What may be called the high political case against censorship as a
principle is now complete. The pleadings are those which have already
freed books and pulpits and political platforms in England from
censorship, if not from occasional legal persecution. The stage alone
remains under a censorship of a grotesquely unsuitable kind. No play can
be performed if the Lord Chamberlain happens to disapprove of it.
And the Lord Chamberlain's functions have no sort of relationship to
dramatic literature. A great judge of literature, a farseeing statesman,
a born champion of liberty of conscience and intellectual integrity--say
a Milton, a Chesterfield, a Bentham--would be a very bad Lord
Chamberlain: so bad, in fact, that his exclusion from such a post may
be regarded as decreed by natural law. On the other hand, a good Lord
Chamberlain would be a stickler for morals in the narrowest sense,
a busy-body, a man to whom a matter of two inches in the length of a
gentleman's sword or the absence of a feather from a lady's head-dress
would be a graver matter than the Habeas Corpus Act. The Lord
Chamberlain, as Censor of the theatre, is a direct descendant of the
King's Master of the Revels, appointed in 1544 by Henry VIII. To keep
order among the players and musicians of that day when they performed at
Court. This first appearance of the theatrical censor in politics as the
whipper-in of the player, with its conception of the player as a rich
man's servant hired to amuse him, and, outside his professional duties,
as a gay, disorderly, anarchic spoilt child, half privileged, half
outlawed, probably as much vagabond as actor, is the real foundation of
the subjection of the whole profession, actors, managers, authors and
all, to the despotic authority of an officer whose business it is to
preserve decorum among menials. It must be remembered that it was not
until a hundred years later, in the reaction against the Puritans, that
a woman could appear on the English stage without being pelted off as
the Italian actresses were. The theatrical profession was regarded as a
shameless one; and it is only of late years that actresses have at last
succeeded in living down the assumption that actress and prostitute are
synonymous terms, and made good their position in respectable society.
This makes the survival of the old ostracism in the Act of 1843
intolerably galling; and though it explains the apparently unaccountable
absurdity of choosing as Censor of dramatic literature an official
whose functions and qualifications have nothing whatever to do with
literature, it also explains why the present arrangement is not only
criticized as an institution, but resented as an insult.