Censorship

Censorship basically takes two forms, namely preventive interference by the state prior to publication, or subsequent punitive prosecution, dealt with more fully under fines and penalties and lawsuits. There are also less direct interventions, from bodies such as the Press Council, the Church, as well as less obvious forms like self-censorship deriving from general cultural expectations within society or from unsourced pressures, such as political correctness. Censorship has a dismayingly long record in English literary history and came to a formal end only comparatively recently with changes in the definition of obscenity in 1959 and the abolition of the office of the Lord Chamberlain in 1968. However, a vigorous debate continued in the United Kingdom and the United States, with authorities such as Lord Patrick Devlin and Professor Irving Kristol arguing for the right of the community to protect its moral standards, and others, like Professors Horace Hart and Ronald Dworkin arguing for the primacy of individual rights. The situation in the United States is more complex, in view of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment, and is treated toward the end of this entry. Film censorship is dealt with under the entries for cinema and Hollywood.

Although censorship is usually associated with repressive regimes, some form of it is found in comparatively democratic societies, especially in relation to the stage, the cinema, and literature. Furthermore, it was absent from comparatively conservative and controlled societies in the past. The Middle Ages, for example, is regarded as being a period of strict ecclesiastical control and censorship. Yet the example of Chaucer shows that it was possible for a writer to use the full extent of obscenity and profanity without censure or punishment. In fact, Henry VIII (1491–1547) was the first European monarch to limit the freedom of expression by publishing a list of banned books in 1529. As the drama became more secular and popular, stringent policing of plays began through the institution by the Crown in 1545 of the ill-named Master of the Revels, a Court officer in the service of the Lord Chamberlain, the most powerful minister in the land. The Master’s powers included the licensing of playhouses and the preemptive right to censor plays, which actors had to present or recite to him prior to public performance.

Another preemptive source was the Index (short for Index Librorum Prohibitorum or List of Forbidden Books) derived from rules agreed at the Council of Trent (1564), formulated by the Catholic Church as part of the Counter-Reformation. This was a list of books that Roman Catholics were forbidden to read. The first Index was published in 1564, the second in 1596, and subsequent editions continued up to 1948. In addition, the Vatican published the Index Expurgatorius , listing books not to be read without correction—that is, after passages had been deleted or altered. This category gave rise to the modern sense of expurgate , meaning “to cleanse or remove impurities,” recorded from 1678 in the comment of Thomas Jones: “The Catholic Church … hath … cracked her credit by forgeing, expurgating, etc.” ( Rome No Mother , chapter 64). In 1966 the Vatican agreed not to publish further editions.

Initially, theatrical censorship was exercised mainly on the grounds of doctrine and politics: an ordinance of 1599 had specified “matters of religion, or the governance of the estate of the common weale.” The scene in Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595) depicting the deposition of the King was banned from being performed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and omitted even from the early printed quartos. Linguistic grounds were instituted only in 1606, three years after the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the relevant legislation being “An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players” (1606):

If … any person or persons doe or shall in any Stage play, Interlude, Shewe, Maygame or Pageant jestingly or prophanely speake or use the holy name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinitie … [they] shall be forfeite for everie such Offence by him or by them committed Tenne pounds. (3 Jac. I. c.21)

Like most restrictive legislation, censorship encouraged ingenious evasions. First, there was a marked increase in the use of pagan deities. Second, “minced oaths” or substitutions avoiding direct references to foul or profane terms, suddenly sprang up in great profusion. Both varieties are still current. Although “by Jove!” is now a dated British exclamation, an early form is found in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (IV ii 13). Similarly, when Faustus blasphemously calls up the devil in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592), within the magic circle used in the ritual “is Jehovah’s name,” not the name of the Christian God. Ben Jonson created some wonderfully absurd pagan exclamations in his comedy Everyman in his Humour (acted in 1598 with Shakespeare in the cast): Bobadill swears by the foot of Pharaoh and exclaims Body o’ Caesar!

As the entry for minced oaths shows, this disguise mechanism had been in existence from the time of Chaucer. However, in the years immediately prior to the legislation against Profanity on the Stage, some self-censorship was evidently taking place, since Shakespeare and other dramatists used many newly minced oaths such as ’ sblood (for God’s blood ) from 1598 onward. These were deliberate evasions, as opposed to the usual process of steady erosion over time, such as God blind me! becoming Gor blimey! and finally plain blimey! The older forms have all passed away, the only survivor being ’ struth , respelled as strewth . Apart from philologists, the speech community generally does not recognize the original profane meanings of minced oaths. Later, in King James I’s reign, in 1623, a more general prohibition was enacted, covered under fines and penalties, specifying a penalty of one shilling per oath.

The Master of the Revels continued with his excisions, which early in James’s reign extended from the performance of plays to include their printing. Comparison of texts shows precisely how some authors under pressure changed their texts for publication. Thus Ben Jonson toned down the oaths in his play The Magnetic Lady (1632), which had been subjected to an investigation into a charge of blasphemy, altering by Jesu to “believe me,” by heaven to “by these hilts” (“by this sword”), and faith to “marry” or “indeed.” The entry for Shakespeare details many similar substitutions in the posthumous First Folio (1623).

When the Civil War broke out in 1642, the Puritan army under Oliver Cromwell took up arms, not only against the king, but against “popery, prelacy, superstition, heresy, schism, and profaneness.” One of the first pieces of legislation passed by the Puritans, on September 2, 1642, was the closing of the theatres for, among other things, “too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth and Levitie.” In this generally repressive atmosphere, numerous tracts were written against swearing, such as Walter Powell’s A Summons for Swearers (1645), but A Free Discourse against Customary Swearing and a Dissuasive against Cursing , written ca. 1647 by Robert Boyle, the famous scientist, was published only in 1695, nearly a half century later and four years after his death. In 1645 the Scottish Parliament determined that cursing or blaspheming should be “censurable” and the fine should be according to rank: a nobleman should pay 20 pounds Scots, a baron 20 marks (about £7), and a gentleman 10 marks (about £3.5).

The Restoration of the Monarchy, in 1660, involved the simultaneous restoration of the theaters and the innovation of women actors, in both of which the new king, Charles II, took an active interest. However, the new theatrical regime was tightly but shrewdly controlled: the Letters Patent or Royal Licences permitted only two theaters in London, and the managers, Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant, were to be responsible for censoring the plays performed there. The new Restoration drama was both a rebellion against Puritanism and a mirror of the decadence and open sexuality of the Court. There were oaths in profusion, but in general they were either minced or secular.

Although there were attacks on the stage as a corrupting institution, notably by Jeremy Collier in 1698, and even assaults on actors, there was little official intervention. But in the early part of the eighteenth century, there emerged fearless satirists such as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Henry Fielding. Pope’s poetic satires pilloried the most powerful in the land using substitute names, some of them transparent, such as “Anna” for Queen Anne, but his attacks provoked no retaliation. When, however, the same technique was used in theatrical satires such as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a thinly-disguised attack on the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and in Fielding’s The Welsh Opera (1731), which lampooned the Royal Family, Walpole himself took action. In 1737 he claimed to have received the manuscript of a scurrilous, anonymous, but unperformed play, enigmatically titled The Golden Rump , allegedly full of scandalous abuse of the King and his ministers. The actual origins of the play are still uncertain, but the parliamentary consequence was the introduction of a Licensing Act of unparalleled restrictiveness.

The powers of the Lord Chamberlain, exercised via officials called Examiners of Plays, remained virtually as defined by the Act of 1737 for well over two centuries. In the interim various attempts were made to limit the Chamberlain’s authority, most notably in 1842 and 1843, resulting in the limiting directive that the Lord Chamberlain was forbidden to withhold his license unless on the grounds of “the preservation of good manners, decorum and of the public peace.” Petitions by dramatic authors of note, especially George Bernard Shaw, achieved some flexibility, but the powers and responsibilities of the Lord Chamberlain for theatrical censorship ended only with abolition of the office in terms of the Theatres Act in 1968.

However, between 1737 and 1968 something of a double standard continued to exist, for in the new and expanding field of fiction very few prosecutions occurred initially. The publication of what is termed an “obscene libel” was made into a common-law offence in 1727. As the entry for John Cleland shows, punishments for pornography were not necessarily severe. The growth of pornography in Victorian times led to the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, with a number of prosecutions and withdrawals of works for fear of prosecution, notably that of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in 1866. The crucial comments made by Lord Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn, in a case in 1868, are discussed further in the entry for obscenity.

By far the greatest number of prosecutions and suppressions of literary works have been on the grounds of obscenity rather than profanity. In the past century censorship has been exercised to prevent or ban the publication of numerous books, including Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (1857), Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939), as well as D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), to name the most famous cases. The last-named work attracted the greatest notoriety. (Incidentally, in France the ban on Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal , also instituted in 1857, was raised only in 1949.)

Under the laws of the United States at the time of the Revolution, the status of obscene libel was unclear, but in the early nineteenth century a number of states in New England strengthened their laws in this regard. After 1868 the Cockburn definition of obscenity started to carry weight. However, the moral crusader who was to prove highly influential was Anthony Comstock (1844–1915). In 1873 he and the Y.M.C.A. Committee for the Suppression of Vice managed to get through Congress an act bearing his name that greatly increased the restrictions on obscene publications, which were taken to include even contraceptive literature.

As the entry for lawsuits shows, the determination of Comstock and his followers led to some extraordinary successes, notably in Boston in the 1920s. Indeed the phrase “Banned in Boston” became something of a cliché. The prosecutors took advantage of a clause in the Massachusetts statute forbidding the public sale of any book “containing obscene indecent language.” (It was the Concord Public Library that first banned Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn , in 1885). However, Comstockery suffered major setbacks in failed prosecutions, most significantly, of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1933 and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959.

While official censorship has declined radically, challenges and bannings continue on a surprising scale. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, among the ten most challenged books of 1990–2000 were Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn , John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men , and the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. In the same period the three most common grounds for banning were “sexually explicit” material (1,607), “offensive language” (1,427), and material considered “unsuited to age group” (1,256). This was out of a total of 6,364 challenges.

Self-censorship continued, usually on the grounds of obscenity, real or imagined. Even after the Chatterley judgments, Lawrence Durrell’s Preface to an American edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1968 resorted to a “reverse code” for the offending words “kcuf,” “tnuc,” “kcirp” and “sllab.” Furthermore, a number of American major dictionaries omitted the most taboo of what Judge van Pelt Bryan called (not with complete accuracy) the “four-letter Anglo-Saxon words.” These included the third edition of Webster (1961) and its derivatives, and even the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (1988).

Of a different order was E.M. Forster’s homosexual novel Maurice, which he wrote between 1910 and 1913, but did not feel able to publish during his lifetime (1879–1970), even when the laws governing homosexuality were revised in 1967. Two instances from very different authors are open about self-censorship. Alluding to an incident of exposure in her novel The Pargiters (written in 1932 but published only in 1977), Virginia Woolf conceded: “There is, as the three dots used after the sentence ‘He unbuttoned his clothes …’ testify, a convention, supported by law, which forbids, whether rightly or wrongly, any plain description of the sight that Rose, in common with many other girls, saw” (cited in Smith, ed., 1993, 119). In The Moon and Sixpence (1930) the explosive comment “Get out, you bloody swine” is followed by Somerset Maugham’s ironic confession that “since this book is meant for family reading, I thought it better—at the expense of truth—to put into [Strickland’s] mouth language familiar to the domestic circle” (chapter 47).

Under the apartheid regime in South Africa writers had to deal with a strict Censorship Board proscribing the traditional topics of obscenity and blasphemy and ordering the wholesale banning of books. Other taboos peculiar to the period were miscegenation or what was called “sex across the color line.” Virtually every major author experienced some difficulty.