Censorship of Theatre in a “Theatre of Censorship”: Interrogating the Multivalent Sources of Censorship on the British Stage
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With close reference to Frances Burney’s The Witlings, George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession and Harley Granville Barker’s Waste, this essay explores how playwrights, theatre managers, theatres and audience members navigated and were affected by formal and informal channels of censorship inherent in the ecosystem of British drama. The choice of the term ‘ecosystem’ is deliberate. Fundamentally, stage censorship is the “interference, usually by or on behalf of government or religious authority…in the content or representation of a dramatic work…in order to ensure its conformity with…political, moral, aesthetic, or religious norms” (Stephens et al. n.p.). This characterises it as a two-dimensional and unidirectional phenomenon – a one-sided application of power. However, after interrogating the circumstances surrounding the attempted suppression of Burney, Shaw and Barker’s plays, the sources, applications and consequences of censorship prove to be far more disparate in nature. Therefore, ‘ecosystem’ appropriately conveys censorship’s intricate and symbiotic complexity than the basic definition here would suggest. To set the stage, I begin by exploring the Lord Chamberlain’s office and its role in refusing licences to works which were deemed guilty of “indecency, impropriety, profanity, seditious matter, and the representation of living persons” (“Lord Chamberlain” n.p.). This is followed by an examination of Parkes’s “theatre of censorship” (xi) and how its concepts augment my subsequent analyses of the literary history surrounding Burney, Shaw and Barker’s plays. My objective is not to construct a coherent theory which would link the censorship of these three works together, for each had individual, unique circumstances which would prevent this. Rather, I will strive to deconstruct how agents of censorship and its consequences are multivalent, and essentialising frameworks should be avoided to allow for a more sophisticated understanding of how censorship functions in British theatre.
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