists and, even in its silent days, composers), performance costs (salaries for actors and later singers, rehearsals, theatre rental), scenery, and costumes. In theatre, “The initial cost of staging the show, the initial costs of production, are high, in addition to the recurring costs of each successive performance (i.e. wages of cast and a big back- and front-of-house staff, hire of theatre).” To meet them, “the performance must be staged repeatedly, so that the high initial costs may be spread over a large number of performances as overheads, and divided by the profits on each (relatively moderate cost) repetition.” Although cinema magnifies production costs of theatre, its repetition costs

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are relatively trivial: rental of premises and salaries of front-of-house personnel (manager, cashier, ushers, cleaning people). Instead of backstage personnel, costs are for projection machines, projectionists, maintenance, repair, and electricity. Whereas the repetition of plays is costly, requiring skilled performers who can only be in one place at a time, the repetition of cinema showings is inexpensive: making new copies of the film, which requires craftsmanship not artistry. Initial costs may be huge (acting, photographing, editing, and producing the negative with sound), but the multiplication of performances, duplication of positive films, and replacement of worn-out negatives are not. In practice, the number of people to whom exhibitors may sell tickets to see a film is limitless. When Montagu wrote this in 1964, second bill or B movies were made for as little as £15,000 to £25,000 (in 2020, these would be over £300,000 to over £500,000). A moderately priced A feature cost £70,000 to £300,000 (in 2020, over £1.4 million to more than £6 million). For the equivalent in $US, as I revise these figures in August 2020, multiply the numbers by 1.34. “And blockbusters much more,” Montagu adds. Considering such factors as the death of the studio system and the high cost of star actors, production, and marketing, I would change to “almost inconceivably more.” In 2017, according to one estimate, Avatar cost $425 million. Each of the Avengers and Hobbit series cost between $200 and $300 million. Others had $100–$150 million budgets. A feature film’s average cost was $70 to $90 million. Since independent films might be self-funded, crowd-funded, or investor-funded, their costs may range from $50,000 to $100,000. With these low figures included, one may imagine how high others were to raise the average to $70 to $90 million.11 “How Much Does the Average Movie Cost to Make?” Stephen Follows asked in 2019. With a dataset of 5713 feature films released in the United States and Canada, he found “reportedly” public budget numbers. Rightly noting that almost all of them “have murky provenances,” he judiciously called them “a rough ballpark.” Having access to the real costs of 29 unnamed Hollywood movies budgeted at over $100 million, he concluded that they averaged 12.5% more than those publicly stated. His summary: “Between 1999 and 2018, half of all movies released in U.S. cinemas cost under $18 million to make.” Of the 5713 films, 25% cost under $5.2 million and 25% over $41 million.12

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The British Board of Film Censors Introducing more conditions to licensing films, local authorities aimed to control their content. In 1912, the Association of Cinematic Exhibitors created the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) and appointed Shaw’s old nemesis G.A. Redford, retired as Examiner of Plays, as president. The Board, an industry cover, operated under general principles, not a fixed code, but it had two specific taboos: nudity and the portrayal of Christ. If it deemed a film objectionable, it withheld its certificate of approval until the producer made cuts or changes. On 1 January 1913, it announced that every film released in Britain after March 1st must have its certificate. Since submission of films to the Board was voluntary, this was sanguine. Companies ignored it and local authorities refused to cede autonomy. But compliance was imminent. In 1916, when many constables attributed the increase in juvenile delinquency to movies, the Board expanded licensing conditions: “No film shall be shown which is likely to be injurious to morality or to encourage or incite to crime, or to lead to disorder, or to be offensive to public feeling, or which contains any offensive representation of living persons.” It was only a matter of time before the courts recognized its almost unlimited censorship powers (CS 50–51). Upon his death in 1916, T.P. O’Connor, an MP who had employed Shaw as music critic for The Star in the late 1880s, replaced Redford. In 1917, the National Council of Public Morals held extensive hearings and published them in The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities. O’Connor, an unnamed BBFC examiner, a bishop, a monsignor, young audience members and representatives from the film trade testified. Summarizing the BBFC policy, O’Connor listed forty-three rules, any of which would disqualify a film from receiving a license. About half related to sex. Among grounds for prohibition were unnecessary display of underwear, “Excessively passionate love scenes,” “premeditated seduction of girls,” “First Night’ scenes,” “Men and women in bed together,” “Prostitution and procuration,” venereal disease, incest, indecorous subtitles, “irreverent treatment of sacred subjects,” the embodiment of Christ, “controversial politics,” “Relations of capital and labour,” disparagement of public persons and institutions, efforts to bring British prestige in the Empire into disrepute, drug addiction, and “The modus operandi of criminals.” The problem with voluntary censorship was enforcement. Of the 4500 movie houses in Britain, a little over half were in the Exhibitors’ Association. To get more and obtain national compliance, the Association

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called itself a National Union. Although trade members negotiated with the Home Office to make government censorship compulsory, the Home Office refused: “it was unable, without legislation (which was out of the question)” to do this. The National Council of Public Morals, which favored the BBFC, consolidated its position. In 1920, the Middlesex County Council required a license to show films; in 1921, the LCC followed suit. Initially, the BBFC created two licenses: “U” (for everyone, including children) and “A” (for adults, with youngsters able to attend if accompanied by a parent or adult guardian). Later, the Board made changes for specific films—surprisingly, it rated Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs “A” in 1938 and, after cuts, “U” in 1964—and in general, including “H” (horror) in 1932 (unsuitable for children, possibly a response to James Whales’s Frankenstein) and “X” in 1951 (restricted to those sixteen or older). By the end of 1924, most authorities accepted the Home Office’s recommendation that they adopt the LCC regulations, which included refusal of licenses to films that—recalling the Lord Chamberlain’s requirements for plays—might harm morality, encourage or incite to crime, lead to disorder, or offend living persons. The rules increased. No license would be given to films showing the effects of diseases, contacted or hereditary, illegal operations, white slavery, and the like. In the Board’s view, such content was “not suitable for exhibition in places maintained for the purpose of entertainment and recreation.” As the Home Office said in 1917, “‘the Cinema differs greatly from the Theatre: the audience is less intelligent and educated, and includes far more children and young people.’”13

Sex As just indicated, sex was as primary a consideration of the BBFC as it was of the Lord Chamberlain. Ivor Montagu analyzes the relationship between cinema and industrialized society. In modern times, people’s lives are unfulfilled. Their jobs are innumerable repetitions of mechanical actions. Society has layers of required obedience and submission that induce habits of subordination into daily life. Sexual urges of males are inhibited by economic disability to marry; males and females face parental and religious prejudices about extra-marital relations and in marital relations, economic fears of procreation. Society provides release and sublimation of sexual repression through vicarious sexual pleasure of cheap fiction, plays, and cinema. Of these, cinema is particularly fitted to provide a safety-valve.

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Whereas one may have to read a short story or novel in a family room, with disturbances, one watches a film, which is more potent than reading, and even if the cinema is crowded, darkness creates solitude. One sees close-ups of details and absorbs a story in a stream of images, often with music and sometimes voluptuously. The surroundings are “calculated to remove repression” and may offer stimulation by contact and hand-­ holding with a person in the next seat. These circumstances make it easy for spectators to identify themselves with characters on the screen, enjoying triumphant battles and sexual victories. Films show men and women so beautiful that self-identification is easy. Importantly, the duplication of many copies of a film from one negative and in many venues allows cinema to offer entertainment less expensively than competitive forms of amusement. As a result, masses of people visit cinemas weekly or more often, unselectively, no matter what they show. In Great Britain in 1930, five and a half million people a week did so. In the United States in the same year, “more than 65% of the population went to the movies weekly,” which is roughly 80 million people. In both countries, they saw the fulfillment of secrets and dreams, contrasts to a bullying superior, complements to an ailing or shrewish wife.14 The film censor’s job is to let nothing offend the prejudices of the audience and to ensure that what the screen shows will not interfere with the “functioning of the social vent, the safety valve nature of the industry.” To do this, the censor permits maximal erotic stimulation as long as unclothed parts of a human body “fall within a certain geographic pattern,” which is almost identical with “the evening dress exposure of ‘our betters,’” and by permitting maximal promiscuity as long as its exact extent is clouded. Promiscuous relationships are allowed “if the participants are unmarried and if they suffer retribution or exhibit remorse. Accepted oral standards and repressions are unshaken, an effective sexual day dream provided,” and life is enveloped in a romantic cloud “in which nothing suffers except truth, reality and the art of the film, about which hardly anyone cares anyway.” The censor’s standards are what will not shock average audiences. Different countries have different rules or customs. The Soviet Union makes no sexually erotic films. In Germany and France, “the licensed geographical area of attractive exposure” is more than in England, but permissible relationships differ. Germany, a leader in sexual study and reformed legislation of “inversion” (homosexuality), allows serious attention to it in movies (such as Pandora’s Box, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s play). In France, where a lover or mistress is permitted (in England she is changed

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to a cousin or sister), serious depiction of homosexuality is almost as strict as in England. The underlying basis of film censorship is the same in every country, “a maximum of sexual stimulation with a minimum shock to prejudice,” but England has distinctions, such as the geography of bodily exposure. Nudity, real and in shadowgraph, tops the list of prohibitions. It is rarely permitted: a barbaric country where characters are savages, and classical statuary, where figures are so far off that details are imagined not shown, or only their backs are seen. In a modern locale, there must be no nudity, but bodily parts may be seen: for women, the leg to the top of the hip if she wears a swimming or stage chorus costume, all of the arms and back, the waist, enough of her breast to suggest its shape, but not the nipple; for men, the chest in such circumstances as swimming, fighting, and a castaway on a desert island; sometimes for infants under four or five, but briefly in long shots. Prohibitions include orgies, embraces that stop short of lasciviousness, suggestive dancing, and unmistakable intentions to rape. What gets by is pictorially decent, for opening and closing a door can suggest intention to rape, and a languorous kiss can suggest extreme passion. What the censor passes is “adequate to raise the feeling of the audience to the acutest pitch.” As an indication of how acute it may be, Montagu quotes a charlady who told a female film critic that “the Ronald Colman film Two Lovers [1928] had ‘given her sensations she had been waiting for all her life.’” In practice, these rules do not limit the amount of erotic stimulation a movie can suggest. What they condition is a film whose narrative is something like a poor girl who in real life is recognizable as an amateur or semi-prostitute, is laden with jewels by a rich man. The spectator has to assume that she receives all these with her chastity unscathed, for no immoral association could possibly be passed. If the benefactor asks for even the least commercial justice, a kiss shall we suppose, he is immediately slapped, and the indignation of the heroine leads us to suppose his insistence quite exceptionally wicked, while we are asked to lose sight of her grasping ingratitude in our admiration for her purity.

While the effect of such a story is to show “amateur prostitution as a bed of roses” and invite “the formation of a nation of gold-diggers,” any “serious representation of sexual problems, any portrayal of the inevitably sordid and unhappy consequences of many sexual laws and customs, is quite out of the question.”15 In this respect, see Chap. 2, on Mrs Warren’s Profession.

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Propaganda From the start, the government recognized cinema’s propaganda value. As Nicholas Pronay observes, “The phenomenal growth of the cinema in working-class districts and its remarkably slow acceptance by the educat[ed] classes, testify to the capacity of the cinema to reach working people,” especially their younger, potentially dangerous segment. In 1911, the Home Secretary negotiated with film distributors for non-governmental censorship. The year 1912 saw extensive strikes for higher wages in Britain: coal miners struck for four weeks, East End dockers for two months, and 6000 West End tailors stopped work, leaving 8000 suits and costumes unfinished. So widespread and effective were they, the government deployed troops against them and put parts of the country under martial law. Radicals distributed leaflets among soldiers, including “Don’t Shoot.” The BBFC suppressed movies of strikes in other countries. By the end of the Great War, its censorship rules included a ban on scenes depicting capital and labor relations. By 1919, cinema was “the medium of the urban working masses,” who recognized its reflection of their relationship to society and their capacity to see something different. Given the dissimilar outlook of political leaders, film makers could hardly make a movie that would not be considered propaganda. If it were set in contemporary Britain, it would uphold or question authority, the distribution of wealth and labor relations. Some MPs thought it ridiculous to imagine that if Londoners saw movies about the Russian Revolution, they would storm Buckingham Palace. Most working-class people, they held, were not remotely politicized. Viewing cinema as a propaganda medium, British leaders—along with Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese government—tried to control what working-class people could see. It is easy to find the BBFC’s political rules, for until 1932 it printed them annually so that producers and importers would know what films would not pass. Among taboo subjects were references to controversial politics and capital-labor relations. Fearing Bolshevik agitation, the BBFC added prohibitions: “Subjects calculated or possibly intended to foment social unrest or discontent.” For over a decade starting in the late 1920s, it banned most Soviet films from public exhibition. Shaw lambasted this. All censorships he charged are “pretexts for retaining a legal or quasi-legal power to suppress works which the authorities dislike.” He applauded Battleship Potemkin (also called Potemkin) by director Sergei Eisenstein, which he saw at a private screening, as “One of the best films ever

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produced as a work of pictorial art,” but as its subjects are a Russian naval mutiny in 1905 “provoked by unbearable tyranny and bad food,” plus “military operations against the citizens who sympathize with the mutineers,” the War Office and the Admiralty object “because it does not represent the quarterdeck and G.H.Q. as peopled exclusively by popular and gallant angels in uniform. It is suppressed” (SC 54–55). When O’Connor banned Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (1926)—adapted from Maxim Gorky’s novel—in 1930, the censors had not seen it. Nor had Shaw, who denounced the ban as political. “British Capitalism is at war with Russian Communism and with British Socialism” and has unleashed “a torrent of calumny. It will not even allow artistic merit to a Russian film” (SC 71). Montagu appealed to O’Connor to reverse his ban. When O’Connor said the scene showing strikers hiding weapons under floorboards violated the veto on showing audiences how to commit crimes, Montagu argued it would also teach policemen where to look for hidden weapons. O’Connor was unpersuaded (or unwilling to admit one of his regulations was questionable). Authorities did not allow left-wing views of economic and social problems in films, despite their availability in print media. Local authorities made it a condition of licensing that no film not passed by the BBFC could be shown. In 1933, the BBFC persuaded the major British studios to submit scenarios before they began filming—a practice similar to that concerning theatre licensing. In 1937, Baron William Tyrell, President of the BBFC, announced to the Exhibitors’ Association without a trace of irony: “‘We may take pride in observing that there is not a single film showing in London today which deals with any of the burning questions of the day.’”16 He voiced the widespread view, which, like Victorians and Edwardians on theatre, was that the purpose of movies was entertainment, not education or, heaven forfend, propaganda. As Montagu says, this distinction is “a form of propaganda.” Entertainment and ideas, he insisted, are not antithetical. “If a film is not entertaining, people will not go to see it and so it cannot have any propaganda effect.” If audiences are coerced into seeing a movie because it is educational or informative, they will react “by indifference, as so many do against compulsory school prayers.” The notion of the happy ending is that “all is right with the world—if it is not all right with you, it might be, just pay at the box-office and see how our dreams may come true.” This formula can embrace even misfortune, misery, and frustration as long as—referencing Julius Caesar—“the fault, dear Brutus, can be shown to be in ourselves, or even in our stars, that we are

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unhappy, with the suggestion that all may yet be well if only we meet that right person round the next corner”—referencing the 1934 song “Love Is Just Around the Corner.” What seldom gets by the censors is a hint “that the fault might be in our society, that it could be changed, that we might change it, and that we might be happier if it were changed.” Britons usually thought film censorship resulted from an Act of Parliament (it did not), found it desirable that regulations should ensure that no film should promote public disorder, and agreed that more stringent standards should apply to cinema than to theatre because its clientele is less selective and visits cinemas weekly or bi-weekly no matter what the fare. But they did not agree with regulations against controversial subjects. The powers that banned subjects used laws enacted for other reasons. The government had no authority to prevent the exhibition of controversial films. The BBFC is not, as usually believed, a governmental but a private body organized, appointed, and salaried by the film industry. Yet no commercial cinema would book films without its approval. Film makers anticipated what authorities wanted while the government honestly said it did not censor any type of film. The Board forbade Battleship Potemkin because “it deals with recent controversial events.” Its importer submits it to county councils, which do not pass it. Before sending it to others, he receives the first of several visits from Scotland Yard. Although he would break no law by submitting it elsewhere, his company has had contact with government inspectors. Since he wants no quarrels, certainly in matters like this, whose commercial gain is problematical, he is so intimidated he refuses to allow a committee of MPs to see it, although he is allowed to do this. In the House, the Government points out that the Board that banned it is not Government-controlled. The BBFC took exception to Mother because it concerns a strike and forces of order fire on a mob. The Agent replies that many films on the Russian Revolution or what preceded it, made in other countries, were unsympathetic to authority but were approved, such as Intolerance, which shows strike-breaking by police. The Board alters its reason: it means how actions are depicted, not the actions themselves. Incidents of oppression in both films—feeding sailors maggot-filled meat in Battleship Potemkin and strike-breakers using knuckle-dusters (called brass knuckles in America) in Mother—were undisputed facts. The Board agreed but as the government did not share its view, its duty was to refuse to license the films. Neither the BBFC nor another responsible body suggested that the content of these films was subversive. They disputed government policy. Thus, the “unofficial” censorship of politically controversial

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films was a “more effective indirect expression of the Government’s will, than would be directly exercised by an official censorship” answerable for its actions in Parliament. Furthermore, what these films expressed was spoken and published.17 “Politically controversial” did not mean only Russian pictures but any left-wing movies. The censor demanded cuts in Germany’s 1932 film Kuhle Wampe (the name of a lakeside camp on the outskirts of Berlin), about unemployment and evictions during the Great Depression. This movie was conceived and co-authored by Bertolt Brecht, who directed the final scene, which has a debate about the world coffee market. The rest (the bulk of the film) was directed by Slatan Dudow, director of credit. When Hitler came to power, Knowles says, he banned the movie in Germany, while in England the censor’s cuts “altogether obscured the issue.” Montagu argues that today’s ban against one viewpoint may tomorrow’s against another and that a ban is founded not on law but on “a network of regulations, beginning with an Act passed for another purpose and ending with intimidation, that enables a Government perfectly to enforce its wishes without accepting responsibility for them.” The government had what the American CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) in the early 1960s called “plausible deniability”: individuals can deny knowing about something that is illegal or unethical because there is no evidence they knew it. Lack of proof makes the denial if not credible, then plausible. In 2009, the issue reached the United States Supreme Court, which in a 5 to 4 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy upheld plausible deniability (the dissenters included Ruth Bader Ginsberg).18 Some acts of censorship seem senseless—or more accurately, explainable by the slippery slope theory. In 1930, Shaw, in The Times, called attention to how “censorships, with the best intentions, safeguard the very evils they are supposed to prevent.” Violet Elizabeth (Betty) Paget Baxter—granddaughter of a minister who established a charity for the poor, clothed them and lodged stranded girls and women—developed a philanthropic institution to help the needy. In 1908, it acquired property in London for use as a hostel to support vulnerable women. In the Edwardian decade, it employed a traveling van to give hot food and drink to the homeless on London’s Embankment. It had done so in the 1920s, when a court summons threatened it on the charge that the van caused an obstruction while it was stationary. To continue its service, it had to be mobile. In 1927, a gearbox was devised so it could move at a quarter of a mile an hour as it fed the poor. In the late 1920s and 1930s, needy people

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visited the Baxter home to see if she had sixpenny or one-shilling coins. They called her the Silver Lady and the van The Silver Lady Fund. This fund still gives silver coins to the needy and Christmas meals to the homeless.19 In 1929, Shaw reports, she “decided to help homeless and penniless people who spend their nights in the streets and make the Embankment a general address for misery.” Men come to London expecting jobs at higher wages than in the provinces, she learned, and women come in response to advertisements, knowing nothing of the Travelers’ Aid and other societies for their protection from White Slave traders. She had a movie made, The Night Patrol, with scenes on the Embankment in a story of a miner leaving his family to help them by finding better work in London and, stranded on the Embankment, unable to return to his home and old job. The film shows a girl lured to London by a White Slaver’s advertisement. Drugged and brought on a ship bound for Europe, she escapes and finds protection and advice. To Baxter’s stupefaction, the BBFC refused to license the film. She went to Shaw, who saw it privately. He wrote that its exhibition would be unwelcome to the White Slavers and would impede the flow of surplus men to London. The film, he stated, contains no incident or suggestion that could not be shown at a Sunday school and is innocent in its execution and intention. When he asked how the censors reached their decision, he was told they relented and would license the miner’s story “‘for adults,’” which he thought more insane than its prohibition. “But they would not license the story of the girl on any terms, their reason being that they thought domestic servants were badly wanted in London, and that the film might discourage girls from coming to help London out of that difficulty.” As he preferred not to make a public grievance of what could quietly be remedied by a reasonable authority, he wrote privately to Edward Shortt, president of the BBFC, thinking his experience and common sense would convince him his examiners had blundered, and he would right matters with no public fuss. To Shaw’s amazement, Shortt agreed with the examiners because a rule allowed no reference to the White Slave traffic or drugs. Shaw found it incredible that he would suppress a film that shows girls the risk of being kidnapped and gives the address of a society that lessens the risk. Since moral judgments by the film censor “are absurdly impracticable, his business reduces itself to the enforcement of a few rules of thumb through which any unscrupulous person can drive a coach and six, though they are intolerably obstructive and injurious to conscientious authors,” this rule

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was beyond belief except by those with financial interests in White Slavery and drugs (SC 67–69). This was the first time Shaw battled film censors, and he lost—a forecast of things to come. Despite the information in IMDb, The Night Patrol, to the best of my knowledge, has not been shown publicly. One of Montagu’s complaints is that BBFC regulations have no provision for “private or limited exhibition of films that, rightly, may have been considered unsuitable for restricted public circulation.” The only films one can distribute without the BBFC’s permission are lurid melodramas that might earn tens of thousands of pounds, since they are promoted by commercial enterprises that can, by advertising, intrigue the curiosity of audiences. Otherwise, getting special permission to show films in different places “is financially impracticable.” Except for minor exceptions for schools and academic societies, both expensive and precarious, films without the BBFC’s requirements cannot be shown. Screenings can take place without permission in private houses, but these present problems: few have space to permit exhibition to more than a small audience and installing projection apparatus is expensive. His remedy is not to remove censorship for commercial films. “The film industry has no conscience, and if it could create a market for pornography, and were allowed to satisfy that market, would cheerfully do so.” His solutions are to give films the freedom of private performances the stage has, through stage societies, and to establish a responsible, central censorship: responsible, so it has power to license limited presentations and prosecute salacious advertisement; central, so it can reduce costs of appeals to different local licensing authorities.20 In 1925, he was among a group of young people who achieved the former by organizing the Film Society in London. Modeled on the Stage Society, which staged private performances of uncommercial or controversial plays for its members, the Film Society showed films of artistic and technical interest unavailable in commercial cinemas, to encourage a view of film-making as an art. In 1925, the year he turned twenty-one, films were not yet thirty years old and there were no film institutes or archives, festivals or Oscars, or film schools. Other organizers included twenty-­ nine-­ year-old Iris Barry, who later established the first American film archive at the Museum of Modern Art and was its first curator. The founders included twenty-two-year-old Anthony Asquith (director of the English film of Pygmalion) and twenty-seven-year-old John Grierson (who coined the term “documentary” and made documentaries), plus such older people as H.G.  Wells and Shaw. It became the model of such

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organizations through the world. Its first show, on 25 October, with an orchestra conducted by twenty-eight-year-old Eugene Goosens, was eclectic: two films from Germany—one on art studies, the other expressionistic—and two from America: a Bronco Billy Anderson western and a Chaplin comedy. Offerings later in the 1920s included a German expressionist Cinderella directed by Ludwig Berger (director of the Dutch film of Pygmalion); Raskolnikov, based on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, directed by Robert Wiene; the American animated Krazy Kat, based on a comic strip; Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s dadaist Le Ballet Mécanique; Wiene’s expressionist Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with music specially arranged for it; Chaplin’s Easy Street; Pudovkin’s Mother; and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, with original music by Edmund Meisel.21

The United States The history of cinema censorship in the United States is similar to that of Great Britain. It even began the same year, 1909, with the creation of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, later called the National Board of Review. As in Britain, it was an industry practice, not a government agency backed by law. What of the American Constitution’s unique First Amendment? I quote it in full, italicizing the phrases pertinent to censorship: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

A century ago, few Americans considered that it applied to movies. States made laws abridging freedom of speech, including motion pictures. The first American blockbuster was in 1915: D.W. Griffith’s overtly racist The Birth of a Nation, which demonized African-Americans and glorified the Ku Klux Klan, which used it for recruiting purposes. It sparked riots in some American cities and lynchings in and outside cities. Liberals, white and black—including Jane Addams (in 1889, founder of Chicago’s Hull House, a settlement house for immigrants, and the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize), Lillian Wald (in 1893, founder of the Henry Street Settlement, in New York’s lower east side, to give health care and social services to immigrants), and W.E.B.  DuBois (in 1895, the first

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African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard, the best-known spokesman for African-American rights in the first half of the twentieth century, and a cofounder of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People])—who ordinarily opposed censorship, considered this film a special case and demanded it be censored. Among other organizations, the NAACP challenged it in the court of public opinion and tried to have it banned in courts of law, where Griffith and the Mutual Film Corporation used as defense the First Amendment and the right of businesses to make money (that phrase is not an editorial comment but a judicial opinion quoted at the end of this paragraph). Most states and cities did not seek to ban the picture, only to delete parts of it. Griffith complied. Ohio and Kansas banned it. In Ohio’s state constitution (1851), Article I amplifies the US Constitution’s First Amendment: “Every citizen may freely speak, write, and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of the right; and no law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech, or of the press.” Addressing the First Amendment and Ohio’s 1913 law creating a board of movie censors, the US Supreme Court in 1915 asked if motion pictures fell within the state’s constitution. It unanimously decreed: “They, indeed, may be mediums of thought, but so are many things. So is the theater, the circus, and all other shows and spectacles, and their performances may be thus brought by the like reasoning under the same immunity from repression or supervision as the public press, made the same agencies of civil liberty.” Rejecting the claim that movies were protected, it ruled that the argument that they were practically and legally similar to a free press and freedom of opinion is “wrong or strained,” for “the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit, like other spectacles, not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion.”22 Unlike the BBFC, the impact of the National Board of Review dissipated. In 1921, thirty-six of America’s then forty-eight states considered censorship legislation for films. In 1922, the threat of censorship by the federal government prompted the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, later the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), to form a self-censorship agency. With former Postmaster General Will H. Hays as its first president, it was called the Hays Office. When films on forbidden subjects were announced, it pressured producers to sanitize them, but when the Great Depression impacted the box office,

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producers tried to boost their takings by going as far as they dared and as close as possible to deviations from Hays’s dicta (CS 51). In Mae West’s first movie, Night After Night (1932), she rewrote her dialogue, including a response to “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds”: “Goodness had nothing to do with it”—a line that became so popular she used it as the title of her autobiography. Religious leaders—who were affronted by her speeches in later films, such as “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”—persuaded studios to tone down her lines. Comic innuendo was allowed to go only so far. Early on, violence was an attention grabber. At the end of Edwin S. Porter’s twelve-minute The Great Train Robbery (1903), a cowboy in full-front close-up shoots his gun at the camera (i.e., at the audience), which may have startled spectators the way the Lumière brothers’ 1895 film of a train coming toward the audience did—the latter supposedly shocking them so much, they screamed and fled toward the exit. In 1934, Catholic bishops organized the Legion of Decency, which tried by threat of boycott to prevent Catholics from seeing movies the bishops deemed unwholesome. Protestant and Jewish leaders joined them. Producers assured them they would comply with Hays Office requirements. On 1 July, the movie industry empowered the Production Code Administration (PCA), which initially was advisory. Headed by Joseph I. Breen, advisory turned mandatory. The PCA reviewed a script and indicated whether it conformed to the Code’s requirements. If not, it cited particulars so that the producer could make changes to get approval. After filming, the PCA screened it and gave it a seal of approval or indicated what changes were required for a seal. The implications of violence in Whale’s Frankenstein (made in pre-Code 1931), now a classic, were upsetting. In Depression Brooklyn, post-Code, it was often revived at my neighborhood cinema on a double bill with Dracula (on the marquee: “We Dare You To See Them”). More shocking than Boris Karloff’s monster was his offscreen killing of a little girl, which audiences of children (like me) as well as adults knew would happen the moment she invited him to play with her. What they saw was her father later carrying her lifeless body. Pre-Code gangster movies disturbed audiences when revived in post-Code years. Most of the violence in Little Caesar (1931), though off-screen, was so powerful that the Hays Office withdrew its license; it was not rereleased until 1953. In The Public Enemy (also 1931), the scene in which James Cagney pushes a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face seems more violent than the gunplay, which was more realistic than in Little

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Caesar. Outdoing both was Howard Hughes’s Scarface (1932), directed by Howard Hawks. Loosely based on Al Capone, it carried a moralistic subtitle, The Shame of the Nation, to placate the Code. Among the rules were prohibitions against profanity, including damn and hell (unless in a religious context or a quotation), fanny and whore; hot (applied to a woman) and fairy (applied to a man); blasphemy, including God, Jesus, and Christ (unless spoken reverently); showing religion or the clergy as ridiculous or villainous; nudity and undressing; sex hygiene and venereal disease; mockery of the sanctity of marriage; scenes of childbirth; white slavery; miscegenation or sexuality between Whites and Blacks; drug addiction and illegal drug traffic; crime scenes that throw sympathy toward the crime and not the law, or that inspire imitation. Movies evaded restrictions against mocking religion the way plays did, as the previous chapter shows: clerics received secular professions. The archdeacon Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame became a judge in the 1939 film and Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers became a Prime Minister in the 1948 movie. Surprisingly, comic exaggeration made Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek get away with the taboo against an unmarried woman having children: she has seven, and to top it off the father, a G.I. about to be deployed overseas for combat, has the comic pseudonym Ignatz Ratzkywatzky.23 As indicated, comedy might overcome restrictions against vulgarity. W.C. Fields said not God damn but Godfrey Daniel, not son of a bitch but mother of pearl and, as the audience knew his subterfuges, an occasional inoffensive Drat! became hilarious. Although homosexuality was taboo, Hollywood circumvented it chiefly through comedy. A sissy, fairy, or pansy suggested effeminacy, but no one spoke those words. Edward Everett Horton, with a quivering voice and mincing mien, was popular in roles suggesting such characters, as was Franklin Pangborn, whose characters were prissy, fastidious, and confused or rattled. This type’s most memorable non-comic version, only implied, was Peter Lorre, with a soft voice and manner, as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon. PCA restrictions did not stop local censors from making cuts. The PCA had no legal status—Breen’s letters said the producer was free to disregard PCA observations—but it gave the impression it did, even imposing a fine of up to $25,000 on violators. In 1939, the year after the PCA forced Pygmalion, an English import, to delete every damning, damn, and damnation or replace them with inoffensive words, American producer David O.  Selznick had Rhett Butler, in the blockbuster Gone with the Wind, tell Scarlett O’Hara, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a

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damn.” His fine was $5000 (adjusted for inflation, it would be $93,000 in 2020), which he thought was worth it. Importantly, the studios supporting the PCA were owned by or in league with cinema chains that exhibited films. Until Otto Preminger successfully defied it in 1953 with The Moon is Blue, which contained the taboo word virgin, and more decisively in 1955 with The Man with the Golden Arm, which dramatized drug addiction, American movie theatres would not exhibit a film without a PCA seal of approval. Helpfully, the latter had a star in the leading role: Frank Sinatra (CS 51–52, 76).

The Aborted Film of Saint Joan I have quoted Shaw on film censorship in general and on films by others. I will now discuss censorship of motion picture versions of his plays. In the silent era, he and movie makers flirted with each other, but only dalliance, not romance, followed. Consequently, the problem did not arise. He recognized that silent films were inappropriate for his plays. As he put it, subtitles were an inadequate substitute for any dialogue except bad dialogue (CS 8). When William Lestocq inquired about movie rights for Pygmalion in 1919, Shaw asked, “how can you film ‘Not——likely’?” The dash indicates what would probably be the censor’s deletion of one word in the familiar phrase (SC 24). When talking picture makers made similar inquiries, they like their predecessors were uninterested in Mrs Warren’s Profession or any other Plays: Unpleasant. What might have become Shaw’s western, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, did not interest Hollywood or anywhere else. With talkies, Hollywood had its own type of dialogue, different from this play’s, which was influenced by Bret Harte’s stories, such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “Salomy Jane,” one of whose characters, like Blanco, is a horse thief. The novel Cashel Byron’s Profession, which has fighting scenes, interested silent film makers, but what attracted them and talkie makers were the censor-resilient Plays: Pleasant and works like them, notably Pygmalion, which was, not coincidentally, Shaw’s commercial breakthrough in London and a success worldwide. When he granted permission for film versions of his plays to British International Pictures, he acted on sound commercial principles, and he did so soon after talkies arrived. The first (1931) was the one-act play How He Lied to Her Husband; the second (1932) was the first of Plays: Pleasant, Arms and the Man. Problems with censors came later—not from England but Hollywood, where he had no power and when he had become too old to

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personally intervene on the set, in the editing room, or in conferences. As with Mary Shaw’s tour of Mrs Warren’s Profession, he seemed to have won, but he really lost, for the censors had their way. As with her (his surrogate in America), as summarized in Chap. 2, so with Gabriel Pascal (his surrogate in Hollywood): market forces prevailed on the issue of censorship. Let me first point out for readers familiar only with today’s screenwriters unions, which protect scripts by contracts that stipulate who has authority to alter them, that from the 1920s to beyond the 1940s, most screenwriters were salaried studio employees. As the US Copyright Act of 1909 states, “the word ‘author’ shall include an employer in the case of works made for hire.” Copyright of a screenplay was held by the employer, the studio. In the days of the studio system, when Shaw wrote movie versions of his plays, studio heads considered the writer’s job to be, as Miranda Banks puts it, “part of an assembly-line production.” In the 1930s and 1940s, as she relates, screenwriters were “hired scribes” under exclusive contract to specific studios, whose heads regarded them as “interchangeable talent” and assigned other writers to rewrite their screenplays. Illustrating this view is a memorandum that Jack Warner, Vice President in charge of production of Warner Brothers, sent to “ALL WRITERS” on 16 December 1937, in which he complained that some of them have become too lax in the hours they keep at the studio, arriving late in the morning and leaving early in the afternoon, whereas they should be at their desks between 9:00 and 9:45 a.m. He insisted that in future those “‘who have been coming in late and leaving early keep regular hours.’” After receiving this memo, says Banks, writers Julius and Philip Epstein requested a meeting “to tell him they finally found the perfect ending to Casablanca. They came up with it at 8:30 a.m.” As Catherine Fisk explains, studios employed most writers on weekly salaries, and although some had enough clout to compel studios to acquiesce to their demands, the workday of many screenwriters was the then-traditional 9:00 to 6:00—longer if the studio head found it necessary, and including weekends—“in offices on the back lots just like any other employee, churning out stories, screenplays and treatments, adapting stories and novels, and polishing plots, characters, settings, and dialogue,” or inventing stories based on a title or idea—for a flat weekly salary. Most of them “sat in cubbyholes, writing to order like tailors cutting a suit.” Celebrity authors received perks, such as huge salaries and permission to work at home. Starting in Depression 1932 William Faulkner spent over two decades, off and on, writing for the

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industry. His reason: money. For him, John Meroney says, such screen pinnacles as The Big Sleep (1946) meant “little more than paychecks.”24 Shaw, who before talkies arrived was wealthy, would have none of this—nor did studios expect him to. He was a worldwide celebrity whose name they expected to increase box-office takings substantially. In the silent era, they offered huge sums of money for movie rights to his plays— up to ₤70,000 from one mogul, 17½ percent of the profits from another. However, he wrote his own contracts, which excluded sales of rights or copyrights, which he demanded he retain. He offered five-year licenses (renewable if the results satisfied both parties) and stipulated no changes or rewritings by anyone—writers, directors, producers, or censors—unless he agreed to them. His terms included distribution and monetary compensation. He insisted on separate licenses for different languages (English for English-speaking countries, e.g., German for Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland). In the event, there were film versions of Pygmalion in Germany, Holland, and England, of which only the last was renewed for five-year periods. He demanded 10% of gross sums that exhibitors paid to the manufacturer or an intermediate between them and the manufacturer; but if the manufacturer were the distributor, his royalty would be 5% of the gross sums paid by the public at cinema theatres. He preferred gross receipts to profits because whereas accounting and legal legerdemain might show no profits and result in dozens of lawsuits, gross receipts were easily ascertainable. To sweeten these terms, he declined advance monetary payments (CS 8–9, 19–20). His first victim of film censorship, his adaptation of Saint Joan, stopped before filming began. In 1934, he wrote a screenplay and gave a copy to the Viennese actress Elisabeth Bergner, who in 1932 had emigrated to England, where she became a stage and screen star. Under the direction of Hungarian stage and screen director Paul Czinner, her husband, she would play the title role, which she had done in Germany, directed by Max Reinhardt. Czinner announced that filming would begin in 1935. Shaw revised the screenplay and the press reported production would begin in the Fall. Unlike his first two films, American distribution was mandatory for a picture of the scale and expense of Saint Joan. Czinner negotiated with Hollywood. According to Bergner, the issue of Catholic approval came from Twentieth Century Fox, which agreed to finance and distribute it if they were assured it would not incur Catholic disapproval. Czinner discussed this with the English Jesuit scholar Cyril Martindale, who agreed to serve as intermediary between him and Catholic examiners. Perhaps

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because Father Martindale was English and lived in England, perhaps because Shaw demanded that no one should submit his screenplay to American censors, he did not go through the PCA or the Legion of Decency, whose driving force was American Catholic bishops. Instead, he negotiated with an organization headquartered in Rome, Catholic Action—technically not an official body of the Church. In summer 1935, unknown to Shaw, Czinner sent the screenplay of Saint Joan to them for approval. Catholic Action raised objections of precisely the sort that would and did stop Twentieth Century Fox from agreeing to finance and distribute it. True, the Church had only the threat of boycott, but in the morality politics of the 1930s its threat—supplemented by acquiescent Protestant and Jewish leaders—was sufficient to persuade Fox not to take the chance of producing an expensive movie that a significant portion of the potential audience might boycott. Shaw considered this threat to be empty. Fox regarded it as formidable. Although it is true, as Czinner maintained, that neither the PCA nor the Church censored the script, it is also true that Catholic Action’s spokesman, who made or summarized its objections, was a priest—Father Barbera, S.J.—whose viewpoint was that of the Vatican. To call Catholic Action’s objections not reflective of the Vatican’s is no different from saying that the English government did not censor movies. The Church had plausible deniability. Still, Catholic censorship prevented the filming of Shaw’s screenplay of Saint Joan (CS 49–50, 53). On 27 August 1935, Father Barbera reported two fundamental reasons that made it impossible to approve Saint Joan: Shaw omitted Joan’s repeated appeals to the Pope, and “It is false that Joan recanted” (the transcript of her trial indicates she did). He called the Church’s interpretation of Joan’s trial “historical facts” which, he charged, Shaw altered. In the screenplay, Father Barbera said, accurately, that Joan’s speeches at the trial “are utterly protestant”; then inaccurately, “Never did Joan pronounce them.” Such statements “represent in Shaw’s intention, an attack to the R.C.C. The whole play is a satire against Church and State which are made to appear stupid and inept.” If this “mocking Irishman” changed the script to conform to these and other points noted in the margins, it “could pass,” and if the completed film conforms to the truth of the story (i.e., as interpreted by the Catholic Church) and does not contain anything against the Church’s prestige, “Catholic Action (Azione Cattolica) will declare that the showing of such a picture has not met with any objection from the Catholic Authorities.” In other words, the Church did not officially censor the script, but it would not oppose the film if the author

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complied with Catholic Action’s demands. Catholic Action complained of such words as backside, holy, and infernal, perhaps because it considered them indecent or blasphemous, and to such phrases as I am damned (beside this exclamation the reader added a question mark), damn you (which the reader lined out), and by Saint Denis (perhaps also because of blasphemy). Cauchon’s humane statement that the Church “cannot take life” must become that it “does not wish death.” Joan’s “Dear child of God” is lined out, as is her insistence that God’s ways are not the ways of men (despite its source in Isaiah 55:8), who are unfit for her to live among, and that she will go through the fire to His bosom must be revised to “I appeal to god and the pope [sic].” The scene wherein Cauchon insists that despite custom Joan will not be tortured, must be omitted not because it is false but because it is “essentially damaging” (CS 53–54).25 In August 1936, while Czinner negotiated with Catholic Action, Shaw learned what happened. Furious, he refused to submit to any censorship. On 2 September, he sent a letter to the New York Times, published 14 September, which made public the Catholic ban on Saint Joan. Accurately summarizing and quoting the letter and marginal comments, he defended his play and screenplay against accusations of historical inaccuracy and called the censor’s demands “absurdities [that] represent not the wisdom of the Catholic Church, but the desperation of a minor official’s attempts to reduce that wisdom to an office routine.” He thought Catholic Action was connected to the PCA (SC 107). Czinner protested that neither the PCA nor the Church censored the script, but Shaw stood firm. An organization named Catholic Action, he reaffirmed, was strong enough to intimidate an English producer into submitting Saint Joan for its approval; its disapproval wrecked the enterprise. To call its censure unofficial is absurd. Representatives of the Church and Hollywood closed ranks, blaming the victim. According to the New York Times, “Spokesmen for the church lifted their eyebrows and wondered who had been picking on Shaw to goad him into the philippic he indited to the editor of the Times. Hollywood’s spokesmen implied that officially they were not acquainted with the Irish dramatist or his works”—which implies that unofficially they were. Both Joseph Breen and Will Hays claimed they never saw a motion picture scenario of Shaw’s version of the Joan of Arc story and therefore “could not have proposed additions or emendations.” Some in Hollywood suggested Shaw was trying to get publicity for his (unmade) film. Michael Williams, editor of Commonweal, a Catholic weekly published by laymen, said, “We don’t know what he’s driving at” and perhaps disingenuously

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claimed he never heard of Catholic Action. Father Francis X. Talbot, editor of America, another Catholic weekly, believed Shaw “‘muddled’ the meaning of Catholic Action,” blaming it to attract attention to the production. While Breen and Hays may be right in contending that they had not read the screenplay, Shaw accused Breen of having “confidential conversations about the play.” There is a fine line between plausible deniability and true denial, and it is difficult to know on which side of the line they stood. It is significant that Pope Pius XI had written to “our venerable brethren, the archbishops and bishops of the United States of America,” published in Motion Pictures less than three months before the New York Times printed Shaw’s letter, praising their initiative in surveilling Hollywood’s activities. He reminded the episcopate that in 1930 “‘the American film industry formally pledged … to safeguard in the future the moral welfare of patrons of the motion picture.’” He counseled “‘unceasing vigilance … to labor to the end that the motion picture be no longer a school of corruption.’” He urged pastors to get pledges from their congregations to boycott offensive films and explicitly referred the bishops to Catholic Action. “I am in a muddle still,” Shaw said of Catholic Action’s interference. All he knew was that the American film industry was “in the grip of a Catholic censorship strong enough to intimidate an English producer into submitting a play for its approval, and its disapproval knocked the whole enterprise on the head although hundreds of thousands of dollars were blamelessly at stake.” He compared himself to a man run over by an automobile without a license plate (SC 111). The New York Times’s film critic, Frank Nugent, who was Catholic, compared Shaw’s letter to Don Quixote tilting at windmills and in an attempt at humor called it “fairly well established by now that Mr. Shaw was stricken with an acute form of censoraphobia, coupled with a distressing ignorance of filmdom and its ways.” He said Shaw was “definitely out of line” by implying “a pernicious link” among Catholic Action, the Church, the Legion of Decency, the Hays office, and Joseph Breen, despite the link having been established. “And he held them all responsible for the utterly ridiculous changes he was instructed to make in his script of the Joan of Arc play.” More successfully witty, Nugent quipped, “Mr. Shaw is more to be pitied than censored.” What he may not have known, since he had not seen the documents to which Shaw alluded, was that Shaw was accurate about the changes Catholic Action instructed him to make. Meanwhile, according to Bergner, who did not tell me the dates, she invited the Scottish dramatist James Bridie to adapt Saint Joan for the screen, but did not tell Shaw

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or Czinner. Prudently, Bridie asked Shaw for approval. Shaw refused and told Bergner that everything was over. Was it? Perhaps as a result of her action and surely as a result of Catholic Action’s actions, Czinner did not direct and she did not star in Shaw’s film adaptation of Saint Joan. Which action proved decisive, I do not know. Perhaps their combination did. Nor do I know whether the Shaw-Bridie contretemps occurred before the New York Times controversy (thus, an outburst of temper) or after it (thus, the last straw).26 Despite these setbacks, Czinner patiently negotiated with Shaw and the censors—with some success. On 29 October 1937, Shaw sent him a Memorandum of Agreement authorizing him to direct Bergner in the Saint Joan film. In May 1938, before the English Pygmalion movie opened, Shaw announced that Czinner and Bergner would film Saint Joan that summer, but he refused to alter passages offensive to the Catholic Church. Importantly, he had not seen Bergner play Joan on stage; that August, at the Malvern Festival, he did. He considered her performance a misrepresentation of the role. Although she drew full houses, he regarded her, as he told Gabriel Pascal, who produced Pygmalion, as “a complete misfit” and “a hopeless failure as Joan.” Elsewhere, he explained, she wants to leave out everything except crying. He refused to let her play Joan on the screen and told her, quoting Dante’s Inferno, to abandon all hope of doing so. Then Pygmalion opened. Its success gave him another reason to drop Czinner’s and Bergner’s plans. He later gave Pascal film rights to Saint Joan (CS 87–89; SP 32–33). Shaw lost the censorship battle of filming his Saint Joan—as he was bound to. The Catholic Church and Hollywood were too powerful. He had failed in the fight for Mrs Warren’s Profession when Mary Shaw toured it in America, as Chap. 2 shows, when she submitted to the demands of the Jesuits who owned the land on which the theatre stood. He lost the motion picture version of his Saint Joan screenplay by refusing to submit to the Church’s demands. He also lost a faithful transference of Saint Joan to the screen posthumously. In 1957, Otto Preminger, who later told me he did not know Shaw had written a screenplay of Saint Joan, produced and directed a film version of it. He commissioned Graham Greene, highly regarded for his screenplays, notably The Third Man, to adapt it. It was well known that Greene was Catholic but less well known that he had a low regard for Shaw and Saint Joan. His review of the German movie version of the Joan of Arc story, Das Mädchen Johanna (1935), disparaged the Nazi film and Shaw’s play in one swoop: “One would have thought it

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almost impossible to produce so dull a film on so dramatic a subject (a subject which defeated even Mr. Shaw’s talent for triviality).” He altered the play to conform to the Church’s view. Among his revisions, the religious hierarchy was not a party to the trial, which was unfair. According to Shaw, Joan’s judges represented the Church and the trial was fair. In the Preminger-Greene film, after the Court accepts Joan’s recantation Stogumber begs Warwick to blame not the Church but the French priests who conducted the trial (thus, absolution remains when the court finds her guilty). Consistent with Catholic Action’s demands (about which Greene probably knew nothing), he invented a speech for Warwick, who consoles Stogumber that Joan will burn before the Pope hears of the matter. In addition to absolving the Church from blame, Greene removed the secular interpretation of one of her miracles. In the play, we hear that she told a drunken soldier not to swear when he was at the point of death, whereupon he drunkenly fell into a well and drowned. Greene dramatizes him as lecherous as well as drunk, reaching for Joan, who says he will soon die. Immediately he stiffens, hands upraised, and expires, as if felled by a divine hand, which makes the scene more of a miracle than Shaw does, especially since Greene cuts Joan’s disavowal that she prophesied his death. Among Greene’s expunged passages are those of Joan as proto-Protestant, such as Cauchon’s warning of a heresy that establishes the private judgment of an erring mortal against the Church’s wisdom. Despite his denial that he watered down Shaw’s Protestantism or inserted a Catholic viewpoint into the play, he did so. Nevertheless, the PCA did not initially accept his script when Preminger submitted it but required cuts, which were made.27 Catholic Action and the Church won the dispute with Shaw. He fought but failed.

The English Film of Pygmalion From the start of its stage history in England in 1914, the major controversy of Pygmalion did not revolve around censorship. Its famous phrase “Not bloody likely!” made headlines and spawned newspaper articles, and the expletive was the subject of commentaries in the British press; but it was not censored. Audiences reacted with gales of laughter, not censure. The controversial issue was romance between Eliza and Higgins. As Richard Huggett chronicles the production, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who played Higgins, “was a romantic and an incurable sentimentalist: it seemed to him natural and inevitable that if a play had a hero, he should

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love and marry the heroine of it.” He proposed that after Eliza leaves in the last act, he should go to the balcony and throw flowers to her. Shaw responded, “‘No!’” and explained that while Higgins was dependent on her, “he does NOT love her, nor she him. If you throw those flowers, it will contradict everything that has been said in the last act.” When the play was well into its long run, Tree implored Shaw to see it again, for he wanted Shaw’s approval of his innovative business, having forgotten that Shaw had forbidden the flower-throwing. Shaw agreed to see its hundredth performance, which he considered the equivalent of not going at all. When Pygmalion reached it (it ran 118 performances and stopped because Tree was bored), Shaw kept his word and wound up cursing the enterprise. Unable to comprehend his anger, Tree reproached him. “‘My ending makes money, you ought to be grateful,’ he said. ‘Sir Herbert,’ trumpeted Shaw, ‘your ending makes nonsense, you ought to be shot.’”28 Until the late twentieth century, most people agreed with Tree, probably because in the play, Freddy, whom Eliza declares she will marry as soon as she is able to support him (that very phrase contrasts with romantic conventions of the time), is not onstage after the third of its five acts. To remedy this, Shaw’s screenplay makes Eliza’s rejection of Higgins in favor of Freddy conclusive. In new scenes, Freddy returns, they kiss, and later they go to Doolittle’s wedding together. Two dozen years after its London première, an English movie version of Pygmalion was made, based on Shaw’s screenplay. Whether or not the subcultural phrase “Not bloody likely!” had become common usage in the dominant culture, I do not know, but it was so well-known and colorful that its comic value remained. As in 1914, the controversy was a romantic ending for the leading characters. The conclusion of Pascal’s motion picture version, as shown in Britain and the United States, whose directors of record are Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard—although according to Wendy Hiller and David Tree, Asquith was the sole director (CS 77–78)— harmonizes with Tree’s view, despite the fact that the screenplay makes Shaw’s meaning explicit. Rather than write new dialogue for the ending, the film makers transferred dialogue from earlier in the screenplay to the end of the film. After Eliza leaves for her father’s wedding, Higgins returns home and accidentally switches on the record player, which by a cinematic coincidence has the disc of what she had said, with a Lisson Grove accent, on her first visit, that she was not dirty, for she had washed her face and hands before she came. After he turns the machine off, he hears her again,

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in person, with perfect diction, repeating the words. The music swells and romance prevails. Tree conquered Shaw posthumously. What was Shaw’s response to this, which was more unambiguous than Tree’s flower-throwing and which played to an immensely larger audience? He told Flora Robson that the trouble with Leslie Howard was he thought he was Romeo. Publicly, he did not undermine the film or Pascal. He endorsed it, called it “substantially” his own version, and declared that Pascal had filmed the play as he had wanted it filmed. In commenting on the ending, though, he did not claim responsibility for it and avoided sanctioning it, saying that as age prevented him from undertaking studio work, other directors sidetracked him and Pascal, giving Howard a lovelorn appearance in a scene that was “too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about.” In other words, the ending was not his, but in view of the film as a whole, it should not receive disproportionate emphasis. The press praised both stars. The Spectator singled out Wendy Hiller for giving one of the year’s best performances and Asquith for making cinematically more from the play’s text than a stage version would likely do. In America, the press was more enthusiastic. Time magazine called it “practically perfect” and the New  York Daily Mirror removed the word “practically.” With American slang, the World-Telegram urged audiences to “lay your dough on the line” and get to the box office right away to see one of “the cinema achievements of the year.” Its detractors too had their say, including the usual “Nothing happens, but everyone continues to talk. No matter how shining the talk, no picture can stand up under that” (New York Sun). More understandable were the views that English accents might be too difficult for American audiences (New York Post), that Howard was too sensitive and delicate for Higgins (New Republic), and that the final scene ends the connection with the play and “becomes like all our worse movies.” Would Eliza and Higgins marry? “Not these two!” (Saturday Review of Literature). An astounding success, the film won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival, eight of New York’s nine film critics voted it one of the ten best pictures of the year, and the following year it received two Academy Awards for 1938: best screenplay went to Shaw and best adaptation to W.P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis, and Ian Dalrymple (CS 82–87, 271–72). This does not mean there was no censorship. As mentioned, the PCA cut every damn and variant thereof uttered by Higgins or replaced it with an innocuous word. Recognizing that such changes were inessential, Shaw acquiesced. On both sides of the Atlantic, before and after Pygmalion,

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distributors made cuts they did not tell him of. In London, Arms and the Man was a critical and commercial flop. When British International Pictures distributed it in the provinces, they cut it to ribbons, paid no attention to continuity, wreaked havoc with the original film, and destroyed dramatic logic—all before Shaw learned what they did. In the United States, the PCA’s changes to Pygmalion did not prevent local censors from making further alterations. In 1938, when a company distributed a picture it provided a copy of cutting continuity to help exhibitors repair the film after complying with local censorship regulations. This was true of Pygmalion (CS 32, 52). Before censorship there was pre-censorship. Since Shaw knew of many of the PCA’s restrictions—for example, an unmarried man and woman living together was a taboo—he pre-censored passages before the PCA read his screenplay, for instance, this comic dialogue from Act 2 of the play: PICKERING.

Why don’t you marry that missus of yours? I rather draw the line at encouraging that sort of immorality. DOOLITTLE. Tell her so, Governor: tell her so. I got to be agreeable to her. I got to give her presents. I got to buy her clothes something sinful. I’m a slave to that woman, Governor, just because I’m not her lawful husband. And she knows it too. Catch her marrying me! (CPP 4: 712–13) Because he knew it would be catnip for American film censors and perhaps British ones as well, Shaw did not retain the passage in his screenplay. Earlier, Mrs. Pearce asks Eliza where her mother is. She replies, “I aint got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth stepmother” (CPP 4: 694). Shaw’s screenplay retains this dialogue (CS 237), but it is absent from both British and American prints of the film. Instead, Mrs. Pearce tells Eliza to go home to her mother. She responds, “I ain’t got no mother.” Out went the euphemism “sixth stepmother.” However, at the end of the movie in British and American prints, as Eliza leaves Mrs. Higgins’s room after Doolittle surprises her, he makes a fleeting reference to her stepmother. Neither film makers nor censors caught this, and only by paying close attention to the sequence would anyone notice it. At the end of the screenplay, as of the play, Doolittle announces he is on his way to marry this woman that afternoon. In the play, Pickering asks why she changed her mind. He replies, “(sadly) Intimidated, Governor. Intimidated. Middle class morality claims its victim.” Then:

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DOOLITTLE. I feel uncommon nervous about the ceremony, Colonel. I wish youd come and see me through it. PICKERING. But youve been through it before, man. You were married to Eliza’s mother. DOOLITTLE. Who told you that, Colonel? PICKERING. Well, nobody told me. But I concluded—naturally— DOOLITTLE. No: that aint the natural way, Colonel: it’s only the middle class way. (CPP 4: 771–72) Shaw’s screenplay preserves this passage (CS 268–69), as does the British print, albeit with insignificant changes. However, the print released in the United States contains not a word of it. It says nothing about Doolittle about to get married or inviting the other characters to attend his wedding, which is the reason for his presence in the scene. No matter, since according to the PCA, references to a man living with a woman who is not his wife were unacceptable and therefore grounds for refusing a license. As for his splendid, new, formal clothing, which is suitable for St. George’s Cathedral in London, American audiences would have to assume, which they did, that it is a consequence of the status precipitated by his sudden wealth. The different version of Pygmalion released in the United States was not only a matter of cutting dialogue, although this was significant. The parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which released it, was the distributor Loew’s, the oldest and perhaps most powerful movie theatre chain in the country, lasting from 1905 to 2006. An indication that MGM made changes is its opening credits. For example, it added Ian Dalrymple to W.P. Lipscomb and Cecil Lewis as adapters of Shaw’s screenplay. “Additional Composition” reveals that William Axt—a studio composer and orchestrator who wrote approximately two hundred scores for silent and talking movies—revised Arthur Honegger’s score. “From the outset,” Derek McGovern points out, “Axt’s score creates a heightened sense of romantic expectation, with its waltz music underscoring the opening credits.” This was not, as Anthony Slide states, “a different musical score” but a revision. In place of Honegger’s cheerful melody for the opening credits, Axt provided a different orchestration of the romantic waltz Honegger composed for the scene at the ball in which Eliza dances with the son of a grand old lady (whose title Shaw does not specify), and its effect is expectation of romance. When Eliza is in her digs, “a jaunty arrangement of the previously heard waltz accompanies the

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scene—effectively nullifying the poverty of her living environment,” as McGovern says. In addition to such changes as blast for damn and confound it for damn it, the alterations emphasize romance between Eliza and Higgins and push Freddy further into the background. Among the deletions in Eliza’s and Higgins’s discussion in the American print’s version of the last act, McGovern makes clear, are his insistence that he is not romantically interested in her and her suggestion that Freddy might make her happier than her so-called betters, who bully her. Freddy is not even discussed in this scene, which reduces his impact. By means of editing and different takes, the final sequence makes the conclusion still more romantic, with, in McGovern’s words, a take that has Howard “displaying a look of trance-like and hitherto unseen serenity, as if imagining Eliza’s voice in a dream.”29 As indicated, the American print conformed to Hollywood’s censorship Code. Pascal told about most but not all of MGM’s changes to the author he called “Maestro,” who was a continent and an ocean away. On 14 April 1938, he sent Shaw “the letter received from the American organization about the Censorship. Will you be so kind as to return it to me after you have been through it.” I have not located it, but one may infer its contents by Shaw’s response of the 16th: “I did not know that you intended to send the script to the American amateur censors, who have no legal status whatever. If I had known I should have locked you up until the film was finished.” Pascal had made a mistake, Shaw scolded him, by sending his screenplay to them as Czinner had done. Although he was right in saying that the American censors had no legal status, his correctness was irrelevant. Legal or not, in 1938 America, film makers and distributors followed the PCA’s dictates. Shaw’s command in the same letter—“There is only one course for you if you want to do serious work in film drama, and that is to make your film and let M.P.P. attempt to boycott it if they dare. They wont dare”—was naïve. Without making the changes demanded by the censors or without persuading them not to insist on specific changes, Pascal would have been unable to obtain distribution in the United States. His only realistic alternative would have been to make a low-budget film that did not rely on the American market to earn a profit. On 21 July 1938, he cabled Shaw that he had presented Pygmalion to the English censors, who passed it with no suggestions for cuts and that he would soon leave for New  York to show the picture to the American censors, where the results, he hoped, would be the same. He was overly optimistic. Pascal, Shaw’s surrogate in this battle, fought the good fight, but

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inevitably he lost, which means that Shaw failed. After Pygmalion’s release in London on October 6th, he telegrammed Shaw, on the 29th, that regardless of his arguments and pleas, MGM would use the “inferior” takes of a number of scenes (BSGP xviii–xix, 27–29, 45). When he rereleased the film in 1948, he asked Breen’s permission to restore a sequence near the end in which Doolittle invites Pickering to his wedding. Not only did Breen remind him that the Code specifically prohibits comic treatment of illicit sex, he added that the absence of this scene from the film “‘will not impair, one iota, its box-office value’” (CS 76–77). Not until Pygmalion was released as a DVD in the United States were American audiences able to see the superior British print of it, which at ninety-six minutes is seven minutes longer than the American print.

The English Film of Major Barbara The success of Pygmalion spurred Shaw into cinematic activities that belied his eighty-odd years. His and Pascal’s next film was Major Barbara, to star Wendy Hiller, and Pascal would direct as well as produce it. Shaw cut passages and added new scenes, including an opening in which Cusins hears Barbara’s sermon at a Salvation Army meeting, meets her and falls in love with her—a crucial change and an improvement, in my opinion, for it makes them more prominent at the start of the film than they are at the start of the play and bookends the comedy with this scene and, as in the play, their vital dialogue at the conclusion (CS 89, 91–92, BSGP 53). Although Cusins takes the initiative by declaring his love for her, she immediately seizes it by taking him home to meet her mother. In view of the laudatory reviews Hiller received for Pygmalion, in a performance as close to perfection as may be possible, the decision to star her in the new film is understandable. But the choice of Major Barbara was, as Shaw and Pascal insufficiently recognized, chancy. Although her performance is outstanding, the character with the most lines, as in the play, is Undershaft, who delivers the bulk of its social, political, and economic meaning. His dialogue is overwhelming and not easy for audiences to take in at one sitting. Major Barbara tested the mettle of film makers in 1940. Shaw recognized the need to cut the play for the screen even as he added new scenes that “opened up” the action, including a dramatization of Bill Walker interrupting Todger Fairmile’s sermon and a tour of Undershaft’s factory town. Had he not deleted so much dialogue, Major Barbara would have run much longer. But the widely held belief that Shaw was a

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loquacious Irishman who refused to cut his plays for the screen was so persistent that some reviewers did not bother to verify if it were true (it is not, as a comparison with the play testifies). Pauline Kael’s view is typical: “Shaw had allowed Pygmalion to be cut and adapted for the screen, and it was a great success, but he got stubborn on this one and hung on to his dialogue” (CS 118, 173 n 16). There was a great deal of tampering with Major Barbara by many hands. Pygmalion changed the play’s ending but retained a great deal of its essence. Major Barbara disemboweled the final act and eliminated much of its essence. More than a third of the play and screenplay (which itself cut much of the play, particularly its last two acts)—a third that is vital to its theme and dramatic development—was deleted or changed (CS 463–66). What was cut? Significantly, the expository dialogue between Lady Britomart and Stephen at the beginning (which explains the Undershaft tradition, necessary to the plot), most of Undershaft’s dialogue in Acts 2 and 3, which conveys the bulk of the political and economic themes, Cusins’s abyss of moral horror and his social goals. Even in the director’s print, which is 16 minutes longer than the 121-minute film that opened in London, most of the dialogue that communicates the political and economic subjects is greatly abridged and thematically significant passages are deleted (CS 109–10). Consider too that Major Barbara was filmed in 1940. Shooting began June 17th, a week after the Nazis invaded France and three days before German troops entered Paris. On July 10th, the Battle of Britain began. Literally, Major Barbara was filmed under fire. Bombs destroyed furniture, properties, and technical equipment or made them inaccessible. Exteriors for location shots in London were filmed one day and before shooting was completed were reduced to rubble by the next day. Railways were out of commission for periods. Robert Morley seemed still dazed when he told me, over thirty years later, that one night when he returned home to London after filming he looked out the train window and was shocked and frightened because “the city was on fire.” Air raids interrupted shooting. Pascal claimed he counted 125 bombs that fell in the studio’s area. The war changed everything. One day the company completed one take out of seventeen scheduled set-ups. During Major Barbara’s filming, editing, and first exhibitions—when Britain was fighting for its existence—it would have been impossible to depict a munitions maker as Mephistophelian, for it is inconceivable that Anglo-American audiences would have accepted this. The same is true of the play’s

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anti-capitalist themes, such as this statement by Undershaft, which was cut, on who really governs the country: [Y]ou [the British government] will do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us and keep peace when it doesnt. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down you will call out the police and military. (CPP 3: 151)

Shaw expanded the importance of Undershaft’s Jewish partner Lazarus. In play, screenplay and print first released in London and New  York, Undershaft calls him “a gentle romantic Jew who … will be blamed for your rapacity in business matters, poor fellow! as he has hitherto been blamed for mine” (CPP 3: 167, CS 343). In a revised passage for the film, Shaw calls it part of the firm’s tradition to have a partner with a Jewish name. “It suggests financial ability; and he gets all the blame when our profits are considered exorbitant.” He is “a scapegoat,” and Cusins explains, “That is the role of the Jew in modern Capitalism” (CS 98, 115–16). This passage does not survive in the motion picture. Pascal intended to be faithful to the play. Of Undershaft’s speech about six hundred fools huddled in Parliament, he insisted, “Without this speech I don’t not make the picture!” For this Hungarian producer, his scenario editor Marjorie Deans said, two negatives were always better than one. Pascal filmed the speech. Shaw’s screenplay included and Pascal filmed Undershaft’s statements that he is not to blame if morality mongers prefer to preach rather than buy his weapons to fight evildoers; that the world would be better if people scrapped obsolete moralities and religions that fail to fit the facts of life just as munitions makers scrap weapons that turn out wrong; that voting changes the names of cabinet members but killing accomplishes genuine, lasting social change; and the armorer’s faith (selling weapons to anyone who pays for them). Although he rearranged some of these passages, they exist only in his personal print (CS 110). Indicative of the deletions are the closing credits. Charles Victor played Bilton, O.B. Clarence (the vicar in Mrs. Higgins’s at-home in Pygmalion) Pettigrew. Although Pascal filmed scenes with both, I have seen no print with Bilton, and Pettigrew (who escorts the family through Undershaft’s factory town) survives, unintroduced, in three short, silent long shots. Running time of Pascal’s personal print is 137 minutes (to be precise, 136

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minutes, 47 seconds). At its world première in London, 7 April 1941, it was 121 minutes. When it opened on 14 May in New York, running time, according to the PCA certificate and Terry Ramsaye, was 115 minutes (CS 109, 483–84). Despite deletions, the Legion of Decency classified it as “B” (“Objectionable in Part”) because of the author’s “‘attitudes of irreverence and cynicism toward religious matters and marriage, together with ideological confusions and subtleties, [which] render this film capable of conveying false and dangerous connotations.’” After premières in both nations, Major Barbara was mutilated throughout the English-speaking world. In American neighborhood and rural theatres, it ran 100 minutes, and cuts were made when it went to British provincial cinemas. Shaw rightly complained to Gilbert Murray, “they cut the last third of the film all to pieces, and left Barbara’s and Undershaft’s position … hopelessly confused” (CL 4: 613). To use Shaw’s wartime word, the result was “sabotage.” In 1964, a 100-minute version (by my watch) played in New York; in 1973, shown by the Toronto Film Society, 95 minutes; in 1979  in Australia, 97 minutes (by my watch)—all far cries from the 137-, 121-, and 115-minute versions. Major Barbara is still available in different versions, but not in the longest one, and lists of its running time vary. As I type this paragraph, YouTube has two entries, one listed as 116 minutes, the other 120 minutes. Rotten Tomatoes erroneously cites its running time in the Criterion Collection as 1 hour and 30 minutes (it is 121 minutes). America first saw Pascal’s print on 19 March 1977, when the Public Broadcasting System showed it on television; it was first seen in England in June 1977, when the National Film Theatre showed it in London (CS 109–10).30 In the hearings of the 1909 Joint Select Committee of Parliament on possible censorship of the play, Chap. 3 records, the issue revolved around whether the Salvation Army would be outraged by references to it. Barker told the committee he had satisfied the Examiner of Plays by assuring him that he had been in communication with the Salvation Army, which considered the play a splendid advertisement. Apparently, the censor had not noticed, perhaps because it was not on his list of taboos, the theme of capitalists buying religious institutions, not to mention the peerage, through their contributions to the former and to political parties. After Shaw’s experiences with Saint Joan and Pygmalion, he was aware that American censors would not be easily placated. And they were not. With the PCA censorship of Pygmalion fresh in mind, he and Pascal knew American distributors required conformity to the Code. Pascal recut

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Major Barbara for the United States and made deletions of and substitutes for offensive language. From “You are damnably discouraging,” he snipped the third word. To avoid offending prudish moviegoers, he laundered the reference to Mog from “carroty slat” (slut) to “carroty cat,” but even this was initially too strong for the PCA, which reminded him that its list of unacceptable words and phrases included the new noun. On the basis of context, Pascal persuaded them to back down. On other matters they did not. Vulgarity and irreverence toward religious institutions were offensive. In Snobby Price’s reference to Peter Shirley as “a jumped-up, jerked-off, orspittle-turned-out incurable of an old workin man,” Pascal replaced the second phrase with the inoffensive chucked out. Since Bill exclaims Gawd! irreverently, Pascal changed it to the neutral Cor! After informing Shaw that he had cut Cusins’s remark “You are really an infernal old rascal” (Catholic Action had demanded Shaw cut infernal from Saint Joan), Shaw suggested that after Undershaft’s “I can buy the Salvation Army,” Cusins should retort, “Tell that to Barbara if you dare. Here she is.” The PCA demanded that the film not lead audiences to conclude what Shaw intended them to conclude, “that the distiller is saved and members of the Salvation Army can rejoice in his salvation simply because he contributed £50,000 toward the work of the organization” and that “the head of a worthwhile religious organization” must not declare that because of his donation “a cynical munitions maker … will be in Heaven with the ‘seal of God on his brow.’” On 26 March 1941, Shaw cabled Pascal, “HOLLYWOOD THINKS HAYS CONTROLS TWENTY MILLION CATHOLICS HIS VETO WOULD KEEP AWAY PERHAPS TWO HUNDRED DEVOTEES DISREGARD HIM ABSOLUTELY DO NOT REDUB STAND FIRM.” Accustomed to such broadsides from the Maestro, Pascal responded, It is very easy, dear GBS, to say “ignore the Hays office” but unfortunately no picture in America can be exhibited without the Hays Office censorship’s certificate, and I consider what I have done, namely from 22 cuts … to compromise on the changing of one word and the cut of a short line, as the best that could be done and I think you must realize that I faithfully fought for our cause.

As Shaw recognized, he was right. Pascal stood as firmly as he could and was partly successful. When he had no choice, he capitulated, but he shrewdly made changes that implicitly retained Shaw’s meaning, especially

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if the meaning were contained elsewhere—as Shaw recognized. For example, the General (Mrs. Baines in the play) tells the gathering at the Salvation Army shelter that Lord Saxmundham promised to donate £5000 to the Salvation Army if five other benefactors will each donate a thousand to raise the total to £10 thousand. Since Barbara did not recognize the name, Undershaft explains he is Sir Horace Bodger, the distiller. Knowing how much this will upset her, he rubs in its implications: He is one of the greatest of our public benefactors. He restored the cathedral at Hakington. They made him a baronet for that. He gave half a million to the funds of his party: they made him a baron for that. SHIRLEY. What will they give him for the five thousand? UNDERSHAFT. There is nothing left to give him. So the five thousand, I should think[,] is to save his soul. MRS BAINES. Heaven grant it may! (CPP 3:130–31)

Shaw’s screenplay contains the same passage (CS 311). So does the 121-minute film, except that Shaw adjusted the sums for inflation to £50,000 and £100,000 and promoted Bodger from baronet to viscount (like a viscount, a baronet may pass on his title, but a viscount, unlike a baronet, is a peer). As an example of Pascal’s failure to retain a passage, he could not have the General ask the audience to rejoice in Bodger’s salvation. Instead, he persuaded the censors to accept her asking them to hope for his salvation. Rather than say after death Undershaft will be with them and will be known by God’s seal on his brow, she asked everyone to “hope and pray that he will be there with us still. Then we shall know them as we ourselves are known.” Despite the substituted line, audiences recognize— since Pascal retained the passage that the purpose of Bodger’s donation was to save his soul—that Undershaft bought the Salvation Army. This change was more easily demanded than done. As Marjorie Deans, who was in England, told Pascal, who was in Hollywood, Sybil Thorndike (who played the General) was on tour, could not go to London to dub the new lines for weeks, and the cost of hiring a sound van and equipment, and paying everyone’s expenses and salaries on location was beyond the resources of Pascal’s company. In movie-mogul mode, he responded by cable that the PCA and he insisted the revised lines be immediately recorded and sent to him by clipper ship. If his company had no money, she should sell his two cows and use the proceeds. Somehow they found the funds without selling his cows. A sound van and recording unit drove

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to Wales, where Thorndike recorded the lines that satisfied Hollywood’s scruples, and sent them to Pascal.31 When by the end of April 1941 Pascal had cut and redubbed Major Barbara to conform to the PCA’s demands, the picture received a seal of approval. Let us not too quickly condemn him. The PCA did not completely defeat Shaw. Pascal fought, won a great deal, and capitulated when he had to. Unfortunately, he also failed a great deal. But the PCA was not the end of North American censorship. British Columbia censors demanded the deletion of Cusins, in Undershaft’s London home, drunkenly rising, staggering, and falling asleep in a stupor (CS 110–11, BSGP 109–10, 123–25). Shaw took chances and sometimes lost, as he may have expected to. When he wrote the play, Cusins persuades Undershaft he is illegitimate (a qualification for succeeding him in the firm) because, as Chap. 2 discusses, since his mother was his father’s deceased wife’s sister, they were legally married in Australia but not in England, where he is a foundling. Despite the fact that the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act legalized such marriages in England two years after the play’s first performance, Shaw never revised the passage in the play’s text. Since Pascal or someone else connected with the film may have told him the reference was dated, he revised the screenplay, adding an exchange between Stephen and Cusins: “But such marriages have been made legal in England.” “Not until I was grown up. I was born and bred a bastard” (CS 341). Shaw ignored, and no one recognized this because he updated the work to 1940, that such marriages had been legal well before Cusins was grown up. The offending profanity did not go unnoticed by the PCA. Since bastard was prohibited in American movies, the exchange became: “I think not. You can marry your wife’s sister even in England.” “Ah, you can now; but not when my parents married.” Although the PCA found no reason to be concerned about sex, the publicity personnel of United Artists were concerned that there was insufficient sex appeal to advertise the picture. As I have quoted Montagu, film censors aimed to let nothing offend huge audiences while simultaneously ensuring a maximum of erotic stimulation—and in its advertisements the promise of more of what the trade called “s. a.” (sex appeal) than films may contain. Untroubled, advertising artists invented posters for display outside and in lobbies of theatres, as well as in advertisements, which suggested more eroticism than moviegoers would find on the screen. One poster had an artist’s rendition of a glamorized Wendy Hiller wearing a dress that showed more cleavage than any costume Barbara wore or would

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wear, and a more conventionally handsome Rex Harrison close to her, holding one of her shoulders. Above them were the words “SHE THOUGHT SHE COULDN’T BE BOTHERED WITH LOVE … till she changed her mind!” Another poster had a drawing of her in a form-­ fitting dress, revealing bare shoulders and arms as well as cleavage, with Harrison close by, holding her left hand. Above them was the announcement “IN PYGMALION … Shaw showed you what a man could do with a woman. NOW … IN MAJOR BARBARA he shows you what a woman can do with a man!”32 Major Barbara disappointed British reviewers, who generally considered it below the level of Pygmalion. The New Statesman and Nation recognized it “made drastic cuts in Mr. Shaw’s argument,” that Undershaft’s profession, “in the atmosphere of the present, [seems] to have entered on a new phase of respectability,” that when Cusins and Barbara submit to him “we have to guess exactly what it is they are taking on,” and that the factory and town montage “hardly make up for arguments not taken over from the play,” whose cuts “rather make hay of the play’s last Act.” Notwithstanding these flaws, the film “is still first-rate entertainment” and “unquestionably fun.” The Spectator damned it with faint praise: “Pygmalion proved that Shaw’s plays can be made into brilliant films: Major Barbara proves that they cannot be made into bad ones. If a bad film could have come out of a Shaw play this would have been it—and no need to look beyond the author for the culprit.” If Shaw did his worst, “fortunately his worst is still good entertainment,” with lines as witty as one could ever hear on screen. But its verbal acrobatics bewildered audiences. In the United States, opinions divided sharply but were more favorable than in Britain. The praise of its admirers was unstinting, as in the New York Times: “To call it a manifest triumph would be arrant stinginess with words.” It is more than “a brilliant and adult translation of a stimulating play,” it is “a more triumphant picture than any the British have yet sent across.” Despite splendid performances by Wendy Hiller and Robert Morley, “Robert Newton pretty near wins the acting prize with his trenchant performance of Bill Walker”—a view shared by most reviewers. The film also had its detractors. Despite enormous deletions, they wrote that the action too often stops so that the characters can discuss Shaw’s ideas, and instead of action there is “eternal talk, talk, talk.” With its usual accuracy and argot, Variety predicted its box-office takings: “substantial biz in metropolitan key runs and de luxers, but … a problem for the nabes and hinterland spots.” It is “too full of Cockney dialect which is too strong

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for American audiences to consume in such a large dose” and its religious satire, despite censorship, “will not set well with the churchgoing element which … makes up a very large majority of theatre audiences”33 (CS 117–19). Chiefly because of excessive deletions of dialogue, not the demands of censors, Major Barbara is botched, or rather, less successful than Pygmalion. With motivations and connections between scenes missing, much of it seems talky, since dialogue loses its relation to dramatic development. The reviewer I quoted as complaining that the film was “eternal talk, talk, talk” may have been off the mark, but his basic point was valid. Most movie audiences now as well as more than seventy years ago are unaccustomed to so much dialogue. Perhaps a director more accomplished than Pascal might have animated and invigorated the dialogue of Major Barbara. Yet what is remarkable is how good much of this film is. Still, instead of a dialectical network of politics, capitalism, social evolution, and religion, which Shaw’s play and screenplay contain, Pascal’s movie is essentially about a religious young woman whose fiancé gets a good job in her father’s business. Too much of it simplifies Shaw’s play. As Variety predicted, it earned less than Pygmalion did (CS 111, 117, 119).

The English Film of Cæsar and Cleopatra American censors gave Cæsar and Cleopatra fewer difficulties than Shaw’s two previous major films, mainly because this big-budget costume comedy, set in a long-gone era, has no words or sequences one could call obscene or erotic. The relationship between its leading actor and actress is not sexual. Caesar regrets he is too old to kindle Cleopatra’s romantic interest and she lusts for Mark Antony, who is in Rome, from which Caesar promises to send him to her after he returns there. As for the fact that she and Ptolemy are both siblings and spouses, the motion picture handles this subject just as the play does (as described in Chap. 2): sibling rivalry, not sex, is the issue, and Caesar uses their dual relationships to try to solve a political problem. True to the title of the book in which it was first published, it is one of Shaw’s Three Plays for Puritans. Puritanical went well with the Hollywood censors. The PCA did not abnegate its responsibilities but had few opportunities to exercise them. The British company that financed the film, the Rank Organisation, objected to the large budget, initially estimated at £550,000, on a play that had never been a major financial success in London—nor, I add, in

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New York. However, J. Arthur Rank believed the movie’s prestige on the American market would help sell other films even if it did not recover its cost. In November 1943, he and Shaw agreed to produce Cæsar and Cleopatra. The screenplay would be entirely Shaw’s, the direction entirely Pascal’s, and neither the film nor advertisements for it would state or suggest that either was by anyone else. As with Major Barbara, Shaw wrote new sequences, and he approved or suggested cuts, changes, and transpositions for the screen. Again, studio hands implored him to shorten the script. Recalling the destruction of Major Barbara, he refused to accommodate “one horse cinemas who must have two features and a slap-stick comic to make up their programs,” and when Pascal conveyed a demand to delete the Syrian palace prologue, Shaw railed at throwing Claude Rains (as Caesar) at the audience before they knew who he was. “Spoil a £300,000 ship for a ha’porth of tar!” he exclaimed. The scene—or part of it—remained in the film. But other parts were cut. Cæsar and Cleopatra opened in London at a reported 138 minutes, in New York at a reported 128 minutes, although the PCA certificate of approval indicates that it had been cut to 126 minutes, which I take to be accurate. I have seen no print longer than (but some shorter than) 128 minutes. Complicating matters as usual, accounts of running times are not always reliable. IMDb gives three different running times: 123 minutes at the top of its website, 138 and 128 minutes below. Furthermore, DVD discs sometimes belie the running times indicated on the boxes that contain them (CS 126, 128–32; BSGP 177, 183–84).34 Cæsar and Cleopatra took over two years to make. Shooting began on 12 June 1944, six days after D-Day: it ended in the summer of 1945. Four days after filming started, the Nazis launched V-2 rocket attacks on London, which in addition to their devastation on the city played havoc with the shooting schedule, damaged one set, destroyed dressmaking workrooms, cracked the windows and ceiling of Pascal’s home, and almost killed several members of the production unit. “Hitler celebrated my birthday,” Shaw said on 28 July 1944, two days later, “by smashing my bedroom window with a bomb,” but his chief annoyance appears to have been that “in the afternoon I had to do a newsreel about it.” Because of the war, transportation of personnel and materials was delayed. Under ordinary circumstances, a costume might take a few days to supply; in wartime it took weeks. Special equipment, such as a heavy, bulky crane for a technicolor camera (a crane for a black-and-white camera was inadequate), was difficult to obtain when it was needed. The English weather

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did not cooperate for exterior scenes. Nor did the weather in Egypt, where out of desperation Pascal moved the production. It turned Britannically cool and rainy. War, weather, and ever-increasing expenses were among the problems. These and other factors devastated the budget, which had proliferated. Figures on the final cost vary, from £1,278,000 to £1,500,000—between twice and almost thrice the original estimate—with $US 4 to £1 at the prevailing rate of exchange. Pascal completed shooting in September 1945, fifteen months after shooting started and nine months behind schedule (CS 126, 135–36; SC 175). Unlike Pygmalion and Major Barbara—also unlike Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, released in 1944, from which the PCA obtained the removal of every bastard and damned Shakespeare wrote (but not con, perhaps because Hollywood’s censors did not know French words that were not taught at school)—Cæsar and Cleopatra encountered no censorship difficulty. As the PCA told Pascal, nothing in the shooting script was “not basically in conformity with the requirements of our Production Code.” But it pointed to potential problems. When Ftatateeta takes Cleopatra to be bathed, Ftatateeta’s sash should “fully cover all the intimate parts of her body” and there should be no suggestion that Cleopatra, about to step into her bath, is naked. Alluding to business in the harp playing scene— her ladies giggle as Iras and Charmian pull down a blue tunic worn by a monkey they have dressed to resemble Britannus—Breen warned, “Care will … be needed … to avoid pointing up any reference to the animal’s sex organs.” Pascal took the greatest care: he did not use the business. Anxious to please the PCA, which had ignored the British meaning and context of Snobby Price’s “jerked-off” (discarded) in Major Barbara and heard only its American meaning (masturbated, which makes no sense in the circumstances), he shrewdly changed the advice of Apollodorus, who is sophisticated about enology, from “Try the Lesbian, Cæsar” to a different wine, Sicilian. Experience taught him to take as few chances as possible with the PCA. It was not Hollywood but Rank who was upset, because the Americans might grumble at possible anti-Semitism in the Persian’s response to Apollodorus’s statement in the last act, that Caesar “was settling the Jewish question”: “He has made short work of them” (since a fanfare of trumpets announcing Caesar’s arrival cues the Persian’s line, them refers not to Jews but to Egyptians, with whom Caesar has been dealing). Taking no chances, Pascal cut the exchange (CPP 2: 285; CS 138; SC 188–89).

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Whereas the PCA gave him less trouble, Rank’s Publicity Department gave him more—not because the material to promote the film contained too much sex but because it contained too little. Like the promotional department of United Artists, Rank’s publicity people insisted that advertisements for Cæsar and Cleopatra needed the promise of more s. a. than the film had. As Montagu said, unclothed parts of a woman’s body allow a maximum of sexuality as long as specific geographical areas are vague or hinted at, and film censors aimed to let nothing offend audiences while simultaneously ensuring a maximum of erotic stimulation—and in its advertisements of specific films, the promise of more sex appeal than is in the films. Movies must have “s. a.” The publicity personnel believed that advertisements for the movie needed more sex appeal. On the set, the first scene of Act 4 was nicknamed “Cleopatra’s pool,” around which and in which pretty actresses played her ladies. Rank’s Publicity Department, Marjorie Deans relates, wanting to meet the demands of Hollywood’s publicity people, with whom Rank had ordered them to comply, clamored for still photographs of the women, whom they wanted to look luscious and to wear as little as possible to boost s. a. in advertisements. But their costumes would not be ready until this scene was filmed, which it had not been. The head of this department was bothered not only by the delay but also if not more so by his desire for the girls to wear less than the costumes designed by Oliver Messel, one of the country’s foremost designers. This scene, the publicity chief explained, was the most glamorous in the film and still pictures of it would entice the public. However beautiful and authentic Messel’s costumes were, they revealed too little. Pascal tended to agree. They consulted with Messel, asking whether it might be possible—considering the requirements of the censors regarding modesty and decorum—to undress the women just a bit. Messel simply refused. After much argument, they resolved the deadlock by sparingly disarranging the women’s dresses, once they were ready, to reveal in photographs and in the film, a little more of a bosom in one part of the frame, a little more of a thigh in another, after which the ladies reclined beside the pool.35 One poster for the movie showed a drawing, like drawings of the Major Barbara posters described earlier, of Vivien Leigh, in a tight costume, displaying a bare shoulder and a good deal of cleavage, lying seductively against Caesar. The words promised “NEVER BEFORE SUCH SEDUCTIVE BEAUTY[,] SUCH RIOTOUS … LUXURIOUS … LOVING AND LIVING!” (CS dust cover and photograph following p. 208).

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Some reviews in Britain praised the film highly. A “tremendous achievement that brings increased honour to the British screen and is worthy of the mighty attempt,” reported the Daily Express. A “standard of artistry and realism hitherto unapproached by any British production,” said The Cinema. Others went to the opposite extreme. “More than a disappointment,” said the News Chronicle, it was “a dismal ordeal.” According to the New Statesman and Nation, Shaw’s dialogue sounded stagey. Caesar’s address to the Sphinx “seemed interminable,” jokes fell flat and Pascal’s editing resembled “desperate clockwork.” The consensus fell between these extremes. Though “entertaining enough to belie its long running time,” The Spectator opined, it was “an above average, yet unsensational, even ordinary film.” Not only is it “wordy,” but the wordiness “is scarcely sufficient to carry a full-length work.” In the United States, opinion also divided sharply. Film Daily called it “a classic delight for the discriminating theatregoer” and “a treat to the eye” of the average one. The New York Times praised Pascal for having “done a superior job in making a conversational drama both intellectual and spectacular” and having “made the movement of peoples dynamic to the eye and he has carefully directed discourses for actual physical suspense.” “As a spectacle, this Gabriel Pascal production does itself proud,” said Time, which eulogized Shaw: “But all the munificent movie art does not conceal art of a rarer, riper kind: the dialogue for this superspectacle was written by a great maser of prose and wit.” Even though “It has become fashionable to think of Shaw as a little musty and more than a little talkative,” nevertheless “audiences are likely to wonder whether it is possible to get enough movie talk as good as this.” To the Journal-American, the movie was “pretentious.” To The Sun, “All that beauty does not make up for all that talk.” The Hollywood Reporter deplored Pascal’s “slow, draggy pace and the clumsy staging of action” and attributed the film’s inadequacies chiefly to his direction. Variety was mainly negative. It has “prodigal magnificence” but “is a disappointment.” Despite “Sketchy references” to young Mark Antony “with strong, round, gleaming arms,” Stewart Granger appears halfway through the film “with flashing eyes, dazzling white teeth and a torso of burnished bronze.” Cleopatra passes him as though he were not “so obviously, so vibrantly [what he] is, a grand chunk of three-quarters nude male s. a.” But the reviewer played fair: “make no mistake about it, the prodigality of this $6 million spectacle”—which was the $US equivalent of the £1,500,000 figure mentioned above—“makes Griffith and DeMille and Von Stroheim look like niggards”36 (CS 144–45).

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Censorship of Shaw’s Films, Cleric and Laic Initially, film censorship by the Catholic Church, which falsely claimed it had nothing to do with film censorship, prevented the production of what would have been the first major film and first international distribution of a motion picture version of one of Shaw’s plays with a screenplay by him, Saint Joan. Hollywood censorship was responsible for numerous alterations of what became the first important film version of another of his plays, which he also adapted, Pygmalion. Yet thanks to producer Gabriel Pascal and director Anthony Asquith, enough of the essential qualities of what Shaw wrote emerged triumphantly. Furthermore, new scenes involving Freddy and Eliza, who kiss each other, make him what Shaw does not adequately make him in the play: a viable love interest for Eliza. Unfortunately, he does not “get the girl at the end”—or in this case more accurately, she the boy—since unlike Shaw’s screenplay she returns to Higgins’s flat in the film’s final moments. Although Hollywood censors pressured Pascal to butcher the dialogue of his next Shaw venture, Major Barbara, which he directed, the major expurgations were not because of censorship but because of long stretches of discussion. With the Church and the PCA in control, there was “no fettering of authority.” Even so, Shaw improved upon Major Barbara by his additional scenes for the screen, particularly a new beginning, which gives Barbara and Cusins the prominence they require in order for their views to balance those of Undershaft. Although talkies had replaced movies by 1940, when it was made, to film makers, whose initial experiences of cinema were silent movies, and younger film makers who had been influenced by these movie makers, the differences between drama and cinema outweighed their similarities. However, as Shaw said ten years earlier, “Drama is a method of rearranging the higgledy-piggledy happenings of actual life in such a way as to make them intelligible and thinkable. Its forms, processes, and instruments include the stage, the screen, the camera, the microphone, the actor”; cinema is new only in the sense that “a new instrument added to the orchestra or a new verse form” is new (SC 63–64). To too many established motion picture makers at the time, talkies should be more like movies: they should show, not tell. Telling was for the stage. Over a decade after The Jazz Singer, they wanted talkies to remain like movies. To them, dialogue, especially Shavian dialogue, was not an asset but a liability. It is little wonder that many American reviewers praised—perhaps overly praised—Shaw’s witty and literate language, as did many moviegoers. It

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was new to the cinema and they loved it. Ironically, Cæsar and Cleopatra is more faithful to Shaw’s play and screenplay, notably to their dialogue, than either of Pascal’s other Shavian films are, but it was less successful. Although Cæsar and Cleopatra is mediocre, the reason is not its fidelity to the author’s language, but its director, who was not as expert in motion picture making as he needed to have been (CS 138).

Notes 1. Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, trans. and ed. Iris Barry (New York: W.W.  Norton and the Museum of Modern Art, 1938), pp. 4–5, 10. 2. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925 (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 13; “A Brief History of Film Censorship.” National Coalition Against Censorship,” https://ncac.org/resource/a-briefhistory-of-film-censorship (accessed 25 April 2019); “The Kiss (1896),” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDc7BuNFefA (accessed 25 April 2019); Tim Dirks, “Sex in Film Pre-1920s,” AMC Filmsite, https://www. filmsite.org/sexinfilms1.html (accessed 25 April 2019); Guy Phelps, Film Censorship (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), p. 19; The Soldier’s Courtship (1896) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P8PuaeEDdM (accessed 25 April 2019); Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, trans. and ed. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp.  213–14, 232 n. 16. 3. Bernard Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 110; “Cinematograph Bill,” HC Debate 21 April 1909, Hansard 1803–2005, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1909/apr/21/cinematograph-bill (accessed 24 April 2019). 4. Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, p.  6 n; Cinematograph Act, 1909, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1909/30/pdfs/ukpga_19090030_en.pdf (accessed 22 March 2018); Mary Blume, “Remembering a Belle Époque inferno in Paris,” New York Times, 28 April 2008, https://www.nytimes. com/2008/04/28/arts/28iht-blume.1.12390921.html (accessed 28 April 2019); “Cinematograph Bill,” HC Debate 21 April 1909, Hansard 1803-2. 5. Tony Fletcher, “The London Council and the Cinematograph, 1896–1900,” Living Pictures: the Journal of the Popular and Projected Image Before 1914 (2001) 1.2: 71–72, 74–76. 6. Dean Rapp, “Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic, and the British Film Industry,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies

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(Autumn 2001), 34.3: 422–24; Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, pp. 49–50, 96–98. 7. Dean Rapp, “Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic, and the British Film Industry,” pp. 436–39, 444, 449. 8. Guy Phelps, Film Censorship, pp.  20–21, 26–27, 29; Frank Fowell and Frank Palmer, Censorship in England (London: Frank Palmer, 1913), pp. 313–15, 317. 9. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925, pp. 15–19. 10. “The 1870 Education Act,” Living Heritage, https://www.parliament. uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/school/ overview/1870educationact/ (accessed 8 May 2019); W.B.  Stephens, “Literacy in England, Scotland, and Wales, 1500–1900,” History of Education Quarterly (Winter 1990) 30.4: 548. 11. “Ivor Montagu (1904–1984).” http://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0598749/?ref_=nv_sr_1 (accessed 26 March 2018); Ivor Montagu, Film World (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), pp.  96, 187–92; “The Take,” 23 February 2017, Parlay Studios, https://parlaystudios.com/ blog/feature-film-budget-breakdown/ (accessed 3 September 2019). 12. Stephen Follows, “How Much Does the Average Movie Cost to Make?” 8 July 2019, Stephen Follows Film Data and Education, https://stephenfollows.com/how-much-does-the-average-movie-cost-to-make/ (accessed 3 September 2019). 13. The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917), pp. lxxxii–lxxxiv, 104; https://babel.hathitrust.org/ cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t41r6q38z;view=1up;seq=8 (accessed 2 May 2019); “BBFC 1912–1949,” British Board of Film Classification, http:// www.bbfc.co.uk/education-resources/student-guide/bbfc-history/1912-1949 (accessed 22 March 2018); Guy Phelps, Film Censorship, pp.  29–31; Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925, p. 120. 14. Ivor Montagu, “The Censorship of Sex in Films,” W.L.S.R.: World League for Sexual Reform: Proceedings of the Third Congress (London: K.  Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1930), 323–24; Caterina Cowden, “Movie Attendance Has Been on a Dismal Decline since the 1940s,” Business Insider, 6 January 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com/movie-attendance-over-theyears-2015-1 (accessed 13 November 2019). 15. Ivor Montagu, “The Censorship of Sex in Films,” pp. 323–24. 16. Nicholas Pronay, “Introduction,” Nicholas Pronay and D.W. Spring, ed., Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 15–16; “Tailors on Strike in the West End,” New York Times, 2 May 1912, https://www.nytimes.com/1912/05/02/archives/tailors-onstrike-in-the-west-end-and-fashionable-london-will-have.html (accessed

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23 July 2019); John Rennie, “1912: a year of strikes in the East End of London,” 25 August 1917, libcom.org, https://libcom.org/history/1912year-strikes-east-end-london (accessed 4 May 2019); “Mass strikes in Britain: the ‘Great Labour Unrest’, 1910–1914,” 9 February 2011, International Communist Current, https://en.internationalism.org/ worldrevolution/201102/4209/mass-strikes-britain-great-labourunrest-1910-1914 (accessed 4 May 2019); Nicholas Pronay, “The Political Censorship of Films in Britain Between the Wars,” Nicholas Pronay and D.W. Spring, ed., Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–1945, pp. 102–04, 110, 122; Bert Hogenkamp, “The Workers’ Film Movement in Britain, 1929–39,” Nicholas Pronay and D.W.  Spring, ed., Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–1945, pp. 146; Ivor Montagu, Film World, p. 265. 17. Ivor Montagu, Film World, pp.  270–71; Ivor Montagu, The Political Censorship of Films (London: Victor Gollancz, 1929), pp. 3–5, 9–14. 18. Dorothy Knowles, The Censor, The Drama and The Film 1930–1934 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), p.  216; Ivor Montagu, The Political Censorship of Films, pp. 14–15; Legal Dictionary, https://legaldictionary.net/plausible-deniability/ (accessed 22 May 2019); Goddard, Taegan, Political Dictionary, https://politicaldictionary.com/words/ plausible-deniability/ (accessed 22 May 2019). 19. “Our History,” The Silver Lady Fund, http://www.silverladyfund.org/ about-us/history/ (accessed 11 February 2018); “Elizabeth Baxter Hostel,” Companies House, https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00099804 (accessed 6 June 2019). 20. Ivor Montagu, “The Censorship of Sex in Films,” pp. 330–32. 21. “The Film Society: 1925–1939,” British Film Institute, http://www.bfi. org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-the-film-society1925-1939-a-guide-to-collections.pdf (accessed 23 January 2018), pp. 1–2; The Film Society Programmes 1925–1939 (New York: Arno Press, 1972), pp. 1–3, 10–11, 18, 22, 24, 30, 98, 130–31. 22. The Constitution of the United States, p.  11, https://constitutioncenter. org/media/files/constitution.pdf (accessed 10 May 2019); Domagoj Valjak, “Blockbuster: the origin of the term and the story of The Birth of a Nation, a controversial Hollywood Hit,” The Vintage News, 9 April 2018, https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/04/09/blockbuster/ (accessed 10 May 2019); Michael Pullen, Paxton Rigby, and Shane Walker, “The Birth of a Nation (1915),” 15 November 2016, The Censorship Files, https://thecensorshipfiles.wordpress.com/the-birth-of-a-nation/ (accessed 25 April 2019); “An NAACP Official Calls for Censorship of The Birth of a Nation. History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu. edu/d/4966 (accessed 10 May 2019); Dorian Lynsky, “‘A Public Menace’: How the fight to ban The Birth of a Nation shaped the nascent

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civil rights ­movement,” 31 March 2015, Slate, https://slate.com/culture/2015/03/the-birth-of-a-nation-how-the-fight-to-censor-d-wgriffiths-film-shaped-american-history.html (accessed 10 May 2019); “Ohio Constitution: The 1851 Constitution with Amendments to 2015,” The Ohio Legislature, https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/laws/ohio-constitution/section?const=1.11 (accessed 10 May 2019); “United States Supreme Court Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, (1915), No. 456. Decided: February 23, 1915,” Findlaw for Legal Professionals, https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/236/230. html (accessed 24 September 2018). 23. “A Brief History of Film Censorship,” The Motion Picture Production Code, http://productioncode.dhwritings.com/multipleframes_productioncode.php (accessed 1 September 2018); “The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code),” ArtsReformation, updated 12 April 2006, http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html (accessed 23 May 2018); “Useful Notes/The Hays Code.” TV Tropes, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/ TheHaysCode?from=Main.HaysCode (accessed 24 May 2018). 24. An Act to Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, https:// law.scu.edu/wp-content/uploads/hightech/1909%20Act%20as%20 enacted.pdf (accessed 16 November 2019); Miranda J. Banks, The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), pp. 6–8, 14, 41; Catherine L. Fisk, Screen Credit and the Writers Guild of America, 1938–2000: A Study in Labor Market and Idea Market Intermediation, http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/ default/files/ECM_PRO_067662.pdf (accessed 13 November 2019), pp.  7–8; John Meroney, “William Faulkner’s Hollywood Odyssey: The Biggest Name in Southern Lit didn’t spend his whole life in Mississippi,” Garden & Gun, April–May 2014 https://gardenandgun.com/feature/ william-faulkners-hollywood-odyssey/ (accessed 14 November 2019). 25. See Appendix B to Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan: A Screenplay, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), pp. 143–47. The original notes and other marks by Catholic Action on Shaw’s Saint Joan screenplay are in the British Library, Add. MS 50634; see also Add. MS 50633. 26. “Shaw ‘Muddled,’ Catholics Hold: Leaders Here Say Complaint Is Aimed at Non-Existent Group,” New York Times, 15 September 1936, p.  36; Frank S.  Nugent, “Don Shaw Tilts at Censors,” New York Times, 20 September 1936, Sect. X, p. 5. Quotations from and paraphrases of Pope Pius XI are from Harry W.  Rudman, “Shaw’s Saint Joan and Motion Picture Censorship,” Shaw Bulletin (September 1958), 2: 1–3. The matter concerning Bridie is drawn from my interview with Bergner, 6 January

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1976, and from Elisabeth Bergner, Bewundert viel und viel gescholten (München: Bertelsmann Verlag, 1978), pp. 165–67. 27. Graham Greene, “The Cinema.” The Spectator, No. 5,600, 25 October 1935, p. 663. The matter of Preminger’s unawareness of Shaw’s screenplay is from my interview with him, 14 January 1967. For a fuller analysis of the screenplay he wrote for Preminger’s motion picture version of the play, see Bernard F.  Dukore, “‘Responsibility to Another’?—Graham Greene’s Screen Version of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan,” Theatre History Studies (1996), 16: 3–13; Anthony Slide, “Banned in the USA”: British Films in the United States and Their Censorship, 1933–1960 (London: J.B.  Tauris Publishers, 1998), p. 175. 28. Richard Huggett, The Truth About Pygmalion (London: William Heinemann, 1969), pp. 84–85, 161–62. 29. Derek John McGovern, “Eliza Undermined: The Romanticisation of Shaw’s Pygmalion” (Ph.D.  Dissertation, Massey University, Turita Campus, New Zealand, 2011), pp. 193–95; Anthony Slide, “Banned in the USA”: British Films in the United States and Their Censorship, 1933–1960, p. 25. 30. Running time of Pascal’s print and showing at the British Film Institute: letter, Jeremy Boulton (British Film Institute) to me, 13 April 1977; the accurate running time of its New York première is in Terry Ramsaye, ed., 1939–1940 International Motion Picture Almanac (New York: Quigley Publishing Co., n.d.), p.  652 n 92, and Anthony Slide, “Banned in the USA”: British Films in the United States and Their Censorship, 1933–1960, pp.  4, 56, 101; the DVD of the film in Criterion’s Eclipse Series (#20, 2010), which presents it without any DVD extras, runs 121 minutes (IMdb’s citation, according to the accurate Ramsaye and Slide is incorrect); considering that Criterion usually provides restorations of the most complete film available, it is unfortunate that Major Barbara was Eclipsed; YouTube’s Major Barbara are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_ vaAz0SplY (accessed 28 May 2018), 116 minutes, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FTMnMseHQ8 (accessed 28 May 2018), 120 minutes; Rotten Tomatoes, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/major_ barbara (accessed 30 May 2019); first American showing of Pascal’s print, letter to me from Benjamin J. Magliano (PBS), 19 April 1977. 31. Marjorie Deans, “Nero’s Fiddle: My Wartime Life with GBS and Gaby” (unpublished, undated, and uncompleted MS, Shaw Collection, University of Guelph), p. 105. 32. In author’s personal collection. 33. “The Cinema: The Ramparts We Watch,” The Spectator, 11 April 1941, p. 11, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/11th-april-1941/11/%2D% 2Dthe-cinema-the-ramparts-we-watch-at-the-gaumont- (accessed 17 May

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2018); Bosley Crowther. “George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara at the Astor,” New York Times, 15 May 1941, p.  27; https://timesmachine. nytimes.com/timesmachine/1941/05/15/85365566.pdf (accessed 17 May 2018). 34. Cæsar and Cleopatra, Internet Broadway Database, https://www.imdb. com/title/tt00038390/ (accessed 4 June 2019). A print on YouTube runs 122 minutes: Cæsar and Cleopatra, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vcOAS0ylQv4 (accessed 4 June 2019). Amazon.co.uk lists the running time of two different DVDs of the picture as 128 and 122 minutes: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Caesar-Cleopatra-DVD-ClaudeRains/dp/B0000634BX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1BWXX7JZEFMII&keywords =caesar+and+cleopatra+dvd&qid=1559656425&s=dvd&sprefix=caesar+ and+c%2Caps%2C475&sr=1-1 and https://www.amazon.co.uk/ CAESAR-CLEOPATRA-George-Bernard-Shaw/dp/B001ED5NJA/ref= sr_1_3?crid=1BWXX7JZEFMII&keywords=caesar+and+cleopatra+dvd& qid=1559656569&s=dvd&sprefix=caesar+and+c%2Caps%2C475&sr=1-3 (both accessed 4 June 2019); Anthony Slide, “Banned in the USA”: British Films in the United States and Their Censorship, 1933–1960, pp. 46–47. 35. Marjorie Deans, “Nero’s Fiddle: My Wartime Life with GBS and Gaby,” pp. 157–58. 36. Bosley Crowther, “Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra Film Opens at the Astor— Rains and Leigh Co-Stars—New Bill at Loew’s State,” New York Times, 6 September 1946, p.  18, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1946/09/06/121026874.pdf (accessed 17 May 2018); “Cinema: The New Pictures,” Time, 19 August 1946, 98, http://content.time. com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,887131,00.html (accessed 17 August 1946); “Caesar and Cleopatra,” Variety, 31 December 1945, h t t p : / / v a r i e t y. c o m / 1 9 4 5 / f i l m / r e v i e w s / c a e s a r- a n d - c l e o p a tra-1200414792/ (accessed 17 May 2018).

CHAPTER 5

The Erosion of Stage and Screen Censorship

Fall, and cease. —William Shakespeare, King Lear, V.iii

Stage Censorship On 8 May 1956, six years after Shaw died, the Royal Court Theatre, which in his time was usually called the Court Theatre, gave the first performance of Look Back in Anger by twenty-six-year-old John Osborne. Its title provided a name for his generation of dramatists and novelists: angry young men. Like Shaw, they were anti-Establishment, and the invective of its protagonist, Jimmy Porter, suggested parallels with the tirades of John Tanner in Man and Superman, which had premièred at the same theatre in 1905. Unlike Tanner, who inveighed against capitalism and middle-­ class morality, and who championed socialism, Jimmy Porter ranted that no one had convictions or cared about anything anymore, that there were no good causes left to die for, and that death for whatever might replace what Aldous Huxley called a Brave New World, the title of his dystopian novel borrowed from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, would be as meaningless and ignoble as walking in front of a moving bus. Not since Shaw, said Nicholas de Jongh, “had there been such an agitating dramatist and agent provocateur.” Osborne confronted the Lord Chamberlain’s vetoes “with determination and fury.” Like Shaw and others, he had to alter dialogue to obtain a license for his play to be performed publicly. Among the lines © The Author(s) 2020 B. F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw and the Censors, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52186-8_5

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that offended the Lord Chamberlain was “Thought of the title for a new song today. It’s called ‘There’s a smoke-screen in my pubic hair.’” Osborne replaced the title with “‘You can quit hanging round my counter Mildred ’cos you’ll find my position is closed,’” a joke the official apparently did not get. Look Back in Anger was licensed and shocked audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, although not usually for sexually suggestive banter. Kenneth Tynan’s review began: “‘They are scum,’ was Mr Maugham’s famous verdict on the class of State-aided university students to which Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim belongs,” and it belonged to Osborne’s protagonist too. Ironically, Amis’s 1954 novel, named for its title character, won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction the year before Look Back in Anger opened, which prompted Maugham to announce he was appalled that such a “vulgar” novel had received it. Those who share Maugham’s opinion, of whom there must be many, Tynan’s review continued, should stay away from Osborne’s play, “which is all scum and a mile wide.” He concluded, “I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.” Upon reading this, I assumed that most of those he could be fond of were young, and I was younger than he and Osborne were. The Royal Court production moved to Broadway. When the box office yielded dwindling returns, its producer, David Merrick, hired a young woman to sit in the audience and appear to be so disturbed by Jimmy’s misogynistic rants that she walked onto the stage and slapped Kenneth Haigh (who played Jimmy, as he had done in London)—seemingly, an act of personal censorship. For weeks, newspapers ran the story, by which time box office proceeds rose and Merrick confessed the incident was a publicity stunt.1 In 1964, the Examiner of Plays wrote a three-page objection to the vulgar dialogue of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane and an Assistant Examiner warned, “‘There is no attempt to deal with the subject of homosexuality in a serious manner.’” “That was true,” de Jongh says, “but this fact bothered no one.” It was produced the same year. Next year, the Royal Court, which had earned a reputation for discovering young, vital dramatists, produced two plays that proved more controversial than Look Back in Anger. In July, the Lord Chamberlain refused to license Osborne’s A Patriot for Me because of its theme of homosexuality—not treated vulgarly there. Based on the true story of Colonel Alfred Redl, a homosexual officer in the Austro-Hungarian army in the years shortly before World War I, whom the Russians blackmailed (twenty years after Osborne’s play, István Szabó directed the film Colonel Redl, based on the same character), the play’s climax is a drag ball with the upper classes of Austrian society.

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Using Victorian and Edwardian precedents, the Royal Court turned itself into a private club and presented the uncut play for members only. In November came the more controversial Saved, by Edward Bond, with violence that outraged critics and spectators. In its most shocking scene, lower-class young men torture and kill an infant in a baby carriage. One “violently” pushes the pram toward another, who stops it “straight on the flat of his boot and sends it back with the utmost ferocity.” When the first man sidesteps it, a third catches it, only to have the first pull it from him, spin it around, and push it “violently” toward the second. The three pull the child’s hair, punch it, throw its diaper in the air, laugh at its defecation, hit the infant, violently jerk the pram, rub the baby’s face in its own excrement, and throw stones and burning matches into the pram. The Lord Chamberlain demanded major cuts and changes before he would license Saved. Instead of complying, the Royal Court again became a private club and presented it for members only. In 1967, Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers, submitted by the National Theatre, whose artistic director was Laurence Olivier and whose literary manager was Kenneth Tynan, was denied a license because it maligned Winston Churchill, who it suggested was complicit in the death of Polish General Władysław Sikorski, Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile during World War II.2 Although these plays did not cause the abolition of censorship, they were steps in that direction. In 1966, Prime Minister Harold Wilson established a Joint Committee on Censorship of the Theatre, which held hearings and deliberated from 1966 through 1967. As de Jongh says, “The House of Lords debate was a typically English occasion, tinged with hypocrisy and humbuggery. The intention was to send the Lord Chamberlain to the blazes in a glow of glory and not to mention the damage he had done to the vitality of the British stage.” L.W. Conolly reports that the Lord Chamberlain himself told the committee “it was ‘absurd that theatre censorship should now be in a completely separate compartment’ from other creative media such as films, radio, and television, none of which are controlled by any means of official or external censorship,” and that he disapproved the fact that power over the theatre “should be ‘entrusted to any one individual without any form of policy supervision or any provision for appeal.’” In a debate in the House of Lords on 17 February 1967, Baron Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor, who was also the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords, said, unlike any public official who had testified to the 1909 committee, “I hope it will not be thought I am too much prejudiced as a lawyer if I say that I have a preference for having our laws administered by judges and

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juries.” The real question, he proposed, Shavianly, is not whether one should be free to put on any play without penalty, but whether “theatres, like most other things in our country, [should] be subject to the rule of law, of the courts, in the ordinary way,” or whether there should be pre-­ censorship. He alluded to Shaw several times. On the differences between a play and a novel, he continued—referencing Gilbert—that one might say, “‘If you read in a book that a woman had taken her clothes off and had a bath, that would be quite all right; but it would be very different on the stage.’” But if one thinks about it, he added—referencing Shaw’s rejoinder to Gilbert—“the whole thing is ridiculous, because any actress who did this would at once be ‘run in’ by the police.” He quoted Shaw’s written testimony to the 1909 committee, which so shocked its members that “when Shaw attended to give oral evidence that they all solemnly handed back their copies of it to him,” in which Shaw called himself a specialist in immoral plays that attempt to persuade the public to reconsider its morality and to convert it to his own views. The absurd position we have got into today is that, after all, you do not have to go to the theatre: you go only if you want to; and it is quite expensive. You obviously do not go to see a play unless you know the sort of play it is. Yet the very play which may be banned by the Lord Chamberlain may be brought into your home on television.

Like Shaw he approved immoral and heretical plays, as Shaw defined them, and like Shaw he would regret an enlightened censorship more than the existing one. Not all members of the House of Lords agreed. On 19 June 1967, the committee issued its report, which concluded that all pre-­ censorship should end, that the theatre should have the same freedom of speech, subject to criminal laws, that apply to the other arts, and that the Lord Chamberlain’s licensing powers should be abolished and not replaced by another type of pre-censorship. For a long time nothing happened, since the primary motive of the Lord Chamberlain, the Prime Minister and the cabinet was to protect the status and authority of the royal family from satirical or malicious attacks. They remembered that among Fleet Street’s stories about the Profumo sex-and-spy scandal in the early 1960s was the suggestion that Queen Elizabeth II’s husband Prince Philip was involved and that, as Chap. 3 notes, scandal attended some actions by her younger sister, Princess Margaret. In the theatre, Bond’s Early Morning (1968), given one private performance in March, provoked the monarchy

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further by dramatizing an outrageous vision of Victorian England in which Disraeli connives with Prince Albert to kill Queen Victoria, who has given birth to two Siamese twins and who rapes Florence Nightingale, with whom she has a lesbian love affair and whom she persuades to poison Albert, whom she strangles. Unsurprisingly, the committee’s recommendations were not acted upon.3 What precipitated the abolition of English censorship was a minimalist one-act play by Harold Pinter, whose first full-length play, The Birthday Party, had been performed on the West End only two years after the production of Look Back in Anger. On 22 January 1968, Martin Esslin records, the London press reported that the dramatist refused to cut Landscape as the Lord Chamberlain demanded. Landscape has no invective, infanticide, homosexuality, or regicide. What it has is what Esslin calls “a few strong words,” the major point of contention being a word on the Examiner of Play’s list of taboos, and it comes at the end of a short speech: “There’s nothing for lunch. There’s nothing cooked. No stew. No pie. No greens. No joint. Fuck all.” In the early 1970s, Esslin told me that one of Pinter’s colleagues or friends, whom I did not ask him to identify, suggested he change the term to “Bugger all.” Pinter refused, tersely explaining, “I need a monosyllable.” At the time of our conversation, neither Esslin nor I remembered that Pinter used the recommended phrase earlier in the play: “This fellow knew bugger all about beer.” When the Lord Chamberlain rejected the play, Esslin, who was Head of Radio Drama at the BBC, offered to produce it on radio, which was outside the censor’s jurisdiction. Pinter accepted the offer and the first performance of Landscape, on 25 April 1968, resulted in the play reaching an audience of millions, obviously larger than any stage production would have done. The preposterousness of the censorship was clear for all to see, and they saw. In this case, they also heard. Shaw turned out to have been mistaken when he said that the abolition of censorship required the abolition of the monarchy. What occurred were the increasing importance of radio as a dramatic medium and the changing mores over time—231 years since the Licensing Act of 1737, to be exact. In July 1968, both houses of Parliament passed the Theatres Act of 1968, which abolished theatre censorship. The Act received the Royal Assent on 26 July 1968, and on 2 July 1969, Landscape was presented on stage in London, on a double bill with Pinter’s Silence. As no one appears to have noticed until now, the date of the Royal Assent was Shaw’s birthday. This was not the result of a mischievous decision by a House of Lords clerk. Rather, Frances Thompson, Assistant

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Private Secretary to the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords, confirmed to me by email, it was “a happy coincidence.” On July 26th, the final sitting day in the House of Commons before the summer recess, she reported, “38 Acts received Royal Assent. The Theatres Bill finished its passage through Parliament the day before,” which “meant the Bill was finished just in time to receive Royal Assent before the summer recess.”4 The end of stage censorship occurring on the birthday of the leader of the campaign against it provides an appropriate conclusion and a recompense for Shaw’s treatment in 1909. Since the new law did not go into effect until September 26th, two months later, theatre managers had time to prepare to produce plays that did not receive or would not have received licenses. However, one play had been prepared and was ready to go. On September 27th, one night after the Royal Assent took effect, Hair (“a hippie musical from America,” The Times described it) in which, the Sunday Times noted, “a number of young people of both sexes [displayed] themselves stark naked before an eagerly expectant audience,” opened on the West End, an occasion that was “in effect … a triumphal dance over the grave of the Lord Chamberlain,” for as Conolly observes, “completely nude figures appeared on the British stage for the first time.” Because the musical’s producers knew exactly when the Royal Assent would take effect, they ensured that the opening of Hair would include nudity—and profanity as well. Since it ran for almost 2000 performances, not everyone was appalled. In November, the National Theatre produced Soldiers, which the Financial Times reminded its readers the Lord Chamberlain had turned down the year before. The same month the Royal Court Theatre went further than Hair had gone, presenting the American Michael McClure’s The Beard, which is not only replete with four-letter words, it also features Billy the Kid performing cunnilingus on the ghost of Jean Harlow. The Royal Court hedged its bets by announcing that the play was “so sophisticated” it would not be performed until 10:30 at night, which was past the bedtime for children (and their grandparents), but choice time for young adults and teenagers. That the day had long since come for the termination of stage censorship is indicated by Scotland Yard’s response, as paraphrased by The Times’s article just cited, that it would deal with matters by officers who examine obscene publications but “would not be sending officers to first nights, and would rely largely on information provided by the public.”5 How Shaw would have regarded Saved (at “his” theatre, the Royal Court) in 1965 is impossible to say, for—in addition to its first

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performance taking place after he died—no one could claim it is in the Shavian tradition. As it was unlicensed and privately performed, he may have castigated the censorship for making it difficult for the general public to see it, but he perhaps would have been pleased that it was available for audiences that elected to go. He would certainly have been happy in 1968 that at last censorship became a thing of the past—with or without the end of the British monarchy—and he may have been amused at the irony that the Queen royally assented on his birthday. Whether or not he would have personally approved of Hair or The Beard is impossible to determine, but it is doubtful he would have disapproved of the nudity in Hair, except possibly to express concern, as he had done earlier, as Chap. 2 mentions, about London’s weather affecting unclothed performers. Even though the United States has not had national censorship, municipal disapprobation of alleged indecency, as we also saw in Chap. 2 in connection with Mrs Warren’s Profession and in Chap. 3 in connection with burlesque, was bad enough. In December 1958, off-Broadway’s Orpheum Theatre produced John Ford’s seventeenth-century play ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. However, an old New York City ordinance prohibiting the word whore on a theatre marquee remained in effect. The producers substituted ’Tis Pity She’s a … on the marquee and in advertisements. In terms of publicity, the ellipsis was an attention-getter. I heard teenagers and adults ask what She was. Such alterations of title have a precedent in Victorian and Edwardian times. According to Cecil Raleigh’s testimony to the 1909 Joint Select Committee, the Turkish Embassy protested a play called Secrets of the Harem, which had been touring the provinces for several years, on the basis that it was offensive to the sultan of Turkey. The Lord Chamberlain immediately withdrew its license and stopped the tour. He later reissued it on the understanding that Harem must be omitted from the title. It reopened as Secrets  – – –. “Everybody knew what the three blanks meant,” said Raleigh. “The Press commented upon the matter, but the Lord Chamberlain took no further action” (1909 Report 117). The next decade heralded other changes in New  York. The colorful, populist Fiorello LaGuardia was gone, and in 1966, the urbane John Lindsay became mayor. Four years earlier, the legendary striptease star Ann Corio (in her early sixties, which her face and figure belied) returned burlesque to the city, opening This Was Burlesque, which Rachel Shteir aptly calls a “nostalgic, feel-good spectacle,” at off-Broadway’s Casino East (formerly the Orpheum Theatre, where ’Tis Pity She’s a … had played). It was so successful, it ran over three years, moving to other

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off-Broadway venues. This Was Burlesque had strippers, baggy-pants comedians, “talking girls” (beautiful, sparsely clad women who had dialogue with the comedians), and Corio in a finale. When I saw it, which I did at least twice, it had become family entertainment. Teenagers were in the audience with their parents; they laughed at the comedians and talking girls, and applauded Corio’s artistry. In one skit, the top banana (a burlesque show’s leading comedian) asked a talking girl, “Do you believe in the hereafter?” “Why, of course I do,” she replied. “Well,” he said with a leer, “you know what I’m here after.” Another comedian told a story of a woman who goes to a dentist’s office. “He looks into her mouth and says, ‘That tooth, it’s got to come out right away.’ ‘Oh, no,’ she screeches. ‘I’d rather have another baby than have my tooth pulled.’ He says, ‘Make up your mind, lady, before I tilt this chair back.’” As Corio said during the run, “we’re really quite mild compared to what children are exposed to on television,” and at another time, “We do nothing you wouldn’t write home about to your aunt in East Cupcake, Ohio.” To 1960s New York audiences, such jokes were old-fashioned fun. As the New York Times review said, some of “the baggy pants routines, the double takes, the squirting seltzer bottles, the raucous guttural sounds” are “really blue and, occasionally, vulgar. But only the bluest nose could refrain from laughing at the comedy in This Was Burlesque.”6 I do not know if Corio was right about the residents of East Cupcake, but to borrow what Shaw said of the Irish about the propriety of a passage in Blanco Posnet, I am content to let them judge for themselves.

Screen Censorship Chapter 4 quotes Ivor Montagu in 1930, that because the motion picture industry has no conscience, if it were permitted to satisfy a market for pornography it would readily do so. Add “violence” and the statement is equally true. Since market forces prevail, film makers create products for both markets, which overlap. Hundreds of “spaghetti westerns,” hallmarks of which are brutality and violence, became popular in Europe and America—the best of them, by common consent, being Sergio Leone’s trilogy beginning with A Fistful of Dollars, in the mid-sixties. When Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch opened in 1969, few predicted that half a century later graphic depictions of violence would make some of what he created in this masterpiece seem tame, although his directorial skills remain outstanding. Jimmy Porter’s complaint of the boredom of Sundays is no

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longer true. The Sunday observance acts have been repealed. Jimmy Porter may now go to the theatre and cinema on Sunday, and in both, the offerings are beyond what he or Montagu might have imagined. As Bob Dylan recognized in his 1963 song, referenced in Chap. 3, “The times they are a-changin’.” As they changed, regulations and codes started a-changin’, albeit more slowly than the times did. Alterations began in Great Britain and the United States the decade following Shaw’s death, the period of Look Back in Anger, when Orson Welles’s film adaptation of Othello—previously, miscegenation had prohibited a motion picture version of it in the United States and the United Kingdom—received the Grand Prix at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival. In 1955, it was released in the United States, and in 1956 in the United Kingdom. Another sign of changing standards was Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. It was first published (in English) in 1955 by Olympia Press, a Parisian firm specializing in books banned, usually because of eroticism, in English-language countries, and avant-garde novels, notably Samuel Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. After receiving accolades from distinguished novelists, Lolita was published in the United States in 1958 and in England the year after. The New York Times review called it “dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion,” “repulsive,” and “disgusting”; its author “does not write cheap pornography. He writes highbrow pornography.” The Manchester Guardian review tried to be even-handed: “its subject is an abnormal and perverted man: and to some people he and the portrayal of him will be too repellent for pleasure. But others will find the narration extremely funny and the satire sharp, if bitter.” Judicious disapprobation arrived in the next sentence: “it deserves the strictures of obscenity now being cast upon it.” Censure was not universal. The Atlantic conveyed judicious approbation: a sexual love affair between a middle-aged man and a twelve-year-old girl “inevitably conjure[s] up expectations of pornography. But there is not a single obscene term in Lolita, and aficionados of erotica are likely to find it a dud.” Nabokov, who “has few living equals as a virtuoso in the handling of the English language,” has created a “hundred-proof intellectual farce.” Next consider the first film version of it, by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, which would have been unthinkable half a dozen years earlier. Consider too the famous poster advertising it: Sue Lyon, who plays Lolita, looks at us provocatively while wearing sunglasses and sucking a lollipop, both red and heart-shaped. Above her is the tag-line, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” (a French poster, which adorns a wall of one of my local

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restaurants, has the image and tag-line in French). Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times quotes the latter (in English) and answers, “They didn’t.” The characters in Kubrick’s movie, he explains, have the same names as those in the book, the plot resembles the original, and some incidents are only vaguely similar. Foremost among their differences is that Lolita “is not a child in the movie.” Lyon “looks to be a good 17 years old, possessed of a striking figure and a devilishly haughty teen-age air” (she was 16). Although Crowther grants his “distinction is fine,” it seems unusual today that one would be calm about a middle-age man’s sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl.7 If it were written today, would it have an easier time finding a mainstream publisher than the 1950s? It would still be controversial. Times appear to have changed, but as Aesop tells us in “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” “Appearances are often deceiving.” Often, not always. Much has changed. 1979 saw Hal Ashby’s movie Being There, about a retarded, soft-spoken, mild-mannered gardener named Chance, who cannot read or write, who receives information about the world only from television (“I like to watch” is its most famous line), who (therefore?) speaks in platitudes, who political powers seriously suggest would be a viable presidential candidate and who at the end literally walks on water, an action associated with only one person. This image, which concludes the film, would have scandalized G.A. Redford in England and Will Hays in the United States, and their successors in both countries. Chapter 4 relates that in 1915 the Supreme Court held, apropos The Birth of a Nation, that movies were simply business, therefore, as Kristin Hunt puts it, “no different from the pharmaceutical or banking industry, both of which were subject to federal regulation.” A major change from this view occurred in 1950, when Joseph Burstyn released The Miracle, directed by the Italian neo-realist Roberto Rossellini, where the New York commissioner of licenses decreed it was “‘officially and personally blasphemous’” and ordered the theatre to stop screening it, which it did. Burstyn challenged this. Ruling against him, the New  York Court of Appeals agreed it was “‘sacrilegious’” and treated religion “‘with contempt, mockery, scorn and ridicule.’” In 1952, Burstyn took the case to the Supreme Court, which reversed this decision, thereby reversing the 1915 decision that freedom of speech did not apply to motion pictures. “It cannot be doubted that motion pictures are a significant medium for the communication of ideas,” said Justice Tom Clark for the majority. This 1952 decision affirmed that film was entitled to freedom of speech protections and

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“New York’s prior restraint on showing The Miracle was unconstitutional.” Nevertheless, local censorship boards continued to cut and ban motion pictures. In 1953, the New York Court of Appeals upheld the ban of the French La Ronde (“sexual immorality”), directed by Max Ophüls, and the Ohio Court of Appeals upheld that of Joseph Losey’s American remake of Fritz Lang’s German film M (“harmful”). The Supreme Court reversed both decisions. In 1958, Ohio used an anti-obscenity law to ban Louis Malle’s Les Amants (The Lovers)—not so much because of graphic sex, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), but rather because it celebrated adultery. The Supreme Court reversed the decision, and the following year it decreed that the First Amendment protected the sympathetic portrayal of adultery in the film version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. During the next decade, Appellate Courts and the Supreme Court “consistently rejected efforts to censor films.”8 Probably the most important decision of the United States Supreme Court concerning the protection of the First Amendment to motion pictures, and a giant step to ending licensing systems, occurred in 1965. In 1962, Ronald Freedman, a film exhibitor in Maryland, released Revenge at Daybreak, a 1952 French movie about the Irish Revolution, without a license from the state. As he was arrested, he told his employees to change the marquee to read “Fight for Freedom of the Screen.” He based his case on the First Amendment. Three years later Freedman v. Maryland reached the Supreme Court, which decided unanimously in his favor. Justice William O. Douglas wrote the 1965 decision, affirming that “movies are entitled to the same degree and kind of protection under the First Amendment as other forms of expression.” No form of censorship, he said, no matter how speedy, was permissible. He added, “I would put an end to all forms and types of censorship and give full literal meaning to the command of the First Amendment.” This ruling did not herald a golden age that ended motion picture censorship because the decision did not explicitly declare prior restraint to be unconstitutional. Rather, the legal terms of the decision revolved around “the film commission’s long, complicated administrative process,” which “deprived filmmakers of due process and timely responses.” Other states saw the handwriting on the wall. In June 1966, Virginia ended film censorship; so did Kansas in October. Of the states that had film censorship statutes, only Maryland held out. Using the loophole just described, it redrafted its censorship law to conform to the guidelines in the decision and continued to censor movies until 1981. Not until 1 November 1968 was the Production Code

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Administration officially ended and replaced by the film rating system.9 Remembering his fights and failures in Hollywood with Pygmalion and Major Barbara, Shaw may have considered 1968 a banner year, for as described earlier in this chapter, it also marked the end of stage censorship in Great Britain. Whether or not he would have done so, the rest of us can regard 1968 as a triumphant date in the battles against theatre and film censorship. In the bad old days, Bob Mondello reminds us, going back two decades before the films mentioned in the penultimate paragraph, if a man and woman were alone in a motel room—with two beds, of course—one of them was obliged to hang a blanket between them, as Clark Gable did in 1934 in It Happened One Night, embarrassing Claudette Colbert on the other side of the blanket, especially when he gave her “a mock tutorial on ‘how a man undresses.’ Colbert fled—she got an Oscar for fleeing, in fact—and propriety was upheld.” As Chap. 4 mentions, Preminger defied the PCA by releasing The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955 without its seal of approval and Frank Sinatra received an Oscar nomination for the leading role. In 1959, Mondello notes, “a Code-approved film could deal with pretty much any topic but homosexuality.” What happened then was Some Like It Hot, in which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, in drag, warded off male suitors. “The film’s plot was a veritable catalog of once-forbidden topics—gambling and racketeering to get the plot going, a booze-swilling Marilyn Monroe to keep it going.” When Monroe, as a character named Sugar Kane, climbed into a train’s upper birth to join nightie-clad Jack Lemmon (called “Daphne” when dressed as a woman), “there was no longer a hanging blanket to separate them—and when Sugar’s breathless, dingbat recollections of bedtime games with her sister inspired a strangled, hormonal snort from Lemmon—the Code was dead, whether Hollywood admitted it or not. And judging from attendance at the nation’s theaters, it was not much missed.” By 1968, the MPAA officially changed from restricting filmmakers to warning audiences, via the aforementioned rating system, which remains today, although it too has changed with the times. Then the ratings were G (general audiences), M (mature content), R (those under 17 must be accompanied by an adult), and X (sexually explicit content). Years later, M changed to GP, then to PG (parental guidance suggested); PG-13 was created as a category between PG and R; and later, because X and double and triple X advertised pornographic films, X

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changed to NC-17 (no children under 17 admitted unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian). The reason for PG-13 was business and illustrates how Hollywood, unsurprisingly, talks morality but acts commercially. According to Matt Goldberg, the reason for PG-13 was that Steven Spielberg, whom one cannot blame, wanted a rating between PG and R for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, since R would keep away too many his target audiences. But fifteen years earlier, something more consequential happened. In 1969, the X-rated Midnight Cowboy, “which violated more ‘don’ts’ and ‘be-carefuls’ than it observed,” including fellatio between two men, opened and the following year won an Oscar for Best Picture. In 1971, it was re-rated from X to R “without a single frame being altered. Community standards had changed—as they invariably do.”10 Film censorship by a national organization created and subsidized by the motion picture industry, and by state and city legislatures, was over in America. But lay religious organizations abounded and distributors accommodated them, for their members were customers. Some Christians consider Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which as its director acknowledged is based not on the scriptures but on Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel, to be blasphemous chiefly because it portrays Jesus as a self-doubting man who is tempted by sexual desires and by a conventional married life. Upon the novel’s publication, the Catholic Church banned it and the Greek Orthodox Church excommunicated the author. Before Scorsese completed his film, Christian groups held worldwide demonstrations against it and mounted protests by petition, telephone, and radio, urging boycotts against the studio that produced it. Bill Bright, founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ, offered to pay Universal Pictures what it had spent to make it, in return for Universal giving him every existing print of the movie, which he vowed to destroy. The studio declined the offer. However, the protests were effective. Chains of American movie houses, with some 3500 theatres, refused to show it. When it opened in nine major North American cities, a coalition of California religious groups organized about 25,000 people to protest in front of Universal’s Los Angeles headquarters. Throughout America, large cities banned the film. In 1989, when it went from cinemas to videocassettes, the international video rental firm Blockbuster, which had more than 4500 stores in the United States and some 9000 worldwide, refused to carry it. By 1 April 2019, Blockbuster dwindled to one store in the small city of Bend, Oregon.11

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Do we now live in a brave new millennium, which began on the fiftieth anniversary of Shaw’s death? Although as Michael Cieply says, the MPAA’s motion picture ratings system, which is a form of self-censorship created by producers, will probably continue in some form to dominate cinema box offices in the twenty-first century, as well as DVDs and TV screening and streaming networks, the rating system’s list of films states that it “‘does not include non-participating independent distributors.’ So we don’t know what we don’t know about who’s viewing what on their many digital devices. But we do know that a lot of it isn’t rated by a system that is beginning to look, well, quaint.” Matt Goldberg calls the ratings system absurd. The MPAA disproportionately gives independent films an R rating, which resulted in the denial of Boyhood “to teenage viewers who could have appreciated the film and have almost certainly heard the swear words that earned the movie its R rating.” The MPAA’s bestowal of an R for cursing is weighed too heavily, “almost ensuring that indie [i.e., independent] films—films that are likely to reflect our reality—are withheld from anyone under the age of 17 who’s unwilling to go to the film with their parent or guardian (because what teenager doesn’t want to go to the movies with their parents instead of their friends?).” The over-use of PG-13 for mainstream films reveals that the MPAA has “no problem with gratuitous amounts of violence (as long as it’s largely bloodless) as long as curse words and sex are kept at a minimum.” What the system means is that “if an indie movie says ‘fuck’ one too many times, it gets an R-rating, but a studio blockbuster can show torture and as long as there’s not too much blood, it gets a PG-13.” I have seen a preview of a film, whose title I have forgotten, with an explanation of its R rating as “Violence, sexuality, drugs, and smoking,” and wondered if it would have been rated PG-13 if its smoking scenes had been deleted. Movie reviewers mock these ratings. The MPAA rates Sollers Point R “for pervasive language, drug content, and some sexual material.” Reviewing it for the New York Times, Glenn Kenney offered another explanation: “Rated R for language, drugs, all the stuff the kids are into these days, plus brawling in strip clubs.”12 In This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick’s 2006 movie about the ratings system, which as its title indicates the MPAA did not rate (in 2020 it was still unrated), director John Waters states, “All teenagers, because of the internet, have seen more hard-core pornography than their parents have seen.” Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the TV animated series South Park and with Robert Lopez authors of the Broadway musical

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comedy The Book of Mormon, have made movies, including Team America, written by them and Pam Brady. For Team America, they wrote and shot more graphic and bizarre sex scenes—with puppets, not actors—than they wanted so that when the MPAA ratings board would demand changes to give the film an R rating rather than an NC-17, they would have plenty of material to cut. The board made the demands and the creators cut the puppet-sex scenes they did not want. Directors who had their films rated X or NC-17 or who cut them to avoid these ratings include Paul Thomas Anderson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Campion, Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Sam Peckinpah, Oliver Stone, and Quentin Tarantino. As my reference to the Indiana Jones movie as the reason for introducing PG-13 reveals, the basis of the ratings system is money. According to box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian, the difference between NC-17 and R could be tens of millions of dollars, since restrictive ratings limit a producer’s ability to market a film profitably. Director Kevin Smith agrees. As he reveals, you cannot run ads or television spots on films rated NC-17. John Waters, who agrees, points out that most big chain stores will not carry DVDs of NC-17-rated movies. The ratings system, which is more significant because it is used by streaming movies (which adversely impacts sales of DVDs), favors big studios over independent movies. Although the ratings board does not give specific notes to independent film makers on why a film receives a rating, it does so to big studios. Warner Brothers, Universal, SONY, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount control more than 95% of the US film business, and they are part of larger conglomerates: Time Warner, GE, SONY, The Walt Disney Co., New Corp, and Viacom, which together own more than 90% of all media in the United States.13

Brave New Millennium Notwithstanding the epigraph of this chapter, censorship fell but it did not cease. As the chapter’s title indicates, it eroded but did not die. When we examine the censorships of previous centuries, it is often difficult to believe their restrictions existed and were supported by the citizenry. Considering Lolita, we may legitimately ask if they really disappeared or simply changed. Is Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s epigram “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more things change, the more they stay the same) accurate? Consider the play Actually, We’re F**ked, produced off-Broadway in

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2019. One may explain that off-Broadway theatres produce innovative or unusual plays. They do, but Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**ker with the Hat was staged on Broadway in 2011 and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play of the season. I do not judge them. I merely allude to the obvious meaning of the asterisks in their titles, which are a far cry from those of ’Tis Pity She’s a … of the last century, and Secrets – – – of the century before that. In the periods this book has explored, audiences would have considered these twenty-first-century titles so offensive, it is inconceivable that the plays would have been produced. The ellipses in the titles of the Victorian and twentieth-century plays represent censorship, but the asterisks in this millennium’s plays are part of the fun. Listen to the dialogue in any film by Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee, or if going to a cinema is inconvenient, difficult, or (as I type these words) impossible, see any episode of any season of Deadwood, which was broadcast on cable television early in this century and remains available on DVD and on streaming channels. I do not disparage them. To the contrary, I greatly admire all three. As for films made for television, in 2018 Netflix produced and streamed Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town, which was NR (not rated). Nevertheless, Amazon advertises it for streaming, rental, and purchase on DVD or Blu-­ray, and the two episodes I have seen suggest that its primary target audience is teenagers. Perhaps a better indication that obscenity has entered the mainstream is a British television series, The F Word (which ran for five seasons in Britain, from 2005 to 2010), that spawned an American one (which ran for one season, in 2017). Their amusing title makes sense only if one thinks it is a euphemism for the obscenity to which the other titles in this paragraph allude. As its producers no doubt counted on, the titular word indicated by its first letter is not what spectators may imagine. It is Food, and the series in both nations features the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. What of homosexuality? In our new millennium, male and female homosexual couples on stage and screen, including television and computer screens, are staples. Furthermore, like their heterosexual counterparts, their simulated sex scenes are often more vividly suggestive than most people at the turn of the twentieth century could have imagined. And as indicated earlier, depictions of violence on screen are more brutal and bloody than they were at the end of that century. In these respects, at least, things have changed.

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Notes 1. Nicholas de Jongh, Politics, Prudery & Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage 1901–1968 (London: Methuen, 2000), pp.  181–82; “Censored Script of Look Back in Anger by John Osborne,” https://www. bl.uk/collection-items/censored-script-of-look-back-in-anger-by-johnosborne (accessed 18 October 2019); John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 49; Kenneth Tynan, “The Voice of the Young,” The Guardian, 13 May 1956, https://www.theguardian. com/books/1956/may/13/stage (accessed 11 June 2019); “Sir Kinglsey Amis” (obituary), The Telegraph, 23 October 1995, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/7734007/Sir-Kingsley-Amis.html (21 June 2019); Frank Rich, “David Merrick, 88, Showman Who Ruled Broadway, Dies,” New York Times, 27 April 2000, https://www.nytimes. com/2000/04/27/theater/david-merrick-88-showman-who-ruledbroadway-dies.html (accessed 8 June 2019). 2. Nicholas de Jongh, Politics, Prudery & Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage 1901–1968, pp. 162, 175; Edward Bond, Saved, ed. David Davis (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2009), pp. 64–71, http:// web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/ bmxlYmtfXzY0NzMxNl9fQU41?sid=24f632d4-0187-45df-8172b38bfc1946f8@pdc-v-sessmgr01&vid=1&format=EB (accessed 1 August 2019). 3. David Thomas, David Carlton and Anne Etienne, Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp.  197–98, 216–17, https://www-oxfordscholarship-com.ezproxy.lib. vt.edu/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260287.001.0001/ acprof-9780199260287 (accessed 11 July 2018); Nicholas de Jongh, Politics, Prudery & Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage 1901–1968, pp. 137–38; L.W. Conolly, “The Abolition of Censorship in Great Britain: The Theatres Act of 1968,” Queen’s Quarterly (Winter 1968), 75.4: 573; “Theatre Censorship,” HL Deb 17 February 1966 vol 272 cc1169–248, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/ lords/1966/feb/17/theatre-censorship-1 (accessed 7 October 2019); “Joint Committee on Censorship of the Theatre Report,” Living Heritage, https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/relationships/collections1/1968-theatrecensorship/1967-joint-committee-report/ (accessed 7 October 2019); Julian Shea, “The Crown: The Profumo affair—the scandal that shook sixties Britain,” BT, 26 January 2019, https://home.bt.com/news/uknews/the-crown-the-profumo-affair-the-scandal-that-shook-sixties-britain-11364242915537 (accessed 8 October 2019).

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4. Martin Esslin, The Peopled Wound: The Work of Harold Pinter (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 22–23, 179; Harold Pinter, Landscape and Silence (New York: Grove Press, 1970), pp. 7, 25, 28; email, Frances Thompson, Assistant Private Secretary to the Lord Speaker, House of Lords, to me, 22 October 2019. 5. J.W.  Lambert, “Exit Censor,” The Sunday Times, 22 September 1968, p.  12, http://tinyurl.gale.com/tinyurl/BwBYh7 (accessed 16 October 2019); “Uncensored plays line up for West End,” The Times, 24 September 1968, p.  2, http://tinyurl.gale.com/tinyurl/BwBwJ8 (accessed 16 October 2019); L.W.  Conolly, “The Abolition of Censorship in Great Britain: The Theatres Act of 1968,” p. 582; “Stage Censorship Ends but Stricter Control Likely,” Financial Times, 26 September 1968, p.  32, http://tinyurl.gale.com/tinyurl/BwBzK1 (accessed 16 October 2019); “Stars of the Sophisticated Play The Beard,” alamy, https://www.alamy. com/oct-10-1968-stars-of-the-sophisticated-play-the-beard-take-alunch-image69437549.html (accessed 17 October 2019). 6. Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 311, https://ebookcentral-proquestcom.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/lib/vt/reader.action?docID=272745 (accessed 10 June 2019); Lawrence Van Gelder, “Ann Corio, a Burlesque Queen on Broadway, Is Dead,” New York Times, 9 March 1999, https://www. nytimes.com/1999/03/09/arts/ann-corio-a-burlesque-queen-onbroadway-is-dead.html (accessed 20 July 2019); Mara Bovsun, “When cops raided NYC’s Minsky’s Burlesque for ‘incorporated filth,’” Daily News, 20 May 1998 https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/copsraided-nyc-minsky-burlesque-incorporated-filth-article-1.2903311 (accessed 9 June 2019); John Kendrick, “Broadway Musical Chronology: The 1960s,” Musicals 101.com, https://www.musicals101.com/1960s. htm (accessed 21 July 2019); Lewis Funke, “This Was Burlesque at Casino East Narrated by Ann Corio,” New York Times, 7 March 1962, https:// timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/03/07/90138218.pdf (accessed 22 July 2019); This Was Burlesque, Original Cast Album, Roulette R 25185. 7. Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 18 August 1958, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/ lifetimes/nab-r-booksoftimes.html?scp=1&sq=Lolita%2520review&st=cse (accessed 17 June 2019); “Lolita and Its Critics,” Manchester Guardian, 23 January 1959, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/ jan/23/archive-1959-lolita-and-its-critics (accessed 17 June 2019); Charles J. Rolo, “Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov,” The Atlantic, September 1958, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1958/09/lolita-

5  THE EROSION OF STAGE AND SCREEN CENSORSHIP 

245

by-vladimir-nabokov/304639 (accessed 17 June 2019); Bosley Crowther, “Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s Adaptation of His Novel,” New York Times, 14 June 1962, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/ film/061462kubrick-lolita.html (accessed 16 August 2019). 8. Kristin Hunt, “The End of American Film Censorship,” JSTOR Daily, 28 February 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/end-american-film-censorship/ (accessed 15 November 2019); “Film Censorship,” ACLU, https://www. aclu.org/files/multimedia/censorshiptimeline.html (accessed 15 November 2019). 9. “The End of Movie Censorship,” The Supreme Court & Movie Censorship, http://moviehistory.us/the-end-of-movie-censorship.html (accessed 26 April 2019); Freedman v. Maryland. 380 U.S. 51 (1965), No. 69. Supreme Court of United States, decided 1 March 1965, https://scholar.google. com/scholar_case?case=5133094020488688451&q=Freedman+v.+Mary land,+380+U.S.+51+(1965)&hl=en&as_sdt=6,47&as_vis=1 (accessed 8 June 2010); Laura Wittern-Keller, “Freedman v. Maryland,” The First Amendment Encyclopedia, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/349/freedman-v-maryland (accessed 25 April 2019); “The End of the Code—November 1, 1968,” Pure Entertainment Preservation Society, h t t p s : / / p u r e e n t e r t a i n m e n t p r e s e r v a t i o n s o c i e t y. w o r d p r e s s . com/2016/11/02/the-end-of-the-code-november-1-1968/ (accessed 1 August 2019); Jeremy Geltzer, “Banned in Baltimore: Film Censorship in the Free State,” Baltimore Sun, 10 April 2016, https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-film-censorship-20160410-story.html (accessed 15 November 2019); “The History of Film Censorship,” Fire, https://www.thefire.org/first-amendment-library/special-collections/ timeline/the-history-of-film-censorship/ (accessed 15 November 2019). 10. Bob Mondello, “Remembering Hollywood’s Hays Code, 40 Years On,” National Public Radio, 8 August 2008, https://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=93301189 (accessed 24 May 2018); Matt Goldberg, “Suicide Squad’s PG-13 Shows Why We Need a New MPAA Rating,” Collider, 16 November 2015, http://collider.com/suicidesquad-movie-rating-mpaa (accessed 21 November 2018). 11. “Theater, Film, and Video: Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ 1988,” Culture Shock, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/theater/lasttemptation.html (accessed 15 May 2018); “Oregon Blockbuster becomes the last one on earth: ‘We didn’t want to give in,’” KATU News and Associated Press, https://katu.com/news/local/oregonblockbuster-becomes-the-last-one-on-earth-bend-location (accessed 13 June 2019). 12. Michael Cieply, “Like Hayrides and Landlines, The Ratings System, For Many Films, Is History,” Deadline Hollywood, 28 April 2018, https://

246 

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deadline.com/2018/04/mpaa-film-ratings-system-histor y-formany-1202378819 (accessed 21 November 2018); Matt Goldberg, “Suicide Squad’s PG-13 Shows Why We Need a New MPAA Rating”; Glenn Kenny, “In Sollers Point, a Hard Road to the Straight and Narrow,” New York Times, 17 May 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/ movies/sollers-point-review.html?referrer=google_kp (accessed 12 January 2019). 13. This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006), directed by Kirby Dick (Genius Entertainment DVD).

Index1

A Abbey Theatre, 93, 101, 104, 107, 108, 145, 152 Abortion, 42, 95, 97, 98, 120, 128, 156, 157 Academy Award, 202 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, 4, 15 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds in England and Wales, 5 Act for Suppressing the Detestable Sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication, 65, 85 Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, see Comstock Law Addams, Jane, 189 Adultery, 41, 95, 97, 98, 120, 127, 131, 133, 147, 148, 237 Æschylus, 96, 142 Aesop, 236

Albert, Prince Consort, Queen Victoria, 231 Alençon, Duke and Duchess of, 171 Alexander, George, 135, 140 Algonquin Round Table, 73 Allégret, Yves and Revenge at Daybreak, 237 Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 100 Amis, Kingsley, 228 and Lucky Jim, 228 Anderson, Bronco Billy, 189 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 241 Antoine, André, 30, 53 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 241 Archer, William, x, 30, 33, 34, 50, 53, 57, 64, 90, 92, 99, 120, 121, 147 Aristophanes, 19, 96, 142 Arnold, Matthew, 20 Ashby, Hal, 236 and Being There, 236 Asquith, Anthony, 188, 201, 202, 219

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 B. F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw and the Censors, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52186-8

247

248 

INDEX

Asquith, Herbert Henry, 100, 101, 153 Association of Cinematic Exhibitors, 179 Augustine, Saint, 6 Les Avariés, see Brieux, Eugène, Damaged Goods Axt, William, 204 B Balfour, Arthur James, 101, 116 Banks, Miranda, 194 Barbera, Father S.J., 196 Bardèche, Maurice, 168 Barker, Granville, 53, 67, 90, 92, 95, 96, 98–101, 121, 127–129, 137, 138, 143, 148, 170, 209 The Marrying of Anne Leete, 90 Waste, 92, 93, 95–99, 128, 131 Barker, Harley, 90, 127, 148, 169 Barrie, J.M., 99, 101, 102, 116, 137 and Josephine, 116 and Punch, 116 Battle of Britain, 207 Baxter, Violet Elizabeth (Betty), 186, 187 and The Night Patrol, 187, 188 Bazar de la Charité, 171, 172 Beckett, Samuel, 84, 235 and Malone Dies, 235 and Molloy, 235 and The Unnamable, 235 and Worstward Ho!, 84 Beerbohm, Max, 100, 145 Belloc, Hilaire, 100 Benchley, Robert, 73 Benn, John, 172 Bennett, Arnold, 138 Berger, Ludwig, 189 and Pygmalion, 189

Bergner, Elisabeth, 195, 198, 199, 223–224n26 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 241 Bible, 4, 83, 104, 108, 114 Black Monday, 24 Bligh, James, 23 Blockbuster, 178, 189, 192, 239, 240 Bloody Sunday, 24 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 26 Bond, Edward, 229, 230 and Early Morning, 230 and Saved, 229 Book of Common Prayer, 65 Booth, General William, 50 Bostwick, Arthur, 71, 74 Bostwick, Arthur Elmore, 70, 71 Brahm, Otto, 30, 53 Brasillach, Robert, 168 Brecht, Bertolt, 186 Breen, Joseph, 191, 192, 197, 198, 206, 216 Bridie, James, 198, 199, 223n26 Brieux, Eugène, 46, 83, 90–92, 97, 112, 121, 135, 139 Damaged Goods (Les Avariés), 46, 83, 97, 153 Maternity, 136 The Three Daughters of M. Dupont, 46, 136, 153 Bright, Bill, 239 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), 92, 179–180, 183–185, 187, 188, 190 Brookfield, Charles, 83, 147, 148 and Dear Old Charlie, 147 Brough, Lionel, 31 Broun, Heywood, 73, 75, 78, 79 Browning, Robert, 40 Buchanan, Robert, 49 Buckton, Alice Mary, 118 and Eager Heart, 118 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 28, 29

 INDEX 

Bunyan, John, 9 The Pilgrim’s Progress, 9 Burch, Noël, 168, 173 Burlesque, 147, 160, 161, 233, 234 Burstyn, Joseph, 236 Byrne, Sir William Patrick, 113, 130 C Caine, Hall, 118, 140, 141 and The Christian, 141 and The White Prophet, 141 Calvin, John, 156 Camille, see Dumas fils, Alexandre, La Dame aux camellias Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 68 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 99, 116 Campion, Jane, 241 Campus Crusade for Christ, 239 Canterbury, Archbishop of, 8, 63, 81, 114, 159 Capra, Frank and It Happened One Night, 148, 238 Carlson, Julia, 156 Carlton, David, 5, 16 Carlyle, Thomas, 96 Carr, J.W. Comyns, 140 and King Arthur, 133 Carr, Philip, 115 Casson, Sir Lewis, 158 Catholic Action, 196–200, 210, 223n25 Catholic Church, x, 3, 40, 67, 106, 154, 168, 196, 197, 199, 219, 239 Censorship of Plays (Repeal) Act, 158 Censorship of Publications Act, 156 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 2, 186 Cervantes, Miguel de, 19

249

Chaplin, Charlie, 158, 169, 189 and Easy Street, 189 Charles I, King, 8, 9 Charles II, King, 9, 10 Charles IX, King of France, 4 Charrington, Charles, 40 Chartists, 22, 23 Chekhov, Anton, 93 Chesterton, G.K., 94 Chief Constables’ Association, 157 Christy Minstrels, 103 Chrysostom, Saint, 6 Churchill, Winston, 100, 229 Church of England, x, 8, 9, 65, 96, 108 Cieply, Michael, 240 Cinematograph, 167, 169–172 Cinematograph Act, 170–178 Cinematograph Exhibitor's Association, 175 Clanricarde, Earl of, 49 Clarence, O.B., 208 Clark, Justice Tom, 236 Clausewitz, Karl von, 25 and On War, 25 Colbert, Claudette, 238 Collier, Jeremy, 11–13 A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, 11, 12 Colman, George the Younger, 20 Colman, Ronald, 182 Comedy of Manners, 13 Commonwealth, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15 Comptroller, Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 32, 49, 133 Comstock, Anthony, 70, 71, 73–76, 78, 79, 160 Comstockery, 71, 75, 78 Comstock Law, 74 Conformity and conventionalism, 144 Conolly, L.W., 68, 81, 82, 229, 232

250 

INDEX

Conrad, Joseph, 92, 99 Constitution of the United States of America, 161, 189, 190 Coote, Alexander, 45, 46 Copyright performance, 28, 29, 58, 60, 98 Corio, Ann, 233, 234 and This Was Burlesque, 233, 234 Coronation Oath, 108 Le Coucher de la mariée, 168 Court Theatre, 90, 227, 232 See also Royal Court Theatre Coward, Noël, 154 and The Vortex, 154 Craig, Edith (Edy), 83 and Pioneer Players, 83 Cromer, Lord, 84, 154 Cromwell, Oliver, 8 Crowther, Bosley, 236 Curtis, Tony, 238 Czinner, Paul, 195–197, 199, 205 D Dalrymple, Ian, 202, 204 Daly, Arnold, 72, 73, 75–77, 79, 80 Dante Alighieri, 199 and Inferno, 199 Daudet, Alphonse, 69 and Sapho (novel), 69, 70 Davenant, Sir William, 10 De Palma, Brian, 241 Deadwood, 242 Deans, Marjorie, 154, 208, 211, 217 Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, 66, 212 Defense of her Realm Act, 151 DeMille, Cecil B., 218 Dergarabedian, Paul, 241 Derwent, Clarence, 136 Deslys, Gaby, 149 Deuteronomy, 8 Deutsches Theater, 53

The Devil, 117, 151 Dick, Kirby, 240 and This Film Is Not Yet Rated, 240 Dickens, Charles, ix, 96, 134 Pickwick Papers, 134 Our Mutual Friend, ix Dieterle, William and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 192 Diggers, 8, 182 Disney, Walt, 180, 241 and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 180 Disraeli, Benjamin, 231 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 93, 189 and Crime and Punishment, 189 Dougherty, Sir James, 104, 106 Douglas, Justice William O., 237 D’Oyly Carte, Helen, 94 D’Oyly Carte, Richard, 94, 134 Dramatic Copyright Act of 1833, 28, 58 Dublin Castle, 68, 104–106, 108, 109 Dublin Repertory Theatre, 68 DuBois, W.E.B., 189 Dudow, Slatan, 186 and Kuhle Wampe, 186 Dumas fils, Alexandre, 30, 33, 82 La Dame aux camélias, 33, 82 Le Demi-monde, 33, 34 Dylan, Bob, 93, 235 E Edison, Thomas Alva, 167, 168 and Carmencita, 168 and Princess Ali, 168 and The Kiss, 168 Edward VII, King, 98–99, 109, 146, 151 Edwardes, George, 134, 140 Edwardian era, x, xi, 3, 99, 138

 INDEX 

Eisenstein, Sergei, 177, 183, 189 and Battleship Potemkin, 183, 189 Elizabeth I, Queen, 7 Elizabeth II, Queen, 230 Elizabethan era, 4, 7, 15, 96 Endeavour, 118 Engels, Friedrich, 28 The Condition of the Working Class in England, 28 Epstein, Julius and Philip and Casablanca, 194 Ervine, St. John, 20, 152 Esslin, Martin, 231 Etherege, Sir George, 10, 13 and She Would if She Could, 10 and The Man of Mode, 13 Etienne, Anne, 5, 16 Euripides, 90, 96 Everyman, 115, 119 Examiner of Plays, 2, 19, 20, 29, 30, 32, 35, 39, 41–44, 46, 48, 50, 60, 61, 69, 82, 83, 89, 94, 95, 103, 112, 114, 116, 117, 120, 122–123, 128, 131, 140, 141, 145–147, 150, 179, 209, 228, 231 F Fagan, J.B., 102 and Shakespear v. Shav, 102 Faulkner, William, 194, 223n24 and The Big Sleep, 195 Faversham, William, 151 Fielding, Henry, 16, 17, 19, 48 Rape Upon Rape, 16 Tom Thumb, 16 The Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb, 16 The Vision of the Golden Rump, 16 The Welsh Opera, 16 Fields, W.C., 192 Film Society, 169, 188, 209

Findlater, Richard, 15, 16, 18, 29, 148, 153 Fisher, James, 83 Fisk, Catherine, 194 Fitch, Clyde, 69 and Sappho, 69 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 156 Fladgate, William F., 31, 130 Fletcher, Tony, 172 Follows, Stephen, 178 Ford, John and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 233 Fowell, Frank, 175 Freedman, Ronald, 237 Freie Bühne, 30, 53, 90 Friedkin, William, 241 Fry, Roger, 100 Furnivall, Dr. F.J., 30 The F Word (TV series), 242 G Gable, Clark, 238 A Gaiety Girl, 134 Galsworthy, John, 90, 92, 99, 138 Garnett, Constance, 93 Garnett, Edward, 92, 93, 118 The Breaking Point, 92, 93, 118 Gash, Norman, 26 Gaumont, Léon, 169 Gay, John, 15, 16 The Beggar’s Opera, 15 Polly, 16 Genesis, 65 George II, King, 15 George V, King, 146, 151 Gilbert, William, 51, 94, 95, 131 H.M.S. Pinafore, 94 The Mikado, 94, 95, 131 The Pirates of Penzance, 51 Ginsberg, Judge Ruth Bader, 186 Gladstone, Herbert, 99, 100 G.M.G., 15, 19, 20

251

252 

INDEX

Goldberg, Matt, 239, 240 Goldwyn, Samuel, 169 Goosens, Eugene, 189 Gorell, Lord, 110, 114, 116, 119, 131, 137, 139 Gorky, Maxim, 90, 184 and Mother, 184 Gosson, Stephen, 6, 7 and The School of Abuse, 6 Granger, Stewart, 218 Grant, President Ulysses S., 74 Granville-Barker, Harley, see Barker, Harley Great Depression, 160, 186, 190 Greater London Council Archives, 172 Great War, 61, 67, 68, 83, 89, 148–161, 174, 183, 228 Greene, Graham, 199, 200 and Das Mädchen Johanna, 199 and Saint Joan, 199, 200 and The Third Man, 199 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 104, 106–109, 129, 145, 151, 152 and The Workhouse Ward, 145 Grein, J.T., 52, 53, 58, 68, 95 Grene, Nicholas, 104 Grierson, John, 188 Griffith, D.W., 53, 189, 190, 218 and The Birth of a Nation, 53, 189 and Ghosts (movie), 53 Guilbert, Yvette, 45 Guirgis, Stephen Adly, 242 and The Motherf**ker with the Hat, 242 Gutenberg, Johannes, 3 Gwyn, Nell, 9 H Haggard, H. Rider, 100 Haigh, Kenneth, 228 Hall, Owen, 134

Hall, Radclyffe, 18 and The Well of Loneliness, 18 Hallström, Per, 155 Handel, George Friderik, 96 and The Messiah, 96 Hankin, St. John, 90 Harcourt, Robert Vernon, 99, 100, 110, 113–119, 122, 125, 128–136, 141, 147, 148, 170 Hardy, Thomas, 99, 138 Hart, William S., 169 Harte, Bret, 193 and “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” 193 and “Salomy Jane,” 193 Harvey, Sir John Martin, 148 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 90, 139 and Hannele, 139 and Johannisfeuer, 139 Hawks, Howard, 192 and Scarface, 192 Hayes, Cathy, 157 Hays, Will H., 190, 191, 197, 198, 210, 236 Headlam, Stewart, 100 Heinemann, William, 42, 48, 59 and The First Step, 42 and Summer Mothers, 48, 59 Hemingway, Ernest, 156 Henrietta Maria (queen consort of King Charles I), 8 Henry VIII, King, 4, 15 Hewlitt, Maurice, 90 Hiller, Wendy, 201, 202, 206, 212, 213 Hiroyasu, Fushimi, Prince of Japan, 94 Hitchcock, Alfred, 177 and The 39 Steps, 177 Hitler, Adolph, 158, 186, 215 Hochhuth, Rolf, 229 and Soldiers, 229 Holmes, Sherlock, 27

 INDEX 

Homosexuality (male), 18 Honegger, Arthur, 204 Hood, Basil Gentleman Joe, 44, 45 Horton, Edward Everett, 192 Houchin, John, 21, 70, 74, 80 Housman, Laurence, 98, 99, 114, 119 and Bethlehem, 114, 118 Howard, Leslie, 201, 202, 205 Huggett, Richard, 200 Hughes, Howard, 192 Hugo, Leon, 28, 29, 35, 44, 59, 69, 92, 95, 126, 127, 145 Huxley, Aldous, 227 and Brave New World, 227 Hynes, Samuel, 94, 95, 119, 147 I Ibsen, Henrik, x, 15, 30, 33, 41, 46, 51–58, 75, 89, 90, 96, 97, 102, 112, 116, 125, 127, 139, 140 A Doll’s House, 30, 33, 50–58, 125, 147 An Enemy of the People, 53, 127 Ghosts, x, 46, 50, 75, 89, 90, 97, 127, 140, 147 IMDb, 188, 215, 224n30 Incest, 30, 39, 64–67, 96, 97, 105, 112, 121, 179 Independent Theatre, 33, 53, 58, 90 Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 4, 40, 67, 158 Inquisition, 156 Ireland, 17, 21, 25, 29, 31, 32, 34, 42, 58, 93, 101–110, 113, 114, 121, 130, 134, 135, 151, 152, 156, 157 Irreligion, 142, 159 Irving, Sir Henry, 31, 54, 122, 133 Islam, 154

253

J Jaeckin, Just and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (film), 237 James, Henry, 99 Jacobean era, 7, 15 Jingoism, 143 Johnston, John, 83, 84 Joint Select Committee of The House of Lords and The House of Commons on Stage Plays (Censorship), 1909, 29, 91, 110 Jones, Henry Arthur, 47, 99 and Michael and His Lost Angel, 47 Jongh, Nicholas de, 158, 227–229 Jonson, Ben, 7 and Bartholomew Fair, 7 Joyce, James, 108, 109, 156 K Kael, Pauline, 207 Kapelke, Randy, 77 Karloff, Boris, 191 Karr, Alphonse, 241 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 239 Kennedy, Justice Anthony, 186 Kenney, Glenn, 240 Kensington, Bishop of, 149 Kent, Brad, 39, 41, 102, 151, 153, 158 Killigrew, Thomas, 10 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, 101 Knowles, Dorothy, 1, 15, 40, 102, 186 Krazy Kat, 189 Kubrick, Stanley, 235, 236, 241 and Lolita, 235–236, 241 Kuhn, Annette, 176 Ku Klux Klan, 189 Kuper, Adam, 67

254 

INDEX

L Labour Party, 50, 110, 146 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 160, 233 Lamb, Charles, 13 and “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century,” 13 Larpent, John, 20 Latham, Woodville, 168 Laurence, Dan H., 68, 104 Law, Hugh, 110, 117–119, 122 Lawrence, D.H., 92, 156 Lee, Spike, 241, 242 Leech, Margaret, 73, 75, 78, 79 Léger, Fernand and Dudley Murphy, 189 and Le Ballet Mécanique, 189 Legion of Decency, 191, 196, 198, 209 Legitimate theatre, 10, 29, 160 Leigh, Vivien, 217 Lemmon, Jack, 238 Leone, Sergio, 234 and A Fistful of Dollars, 234 Lesbianism, 18 Lessing Theater, 53 Lestocq, William, 193 Levelers, 8, 176 Lewis, Cecil, 202, 204 Licensing Act of 1737, xi, 15–19, 28, 113–115, 231 Linder, Max, 169 Lindsay, John, 233 Lipscomb, W.P., 202, 204 Little Caesar, 191–192 The Living Pictures, 45 Lockwood, Colonel, 110 London County Council (LCC), ix, 170–172, 176, 180 London Metropolitan Police Service, 24–26 London Playgoers’ Club, 50 London Society for Women’s Suffrage, 101

Long Parliament, 8 Loraine, Robert, 152 Lord Campbell’s Act, see Obscene Publications Act Lord Chamberlain, xi, 2, 4–5, 15–19, 28–32, 34, 39–40, 42, 44, 47–50, 53, 58, 60, 61, 67, 83, 84, 89–91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100–104, 106–108, 110, 111, 113–115, 123, 124, 126, 128, 130, 131, 133–135, 137, 141, 144–148, 151, 153, 154, 158, 159, 180, 227–233 Lord Chancellor, 229 Lord Chesterfield, 18 Lord Chief Justice, 159 Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 104–106, 129 Lord’s Day Observance Society, 11 Lord Speaker, House of Lords, 229 Lorre, Peter, 192 and The Maltese Falcon, 192 Losey, Joseph and M, 237 Lowell, James Russell, 40 Lumière, Louis and August, 167, 168, 170, 191 and Lunch Hour at the Lumière Factory, 167 Luther, Martin, 4 Lyttleton, Dame Edith, 111 M Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 14 and “Comic Dramatists of the Restoration,” 14 Macdona, Charles, 84 Das Mädchen Johanna, 199 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 90, 139 Monna Vanna, 90 Mahomet, 154

 INDEX 

Malle, Louis, 237 and Les Amants, 237 Mansfield, Richard, 72 Margaret, Princess (sister of Queen Elizabeth II), 118, 230 Marriage Act of 1835, 65 Marshik, Celia, 58, 60, 93, 109, 114 Martin, Jean, 157 and The Raped Little Runaway, 157 Martindale, Father Cyril, 195, 196 Marx, Harpo, 73 Marx, Karl, 23, 173 Masefield, John, 90, 99 Mason, A.E.W., 99, 110, 115, 116, 121, 122, 129, 135, 137 and The Four Feathers, 110 Master of the Revels, 5, 15 Mather, F.C., 27 Maugham, W. Somerset, 90, 228 McAdoo, Police Commissioner William, 76, 77 McClellan, Mayor George Brinton Jr., 77 McClure, Michael, 232 McGovern, Derek, 204, 205 McNulty, Matthew Edward, 58 Meisel, Edmund, 189 Meliès, Georges, 168 Meredith, George, 40, 96, 99 Meroney, John, 195 Merrick, David, 228 Messel, Oliver, 217 Metropolitan Police Act, 25 Millard, Evelyn, 20 Miller, Wilbur, 25, 27 Minsky, Billy, 160 Minstrel show, 101–110 Molière, 19 Mondello, Bob, 238 Monroe, Marilyn, 238 Montagu, Ivor, 177, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 212, 217, 234, 235

255

Morley, Robert, 207, 213 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 3, 190, 238, 240, 241 Mouillot, Frederick, 134 Mulholland, J.B., 135 Murphy, Dudley and Areopagitica, 189 Murray, Gilbert, 98, 139–141, 209 Mussolini, Benito, 158, 183 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 235 and Lolita, 235, 241 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 190 National Board of Review, 189, 190 National Council of Public Morals, 179, 180 National Film Theatre, 209 National Gallery, 47 National Vigilance Association, 45 Nethersole, Olga, 69, 70 Newth, Mette, 3, 14 Newton, Lord, 110, 143 Newton, Robert, 213 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 70, 160 Nicholas II, Tsar, 151 Nicholson, Steve, 17, 29, 40, 93 Nightingale, Florence, 231 Nobel Prize, x, 155 Northbrooke, John, 6 and A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, 6 Nugent, Frank, 198 O O’Brien, Bronterre, 23 O’Brien, Edna, 156

256 

INDEX

Obscene Publications Act, 32 Obscenity, 13, 18, 40, 43, 113, 118, 140, 175, 235, 242 O’Connor, T.P., 179, 184 O’Flaherty, Liam, 156 O’Leary, Lance-Corporal Michael, 152 O’Shea, Mrs. Katharine, 42, 97 Olivier, Laurence, 216, 229 and Henry V, 216 Olivier, Sydney, 42 and A Freedom in Fetters, 42 Olmsted, Justice, 79 Ophüls, Max, 237 and La Ronde, 237 Orton, Joe and Entertaining Mr. Sloane, 228 Osborne, John, 227, 228 and Look Back in Anger, 227, 228, 231, 235 and A Patriot for Me, 228 Ovid, 6 P Palmer, Frank, 175 Palmer, John, 4, 5 Pangborn, Franklin, 192 Papiernak, Christian and Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town, 242 Parker, Dorothy, 73 Parker, Trey, 240 and The Book of Mormon, 241 and South Park, 240 and Team America, 241 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 42, 97 Pascal, Gabriel, 194, 199, 201, 202, 205–212, 214–220, 224n30 Paul, Robert, 168 and The Soldier’s Courtship, 168 Paul IV, Pope, 4 Payne, B. Iden, 82, 83

PCA, see Production Code Administration Peace Preservation Force, 25 Peckinpah, Sam, 234, 241 and The Wild Bunch, 234 Peel, Sir Robert, 25, 26 People’s Budget, 100, 146 People’s Charter of 1838, 22 Peterloo Massacre, 26 Phelps, Guy, 175 Philip, Prince Consort, Queen Elizabeth II, 230 Phillips, Reverend Thomas, 146 Phillpotts, Eden, 148, 149 and The Secret Woman, 148, 149 Phipson, Evacustes, Jr., 41 Pickering, Ellen, 118, 163 Nan Darrell; or The Gipsy Mother, 118, 163n24 Pickford, Mary, 169 Pigott, Edward F. Smyth, 32–34, 39–44, 50, 52, 54, 116, 117, 125 Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing, 99, 141, 147, 169 Pinter, Harold, 231 and The Birthday Party, 231 and Landscape, 231 Pius XI, Pope, 198, 223n26 Plato, 13 and The Republic, 13 Plymouth, Lord, 71 Poel, William, 100, 115 Police, 1, 22–28, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 106, 108, 113, 118, 124, 129, 130, 132, 153, 154, 173–175, 185, 208, 230 Ponsonby-Fane, Sir Spencer, 32 Pope, Alexander, 49 and Epilogue to the Satires, 49 Porter, Edwin S., 191 and The Great Train Robbery, 191

 INDEX 

Porterfield, Matthew and Sollers Point, 240 Potter, Paul M., 48 and The Conquerors, 48 Preminger, Otto, 193, 199, 200, 224n27, 238 and The Man with the Golden Arm, 193, 238 and The Moon Is Blue, 193 and Saint Joan, 193–200 Production Code Administration (PCA), 191–193, 196, 197, 200, 202–205, 209–212, 214–217, 219, 238 Profumo, John, 230 Pronay, Nicholas, 183 Propaganda, 155, 183–189 Public Broadcasting System, 209 The Public Enemy, 191 Public Morality Council, 3, 40 Public Morals Conference, 146 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 184, 189 and Mother, 184, 189 Punch, 101, 116 Puritans and Puritanism, 5–12, 45, 71 R Radicalism, 155 Rado, James and Hair, 232, 233 Rains, Claude, 215, 225n36 Raleigh, Cecil, 130, 137, 138, 233 Ramsaye, Terry, 209, 224n30 Rank, J. Arthur, 215–217 Rapp, Dean, 173, 220n6, 221n7 Rattigan, Terence, 158 and Follow My Leader, 158 Redford, George Alexander, 34, 35, 44, 46, 48, 49, 52, 54, 58–60, 63, 67, 82, 83, 90, 92, 95–99, 101, 103, 104, 111, 114–120,

257

125, 127, 128, 131, 135, 139, 141, 147, 179, 236 Reformation, 4, 15 Restoration, 9–12, 14, 15, 65, 115, 129, 130, 224n30 Restoration comedy, 11–13, 129 Revolution, 183, 185 French Revolution, 23, 25 Irish Revolution, 237 Ribblesdale, Lord, 110, 117, 122, 130 Rich, John, 15, 16 Ricketts, Charles, 100 Robertson, Thomas, 30 Robins, Elizabeth, 90, 99, 128 Robson, Flora, 202 Rosebery, Lord, 116 Rossellini, Roberto, 236 and The Miracle, 236, 237 Rotten Tomatoes, 209 Royal Court Theatre, 67, 92, 100, 101, 148, 227 See also Court Theatre Royal Dublin Society Horse Show, 104 Ruskin, John, 96 Russell, Bertrand, 100 Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, 94 Rutherford, Watson, 171, 172 S Saint-Saëns, Camille and Samson and Delilah, 118, 133 Salvation Army, 50, 67, 139, 174, 206, 209–211 Samuel, Herbert, 110, 115, 116, 122–126, 130, 131, 135, 143, 170–172 Saturday Review, 42, 59, 164n32 Saville, John Henry, 134 Scandals, George White’s, 160

258 

INDEX

Schlesinger, John and Midnight Cowboy, 239 Schnitzler, Arthur, 90 Scorsese, Martin, 239 and The Last Temptation of Christ, 239, 245n11 Scotland Yard, 27, 185, 232 Scott, Clement, 31, 33, 49, 53, 54, 57 Secrets of the Harem, 94, 233 Select Committee, 1832, x, xii, 28 Select Committee of the House of Commons, 1892, xii, 30, 31 Selznick, David O., 192 and Gone with the Wind, 192 Sex, 6, 12, 13, 46, 52, 70, 74, 98, 111, 120, 149, 150, 157, 159, 169, 173, 174, 179–182, 192, 206, 212, 214, 216, 217, 237, 240–242 Shakespeare, William, xi, 10, 19, 35, 96, 102, 112, 114, 115, 121, 140, 216 Hamlet, 1, 50, 62, 66, 95, 121, 135 King Henry IV, Part 1, xi, 11, 98 King Henry IV, Part 2, 11, 98 King Henry V, vii, xi, 216 King Lear, 227 Macbeth, 73 Measure for Measure, 1 Othello, 121, 235 Romeo and Juliet, 149 The Tempest, 227 Twelfth Night, 7 Shaw, Bernard, 2, 5, 15, 19, 23, 24, 33, 34, 39–60, 62, 64, 66–69, 71–84, 85n12, 89–161, 167–220, 227, 230–232, 234, 235, 238, 240 other works; The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 157; Cashel Byron’s Profession, 193; “The Cinema as a Moral Leveler,” 176; Plays

Unpleasant, 33, 60, 155, 193; The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 51, 54, 57; Saturday Review, xii, 42, 50, 59; Three Plays for Puritans, 214 plays; Androcles and the Lion, 150; Arms and the Man, xii, 193; Back to Methuselah, 153; Cæsar and Cleopatra, 66, 220, 225n36; Candida, 72, 90; The Devil’s Disciple, xiii, 151; The Doctor’s Dilemma, 75; Farfetched Fables, 159; Geneva, 158; Getting Married, 142; Heartbreak House, 64, 104; How He Lied to Her Husband, 72, 193; The Inca of Perusalem, 151; John Bull’s Other Island, 72, 124, 141; Major Barbara, xiii, 23, 24, 66, 67, 126, 206–217, 219, 225n33, 238; Man and Superman, 70, 71, 74, 78, 101, 227; Misalliance, 150; Mrs Warren’s Profession, ix–xii, 29, 42, 46, 58–80, 82–84, 90, 97, 103, 118, 121, 124, 125, 129, 154, 155, 159, 193, 194, 199, 233; O’Flaherty, V.C., 151, 165n39; Press Cuttings, xii, 101–104, 121, 124; Pygmalion, x, xii, xiii, 150, 188, 189, 193, 195, 199, 200, 206–209, 213, 214, 216, 219, 224n29; Saint Joan, 154, 193–200, 209, 210, 219, 223n25, 223n26, 224n27; The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, x, xii, 95, 101, 103, 107, 124, 139, 193; The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, 158; Widowers’ Houses, xi, 33; You Never Can Tell, 72, 90

 INDEX 

prefaces; Hall Caine, The White Prophet, 141; Misalliance, 150; Plays Pleasant, 19, 60, 193; Plays Unpleasant, 33, 193 screenplays; Arms and the Man, xii, 99, 193, 203; Cæsar and Cleopatra, xiii, 66, 214–218, 220; The Devil’s Disciple, xiii; How He Lied to Her Husband, xii, 193; Major Barbara, xiii, 23, 24, 66, 67, 126, 206–217, 219, 224n30; Pygmalion, x, xiii, 188, 189, 192, 193, 195, 199–209, 213, 214, 216, 219, 238; Saint Joan, 193–200, 209, 210, 219, 223n26 Shaw, Charlotte, 98 Shaw, Mary, 72, 76, 80–82, 194, 199 Shelley Society, 30, 34, 39 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 34, 40 The Cenci, 30, 34, 39–41, 89, 132 Shortt, Edward, 187 Shteir, Rachel, 160, 233 Sidney, George, 114 and The Three Musketeers, 192 Sigel, Lisa, 152 Sikorski, Władysław, 229 Silver Lady Fund, 187 Sinatra, Frank, 193, 238 Skladanowsky, Emil, 168 Skladanowsky, Max, 168 Smith, Edward Percy, 149, 158 Smith, Kevin, 241 Smith, W.H., 94 Smyth, Ethel, 100 Snead-Cox, John, 133 Society of Authors, 137 Society of West End Theatre Managers, 158 Socrates, 3 Sophocles, 96, 142 and Oedipus the King, 105, 112

259

Southwark, Bishop of, 112, 142 Spielberg, Steven and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 239 Stage Society, 68, 82, 90, 91, 95, 145, 153, 188 Stalin, Joseph, 183 Star Chamber, 20, 32 Stead, William T., 46, 47, 90 Steyne, Geoffrey, 73 Stoker, Bram, 133 and Dracula, 133, 191 Stone, I.F., 3 Stone, Matt, 240 and South Park, 240 and Team America, 241 and The Book of Mormon, 241 Stone, Oliver, 241 St. Pancras Vestry, ix Street, G.S., 83 Strindberg, August, 156 and The Ghost Sonata, 156 Stroheim, Erich von, 218 Studley, Mayor John P., 73 Sturges, Preston, 192 and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, 192 Sullivan, Arthur H.M.S. Pinafore, 94 The Mikado, 94, 95, 131 The Pirates of Penzance, 51 Sumner, John, 160 Sunday Observance Act, 11 Sunday Trading Bill, 23 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 99 Synge, J.M., 54, 93, 99, 106 and The Playboy of the Western World, 54, 93, 104, 135 and The Tinker’s Wedding, 106 Szabó, István, 228 and Colonel Redl, 228

260 

INDEX

T Talbot, Father Francis X., 198 Tarantino, Quentin, 241, 242 Templeton, Joan, 50, 53, 57 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 138 and Four Georges, 138 Théâtre Libre, 30, 53, 90, 143 Theatre Regulation Act, see Theatres Act of 1843 Theatres Act of 1843, 17, 29, 113 Theatres Act of 1968, 231 Theatrical Managers’ Association, 100, 134 Thomas, David, 5, 16 Thompson, Frances, 231 Thorndike, Sybil, 211, 212 Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich, 91, 93, 96 and The Power of Darkness, 82, 91 Torquemada, Tomás de, 156 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 45 Tree, David, 201, 202 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 40, 103, 109, 135, 141, 200, 201 Twentieth Century Fox, 195, 196 Two Lovers, 182 Tynan, Kenneth, 228, 229 Tyrell, Baron William, 184 U Under Secretary of State for Ireland, 152 United States Supreme Court, 186, 190, 237 V Vedrenne, J.E., 90, 132 Vice Chamberlain, 49 Victor, Charles, 208 Victoria, Queen, 13, 14, 20, 27, 149, 151, 152, 231

Victoria and Albert Museum, 149 Victorian era, 93 “Les Vierges,” 45 Vitale, Alex, 25, 26 Voltaire, 133 W Wagner, Richard and Die Walküre, 112 and Tristan and Isolde, 149 Wald, Lillian, 189 Walkley, Arthur Bingham, 95, 132–135 Wallace, Lady Eglantine, 20 and The Whim, 20 Walpole, Robert, 15–17 Ward, Charles E.D., 42, 43 and A Leader of Men, 42 Warner, Jack, 194, 241 Waterloo, Battle of, 26 Waters, John, 240, 241 Webb, Beatrice, 58, 100, 114 Webb, Sydney, 58, 100, 114 Wedekind, Frank, 181 and Pandora’s Box, 181 Welles, Orson, 235 Wells, H.G., 98, 100, 188 West, Mae, 191 and Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, 191 and Night After Night, 191 West End Managers Association, 31 Whale, James, 180, 191 and Frankenstein, 180, 191 Whelen, Frederick, 82, 103, 139 White Slave Traffic, 61, 62, 187 Wiene, Robert, 189 and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 189 and Raskolnikov, 189 Wilde, Oscar, 18, 67, 95 and The Importance of Being Earnest, 67

 INDEX 

Wilder, Billy and Some Like It Hot, 238 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 151 Williams, Matt and Actually, We’re F**ked, 241 Williams, Michael, 197 Willoughby de Broke, Lord, 110 Wilson, Harold, 229 Windsor, House of, 151 Windsor-Clive, Viscount Robert George, 112 Winter, William, 57 Woodfield, James, 20, 34, 89, 120, 146 Woollcott, Alexander, 73 Wycherley, William, 10 and The Country Wife, 10

Y Yeats, W.B., 90, 100, 104–108, 145, 152 and The Countess Cathleen, 106 and Kathleen ni Houlihan, 145 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 74 YouTube, 209, 224n30 Z Zangwill, Israel, 142, 143 and The Melting Pot, 143 Ziegfeld Follies, 160 Zola, Émile, 18, 40, 41, 90, 92 La Terre, 40 Thérèse Raquin, 90

261