The only one of these influences which seems to be generally
misunderstood is that of the managers. It has been assumed repeatedly
that managers and authors are affected in the same way by the
censorship. When a prominent author protests against the censorship, his
opinion is supposed to be balanced by that of some prominent manager
who declares that the censorship is the mainstay of the theatre, and
his relations with the Lord Chamberlain and the Examiner of Plays a
cherished privilege and an inexhaustible joy. This error was not removed
by the evidence given before the Joint Select Committee. The managers
did not make their case clear there, partly because they did not
understand it, and partly because their most eminent witnesses were not
personally affected by it, and would not condescend to plead it, feeling
themselves, on the contrary, compelled by their self-respect to admit
and even emphasize the fact that the Lord Chamberlain in the exercise of
his duties as licenser had done those things which he ought not to
have done, and left undone those things which he ought to have done. Mr
Forbes Robertson and Sir Herbert Tree, for instance, had never felt the
real disadvantage of which managers have to complain. This disadvantage
was not put directly to the Committee; and though the managers are
against me on the question of the censorship, I will now put their case
for them as they should have put it themselves, and as it can be read
between the lines of their evidence when once the reader has the clue.
The manager of a theatre is a man of business. He is not an expert in
politics, religion, art, literature, philosophy, or law. He calls in
a playwright just as he calls in a doctor, or consults a lawyer, or
engages an architect, depending on the playwright's reputation and past
achievements for a satisfactory result. A play by an unknown man may
attract him sufficiently to induce him to give that unknown man a trial;
but this does not occur often enough to be taken into account: his
normal course is to resort to a well-known author and take (mostly with
misgiving) what he gets from him. Now this does not cause any anxiety
to Mr Forbes Robertson and Sir Herbert Tree, because they are only
incidentally managers and men of business: primarily they are highly
cultivated artists, quite capable of judging for themselves anything
that the most abstruse playwright is likely to put before them, But the
plain sailing tradesman who must be taken as the typical manager (for
the West end of London is not the whole theatrical world) is by no means
equally qualified to judge whether a play is safe from prosecution or
not. He may not understand it, may not like it, may not know what the
author is driving at, may have no knowledge of the ethical, political,
and sectarian controversies which may form the intellectual fabric of
the play, and may honestly see nothing but an ordinary "character part"
in a stage figure which may be a libellous and unmistakeable caricature
of some eminent living person of whom he has never heard. Yet if he
produces the play he is legally responsible just as if he had written it
himself. Without protection he may find himself in the dock answering
a charge of blasphemous libel, seditious libel, obscene libel, or all
three together, not to mention the possibility of a private action for
defamatory libel. His sole refuge is the opinion of the Examiner of
Plays, his sole protection the licence of the Lord Chamberlain. A
refusal to license does not hurt him, because he can produce another
play: it is the author who suffers. The granting of the licence
practically places him above the law; for though it may be legally
possible to prosecute a licensed play, nobody ever dreams of doing it.
The really responsible person, the Lord Chamberlain, could not be put
into the dock; and the manager could not decently be convicted when he
could procure in his defence a certificate from the chief officer of the
King's household that the play was a proper one.