Censorship; Horse stealing -- Drama; West (U.S.) -- Drama
If the manager is to be responsible he should be made
responsible to a responsible functionary. To be responsible to every
fanatical ignoramus who chooses to prosecute him for exhibiting a cast
of the Hermes of Praxiteles in his vestibule, or giving a performance of
Measure for Measure, is mere slavery. It is made bearable at present by
the protection of the Lord Chamberlain's certificate. But when that is
no longer available, the common informer must be disarmed if the manager
is to enjoy security.
SUMMARY
The general case against censorship as a principle, and the particular
case against the existing English censorship and against its replacement
by a more enlightened one, is now complete. The following is a
recapitulation of the propositions and conclusions contended for.
1. The question of censorship or no censorship is a question of high
political principle and not of petty policy.
2. The toleration of heresy and shocks to morality on the stage, and
even their protection against the prejudices and superstitions which
necessarily enter largely into morality and public opinion, are
essential to the welfare of the nation.
3. The existing censorship of the Lord Chamberlain does not only
intentionally suppress heresy and challenges to morality in their
serious and avowed forms, but unintentionally gives the special
protection of its official licence to the most extreme impropriety
that the lowest section of London playgoers will tolerate in theatres
especially devoted to their entertainment, licensing everything that is
popular and forbidding any attempt to change public opinion or morals.
4. The Lord Chamberlain's censorship is open to the special objection
that its application to political plays is taken to indicate the
attitude of the Crown on questions of domestic and foreign policy, and
that it imposes the limits of etiquet on the historical drama.
5. A censorship of a more enlightened and independent kind, exercised
by the most eminent available authorities, would prove in practice more
disastrous than the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, because the
more eminent its members were the less possible it would be for them to
accept the responsibility for heresy or immorality by licensing them,
and because the many heretical and immoral plays which now pass the Lord
Chamberlain because he does not understand them, would be understood and
suppressed by a more highly enlightened censorship.
6. A reconstructed and enlightened censorship would be armed with
summary and effective powers which would stop the evasions by which
heretical and immoral plays are now performed in spite of the Lord
Chamberlain; and such powers would constitute a tyranny which would ruin
the theatre spiritually by driving all independent thinkers from the
drama into the uncensored forms of art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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