Bernard Shaw and the Censors: Fights

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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, lec-
turer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the mod-
ern 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

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in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
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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 lan-
guage 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
x PREFACE

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
 PREFACE xi

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 parlia-
mentary 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, cel-
ebrates 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 cen-
sors 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 epi-
graph, 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
xii PREFACE

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 chap-
ter examines, he fought on behalf of and sometimes at the expense of
other English playwrights. His first major campaign was for Ibsen’s unli-
censed 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
 PREFACE xiii

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 recommen-
dations rather than licenses or refusals to license, censorship did not disap-
pear 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 sugges-
tions 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 apostro-

phes 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.

xvii
 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
xxii Contents

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
xxiv ABBREVIATIONS

SGA Shaw, Lady Gregory and The Abbey: A Correspondence and a

Record. Ed. Dan H. Laurence and Nicholas Grene. Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993.
TDO 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 cen-
sorship in Great Britain, and in the United States the names of the depart-
ments 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 counterintelli-
gence agencies—as well as fire and rescue forces, visas, and immigration.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

B. F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw and the Censors, Bernard Shaw and His
Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52186-8_1
2 B. F. DUKORE

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 proscrib-
ing reading, hearing, and viewing what may influence men and women,
adults and children, citizens and other residents of a nation, state, prov-
ince, 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 pat-
ent from the King, or the manager of that theatre wished to have per-
formed 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 acknowl-
edge 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 chap-
ters, 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 con-
nect them and us, as well as to recognize what separates both. After a his-
torical 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 twen-
tieth century and partly on the early twenty-first.
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 3

Brief Survey of Censorship

Censorship existed in Great Britain and elsewhere long before any govern-
ment, 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 fol-
lowed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout
history.” Ancient societies in China, Greece, and Rome considered cen-
sorship 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 main-
tains, “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 expres-
sion 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
4 B. F. DUKORE

its mission, it also aided the Protestant Reformation and ‘heretics,’ such as
Martin Luther. Thus the printed book also became a religious battle-
ground.” 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, noble-
men, 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 interpre-
tation of Scripture as set forth by the King.” Claiming that malicious sub-
jects, “‘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
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 5

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 activ-
ities 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 pre-
scribed 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 gentle-
men 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,
6 B. F. DUKORE

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 con-
tained 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 inter-
ludes 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 rec-
onciliation [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, wink-
ing, 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
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 7

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 consid-
ered 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 stew-
ard? 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 recre-
ational 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, spo-
ken 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
8 B. F. DUKORE

and Leander, together with that of Damon and Pythias. “Yes,” Busy affir-
matively 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, nei-
ther shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomina-
tion 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 suf-
frage, 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
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 9

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 com-
merce 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 preroga-
tives 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
10 B. F. DUKORE

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 perfor-
mances 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 profes-
sional 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 entertain-
ment 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 domi-
nance of king and courtiers in the audience guaranteed not decorum, but
usually the reverse. There were frequent riots, sometimes fatal. Peace offi-
cers 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 dress-
ing 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.
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 11

—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 politi-
cally 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 immoral-
ity. Its locus included playhouses. As soon after the Restoration as 1677,
Parliament passed the Sunday Observance Act, which legally forbade com-
mercial occupations on the Sabbath except for food service. “Any recre-
ation 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 “smutti-
ness.” 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.
12 B. F. DUKORE

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 fulfill-
ment. 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 cen-
soring 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 con-
temptible,” 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, tak-
ing 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
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 13

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—sex-
uality. “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 atheisti-
cal 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 cen-
sored 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 bed-
chamber. 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 syn-
onymous 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
14 B. F. DUKORE

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 sus-
ceptible 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 cen-
sorship 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 unlim-
ited 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 hence-
forth be printed, bound, stitched or put to sale” except under specified
conditions. Plays were excluded because “the great late abuses and fre-
quent 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 argu-
ments 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
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 15

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 writ-
ings 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 sup-
press—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 contem-
porary 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 politi-
cal 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 ‘court-
iers,’ 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
16 B. F. DUKORE

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 mil-
lion today). Banning so successful a play would have been politically awk-
ward, 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 par-
ticular 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 author-
ity 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 anon-
ymous 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,
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 17

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 publish-
ers, 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 deci-
sion. If he deemed it necessary, he could close a theatre that gave a perfor-
mance of an unlicensed play. For every performance of an unlicensed play,
he could demand the forfeiture of fifty pounds from every person con-
nected 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.”
18 B. F. DUKORE

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 dis-
guised as novels, secret histories, dialogues, and what not. From a theatri-
cal 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 hear-
ings 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 arbi-
ter 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 inde-
cency.” 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
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 19

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 sup-
presses 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 guin-
eas (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 rob-
bery (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
20 B. F. DUKORE

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 consid-
ered 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 mild-
est oaths were severely expunged.” He considered a play about revolu-
tionary 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 respect-
ability. 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
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 21

bolstered their own authority and kept those below in order; and still oth-
ers 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 increas-
ingly 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, chal-
lenging 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 behav-
ior among workers and the poor.”17
At the start of the nineteenth century, London—the center of govern-
ment of a vast empire—was the largest city in Europe, and it grew phe-
nomenally 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 mil-
lion); by 1911, it had over seven million (when Paris had under three mil-
lion). 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 coun-
tries 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
22 B. F. DUKORE

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 long-
shoremen, 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—includ-
ing shop workers, furniture makers, upholsterers, glaziers, painters, and
decorators—many thousands of women arrived to become domestic ser-
vants (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 numer-
ous 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 antici-
pated—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 crimi-
nals—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 influ-
enced public disturbance. The name comes from the People’s Charter of
1838, which demanded six reforms to democratize the political system: a
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 23

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, pay-
ment 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 rebel-
lion, 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 organi-
zational skills, they created disturbances that occurred almost simultane-
ously 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 threat-
ened 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
24 B. F. DUKORE

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 demon-
strating 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 advo-
cate 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 bystand-
ers 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 cre-
ate, the Police Commissioner banned all meetings in Trafalgar Square. On
Bloody Sunday over 4000 policemen, augmented by hundreds of consta-
bles 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 hospi-
talized, and fifty arrested. Maintaining “law and order” policies, the gov-
ernment 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
 1 WHO IS THE CENSOR? 25

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 organiza-
tions, 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, rec-
ognizing 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 popula-
tion. The police “contained disorder with minimal violence,” which
increased their sense of security and economic stability. Although aristo-
crats created them and continued to dominate society, “to a great extent
26 B. F. DUKORE

the police were a middle-class institution,” since this class “probably ben-
efited 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 attrib-
utable to such factors as unsuitability for the job and disciplinary prob-
lems. 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 con-
clusively 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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