The Licensing Act of 1737 was to have huge impact on the development of theatre in Britain. The Act restricted the production of plays to the two Patent
theatres and tightened
up the censorship of drama, stating that the Lord Chamberlain with his Examiners of Plays must vet any script before a performance was allowed.
The Act was put in place by Prime Minister Robert Walpole who
was concerned that political satire on the stage was undermining him and the authority
of the government. A production of The Golden Rump enabled Walpole to push the case for banning obscene drama from the public arena. The
play scandalously suggested that the Queen administered enemas to the King. Henry Fielding, author of a number of successful satires, and
others were suspicious that this play had been engineered by Walpole
himself .
Over the next one hundred years the restrictions of the Licensing Act contributed to the popularity of certain styles of theatre. Non-patent theatres produced melodrama,
ballad opera and burlesque which incorporated music between short scenes and thus were not classed as plays. The Act was responsible for
dividing British theatrical performance into what became known as legitimate and illegitimate theatre.
The huge growth in demand for theatrical entertainment in the early 19th century made the dominance of the patent theatres unworkable. In 1843 the Patent Act was dropped,
enabling other theatres to present drama. However, the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of plays remained in place until 1968. One of the last play to be censored was
Edward Bond’s production of Saved in 1965.
Before 1968 the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil marks were struck through lines in literally hundreds of plays including classical works such as Lysistrata by Aristophanes,
George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. In the 1930s club
theatres in London managed
to avoid censorship by admitting ‘members’ and presented new and controversial works, including many plays by foreign writers.
Introduction
